Rhoda Fleming, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Rhoda Fleming, Complete

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Money, when the imagination deals with it thus, has no substantial
relation to mortal affairs. It is a tricksy thing, distending and
contracting as it dances in the mind, like sunlight on the ceiling cast
from a morning tea-cup, if a forced simile will aid the conception. The
farmer struck on thirty thousand and some odd hundred pounds--outlying
debts, or so, excluded--as what Anthony's will, in all likelihood, would
be sworn under: say, thirty thousand, or, safer, say, twenty thousand.
Bequeathed--how? To him and to his children. But to the children in
reversion after his decease? Or how? In any case, they might make capital
marriages; and the farm estate should go to whichever of the two young
husbands he liked the best. Farmer Fleming asked not for any life of ease
and splendour, though thirty thousand pounds was a fortune; or even
twenty thousand. Noblemen have stooped to marry heiresses owning no more
than that! The idea of their having done so actually shot across him, and
his heart sent up a warm spring of tenderness toward the patient, good,
grubbing old fellow, sitting beside him, who had lived and died to enrich
and elevate the family. At the same time, he could not refrain from
thinking that Anthony, broad-shouldered as he was, though bent, sound on
his legs, and well-coloured for a Londoner, would be accepted by any Life
Insurance office, at a moderate rate, considering his age. The farmer
thought of his own health, and it was with a pang that he fancied himself
being probed by the civil-speaking Life Insurance doctor (a gentleman who
seems to issue upon us applicants from out the muffled folding doors of
Hades; taps us on the chest, once, twice, and forthwith writes down our
fateful dates). Probably, Anthony would not have to pay a higher rate of
interest than he.

"Are you insured, brother Tony?" the question escaped him.

"No, I ain't, brother William John;" Anthony went on nodding like an
automaton set in motion. "There's two sides to that. I'm a long-lived
man. Long-lived men don't insure; that is, unless they're fools. That's
how the Offices thrive."

"Case of accident?" the farmer suggested.

"Oh! nothing happens to me," replied Anthony.

The farmer jumped on his legs, and yawned.

"Shall we take a turn in the garden, brother Tony?"

"With all my heart, brother William John."

The farmer had conscience to be ashamed of the fit of irritable vexation
which had seized on him; and it was not till Anthony being asked the date
of his birth, had declared himself twelve years his senior, that the
farmer felt his speculations to be justified. Anthony was nearly a
generation ahead. They walked about, and were seen from the windows
touching one another on the shoulder in a brotherly way. When they came
back to the women, and tea, the farmer's mind was cooler, and all his
reckonings had gone to mist. He was dejected over his tea.

"What is the matter, father?" said Rhoda.

"I'll tell you, my dear," Anthony replied for him. "He's envying me some
one I want to ask me that question when I'm at my tea in London."

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Fleming kept his forehead from his daughter's good-night kiss until
the room was cleared, after supper, and then embracing her very heartily,
he informed her that her uncle had offered to pay her expenses on a visit
to London, by which he contrived to hint that a golden path had opened to
his girl, and at the same time entreated her to think nothing of it; to
dismiss all expectations and dreams of impossible sums from her mind, and
simply to endeavour to please her uncle, who had a right to his own, and
a right to do what he liked with his own, though it were forty, fifty
times as much as he possessed--and what that might amount to no one knew.
In fact, as is the way with many experienced persons, in his attempt to
give advice to another, he was very impressive in lecturing himself, and
warned that other not to succumb to a temptation principally by
indicating the natural basis of the allurement. Happily for young and for
old, the intense insight of the young has much to distract or soften it.
Rhoda thanked her father, and chose to think that she had listened to
good and wise things.

"Your sister," he said--"but we won't speak of her. If I could part with
you, my lass, I'd rather she was the one to come back."

"Dahlia would be killed by our quiet life now," said Rhoda.

"Ay," the farmer mused. "If she'd got to pay six men every Saturday
night, she wouldn't complain o' the quiet. But, there--you neither of you
ever took to farming or to housekeeping; but any gentleman might be proud
to have one of you for a wife. I said so when you was girls. And if,
you've been dull, my dear, what's the good o' society? Tea-cakes mayn't
seem to cost money, nor a glass o' grog to neighbours; but once open the
door to that sort o' thing and your reckoning goes. And what I said to
your poor mother's true. I said: Our girls, they're mayhap not equals of
the Hollands, the Nashaws, the Perrets, and the others about here--no;
they're not equals, because the others are not equals o' them, maybe."

The yeoman's pride struggled out in this obscure way to vindicate his
unneighbourliness and the seclusion of his daughters from the society of
girls of their age and condition; nor was it hard for Rhoda to assure
him, as she earnestly did, that he had acted rightly.

Rhoda, assisted by Mrs. Sumfit, was late in the night looking up what
poor decorations she possessed wherewith to enter London, and be worthy
of her sister's embrace, so that she might not shock the lady Dahlia had
become.

"Depend you on it, my dear," said Mrs. Sumfit, "my Dahly's grown above
him. That's nettles to your uncle, my dear. He can't abide it. Don't you
see he can't? Some men's like that. Others 'd see you dressed like a
princess, and not be satisfied. They vary so, the teasin' creatures! But
one and all, whether they likes it or not, owns a woman's the better for
bein' dressed in the fashion. What do grieve me to my insidest heart, it
is your bonnet. What a bonnet that was lying beside her dear round arm in
the po'trait, and her finger up making a dimple in her cheek, as if she
was thinking of us in a sorrowful way. That's the arts o' being
lady-like--look sad-like. How could we get a bonnet for you?"

"My own must do," said Rhoda.

"Yes, and you to look like lady and servant-gal a-goin' out for an
airin'; and she to feel it! Pretty, that'd be!"

"She won't be ashamed of me," Rhoda faltered; and then hummed a little
tune, and said firmly--"It's no use my trying to look like what I'm not."

"No, truly;" Mrs. Sumfit assented. "But it's your bein' behind the
fashions what hurt me. As well you might be an old thing like me, for any
pleasant looks you'll git. Now, the country--you're like in a coalhole
for the matter o' that. While London, my dear, its pavement and gutter,
and omnibus traffic; and if you're not in the fashion, the little wicked
boys of the streets themselves 'll let you know it; they've got such eyes
for fashions, they have. And I don't want my Dahly's sister to be laughed
at, and called 'coal-scuttle,' as happened to me, my dear, believe it or
not--and shoved aside, and said to--'Who are you?' For she reely is
nice-looking. Your uncle Anthony and Mr. Robert agreed upon that."

Rhoda coloured, and said, after a time, "It would please me if people
didn't speak about my looks."

The looking-glass probably told her no more than that she was nice to the
eye, but a young man who sees anything should not see like a mirror, and
a girl's instinct whispers to her, that her image has not been taken to
heart when she is accurately and impartially described by him.

The key to Rhoda at this period was a desire to be made warm with praise
of her person. She beheld her face at times, and shivered. The face was
so strange with its dark thick eyebrows, and peculiarly straight-gazing
brown eyes; the level long red under-lip and curved upper; and the chin
and nose, so unlike Dahlia's, whose nose was, after a little dip from the
forehead, one soft line to its extremity, and whose chin seemed shaped to
a cup. Rhoda's outlines were harder. There was a suspicion of a
heavenward turn to her nose, and of squareness to her chin. Her face,
when studied, inspired in its owner's mind a doubt of her being even nice
to the eye, though she knew that in exercise, and when smitten by a
blush, brightness and colour aided her claims. She knew also that her
head was easily poised on her neck; and that her figure was reasonably
good; but all this was unconfirmed knowledge, quickly shadowed by the
doubt. As the sun is wanted to glorify the right features of a landscape,
this girl thirsted for a dose of golden flattery. She felt, without envy
of her sister, that Dahlia eclipsed her: and all she prayed for was that
she might not be quite so much in the background and obscure.

But great, powerful London--the new universe to her spirit--was opening
its arms to her. In her half sleep that night she heard the mighty
thunder of the city, crashing, tumults of disordered harmonies, and the
splendour of the lamp-lighted city appeared to hang up under a dark-blue
heaven, removed from earth, like a fresh planet to which she was being
beckoned.

At breakfast on the Sunday morning, her departure was necessarily spoken
of in public. Robert talked to her exactly as he had talked to Dahlia, on
the like occasion. He mentioned, as she remembered in one or two
instances, the names of the same streets, and professed a similar anxiety
as regarded driving her to the station and catching the train. "That's a
thing which makes a man feel his strength's nothing," he said. "You can't
stop it. I fancy I could stop a four-in-hand at full gallop. Mind, I only
fancy I could; but when you come to do with iron and steam, I feel like a
baby. You can't stop trains."

"You can trip 'em," said Anthony, a remark that called forth general
laughter, and increased the impression that he was a man of resources.

Rhoda was vexed by Robert's devotion to his strength. She was going, and
wished to go, but she wished to be regretted as well; and she looked at
him more. He, on the contrary, scarcely looked at her at all. He threw
verbal turnips, oats, oxen, poultry, and every possible melancholy
matter-of-fact thing, about the table, described the farm and his
fondness for it and the neighbourhood; said a farmer's life was best, and
gave Rhoda a week in which to be tired of London.

She sneered in her soul, thinking "how little he knows of the constancy
in the nature of women!" adding, "when they form attachments."

Anthony was shown at church, in spite of a feeble intimation he
expressed, that it would be agreeable to him to walk about in the March
sunshine, and see the grounds and the wild flowers, which never gave
trouble, nor cost a penny, and were always pretty, and worth twenty of
your artificial contrivances.

"Same as I say to Miss Dahly," he took occasion to remark; "but no!--no
good. I don't believe women hear ye, when you talk sense of that kind.
'Look,' says I, 'at a violet.' 'Look,' says she, 'at a rose.' Well, what
can ye say after that? She swears the rose looks best. You swear the
violet costs least. Then there you have a battle between what it costs
and how it looks."

Robert pronounced a conventional affirmative, when called on for it by a
look from Anthony. Whereupon Rhoda cried out,--

"Dahlia was right--she was right, uncle."

"She was right, my dear, if she was a ten-thousander. She wasn't right as
a farmer's daughter with poor expectations.--I'd say humble, if humble
she were. As a farmer's daughter, she should choose the violet side.
That's clear as day. One thing's good, I admit; she tells me she makes
her own bonnets, and they're as good as milliners', and that's a proud
matter to say of your own niece. And to buy dresses for herself, I
suppose, she's sat down and she made dresses for fine ladies. I've found
her at it. Save the money for the work, says I. What does she reply--she
always has a reply: 'Uncle, I know the value of money better. 'You mean,
you spend it,' I says to her. 'I buy more than it's worth,' says she. And
I'll tell you what, Mr. Robert Armstrong, as I find your name to be, sir;
if you beat women at talking, my lord! you're a clever chap."

Robert laughed. "I give in at the first mile."

"Don't think much of women--is that it, sir?"

"I'm glad to say I don't think of them at all."

"Do you think of one woman, now, Mr. Robert Armstrong?"

"I'd much rather think of two."

"And why, may I ask?"

"It's safer."

"Now, I don't exactly see that," said Anthony.

"You set one to tear the other," Robert explained.

"You're a Grand Turk Mogul in your reasonings of women, Mr. Robert
Armstrong. I hope as your morals are sound, sir?"

They were on the road to church, but Robert could not restrain a swinging
outburst.

He observed that he hoped likewise that his morals were sound.

"Because," said Anthony, "do you see, sir, two wives--"

"No, no; one wife," interposed Robert. "You said 'think about;' I'd
'think about' any number of women, if I was idle. But the woman you mean
to make your wife, you go to at once, and don't 'think about' her or the
question either."

"You make sure of her, do you, sir?"

"No: I try my luck; that is all."

"Suppose she won't have ye?"

"Then I wait for her."

"Suppose she gets married to somebody else?"

"Well, you know, I shouldn't cast eye on a woman who was a fool."

"Well, upon my--" Anthony checked his exclamation, returning to the
charge with, "Just suppose, for the sake of supposing--supposing she was
a fool, and gone and got married, and you thrown back'ard on one leg,
starin' at the other, stupified-like?"

"I don't mind supposing it," said Robert. "Say, she's a fool. Her being a
fool argues that I was one in making a fool's choice. So, she jilts me,
and I get a pistol, or I get a neat bit of rope, or I take a clean header
with a cannon-ball at my heels, or I go to the chemist's and ask for
stuff to poison rats,--anything a fool'd do under the circumstances, it
don't matter what."

Old Anthony waited for Rhoda to jump over a stile, and said to her,--

"He laughs at the whole lot of ye."

"Who?" she asked, with betraying cheeks.

"This Mr. Robert Armstrong of yours."

"Of mine, uncle!"

"He don't seem to care a snap o' the finger for any of ye."

"Then, none of us must care for him, uncle."

"Now, just the contrary. That always shows a young fellow who's attending
to his business. If he'd seen you boil potatoes, make dumplings, beds,
tea, all that, you'd have had a chance. He'd have marched up to ye before
you was off to London."

"Saying, 'You are the woman.'" Rhoda was too desperately tickled by the
idea to refrain from uttering it, though she was angry, and suffering
internal discontent. "Or else, 'You are the cook,'" she muttered, and
shut, with the word, steel bars across her heart, calling him, mentally,
names not justified by anything he had said or done--such as mercenary,
tyrannical, and such like.

Robert was attentive to her in church. Once she caught him with his eyes
on her face; but he betrayed no confusion, and looked away at the
clergyman. When the text was given out, he found the place in his Bible,
and handed it to her pointedly--"There shall be snares and traps unto
you;" a line from Joshua. She received the act as a polite pawing
civility; but when she was coming out of church, Robert saw that a blush
swept over her face, and wondered what thoughts could be rising within
her, unaware that girls catch certain meanings late, and suffer a fiery
torture when these meanings are clear to them. Rhoda called up the pride
of her womanhood that she might despise the man who had dared to distrust
her. She kept her poppy colour throughout the day, so sensitive was this
pride. But most she was angered, after reflection, by the doubts which
Robert appeared to cast on Dahlia, in setting his finger upon that
burning line of Scripture. It opened a whole black kingdom to her
imagination, and first touched her visionary life with shade. She was
sincere in her ignorance that the doubts were her own, but they lay deep
in unawakened recesses of the soul; it was by a natural action of her
reason that she transferred and forced them upon him who had chanced to
make them visible.

CHAPTER V

When young minds are set upon a distant object, they scarcely live for
anything about them. The drive to the station and the parting with
Robert, the journey to London, which had latterly seemed to her
secretly-distressed anticipation like a sunken city--a place of wonder
with the waters over it--all passed by smoothly; and then it became
necessary to call a cabman, for whom, as he did her the service to lift
her box, Rhoda felt a gracious respect, until a quarrel ensued between
him and her uncle concerning sixpence;--a poor sum, as she thought; but
representing, as Anthony impressed upon her understanding during the
conflict of hard words, a principle. Those who can persuade themselves
that they are fighting for a principle, fight strenuously, and maybe
reckoned upon to overmatch combatants on behalf of a miserable small
coin; so the cabman went away discomfited. He used such bad language that
Rhoda had no pity for him, and hearing her uncle style it "the London
tongue," she thought dispiritedly of Dahlia's having had to listen to it
through so long a season. Dahlia was not at home; but Mrs. Wicklow,
Anthony's landlady, undertook to make Rhoda comfortable, which operation
she began by praising dark young ladies over fair ones, at the same time
shaking Rhoda's arm that she might not fail to see a compliment was
intended. "This is our London way," she said. But Rhoda was most
disconcerted when she heard Mrs. Wicklow relate that her daughter and
Dahlia were out together, and say, that she had no doubt they had found
some pleasant and attentive gentleman for a companion, if they had not
gone purposely to meet one. Her thoughts of her sister were perplexed,
and London seemed a gigantic net around them both.

"Yes, that's the habit with the girls up here," said Anthony; "that's
what fine bonnets mean."

Rhoda dropped into a bitter depth of brooding. The savage nature of her
virgin pride was such that it gave her great suffering even to suppose
that a strange gentleman would dare to address her sister. She
half-fashioned the words on her lips that she had dreamed of a false
Zion, and was being righteously punished. By-and-by the landlady's
daughter returned home alone, saying, with a dreadful laugh, that Dahlia
had sent her for her Bible; but she would give no explanation of the
singular mission which had been entrusted to her, and she showed no
willingness to attempt to fulfil it, merely repeating, "Her Bible!" with
a vulgar exhibition of simulated scorn that caused Rhoda to shrink from
her, though she would gladly have poured out a multitude of questions in
the ear of one who had last been with her beloved. After a while, Mrs.
Wicklow looked at the clock, and instantly became overclouded with an
extreme gravity.

"Eleven! and she sent Mary Ann home for her Bible. This looks bad. I call
it hypocritical, the idea of mentioning the Bible. Now, if she had said
to Mary Ann, go and fetch any other book but a Bible!"

"It was mother's Bible," interposed Rhoda.

Mrs. Wicklow replied: "And I wish all young women to be as innocent as
you, my dear. You'll get you to bed. You're a dear, mild, sweet, good
young woman. I'm never deceived in character."

Vaunting her penetration, she accompanied Rhoda to Dahlia's chamber,
bidding her sleep speedily, or that when her sister came they would be
talking till the cock crowed hoarse.

"There's a poultry-yard close to us?" said Rhoda; feeling less at home
when she heard that there was not.

The night was quiet and clear. She leaned her head out of the window, and
heard the mellow Sunday evening roar of the city as of a sea at ebb. And
Dahlia was out on the sea. Rhoda thought of it as she looked at the row
of lamps, and listened to the noise remote, until the sight of stars was
pleasant as the faces of friends. "People are kind here," she reflected,
for her short experience of the landlady was good, and a young gentleman
who had hailed a cab for her at the station, had a nice voice. He was
fair. "I am dark," came a spontaneous reflection. She undressed, and half
dozing over her beating heart in bed, heard the street door open, and
leaped to think that her sister approached, jumping up in her bed to give
ear to the door and the stairs, that were conducting her joy to her: but
she quickly recomposed herself, and feigned sleep, for the delight of
revelling in her sister's first wonderment. The door was flung wide, and
Rhoda heard her name called by Dahlia's voice, and then there was a
delicious silence, and she felt that Dahlia was coming up to her on
tiptoe, and waited for her head to be stooped near, that she might fling
out her arms, and draw the dear head to her bosom. But Dahlia came only
to the bedside, without leaning over, and spoke of her looks, which held
the girl quiet.

"How she sleeps! It's a country sleep!" Dahlia murmured. "She's changed,
but it's all for the better. She's quite a woman; she's a perfect
brunette; and the nose I used to laugh at suits her face and those black,
thick eyebrows of hers; my pet! Oh, why is she here? What's meant by it?
I knew nothing of her coming. Is she sent on purpose?"

Rhoda did not stir. The tone of Dahlia's speaking, low and almost awful
to her, laid a flat hand on her, and kept her still.

"I came for my Bible," she heard Dahlia say. "I promised mother--oh, my
poor darling mother! And Dody lying in my bed! Who would have thought of
such things? Perhaps heaven does look after us and interfere. What will
become of me? Oh, you pretty innocent in your sleep! I lie for hours, and
can't sleep. She binds her hair in a knot on the pillow, just as she used
to in the old farm days!"

Rhoda knew that her sister was bending over her now, but she was almost
frigid, and could not move.

Dahlia went to the looking-glass. "How flushed I am!" she murmured. "No;
I'm pale, quite white. I've lost my strength. What can I do? How could I
take mother's Bible, and run from my pretty one, who expects me, and
dreams she'll wake with me beside her in the morning! I can't--I can't If
you love me, Edward, you won't wish it."

She fell into a chair, crying wildly, and muffling her sobs. Rhoda's
eyelids grew moist, but wonder and the cold anguish of senseless sympathy
held her still frost-bound. All at once she heard the window open. Some
one spoke in the street below; some one uttered Dahlia's name. A deep
bell swung a note of midnight.

"Go!" cried Dahlia.

The window was instantly shut.

The vibration of Dahlia's voice went through Rhoda like the heavy shaking
of the bell after it had struck, and the room seemed to spin and hum. It
was to her but another minute before her sister slid softly into the bed,
and they were locked together.

CHAPTER VI

Boyne's bank was of the order of those old and firmly fixed
establishments which have taken root with the fortunes of the
country--are honourable as England's name, solid as her prosperity, and
even as the flourishing green tree to shareholders: a granite house.
Boyne himself had been disembodied for more than a century: Burt and
Hamble were still of the flesh; but a greater than Burt or Hamble was
Blancove--the Sir William Blancove, Baronet, of city feasts and
charities, who, besides being a wealthy merchant, possessed of a very
acute head for banking, was a scholarly gentleman, worthy of riches. His
brother was Squire Blancove, of Wrexby; but between these two close
relatives there existed no stronger feeling than what was expressed by
open contempt of a mind dedicated to business on the one side, and quiet
contempt of a life devoted to indolence on the other. Nevertheless,
Squire Blancove, though everybody knew how deeply he despised his junior
for his city-gained title and commercial occupation, sent him his son
Algernon, to get the youth into sound discipline, if possible. This was
after the elastic Algernon had, on the paternal intimation of his
colonel, relinquished his cornetcy and military service. Sir William
received the hopeful young fellow much in the spirit with which he
listened to the tales of his brother's comments on his own line of
conduct; that is to say, as homage to his intellectual superiority. Mr.
Algernon was installed in the Bank, and sat down for a long career of
groaning at the desk, with more complacency than was expected from him.
Sir William forwarded excellent accounts to his brother of the behaviour
of the heir to his estates. It was his way of rebuking the squire, and in
return for it the squire, though somewhat comforted, despised his clerkly
son, and lived to learn how very unjustly he did so. Adolescents, who
have the taste for running into excesses, enjoy the breath of change as
another form of excitement: change is a sort of debauch to them. They
will delight infinitely in a simple country round of existence, in
propriety and church-going, in the sensation of feeling innocent. There
is little that does not enrapture them, if you tie them down to nothing,
and let them try all. Sir William was deceived by his nephew. He would
have taken him into his town-house; but his own son, Edward, who was
studying for the Law, had chambers in the Temple, and Algernon, receiving
an invitation from Edward, declared a gentle preference for the abode of
his cousin. His allowance from his father was properly contracted to keep
him from excesses, as the genius of his senior devised, and Sir William
saw no objection to the scheme, and made none. The two dined with him
about twice in the month.

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