Rhoda Fleming, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Rhoda Fleming, Complete

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"It's over very soon, mother," said Dahlia.

"The coldness of you young women! Yes; but it's the time--you feeling,
trying for air; it's the horrid 'Oh, dear me!' You set your mind on it!"

"I do," said Dahlia. "You see coffin-nails instead of stars. You'd give
the world to turn upon one side. You can't think. You can only hate those
who put you there. You see them taking tea, saying prayers, sleeping in
bed, putting on bonnets, walking to church, kneading dough, eating--all
at once, like the firing of a gun. They're in one world; you're in
another."

"Why, my goodness, one'd say she'd gone through it herself," ejaculated
Mrs. Sumfit, terrified.

Dahlia sent her eyes at Rhoda.

"I must go and see that poor man covered." Mrs. Sumfit succumbed to a fit
of resolution much under the pretence that it had long been forming.

"Well, and mother," said Dahlia, checking her, "promise me. Put a feather
on my mouth; put a glass to my face, before you let them carry me out.
Will you? Rhoda promises. I have asked her."

"Oh! the ideas of this girl!" Mrs. Sumfit burst out. "And looking so, as
she says it. My love, you didn't mean to die?"

Dahlia soothed her, and sent her off.

"I am buried alive!" she said. "I feel it all--the stifling! the hopeless
cramp! Let us go and garden. Rhoda, have you got laudanum in the house?"

Rhoda shook her head, too sick at heart to speak. They went into the
garden, which was Dahlia's healthfullest place. It seemed to her that her
dead mother talked to her there. That was not a figure of speech, when
she said she felt buried alive. She was in the state of sensational
delusion. There were times when she watched her own power of motion
curiously: curiously stretched out her hands, and touched things, and
moved them. The sight was convincing, but the shudder came again. In a
frame less robust the brain would have given way. It was the very
soundness of the brain which, when her blood was a simple tide of life in
her veins, and no vital force, had condemned her to see the wisdom and
the righteousness of the act of sacrifice committed by her, and had urged
her even up to the altar. Then the sudden throwing off of the mask by
that man to whom she had bound herself, and the reading of Edward's
letter of penitence and love, thwarted reason, but without blinding or
unsettling it. Passion grew dominant; yet against such deadly matters on
all sides had passion to strive, that, under a darkened sky, visibly
chained, bound down, and hopeless, she felt between-whiles veritably that
she was a living body buried. Her senses had become semi-lunatic.

She talked reasonably; and Rhoda, hearing her question and answer at
meal-times like a sane woman, was in doubt whether her sister wilfully
simulated a partial insanity when they were alone together. Now, in the
garden, Dahlia said: "All those flowers, my dear, have roots in mother
and me. She can't feel them, for her soul's in heaven. But mine is down
there. The pain is the trying to get your soul loose. It's the edge of a
knife that won't cut through. Do you know that?"

Rhoda said, as acquiescingly as she could, "Yes."

"Do you?" Dahlia whispered. "It's what they call the 'agony.' Only, to go
through it in the dark, when you are all alone! boarded round! you will
never know that. And there's an angel brings me one of mother's roses,
and I smell it. I see fields of snow; and it's warm there, and no labour
for breath. I see great beds of flowers; I pass them like a breeze. I'm
shot, and knock on the ground, and they bury me for dead again. Indeed,
dearest, it's true."

She meant, true as regarded her sensations. Rhoda could barely give a
smile for response; and Dahlia's intelligence being supernaturally
active, she read her sister's doubt, and cried out,--

"Then let me talk of him!"

It was the fiery sequence to her foregone speech, signifying that if her
passion had liberty to express itself, she could clear understandings.
But even a moment's free wing to passion renewed the blinding terror
within her. Rhoda steadied her along the walks, praying for the time to
come when her friends, the rector and his wife, might help in the task of
comforting this poor sister. Detestation of the idea of love made her
sympathy almost deficient, and when there was no active work to do in
aid, she was nearly valueless, knowing that she also stood guilty of a
wrong.

The day was very soft and still. The flowers gave light for light. They
heard through the noise of the mill-water the funeral bell sound. It sank
in Rhoda like the preaching of an end that was promise of a beginning,
and girdled a distancing land of trouble. The breeze that blew seemed
mercy. To live here in forgetfulness with Dahlia was the limit of her
desires. Perhaps, if Robert worked among them, she would gratefully give
him her hand. That is, if he said not a word of love.

Master Gammon and Mrs. Sumfit were punctual in their return near the
dinnerhour; and the business of releasing the dumplings and potatoes, and
spreading out the cold meat and lettuces, restrained for some period the
narrative of proceedings at the funeral. Chief among the incidents was,
that Mrs. Sumfit had really seen, and only wanted, by corroboration of
Master Gammon, to be sure she had positively seen, Anthony Hackbut on the
skirts of the funeral procession. Master Gammon, however, was no
supporter of conjecture. What he had thought he had thought; but that was
neither here nor there. He would swear to nothing that he had not
touched;--eyes deceived;--he was never a guesser. He left Mrs. Sumfit to
pledge herself in perturbation of spirit to an oath that her eyes had
seen Anthony Hackbut; and more, which was, that after the close of the
funeral service, the young squire had caught sight of Anthony crouching
in a corner of the churchyard, and had sent a man to him, and they had
disappeared together. Mrs. Sumfit was heartily laughed at and rallied
both by Robert and the farmer. "Tony at a funeral! and train expenses!"
the farmer interjected. "D'ye think, mother, Tony'd come to Wrexby
churchyard 'fore he come Queen Anne's Farm? And where's he now, mayhap?"

Mrs. Sumfit appealed in despair to Master Gammon, with entreaties, and a
ready dumpling.

"There, Mas' Gammon; and why you sh'd play at 'do believe' and at 'don't
believe,' after that awesome scene, the solem'est of life's, when you did
declare to me, sayin', it was a stride for boots out o' London this
morning. Your words, Mas' Gammon! and 'boots'-=it's true, if by that
alone! For, 'boots,' I says to myself--he thinks by 'boots,' there being
a cord'er in his family on the mother's side; which you yourself told to
me, as you did, Mas' Gammon, and now holds back, you did, like a bad
horse."

"Hey! does Gammon jib?" said the farmer, with the ghost of old laughter
twinkling in his eyes.

"He told me this tale," Mrs. Sumfit continued, daring her irresponsive
enemy to contradict her, with a threatening gaze. "He told me this tale,
he did; and my belief's, his game 's, he gets me into a corner--there to
be laughed at! Mas' Gammon, if you're not a sly old man, you said, you
did, he was drownded; your mother's brother's wife's brother; and he had
a brother, and what he was to you--that brother--" Mrs. Sumfit smote her
hands--"Oh, my goodness, my poor head! but you shan't slip away, Mas'
Gammon; no, try you ever so much. Drownded he was, and eight days in the
sea, which you told me over a warm mug of ale by the fire years back. And
I do believe them dumplings makes ye obstinate; for worse you get, and
that fond of 'em, I sh'll soon not have enough in our biggest pot. Yes,
you said he was eight days in the sea, and as for face, you said, poor
thing! he was like a rag of towel dipped in starch, was your own words,
and all his likeness wiped out; and Joe, the other brother, a
cord'er--bootmaker, you call 'em--looked down him, as he was stretched
out on the shore of the sea, all along, and didn't know him till he come
to the boots, and he says, 'It's Abner;' for there was his boots to know
him by. Now, will you deny, Mas' Gammon, you said, Mr. Hackbut's boots,
and a long stride it was for 'em from London? And I won't be laughed at
through arts of any sly old man!"

The circumstantial charge made no impression on Master Gammon, who was
heard to mumble, as from the inmost recesses of tight-packed dumpling;
but he left the vindication of his case to the farmer's laughter. The
mention of her uncle had started a growing agitation in Rhoda, to whom
the indication of his eccentric behaviour was a stronger confirmation of
his visit to the neighbourhood. And wherefore had he journeyed down? Had
he come to haunt her on account of the money he had poured into her lap?
Rhoda knew in a moment that she was near a great trial of her strength
and truth. She had more than once, I cannot tell you how distantly,
conceived that the money had been money upon which the mildest word for
"stolen" should be put to express the feeling she had got about it, after
she had parted with the bulk of it to the man Sedgett. Not "stolen," not
"appropriated," but money that had perhaps been entrusted, and of which
Anthony had forgotten the rightful ownership. This idea of hers had
burned with no intolerable fire; but, under a weight of all
discountenancing appearances, feeble though it was, it had distressed
her. The dealing with money, and the necessity for it, had given Rhoda a
better comprehension of its nature and value. She had taught herself to
think that her suspicion sprang from her uncle's wild demeanour, and the
scene of the gold pieces scattered on the floor, as if a heart had burst
at her feet.

No sooner did she hear that Anthony had been, by supposition, seen, than
the little light of secret dread flamed a panic through her veins. She
left the table before Master Gammon had finished, and went out of the
house to look about for her uncle. He was nowhere in the fields, nor in
the graveyard. She walked over the neighbourhood desolately, until her
quickened apprehension was extinguished, and she returned home relieved,
thinking it folly to have imagined her uncle was other than a man of
hoarded wealth, and that he was here. But, in the interval, she had
experienced emotions which warned her of a struggle to come. Who would be
friendly to her, and an arm of might? The thought of the storm she had
sown upon all sides made her tremble foolishly. When she placed her hand
in Robert's, she gave his fingers a confiding pressure, and all but
dropped her head upon his bosom, so sick she was with weakness. It would
have been a deceit toward him, and that restrained her; perhaps, yet
more, she was restrained by the gloomy prospect of having to reply to any
words of love, without an idea of what to say, and with a loathing of
caresses. She saw herself condemned to stand alone, and at a season when
she was not strengthened by pure self-support.

Rhoda had not surrendered the stern belief that she had done well by
forcing Dahlia's hand to the marriage, though it had resulted evilly. In
reflecting on it, she had still a feeling of the harsh joy peculiar to
those who have exercised command with a conscious righteousness upon
wilful, sinful, and erring spirits, and have thwarted the wrongdoer. She
could only admit that there was sadness in the issue; hitherto, at least,
nothing worse than sad disappointment. The man who was her sister's
husband could no longer complain that he had been the victim of an
imposition. She had bought his promise that he would leave the country,
and she had rescued the honour of the family by paying him. At what cost?
She asked herself that now, and then her self-support became uneven.
Could her uncle have parted with the great sum--have shed it upon her,
merely beneficently, and because he loved her? Was it possible that he
had the habit of carrying his own riches through the streets of London?
She had to silence all questions imperiously, recalling exactly her ideas
of him, and the value of money in the moment when money was an object of
hunger--when she had seized it like a wolf, and its value was quite
unknown, unguessed at.

Rhoda threw up her window before she slept, that she might breathe the
cool night air; and, as she leaned out, she heard steps moving away, and
knew them to be Robert's, in whom that pressure of her hand had cruelly
resuscitated his longing for her. She drew back, wondering at the
idleness of men--slaves while they want a woman's love, savages when they
have won it. She tried to pity him, but she had not an emotion to spare,
save perhaps one of dull exultation, that she, alone of women, was free
from that wretched mess called love; and upon it she slept.

It was between the breakfast and dinner hours, at the farm, next day,
when the young squire, accompanied by Anthony Hackbut, met farmer Fleming
in the lane bordering one of the outermost fields of wheat. Anthony gave
little more than a blunt nod to his relative, and slouched on, leaving
the farmer in amazement, while the young squire stopped him to speak with
him. Anthony made his way on to the house. Shortly after, he was seen
passing through the gates of the garden, accompanied by Rhoda. At the
dinner-hour, Robert was taken aside by the farmer. Neither Rhoda nor
Anthony presented themselves. They did not appear till nightfall. When
Anthony came into the room, he took no greetings and gave none. He sat
down on the first chair by the door, shaking his head, with vacant eyes.
Rhoda took off her bonnet, and sat as strangely silent. In vain Mrs.
Sumfit asked her; "Shall it be tea, dear, and a little cold meat?" The
two dumb figures were separately interrogated, but they had no answer.

"Come! brother Tony?" the farmer tried to rally him.

Dahlia was knitting some article of feminine gear. Robert stood by the
musk-pots at the window, looking at Rhoda fixedly. Of this gaze she
became conscious, and glanced from him to the clock.

"It's late," she said, rising.

"But you're empty, my dear. And to think o' going to bed without a
dinner, or your tea, and no supper! You'll never say prayers, if you do,"
said Mrs. Sumfit.

The remark engendered a notion in the farmer's head, that Anthony
promised to be particularly prayerless.

"You've been and spent a night at the young squire's, I hear, brother
Tony. All right and well. No complaints on my part, I do assure ye. If
you're mixed up with that family, I won't bring it in you're anyways
mixed up with this family; not so as to clash, do you see. Only, man, now
you are here, a word'd be civil, if you don't want a doctor."

"I was right," murmured Mrs. Sumfit. "At the funeral, he was; and Lord be
thanked! I thought my eyes was failin'. Mas' Gammon, you'd ha' lost no
character by sidin' wi' me."

"Here's Dahlia, too," said the farmer. "Brother Tony, don't you see her?
She's beginning to be recognizable, if her hair'd grow a bit faster.
She's...well, there she is."

A quavering, tiny voice, that came from Anthony, said: "How d' ye do--how
d' ye do;" sounding like the first effort of a fife. But Anthony did not
cast eye on Dahlia.

"Will you eat, man?--will you smoke a pipe?--won't you talk a word?--will
you go to bed?"

These several questions, coming between pauses, elicited nothing from the
staring oldman.

"Is there a matter wrong at the Bank?" the farmer called out, and Anthony
jumped in a heap.

"Eh?" persisted the farmer.

Rhoda interposed: "Uncle is tired; he is unwell. Tomorrow he will talk to
you."

"No, but is there anything wrong up there, though?" the farmer asked with
eager curiosity, and a fresh smile at the thought that those Banks and
city folk were mortal, and could upset, notwithstanding their crashing
wheels. "Brother Tony, you speak out; has anybody been and broke? Never
mind a blow, so long, o' course, as they haven't swallowed your money.
How is it? Why, I never saw such a sight as you. You come down from
London; you play hide and seek about your relation's house; and here,
when you do condescend to step in--eh? how is it? You ain't, I hope,
ruined, Tony, are ye?"

Rhoda stood over her uncle to conceal him.

"He shall not speak till he has had some rest. And yes, mother, he shall
have some warm tea upstairs in bed. Boil some water. Now, uncle, come
with me."

"Anybody broke?" Anthony rolled the words over, as Rhoda raised his arm.
"I'm asked such a lot, my dear, I ain't equal to it. You said here 'd be
a quiet place. I don't know about money. Try my pockets. Yes, mum, if you
was forty policemen, I'm empty; you'd find it. And no objection to nod to
prayers; but never was taught one of my own. Where am I going, my dear?"

"Upstairs with me, uncle."

Rhoda had succeeded in getting him on his feet.

The farmer tapped at his forehead, as a signification to the others that
Anthony had gone wrong in the head, which reminded him that he had
prophesied as much. He stiffened out his legs, and gave a manful spring,
crying, "Hulloa, brother Tony! why, man, eh? Look here. What, goin' to
bed? What, you, Tony? I say--I say--dear me!" And during these
exclamations intricate visions of tripping by means of gold wires danced
before him.

Rhoda hurried Anthony out.

After the door had shut, the farmer said: "That comes of it; sooner or
later, there it is! You give your heart to money--you insure in a ship,
and as much as say, here's a ship, and, blow and lighten, I defy you.
Whereas we day-by-day people, if it do blow and if it do lighten, and the
waves are avilanches, we've nothing to lose. Poor old Tony--a smash, to a
certainty. There's been a smash, and he's gone under the harrow. Any o'
you here might ha' heard me say, things can't last for ever. Ha'n't you,
now?"

The persons present meekly acquiesced in his prophetic spirit to this
extent. Mrs. Sumfit dolorously said, "Often, William dear," and accepted
the incontestable truth in deep humiliation of mind.

"Save," the farmer continued, "save and store, only don't put your heart
in the box."

"It's true, William;" Mrs. Sumfit acted clerk to the sermon.

Dahlia took her softly by the neck, and kissed her.

"Is it love for the old woman?" Mrs. Sumfit murmured fondly; and Dahlia
kissed her again.

The farmer had by this time rounded to the thought of how he personally
might be affected by Anthony's ill-luck, supposing; perchance, that
Anthony was suffering from something more than a sentimental attachment
to the Bank of his predilection: and such a reflection instantly diverted
his tendency to moralize.

"We shall hear to-morrow," he observed in conclusion; which, as it caused
a desire for the morrow to spring within his bosom, sent his eyes at
Master Gammon, who was half an hour behind his time for bed, and had
dropped asleep in his chair. This unusual display of public somnolence on
Master Gammon's part, together with the veteran's reputation for
slowness, made the farmer fret at him as being in some way an obstruction
to the lively progress of the hours.

"Hoy, Gammon!" he sang out, awakeningly to ordinary ears; but Master
Gammon was not one who took the ordinary plunge into the gulf of sleep,
and it was required to shake him and to bellow at him--to administer at
once earthquake and thunder--before his lizard eyelids would lift over
the great, old-world eyes; upon which, like a clayey monster refusing to
be informed with heavenly fire, he rolled to the right of his chair and
to the left, and pitched forward, and insisted upon being inanimate.
Brought at last to a condition of stale consciousness, he looked at his
master long, and uttered surprisingly "Farmer, there's queer things going
on in this house," and then relapsed to a combat with Mrs. Sumfit,
regarding the candle; she saying that it was not to be entrusted to him,
and he sullenly contending that it was.

"Here, we'll all go to bed," said the farmer. "What with one person
queer, and another person queer, I shall be in for a headache, if I take
to thinking. Gammon's a man sees in 's sleep what he misses awake. Did
you ever know," he addressed anybody, "such a thing as Tony Hackbut
coming into a relation's house, and sitting there, and not a word for any
of us? It's, I call it, dumbfoundering. And that's me: why didn't I go up
and shake his hand, you ask. Well, why not? If he don't know he's
welcome, without ceremony, he's no good. Why, I've got matters t' occupy
my mind, too, haven't I? Every man has, and some more'n others, let alone
crosses. There's something wrong with my brother-in-law, Tony, that's
settled. Odd that we country people, who bide, and take the Lord's
gifts--" The farmer did not follow out this reflection, but raising his
arms, shepherd-wise, he puffed as if blowing the two women before him to
their beds, and then gave a shy look at Robert, and nodded good-night to
him. Robert nodded in reply. He knew the cause of the farmer's uncommon
blitheness. Algernon Blancove, the young squire, had proposed for Rhoda's
hand.

CHAPTER XLIII

Anthony had robbed the Bank. The young squire was aware of the fact, and
had offered to interpose for him, and to make good the money to the Bank,
upon one condition. So much, Rhoda had gathered from her uncle's babbling
interjections throughout the day. The farmer knew only of the young
squire's proposal, which had been made direct to him; and he had left it
to Robert to state the case to Rhoda, and plead for himself. She believed
fully, when she came downstairs into the room where Robert was awaiting
her, that she had but to speak and a mine would be sprung; and shrinking
from it, hoping for it, she entered, and tried to fasten her eyes upon
Robert distinctly, telling him the tale. Robert listened with a
calculating seriousness of manner that quieted her physical dread of his
passion. She finished; and he said "It will, perhaps, save your uncle:
I'm sure it will please your father."

She sat down, feeling that a warmth had gone, and that she was very bare.

"Must I consent, then?"

"If you can, I suppose."

Both being spirits formed for action, a perplexity found them weak as
babes. He, moreover, was stung to see her debating at all upon such a
question; and he was in despair before complicated events which gave
nothing for his hands and heart to do. Stiff endurance seemed to him to
be his lesson; and he made a show of having learnt it.

"Were you going out, Robert?"

"I usually make the rounds of the house, to be sure all's safe."

His walking about the garden at night was not, then, for the purpose of
looking at her window. Rhoda coloured in all her dark crimson with shame
for thinking that it had been so.

"I must decide to-morrow morning."

"They say, the pillow's the best counsellor."

A reply that presumed she would sleep appeared to her as bitterly
unfriendly.

"Did father wish it?"

"Not by what he spoke."

"You suppose he does wish it?"

"Where's the father who wouldn't? Of course, he wishes it. He's kind
enough, but you may be certain he wishes it."

"Oh! Dahlia, Dahlia!" Rhoda moaned, under a rush of new sensations,
unfilial, akin to those which her sister had distressed her by speaking
shamelessly out.

"Ah! poor soul!" added Robert.

"My darling must be brave: she must have great courage. Dahlia cannot be
a coward. I begin to see."

Rhoda threw up her face, and sat awhile as one who was reading old
matters by a fresh light.

"I can't think," she said, with a start. "Have I been dreadfully cruel?
Was I unsisterly? I have such a horror of some things--disgrace. And men
are so hard on women; and father--I felt for him. And I hated that base
man. It's his cousin and his name! I could almost fancy this trial is
brought round to me for punishment."

An ironic devil prompted Robert to say, "You can't let harm come to your
uncle."

The thing implied was the farthest in his idea of any woman's possible
duty.

"Are you of that opinion?" Rhoda questioned with her eyes, but uttered
nothing.

Now, he had spoken almost in the ironical tone. She should have noted
that. And how could a true-hearted girl suppose him capable of giving
such counsel to her whom he loved? It smote him with horror and anger;
but he was much too manly to betray these actual sentiments, and
continued to dissemble. You see, he had not forgiven her for her
indifference to him.

"You are no longer your own mistress," he said, meaning exactly the
reverse.

This--that she was bound in generosity to sacrifice herself--was what
Rhoda feared. There was no forceful passion in her bosom to burst through
the crowd of weak reasonings and vanities, to bid her be a woman, not a
puppet; and the passion in him, for which she craved, that she might be
taken up by it and whirled into forgetfulness, with a seal of betrothal
upon her lips, was absent so that she thought herself loved no more by
Robert. She was weary of thinking and acting on her own responsibility,
and would gladly have abandoned her will; yet her judgement, if she was
still to exercise it, told her that the step she was bidden to take was
one, the direct consequence and the fruit of her other resolute steps.
Pride whispered, "You could compel your sister to do that which she
abhorred;" and Pity pleaded for her poor old uncle Anthony. She looked
back in imagination at that scene with him in London, amazed at her
frenzy of power, and again, from that contemplation, amazed at her
present nervelessness.

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