One of Our Conquerors, v4
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George Meredith >> One of Our Conquerors, v4
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She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to her.
'An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?' she was asked, and she said: 'This
afternoon, if you like.'
So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of delight she
felt in the prospect.
The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced the name of
Marsett to be a reputable County name. 'There was a Leicestershire
baronet of the name of Marsett.' They arranged to send their button-
blazing boy at Nesta's heels. Mrs. Marsett resided in a side-street not
very distant from the featureless but washed and orderly terrace of the
glassy stare at sea.
CHAPTER XXIX
SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND
Nasta and her maid were brought back safely through the dusk by their
constellation of a boy, to whom the provident ladies had entrusted her.
They could not but note how short her syllables were. Her face was only
partly seen. They had returned refreshed from their drive on the
populous and orderly parade---so fair a pattern of their England!--after
discoursing of 'the dear child,' approving her manners, instancing proofs
of her intelligence, nay, her possession of 'character.' They did so,
notwithstanding that these admissions were worse than their growing love
for the girl, to confound established ideas. And now, in thoughtfulness
on her behalf, Dorothea said, 'We have considered, Nesta, that you may
be lonely; and if it is your wish, we will leave our card on your new
acquaintance.' Nesta took her hand and kissed it; she declined, saying,
'No,' without voice.
They had two surprises at the dinner-hour. One was the card of Dartrey
Fenellan, naming an early time next day for his visit; and the other was
the appearance of the Rev. Stuart Rem, a welcome guest. He had come to
meet his Bishop.
He had come also with serious information for the ladies, regarding the
Rev. Abram Posterley. No sooner was this out of his mouth than both
ladies exclaimed:
'Again!' So serious was it, that there had been a consultation at the
Wells; Mr. Posterley's friend, the Rev. Septimus Barmby, and his own
friend, the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had journeyed from London to sit
upon the case: and, 'One hoped,' Mr. Stuart Rem said, 'poor Posterley
would be restored to the senses he periodically abandoned.' He laid a
hand on Tasso's curls, and withdrew it at a menace of teeth. Tasso would
submit to rough caresses from Mr. Posterley; he would not allow Mr.
Stuart Rem to touch him. Why was that? Perhaps for the reason of Mr.
Posterley's being so emotional as perpetually to fall a victim to some
bright glance and require the rescue of his friends; the slave of woman
had a magnet for animals!
Dorothea and Virginia were drawn to compassionate sentiments, in spite
of the provokeing recurrence of Mr. Posterley's malady. He had not an
income to support a wife. Always was this unfortunate gentleman
entangling himself in a passion for maid or widow of the Wells and it was
desperate, a fever. Mr. Stuart Rem charitably remarked on his taking it
so severely because of his very scrupulous good conduct. They pardoned a
little wound to their delicacy, and asked: 'On this occasion?' Mr. Stuart
Rem named a linendraper's establishment near the pantiles, where a fair
young woman served. 'And her reputation?' That was an article less
presentable through plate-glass, it seemed: Mr. Stuart Rem drew a
prolonged breath into his nose.
'It is most melancholy!' they said in unison. 'Nothing positive,' said
he. 'But the suspicion of a shadow, Mr. Stuart Rem! You will not permit
it?' He stated, that his friend Buttermore might have influence.
Dorothea said: 'When I think of Mr. Posterley's addiction to ceremonial
observances, and to matrimony, I cannot but think of a sentence that fell
from Mr. Durance one day, with reference to that division of our Church:
he called it:--you frown! and I would only quote Mr. Durance to you in
support of your purer form, as we hold it to be--with the candles, the
vestments, Confession, alas! he called it, "Rome and a wife."'
Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent: he testily dismissed mention of
Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr. Posterley.
The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased, considerately
signified to him, that a young maiden was present.
The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum of
summer midges. She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any
way. She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time to
time. She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her.
To-morrow she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that prospect,
for an escape from the meshes of a painful hour--the most woeful of the
hours she had yet known-passed with Judith Marsett: which dragged her
soul through a weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still
did it with her ideas. It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much
of the world's flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended, and so
coldly, previous to Mrs. Marsett's lift of the veil in her story of
herself: a skipping revelation, terrible enough to the girl; whose
comparison of the previously suspected things with the things now
revealed imposed the thought of her having been both a precocious and a
callous young woman: a kind of 'Delphica without the erudition,' her mind
phrased it airily over her chagrin.--And the silence of Dudley proved him
to have discovered his error in choosing such a person--he was wise, and
she thanked him. She had an envy of the ignorant-innocents adored by the
young man she cordially thanked for quitting her. She admired the white
coat of armour they wore, whether bestowed on them by their constitution
or by prudence. For while combating mankind now on Judith Marsett's
behalf, personally she ran like a hare from the mere breath of an
association with the very minor sort of similar charges; ardently she
desired the esteem of mankind; she was at moments abject. But had she
actually been aware of the facts now known?
Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding
senses--and however vividly--require enlightenment of the audible and
visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them away
from a blushful dread and force the mind to know. As much as the
wilfully or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by
touch: only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse as
our society's matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized man--
a creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him--barbarously
exacts. The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is after
all in his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she appears
as a phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer; and he
insists upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he is to
have sense of surety. Many a young girl is misread by the amount she
seems to know of our construction, history, and dealings, when it is not
more than her sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the facts of
life profuse about her, and prompts her through one or other of the
instincts, often vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to her;
or haply her filly nature is having a fling at the social harness of
hypocrisy. If you (it is usually through the length of ears of your
Novelist that the privilege is yours) have overheard queer communications
passing between girls, and you must act the traitor eavesdropper or
Achilles masquerader to overhear so clearly, these, be assured, are not
specially the signs of their corruptness. Even the exceptionally cynical
are chiefly to be accused of bad manners. Your Moralist is a myopic
preacher, when he stamps infamy, on them, or on our later generation, for
the kick they have at grandmother decorum, because you do not or cannot
conceal from them the grinning skeleton behind it.
Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to love in return
for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not her lover
could love, she thought with grateful pride in the treasure she was to
pour out at his feet; as only one or two (and they were women) in the
world had ever loved. Her notion of the passion was parasitic: man the
tree, woman the bine: but the bine was flame to enwind and to soar,
serpent to defend, immortal flowers to crown. The choice her parents had
made for her in Dudley, behind the mystery she had scent of, nipped her
dream, and prepared her to meet, as it were, the fireside of a November
day instead of springing up and into the dawn's blue of full summer with
swallows on wing. Her station in exile at the Wells of the weariful
rich, under the weight of the sullen secret, unenlivened by Dudley's
courtship, subdued her to the world's decrees; phrased thus: 'I am not to
be a heroine.' The one golden edge to the view was, that she would
greatly please her father.
Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist's pressed weed. But
after hearing Judith Marsett's wild sobs, it had no place in her
cherishing. For, above all, the unhappy woman protested love to have
been the cause of her misery. She moaned of 'her Ned'; of his goodness,
his deceitfulness, her trustfulness; his pride and the vileness of his
friends; her longsuffering and her break down of patience. It was done
for the proof of her unworthiness of Nesta's friendship: that she might
be renounced, and embraced. She told the pathetic half of her story, to
suit the gentle ear, whose critical keenness was lost in compassion. How
deep the compassion, mixed with the girl's native respect for the evil-
fortuned, may be judged by her inaccessibility to a vulgar tang that she
was aware of in the deluge of the torrent, where Innocence and Ned and
Love and a proud Family and that beast Worrell rolled together in leaping
and shifting involutions.
A darkness of thunder was on the girl. Although she was not one to
shrink beneath it like the small bird of the woods, she had to say within
herself many times, 'I shall see Captain Dartrey to-morrow,' for a
recovery and a nerving. And with her thought of him, her tooth was at
her underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over men's views of
her sex, and how to bring a frank mind to meet him; to be sure of his not
at heart despising; until his character swam defined and bright across
her scope. 'He is good to women.' Fragments of conversation,
principally her father's, had pictured Captain Dartrey to her most
manfully tolerant toward a frivolous wife.
He came early in the morning, instantly after breakfast.
Not two minutes had passed before she was at home with him. His words,
his looks, revived her spirit of romance, gave her the very landscapes,
and new ones. Yes, he was her hero. But his manner made him also an
adored big brother, stamped splendid by the perils of life. He sat
square, as if alert to rise, with an elbow on a knee, and the readiest
turn of head to speakers, the promptest of answers, eyes that were a
brighter accent to the mouth, so vividly did look accompany tone. He
rallied her, chatted and laughed; pleased the ladies by laughing at
Colney Durance, and inspired her with happiness when he spoke of
England:--that 'One has to be in exile awhile, to see the place she
takes.'
'Oh, Captain Dartrey, I do like to hear you say so,' she cried; his voice
was reassuring also in other directions: it rang of true man.
He volunteered, however, a sad admission, that England had certainly lost
something of the great nation's proper conception of Force: the meaning
of it, virtue of it, and need for it. 'She bleats for a lesson, and will
get her lesson.'
But if we have Captain Dartrey, we shall come through! So said the
sparkle of Nesta's eyes.
'She is very like her father,' he said to the ladies.
'We think so,' they remarked.
'There's the mother too,' said he; and Nesta saw that the ladies
shadowed.
They retired. Then she begged him to 'tell her of her own dear mother.'
The news gave comfort, except for the suspicion, that the dear mother was
being worn by her entertaining so largely. 'Papa is to blame,' said
Nesta.
'A momentary strain. Your father has an idea of Parliament; one of the
London Boroughs.'
'And I, Captain Dartrey, when do I go back to them?'
'Your mother comes down to consult with you. And now, do we ride
together?'
'You are free?'
'My uncle, Lord Clan, lets me out.'
'To-day?'
'Why, yes!'
'This morning?'
'In an hour's time.'
'I will be ready.'
Nesta sent a line of excuse to Mrs. Marsett, throwing in a fervent
adjective for balm.
That fair person rode out with the troop under conduct of the hallowing
squire of the stables, and passed by Nesta on horseback beside Dartrey
Fenellan at the steps of a huge hotel; issuing from which, pretty Mrs.
Blathenoy was about to mount. Mrs. Marsett looked ahead and coloured,
but she could not restrain one look at Nesta, that embraced her cavalier.
Nesta waved hand to her, and nodded. Mrs. Marsett withdrew her eyes; her
doing so, silent though it was, resembled the drag back to sea of the
shingle-wave below her, such a screaming of tattle she heard in the
questions discernible through the attitude of the cavalier and of the
lady, who paused to stare, before the leap up in the saddle. 'Who is
she?--what is she?--how did you know her?--where does she come from?--
wears her hat on her brows!--huge gauntlets out of style!--shady! shady!
shady!' And as always during her nervous tumults, the name of Worrell
made diapason of that execrable uproar. Her hat on her brows had an air
of dash, defying a world it could win, as Ned well knew. But she scanned
her gauntlets disapprovingly. This town, we are glad to think, has a
bright repute for glove-shops. And Mrs. Marsett could applaud herself
for sparing Ned's money; she had mended her gloves, if they were in the
fashion.--But how does the money come? Hark at that lady and that
gentleman questioning Miss Radnor of everything, everything in the world
about her! Not a word do they get from Miss Radnor. And it makes them
the more inquisitive. Idle rich people, comfortably fenced round, are so
inquisitive! And Mrs. Marsett, loving Nesta for the notice of her,
maddened by the sting of tongues it was causing, heard the wash of the
beach, without consciousness of analogies, but with a body ready to jump
out of skin, out of life, in desperation at the sound.
She was all impulse; a shifty piece of unmercenary stratagem occasionally
directing it. Arrived at her lodgings, she wrote to Nesta: 'I entreat
you not to notice me, if you pass me on the road again. Let me drop,
never mind how low I go. I was born to be wretched. A line from you,
just a line now and then, only to show me I am not forgotten. I have had
a beautiful dream. I am not bad in reality; I love goodness, I know.
I cling to the thought of you, as my rescue, I declare. Please, let me
hear: if it's not more than "good day" and your initials on a post-card.'
The letter brought Nesta in person to her.
CHAPTER XXX
THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett with Captain
Dartrey?--Nesta timidly questioned her heart: she knocked at an iron door
shut upon a thing alive. The very asking froze her, almost to stopping
her throbs of pity for the woman. With Captain Dartrey, if with any one;
but with no one. Not with her mother even. Toward her mother, she felt
guilty of knowing. Her mother had a horror of that curtain. Nesta had
seen it, and had taken her impressions; she, too, shrank from it; the
more when impelled to draw near it. Louise de Seilles would have been
another self; Louise was away; when to return, the dear friend could not
state. Speaking in her ear, would have been possible; the theme
precluded writing.
It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for a girl to hold
unaided. In the presence of the simple silvery ladies Dorothea and
Virginia, she had qualms, as if she were breaking out in spots before
them. The ladies fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly
of the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too
cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley's malady--as girls in these
terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are. They discoursed
to her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young
Englishwomen, once patterns! They sketched the young English gentlewoman
of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open
eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet's divine ignorance; inoffensive
in the highest degree, rightly worshipped. They were earnest, and Nesta
struck at herself. She wished to be as they had been, reserving her
painful independence.
They were good: they were the ideal women of our country; which demands
if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence;
such as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth as
ever by the morning's flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of accidents--
accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we think, when we
are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the generations to follow.
Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them; yet her sharp
intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought coming of
strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness what blest
conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence. Without
challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our evil-
fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded, trodden,
mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one out of
the fold.
She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the
pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey. The
next time she saw Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the
man who might be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
spoken to by her. The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided
to a dumb yearning. He noticed her look: he was unaware of the human sun
in the girl's eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in her
breast. That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the blue
smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not mean
hardness, she could have vowed. O that some woman, other than the
unhappy woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl! He was
the man who would hearken and help. Essential immediate help was to be
given besides the noble benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness
and the world's need for it were printed on her understanding. For what
could women do in aid of a good cause! She fawned: she deemed herself
very despicably her hero's inferior. The thought of him enclosed her.
In a prison, the gaoler is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be;
and, by the present arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world
allowed not to have an intimation from eye or ear, or from nature's
blood-ripeness in commune with them, of certain matters, which it suffers
to be notorious, necessarily directed her appeal almost in worship to the
man, who was the one man endowed to relieve, and who locked her mouth for
shame.
Thus was she, too, being put into her woman's harness of the bit and the
blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle
parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly
and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of hero
Comedy of Clowns!--that in the passive she be a rockfortress impregnable,
not to speak of magically encircled. She must also have her feelings;
she must not be an unnatural creature. And she must have a sufficient
intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the possessing man. It
is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate, but a happy
composition. You see the world which comes of the pair.
This burning Nesta, Victor's daughter, tempered by Nataly's milder blood,
was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life, perforce of
the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for generous
imagination. She did not sit to brood on her injured senses or set them
through speculation touching heat; they were taken up and consumed by the
fire of her mind. Nor had she leisure for the abhorrences, in a heart
all flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore. Self was as urgent in
her as in most of the young; but the gift of humour, which had previously
diverted it, was now the quick feeling for her sisterhood, through the
one piteous example she knew; and broadening it, through her insurgent
abasement on their behalf, which was her scourged pride of sex. She but
faintly thought of blaming the men whom her soul besought for justice,
for common kindness, to women. There was the danger, that her aroused
young ignorance would charge the whole of the misery about and abroad
upon the stronger of those two: and another danger, that the vision of
the facts below the surface would discolour and disorder her views of
existence. But she loved, she sprang to, the lighted world; and she had
figures of male friends, to which to cling; and they helped in animating
glorious historical figures on the world's library-shelves or under yet
palpitating earth. Promise of a steady balance of her nature, too, was
shown in the absence of any irritable urgency to be doing, when her bosom
bled to help. Beyond the resolve, that she would not abandon the woman
who had made confession to her, she formed no conscious resolutions. Far
ahead down her journey of the years to come, she did see muffled things
she might hope and would strive to do. They were chrysalis shapes.
Above all, she flew her blind quickened heart on the wings of an
imaginative force; and those of the young who can do that, are in their
blood incorruptible by dark knowledge, irradiated under darkness in the
mind. Let but the throb be kept for others. That is the one secret, for
redemption; if not for preservation.
Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of
regrets at Fredi's absence from the great whirl 'overhead,' as places of
multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him. But it
was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again! At the
first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song. He challenged her
to duet before the good ladies, and she kindled, she was caught up by his
gaiety, wondering at herself; faintly aware of her not being spontaneous.
And she made her father laugh, just in the old way; and looked at herself
in his laughter, with the thought, that she could not have become so
changed; by which the girl was helped to jump to her humour. Victor
turned his full front to Dorothea and Virginia, one sunny beam of delight
and although it was Mr. Stuart Rem who was naughty Nesta's victim, and
although it seemed a trespass on her part to speak in such a manner of a
clerical gentleman, they were seized; they were the opposite partners of
a laughing quadrille, lasting till they were tired out.
Victor had asked his girl, if she sang on a Sunday. The ladies
remembered, that she had put the question for permission to Mr. Stuart
Rem, who was opposed to secular singing.
'And what did he say?' said Victor.
Nesta shook her head: 'It was not what he said, papa; it was his look.
His duty compelled him, though he loves music. He had the look of a
Patriarch putting his handmaiden away into the desert.'
Dorothea and Virginia, in spite of protests within, laughed to streams.
They recollected the look; she had given the portrait of Mr. Stuart Rem
in the act of repudiating secular song.
'Victor conjured up a day when this darling Fredi, a child, stood before
a famous picture in the Brera, at Milan; when he and her mother noticed
the child's very studious graveness; and they had talked of it; he
remarking, that she disapproved of the Patriarch; and Nataly, that she
was taken with Hagar's face.
He seemed surprised at her not having heard from Dudley.
'How is that?' said he.
'Most probably because he has not written, papa.'
He paused after the cool reply. She had no mournful gaze at all;
but in the depths of the clear eyes he knew so well, there was a coil
of something animate, whatever it might be. And twice she drew a heavy
breath.
He mentioned it in London. Nataly telegraphed at night for her girl to
meet her next day at Dartrey's hotel.
Their meeting was incomprehensibly joyless to the hearts of each,
though it was desired, and had long been desired, and mother was mother,
daughter daughter, without diminution of love between them. They held
hands, they kissed and clasped, they showered their tender phrases with
full warm truth, and looked into eyes and surely saw one another. But
the heart of each was in a battle of its own, taking wounds or crying for
supports. Whether to speak to her girl at once, despite the now vehement
contrary counsel of Victor, was Nataly's deliberation, under the thought
of the young creature's perplexity in not seeing her at the house of the
Duvidney ladies: while Nesta conjured in a flash the past impressions of
her mother's shrinking distaste from any such hectic themes as this which
burdened and absorbed her; and she was almost joining to it, through
sympathy with any thought or feeling of one in whom she had such pride;
she had the shudder of revulsion. Further, Nataly put on, rather
cravenly an air, of distress, or she half designingly permitted her
trouble to be seen, by way of affecting her girl's recollection when
the confession was to come, that Nesta might then understand her to have
been restrained from speaking, not evasive of her duty. The look was
interpreted by Nesta as belonging to the social annoyances dating, in her
calendar, from Creckholt, apprehensively dreaded at Lakelands. She
hinted asking, and her mother nodded; not untruthfully; but she put on a
briskness after the nod; and a doubt was driven into Nesta's bosom.
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