Rhoda Fleming, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Rhoda Fleming, Complete

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Percy asked him what he thought of his country. "I'll tell you," said
Jonathan; "Englishmen's business is to go to war with the elements, and
so long as we fight them, we're in the right academy for learnin' how the
game goes. Our vulnerability commences when we think we'll sit down and
eat the fruits, and if I don't see signs o' that, set me mole-tunnelling.
Self-indulgence is the ruin of our time."

This was the closest remark he made to his relations with Robert, who
informed him that he was going to London on the following day. Jonathan
shook his hand heartily, without troubling himself about any inquiries.

"There's so much of that old man in me," said Robert, when Percy praised
him, on their return, "that I daren't call him a Prince of an old boy:
and never a spot of rancour in his soul. Have a claim on him--and there's
your seat at his table: take and offend him--there's your seat still. Eat
and drink, but you don't get near his heart. I'll surprise him some day.
He fancies he's past surprises."

"Well," said Percy, "you're younger than I am, and may think the future
belongs to you."

Early next morning they parted. Robert was in town by noon. He lost no
time in hurrying to the Western suburb. As he neared the house where he
was to believe Dahlia to be residing, he saw a man pass through the
leafless black shrubs by the iron gate; and when he came to the gate
himself the man was at the door. The door opened and closed on this man.
It was Nicodemus Sedgett, or Robert's eyes did him traitorous service. He
knocked at the door violently, and had to knock a second and a third
time. Dahlia was denied to him. He was told that Mrs. Ayrton had lived
there, but had left, and her present address was unknown. He asked to be
allowed to speak a word to the man who had just entered the house. No one
had entered for the last two hours, was the reply. Robert had an impulse
to rush by the stolid little female liar, but Percy's recent lesson to
him acted as a restraint; though, had it been a brawny woman or a lacquey
in his path, he would certainly have followed his natural counsel. He
turned away, lingering outside till it was dusk and the bruise on his
head gave great throbs, and then he footed desolately farther and farther
from the house. To combat with evil in his own country village had seemed
a simple thing enough, but it appeared a superhuman task in giant London.

CHAPTER XXV

It requires, happily, many years of an ordinary man's life to teach him
to believe in the exceeding variety and quantity of things money can buy:
yet, when ingenuous minds have fully comprehended the potent character of
the metal, they are likely enough to suppose that it will buy everything:
after which comes the groaning anxiety to possess it.

This stage of experience is a sublime development in the great souls of
misers. It is their awakening moment, and it is their first real sense of
a harvest being in their hands. They have begun under the influence of
the passion for hoarding, which is but a blind passion of the
finger-ends. The idea that they have got together, bit by bit, a power,
travels slowly up to their heavy brains. Once let it be grasped, however,
and they clutch a god. They feed on everybody's hunger for it. And, let
us confess, they have in that a mighty feast.

Anthony Hackbut was not a miser. He was merely a saving old man. His
vanity was, to be thought a miser, envied as a miser. He lived in daily
hearing of the sweet chink of gold, and loved the sound, but with a
poetical love, rather than with the sordid desire to amass gold pieces.
Though a saving old man, he had his comforts; and if they haunted him and
reproached him subsequently, for indulging wayward appetites for herrings
and whelks and other sea-dainties that render up no account to you when
they have disappeared, he put by copper and silver continually, weekly
and monthly, and was master of a sum.

He knew the breadth of this sum with accuracy, and what it would expand
to this day come a year, and probably this day come five years. He knew
it only too well. The sum took no grand leaps. It increased, but did not
seem to multiply. And he was breathing in the heart of the place, of all
places in the world, where money did multiply.

He was the possessor of twelve hundred pounds, solid, and in haven; that
is, the greater part in the Bank of England, and a portion in Boyne's
Bank. He had besides a few skirmishing securities, and some such bits of
paper as Algernon had given him in the public-house on that remarkable
night of his visit to the theatre.

These, when the borrowers were defaulters in their payments and pleaded
for an extension of time, inspired him with sentiments of grandeur that
the solid property could not impart. Nevertheless, the anti-poetical
tendency within him which warred with the poetical, and set him reducing
whatsoever he claimed to plain figures, made it but a fitful hour of
satisfaction.

He had only to fix his mind upon Farmer Fleming's conception of his
wealth, to feel the miserable smallness of what seemed legitimately his
own; and he felt it with so poignant an emotion that at times his fears
of death were excited by the knowledge of a dead man's impotence to
suggest hazy margins in the final exposure of his property. There it
would lie, dead as himself! contracted, coffined, contemptible!

What would the farmer think when he came to hear that his brother Tony's
estate was not able to buy up Queen Anne's Farm?--when, in point of fact,
he found that he had all along been the richer man of the two!

Anthony's comfort was in the unfaltering strength of his constitution. He
permitted his estimate of it to hint at the probability of his outlasting
his brother William John, to whom he wished no earthly ill, but only that
he should not live with a mitigated veneration for him. He was really
nourished by the farmer's gluttonous delight in his supposed piles of
wealth. Sometimes, for weeks, he had the gift of thinking himself one of
the Bank with which he had been so long connected; and afterward a
wretched reaction set in.

It was then that his touch upon Bank money began to intoxicate him
strangely. He had at times thousands hugged against his bosom, and his
heart swelled to the money-bags immense. He was a dispirited, but a
grateful creature, after he had delivered them up. The delirium came by
fits, as if a devil lurked to surprise him.

"With this money," said the demon, "you might speculate, and in two days
make ten times the amount."

To which Anthony answered: "My character's worth fifty times the amount."

Such was his reply, but he did not think it. He was honest, and his
honesty had become a habit; but the money was the only thing which acted
on his imagination; his character had attained to no sacred halo, and was
just worth his annual income and the respect of the law for his person.
The money fired his brain!

"Ah! if it was mine!" he sighed. "If I could call it mine for just forty
or fifty hours! But it ain't, and I can't."

He fought dogged battles with the tempter, and beat him off again and
again. One day he made a truce with him by saying that if ever the farmer
should be in town of an afternoon he would steal ten minutes or so, and
make an appointment with him somewhere and show him the money-bags
without a word: let him weigh and eye them: and then the plan was for
Anthony to talk of politics, while the farmer's mind was in a ferment.

With this arrangement the infernal Power appeared to be content, and
Anthony was temporarily relieved of his trouble. In other words, the
intermittent fever of a sort of harmless rascality was afflicting this
old creature. He never entertained the notion of running clear away with
the money entrusted to him.

Whither could an aged man fly? He thought of foreign places as of spots
that gave him a shivering sense of its being necessary for him to be born
again in nakedness and helplessness, if ever he was to see them and set
foot on them.

London was his home, and clothed him about warmly and honourably, and so
he said to the demon in their next colloquy.

Anthony had become guilty of the imprudence of admitting him to
conferences and arguing with him upon equal terms. They tell us, that
this is the imprudence of women under temptation; and perhaps Anthony was
pushed to the verge of the abyss from causes somewhat similar to those
which imperil them, and employed the same kind of efforts in his
resistance.

In consequence of this compromise, the demon by degrees took seat at his
breakfast-table, when Mrs. Wicklow, his landlady, could hear Anthony
talking in the tone of voice of one who was pushed to his sturdiest
arguments. She conceived that the old man's head was softening.

He was making one of his hurried rushes with the porterage of money on an
afternoon in Spring, when a young female plucked at his coat, and his
wrath at offenders against the law kindled in a minute into fury.

"Hands off, minx!" he cried. "You shall be given in charge. Where's a
policeman?"

"Uncle!" she said.

"You precious swindler in petticoats!" Anthony fumed.

But he had a queer recollection of her face, and when she repeated
piteously: "Uncle!" he peered at her features, saying,--

"No!" in wonderment, several times.

Her hair was cut like a boy's. She was in common garments, with a
close-shaped skull-cap and a black straw bonnet on her head; not gloved,
of ill complexion, and with deep dark lines slanting down from the
corners of her eyes. Yet the inspection convinced him that he beheld
Dahlia, his remembering the niece. He was amazed; but speedily priceless
trust in his arms, and the wickedness of the streets, he bade her follow
him. She did so with some difficulty, for he ran, and dodged, and treated
the world as his enemy, suddenly vanished, and appeared again breathing
freely.

"Why, my girl?" he said: "Why, Dahl--Mrs. What's-your-name? Why, who'd
have known you? Is that"--he got his eyes close to her hair; "is that the
ladies' fashion now? 'Cause, if it is, our young street scamps has only
got to buy bonnets, and--I say, you don't look the Pomp. Not as you used
to, Miss Ma'am, I mean--no, that you don't. Well, what's the news? How's
your husband?"

"Uncle," said Dahlia; "will you, please, let me speak to you somewhere?"

"Ain't we standing together?"

"Oh! pray, out of the crowd!"

"Come home with me, if my lodgings ain't too poor for you," said Anthony.

"Uncle, I can't. I have been unwell. I cannot walk far. Will you take me
to some quiet place?"

"Will you treat me to a cab?" Anthony sneered vehemently.

"I have left off riding, uncle."

"What! Hulloa!" Anthony sang out. "Cash is down in the mouth at home, is
it? Tell me that, now?"

Dahlia dropped her eyelids, and then entreated him once more to conduct
her to a quiet place where they might sit together, away from noise. She
was very earnest and very sad, not seeming to have much strength.

"Do you mind taking my arm?" said Anthony.

She leaned her hand on his arm, and he dived across the road with her,
among omnibuses and cabs, shouting to them through the roar,--

"We're the Independence on two legs, warranted sound, and no
competition;" and saying to Dahlia: "Lor' bless you! there's no retort in
'em, or I'd say something worth hearing. It's like poking lions in cages
with raw meat, afore you get a chaffing-match out o' them. Some of 'em
know me. They'd be good at it, those fellows. I've heard of good things
said by 'em. But there they sit, and they've got no circulation--ain't
ready, except at old women, or when they catch you in a mess, and getting
the worst of it. Let me tell you; you'll never get manly chaff out of big
bundles o' fellows with ne'er an atom o' circulation. The river's the
place for that. I've heard uncommon good things on the river--not of 'em,
but heard 'em. T' other's most part invention. And, they tell me,
horseback's a prime thing for chaff. Circulation, again. Sharp and
lively, I mean; not bawl, and answer over your back--most part impudence,
and nothing else--and then out of hearing. That sort o' chaff's cowardly.
Boys are stiff young parties--circulation--and I don't tackle them pretty
often, 'xcept when I'm going like a ball among nine-pins. It's all a
matter o' circulation. I say, my dear," Anthony addressed her seriously,
"you should never lay hold o' my arm when you see me going my pace of an
afternoon. I took you for a thief, and worse--I did. That I did. Had you
been waiting to see me?"

"A little," Dahlia replied, breathless.

"You have been ill?"

"A little," she said.

"You've written to the farm? O' course you have!"

"Oh! uncle, wait," moaned Dahlia.

"But, ha' you been sick, and not written home?"

"Wait; please, wait," she entreated him.

"I'll wait," said Anthony; "but that's no improvement to queerness; and
'queer''s your motto. Now we cross London Bridge. There's the Tower that
lived in times when no man was safe of keeping his own money, 'cause of
grasping kings--all claws and crown. I'm Republican as far as 'none o'
them'--goes. There's the ships. The sun rises behind 'em, and sets afore
'em, and you may fancy, if you like, there's always gold in their
rigging. Gals o' your sort think I say, come! tell me, if you are a
lady?"

"No, uncle, no!" Dahlia cried, and then drawing in her breath, added:
"not to you."

"Last time I crossed this bridge with a young woman hanging on my arm, it
was your sister; they say she called on you, and you wouldn't see her;
and a gal so good and a gal so true ain't to be got for a sister every
day in the year! What are you pulling me for?"

Dahlia said nothing, but clung to him with a drooping head, and so they
hurried along, until Anthony stopped in front of a shop displaying cups
and muffins at the window, and leprous-looking strips of bacon, and
sausages that had angled for appetites till they had become pallid sodden
things, like washed-out bait.

Into this shop he led her, and they took possession of a compartment, and
ordered tea and muffins.

The shop was empty.

"It's one of the expenses of relationship," Anthony sighed, after probing
Dahlia unsatisfactorily to see whether she intended to pay for both, or
at least for herself; and finding that she had no pride at all. "My
sister marries your father, and, in consequence--well! a muffin now and
then ain't so very much. We'll forget it, though it is a breach, mind, in
counting up afterwards, and two-pences every day's equal to a good big
cannonball in the castle-wall at the end of the year. Have you written
home?"

Dahlia's face showed the bright anguish of unshed tears.

"Uncle-oh! speak low. I have been near death. I have been ill for so long
a time. I have come to you to hear about them--my father and Rhoda. Tell
me what they are doing, and do they sleep and eat well, and are not in
trouble? I could not write. I was helpless. I could not hold a pen. Be
kind, dear uncle, and do not reproach me. Please, tell me that they have
not been sorrowful."

A keenness shot from Anthony's eyes. "Then, where's your husband?" he
asked.

She made a sad attempt at smiling. "He is abroad."

"How about his relations? Ain't there one among 'em to write for you when
you're ill?"

"He... Yes, he has relatives. I could not ask them. Oh! I am not strong,
uncle; if you will only leave following me so with questions; but tell
me, tell me what I want to know."

"Well, then, you tell me where your husband banks," returned Anthony.

"Indeed, I cannot say."

"Do you," Anthony stretched out alternative fingers, "do you get money
from him to make payments in gold, or, do you get it in paper?"

She stared as in terror of a pit-fall. "Paper," she said at a venture.

"Well, then, name your Bank."

There was no cunning in her eye as she answered: "I don't know any bank,
except the Bank of England."

"Why the deuce didn't you say so at once--eh?" cried Anthony. "He gives
you bank-notes. Nothing better in the world. And he a'n't been givin' you
many lately--is that it? What's his profession, or business?"

"He is...he is no profession."

"Then, what is he? Is he a gentleman?"

"Yes," she breathed plaintively.

"Your husband's a gentleman. Eh?--and lost his money?"

"Yes."

"How did he lose it?"

The poor victim of this pertinacious interrogatory now beat about within
herself for succour. "I must not say," she replied.

"You're going to try to keep a secret, are ye?" said Anthony; and she, in
her relief at the pause to her torment, said: "I am," with a little
infantile, withering half-smile.

"Well, you've been and kept yourself pretty secret," the old man pursued.
"I suppose your husband's proud? He's proud, ain't he? He's of a family,
I'll be bound. Is he of a family? How did he like your dressing up like a
mill'ner gal to come down in the City and see me?"

Dahlia's guile was not ready. "He didn't mind," she said.

"He didn't mind, didn't he? He don't mind your cutting of your hair
so?--didn't mind that?"

She shook her head. "No."

Anthony was down upon her like a hawk.

"Why, he's abroad!"

"Yes; I mean, he did not see me."

With which, in a minute, she was out of his grasp; but her heart beat
thick, her lips were dry, and her thoughts were in disorder.

"Then, he don't know you've been and got shaved, and a poll like a
turnip-head of a thief? That's something for him to learn, is it?"

The picture of her beauty gone, seared her eyes like heated brass. She
caught Anthony's arm with one firm hand to hold him silent, and with the
other hand covered her sight and let the fit of weeping pass.

When the tears had spent themselves, she relinquished her hold of the
astonished old man, who leaned over the table to her, and dominated by
the spirit of her touch, whispered, like one who had accepted a bond of
secresy: "Th' old farmer's well. So's Rhoda--my darkie lass. They've
taken on a bit. And then they took to religion for comfort. Th' old
farmer attends Methody meetin's, and quotes Scriptur' as if he was fixed
like a pump to the Book, and couldn't fetch a breath without quotin'.
Rhoda's oftenest along with your rector's wife down there, and does works
o' charity, sicknussin', readin'--old farmer does the preachin'. Old
mother Sumfit's fat as ever, and says her money's for you. Old Gammon
goes on eatin' of the dumplins. Hey! what a queer old ancient he is. He
seems to me to belong to a time afore ever money was. That Mr. Robert's
off...never been down there since he left, 'cause my darkie lass thought
herself too good for him. So she is!--too good for anybody. They're going
to leave the farm; sell, and come to London."

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Dahlia; "not going to leave the dear old farm, and
our lane, and the old oaks, leading up to the heath. Are they? Father
will miss it. Rhoda will mourn so. No place will ever be like that to
them. I love it better than any place on earth."

"That's queer," said Anthony. "Why do you refuse to go, or won't let your
husband take you down there; if you like the place that raving-like? But
'queer''s your motto. The truth is this--you just listen. Hear me--hush!
I won't speak in a bawl. You're a reasonable being, and you don't--that's
to say, you do understand, the old farmer feels it uncomfortable--"

"But I never helped him when I was there," said Dahlia, suddenly
shrinking in a perceptible tremble of acute divination. "I was no use. I
never helped him--not at all. I was no--no use!"

Anthony blinked his eyes, not knowing how it was that he had thus been
thrown out of his direct road. He began again, in his circumlocutory
delicacy: "Never mind; help or no help, what th' old farmer feels is--and
quite nat'ral. There's sensations as a father, and sensations as a man;
and what th' old farmer feels is--"

"But Rhoda has always been more to father than I have," Dahlia cried, now
stretching forward with desperate courage to confront her uncle, distract
his speech, and avert the saying of the horrible thing she dreaded.
"Rhoda was everything to him. Mother perhaps took to me--my mother!"

The line of her long underlie drawn sharp to check her tears, stopped her
speaking.

"All very well about Rhoda," said Anthony. "She's everything to me, too."

"Every--everybody loves her!" Dahlia took him up.

"Let 'em, so long as they don't do no harm to her," was Anthony's remark.
There was an idea in this that he had said, and the light of it led off
his fancy. It was some time before he returned to the attack.

"Neighbours gossip a good deal. O' course you know that."

"I never listen to them," said Dahlia, who now felt bare at any instant
for the stab she saw coming.

"No, not in London; but country's different, and a man hearing of his
child 'it's very odd!' and 'keepin' away like that!' and 'what's become
of her?' and that sort of thing, he gets upset."

Dahlia swallowed in her throat, as in perfect quietude of spirit, and
pretended to see no meaning for herself in Anthony's words.

But she said, inadvertently, "Dear father!" and it gave Anthony his
opening.

"There it is. No doubt you're fond of him. You're fond o' th' old farmer,
who's your father. Then, why not make a entry into the village, and show
'em? I loves my father, says you. I can or I can't bring my husband, you
seems to say; but I'm come to see my old father. Will you go down
to-morrow wi' me?"

"Oh!" Dahlia recoiled and abandoned all defence in a moan: "I can't--I
can't!"

"There," said Anthony, "you can't. You confess you can't; and there's
reason for what's in your father's mind. And he hearin' neighbours'
gossip, and it comes to him by a sort of extractin'--'Where's her
husband?' bein' the question; and 'She ain't got one,' the answer--it's
nat'ral for him to leave the place. I never can tell him how you went
off, or who's the man, lucky or not. You went off sudden, on a morning,
after kissin' me at breakfast; and no more Dahly visible. And he
suspects--he more'n suspects. Farm's up for sale. Th' old farmer thinks
it's unbrotherly of me not to go and buy, and I can't make him see I
don't understand land: it's about like changeing sovereigns for lumps o'
clay, in my notions; and that ain't my taste. Long and the short
is--people down there at Wrexby and all round say you ain't married. He
ain't got a answer for 'em; it's cruel to hear, and crueller to think:
he's got no answer, poor old farmer! and he's obliged to go inter exile.
Farm's up for sale."

Anthony thumped with his foot conclusively.

"Say I'm not married!" said Dahlia, and a bad colour flushed her
countenance. "They say--I'm not married. I am--I am. It's false. It's
cruel of father to listen to them--wicked people! base--base people! I am
married, uncle. Tell father so, and don't let him sell the farm. Tell
him, I said I was married. I am. I'm respected. I have only a little
trouble, and I'm sure others have too. We all have. Tell father not to
leave. It breaks my heart. Oh! uncle, tell him that from me."

Dahlia gathered her shawl close, and set an irresolute hand upon her
bonnet strings, that moved as if it had forgotten its purpose. She could
say no more. She could only watch her uncle's face, to mark the effect of
what she had said.

Anthony nodded at vacancy. His eyebrows were up, and did not descend from
their elevation. "You see, your father wants assurances; he wants facts.
They're easy to give, if give 'em you can. Ah, there's a weddin' ring on
your finger, sure enough. Plain gold--and, Lord! how bony your fingers
ha' got, Dahly. If you are a sinner, you're a bony one now, and that
don't seem so bad to me. I don't accuse you, my dear. Perhaps I'd like to
see your husband's banker's book. But what your father hears, is--You've
gone wrong."

Dahlia smiled in a consummate simulation of scorn.

"And your father thinks that's true."

She smiled with an equal simulation of saddest pity.

"And he says this: 'Proof,' he says, 'proof's what I want, that she's an
honest woman.' He asks for you to clear yourself. He says, 'It's hard for
an old man'--these are his words 'it's hard for an old man to hear his
daughter called...'"

Anthony smacked his hand tight on his open mouth.

He was guiltless of any intended cruelty, and Dahlia's first impulse when
she had got her breath, was to soothe him. She took his hand. "Dear
father! poor father! Dear, dear father!" she kept saying.

"Rhoda don't think it," Anthony assured her.

"No?" and Dahlia's bosom exulted up to higher pain.

"Rhoda declares you are married. To hear that gal fight for you--there's
ne'er a one in Wrexby dares so much as hint a word within a mile of her."

"My Rhoda! my sister!" Dahlia gasped, and the tears came pouring down her
face.

In vain Anthony lifted her tea-cup and the muffin-plate to her for
consolation. His hushings and soothings were louder than her weeping.
Incapable of resisting such a protest of innocence, he said, "And I don't
think it, neither."

She pressed his fingers, and begged him to pay the people of the shop: at
which sign of her being probably moneyless, Anthony could not help
mumbling, "Though I can't make out about your husband, and why he lets ye
be cropped--that he can't help, may be--but lets ye go about dressed like
a mill'ner gal, and not afford cabs. Is he very poor?"

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