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Rhoda Fleming, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Rhoda Fleming, Complete



RHODA FLEMING, complete

By George Meredith




CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I. THE KENTISH FAMILY
II. QUEEN ANNE'S FARM
III. SUGGESTS THE MIGHT OF THE MONEY DEMON
IV. THE TEXT FROM SCRIPTURE
V. THE SISTERS MEET
VI. EDWARD AND ALGERNON
VII. GREAT NEWS FROM DAHLIA
VIII. INTRODUCES MRS. LOVELL
IX. ROBERT INTERVENES
X. DAHLIA IS NOT VISIBLE
XI. AN INDICATIVE DUET IN A MINOR KEY

BOOK 2.
XII. AT THE THEATRE.
XIII. THE FARMER SPEAKS
XIV. BETWEEN RHODA AND ROBERT
XI. A VISIT TO WREXBY HALL
XII. AT FAIRLY PARK
XVII. A YEOMAN OF THE OLD BREED
XVIII. AN ASSEMBLY AT THE PILOT INN
XIX. ROBERT SMITTEN LOW
XX. MRS. LOVELL SHOWS A TAME BRUTE

BOOK 3.
XXI. GIVES A GLIMPSE OF WHAT POOR VILLANIES THE STORY CONTAINS
XXII. EDWARD TAKES HIS COURSE
XXIII. MAJOR PERCY WARING
XXIV. WARBEACH VILLAGE CHURCH
XXV. OF THE FEARFUL TEMPTATION WHICH CAME UPON ANTHONY HACKBUT, AND
OF HIS MEETING WITH DAHLIA
XXVI. IN THE PARK
XXVII. CONTAINS A STUDY OF A FOOL IN TROUBLE
XXVIII. EDWARD'S LETTER
XXIX. FURTHERMORE OF THE FOOL

BOOK 4.
XXX. THE EXPIATION
XXXI. THE MELTING OF THE THOUSAND
XXXII. LA QUESTION D'ARGENT
XXXIII. EDWARD'S RETURN
XXXIV. FATHER AND SON
XXXV. THE NIGHT BEFORE
XXXVI. EDWARD MEETS HIS MATCH
XXXVII. EDWARD TRIES HIS ELOQUENCE
XXXVIII. TOO LATE

BOOK 5.
XXXIX. DAHLIA GOES HOME
XL. A FREAK OF THE MONEY-DEMON, THAT MAY HAVE BEEN ANTICIPATED
XLI. DAHLIA'S FRENZY
XLII. ANTHONY IN A COLLAPSE
XLIII. RHODA PLEDGES HER HAND
XLIV. THE ENEMY APPEARS
XLV. THE FARMER IS AWAKENED
XLVI. WHEN THE NIGHT IS DARKEST
XLVII. DAWN IS NEAR
XLVIII. CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I

Remains of our good yeomanry blood will be found in Kent, developing
stiff, solid, unobtrusive men, and very personable women. The distinction
survives there between Kentish women and women of Kent, as a true
South-eastern dame will let you know, if it is her fortune to belong to
that favoured portion of the county where the great battle was fought, in
which the gentler sex performed manful work, but on what luckless heads
we hear not; and when garrulous tradition is discreet, the severe
historic Muse declines to hazard a guess. Saxon, one would presume, since
it is thought something to have broken them.

My plain story is of two Kentish damsels, and runs from a home of flowers
into regions where flowers are few and sickly, on to where the flowers
which breathe sweet breath have been proved in mortal fire.

Mrs. Fleming, of Queen Anne's Farm, was the wife of a yeoman-farmer of
the county. Both were of sound Kentish extraction, albeit varieties of
the breed. The farm had its name from a tradition, common to many other
farmhouses within a circuit of the metropolis, that the ante-Hanoverian
lady had used the place in her day as a nursery-hospital for the royal
little ones. It was a square three-storied building of red brick, much
beaten and stained by the weather, with an ivied side, up which the ivy
grew stoutly, topping the roof in triumphant lumps. The house could
hardly be termed picturesque. Its aspect had struck many eyes as being
very much that of a red-coat sentinel grenadier, battered with service,
and standing firmly enough, though not at ease. Surrounding it was a high
wall, built partly of flint and partly of brick, and ringed all over with
grey lichen and brown spots of bearded moss, that bore witness to the
touch of many winds and rains. Tufts of pale grass, and gilliflowers, and
travelling stone-crop, hung from the wall, and driblets of ivy ran
broadening to the outer ground. The royal Arms were said to have
surmounted the great iron gateway; but they had vanished, either with the
family, or at the indications of an approaching rust. Rust defiled its
bars; but, when you looked through them, the splendour of an unrivalled
garden gave vivid signs of youth, and of the taste of an orderly,
laborious, and cunning hand.

The garden was under Mrs. Fleming's charge. The joy of her love for it
was written on its lustrous beds, as poets write. She had the poetic
passion for flowers. Perhaps her taste may now seem questionable. She
cherished the old-fashioned delight in tulips; the house was reached on a
gravel-path between rows of tulips, rich with one natural blush, or
freaked by art. She liked a bulk of colour; and when the dahlia dawned
upon our gardens, she gave her heart to dahlias. By good desert, the
fervent woman gained a prize at a flower-show for one of her dahlias, and
`Dahlia' was the name uttered at the christening of her eldest daughter,
at which all Wrexby parish laughed as long as the joke could last. There
was laughter also when Mrs. Fleming's second daughter received the name
of 'Rhoda;' but it did not endure for so long a space, as it was known
that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective reading of her
Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal. Country people are not
inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for anything. They find it
as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the midst of larger
congregations, what we call genius. For some years, Mrs. Fleming's
proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity was openly
pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance which her labour
lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced confession of there
being poverty in the household. The ragged elbow was then projected in
the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a sober appreciation
of the fairness of the face.

Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her garden
was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and she had been
heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully fed. The
encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was indicative of a
moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply her table with
plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how provided,
sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated to have
fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right in the
abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said, `Good
bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and my
children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced by
foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby, in
cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers economies
consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman. Practically
it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her. Though
payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost ones by
Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main secret for
mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate remembrance and
regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she seemed to be only
always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded in theory. Wrexby,
therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her children to stoutness,
and but for the blindness of all people, save artists, poets, novelists,
to the grandeur of their own creations, the inhabitants of this Kentish
village might have had an enjoyable pride in the beauty and robust grace
of the young girls,--fair-haired, black-haired girls, a kindred contrast,
like fire and smoke, to look upon. In stature, in bearing, and in
expression, they were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern manner of
eulogy, strikingly above their class. They carried erect shoulders, like
creatures not ashamed of showing a merely animal pride, which is never
quite apart from the pride of developed beauty. They were as upright as
Oriental girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to
the well. Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her
Rachel. They tossed one another their mutual compliments, drawn from the
chief book of their reading. Queen of Sheba was Dahlia's title. No master
of callisthenics could have set them up better than their mother's
receipt for making good blood, combined with a certain harmony of their
systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter
speaking. The characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to
be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by
degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly
grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in
story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the
princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves;
nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;
and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret
Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the
contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be
seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London. Naturally,
the girls dreamed of London. To educate themselves, they copied out whole
pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,' which was next to the family
Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer's small library. The deeds
of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy princes, were
assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them upon millers',
farmers', maltsters', and tradesmen's sons, the thought of what manner of
youth would propose to marry them became a precocious tribulation. Rhoda,
at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing to her sister's habit
of masking her own dismal internal forebodings on the subject, under the
guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad chance.

In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model. There came
once to Squire Blancove's unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair
lady. They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow,
Mrs. Lovell by name. They looked at her all through the service, and the
lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any
distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and
often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut her
eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of herself,
as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of grey-shot
silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and the picture
she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many ensuing years.

Mrs. Fleming fought her battle with a heart worthy of her countrywomen,
and with as much success as the burden of a despondent husband would
allow to her. William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer, for whom the
wheels of the world went too fast:--a big man, appearing to be difficult
to kill, though deeply smitten. His cheeks bloomed in spite of lines and
stains, and his large, quietly dilated, brown ox-eyes, that never gave
out a meaning, seldom showed as if they had taken one from what they saw.
Until his wife was lost to him, he believed that he had a mighty
grievance against her; but as he was not wordy, and was by nature kind,
it was her comfort to die and not to know it. This grievance was rooted
in the idea that she was ruinously extravagant. The sight of the
plentiful table was sore to him; the hungry mouths, though he grudged to
his offspring nothing that he could pay for, were an afflicting prospect.
"Plump 'em up, and make 'em dainty," he advanced in contravention of his
wife's talk of bread and beef.

But he did not complain. If it came to an argument, the farmer sidled
into a secure corner of prophecy, and bade his wife to see what would
come of having dainty children. He could not deny that bread and beef
made blood, and were cheaper than the port-wine which doctors were in the
habit of ordering for this and that delicate person in the neighbourhood;
so he was compelled to have recourse to secret discontent. The attention,
the time, and the trifles of money shed upon the flower garden, were
hardships easier to bear. He liked flowers, and he liked to hear the
praise of his wife's horticultural skill. The garden was a distinguishing
thing to the farm, and when on a Sunday he walked home from church among
full June roses, he felt the odour of them to be so like his imagined
sensations of prosperity, that the deception was worth its cost. Yet the
garden in its bloom revived a cruel blow. His wife had once wounded his
vanity. The massed vanity of a silent man, when it does take a wound,
desires a giant's vengeance; but as one can scarcely seek to enjoy that
monstrous gratification when one's wife is the offender, the farmer
escaped from his dilemma by going apart into a turnip-field, and
swearing, with his fist outstretched, never to forget it. His wife had
asked him, seeing that the garden flourished and the farm decayed, to
yield the labour of the farm to the garden; in fact, to turn nurseryman
under his wife's direction. The woman could not see that her garden
drained the farm already, distracted the farm, and most evidently
impoverished him. She could not understand, that in permitting her, while
he sweated fruitlessly, to give herself up to the occupation of a lady,
he had followed the promptings of his native kindness, and certainly not
of his native wisdom. That she should deem herself `best man' of the two,
and suggest his stamping his name to such an opinion before the world,
was an outrage.

Mrs. Fleming was failing in health. On that plea, with the solemnity
suited to the autumn of her allotted days, she persuaded her husband to
advertise for an assistant, who would pay a small sum of money to learn
sound farming, and hear arguments in favour of the Corn Laws. To please
her, he threw seven shillings away upon an advertisement, and laughed
when the advertisement was answered, remarking that he doubted much
whether good would come of dealings with strangers. A young man, calling
himself Robert Armstrong, underwent a presentation to the family. He paid
the stipulated sum, and was soon enrolled as one of them. He was of a
guardsman's height and a cricketer's suppleness, a drinker of water, and
apparently the victim of a dislike of his species; for he spoke of the
great night-lighted city with a horror that did not seem to be an
estimable point in him, as judged by a pair of damsels for whom the
mysterious metropolis flew with fiery fringes through dark space, in
their dreams.

In other respects, the stranger was well thought of, as being handsome
and sedate. He talked fondly of one friend that he had, an officer in the
army, which was considered pardonably vain. He did not reach to the ideal
of his sex which had been formed by the sisters; but Mrs. Fleming,
trusting to her divination of his sex's character, whispered a mother's
word about him to her husband a little while before her death.

It was her prayer to heaven that she might save a doctor's bill. She
died, without lingering illness, in her own beloved month of June; the
roses of her tending at the open window, and a soft breath floating up to
her from the garden. On the foregoing May-day, she had sat on the green
that fronted the iron gateway, when Dahlia and Rhoda dressed the children
of the village in garlands, and crowned the fairest little one queen of
May: a sight that revived in Mrs. Fleming's recollection the time of her
own eldest and fairest taking homage, shy in her white smock and light
thick curls. The gathering was large, and the day was of the old nature
of May, before tyrannous Eastwinds had captured it and spoiled its
consecration. The mill-stream of the neighbouring mill ran blue among the
broad green pastures; the air smelt of cream-bowls and wheaten loaves;
the firs on the beacon-ridge, far southward, over Fenhurst and Helm
villages, were transported nearer to see the show, and stood like friends
anxious to renew acquaintance. Dahlia and Rhoda taught the children to
perceive how they resembled bent old beggar-men. The two stone-pines in
the miller's grounds were likened by them to Adam and Eve turning away
from the blaze of Paradise; and the saying of one receptive child, that
they had nothing but hair on, made the illustration undying both to
Dahlia and Rhoda.

The magic of the weather brought numerous butterflies afield, and one
fiddler, to whose tuning the little women danced; others closer upon
womanhood would have danced likewise, if the sisters had taken partners;
but Dahlia was restrained by the sudden consciousness that she was under
the immediate observation of two manifestly London gentlemen, and she
declined to be led forth by Robert Armstrong. The intruders were youths
of good countenance, known to be the son and the nephew of Squire
Blancove of Wrexby Hall. They remained for some time watching the scene,
and destroyed Dahlia's single-mindedness. Like many days of gaiety, the
Gods consenting, this one had its human shadow. There appeared on the
borders of the festivity a young woman, the daughter of a Wrexby
cottager, who had left her home and but lately returned to it, with a
spotted name. No one addressed her, and she stood humbly apart. Dahlia,
seeing that every one moved away from her, whispering with satisfied
noddings, wished to draw her in among the groups. She mentioned the name
of Mary Burt to her father, supposing that so kind a man would not fail
to sanction her going up to the neglected young woman. To her surprise,
her father became violently enraged, and uttered a stern prohibition,
speaking a word that stained her cheeks. Rhoda was by her side, and she
wilfully, without asking leave, went straight over to Mary, and stood
with her under the shadow of the Adam and Eve, until the farmer sent a
messenger to say that he was about to enter the house. Her punishment for
the act of sinfulness was a week of severe silence; and the farmer would
have kept her to it longer, but for her mother's ominously growing
weakness. The sisters were strangely overclouded by this incident. They
could not fathom the meaning of their father's unkindness, coarseness,
and indignation. Why, and why? they asked one another, blankly. The
Scriptures were harsh in one part, but was the teaching to continue so
after the Atonement? By degrees they came to reflect, and not in a mild
spirit, that the kindest of men can be cruel, and will forget their
Christianity toward offending and repentant women.




CHAPTER II

Mrs. Fleming had a brother in London, who had run away from his Kentish
home when a small boy, and found refuge at a Bank. The position of
Anthony Hackbut in that celebrated establishment, and the degree of
influence exercised by him there, were things unknown; but he had stuck
to the Bank for a great number of years, and he had once confessed to his
sister that he was not a beggar. Upon these joint facts the farmer
speculated, deducing from them that a man in a London Bank, holding money
of his own, must have learnt the ways of turning it over--farming golden
ground, as it were; consequently, that amount must now have increased to
a very considerable sum. You ask, What amount? But one who sits brooding
upon a pair of facts for years, with the imperturbable gravity of
creation upon chaos, will be as successful in evoking the concrete from
the abstract. The farmer saw round figures among the possessions of the
family, and he assisted mentally in this money-turning of Anthony's,
counted his gains for him, disposed his risks, and eyed the pile of
visionary gold with an interest so remote, that he was almost correct in
calling it disinterested. The brothers-in-law had a mutual plea of
expense that kept them separate. When Anthony refused, on petition, to
advance one hundred pounds to the farmer, there was ill blood to divide
them. Queen Anne's Farm missed the flourishing point by one hundred
pounds exactly. With that addition to its exchequer, it would have made
head against its old enemy, Taxation, and started rejuvenescent. But the
Radicals were in power to legislate and crush agriculture, and "I've got
a miser for my brother-in-law," said the farmer. Alas! the hundred pounds
to back him, he could have sowed what he pleased, and when it pleased
him, partially defying the capricious clouds and their treasures, and
playing tunefully upon his land, his own land. Instead of which, and
while too keenly aware that the one hundred would have made excesses in
any direction tributary to his pocket, the poor man groaned at continuous
falls of moisture, and when rain was prayed for in church, he had to be
down on his knees, praying heartily with the rest of the congregation. It
was done, and bitter reproaches were cast upon Anthony for the enforced
necessity to do it.

On the occasion of his sister's death, Anthony informed his bereaved
brother-in-law that he could not come down to follow the hearse as a
mourner. "My place is one of great trust;" he said, "and I cannot be
spared." He offered, however, voluntarily to pay half the expenses of the
funeral, stating the limit of the cost. It is unfair to sound any man's
springs of action critically while he is being tried by a sorrow; and the
farmer's angry rejection of Anthony's offer of aid must pass. He remarked
in his letter of reply, that his wife's funeral should cost no less than
he chose to expend on it. He breathed indignant fumes against
"interferences." He desired Anthony to know that he also was "not a
beggar," and that he would not be treated as one. The letter showed a
solid yeoman's fist. Farmer Fleming told his chums, and the shopkeeper of
Wrexby, with whom he came into converse, that he would honour his dead
wife up to his last penny. Some month or so afterward it was generally
conjectured that he had kept his word.

Anthony's rejoinder was characterized by a marked humility. He expressed
contrition for the farmer's misunderstanding of his motives. His
fathomless conscience had plainly been reached. He wrote again, without
waiting for an answer, speaking of the Funds indeed, but only to
pronounce them worldly things, and hoping that they all might meet in
heaven, where brotherly love, as well as money, was ready made, and not
always in the next street. A hint occurred that it would be a
gratification to him to be invited down, whether he could come or no; for
holidays were expensive, and journeys by rail had to be thought over
before they were undertaken; and when you are away from your post, you
never knew who maybe supplanting you. He did not promise that he could
come, but frankly stated his susceptibility to the friendliness of an
invitation. The feeling indulged by Farmer Fleming in refusing to notice
Anthony's advance toward a reconciliation, was, on the whole, not
creditable to him. Spite is more often fattened than propitiated by
penitence. He may have thought besides (policy not being always a vacant
space in revengeful acts) that Anthony was capable of something stronger
and warmer, now that his humanity had been aroused. The speculation is
commonly perilous; but Farmer Fleming had the desperation of a man who
has run slightly into debt, and has heard the first din of dunning, which
to the unaccustomed imagination is fearful as bankruptcy (shorn of the
horror of the word). And, moreover, it was so wonderful to find Anthony
displaying humanity at all, that anything might be expected of him.
"Let's see what he will do," thought the farmer in an interval of his
wrath; and the wrath is very new which has none of these cool intervals.
The passions, do but watch them, are all more or less intermittent.

As it chanced, he acted sagaciously, for Anthony at last wrote to say
that his home in London was cheerless, and that he intended to move into
fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young
housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance with the
world, would be agreeable to him. His project was that one of his nieces
should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to reflect
on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now and in the
time to come. Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite unctuously.
Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old crabbed miser? "Tell
her," he said, "there's fruit at stalls at every street-corner all the
year through--oysters and whelks, if she likes--winkles, lots of pictures
in shops--a sight of muslin and silks, and rides on omnibuses--bands of
all sorts, and now and then we can take a walk to see the military on
horseback, if she's for soldiers." Indeed, he joked quite comically in
speaking of the famous horse-guards--warriors who sit on their horses to
be looked at, and do not mind it, because they are trained so thoroughly.
"Horse-guards blue, and horse-guards red," he wrote--"the blue only want
boiling." There is reason to suppose that his disrespectful joke was not
original in him, but it displayed his character in a fresh light. Of
course, if either of the girls was to go, Dahlia was the person. The
farmer commenced his usual process of sitting upon the idea. That it
would be policy to attach one of the family to this chirping old miser,
he thought incontestable. On the other hand, he had a dread of London,
and Dahlia was surpassingly fair. He put the case to Robert, in
remembrance of what his wife had spoken, hoping that Robert would
amorously stop his painful efforts to think fast enough for the occasion.
Robert, however, had nothing to say, and seemed willing to let Dahlia
depart. The only opponents to the plan were Mrs. Sumfit, a kindly, humble
relative of the farmer's, widowed out of Sussex, very loving and fat; the
cook to the household, whose waist was dimly indicated by her
apron-string; and, to aid her outcries, the silently-protesting Master
Gammon, an old man with the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard, the
slowest old man of his time--a sort of foreman of the farm before Robert
had come to take matters in hand, and thrust both him and his master into
the background. Master Gammon remarked emphatically, once and for all,
that "he never had much opinion of London." As he had never visited
London, his opinion was considered the less weighty, but, as he advanced
no further speech, the sins and backslidings of the metropolis were
strongly brought to mind by his condemnatory utterance. Policy and
Dahlia's entreaties at last prevailed with the farmer, and so the fair
girl went up to the great city.