One of Our Conquerors, v4

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Her dear Skepsey was coming down to her for a holiday, she was glad to
hear. Of Dudley, there was no word. Nataly shunned his name, with a
superstitious dread lest any mention of him should renew pretensions that
she hoped, and now supposed, were quite withdrawn. So she had told poor
Mr. Barmby only yesterday, at his humble request to know. He had seen
Dudley on the pantiles, walking with a young lady, he said. And 'he
feared,' he said; using, a pardonable commonplace of deceit. Her
compassion accounted for the 'fear' which was the wish, and caused her
not to think it particularly strange, that he should imagine Dudley to
have quitted the field. Now that a disengaged Dartrey Fenellan was at
hand, poor Mr. Barmby could have no chance.

Dartrey came to her room by appointment. She wanted to see him alone,
and he informed her, that Mrs. Blathenoy was in the hotel, and would
certainly receive and amuse Nesta for any length of time.

'I will take her up,' said Nataly, and rose, and she sat immediately,
and fluttered a hand at her breast. She laughed: 'Perhaps I'm tired!'

Dartrey took Nesta.

He returned, saying: 'There's a lift in the hotel. Do the stairs affect
you at all?'

She fenced his sharp look. 'Laziness, I fancy; age is coming on. How is
it Mrs. Blathenoy is here?'

'Well! how?' 'Foolish curiosity?' 'I think I have made her of service.
I did not bring the lady here.' 'Of service to whom?' 'Why, to Victor!'
'Has Victor commissioned you?' 'You can bear to hear it. Her husband
knows the story. He has a grudge . . . commercial reasons. I fancy
it is, that Victor stood against his paper at the table of the Bank.
Blathenoy vowed blow for blow. But I think the little woman holds him
in. She says she does.' 'Victor prompted you?' 'It occurred as it
occurred.' 'She does it for love of us?--Oh! I can't trifle.
Dartrey!' 'Tell me.' 'First, you haven't let me know what you think of
my Nesta.' 'She's a dear good girl.' 'Not so interesting to you as a
flighty little woman!' 'She has a speck of some sort on her mind.'
Nataly spied at Dudley's behaviour, and said: 'That will wear away. Is
Mr. Blathenoy much here?' 'As often as he can come, I believe.' 'That
is . . . ?' 'I have seen him twice.' 'His wife remains?' 'Fixed here
for the season.' 'My friend!' 'No harm, no harm!' 'But-to her!' 'You
have my word of honour.' 'Yes: and she is doing you a service, at your
request; you occasionally reward her with thanks; and she sees you are a
man of honour. Do you not know women?'

Dartrey blew his pooh-pooh on feminine suspicions. 'There's very little
left of the Don Amoroso in me. Women don't worship stone figures.'

'They do: like the sea-birds. And what do you say to me, Dartrey?--I can
confess it: I am one of them: I love you. When last you left England, I
kissed your hand. It was because of your manly heart in that stone
figure. I kept from crying: you used to scorn us English for the
"whimpering fits" you said we enjoy and must have in books, if we can't
get them up for ourselves. I could have prayed to have you as brother or
son. I love my Victor the better for his love of you. Oh!--poor soul--
how he is perverted since that building of Lakelands! He cannot take
soundings of the things he does. Formerly he confided in me, in all
things: now not one;--I am the chief person to deceive. If only he had
waited! We are in a network of intrigues and schemes, every artifice in
London--tempting one to hate simple worthy people, who naturally have
their views, and see me an impostor, and tolerate me, fascinated by him:
--or bribed--it has to be said. There are ways of bribeing. I trust he
may not have in the end to pay too heavily for succeeding. He seems a
man pushed by Destiny; not irresponsible, but less responsible than most.
He is desperately tempted by his never failing. Whatever he does! . .
it is true! And it sets me thinking of those who have never had an
ailment, up to a certain age, when the killing blow comes. Latterly I
have seen into him: I never did before. Had I been stronger, I might
have saved, or averted . . . . But, you will say, the stronger woman
would not have occupied my place. I must have been blind too. I did not
see, that his nature shrinks from the thing it calls up. He dreads the
exposure he courts--or has to combat with all his powers. It has been a
revelation to me of him life as well. Nothing stops him. Now it is
Parliament--a vacant London Borough. He counts on a death:
Ah! terrible! I have it like a snake's bite night and day.'

Nataly concluded: 'There: it has done me some good to speak. I feel so
base.' She breathed heavily.

Dartrey took her hand and bent his lips to it. 'Happy the woman who has
not more to speak! How long will Nesta stay here?'

'You will watch over her, Dartrey? She stays-her father wishes--up to--
ah! We can hardly be in such extreme peril. He has her doctor, her
lawyer, and her butler--a favourite servant--to check, and influence,
her: She--you know who it is!--does not, I am now convinced, mean
persecution. She was never a mean-minded woman. Oh! I could wish she
were. They say she is going. Then I am to be made an "honest woman of."
Victor wants Nesta, now that she is away, to stay until . . . You
understand. He feels she is safe from any possible kind of harm with
those good ladies. And I feel she is the safer for having you near.
Otherwise, how I should pray to have you with us! Daily I have to pass
through, well, something like the ordeal of the red-hot ploughshares--
and without the innocence, dear friend! But it's best that my girl
should not have to be doing the same; though she would have the
innocence. But she writhes under any shadow of a blot. And for her to
learn the things that are in the world, through her mother's history!--
and led to know it by the falling away of friends, or say, acquaintances!
However ignorant at present, she learns from a mere nothing. I dread!
. . . . In a moment, she is a blaze of light. There have been
occurrences. Only Victor could have overcome them! I had to think it
better for my girl, that she was absent. We are in such a whirl up
there! So I work round again to "how long?" and the picture of myself
counting the breaths of a dying woman. The other day I was told I was
envied!'

'Battle, battle, battle; for all of us, in every position!' said Dartrey
sharply, to clip a softness: 'except when one's attending on an invalid
uncle. Then it's peace; rather like extinction. And I can't be crying
for the end either. I bite my moustache and tap foot on the floor, out
of his hearing; make believe I'm patient. Now I 'll fetch Nesta.'

Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta's shoulder. She held a
telegram, and said to Nataly

'What can this mean? It's from my husband; he puts "Jacob": my husband's
Christian name:--so like my husband, where there's no concealment!
There--he says:

"Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow." Can it signify, affairs
are bad with my husband in the city?'

It had that signification to Nataly's understanding. At the same time,
the pretty little woman's absurd lisping repetition of 'my husband' did
not seem without design to inflict the wound it caused.

In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment of a silly
tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be controlled: and after
contrasting her fortunes with Nataly's, on her way downstairs, she had
comforted herself by saying, that at least she had a husband. She was
not aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation
in the indulgence: for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding
figure of a woman, who could not legally say that which the woman he
admired less, if at all, legally could say.

'I must leave you to interpret,' Nataly remarked.

Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style. For this reason,
she abstained from an intended leading up to mention of the 'singular-
looking lady' seen riding with Miss Radnor more than once; and as to
whom, Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just now, when
questioned, spoken very clearly. So the mother's alarms were not raised.

And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey subsequently;
finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor's visit; it was a pity,
because a young woman in Miss Radnor's position should not by any
possibility be seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful
appearance.

She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the championship
bitter to her. Dartrey would not deliver an opinion on Miss Radnor's
conduct. He declined, moreover, to assist in elucidating the telegram by
'looking here,' and poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek. He was
petulantly whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted at. And it was
then--and then only or chiefly through Nataly's recent allusion--that the
man of honour had his quakings in view of the quagmire, where he was
planted on an exceedingly narrow causeway, not of the firmest. For she
was a pretty little woman, one of the prize gifts of the present
education of women to the men who are for having them quiescent domestic
patterns; and her artificial ingenuousness or candid frivolities came to
her by nature to kindle the nature of the gentleman on the other bank of
the stream, and witch him to the plunge, so greatly mutually regretted
after taken: an old duet to the moon.

Dartrey escaped to the Club, where he had a friend. The friend was
Colonel Sudley, one of the modern studious officers, not in good
esteem with the authorities. He had not forgiven Dartrey for the
intemperateness which cut off a brilliant soldier from the service.
He was reduced to acknowledge, however, that there was a sparkling
defence for him to reply with, in the shape of a fortune gained and
where we have a Society forcing us to live up to an expensive level,
very trying to a soldier's income, a fortune gained will offer excuses
for misconduct short of disloyal or illegal. They talked of the state of
the Army: we are moving. True, and at the last Review, the 'march past'
was performed before a mounted generalissimo profoundly asleep, head on
breast. Our English military 'moving' may now be likened to Somnolency
on Horseback. 'Oh, come, no rancour,' said the colonel; 'you know he's a
kind old boy at heart; nowhere a more affectionate man alive!'

'So the sycophants are sure of posts!'

'Come, I say! He's devoted to the Service.'

'Invalid him, and he shall have a good epitaph.'

'He's not so responsible as the taxpayer.'

'There you touch home. Mother Goose can't imagine the need for defence
until a hand's at her feathers.'

'What about her shrieks now and then?'

'Indigestion of a surfeit?'

They were in a laughing wrangle when two acquaintances of the colonel's
came near. One of them recognized Dartrey. He changed a prickly subject
to one that is generally as acceptable to the servants of Mars. His
companion said: 'Who is the girl out with Judith Marsett?' He flavoured
eulogies of the girl's good looks in easy garrison English. She was
praised for sitting her horse well. One had met her on the parade, in
the afternoon, walking with Mrs. Marsett. Colonel Sudley had seen them
on horseback. He remarked to Dartrey:

'And by the way, you're a clean stretch ahead of us. I've seen you go by
these windows, with the young lady on one side, and a rather pretty woman
on the other too.'

'Nothing is unseen in this town!' Dartrey rejoined.

Strolling to his quarters along the breezy parade at night, he proposed
to himself, that he would breathe an immediate caution to Nesta. How had
she come to know this Mrs. Marsett? But he was more seriously thinking
of what Colney Durance called 'The Mustard Plaster'; the satirist's
phrase for warm relations with a married fair one: and Dartrey, clear of
any design to have it at his breast, was beginning to take intimations of
pricks and burns. They are an almost positive cure of inflammatory
internal conditions. They were really hard on him, who had none to be
cured.

The hour was nigh midnight. As he entered his hotel, the porter ran off
to the desk in his box, and brought him a note, saying, that a lady had
left it at half-past nine. Left it?--Then the lady could not be the
alarming lady. He was relieved. The words of the letter were
cabalistic; these, beneath underlined address:

'I beg you to call on me, if I do not see you this evening. It is
urgent; you will excuse me when I explain. Not late to-morrow. I am
sure you will not fail to come. I could write what would be certain to
bring you. I dare not trust any names to paper.'

The signature was, Judith Marsett.

CHAPTER XXXI

SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO DO
KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES

By the very earliest of the trains shot away to light and briny air from
London's November gloom, which knows the morning through increase of
gasjets, little Skepsey was hurried over suburban chimneys, in his
friendly third-class carriage; where we have reminders of ancient
pastoral times peculiar to our country, as it may chance; but where a man
may speak to his neighbour right off without being deemed offensive.
That is homely. A social fellow knitting closely to his fellows when he
meets them, enjoys it, even at the cost of uncushioned seats he can, if
imps are in him, merryandrew as much as he pleases; detested punctilio
does not reign there; he can proselytize for the soul's welfare; decry
or uphold the national drink; advertize a commercial Firm deriving
prosperity from the favour of the multitude; exhort to patriotism. All
is accepted. Politeness is the rule, according to Skepsey's experience
of the Southern part of the third-class kingdom. And it is as well to
mark the divisions, for the better knowledge of our countrymen. The
North requires volumes to itself.

The hard-grained old pirate-stock Northward has built the land, and is to
the front when we are at our epic work. Meanwhile it gets us a blowzy
character, by shouldering roughly among the children of civilization.
Skepsey, journeying one late afternoon up a Kentish line, had, in both
senses of the word, encountered a long-limbed navvy; an intoxicated, he
was compelled by his manly modesty to desire to think; whose loathly
talk, forced upon the hearing of a decent old woman opposite him, passed
baboonish behaviour; so much so, that Skepsey civilly intervened;
subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage and receive a lesson at
the station they were nearing. Upon his promising faithfully, that it
should be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this pygmy spark
to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant war in due sincerity; and he
as faithfully, all honour, promising not to let it bring about a breakage
of the laws of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed. So they went
forth.

Skepsey alluded to the incident, for an example of the lamentable
deficiency in science betrayed by most of our strong men when put to it;
and the bitter thought, that he could count well nigh to a certainty on
the total absence of science in the long-armed navvy, whose fist on his
nose might have been as the magnet of a pin, was chief among his
reminiscences after the bout, destroying pleasure for the lover of Old
England's might. One blow would have sent Skepsey travelling. He was
not seriously struck once. They parted, shaking hands; the navvy
confessing himself to have 'drunk a drop'; and that perhaps accounted for
his having been 'topped by a dot on him.'

He declined to make oath never to repeat his offence; but said, sending
his vanquisher to the deuce, with an amicable push at his shoulder,
'Damned if I ever forget five foot five stretched six foot flat!'

Skepsey counted his feet some small amount higher; but our hearty rovers'
sons have their ballad moods when giving or taking a thrashing. One of
the third-class passengers, a lad of twenty, became Skepsey's pupil, and
turned out clever with the gloves, and was persuaded to enter the
militia, and grew soon to be a corporal. Thus there was profit of the
affair, though the navvy sank out of sight. Let us hope and pray he will
not insult the hearing of females again. If only females knew how
necessary it is, for their sakes, to be able to give a lesson now and
then! Ladies are positively opposed. And Judges too, who dress so like
them. The manhood of our country is kept down, in consequence. Mr.
Durance was right, when he said something about the state of war being
wanted to weld our races together: and yet we are always praying for
the state of peace, which causes cracks and gaps among us! Was that
what he meant by illogical? It seemed to Skepsey--oddly, considering
his inferior estimate of the value of the fair sex--that a young woman
with whom he had recently made acquaintance; and who was in Brighton now,
upon missionary work; a member of the 'Army,' an officer of advancing
rank, Matilda Pridden, by name; was nearer to the secret of the right
course of conduct for individual citizens and the entire country than any
gentleman he knew.

Yes, nearer to it than his master was! Thinking of Mr. Victor Radnor,
Skepsey fetched a sigh. He had knocked at his master's door at the
office one day, and imagining the call to enter, had done so, and had
seen a thing he could not expunge. Lady Grace Halley was there. From
matters he gathered, Skepsey guessed her to be working for his master
among the great folks, as he did with Jarniman, and Mr. Fenellan with Mr.
Carling. But is it usual; he asked himself--his natural veneration
framing the rebuke to his master thus--to repay the services of a lady
so warmly?--We have all of us an ermined owl within us to sit in
judgement of our superiors as well as our equals; and the little man,
notwithstanding a servant's bounden submissiveness, was forced to hear
the judicial pronouncement upon his master's behaviour. His master had,
at the same time, been saying most weighty kind words more and more of
late: one thing:--that, if he gave all he had to his fellows, and did all
he could, he should still be in their debt. And he was a very wealthy
gentleman. What are we to think? The ways of our superiors are
wonderful. We do them homage: still we feel, we painfully feel, we are
beginning to worship elsewhere. It is the pain of a detachment of the
very roots of our sea-weed heart from a rock. Mr. Victor Radnor was an
honour to his country. Skepsey did not place the name of Matilda Pridden
beside it or in any way compare two such entirely different persons. At
the same time and most earnestly, while dreading to hear, he desired to
have Matilda Pridden's opinion of the case distressing him. He never
could hear it, because he could never be allowed to expound the case to
her. Skepsey sighed again: he as much as uttered: Oh, if we had a few
thousands like her!--But what if we do have them? They won't marry!
There they are, all that the country requires in wives and mothers; and
like Miss Priscilla Graves, they won't marry!

He looked through sad thoughts across the benches of the compartments to
the farther end of the carriage, where sat the Rev. Septimus Barmby,
looking at him through a meditation as obscure if not so mournful. Few
are the third-class passengers outward at that early hour in the winter
season, and Skepsey's gymnastics to get beside the Rev. Septimus were
unimpeded; though a tight-packed carriage of us poor journaliers would
not have obstructed them with as much as a sneer. Mr. Barmby and Skepsey
greeted. The latter said, he had a holiday, to pay a visit to Miss
Nesta. The former said, he hoped he should see Miss Nesta. Skepsey then
rapidly brought the conversation to a point where Matilda Pridden was
comprised. He discoursed of the 'Army' and her position in the Army,
giving instances of her bravery, the devotion shown by her to the cause
of morality, in all its forms. Mr. Barmby had his fortunes on his hands
at the moment, he could not lend an attentive ear; and he disliked this
Army, the title it had taken, and the mixing of women and men in its
ranks; not to speak of a presumption in its proceedings, and the public
marching and singing. Moreover, he enjoyed his one or two permissible
glasses: he doubted that the Chiefs of the Army had common benevolence
for the inoffensive pipe. But the cause of morality was precious to him;
morality and a fit of softness, and the union of the happiest contrast of
voices, had set him for a short while, before the dawn of Nesta's day,
hankering after Priscilla Graves. Skepsey's narrative of Matilda
Pridden's work down at the East of London; was effective; it had the ring
to thrill a responsive chord in Mr. Barmby, who mused on London's East,
and martyrly service there. His present expectations were of a very
different sort; but a beautiful bride, bringing us wealth, is no
misleading beam, if we direct the riches rightly. Septimus, a solitary
minister in those grisly haunts of the misery breeding vice, must needs
accomplish less than a Septimus the husband of one of England's chief
heiresses:--only not the most brilliant, owing to circumstances known to
the Rev. Groseman Buttermore: strangely, and opportunely, revealed: for
her exceeding benefit, it may be hoped. She is no longer the ignorant
girl, to reject the protecting hand of one whose cloth is the best of
cloaking. A glance at Dudley Sowerby's defection, assures our worldly
wisdom too, that now is the time to sue.

Several times while Mr. Barmby made thus his pudding of the desires of
the flesh and the spirit, Skepsey's tales of Matilda Pridden's heroism
caught his attention. He liked her deeds; he disliked the position in
which the young woman placed herself to perform them; and he said so.
Women are to be women, he said.

Skepsey agreed: 'If we could get men to do the work, sir!'

Mr. Barmby was launching forth: Plenty of men!--His mouth was blocked by
the reflection, that we count the men on our fingers; often are we, as it
were, an episcopal thumb surveying scarce that number of followers! He
diverged to censure of the marchings and the street-singing: the
impediment to traffic, the annoyance to a finely musical ear. He
disapproved altogether of Matilda Pridden's military display, pronouncing
her to be, 'Doubtless a worthy young person.'

'Her age is twenty-seven,' said Skepsey, spying at the number of his own.

'You have known her long?' Mr. Barmby asked.

'Not long, sir. She has gone through trouble. She believes very
strongly in the will:--If I will this, if I will that, and it is the
right will, not wickedness, it is done--as good as done; and force is
quite superfluous. In her sermons, she exhorts to prayer before action.'

'Preaches?'

'She moves a large assembly, sir.'

'It would seem, that England is becoming Americanized!' exclaimed the
Conservative in Mr. Barmby. Almost he groaned; and his gaze was fish-
like in vacancy, on hearing the little man speak of the present intrepid
forwardness of the sex to be publicly doing. It is for men the most
indigestible fact of our century: one that--by contrast throws an
overearthly holiness on our decorous dutiful mothers, who contentedly
worked below the surface while men unremittingly attended to their
interests above.

Skepsey drew forth a paper-covered shilling-book: a translation from the
French, under a yelling title of savage hate of Old England and cannibal
glee at her doom. Mr. Barmby dropped his eyelashes on it, without
comment; nor did he reply to Skepsey's forlorn remark: 'We let them think
they could do it!'

Behold the downs. Breakfast is behind them. Miss Radnor likewise: if
the poor child has a name. We propose to supply the deficiency. She
does not declare war upon tobacco. She has a cultured and a beautiful
voice. We abstain from enlargeing on the charms of her person. She has
resources, which representatives of a rival creed would plot to secure.

'Skepsey, you have your quarters at the house of Miss Radnor's
relatives?' said Mr. Barmby, as they emerged from tunnelled chalk.

'Mention, that I think of calling in the course of the day.'

A biscuit had been their breakfast without a name.

They parted at the station, roused by the smell of salt to bestow a more
legitimate title on the day's restorative beginning. Down the hill,
along by the shops, and Skepsey, in sight of Miss Nesta's terrace,
considered it still an early hour for a visitor; so, to have the sea
about him, he paid pier-money, and hurried against the briny wings of a
South-wester; green waves, curls of foam, flecks of silver, under low-
flying grey-dark cloud-curtains shaken to a rift, where at one shot the
sun had a line of Nereids nodding, laughing, sparkling to him. Skepsey
enjoyed it, at the back of thoughts military and naval. Visible sea,
this girdle of Britain, inspired him to exultations in reverence. He
wished Mr. Durance could behold it now and have such a breastful. He was
wishing he knew a song of Britain and sea, rather fancying Mr. Durance to
be in some way a bar to patriotic poetical recollection, when he saw his
Captain Dartrey mounting steps out of an iron anatomy of the pier, and
looking like a razor off a strap.

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