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Title: One of Our Conquerors, v1

Author: George Meredith

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4471]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on February 19, 2002]


The Project Gutenberg Etext of One of Our Conquerors, v1, by Meredith
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ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

By George Meredith

1897



CONTENTS:

BOOK 1.
I.        ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
II.       THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
III.      OLD VEUVE
IV.       THE SECOND BOTTLE
V.        THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
VI.       NATALY
VII.      BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
VIII.     SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS.
IX.       AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
X.        SKEPSEY IN MOTION
XI.       WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF
          THEIR SCOURGE

BOOK 2.
XII.      TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
          HAVING ONE HEART
XIII.     THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
XIV.      DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
XV.       A PATRIOT ABROAD
XVI.      ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
          NATALY
XVII.     CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
XVIII.    SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA

BOOK 3.
XIX.      TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN
          THEM AND OF A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS
          COUNTRY
XX.       THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELAND
XXI.      DARTREY FENELLAN
XXII.     CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN
XXIII.    TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS
          EFFECTS PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES
XXIV.     NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT

BOOK 4.
XXV.      NATALY IN ACTION
XXVI.     IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLE MAN ENDEAVOURING TO
          EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
XXVII.    CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE
          CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE
XXVIII.   MRS. MARSETT
XXIX.     SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND
XXX.      THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
XXXI.     SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO
          DO KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES
XXXII.    SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET
          HER WEAPON
XXXIII.   A PAIR OF WOOERS
XXXIV.    CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
XXXV.     IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN
          ABYSMAL DARKNESS

BOOK 5.
XXXVI.    NESTA AND HER FATHER
XXXVII.   THE MOTHER--THE DAUGHTER
XXXVIII.  NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
XXXIX.    A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
XL.       AN EXPIATION
XLI.      THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
XLII.     THE LAST




ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

By George Meredith

1897



BOOK 1.

I.        ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
II.       THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
III.      OLD VEUVE
IV.       THE SECOND BOTTLE
V.        THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
VI.       NATALY
VII.      BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
VIII.     SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS.
IX.       AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
X.        SKEPSEY IN MOTION



CHAPTER I

ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE

A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to match
it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was almost
magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly strip of
slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which had more or
less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passengers, and now laid
this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful for the moment as the
uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides.  He was unhurt,
quite sound, merely astonished, he remarked, in reply to the inquiries of
the first kind helper at his elbow; and it appeared an acceptable
statement of his condition.  He laughed, shook his coat-tails, smoothed
the back of his head rather thoughtfully, thankfully received his runaway
hat, nodded bright beams to right and left, and making light of the muddy
stigmas imprinted by the pavement, he scattered another shower of his
nods and smiles around, to signify, that as his good friends would wish,
he thoroughly felt his legs and could walk unaided.  And he was in the
act of doing it, questioning his familiar behind the waistcoat amazedly,
to tell him how such a misadventure could have occurred to him of all
men, when a glance below his chin discomposed his outward face.  'Oh,
confound the fellow!' he said, with simple frankness, and was humorously
ruffled, having seen absurd blots of smutty knuckles distributed over the
maiden waistcoat.

His outcry was no more than the confidential communication of a genial
spirit with that distinctive article of his attire.  At the same time,
for these friendly people about him to share the fun of the annoyance,
he looked hastily brightly back, seeming with the contraction of his
brows to frown, on the little band of observant Samaritans; in the centre
of whom a man who knew himself honourably unclean, perhaps consequently a
bit of a political jewel, hearing one of their number confounded for his
pains, and by the wearer of a superfine dashing-white waistcoat, was
moved to take notice of the total deficiency of gratitude in this kind of
gentleman's look and pocket.  If we ask for nothing for helping gentlemen
to stand upright on their legs, and get it, we expect civility into the
bargain.  Moreover, there are reasons in nature why we choose to give
sign of a particular surliness when our wealthy superiors would have us
think their condescending grins are cordials.

The gentleman's eyes were followed on a second hurried downward grimace,
the necessitated wrinkles of which could be stretched by malevolence to a
semblance of haughty disgust; reminding us, through our readings in
journals, of the wicked overblown Prince Regent and his Court, together
with the view taken of honest labour in the mind of supercilious luxury,
even if indebted to it freshly for a trifle; and the hoar-headed
nineteenth-century billow of democratic ire craved the word to be set
swelling.

'Am I the fellow you mean, sir?' the man said.

He was answered, not ungraciously: 'All right, my man.'

But the balance of our public equanimity is prone to violent antic
bobbings on occasions when, for example, an ostentatious garment shall
appear disdainful our class and ourself, and coin of the realm has not
usurped command of one of the scales: thus a fairly pleasant answer, cast
in persuasive features, provoked the retort:

'There you're wrong; nor wouldn't be.'

'What's that?' was the gentleman's musical inquiry.

'That's flat, as you was half a minute ago,' the man rejoined.

'Ah, well, don't be impudent,' the gentleman said, by way of amiable
remonstrance before a parting.

'And none of your dam punctilio,' said the man.

Their exchange rattled smartly, without a direct hostility, and the
gentleman stepped forward.

It was observed in the crowd, that after a few paces he put two fingers
on the back of his head.

They might suppose him to be condoling with his recent mishap.  But,
in fact, a thing had occurred to vex him more than a descent upon the
pavement or damage to his waistcoat's whiteness: he abominated the
thought of an altercation with a member of the mob; he found that
enormous beat comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides
he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners,
country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed:
he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops,
never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it
to exhibit the grinders: and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his
dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word
punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered
him susceptible.  Headache threatened--and to him of all men!  But was
there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium?  Puzzles are presented
to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they are
the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in rattle-boxes,
they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the
less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we,
and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness.
Or does this happen to us only after a fall?

He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the
clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations,
in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by
any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London Bridge,
of all places in the world!--he, so popular, renowned for his affability,
his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs, entirely the
reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and accustomed to
receive their applause.  And in what way had he offered a hint to bring
on him the charge of punctilio?

'But I am treating it seriously!' he said, and jerked a dead laugh while
fixing a button of his coat.

That he should have treated it seriously, furnished next the subject of
cogitation; and here it was plainly suggested, that a degradation of his
physical system, owing to the shock of the fall, must be seen and
acknowledged; for it had become a perverted engine, to pull him down
among the puerilities, and very soon he was worrying at punctilio anew,
attempting to read the riddle of the application of it to himself, angry
that he had allowed it to be the final word, and admitting it a famous
word for the closing of a controversy:--it banged the door and rolled
drum-notes; it deafened reason.  And was it a London cockney crow-word of
the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head from the perusal
of his pothouse newspaper columns?

Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall,
required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to
him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of
collapses.  This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee--using a
friend's term for the ready gift--was an old and a rueful one with Victor
Radnor.  His godmother Fortune denied him that.  She bestowed it on his
friend Fenellan, and little else.  Simeon Fenellan could clap the halter
on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and stilled
it, by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him; and the
effect of the scene upon Victor Radnor disposed him to rank the gift of
repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was permitted to
tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught.  Let it only be
explosive repartee: the well-fused bomb, the bubble to the stone, echo
round the horn.  Fenellan, would have discharged an extinguisher on
punctilio in emission.  Victor Radnor was unable to cope with it
reflectively.

No, but one doesn't like being beaten by anything!  he replied to an
admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more
significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head, and
checked or stemmed the current of a fear.  For he was utterly unlike
himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the
smallest, an incident of the streets; and although he refused to feel a
bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of
his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been
shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking.

Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word
engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another
friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him Colney;
and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between them upon
man's present achievements and his probable destinies: especially upon
England's grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent appreciation of
her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic dignity of London
City.  Colney had to be overcome afresh, and he fled, but managed, with
two or three of his bitter phrases, to make a cuttle-fish fight of it,
that oppressively shadowed his vanquisher:

The Daniel Lambert of Cities: the Female Annuitant of Nations:--and such
like, wretched stuff, proper to Colney Durance, easily dispersed and out-
laughed when we have our vigour.  We have as much as we need of it in
summoning a contemptuous Pooh to our lips, with a shrug at venomous
dyspepsia.

Nevertheless, a malignant sketch of Colney's, in the which Hengist and
Horsa, our fishy Saxon originals, in modern garb of liveryman and
gaitered squire, flat-headed, paunchy, assiduously servile, are shown
blacking Ben-Israel's boots and grooming the princely stud of the Jew,
had come so near to Victor Radnor's apprehensions of a possible, if not
an impending, consummation, that the ghastly vision of the Jew Dominant
in London City, over England, over Europe, America, the world (a picture
drawn in literary sepia by Colney: with our poor hang neck population
uncertain about making a bell-rope of the forelock to the Satyr-snouty
master; and the Norman Lord de Warenne handing him for a lump sum son and
daughter, both to be Hebraized in their different ways), fastened on the
most mercurial of patriotic men, and gave him a whole-length plunge into
despondency.

It lasted nearly a minute.  His recovery was not in this instance due to
the calling on himself for the rescue of an ancient and glorious country;
nor altogether to the spectacle of the shipping, over the parapet, to his
right: the hundreds of masts rising out of the merchant river; London's
unrivalled mezzotint and the City' rhetorician's inexhaustible argument:
he gained it rather from the imperious demand of an animated and thirsty
frame for novel impressions.  Commonly he was too hot with his business,
and airy fancies above it when crossing the bridge, to reflect in
freshness on its wonders; though a phrase could spring him alive to them;
a suggestion of the Foreigner, jealous, condemned to admire in despair of
outstripping, like Satan worsted; or when a Premier's fine inflation
magnified the scene at City banquets--exciting while audible, if a
waggery in memory; or when England's cherished Bard, the Leading Article,
blew bellows, and wind primed the lieges.

That a phrase on any other subject was of much the same effect, in
relation to it, may be owned; he was lightly kindled.  The scene,
however, had a sharp sparkle of attractiveness at the instant.  Down went
the twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the
bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek
of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and the
Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against
descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer
slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw;
and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along
an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a
wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts
and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously
undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash
of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.

Surely a scene pretending to sublimity?

Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your London
citizen of good estate has reproached his country's poets for not pouring
out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of notions
begotten by the scene.  For there are times when he would, pay to have
them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in their bulk;
they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get them scored on
the tablets of the quotable at festive boards.  This he can promise to
his poets.  As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce invoked is a
Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her nostrils, and
poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime, she leads them,
after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive into the turtle-
tureen.  Heels up they go, poet first--a plummet he!

And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, in the mood of
meditation, to direct his gaze off the bridge along the waterway North-
eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait's bow-window
by the riverside, to the front of the summer sunset, a league or so down
stream; where he sees, in memory savours, the Elysian end of Commerce:
frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the out-wearied spectre of old
Apicius; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel his purse into the market for
the purchase of a costlier mullet!

But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot-king of Commerce?

In that case, we do not ask our country's poets to compose a single
stanza of eulogy's rhymes--far from it.  Far to the contrary, we bid
ourselves remember the sons of whom we are; instead of revelling in the
fruits of Commerce, we shoot scornfully past those blazing bellied
windows of the aromatic dinners, and beyond Thames, away to the
fishermen's deeps, Old England's native element, where the strenuous
ancestry of a race yet and ever manful at the stress of trial are heard
around and aloft whistling us back to the splendid strain of muscle, and
spray fringes cloud, and strong heart rides the briny scoops and
hillocks, and Death and Man are at grip for the haul.

There we find our nationality, our poetry, no Hebrew competing.

We do: or there at least we left it.  Whether to recover it when wanted,
is not so certain.  Humpy Hengist and dumpy Horsa, quitting ledger and
coronet, might recur to their sea bowlegs and red-stubble chins, might
take to their tarpaulins again; they might renew their manhood on the
capture of cod; headed by Harald and Hardiknut, they might roll surges to
whelm a Dominant Jew clean gone to the fleshpots and effeminacy.
Aldermen of our ancient conception, they may teach him that he has been
backsliding once more, and must repent in ashes, as those who are for
jewels, titles, essences, banquets, for wallowing in slimy spawn of
lucre, have ever to do.  They dispossess him of his greedy gettings.

And how of the Law?

But the Law is always, and must ever be, the Law of the stronger.

--Ay, but brain beats muscle, and what if the Jew should prove to have
superior power of brain?  A dreaded hypothesis!  Why, then you see the
insurgent Saxon seamen (of the names in two syllables with accent on the
first), and their Danish captains, and it may be but a remnant of high-
nosed old Norman Lord de Warenne beside them, in the criminal box: and
presently the Jew smoking a giant regalia cigar on a balcony giving view
of a gallows-tree.  But we will try that: on our side, to back a native
pugnacity, is morality, humanity, fraternity--nature's rights, aha! and
who withstands them? on his, a troop of mercenaries!

And that lands me in Red Republicanism, a hop and a skip from Socialism!
said Mr. Radnor, and chuckled ironically at the natural declivity he had
come to.  Still, there was an idea in it .  .  .  .

A short run or attempt at running after the idea, ended in pain to his
head near the spot where the haunting word punctilio caught at any excuse
for clamouring.

Yet we cannot relinquish an idea that was ours; we are vowed to the
pursuit of it.  Mr. Radnor lighted on the tracks, by dint of a thought
flung at his partner Mr. Inchling's dread of the Jews.  Inchling dreaded
Scotchmen as well, and Americans, and Armenians, and Greeks: latterly
Germans hardly less; but his dread of absorption in Jewry, signifying
subjection, had often precipitated a deplorable shrug, in which Victor
Radnor now perceived the skirts of his idea, even to a fancy that
something of the idea must have struck Inchling when he shrugged: the
idea being .  .  .  he had lost it again.  Definition seemed to be an
extirpation enemy of this idea, or she was by nature shy.  She was very
feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted.  Not until nigh
upon the close of his history did she return, full-statured and
embraceable, to Victor Radnor.




CHAPTER II

THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE

The fair dealing with readers demands of us, that a narrative shall not
proceed at slower pace than legs of a man in motion; and we are still but
little more than midway across London Bridge.  But if a man's mind is to
be taken as a part of him, the likening of it, at an introduction, to an
army on the opening march of a great campaign, should plead excuses for
tardy forward movements, in consideration of the large amount of matter
you have to review before you can at all imagine yourselves to have made
his acquaintance.  This it is not necessary to do when you are set
astride the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man's mind at
home while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be rapid.
Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the
governing element in the composition of man, and of hid present business
here.  The Tale inspirits one's earlier ardours, when we sped without
baggage, when the Impossible was wings to imagination, and heroic
sculpture the simplest act of the chisel.  It does not advance, 'tis
true; it drives the whirligig circle round and round the single existing
central point; but it is enriched with applause of the boys and girls of
both ages in this land; and all the English critics heap their honours on
its brave old Simplicity: our national literary flag, which signalizes us
while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows.  One may sigh
for it.  An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been
brought to see with distinctness, that man is not as much comprised in
external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the
fuller portraiture.

After his ineffectual catching at the volatile idea, Mr. Radnor found
repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother.  They had begged
him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken kerchief
for the throat.  Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since
boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal month,
the white of the daisied meadow, and although he owned a light overcoat
to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to wear it for
protection.  His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever the tender
request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to the control
of garments.  Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over the couple
beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced waistcoat,
exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on Norwegian
peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh--horrid women of the whistling
clouts, in the pay of our doctors.  He braved them; he starved the
profession.  He was that man in fifty thousand who despises hostile
elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a sneezing and tumbled
host, as a lighthouse overhead of breezy fleets.  The coursing of his
blood was by comparison electrical; he had not the sensation of cold,
other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse him; and so quick
was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act, that the three
successive tributaries of conduct appeared as an irreflective flash and a
gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him and
his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding.

Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so,
with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are
reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small band
of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish in
their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord,
with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad step
chargeable upon his antecedents.  But do we listen to them?  Shall we not
have them turned out?  He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his
buoying constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it was
not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us
explain to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in;
a step deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed: it
was a step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step; and
having youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance;
and secondly, and O how deeply truly!  Love.  Deep true love, proved by
years, is the advocate.

He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate's
exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them
only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by
those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.

To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.

As to that, there is no doubt: whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they
do, acquit they justify.

Whom they justify, they compliment.

They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinctions, as the
world is.

What, to them, is the spot of the error?--admitting it as an error.
They know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature.  We stand forth
to plead it in proof of an adherence to Nature's laws: we affirm, that
far from a defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility.  On
the beloved who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility.
Our world has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot
brand an angel.

This was another favourite sentence of Love's grand oration for the
defence.  So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the
case, that they all, when the sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel,
and they smiled.

They do not smile on the condemnable.

She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him.  And who,
calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful!

Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he flew
to it, he breathed, dispensed it.  How conceive the clear-sighted
celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate?  Not they.  He
knew, for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield
him subservient responses.  The world, or Puritanic members of it, had
pushed him to the trial once or twice--or had put on an air of doing so;
creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his
daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet
lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good
example to shine in the sun.

He had a secret for them.

Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his baritone
--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate notes--should
be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that secret: there was
matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in it.  And during
the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast thought on a secret
so palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition and a long year's
prospect of the present day!  It seemed to have been knocked clean out of
it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say.  Nor had any combinations upon
the theme of business displaced it.  Just before the fall, the whole
drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to his eyes as a
scene on a stage.

He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than
the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as
feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic
globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything.  Only, Sanity does
not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.

Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely
little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white
waistcoats.  Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in
its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the <DW72> where the seas
of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he stood
contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic countenance,
from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a novelty to him;
unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often traversed, equally
careful that his hesitation should not be seen.  A trifle more
impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and magnum of
pursiness barring the City against him.  He could have laughed aloud at
the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment at London's
sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as well by the singular fit of
timidity enchaining him.  Cart, omnibus, cab, van, barrow, donkey-tray,
went by in strings, broken here and there, and he could not induce his
legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened to a warning that he
would be down again if he tried it, among those wheels; and his nerves
clutched him, like a troop of household women, to keep him from the
hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth;
and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of the rutted line, you
are food for lion and jackal--the forces of the world will have you in
their mandibles.

An idea was there too; but it would not accept pursuit.

'A pretty scud overheard?' said a voice at his ear.

'For fine!--to-day at least,' Mr. Radnor affably replied to a stranger;
and gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and
laughed: 'You?' He straightened his back immediately to cross the road,
dismissing nervousness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van:
'Anything doing in the City?' For Mr. Fenellan's proper station faced
Westward.

The reply was deferred until they had reached the pavement, when Mr.
Fenellan said: 'I'll tell you,' and looked a dubious preface, to his
friend's thinking.

But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots on
the coat.

'We'll lunch; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then,' said Mr. Radnor,
adding within himself: 'Emptiness! want of food!' to account for recent
ejaculations and qualms.  He had not eaten for a good four hours.

Fenellan's tone signified to his feverish sensibility of the moment,
that the matter was personal; and the intimation of a touch on domestic
affairs caused sinkings in his vacuity, much as though his heart were
having a fall.

He mentioned the slip on the bridge, to explain his: need to visit a
haberdasher's shop, and pointed at the waistcoat.

Mr. Fenellan was compassionate over the 'Poor virgin of the smoky city!'

'They have their ready-made at these shops--last year's: perhaps, never
mind, do for the day,' said Mr. Radnor, impatient for eating, now that he
had spoken of it.  'A basin of turtle; I can't wait.  A brush of the
coat; mud must be dry by this time.  Clear turtle, I think, with a bottle
of the Old Veuve.  Not bad news to tell?  You like that Old Veuve?'

'Too well to tell bad news of her,' said Mr. Fenellan in a manner to
reassure his friend, as he intended.  'You wouldn't credit it for the
Spring of the year, without the spotless waistcoat?'

'Something of that, I suppose.'  And so saying, Mr. Radnor entered the
shop of his quest, to be complimented by the shopkeeper, while the
attendants climbed the ladder to upper stages for white-waistcoat boxes,
on his being; the first bird of the season; which it pleased him to hear;
for the smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone to
this brightly-constituted gentleman.




CHAPTER III

OLD VEUVE

They were known at the house of the turtle and the attractive Old Veuve:
a champagne of a sobered sweetness, of a great year, a great age,
counting up to the extremer maturity attained by wines of stilly depths;
and their worthy comrade, despite the wanton sparkles, for the promoting
of the state of reverential wonderment in rapture, which an ancient wine
will lead to, well you wot.  The silly girly sugary crudity his given way
to womanly suavity, matronly composure, with yet the sparkles; they
ascend; but hue and flavour tell of a soul that has come to a lodgement
there.  It conducts the youthful man to temples of dusky thought:
philosophers partaking of it are drawn by the arms of garlanded nymphs
about their necks into the fathomless of inquiries.  It presents us with
a sphere, for the pursuit of the thing we covet most.  It bubbles over
mellowness; it has, in the marriage with Time, extracted a spice of
individuality from the saccharine: by miracle, one would say, were it
not for our knowledge of the right noble issue of Time when he and good
things unite.  There should be somewhere legends of him and the wine-
flask.  There must be meanings to that effect in the Mythology, awaiting
unravelment.  For the subject opens to deeper than cellars, and is a tree
with vast ramifications of the roots and the spreading growth, whereon
half if not all the mythic Gods, Inferior and Superior, Infernal and
Celestial, might be shown sitting in concord, performing in concert,
harmoniously receiving sacrificial offerings of the black or the white;
and the black not extinguishing the fairer fellow.  Tell us of a
certainty that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be asserted
(assuming the great year for the wine, i.e.  combinations above) that a
speck of the white within us who drink will conquer, to rise in main
ascension over volumes of the black.  It may, at a greater venture, but
confidently, be said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of auspicious
birth induces ever to the worship of the loftier Deities.

Think as you will; forbear to come hauling up examples of malarious men,
in whom these pourings of the golden rays of life breed fogs; and be
moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning,
in tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of
the reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a most
magnetic polarity.  Take it for not worse than accompanying choric
flourishes, in accord with Mr. Victor Radnor and Mr. Simeon Fenellan at
their sipping of the venerable wine.

Seated in a cosy corner, near the grey City window edged with a sooty
maze, they praised the wine, in the neuter and in the feminine; that for
the glass, this for the widow-branded bottle: not as poets hymning; it
was done in the City manner, briefly, part pensively, like men travelling
to the utmost bourne of flying flavour (a dell in infinite nether), and
still masters of themselves and at home.

Such a wine, in its capturing permeation of us, insists on being for a
time a theme.

'I wonder!' said Mr. Radnor, completely restored, eyeing his half-emptied
second glass and his boon-fellow.

'Low!' Mr. Fenellan shook his head.

'Half a dozen dozen left?'

'Nearer the half of that.  And who's the culprit?'

'Old days!  They won't let me have another dozen out of the house now.'

'They'll never hit on such another discovery in their cellar, unless they
unearth a fifth corner.'

'I don't blame them for making the price prohibitive.  And sound as
ever!'

Mr. Radnor watched the deliberate constant ascent of bubbles through
their rose-topaz transparency.  He drank.  That notion of the dish of
turtle was an inspiration of the right: he ought always to know it for
the want of replenishment when such a man as he went quaking.  His latest
experiences of himself were incredible; but they passed, as the dimples
of the stream.  He finished his third glass.  The bottle, like the
cellar-wine, was at ebb: unlike the cellar-wine, it could be set flowing
again: He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion:

'Fenellan, remember, I had a sort of right to the wine--to the best I
could get; and this Old Veuve, more than any other, is a bridal wine!
We heard of Giulia Sanfredini's marriage to come off with the Spanish
Duke, and drank it to the toast of our little Nesta's godmother.  I 've
told you.  We took the girl to the Opera, when quite a little one--that
high:--and I declare to you, it was marvellous!  Next morning after
breakfast, she plants herself in the middle of the room, and strikes her
attitude for song, and positively, almost with the Sanfredini's voice--
illusion of it, you know,--trills us out more than I could have believed
credible to be recollected by a child.  But I've told you the story.  We
called her Fredi from that day.  I sent the diva, with excuses and
compliments, a nuptial present-necklace, Roman goldwork, locket-pendant,
containing sunny curl, and below a fine pearl; really pretty; telling her
our grounds for the liberty.  She replied, accepting the responsible
office; touching letter--we found it so; framed in Fredi's room, under
her godmother's photograph.  Fredi has another heroine now, though she
worships her old one still; she never abandons her old ones.  You've
heard the story over and over!'

Mr. Fenellan nodded; he had a tenderness for the garrulity of Old Veuve,
and for the damsel.  Chatter on that subject ran pleasantly with their
entertainment.

Mr. Radnor meanwhile scribbled, and despatched a strip of his Note-book,
bearing a scrawl of orders, to his office.  He was now fully himself,
benevolent, combative, gay, alert for amusement or the probeing of
schemes to the quick, weighing the good and the bad in them with his
fine touch on proportion.

'City dead flat?  A monotonous key; but it's about the same as fetching a
breath after a run; only, true, it lasts too long--not healthy!  Skepsey
will bring me my letters.  I was down in the country early this morning,
looking over the house, with Taplow, my architect; and he speaks fairly
well of the contractors.  Yes, down at Lakelands; and saw my first lemon
butterfly in a dell of sunshine, out of the wind, and had half a mind to
catch it for Fredi,--and should have caught it myself, if I had!  The
truth is, we three are country born and bred; we pine in London.  Good
for a season; you know my old feeling.  They are to learn the secret of
Lakelands to-morrow.  It 's great fun; they think I don't see they've had
their suspicion for some time.  You said--somebody said--"the eye of a
needle for what they let slip of their secrets, and the point of it for
penetrating yours":--women.  But no; my dear souls didn't prick and
bother.  And they dealt with a man in armour.  I carry them down to
Lakelands to-morrow, if the City's flat.'

'Keeping a secret's the lid on a boiling pot with you,' Mr. Fenellan
said; and he mused on the profoundness of the flavour at his lips.

'I do it.'

'You do: up to bursting at the breast.'

'I keep it from Colney!'

'As Vesuvius keeps it from Palmieri when shaking him.'

'Has old Colney an idea of it?'

'He has been foretelling an eruption of an edifice.'

The laugh between them subsided to pensiveness.

Mr. Fenellan's delay in the delivery of his news was eloquent to reveal
the one hateful topic; and this being seen, it waxed to such increase of
size with the passing seconds, that prudence called for it.

'Come!' said Mr. Radnor.

The appeal was understood.

'Nothing very particular.  I came into the City to look at a warehouse
they want to mount double guard on.  Your idea of the fireman's night-
patrol and wires has done wonders for the office.'

'I guarantee the City if all my directions are followed.'

Mr. Fenellan's remark, that he had nothing very particular to tell,
reduced it to the mere touch upon a vexatious matter, which one has to
endure in the ears at times; but it may be postponed.  So Mr. Radnor
encouraged him to talk of an Insurance Office Investment.  Where it is
all bog and mist, as in the City to-day, the maxim is, not to take a
step, they agreed.  Whether it was attributable to an unconsumed glut of
the markets, or apprehension of a panic, had to be considered.  Both
gentlemen were angry with the Birds on the flags of foreign nations,
which would not imitate a sawdust Lion to couch reposefully.  Incessantly
they scream and sharpen talons.

'They crack the City bubbles and bladders, at all events,' Mr. Fenellan
said.  'But if we let our journals go on making use of them, in the shape
of sham hawks overhead, we shall pay for their one good day of the game
with our loss of the covey.  An unstable London's no world's market-
place.'

'No, no; it's a niggardly national purse, not the journals,' Mr. Radnor
said.  'The journals are trading engines.  Panics are grist to them; so
are wars; but they do their duty in warning the taxpayer and rousing
Parliament.  Dr. Schlesien's right: we go on believing that our God
Neptune will do everything for us, and won't see that Steam has paralyzed
his Trident: good!  You and Colney are hard on Schlesien--or at him, I
should say.  He's right: if we won't learn that we have become
Continentals, we shall be marched over.  Laziness, cowardice, he says.'

'Oh, be hanged!' interrupted Fenellan.  'As much of the former as you
like.  He 's right about our "individualismus" being another name for
selfishness, and showing the usual deficiency in external features; it's
an individualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky, each
fellow his own way.  Well, then, conscript them, and they'll be all of a
better pattern.  The only thing to do, and the cheapest.  By heaven!
it's the only honourable thing to do.'

Mr. Radnor disapproved.  'No conscription here.'

'Not till you've got the drop of poison in your blood, in the form of an
army landed.  That will teach you to catch at the drug.'

'No, Fenellan!  Besides they've got to land.  I guarantee a trusty army
and navy under a contract, at two-thirds of the present cost.  We'll
start a National Defence Insurance Company after the next panic.'

'During,' said Mr. Fenellan, and there was a flutter of laughter at the
unobtrusive hint for seizing Dame England in the mood.

Both dropped a sigh.

'But you must try and run down with us to Lakelands to-morrow,' Mr.
Radnor resumed on a cheerfuller theme.  'You have not yet seen all I 've
done there.  And it 's a castle with a drawbridge: no exchangeing of
visits, as we did at Craye Farm and at Creckholt; we are there for
country air; we don't court neighbours at all--perhaps the elect; it will
depend on Nataly's wishes.  We can accommodate our Concert-set, and about
thirty or forty more, for as long as they like.  You see, that was my
intention--to be independent of neighbouring society.  Madame Callet
guarantees dinners or hot suppers for eighty--and Armandine is the last
person to be recklessly boasting.--When was it I was thinking last of
Armandine?' He asked himself that, as he rubbed at the back of his head.

Mr. Fenellan was reading his friend's character by the light of his
remarks and in opposition to them, after the critical fashion of
intimates who know as well as hear: but it was amiably and trippingly,
on the dance of the wine in his veins.

His look, however, was one that reminded; and Mr. Radnor cried: 'Now!
whatever it is!'

'I had an interview: I assure you,' Mr. Fenellan interposed to pacify:
'the smallest of trifles, and to be expected: I thought you ought to know
it:--an interview with her lawyer; office business, increase of Insurance
on one of her City warehouses.'

'Speak her name, speak the woman's name; we're talking like a pair of
conspirators,' exclaimed Mr. Radnor.

'He informed me that Mrs. Burman has heard of the new mansion.'

'My place at Lakelands?'

Mr. Radnor's clear-water eyes hardened to stony as their vision ran along
the consequences of her having heard it.

'Earlier this time!' he added, thrummed on the table, and thumped with
knuckles.  'I make my stand at Lakelands for good!  Nothing mortal moves
me!'

'That butler of hers--'

'Jarniman, you mean: he's her butler, yes, the scoundrel--h'm-pah!
Heaven forgive me! she's an honest woman at least; I wouldn't rob her of
her little: fifty-nine or sixty next September, fifteenth of the month!
with the constitution of a broken drug-bottle, poor soul!  She hears
everything from Jarniman: he catches wind of everything.  All foreseen,
Fenellan, foreseen.  I have made my stand at Lakelands, and there's my
flag till it's hauled down over Victor Radnor.  London kills Nataly as
well as Fredi--and me: that is--I can use the words to you--I get back to
primal innocence in the country.  We all three have the feeling.  You're
a man to understand.  My beasts, and the wild flowers, hedge-banks, and
stars.  Fredi's poetess will tell you.  Quiet waters reflecting.  I
should feel it in Paris as well, though they have nightingales in their
Bois.  It's the rustic I want to bathe me; and I had the feeling at
school, biting at Horace.  Well, this is my Sabine Farm, rather on a
larger scale, for the sake of friends.  Come, and pure air, water from
the springs, walks and rides in lanes, high sand-lanes; Nataly loves
them; Fredi worships the old roots of trees: she calls them the faces of
those weedy sandy lanes.  And the two dear souls on their own estate,
Fenellan!  And their poultry, cows, cream.  And a certain influence one
has in the country socially.  I make my stand on a home--not empty
punctilio.'

Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, 'Punctilio,' and not emphatically.

'Don't bawl the word,' said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it rang
and sang.  'Here in the City the woman's harmless; and here,' he struck
his breast.  'But she can shoot and hit another through me.  Ah, the
witch!--poor wretch!  poor soul!  Only, she's malignant.  I could swear!
But Colney 's right for once in something he says about oaths--"dropping
empty buckets," or something.'

'"Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as
heavily as the ready devil himself,"' Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase.
'Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he's what the critics call
sententious.  We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us.'

'Come, Fenellan, I don't think .  .  .'

'Oh, yes, but it's true of me too.'

'You reserve it for your enemies.'

'I 'd like to distract it a bit from the biggest of 'em.'  He pointed
finger at the region of the heart.

'Here we have Skepsey,' said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach of
a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed javelin's
cast, shot from the doorway to the table.




CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND BOTTLE

This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from
his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism.  His lean
slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest of
prominent large eyes.  He placed his master's letters legibly on the
table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the
hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.

Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.

'How about the Schools for Boxing?' that gentleman said.

Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: 'I
have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously: a person of no
station:--it does not appear of national importance.  Ladies are against.
They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because
of the blood; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not; and
it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex.  They seem to be
unaware of their own interests--ladies.  The contention all around us is
with ignorance.  My plan is written; I have shown it, and signatures of
gentlemen, to many of our City notables favourable in most cases:
gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly.  The clergy and the medical
profession are quite with me.'

'The surgical, perhaps you mean?'

'Also, sir.  The clergy strongly.'

'On the grounds of--what, Skepsey?'

'Morality.  I have fully explained to them:--after his work at the desk
all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment.  He needs it, must have
it.  I propose to catch him on his way to his music-halls and other
places, and take him to one of our establishments.  A short term of
instruction, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves; it would delight
him more than excesses-beer and tobacco.  The female in her right place,
certainly.'  Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his hearer, and
pursued

'It would improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his
sense of personal dignity.'

'Would you teach females as well--to divert them from their frivolities?'

'That would have to be thought over, sir.  It would be better for them
than using their nails.'

'I don't know, Skepsey: I'm rather a Conservative there.'

'Yes; with regard to the female, sir: I confess, my scheme does not
include them.  They dance; that is a healthy exercise.  One has only to
say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency.
I look to that.  And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent
of--I have to say--sex.  Not that there is harm in sex.  But we are for
training.  I hope my meaning is clear?'

'Quite.  You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic
recreation.'

'Recreation is the word, sir; I have often admired it,' said Skepsey,
blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic.

'I was a bit of a boxer once,' Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height and
breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him.

'Something might be done with you still, sir.'

Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful summary of his gifts in
a glimpse.  Mr. Fenellan bowed to him.

Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters
perused.

'Skepsey's craze: regeneration of the English race by boxing--nucleus of
a national army?'

'To face an enemy at close quarters--it teaches that, sir.  I have always
been of opinion, that courage may be taught.  I do not say heroism.  And
setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable
citizens.  Protection to the weak in streets and by-places--shocking
examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd.'

'One strong man is an overmatch for your mob,' said Mr. Fenellan.

Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion of
the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn.

'Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant mob:--strong, you
say, sir?  I venture my word that a, decent lad, with science, would beat
him.  It is a question of the study and practice of first principles.'

'If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman?' Skepsey conjured
the scene by bending his head and peering abstractedly, as if over
spectacles.

'I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake.'

Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting.

'My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first principles,
I think?'

'Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir: exceedingly quick and clever; a hard
boxer to beat.'

'You will not call him captain when you see him; he has dismissed the
army.'

'I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him.  Captain Dartrey
Fenellan was a beautiful fencer.  He gave me some instruction; unhappily,
I have to acknowledge, too late.  It is a beautiful art.  Captain Dartrey
says, the French excel at it.  But it asks for a weapon, which nature has
not given: whereas the fists .  .  .'

'So,' Mr. Radnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey: 'No sign of life?'

'It is not yet seen in the City, sir.'

'The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth's
maziest penetralia, where no tides are! is it not so, Skepsey?' said Mr.
Fenellan, whose initiative and exuberance in loquency had been restrained
by a slight oppression, known to guests; especially to the guest in the
earlier process of his magnification and illumination by virtue of a
grand old wine; and also when the news he has to communicate may be a
stir to unpleasant heaps.  The shining lips and eyes of his florid face
now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy jack-o'-lanterning over it.
'Business hangs to swing at every City door, like a ragshop Doll, on the
gallows of overproduction.  Stocks and Shares are hollow nuts not a
squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight of the milky kernel
mouldered to beard.

Percentage, like a cabman without a fare, has gone to sleep inside his
vehicle.  Dividend may just be seen by tiptoe: stockholders, twinkling
heels over the far horizon.  Too true!--and our merchants, brokers,
bankers, projectors of Companies, parade our City to remind us of the
poor steamed fellows trooping out of the burst-boiler-room of the big
ship Leviathan, in old years; a shade or two paler than the crowd o' the
passengers, apparently alive and conversible, but corpses, all of them to
lie their length in fifteen minutes.'

'And you, Fenellan?' cried his host, inspired for a second bottle by the
lovely nonsense of a voluble friend wound up to the mark.

'Doctor of the ship!  with this prescription!' Mr. Fenellan held up his
glass.

'Empty?'

Mr. Fenellan made it completely so.  'Confident!' he affirmed.

An order was tossed to the waiter, and both gentlemen screwed their lips
in relish of his heavy consent to score off another bottle from the
narrow list.

'At the office in forty minutes,' Skepsey's master nodded to him and shot
him forth, calling him back: 'By the way, in case a man named Jarniman
should ask to see me, you turn him to the rightabout.'

Skepsey repeated: 'Jarniman !' and flew.

'A good servant,' Mr. Radnor said.  'Few of us think of our country so
much, whatever may be said of the specific he offers.  Colney has
impressed him somehow immensely: he studies to write too; pushes to
improve himself; altogether a worthy creature.'

The second bottle appeared.  The waiter, in sincerity a reluctant
executioner, heightened his part for the edification of the admiring
couple.

'Take heart, Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan; 'it's only the bottle dies;
and we are the angels above to receive the spirit.'

'I'm thinking of the house,' Benjamin replied.  He told them that again.

'It 's the loss of the fame of having the wine, that he mourns.  But,
Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan, 'the fame enters into the partakers of it,
and we spread it, and perpetuate it for you.'

'That don't keep a house upright,' returned Benjamin.

Mr. Fenellan murmured to himself: 'True enough, it 's elegy--though we
perform it through a trumpet; and there's not a doubt of our being down
or having knocked the world down, if we're loudly praised.'

Benjamin waited to hear approval sounded on the lips uncertain as a woman
is a wine of ticklish age.  The gentlemen nodded, and he retired.

A second bottle, just as good as the first, should, one thoughtlessly
supposes, procure us a similar reposeful and excursive enjoyment, as of
men lying on their backs and flying imagination like a kite.  The effect
was quite other.  Mr. Radnor drank hastily and spoke with heat: 'You told
me All? tell me that!'

Mr. Fenellan gathered himself together; he sipped, and relaxed his
bracing.  But there really was a bit more to tell: not much, was it?  Not
likely to puff a gale on the voluptuous indolence of a man drawn along by
Nereids over sunny sea-waves to behold the birth of the Foam-Goddess?
'According to Carling, her lawyer; that is, he hints she meditates a
blow.'

'Mrs. Burman means to strike a blow?'

'The lady.'

'Does he think I fear any--does he mean a blow with a weapon?  Is it a
legal .  .  . ?  At last?  Fenellan!'

'So I fancied I understood.'

'But can the good woman dream of that as a blow to strike and hurt, for a
punishment?--that's her one aim.'

'She may have her hallucinations.'

'But a blow--what a word for it!  But it's life to us life!  It's the
blow we've prayed for.  Why, you know it!  Let her strike, we bless her.
We've never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary--pity,
pity, pity!  Let her do that, we're at her feet, my Nataly and I.  If you
knew what my poor girl suffers!  She 's a saint at the stake.  Chiefly on
behalf of her family.  Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my
fortune: I'll own to luck; I put in a claim to courage and calculation.'

'You've been a bulwark to your friends.'

'All, Fenellan, all-stocks, shares, mines, companies, industries at home
and--abroad--all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow!
Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again--singing!  Ha!
the woman has threatened it before.  It's probably feline play with us.'

His chin took support, he frowned.

'You may have touched her.'

'She won't be touched, and she won't be driven.  What 's the secret of
her?  I can't guess, I never could.  She's a riddle.'

'Riddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the
ardently sought secret to reveal itself,' said Mr. Fenellan.

His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor's
eyes, they turned over.  'Oh!--her charms!  She had a desperate belief in
her beauty.  The woman 's undoubtedly charitable; she's not without a
mind--sort of mind: well, it shows no crack till it's put to use.  Heart!
yes, against me she has plenty of it.  They say she used to be courted;
she talked of it: "my courtiers, Mr. Victor!"  There, heaven forgive me,
I wouldn't mock at her to another.'

'It looks as if she were only inexorably human,' said Mr. Fenellan,
crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to
flavour.  'We read of the tester of a bandit-bed; and it flattened unwary
recumbents to pancakes.  An escape from the like of that seems pleadable,
should be: none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the
insane.'

Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case.  'For the sake of
my sanity, it was!  to preserve my . . . . but any word makes nonsense of
it.  Could--I must ask you--could any sane man--you were abroad in those
days, horrible days!  and never met her: I say, could you consent to be
tied--I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth-tied to--I was barely twenty-
one: I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an engagement--which
is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good faith; that is, with
capacity on both sides to keep the engagement: between the man you know
I was in youth and a more than middle-aged woman crazy up to the edge of
the cliff--as Colney says half the world is, and she positively is when
her spite is roused.  No, Fenellan, I have nothing on my conscience with
regard to the woman.  She had wealth: I left her not one penny the worse
for--but she was not one to reckon it, I own.  She could be generous,
was, with her money.  If she had struck this blow--I know she thought of
it: or if she would strike it now, I could not only forgive her, I could
beg forgiveness.'

A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead.

'You've borne your part bravely, my friend.'

'I!' Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal burdens.  'Praise my
Nataly if you like!  Made for one another, if ever two in this world!
You know us both, and do you doubt it?  The sin would have been for us
two to meet and--but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death
and beyond it: that's my firm faith.  Nataly teaches me the religion of
life, and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman.
Eighteen-nineteen-twenty years!'

Tears fell from him, two drops.  He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed
his watch, and smiled: 'The finishing glass!  We should have had to put
Colney to bed.  Few men stand their wine.  You and I are not lamed by it;
we can drink and do business: my first experience in the City was, that
the power to drink--keeping a sound head--conduces to the doing of
business.'

'It's a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror.'

'If it doubles the energies, mind.'

'Not if it fiddles inside.  I confess to that effect upon me.  I've a
waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and
it won't allow of a thought upon Investments.'

'Consult me to-morrow,' said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having
inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided.
'You've looked at the warehouse?'

'That's performed.'

'Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early
morning as you well can.'

Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent,
the giant spoke in good fellowship.  It would have been to have strained
his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to
boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.

He stopped, and laughed: 'Now I 'm pumping my pulpit-eh?  You come with
us to Lakelands.  I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.: if it's
fine; train half-past.  We take a basket.  By the way, I had no letter
from Dartrey last mail.'

'He has buried his wife.  It happens to some men.'

Mr. Radnor stood gazing.  He asked for the name of the place of the
burial.  He heard without seizing it.  A simulacrum spectre-spark of
hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening at
the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy.
Dartrey--Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and
dishonoured him: and it was in Africa!  One would have to go to Africa to
be free of the galling.  But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!--The
strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off
their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the
brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring,
always in ambush.  We do not speak of them: we have not words to stamp
the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had
the words; we know them as out of reason: they haunt us, pluck at us,
fret us, nevertheless.

Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the
mind of shackled men.

It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that Dartrey
should be free, suddenly free; and free while still a youngish man.  He
was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country for vigour,
gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness; his heavenly good fortune decked
him as a prodigy.

'No harm to the head from that fall of yours?' Mr. Fenellan said.

'None.' Mr. Radnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and
cried cheerily: 'Now to business'; as men may, who have confidence in
their ability to concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial.
'You dine with us.  The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or
Catkin: Priscilla Graves and Nataly--the Rev. Septimus; Cormyn and his
wife: Young Dudley Sowerby and I--flutes: he has precision, as naughty
Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression.  In the course of the
evening, Lady Grace, perhaps: you like her.'

'Human nature in the upper circle is particularly likeable.'

'Fenellan,' said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his
fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey's, 'I put it to you:
would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend
Carling's report?'

Although it had not been phrased as a report, Mr. Fenellan's answering
look and gesture, and a run of indiscriminate words, enrolled it in that
form, greatly to the inspiriting of Mr. Radnor.

Old Veuve in one, to the soul of Old Veuve in the other, they recalled a
past day or two, touched the skies; and merriment or happiness in the
times behind them held a mirror to the present: or the hour of the
reverse of happiness worked the same effect by contrast: so that notions
of the singular election of us by Dame Fortune, sprang like vinous
bubbles.  For it is written, that however powerful you be, you shall not
take the Winegod on board to entertain him as a simple passenger; and you
may captain your vessel, you may pilot it, and keep to your reckonings,
and steer for all the ports you have a mind to, even to doing profitable
exchange with Armenian and Jew, and still you shall do the something
more, which proves that the Winegod is on board: he is the pilot of your
blood if not the captain of your thoughts.

Mr. Fenellan was unused to the copious outpouring of Victor Radnor's
confidences upon his domestic affairs; and the unwonted excitement of
Victor's manner of speech would have perplexed him, had there not been
such a fiddling of the waltz inside him.

Payment for the turtle and the bottles of Old Veuve was performed
apart with Benjamin, while Simeon Fenellan strolled out of the house,
questioning a tumbled mind as to what description of suitable
entertainment, which would be dancing and flirting and fal-lallery in the
season of youth, London City could provide near meridian hours for a man
of middle age carrying his bottle of champagne, like a guest of an old-
fashioned wedding-breakfast.  For although he could stand his wine as
well as his friend, his friend's potent capacity martially after the
feast to buckle to business at a sign of the clock, was beyond him.
It pointed to one of the embodied elements, hot from Nature's workshop.
It told of the endurance of powers, that partly explained the successful,
astonishing career of his friend among a people making urgent, if
unequal, demands perpetually upon stomach and head.




CHAPTER V

THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD

In that nationally interesting Poem, or Dramatic Satire, once famous,
THE RAJAH IN LONDON (London, Limbo and Sons, 1889), now obliterated
under the long wash of Press-matter, the reflection--not unknown to
philosophical observers, and natural perhaps in the mind of an Oriental
Prince--produced by his observation of the march of London citizens
Eastward at morn, Westward at eve, attributes their practice to a
survival of the Zoroastrian form of worship.  His Minister, favourable
to the people or for the sake of fostering an idea in his Master's head,
remarks, that they show more than the fidelity of the sunflower to her
God.  The Rajah, it would appear, frowns interrogatively, in the princely
fashion, accusing him of obscureness of speech:--princes and the louder
members of the grey public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip
of that which they do not immediately comprehend.  It is explained by the
Minister: not even the flower, he says, would hold constant, as they, to
the constantly unseen--a trebly cataphractic Invisible.  The Rajah
professes curiosity to know how it is that the singular people nourish
their loyalty, since they cannot attest to the continued being of the
object in which they put their faith.  He is informed by his prostrate
servant of a settled habit they have of diligently seeking their
Divinity, hidden above, below; and of copiously taking inside them doses
of what is denied to their external vision: thus they fortify credence
chemically on an abundance of meats and liquors; fire they eat, and they
drink fire; they become consequently instinct with fire.  Necessarily
therefore they believe in fire.  Believing, they worship.  Worshipping,
they march Eastward at morn, Westward at eve.  For that way lies the key,
this way the cupboard, of the supplies, their fuel.

According to Stage directions, THE RAJAH AND HIS MINISTER Enter a Gin-
Palace.--It is to witness a service that they have learnt to appreciate
as Anglicanly religious.

On the step of the return to their Indian clime, they speak of the hatted
sect, which is most, or most commercially, succoured and fattened by our
rule there: they wave adieu to the conquering Islanders, as to 'Parsees
beneath a cloud.'

The two are seen last on the deck of the vessel, in perusal of a medical
pamphlet composed of statistics and sketches, traceries, horrid blots,
diagrams with numbers referring to notes, of the various maladies caused
by the prolonged prosecution of that form of worship.

'But can they suffer so and live?' exclaims the Rajah, vexed by the
physical sympathetic twinges which set him wincing.

'Science,' his Minister answers, 'took them up where Nature, in pity of
their martyrdom, dropped them.  They do not live; they are engines,
insensible things of repairs and patches; insteamed to pursue their
infuriate course, to the one end of exhausting supplies for the renewing
of them, on peril of an instant suspension if they deviate a step or
stop: nor do they.'

The Rajah is of opinion, that he sails home with the key of the riddle of
their power to vanquish.  In some apparent allusion to an Indian story of
a married couple who successfully made their way, he accounts for their
solid and resistless advance, resembling that of--

                         The doubly-wedded man and wife,
               Pledged to each other and against the world
               With mutual union.

One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian
citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to
our nourishing luminary: at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king,
after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish
smack-o'-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy
javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the
circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of
Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed
chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and
pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella.  One would fair believe that
they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams.
No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from coal-
dust to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an enormous
engine's centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to
meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in
his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not roughened,
as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler's hand seen
from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have all the appearance of
sour scientific productions.  And unhappily for the national portrait, in
the Poem quoted, the Rajah's Minister chose an hour between morning and
meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure
inside their persons, for drawing his Master's attention to the quaint
similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they
had travelled so far to visit and to study:

                              These Britons wear
               The driven and perplexed look of men
               Begotten hastily 'twixt business hours

It could not have been late afternoon.

These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them,
fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset.  In April, the month of
piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all
quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking
royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for
possession of the portly dames.  There is immensity, swinging motion,
collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind
idea.  London presents it.  If we can allow ourselves a moment for not
inquireing scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the ripe
kitchen hour), here is a noble harmony of heaven and the earth of the
works of man, speaking a grander tongue than barren sea or wood or
wilderness.  Just a moment; it goes; as, when a well-attuned barrel-organ
in a street has drawn us to recollections of the Opera or Italy, another
harshly crashes, and the postman knocks at doors, and perchance a
costermonger cries his mash of fruit, a beggar woman wails her hymn.
For the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths,
the forces repressing them.  That grand tongue of the giant City inspires
none human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be.  An
embittered Muse of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of the
adulatory Essay and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an angry
irony 'upon those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff.  Song of
praise she does not permit.  A moment of satisfaction in a striking
picture is accorded, and no more.  For this London, this England, Europe,
world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital
operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet
and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic
work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely
discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour,
will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of
diseases.  Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material
accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous
bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might--as may, we will
suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of
Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the Spirit of Song.

But first there must be the cleansing.  When Night has fallen upon
London, the Rajah remarks:

               Monogamic Societies present
               A decent visage and a hideous rear.

His Minister (satirically, or in sympathetic Conservatism) would have
them not to move on, that they may preserve among beholders the
impression of their handsome frontage.  Night, however, will come; and
they, adoreing the decent face, are moved on, made to expose what the
Rajah sees.  Behind his courteousness, he is an antagonistic observer of
his conquerors; he pushes his questions farther than the need for them;
his Minister the same; apparently to retain the discountenanced people in
their state of exposure.  Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle
on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's
reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate-
whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he
becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly
peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious
contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound
in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with the
cat of the tiles at night.

Granting all that, it being a transient novelist's business to please the
light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only chance
of half of it, let him identify himself with them, in keeping to the
quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable.

Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess
to lift the angry heroic head over human.  They gloriously transfigure.
A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the
streets admitting  cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun's hand so
speaks to us.  And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of street-
organs has quickened little children's legs to rhythmic footing, they
strike on thoughts braver than pastoral.  Victor Radnor, lover of the
country though he was, would have been the first to say it.  He would
indeed have said it too emphatically.  Open London as a theme, to a
citizen of London ardent for the clear air out of it, you have roused an
orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his
reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages.

The figures of the hurtled fair ones in sky were wreathing Nelson's
cocked hat when Victor, distinguishably bright-faced amid a crowd of the
irradiated, emerged from the tideway to cross the square, having thoughts
upon Art, which were due rather to the suggestive proximity of the
National Gallery than to the Flemish mouldings of cloud-forms under
Venetian brushes.  His purchases of pictures had been his unhappiest
ventures.  He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics;
who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are
fatal.  He was led to the conclusion that our modern-lauded pictures
do not ripen.  They have a chance of it, if abused.  But who thinks of
buying the abused?  Exalted by the critics, they have, during the days
of Exhibition, a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them where
examination is close and constant, and the critic's trumpet-note
dispersed to the thinness of the fee for his blowing.  As to foreign
pictures, classic pictures, Victor had known his purse to leap for a
Raphael with a history in stages of descent from the Master, and critics
to swarm: a Raphael of the dealers, exposed to be condemned by the
critics, universally derided.  A real Raphael in your house is
aristocracy to the roof-tree.  But the wealthy trader will reach to
title before he may hope to get the real Raphael or a Titian.  Yet he
is the one who would, it may be, after enjoyment of his prize, bequeath
it to the nation--PRESENTED TO THE NATION BY VICTOR MONTGOMERY RADNOR.
There stood the letters in gilt; and he had a thrill of his generosity;
for few were the generous acts he could not perform; and if an object
haunted the deed, it came of his trader's habit of mind.

He revelled in benevolent projects of gifts to the nation, which would
coat a sensitive name.  Say, an ornamental City Square, flowers,
fountains, afternoon bands of music--comfortable seats in it, and a
shelter, and a ready supply of good cheap coffee or tea.  Tobacco?
why not rolls of honest tobacco! nothing so much soothes the labourer.
A volume of plans for the benefit of London smoked out of each ascending
pile in his brain.  London is at night a moaning outcast round the
policeman's' legs.  What of an all-night-long, cosy, brightly lighted,
odoriferous coffee-saloon for rich or poor, on the model of the
hospitable Paduan?  Owner of a penny, no soul among us shall be
rightly an outcast .  .  .  .

Dreams of this kind are taken at times by wealthy people as a cordial at
the bar of benevolent intentions.  But Victor was not the man to steal
his refreshments in that known style.  He meant to make deeds of them,
as far as he could, considering their immense extension; and except for
the sensitive social name, he was of single-minded purpose.

Turning to the steps of a chemist's shop to get a prescription made up
for his Nataly's doctoring of her domestics, he was arrested by a rap on
his elbow; and no one was near; and there could not be a doubt of the
blow--a sharp hard stroke, sparing the funny-bone, but ringing.  His
head, at the punctilio bump, throbbed responsively--owing to which or
indifference to the prescription, as of no instant requirement, he
pursued his course, resembling mentally the wanderer along a misty beach,
who hears cannon across the waters.

He certainly had felt it.  He remembered the shock: he could not remember
much of pain.  How about intimations?  His asking caused a smile.

Very soon the riddle answered itself.  He had come into view of the
diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a
couplet from the pen of the disrespectful Satirist Peter, he thought of a
fall: his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought.

All was explained save his consequent rightabout from the chemist's shop:
and that belongs to the minor involutions of circumstances and the will.
It passed like a giver's wrinkle.  He read the placards of the Opera;
reminding himself of the day when it was the single Opera-house; and now
we have two-or three.  We have also a distracting couple of Clowns and
Pantaloons in our Pantomimes: though Colney says that the multiplication
of the pantaloon is a distinct advance to representative truth--and
bother Colney!  Two Columbines also.  We forbear to speak of men, but
where is the boy who can set his young heart upon two Columbines at once!
Victor felt the boy within him cold to both: and in his youth he had
doated on the solitary twirling spangled lovely Fairy.  The tale of a
delicate lady dancer leaping as the kernel out of a nut from the arms of
Harlequin to the legalized embrace of a wealthy brewer, and thenceforth
living, by repute, with unagitated legs, as holy a matron, despite her
starry past, as any to be shown in a country breeding the like
abundantly, had always delighted him.  It seemed a reconcilement of
opposing stations, a defeat of Puritanism.  Ay, and poor women!--women in
the worser plight under the Puritan's eye.  They may be erring and good:
yes, finding the man to lift them the one step up!  Read the history of
the error.  But presently we shall teach the Puritan to act by the
standards of his religion.  All is coming right--must come right.  Colney
shall be confounded.

Hereupon Victor hopped on to Fenellan's hint regarding the designs of
Mrs. Burman.

His Nataly might have to go through a short sharp term of scorching--
Godiva to the gossips.

She would come out of it glorified.  She would be reconciled with her
family.  With her story of her devotion to the man loving her, the world
would know her for the heroine she was: a born lady, in appearance and
manner an empress among women.  It was a story to be pleaded in any
court, before the sternest public.  Mrs. Burman had thrown her into
temptation's way.  It was a story to touch the heart, as none other ever
written of over all the earth was there a woman equalling his Nataly!

And their Nesta would have a dowry to make princesses envious:--she would
inherit .  .  .  he ran up an arithmetical column, down to a line of
figures in addition, during three paces of his feet.  Dartrey Fenellan
had said of little Nesta once, that she had a nature pure and sparkling
as mid-sea foam.  Happy he who wins her!  But she was one of the young
women who are easily pleased and hardly enthralled.  Her father strained
his mind for the shape of the man to accomplish the feat.  Whether she
had an ideal of a youth in her feminine head, was beyond his guessing.
She was not the damsel to weave a fairy waistcoat for the identical
prince, and try it upon all comers to discover him: as is done by some;
excuseably, if we would be just.  Nesta was of the elect, for whom
excuses have not to be made.  She would probably like a flute-player
best; because her father played the flute, and she loved him--laughably
a little maiden's reason!  Her father laughed at her.

Along the street of Clubs, where a bruised fancy may see black balls
raining, the narrow way between ducal mansions offers prospect of the
sweep of greensward, all but touching up to the sunset to draw it to the
dance.

Formerly, in his very early youth, he clasped a dream of gaining way
to an alliance with one of these great surrounding houses; and he had
a passion for the acquisition of money as a means.  And it has to be
confessed, he had sacrificed in youth a slice of his youth, to gain it
without labour--usually a costly purchase.  It had ended disastrously: or
say, a running of the engine off the rails, and a speedy re-establishment
of traffic.  Could it be a loss, that had led to the winning of his
Nataly?  Can we really loathe the first of the steps when the one in
due sequence, cousin to it, is a blessedness?  If we have been righted
to health by a medical draught, we are bound to be respectful to our
drug.  And so we are, in spite of Nature's wry face and shiver at a
mention of what we went through during those days, those horrible days:
--hide them!

The smothering of them from sight set them sounding he had to listen.
Colney Durance accused him of entering into bonds with somebody's
grandmother for the simple sake of browsing on her thousands: a picture
of himself too abhorrent to Victor to permit of any sort of acceptance.
Consequently he struck away to the other extreme of those who have a
choice in mixed motives: he protested that compassion had been the cause
of it.  Looking at the circumstance now, he could see, allowing for human
frailty-perhaps a wish to join the ranks of the wealthy compassion for
the woman as the principal motive.  How often had she not in those old
days praised his generosity for allying his golden youth to her withered
age--Mrs. Burman's very words!  And she was a generous woman or had been:
she was generous in saying that.  Well, and she was generous in having a
well-born, well-bred beautiful young creature like Nataly for her
companion, when it was a case of need for the dear girl; and
compassionately insisting, against remonstrances: they were spoken by
him, though they were but partial.  How, then, had she become--at least,
how was it that she could continue to behave as the vindictive Fury who
persecuted remorselessly, would give no peace, poisoned the wells round
every place where he and his dear one pitched their tent!

But at last she had come to charity, as he could well believe.  Not too
late!  Victor's feeling of gratitude to Mrs. Burman assured him it was
genuine because of his genuine conviction, that she had determined to end
her incomprehensibly lengthened days in reconcilement with him: and he
had always been ready to 'forget and forgive.' A truly beautiful old
phrase!  It thrilled off the most susceptible of men.

His well-kept secret of the spacious country-house danced him behind a
sober demeanour from one park to another; and along beside the drive to
view of his townhouse--unbeloved of the inhabitants, although by
acknowledgement it had, as Fredi funnily drawled, to express her sense
of justice in depreciation, 'good accommodation.'  Nataly was at home,
he was sure.  Time to be dressing: sun sets at six-forty, he said, and
glanced at the stained West, with an accompanying vision of outspread
primroses flooding banks of shadowy fields near Lakelands.

He crossed the road and rang.

Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs.
His darling Fredi stood out of it, a dramatic Undine.




CHAPTER VI

NATALY

'Il segreto!' the girl cried commandingly, with a forefinger at his
breast.

He crossed arms, toning in similar recitative, with anguish,
'Dove volare!'

They joined in half a dozen bars of operatic duet.

She flew to him, embraced and kissed.

'I must have it, my papa! unlock.  I've been spying the bird on its
hedgerow nest so long!  And this morning, my own dear cunning papa,
weren't you as bare as winter twigs?  "Tomorrow perhaps we will have a
day in the country."  To go and see the nest?  Only, please, not a big
one.  A real nest; where mama and I can wear dairymaid's hat and apron
all day--the style you like; and strike roots.  We've been torn away two
or three times: twice, I know.'

'Fixed, this time; nothing shall tear us up,' said her father, moving on
to the stairs, with an arm about her.

'So, it is .  .  . ?'

'She's amazed at her cleverness!'

'A nest for three?'

'We must have a friend or two.'

'And pretty country?'

'Trust her papa for that.'

'Nice for walking and running over fields?  No rich people?'

'How escape that rabble in England! as Colney says.  It's a place for
being quite independent of neighbours, free as air.'

'Oh!  bravo!'

'And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony-carriage; and Fredi can
have a swim every Summer morning.'

'A swim?' Her note was dubious.  'A river?'

'A good long stretch--fairish, fairish.  Bit of a lake; bathing-shed; the
Naiad's bower: pretty water to see.'

'Ah.  And has the house a name?'

'Lakelands.  I like the name.'

'Papa gave it the name!'

'There's nothing he can conceal from his girl.  Only now and then a
little surprise.'

'And his girl is off her head with astonishment.  But tell me, who has
been sharing the secret with you?'

'Fredi strikes home!  And it is true, you dear; I must have a confidant:
Simeon Fenellan.'

'Not Mr. Durance?'

He shook out a positive negative.  'I leave Col to his guesses.  He'd
have been prophesying fire the works before the completion.'

'Then it is not a dear old house, like Craye and Creckholt?'

'Wait and see to-morrow.'

He spoke of the customary guests for concert practice; the music,
instrumental and vocal; quartet, duet, solo; and advising the girl to be
quick, as she had but twenty-five minutes, he went humming and trilling
into his dressing-room.

Nesta signalled at her mother's door for permission to enter.  She
slipped in, saw that the maid was absent, and said: 'Yes, mama; and
prepare, I feared it; I was sure.'

Her mother breathed a little moan: 'Not a cottage?'

'He has not mentioned it to Mr. Durance.'

'Why not?'

'Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant.'

'My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speaking.  You don't
know for certain yet?'

'It's a large estate, mama, and a big new house.'

Nataly's bosom sank.  'Ah me! here's misery!  I ought to have known.
And too late now it has gone so far!  But I never imagined he would be
building.'

She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if her beauty
were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily.  To be looking in that
manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish.  But Nesta's divinations
were target-arrows; they flew to the mark.  Could it have been expected
that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale?  O the dear little
lost lost cottage!  She thought of it with a strain of the arms of
womanhood's longing in the unblessed wife for a babe.  For the secluded
modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with
suspicions.  .  .  .

'My child, you won't possibly have time before the dinner-hour,' she said
to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and
straining look out of the depths.

Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient
dislike, when one's own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be
affectionate.  We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves
by a false position.

She heard his voice on a carol.  Men do not feel this doubtful position
as women must.  They have not the same to endure; the world gives them
land to tread, where women are on breaking seas.  Her Nesta knew no more
than the pain of being torn from a home she loved.  But now the girl was
older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful
directness would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come,
necessarily to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother.  But
if it might be postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave
understanding, with some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a
case that could be pleaded!

He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her
present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new
intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the
wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence
though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and
discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have
asked whether he was perfectly sane.

Who half so brilliantly!--Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the
glittering armies of her enthusiasm.  He had proved it; he proved it
daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like
hers: yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable.

But those were times of weakness.  Let anything be doubted rather than
the good guidance of the man who was her breath of life!  Whither he led,
let her go, not only submissively, exultingly.

Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing
into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should
therefore think it.

This was the prudent woman's clear deduction from the state wherein
she found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman.
Her surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the
river's bank by swell of flood: she had no longer root of her own; away
she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing fall,
a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny whirling
surface.  Strange to think, she had not since then power to grasp in her
abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within.

But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman.  Love is a madness, having
heaven's wisdom in it--a spark.  But even when it is driving us on the
breakers, call it love: and be not unworthy of it, hold to it.  She and
Victor had drunk of a cup.  The philtre was in her veins, whatever the
directions of the rational mind.

Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car with a racing
charioteer.  Or up beside a more than Titanically audacious balloonist.
For the charioteer is bent on a goal; and Victor's course was an
ascension from heights to heights.  He had ideas, he mastered Fortune.
He conquered Nataly and held her subject, in being above his ambition;
which was now but an occupation for his powers, while the aim of his life
was at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment.  In spite of his fits
of unreasonableness in the means--and the woman loving him could trace
them to a breath of nature--his gentle good friendly innocent aim in life
was of this very simplest; so wonderful, by contrast with his powers,
that she, assured of it as she was by experience of him, was touched,
in a transfusion of her feelings through lucent globes of admiration and
of tenderness, to reverence.  There had been occasions when her wish for
the whole world to have proof and exhibition of his greatness, goodness,
and simplicity amid his gifts, prompted her incitement of him to stand
forth eminently: 'lead a kingdom,' was the phrase behind the curtain
within her shy bosom); and it revealed her to herself, upon reflection,
as being still the Nataly who drank the cup with him, to join her fate
with his.

And why not?  Was that regretted?  Far from it.  In her maturity, the
woman was unable to send forth any dwelling thought or more than a flight
of twilight fancy, that cancelled the deed of her youth, and therewith
seemed to expunge near upon the half--of her term of years.  If it came
to consideration of her family and the family's opinion of her conduct,
her judgement did not side with them or with herself, it whirled, swam to
a giddiness and subsided.

Of course, if she and Victor were to inhabit a large country-house,
they might as well have remained at Craye Farm or at Creckholt; both
places dear to them in turn.  Such was the plain sense of the surface
question.  And how strange it was to her, that he, of the most quivering
sensitiveness on her behalf; could not see, that he threw her into
situations where hard words of men and women threatened about her head;
where one or two might on a day, some day, be heard; and where, in the
recollection of two years back, the word 'Impostor' had smacked her on
both cheeks from her own mouth.

Now once more they were to run the same round of alarms, undergo the love
of the place, with perpetual apprehensions of having to leave it: alarms,
throbbing suspicions, like those of old travellers through the haunted
forest, where whispers have intensity of meaning, and unseeing we are
seen, and unaware awaited.

Nataly shook the rolls of her thick brown hair from her forehead; she
took strength from a handsome look of resolution in the glass.  She could
always honestly say, that her courage would not fail him.

Victor tapped at the door; he stepped into the room, wearing his evening
white flower over a more open white waistcoat; and she was composed and
uninquiring.  Their Nesta was heard on the descent of the stairs, with a
rattle of Donizetti's Il segreto to the skylights.

He performed his never-omitted lover's homage.

Nataly enfolded him in a homely smile.  'A country-house?  We go and see
it to-morrow?'

'And you've been pining for a country home, my dear soul.'

'After the summer six weeks, the house in London does not seem a home to
return to.'

'And next day, Nataly draws five thousand pounds for the first sketch of
the furniture.'

'There is the Creckholt .  .  .' she had a difficulty in saying.

'Part of it may do.  Lakelands requires--but you will see to-morrow.'

After a close shutting of her eyes, she rejoined: 'It is not a cottage?'

'Well, dear, no: when the Slave of the Lamp takes to building, he does
not run up cottages.  And we did it without magic, all in a year; which
is quite as good as a magical trick in a night.'  He drew her close to
him.  'When was it my dear girl guessed me at work?'

'It was the other dear girl.  Nesta is the guesser.'

'You were two best of souls to keep from bothering me; and I might have
had to fib; and we neither of us like that.'  He noticed a sidling of her
look.  'More than the circumstances oblige:--to be frank.  But now we can
speak of them.  Wait--and the change comes; and opportunely, I have
found.  It's true we have waited long; my darling has had her worries.
However, it 's here at last.  Prepare yourself.  I speak positively.
You have to brace up for one sharp twitch--the woman's portion!  as
Natata says--and it's over.' He looked into her eyes for comprehension;
and not finding inquiry, resumed: 'Just in time for the entry into
Lakelands.  With the pronouncement of the decree, we present the licence
.  .  .  at an altar we've stood before, in spirit .  .  .  one of the
ladies of your family to support you:--why not?  Not even then?'

'No, Victor; they have cast me off.'

'Count on my cousins, the Duvidney ladies.  Then we can say, that those
two good old spinsters are less narrow than the Dreightons.  I have to
confess I rather think I was to blame for leaving Creckholt.  Only,
if I see my girl wounded, I hate the place that did the mischief.
You and Fredi will clap hands for the country about Lakelands.'

'Have you heard from her .  .  .  of her .  .  .  is it anything,
Victor?'  Nataly asked him shyly; with not much of hope, but some
readiness to be inflated.  The prospect of an entry into the big new
house, among a new society, begirt by the old nightmares and fretting
devils, drew her into staring daylight or furnace-light.

He answered: 'Mrs. Burman has definitely decided.  In pity of us?--to be
free herself?--who can say!  She 's a woman with a conscience--of a kind:
slow, but it brings her to the point at last.  You know her, know her
well.  Fenellan has it from her lawyer--her lawyer! a Mr. Carting;
a thoroughly trustworthy man--'

'Fenellan, as a reporter?'

'Thoroughly to be trusted on serious matters.  I understand that Mrs.
Burman:--her health is awful: yes, yes; poor woman!  poor woman!  we feel
for her:--she has come to perceive her duty to those she leaves behind.
Consider: she HAS used the rod.  She must be tired out--if human.  And
she is.  One remembers traits.'

Victor sketched one or two of the traits allusively to the hearer
acquainted with them.  They received strong colouring from midday's Old
Veuve in his blood.  His voice and words had a swing of conviction: they
imparted vinousness to a heart athirst.

The histrionic self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another,
who is again, though not ignorant of his character, tempted to swallow
the nostrums which have made so gallant a man of him: his imperceptible
sensible playing of the part, on a substratum of sincereness, induces
fascinatingly to the like performance on our side, that we may be armed
as he is for enjoying the coveted reality through the partial simulation
of possessing it.  And this is not a task to us when we have looked our
actor in the face, and seen him bear the look, knowing that he is not
intentionally untruthful; and when we incline to be captivated by his
rare theatrical air of confidence; when it seems as an outside thought
striking us, that he may not be altogether deceived in the present
instance; when suddenly an expectation of the thing desired is born and
swims in a credible featureless vagueness on a misty scene: and when we
are being kissed and the blood is warmed.  In fine, here as everywhere
along our history, when the sensations are spirited up to drown the mind,
we become drift-matter of tides, metal to magnets.  And if we are women,
who commonly allow the lead to men, getting it for themselves only by
snaky cunning or desperate adventure, credulity--the continued trust in
the man--is the alternative of despair.

'But, Victor, I must ask,' Nataly said: 'you have it through Simeon
Fenellan; you have not yourself received the letter from her lawyer?'

'My knowledge of what she would do near the grave--poor soul, yes!  I
shall soon be hearing.'

'You do not, propose to enter this place until--until it is over?'

'We enter this place, my love, without any sort of ceremony.  We live
there independently, and we can we have quarters there for our friends.
Our one neighbour is London--there!  And at Lakelands we are able to
entertain London and wife;--our friends, in short; with some, what we
have to call, satellites.  You inspect the house and grounds to-morrow
--sure to be fair.  Put aside all but the pleasant recollections of Craye
and Creckholt.  We start on a different footing.  Really nothing can be
simpler.  Keeping your town-house, you are now and then in residence at
Lakelands, where you entertain your set, teach them to feel the charm of
country life: we have everything about us; could have had our own milk
and cream up to London the last two months.  Was it very naughty?--
I should have exploded my surprise!  You will see, you will see
to-morrow.'

Nataly nodded, as required.  'Good news from the mines?' she said.

He answered: 'Dartrey is--yes, poor fellow! Dartrey is confident, from
the yield of stones, that the value of our claim counts in a number of
millions.  The same with the gold.  But gold-mines are lodgeings, not
homes.'

'Oh, Victor!  if money .  .  .  !  But why did you say "poor fellow" of
Dartrey Fenellan?'

'You know how he's .  .  .'

'Yes, yes,' she said hastily.  'But has that woman been causing fresh
anxiety?'

'And Natata's chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow,' said
he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them liked
to touch.

Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow;
and he would have mentioned the circumstance confided to him by Simeon,
but for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy.  He had
also another, more distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be
mentioned just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.

He consulted his watch.  The maid had come in for the robeing of her
mistress.  Nataly's mind had turned to the little country cottage which
would have given her such great happiness.  She raised her eyes to him;
she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying
moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.

He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them.  With an impatient,
'There, there!' and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in
our old satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman's
mind without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts.  Even the
best of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest
beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts.  You must not expect to
appease them unless you administer solids.  It would almost appear that
man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his mate, the fair,
the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and purest of natures,
cannot help being something of a groveller.

Nataly had likewise her thoughts.




CHAPTER VII

BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THIN WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL

Rather earlier in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking
of the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy for lack of
amusements properly to follow Old Veuve, that he could ask himself
whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his fellow-men
like an owl all mad for the reveller's hoots and flights and mice and
moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure,
chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln's Inn pumps lawyers
into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane.  He was in the
state of the wine when a shake will rouse the sluggish sparkles to foam.
Sight of Mrs. Burman's legal adviser had instantly this effect upon him:
his bubbling friendliness for Victor Radnor, and the desire of the voice
in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the rush of two waves
together, upon which he may be figured as the boat: he caught at Mr.
Carling's hand more heartily than their acquaintanceship quite
sanctioned; but his grasp and his look of overflowing were immediately
privileged; Mr. Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman's conversation
as he did, liked the warmth, and was flattered during the squeeze with a
prospect of his wife and friends partaking of the fun from time to time.

'I was telling my wife yesterday your story of the lady contrabandist: I
don't think she has done laughing since,' Mr. Calling said.

Fenellan fluted: 'Ah?' He had scent, in the eulogy of a story grown flat
as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way of men, a step or two
behind the man of the world.  He expressed profound regret at not having
heard the silvery ring of the lady's laughter.

Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his
wife.  'Perhaps you will some day honour us?'

'You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.'

'Now, if I might name the day?'

'You lump the gold and make it current coin;--says the blushing bride,
who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten
her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel,
her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, named
the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the complimentary
tyrant he was.'

'To-morrow, then!' said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm,
through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of
friends at short notice.  He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might
indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow.

'With happiness,' Fenellan responded.

Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.

'To-morrow, half-past seven: as for company to meet you, we will do what
we can.  You go Westward?'

'To bed with the sun,' said the reveller.

'Perhaps by Covent Garden?  I must give orders there.'

'Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the
domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter!  Ah, dear me!  Is
there anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life?'

'I was married at four and twenty,' said Carling, as one taking up
the expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, but weighty and
necessary: 'my wife was in her twentieth year: we have five children; two
sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby.  So we are grandfather
and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may say for both
of us.'

'Think of it!  Good luck and sagacity joined hands overhead on the day
you proposed to the lady: and I'd say, that all the credit is with her,
but that it would seem to be at the expense of her sex.'

'She would be the last to wish it, I assure you.'

'True of all good women!  You encourage me, touching a matter of deep
interest, not unknown to you.  The lady's warm heart will be with us.
Probably she sees Mrs. Burman?'

'Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one.'

A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferentially accepted
by Fenellan.

'Pardon.  She flies her flag, with her captain wanting; and she has,
queerly, the right.  So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one, might
be treated, it struck us, conversationally, as a respectable harbour-
hulk, with more history than top-honours.  But she has the indubitable
legal right to fly them--to proclaim it; for it means little else.'

'You would have her, if I follow you, divest herself of the name?'

'Pin me to no significations, if you please, O shrewdest of the legal
sort!  I have wit enough to escape you there.  She is no doubt an
estimable person.'

'Well, she is; she is in her way a very good woman.'

'Ah.  You see, Mr. Carling, I cannot bring myself to rank her beside
another lady, who has already claimed the title of me; and you will
forgive me if I say, that your word "good" has a look of being stuck upon
the features we know of her, like a coquette's naughty patch; or it's
a jewel of an eye in an ebony idol: though I've heard tell she performs
her charities.'

'I believe she gives away three parts of her income and that is large.'

'Leaving the good lady a fine fat fourth.'

'Compare her with other wealthy people.'

'And does she outshine the majority still with her personal attractions.

Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on his wife to
separate himself from a female pretender so ludicrous; he sought
Fenellan's nearest ear, emitting the sound of 'hum.'

'In other respects, unimpeachable!'

'Oh! quite!'

'There was a fishfag of classic Billingsgate, who had broken her
husband's nose with a sledgehammer fist, and swore before the magistrate,
that the man hadn't a crease to complain of in her character.  We are
condemned, Mr. Carling, sometimes to suffer in the flesh for the
assurance we receive of the inviolability of those moral fortifications.'

'Character, yes, valuable--I do wish you had named to-night for doing me
the honour of dining with me!' said the lawyer impulsively, in a rapture
of the appetite for anecdotes.  'I have a ripe Pichon Longueville, '65.'

'A fine wine.  Seductive to hear of.  I dine with my friend Victor
Radnor.  And he knows wine.--There are good women in the world, Mr.
Carling, whose characters .  .  .'

'Of course,'of course there are; and I could name you some.
We lawyers . . . . !

'You encounter all sorts.'

'Between ourselves,' Carling sank his tones to the indiscriminate, where
it mingled with the roar of London.

'You do?' Fenellan hazarded a guess at having heard enlightened liberal
opinions regarding the sex.  'Right!'

'Many!'

'I back you, Mr. Carling.'

The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communication, up to the verge
of the clearly audible: he spoke of examples, experiences.  Fenellan
backed him further.

'Acting on behalf of clients, you understand, Mr. Fenellan.'

'Professional, but charitable; I am with you.'

'Poor things!  we--if we have to condemn--we owe them something.'

'A kind word for poor Polly Venus, with all the world against her!  She
doesn't hear it often.'

'A real service,' Carling's voice deepened to the legal 'without
prejudice,'--'I am bound to say it--a service to Society.'

'Ah, poor wench!  And the kind of reward she gets?'

'We can hardly examine .  .  .  mysterious dispensations .  .  .  here we
are to make the best we can of it.'

'For the creature Society's indebted to?  True.  And am I to think
there's a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in
founding an Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the
country, and win compassion for her, as one of the principal persons of
her time, that Society's indebted to for whatever it's indebted for?'

'Scarcely that,' said Carling, contracting.

'But you 're for great Reforms?'

'Gradual.'

'Then it's for Reformatories, mayhap.'

'They would hardly be a cure.'

'You 're in search of a cure?'

'It would be a blessed discovery.'

'But what's to become of Society?'

'It's a puzzle to the cleverest.'

'All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that.

'Establishments must have their sacrifices.  Beware of interfering: eh?'

'By degrees, we may hope . . . .'

'Society prudently shuns the topic; and so 'll we.  For we might tell of
one another, in a fit of distraction, that t' other one talked of it, and
we should be banished for an offence against propriety.  You should read
my friend Durance's Essay on Society.  Lawyers are a buttress of Society.
But, come: I wager they don't know what they support until they read that
Essay.'

Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being personally asked to
read the Essay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to
him.

He said: 'Mr. Radnor is a very old friend?'

'Our fathers were friends; they served in the same regiment for years.
I was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal!'

'Followed by a second, not less .  .  . ?'

'In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to
make it so!'

'The Law must be vindicated.'

'The law is a clumsy bludgeon.'

'We think it the highest effort of human reason--the practical
instrument.'

'You may compare it to a rustic's finger on a fiddlestring, for the
murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument.

'I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not.'

'You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, when, by
chance, down it comes on the foot an inch off the line.--Here's a peep
of Old London; if the habit of old was not to wash windows.  I like these
old streets!'

'Hum,' Carling hesitated.  'I can remember when the dirt at the windows
was appalling.'

'Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster's green-
scum eye: it was.  And there your Law did good work.--You're for
Bordeaux.  What is your word on Burgundy?'

'Our Falernian!'

'Victor Radnor has the oldest in the kingdom.  But he will have the best
of everything.  A Romanee!  A Musigny!  Sip, my friend, you embrace the
Goddess of your choice above.  You are up beside her at a sniff of that
wine.--And lo, venerable Drury! we duck through the court, reminded a bit
by our feelings of our first love, who hadn't the cleanest of faces or
nicest of manners, but she takes her station in memory because we were
boys then, and the golden halo of youth is upon her.'

Carling, as a man of the world, acquiesced in souvenirs he did not share.
He said urgently: 'Understand me; you speak of Mr. Radnor; pray, believe
I have the greatest respect for Mr. Radnor's abilities.  He is one of our
foremost men .  .  .  proud of him.  Mr. Radnor has genius; I have
watched him; it is genius; he shows it in all he does; one of the
memorable men of our times.  I can admire him, independent of--well,
misfortune of that kind .  .  .  a mistaken early step.  Misfortune,
it is to be named.  Between ourselves--we are men of the world--if one
could see the way!  She occasionally .  .  .  as I have told you.  I have
ventured suggestions.  As I have mentioned, I have received an impression
.  .  .'

'But still, Mr. Carling, if the lady doesn't release him and will keep
his name, she might stop her cowardly persecutions.'

'Can you trace them?'

'Undisguised!'

'Mrs. Burman Radnor is devout.  I should not exactly say revengeful.
We have to discriminate.  I gather, that her animus is, in all honesty,
directed at the--I quote--state of sin.  We are mixed, you know.'

The Winegod in the blood of Fenellan gave a leap.  'But, fifty thousand
times more mixed, she might any moment stop the state of sin, as she
calls it, if it pleased her.'

'She might try.  Our Judges look suspiciously on long delayed actions.
And there are, too, women who regard the marriage-tie as indissoluble.
She has had to combat that scruple.'

'Believer in the renewing of the engagement overhead!--well.  But put a
by-word to Mother Nature about the state of sin.  Where, do you imagine,
she would lay it?  You'll say, that Nature and Law never agreed.  They
ought.'

'The latter deferring to the former?'

'Moulding itself on her swelling proportions.  My dear dear sir, the
state of sin was the continuing to live in defiance of, in contempt of,
in violation of, in the total degradation of, Nature.'

'He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar.'

'He was a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley
sugar in her pockets;--and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar
for awful combinations in druggery!  Gilt widows are equal to decrees of
Fate to us young ones.  Upon my word, the cleric who unites, and the Law
that sanctions, they're the criminals.  Victor Radnor is the noblest of
fellows, the very best friend a man can have.  I will tell you: he saved
me, after I left the army, from living on the produce of my pen--which
means, if there is to be any produce, the prostrating of yourself to the
level of the round middle of the public: saved me from that!  Yes, Mr.
Carling, I have trotted our thoroughfares a poor Polly of the pen; and it
is owing to Victor Radnor that I can order my thoughts as an individual
man again before I blacken paper.  Owing to him, I have a tenderness for
mercenaries; having been one of them and knowing how little we can help
it.  He is an Olympian--who thinks of them below.  The lady also is an
admirable woman at all points.  The pair are a mated couple, such as you
won't find in ten households over Christendom.  Are you aware of the
story?'

Carling replied: 'A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two very
distinct versions.'

'Hear mine.--And, by Jove!  a runaway cab.  No, all right.  But a crazy
cab it is, and fit to do mischief in narrow Drury.  Except that it's
sheer riff-raff here to knock over.'

'Hulloa?--come!' quoth the wary lawyer.

'There's the heart I wanted to rouse to hear me!  One may be sure that
the man for old Burgundy has it big and sound, in spite of his legal
practices; a dear good spherical fellow!  Some day, we'll hope, you will
be sitting with us over a magnum of Victor Radnor's Romance Conti aged
thirty-one: a wine, you'll say at the second glass, High Priest for the
celebration of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of
man.'

'You hit me rightly,'said Carting, tickled and touched; sensually excited
by the bouquet of Victor Radnor's hospitality and companionship, which
added flavour to Fenellan's compliments.  These came home to him through
his desire to be the 'good spherical fellow'; for he, like modern
diplomatists in the track of their eminent Berlinese New Type of the
time, put on frankness as an armour over wariness, holding craft in
reserve: his aim was at the refreshment of honest fellowship: by no means
to discover that the coupling of his native bias with his professional
duty was unprofitable nowadays.  Wariness, however, was not somnolent,
even when he said: 'You know, I am never the lawyer out of my office.
Man of the world to men of the world; and I have not lost by it. I am
Mrs. Barman Radnor's legal adviser: you are Mr. Victor Radnor's friend.
They are, as we see them, not on the best of terms.  I would rather--at
its lowest, as a matter of business--be known for having helped them to
some kind of footing than send in a round bill to my client--or another.
I gain more in the end.  Frankly, I mean to prove, that it's a lawyer's
interest to be human.'

'Because, now, see!' said Fenellan, 'here's the case.  Miss Natalia
Dreighton, of a good Yorkshire family--a large one, reads an
advertisement for the post of companion to a lady, and answers it,
and engages herself, previous to the appearance of the young husband.
Miss Dreighton is one of the finest young women alive.  She has a
glorious contralto voice.  Victor and she are encouraged by Mrs. Barman
to sing duets together.  Well?

Why, Euclid would have theorem'd it out for you at a glance at the trio.
You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a Drama
without a stop.  If Mrs. Barman cares to practise charity, she has only
to hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think 's the name.'

Carting shrugged.

'Let her keep from striking, if she's Christian,' pursued Fenetlan, 'and
if kind let her resume the name of her first lord, who did a better thing
for himself than for her, when he shook off his bars of bullion, to rise
the lighter, and left a wretched female soul below, with the devil's own
testimony to her attractions--thousands in the Funds, houses in the City.
She threw the young couple together.  And my friend Victor Radnor is of a
particularly inflammable nature.  Imagine one of us in such a situation,
Mr. Carting!'

'Trying!' said the lawyer.

'The dear fellow was as nigh death as a man can be and know the sweetness
of a woman's call to him to live.  And here's London's garden of pines,
bananas, oranges; all the droppings of the Hesperides here!  We don't
reflect on it, Mr. Carling.'

'Not enough, not enough.'

'I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a Leading
Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you're bending over the
baskets.  I seem to have got circularly round again to Eden when I enter
a garden.  Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck.  Well, and
just the same there; and no end to the payment either.  We're always
paying!  By the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor's dinner-table's a spectacle.
Her taste in flowers equals her lord's in wine.  But age improves the
wine and spoils the flowers, you'll say.  Maybe you're for arguing that
lovely women show us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to
the course of time.  I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxicant
she is.  We reconcile it, Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape's
her spirit, the flower her body.  Or is it the reverse?  Perhaps an
intertwining.  But look upon bouquets and clusters, and the idea of
woman springs up at once, proving she's composed of them.  I was about
to remark, that with deference to the influence of Mrs. Burman's legal
adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner's pastor, the Reverend
gentleman ministering to her spiritual needs, would presumptively
exercise it, in this instance, in a superior degree.'

Carling murmured: 'The Rev. Groseman Buttermore'; and did so for
something of a cover, to continue a run of internal reflections: as, that
he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day; which
impression placed him on a decorous platform above the amusing gentleman;
to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing consequently, that his
exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that an indication here and
there of a trap in his talk, must have been due rather to excess of
wariness, habitual in the mind of a long-headed man, whose incorrigibly
impulsive fits had necessarily to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity.

'Buttermore!' ejaculated Fenellan: 'Groseman Buttermore!  Mrs. Victor's
Father Confessor is the Rev. Septimus Barmby.  Groseman Buttermore--
Septimus Barmby.  Is there anything in names?  Truly, unless these
clerical gentlemen take them up at the crossing of the roads long
after birth, the names would appear the active parts of them, and
themselves mere marching supports, like the bearers of street placard-
advertisements.  Now, I know a Septimus Barmby, and you a Groseman
Buttermore, and beyond the fact that Reverend starts up before their
names without mention, I wager it's about all we do know of them.
They're Society's trusty rock-limpets, no doubt.'

'My respect for the cloth is extreme.' Carling's short cough prepared the
way for deductions.  'Between ourselves, they are men of the world.'

Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose innermost imp burst
out periodically, like a Dutch clocksentry, to trot on his own small
grounds for thinking himself of the community of the man of the world.
'You lawyers dress in another closet,' he said.  'The Rev. Groseman has
the ear of the lady?'

'He has:--one ear.'

'Ah?  She has the other open for a man of the world, perhaps.'

'Listens to him, listens to me, listens to Jarniman; and we neither of
us guide her.  She's very curious--a study.  You think you know her--next
day she has eluded you.  She's emotional, she's hard; she's a woman,
she's a stone.  Anything you like; but don't count on her.  And another
thing--I'm bound to say it of myself,' Carling claimed close hearing of
Fenellan over a shelf of saladstuff, 'no one who comes near her has any
real weight with her in this matter.'

'Probably you mix cream in your salad of the vinegar and oil,' said
Fenellan.  'Try jelly of mutton.'--'You give me a new idea.  Latterly,
fond as I am of salads, I've had rueful qualms.  We'll try it.'

'You should dine with Victor Radnor.'

'French cook, of course!'

'Cordon bleu.'

'I like to be sure of my cutlet.'

'I like to be sure of a tastiness in my vegetables.'

'And good sauces!'

'And pretty pastry.  I said, Cordon bleu.  The miracle is, it 's a woman
that Victor Radnor has trained: French, but a woman; devoted to him, as
all who serve him are.  Do I say "but" a woman?  There's not a Frenchman
alive to match her.  Vatel awaits her in Paradise with his arms extended;
and may he wait long!'

Carling indulged his passion for the genuine by letting a flutter of real
envy be seen.  'My wife would like to meet such a Frenchwoman.  It must
be a privilege to dine with him--to know him.  I know what he has done
for English Commerce, and to build a colossal fortune: genius, as I said:
and his donations to Institutions.  Odd, to read his name and Mrs. Burman
Radnor's at separate places in the lists!  Well, we'll hope.  It's a case
for a compromise of sentiments and claims.'

'A friend of mine, spiced with cynic, declares that there's always an
amicable way out of a dissension, if we get rid of Lupus and Vulpus.'

Carling spied for a trap in the citation of Lupus and Vulpus; he saw
none, and named the square of his residence on the great Russell
property, and the number of the house, the hour of dinner next day.
He then hung silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp
'Well?' that rattled a whirligig sound in his head upward.  His leave of
people was taken in this laughing falsetto, as of one affected by the
curious end things come to.

Fenellan thought of him for a moment or two, that he was a better than
the common kind of lawyer; who doubtless knew as much of the wrong side
of the world as lawyers do, and held his knowledge for the being a man of
the world:--as all do, that have not Alpine heights in the mind to mount
for a look out over their own and the world's pedestrian tracks.  I could
spot the lawyer in your composition, my friend, to the exclusion of the
man he mused.  But you're right in what you mean to say of yourself:
you're a good fellow, for a lawyer, and together we may manage somehow
to score a point of service to Victor Radnor.




CHAPTER VIII

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS

Nesta read her mother's face when Mrs. Victor entered the drawing-room to
receive the guests.  She saw a smooth fair surface, of the kind as much
required by her father's eyes as innocuous air by his nostrils: and it
was honest skin, not the deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear man
happy over his volcano.  Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with whom
her feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts gave her station:
they liked her for herself; they helped her to feel at home with herself
and be herself: a rarer condition with us all than is generally supposed.
So she could determine to be cheerful in the anticipation of an evening
that would at least be restful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her
heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling to the great organ;
often colouring the shows and seems of adverse things for an apeing of
reality with too cruel a resemblance.  One of the scraps of practical
wisdom gained by hardened sufferers is, to keep from spying at horizons
when they drop into a pleasant dingle.  Such is the comfort of it, that
we can dream, and lull our fears, and half think what we wish: and it is
a heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided from our wishes.

Nesta wondered at her mother's complacent questions concerning this
Lakelands: the house, the county, the kind of people about, the features
of the country.  Physically unable herself to be regretful under a burden
three parts enrapturing her, the girl expected her mother to display a
shadowy vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon her
thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part: namely, the aristocratic
iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them off; as they
had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt: she remembered it,
of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home
she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding people
--or no, not all, but some of them.  And what had roused their pride?

Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation,
had hit on her father's profession of merchant.  It accounted to her
for the behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families.  But
certain of the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of
the families were avowedly commercial.  'They follow suit,' her father
said at Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided
instantly to quit and fly once more.  But if they followed suit in such
a way, then Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English
the most sheepy of sheep:--and Nesta could not consent to the cruel
verdict, she adored her compatriots.  Incongruities were pacified for
her by the suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being
a merchant, was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is
not liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like
his being both.

She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old
high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts
rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of
gambler.  An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the
enthusiast for things old English.  She was consciously ahead of them
in the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling,
a beneficent speculator.  The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his
dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America,
his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the
Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it.  O and
he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the
very brightest of parents: he was his girl's playmate.  She could be
critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly: yet if
he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen
young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could
accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred.  Designedly,
frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an
incomprehensible baseness.  The dropping of acquaintanceship with him,
after the taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any
better elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit.  It drove her,
despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could
find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even when they passed
her understanding; or when he was not too distinctly seen by her to be
shooting at all the parties of her beloved England, beneath the wicked
semblance of shielding each by turns.

The young gentleman introduced to the Radnor Concert-parties by Lady
Grace Halley as the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, had to bear the sins of his
class.  Though he was tall, straight-featured, correct in costume,
appearance, deportment, second son of a religious earl and no scandal to
the parentage, he was less noticed by Nesta than the elderly and the
commoners.  Her father accused her of snubbing him.  She reproduced her
famous copy of the sugared acid of Mr. Dudley Sowerby's closed mouth:
a sort of sneer in meekness, as of humility under legitimate compulsion;
deploring Christianly a pride of race that stamped it for this cowled
exhibition: the wonderful mimicry was a flash thrown out by a born
mistress of the art, and her mother was constrained to laugh, and so was
her father; but he wilfully denied the likeness.  He charged her with
encouraging Colney Durance to drag forth the sprig of nobility, in the
nakedness of evicted shell-fish, on themes of the peril to England,
possibly ruin, through the loss of that ruling initiative formerly
possessed, in the days of our glory, by the titular nobles of the land.
Colney spoke it effectively, and the Hon.  Dudley's expressive lineaments
showed print of the heaving word Alas, as when a target is penetrated,
centrally.  And he was not a particularly dull fellow 'for his class and
country,' Colney admitted; adding: 'I hit his thought and out he came.'
One has, reluctantly with Victor Radnor, to grant, that when a man's
topmost unspoken thought is hit, he must be sharp on his guard to keep
from coming out:--we have won a right to him.

'Only, it's too bad; it 's a breach of hospitality,' Victor said, both
to Nesta and to Nataly, alluding to several instances of Colney's ironic
handling of their guests, especially of this one, whom Nesta would
attack, and Nataly would not defend.

They were alive at a signal to protect the others.  Miss Priscilla
Graves, an eater of meat, was ridiculous in her ant'alcoholic
exclusiveness and scorn: Mr. Pempton, a drinker of wine, would laud
extravagantly the more transparent purity of vegetarianism.  Dr. Peter
Yatt jeered at globules: Dr. John Cormyn mourned over human creatures
treated as cattle by big doses.  The Rev. Septimus Barmby satisfactorily
smoked: Mr. Peridon traced mortal evil to that act.  Dr. Schlesien had
his German views, Colney Durance his ironic, Fenellan his fanciful and
free-lance.  And here was an optimist, there a pessimist; and the rank
Radical, the rigid Conservative, were not wanting.  All of them were
pointedly opposed, extraordinarily for so small an assembly: absurdly,
it might be thought: but these provoked a kind warm smile, with the
exclamation: 'They are dears!'  They were the dearer for their fads
and foibles.

Music harmonized them.  Music, strangely, put the spell on Colney
Durance, the sayer of bitter things, manufacturer of prickly balls,
in the form of Discord's apples of whom Fenellan remarked, that he took
to his music like an angry little boy to his barley-sugar, with a growl
and a grunt.  All these diverse friends could meet and mix in Victor's
Concert-room with an easy homely recognition of one another's musical
qualities, at times enthusiastic; and their natural divergencies and
occasional clashes added a salient tastiness to the group of whom Nesta
could say: 'Mama, was there ever such a collection of dear good souls
with such contrary minds?'  Her mother had the deepest of reasons for
loving them, so as not to wish to see the slightest change in their
minds, that the accustomed features making her nest of homeliness and
real peace might be retained, with the humour of their funny silly
antagonisms and the subsequent march in concord; excepting solely as
regarded the perverseness of Priscilla Graves in her open contempt of Mr.
Pempton's innocent two or three wine-glasses.  The vegetarian gentleman's
politeness forbore to direct attention to the gobbets of meat Priscilla
consumed, though he could express disapproval in general terms; but he
entertained sentiments as warlike to the lady's habit of 'drinking the
blood of animals.'  The mockery of it was, that Priscilla liked Mr.
Pempton and admired his violoncello-playing, and he was unreserved in
eulogy of her person and her pure soprano tones.  Nataly was a poetic
match-maker.  Mr. Peridon was intended for Mademoiselle de Seilles,
Nesta's young French governess; a lady of a courtly bearing, with placid
speculation in the eyes she cast on a foreign people, and a voluble
muteness shadowing at intervals along the line of her closed lips.

The one person among them a little out of tune with most, was Lady Grace
Halley.  Nataly's provincial gentlewoman's traditions of the manners
indicating conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace;
who, in allusion to Hymen's weaving of a cousinship between the earldom
of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her
mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from
the egg to the empyrean.  Her stature was rather short, all of it
conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the
twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half
sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily
candid.  Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City,
and that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great good luck
she had come across Victor Radnor, who, with two turns of the wrist,
had plucked her out of the mire, the miraculous man!  And she had vowed
to him, never again to run doing the like without his approval.

The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments;
brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture: she
was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, 'an excellent
man.'  For the not colloquial do not commit themselves.  But one wants a
little animation in a husband.  She called on bell-motion of the head to
toll forth the utter nightcap negative.  He had not any: out of the
saddle, he was asleep:--'next door to the Last Trump,' Colney Durance
assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after wooing
her to unbosom herself.  She was awake to his guileful arts, and sailed
along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one; prankishly
exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a grinding
world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim.  So to refresh
ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we shock our
hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a dexterous
merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice than her
nature that she indulged, 'A woman must have some excitement.'  The most
innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange.  The opinions of husbands
who are not summoned to pay are hardly important; they vary.

Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride,
but if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the
decorous, it was great gain.  Her supple person, pretty lips, the style
she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for masculine
ears, whatever the sex.  Nataly might share in them, but women did not
lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted class:
Miss Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts.  She had a
special consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her exquisite
French, as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the young
Frenchwoman's air of high breeding that won her esteem.  Girls were
spring frosts to her.  Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or
wood-cut of a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl
sang.  Music she loved.  She said it was the saving of poor Dudley.  It
distinguished him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family;
and it gave him a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly, it
contributed to his comelier air.  Flute [This would be the German
Blockeflute or our Recorder.  D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop
was relieved of its pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved a
gentlemanly high figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken of
all likeness to the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor's punctuating
trunk of the puffing frame at almost every bar--an Apollo brilliancy in
energetic pursuit of the nymph of sweet sound.  Too methodical one, too
fiery the other.

In duets of Hauptmann's, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull
smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the
fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute,
she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from lips
that had devoted themselves wholly to song: song being one of the
damsel's present pressing ambitions.  She found nothing to correct in Mr.
Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father
could plead vitality, passion.  He held his performances cheap after the
vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of his
'dear old Corelli,' or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying
forests of Beethoven.

His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment;
the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of a
soul at holiday.  Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures and
reveal the joy of his pasture on them: gateways to the sunny within,
issues to all the outer Edens.  Few of us possess that double
significance of the pure sparkle.  It captivated Lady Grace.  She said
a word of it to Fenellan: 'There is a man who can feel rapture!'  He had
not to follow the line of her sight: she said so on a previous evening,
in a similar tone; and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very
emphasis, was quaint.  She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs
were in motion to designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had the
instinct to be dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and
delighted in its effectiveness: only when observing that winged sparkle
of eyes did an idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being
surpassed; and it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to
express.  Such a reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally
sensible that they are the feminine of him.

'His girl has the look,' Fenellan said in answer.

She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.

And it was true, that the figure of a mother, not pretending to the
father's vividness, eclipsed it somewhat in their child.  The mother gave
richness of tones, hues and voice, and stature likewise, and the thick
brown locks, which in her own were threads of gold along the brush from
the temples: she gave the girl a certain degree of the composure of
manner which Victor could not have bestowed; she gave nothing to clash
with his genial temper; she might be supposed to have given various
qualities, moral if you like.  But vividness was Lady Grace's admirable
meteor of the hour: she was unable to perceive, so as to compute, the
value of obscurer lights.  Under the charm of Nataly's rich contralto
during a duet with Priscilla Graves, she gesticulated ecstasies, and
uttered them, and genuinely; and still, when reduced to meditations,
they would have had no weight, they would hardly have seemed an apology
for language, beside Victor's gaze of pleasure in the noble forthroll of
the notes.

Nataly heard the invitation of the guests of the evening to Lakelands
next day.

Her anxieties were at once running about to gather provisions for the
baskets.  She spoke of them at night.  But Victor had already put the
matter in the hands of Madame Callet; and all that could be done, would
be done by Armandine, he knew.  'If she can't muster enough at home,
she'll be off to her Piccadilly shop by seven A.M. Count on plenty for
twice the number.'

Nataly was reposing on the thought that they were her friends, when
Victor mentioned his having in the afternoon despatched a note to his
relatives, the Duvidney ladies, inviting them to join him at the station
to-morrow, for a visit of inspection to the house of his building on his
new estate.  He startled her.  The Duvidney ladies were, to his
knowledge, of the order of the fragile minds which hold together by
the cement of a common trepidation for the support of things established,
and have it not in them to be able to recognize the unsanctioned.  Good
women, unworldly of the world, they were perforce harder than the world,
from being narrower and more timorous.

'But, Victor, you were sure they would refuse!'

He answered: 'They may have gone back to Tunbridge Wells.  By the way,
they have a society down there I want for Fredi.  Sure, do you say, my
dear?  Perfectly sure.  But the accumulation of invitations and refusals
in the end softens them, you will see.  We shall and must have them for
Fredi.'

She was used to the long reaches of his forecasts, his burning activity
on a project; she found it idle to speak her thought, that his ingenuity
would have been needless in a position dictated by plain prudence, and so
much happier for them.

They talked of Mrs. Burman until she had to lift a prayer to be saved
from darker thoughts, dreadfully prolific, not to be faced.  Part of her
prayer was on behalf of Mrs. Burman, for life to be extended to her, if
the poor lady clung to life--if it was really humane to wish it for her:
and heaven would know: heaven had mercy on the afflicted.

Nataly heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer.  She had to cease to
pray.




CHAPTER IX

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS

One may not have an intention to flourish, and may be pardoned for a
semblance of it, in exclaiming, somewhat royally, as creator and owner
of the place: 'There you see Lakelands.'

The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a rise of road
fronting an undulation, where our modern English architect's fantasia
in crimson brick swept from central gables to flying wings, over pents,
crooks, curves, peaks, cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections,
away to a red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious in
irregularity; and  homely with the greensward about it, the pines
beside it, the clouds above it.  Not many palaces would be reckoned as
larger.  The folds and swells and stream of the building along the roll
of ground, had an appearance of an enormous banner on the wind.  Nataly
looked.  Her next look was at Colney Durance.  She sent the expected nods
to Victor's carriage.  She would have given the whole prospect for the
covering solitariness of her chamber.  A multitude of clashing
sensations, and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled her to
summon so as to force herself to feel a groundless anger, directed
against none, against nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only resource
for keeping down the great wave surgent at her eyes.

Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations encircling
him.  He led through the straight passage of the galleried hall, offering
two fair landscapes at front door and at back, down to the lake, Fredi's
lake; a good oblong of water, notable in a district not abounding in the
commodity.  He would have it a feature of the district; and it had been
deepened and extended; up rose the springs, many ran the ducts.  Fredi's
pretty little bathshed or bower had a space of marble on the three-feet
shallow it overhung with a shade of carved woodwork; it had a diving-
board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and small row-boat of elegant
build hard by.  Green ran the banks about, and a beechwood fringed with
birches curtained the Northward length: morning sun and evening had a
fair face of water to paint.  Saw man ever the like for pleasing a
poetical damsel?  So was Miss Fredi, the coldest of the party hitherto,
and dreaming a preference of 'old places' like Creckholt and Craye Farm,
'captured to be enraptured,' quite according to man's ideal of his
beneficence to the sex.  She pressed the hand of her young French
governess, Louise de Seilles.  As in everything he did for his girl,
Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience and her
tastes: the pine-panels of the interior, the shelves for her books, pegs
to hang her favourite drawings, and the couch-bunk under a window to
conceal the summerly recliner while throwing full light on her book; and
the hearth-square for logs, when she wanted fire: because Fredi bathed in
any weather: the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings of doves, tits,
fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings she was to choose, and
have shy odalisque peeps of sunny water from her couch.

'Fredi's Naiad retreat, when she wishes to escape Herr Strauscher or
Signor Ruderi,' said Victor, having his grateful girl warm in an arm;
'and if they head after her into the water, I back her to leave them
puffing; she's a dolphin.  That water has three springs and gets all the
drainage of the upland round us.  I chose the place chiefly on account of
it and the pines.  I do love pines!'

'But, excellent man! what do you not love?' said Lady Grace, with the
timely hit upon the obvious, which rings.

'It saves him from accumulation of tissue,' said Colney.

'What does?' was eagerly asked by the wife of the homoeopathic Dr. John
Cormyn, a sentimental lady beset with fears of stoutness.

Victor cried: 'Tush; don't listen to Colney, pray.'

But she heard Colney speak of a positive remedy; more immediately
effective than an abjuration of potatoes and sugar.  She was obliged by
her malady to listen, although detesting the irreverent ruthless man, who
could direct expanding frames, in a serious tone, to love; love
everybody, everything; violently and universally love; and so without
intermission pay out the fat created by a rapid assimilation of
nutriment.  Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments: probably as
being aware, that its legitimate appeal to pathos is ever smothered in
its pudding-bed of the grotesque.  She was pained, and showed it, and was
ashamed of herself for showing it; and that very nearly fetched the tear.

'Our host is an instance in proof,' Colney said.  He waved hand at the
house.  His meaning was hidden; evidently he wanted victims.  Sight of
Lakelands had gripped him with the fell satiric itch; and it is a passion
to sting and tear, on rational grounds.  His face meanwhile, which had
points of the handsome, signified a smile asleep, as if beneath a cloth.
Only those who knew him well were aware of the claw-like alertness under
the droop of eyelids.

Admiration was the common note, in the various keys.  The station
selected for the South-eastward aspect of the dark-red gabled pile on
its white shell-terrace, backed by a plantation of tall pines, a mounded
and full-plumed company, above the left wing, was admired, in files and
in volleys.  Marvellous, effectively miraculous, was the tale of the vow
to have the great edifice finished within one year: and the strike of
workmen, and the friendly colloquy with them, the good reasoning, the
unanimous return to duty; and the doubling, the trebling of the number
of them; and the most glorious of sights-0the grand old English working
with a will! as Englishmen do when they come at last to heat; and they
conquer, there is then nothing that they cannot conquer.  So the
conqueror said.--And admirable were the conservatories running three long
lines, one from the drawing-room, to a central dome for tropical growths.
And the parterres were admired; also the newly-planted Irish junipers
bounding the West-walk; and the three tiers of stately descent from the
three green terrace banks to the grassy <DW72>s over the lake.  Again the
lake was admired, the house admired.  Admiration was evoked for great
orchid-houses 'over yonder,' soon to be set up.

Off we go to the kitchen-garden.  There the admiration is genial,
practical.  We admire the extent of the beds marked out for asparagus,
and the French disposition of the planting at wide intervals; and the
French system of training peach, pear, and plum trees on the walls to win
length and catch sun, we much admire.  We admire the gardener.  We are
induced temporarily to admire the French people.  They are sagacious in
fruit-gardens.  They have not the English Constitution, you think
rightly; but in fruit-gardens they grow for fruit, and not, as Victor
quotes a friend, for wood, which the valiant English achieve.  We hear
and we see examples of sagacity; and we are further brought round to the
old confession, that we cannot cook; Colney Durance has us there; we have
not studied herbs and savours; and so we are shocked backward step by
step until we retreat precipitately into the nooks where waxen tapers,
carefully tended by writers on the Press, light-up mysterious images of
our national selves for admiration.  Something surely we do, or we should
not be where we are.  But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
which others cannot do?  Colney asks; and he excludes cricket and
football.

An acutely satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the
fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in
his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, mainly
tongueless or of leaden tongue above the pressure of their necessities,
as he takes them to be.  They give him so many opportunities.  They are
angry and helpless as the log hissing to the saw.  Their instinct to make
use of the downright in retort, restrained as it is by a buttoned coat of
civilization, is amusing, inviting.  Colney Durance allured them to the
quag's edge and plunged them in it, to writhe patriotically; and although
it may be said, that they felt their situation less than did he the venom
they sprang in his blood, he was cruel; he caused discomfort.  But these
good friends about him stood for the country, an illogical country; and
as he could not well attack his host Victor Radnor, an irrational man,
he selected the abstract entity for the discharge of his honest spite.

The irrational friend was deeper at the source of his irritation than the
illogical old motherland.  This house of Lakelands, the senselessness of
his friend in building it and designing to live in it, after experiences
of an incapacity to stand in a serene contention with the world he
challenged, excited Colney's wasp.  He was punished, half way to frenzy
behind his placable demeanour, by having Dr. Schlesien for chorus.  And
here again, it was the unbefitting, not the person, which stirred his
wrath.  A German on English soil should remember the dues of a guest.
At the same time, Colney said things to snare the acclamation of an
observant gentleman of that race, who is no longer in his first
enthusiasm for English beef and the complexion of the women.  'Ah, ya,
it is true, what you say: "The English grow as fast as odders, but they
grow to corns instead of brains."  They are Bull.  Quaat true.'  He
bellowed on a laugh the last half of the quotation.

Colney marked him.  His encounters with Fenellan were enlivening
engagements and left no malice; only a regret, when the fencing passed
his guard, that Fenellan should prefer to flash for the minute.  He would
have met a pert defender of England, in the person of Miss Priscilla
Graves, if she had not been occupied with observation of the bearing of
Lady Grace Halley toward Mr. Victor Radnor; which displeased her on
behalf of Mrs. Victor; she was besides hostile by race and class to
an aristocratic assumption of licence.  Sparing Colney, she with some
scorn condemned Mr. Pempton for allowing his country to be ridiculed
without a word.  Mr. Pempton believed that the Vegetarian movement was
more progressive in England than in other lands, but he was at the
disadvantage with the fair Priscilla, that eulogy of his compatriots
on this account would win her coldest approval.  'Satire was never an
argument,' he said, too evasively.

The Rev. Septimus Barmby received the meed of her smile, for saying in
his many-fathom bass, with an eye on Victor: 'At least we may boast of
breeding men, who are leaders of men.'

The announcement of luncheon, by Victor's butler Arlington, opportunely
followed and freighted the remark with a happy recognition of that which
comes to us from the hands of conquerors.  Dr. Schlesien himself, no
antagonist to England, but like Colney Durance, a critic, speculated in
view of the spread of pic-nic provision beneath the great glass dome, as
to whether it might be, that these English were on another start out of
the dust in vigorous commercial enterprise, under leadership of one of
their chance masterly minds-merchant, in this instance: and be debated
within, whether Genius, occasionally developed in a surprising superior
manner by these haphazard English, may not sometimes wrest the prize from
Method; albeit we count for the long run, that Method has assurance of
success, however late in the race to set forth.

Luncheon was a merry meal, with Victor and Nataly for host and hostess;
Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Lady Grace Halley for the talkers.  A gusty
bosom of sleet overhung the dome, rattled on it, and rolling Westward,
became a radiant mountain-land, partly worthy of Victor's phrase: 'A
range of Swiss Alps in air.'

'With periwigs Louis Quatorze for peaks,' Colney added.

And Fenellan improved on him: 'Or a magnified Bench of Judges at the
trial of your caerulean Phryne.'

The strip of white cloud flew on a whirl from the blue, to confirm it.

But Victor and Lady Grace rejected any play of conceits upon nature.
Violent and horrid interventions of the counterfeit, such mad similes
appeared to them, when pure coin was offered.  They loathed the Rev.
Septimus Barmby for proclaiming, that he had seen 'Chapters of Hebrew
History in the grouping of clouds.'

His gaze was any one of the Chapters upon Nesta.  The clerical
gentleman's voice was of a depth to claim for it the profoundest which
can be thought or uttered; and Nesta's tender youth had taken so strong
an impression of sacredness from what Fenellan called 'his chafer tones,'
that her looks were often given him in gratitude, for the mere sound.
Nataly also had her sense of safety in acquiescing to such a voice coming
from such a garb.  Consequently, whenever Fenellan and Colney were at
him, drawing him this way and that for utterances cathedral in sentiment
and sonorousness, these ladies shed protecting beams; insomuch that he
was inspired to the agreeable conceptions whereof frequently rash
projects are an issue.

Touching the neighbours of Lakelands, they were principally enriched
merchants, it appeared; a snippet or two of the fringe of aristocracy lay
here and there among them; and one racy-of-the-soil old son of Thames,
having the manners proper to last century's yeoman.  Mr. Pempton knew
something of this quaint Squire of Hefferstone, Beaves Urmsing by name;
a ruddy man, right heartily Saxon; a still glowing brand amid the ashes
of the Heptarchy hearthstone; who had a song, The Marigolds, which he
would troll out for you anywhere, on any occasion.  To have so near to
the metropolis one from the centre of the venerable rotundity of the
country, was rare.  Victor exclaimed 'Come!' in ravishment over the
picturesqueness of a neighbour carrying imagination away to the founts
of England; and his look at Nataly proposed.  Her countenance was
inapprehensive.  He perceived resistance, and said: 'I have met two or
three of them in the train: agreeable men: Gladding, the banker;
a General Fanning; that man Blathenoy, great billbroker.  But the fact
is, close on London, we're independent of neighbours; we mean to be.
Lakelands and London practically join.'

'The mother city becoming the suburb,' murmured Colney, in report of the
union.

'You must expect to be invaded, sir,' said Mr. Sowerby; and Victor
shrugged: 'We are pretty safe.'

'The lock of a door seems a potent security until some one outside is
heard fingering the handle nigh midnight,' Fenellan threw out his airy
nothing of a remark.

It struck on Nataly's heart.  'So you will not let us be lonely here,'
she said to her guests.

The Rev. Septimus Barmby was mouthpiece for congregations.  Sound of a
subterranean roar, with a blast at the orifice, informed her of their
'very deep happiness in the privilege.'

He comforted her.  Nesta smiled on him thankfully.

'Don't imagine, Mrs. Victor, that you can be shut off from neighbours,
in a house like this; and they have a claim,' said Lady Grace, quitting
the table.

Fenellan and Colney thought so:

'Like mice at a cupboard.'

'Beetles in a kitchen.'

'No, no-no, no !' Victor shook head, pitiful over the good people likened
to things unclean, and royally upraising them: in doing which, he
scattered to vapour the leaden incubi they had been upon his flatter
moods of late.  'No, but it's a rapture to breathe the air here!'  His
lifted chest and nostrils were for the encouragement of Nataly to soar
beside him.

She summoned her smile and nodded.

He spoke aside to Lady Grace: 'The dear soul wants time to compose
herself after a grand surprise.'

She replied: 'I think I could soon be reconciled.  How much land?'

'In treaty for some hundred and eighty or ninety acres .  .  .  in all
at present three hundred and seventy, including plantations, lake,
outhouses.'

'Large enough; land paying as it does--that is, not paying.  We shall be
having to gamble in the City systematically for subsistence.'

'You will not so much as jest on the subject.'

Coming from such a man, that was clear sky thunder.  The lady played
it off in a shadowy pout and shrug while taking a stamp of his
masterfulness, not so volatile.

She said to Nataly: 'Our place in Worcestershire is about half the size,
if as much.  Large enough when we're not crowded out with gout and can
open to no one.  Some day you will visit us, I hope.'

'You we count on here, Lady Grace.'

It was an over-accentuated response; unusual with this well-bred woman;
and a bit of speech that does not flow, causes us to speculate.  The lady
resumed: 'I value the favour.  We're in a horsey-doggy-foxy circle down
there.  We want enlivening.  If we had your set of musicians and
talkers!'

Nataly smiled in vacuous kindness, at a loss for the retort of a
compliment to a person she measured.  Lady Grace also was an amiable
hostile reviewer.  Each could see, to have cited in the other, defects
common to the lower species of the race, admitting a superior personal
quality or two; which might be pleaded in extenuation; and if the apology
proved too effective, could be dispersed by insistence upon it, under an
implied appeal to benevolence.  When we have not a liking for the
creature whom we have no plain cause to dislike, we are minutely just.

During the admiratory stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney
Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking, striding,
emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was not
perpetually at the gape in laudation.  Colney was heard to say: 'No
doubt: the German is the race the least mixed in Europe: it might
challenge aboriginals for that.  Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia
for knowledge, the sausage for nutrition!  How would you explain it?'

Dr. Schlesien replied with an Atlas shrug under fleabite to the
insensately infantile interrogation.

He in turn was presently heard.

'But, my good sir! you quote me your English Latin.  I must beg of you
you write it down.  It is orally incomprehensible to Continentals.'

'We are Islanders!' Colney shrugged in languishment.

'Oh, you do great things .  .  .'  Dr. Schlesien rejoined in kindness,
making his voice a musical intimation of the smallness of the things.

'We build great houses, to employ our bricks'

'No, Colney, to live in,' said Victor.

'Scarcely long enough to warm them.'

'What do you .  .  .  fiddle!'

'They are not Hohenzollerns !'

'It is true,' Dr. Schlesien called.  'No, but you learn discipline; you
build.  I say wid you, not Hohenzollerns you build!  But you shall look
above: Eyes up.  Ire necesse est.  Good, but mount; you come to
something.  Have ideas.'

'Good, but when do we reach your level?'

'Sir, I do not say more than that we do not want instruction from
foreigners.'

'Pupil to paedagogue indeed.  You have the wreath in Music, in
Jurisprudence, Chemistry, Scholarship, Beer, Arms, Manners.'

Dr. Schlesien puffed a tempest of tobacco and strode.

'He is chiselling for wit in the Teutonic block,' Colney said, falling
back to Fenellan.

Fenellan observed: 'You might have credited him with the finished
sculpture.'

'They're ahead of us in sticking at the charge of wit.'

'They've a widening of their swallow since Versailles.'

'Manners?'

'Well, that's a tight cravat for the Teutonic thrapple!  But he's off by
himself to loosen it.'

Victor came on the couple testily.  'What are you two concocting!
I say, do keep the peace, please.  An excellent good fellow; better up
in politics than any man I know; understands music; means well, you can
see.  You two hate a man at all serious.  And he doesn't bore with his
knowledge.  A scholar too.'

'If he'll bring us the atmosphere of the groves of Academe, he may swing
his ferule pickled in himself, and welcome,' said Fenellan.

'Yes!' Victor nodded at a recognized antagonism in Fenellan; 'but
Colney's always lifting the Germans high above us.'

'It's to exercise his muscles.'

Victor headed to the other apartments, thinking that the Rev. Septimus
and young Sowerby, Old England herself, were spared by the diversion of
these light skirmishing shots from their accustomed victims to the
'masculine people of our time.  His friends would want a drilling to be
of aid to him in his campaign to come.  For it was one, and a great one.
He remembered his complete perception of the plan, all the elements of
it, the forward whirling of it, just before the fall on London Bridge.
The greatness of his enterprise laid such hold of him that the smallest
of obstacles had a villanous aspect; and when, as anticipated, Colney and
Fenellan were sultry flies for whomsoever they could fret, he was blind
to the reading of absurdities which caused Fredi's eyes to stream and
Lady Grace beside him to stand awhile and laugh out her fit.  Young
Sowerby appeared forgiving enough--he was a perfect gentleman: but
Fredi's appalling sense of fun must try him hard.  And those young
fellows are often more wounded by a girl's thoughtless laughter than
by a man's contempt.  Nataly should have protected him.  Her face had
the air of a smiling general satisfaction; sign of a pleasure below the
mark required; sign too of a sleepy partner for a battle.  Even in the
wonderful kitchen, arched and pillared (where the explanation came to
Nesta of Madame Callet's frequent leave of absence of late, when an
inferior dinner troubled her father in no degree), even there his Nataly
listened to the transports of the guests with benign indulgence.

'Mama!' said Nesta, ready to be entranced by kitchens in her bubbling
animation: she meant the recalling of instances of the conspirator her
father had been.

'You none of you guessed Armandine's business!' Victor cried, in a glee
that pushed to make the utmost of this matter and count against chagrin.
'She was off to Paris; went to test the last inventions:--French brains
are always alert:--and in fact, those kitchen-ranges, gas and coal, and
the apparatus for warming plates and dishes, the whole of the battery is
on the model of the Duc d'Ariane's--finest in Europe.  Well,' he agreed
with Colney, 'to say France is enough.'

Mr. Pempton spoke to Miss Graves of the task for a woman to conduct a
command so extensive.  And, as when an inoffensive wayfarer has chanced
to set foot near a wasp's nest, out on him came woman and her champions,
the worthy and the sham, like a blast of powder.

Victor ejaculated: 'Armandine !'  Whoever doubted her capacity, knew not
Armandine; or not knowing Armandine, knew not the capacity in women.

With that utterance of her name, he saw the orangey spot on London
Bridge, and the sinking Tower and masts and funnels, and the rising of
them, on his return to his legs; he recollected, that at the very edge of
the fall he had Armandine strongly in his mind.  She was to do her part:
Fenellan and Colney on the surface, she below: and hospitality was to do
its part, and music was impressed--the innocent Concerts; his wealth, all
his inventiveness were to serve;--and merely to attract and win the
tastes of people, for a social support to Lakelands!  Merely that?  Much
more:--if Nataly's coldness to the place would but allow him to form an
estimate of how much.  At the same time, being in the grasp of his
present disappointment, he perceived a meanness in the result, that was
astonishing and afflicting.  He had not ever previously felt imagination
starving at the vision of success.  Victor had yet to learn, that the man
with a material object in aim, is the man of his object; and the nearer
to his mark, often the farther is he from a sober self; he is more the
arrow of his bow than bow to his arrow.  This we pay for scheming: and
success is costly; we find we have pledged the better half of ourselves
to clutch it; not to be redeemed with the whole handful of our prize!
He was, however, learning after his leaping fashion.  Nataly's defective
sympathy made him look at things through the feelings she depressed.
A shadow of his missed Idea on London Bridge seemed to cross him from the
close flapping of a wing within reach.  He could say only, that it would,
if caught, have been an answer to the thought disturbing him.

Nataly drew Colney Durance with her eyes to step beside her, on the
descent to the terrace.  Little Skepsey hove in sight, coming swift as
the point of an outrigger over the flood.




CHAPTER X

SKEPSEY IN MOTION

The bearer of his master's midday letters from London shot beyond Nataly
as soon as seen, with an apparent snap of his body in passing.  He
steamed to the end of the terrace and delivered the packet, returning at
the same rate of speed, to do proper homage to the lady he so much
respected.  He had left the railway-station on foot instead of taking a
fly, because of a calculation that he would save three minutes; which he
had not lost for having to come through the raincloud.  'Perhaps the
contrary,' Skepsey said: it might be judged to have accelerated his
course: and his hat dripped, and his coat shone, and he soaped his hands,
cheerful as an ouzel-cock when the sun is out again.

'Many cracked crowns lately, in the Manly Art?' Colney inquired of him.
And Skepsey answered with precision of statement: 'Crowns, no, sir; the
nose, it may happen; but it cannot be said to be the rule.'

'You are of opinion, that the practice of Scientific Pugilism offers us
compensation for the broken bridge of a nose?'

'In an increase of manly self-esteem: I do, sir, yes.'

Skepsey was shy of this gentleman's bite; and he fancied his defence had
been correct.  Perceiving a crumple of the lips of Mr. Durance, he took
the attitude of a watchful dubiety.

'But, my goodness, you are wet through!' cried Nataly, reproaching
herself for the tardy compassion; and Nesta ran up to them and heaped a
thousand pities on her 'poor dear Skip,' and drove him in beneath the
glass-dome to the fragments of pic-nic, and poured champagne for him,
'lest his wife should have to doctor him for a cold,' and poured afresh,
when he had obeyed her: 'for the toasting of Lakelands, dear Skepsey !'
impossible to resist: so he drank, and blinked; and was then told, that
before using his knife and fork he must betake himself to some fire of
shavings and chips, where coffee was being made, for the purpose of
drying his clothes.  But this he would not hear of: he was pledged to
business, to convey his master's letters, and he might have to catch a
train by the last quarter-minute, unless it was behind the time-tables;
he must hold himself ready to start.  Entreated, adjured, commanded,
Skepsey commiseratingly observed to Colney Durance, 'The ladies do not
understand, sir!'  For Turk of Constantinople had never a more haremed
opinion of the unfitness of women in the brave world of action.  The
persistence of these ladies endeavouring to obstruct him in the course of
his duty, must have succeeded save that for one word of theirs he had
two, and twice the promptitude of motion.  He explained to them, as to
good children, that the loss of five minutes might be the loss of a Post,
the loss of thousands of pounds, the loss of the character of a Firm;
and he was away to the terrace.  Nesta headed him and waved him back.
She and her mother rebuked him: they called him unreasonable; wherein
they resembled the chief example of the sex to him, in a wife he had at
home, who levelled that charge against her husband when most she needed
discipline: the woman laid hand on the very word legitimately his own
for the justification of his process with her.

'But, Skips! if you are ill and we have to nurse you!' said Nesta.

She forgot the hospital, he told her cordially, and laughed at the notion
of a ducking producing a cold or a cold a fever, or anything consumption,
with him.  So the ladies had to keep down their anxious minds and allow
him to stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and salad.

Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness that they were
seductresses for inducing him to drink wine--and a sparkling wine.

'It is to warm him,' they pleaded; and she said: 'He must be warm from
his walk'; and they said: 'But he is wet'; and said she, without a show
of feeling: 'Warm water, then'; and Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp
of anatomists, at being the subject of female contention or humane
consideration.  Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in
him; she remarked encouragingly:

'I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.'

She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his hand, and
he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion; and he profoundly
bowed to principles, believing his England to be pillared on them; and
the lady looked like one who bore the standard of a principle; and if we
slap and pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems
entering us to support.  Subscribing to a principle, our energies are
refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not with us before the
act; and of a real well-founded faith come the glowing thoughts which we
have at times: thoughts of England heading the nations; when the smell of
an English lane under showers challenges Eden, and the threading of a
London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral organ.  It may
be, that by the renunciation of any description of alcohol, a man will
stand clearer-headed to serve his country.  He may expect to have a
clearer memory, for certain: he will not be asking himself, unable to
decide, whether his master named a Mr. Journeyman or a Mr. Jarniman, as
the person he declined to receive.  Either of the two is repulsed upon
his application, owing to the guilty similarity of sounds but what we are
to think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency in failing to remember;
which accuses our physical condition, therefore our habits.--Thus the
little man debated, scarcely requiring more than to hear the right word,
to be a convert and make him a garland of the proselyte's fetters.

Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla gestured the
putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation to him, so to
put aside temptation that instant; and she signified in a very ugly jerk
of her features, the vilely filthy stuff Morality thought it, however
pleasing it might be to a palate corrupted by indulgence of the sensual
appetites.

But the glass had been handed to him by the lady he respected, who looked
angelical in offering it, divinely other than ugly; and to her he could
not be discourteous; not even to pay his homage to the representative of
a principle.  He bowed to Miss Graves, and drank, and rushed forth;
hearing shouts behind him.

His master had a packet of papers ready, easy for the pocket.

'By the way, Skepsey,' he said, 'if a man named Jarniman should call at
the office, I will see him.'

Skepsey's grey eyes came out.

Or was it Journeyman, that his master would not see; and Jarniman that he
would?

His habit of obedience, pride of apprehension, and the time to catch the
train, forbade inquiry.  Besides he knew of himself of old, that his
puzzles were best unriddled running.

The quick of pace are soon in the quick of thoughts.

Jarniman, then, was a man whom his master, not wanting to see, one day,
and wanting to see, on another day, might wish to conciliate: a case of
policy.  Let Jarniman go.  Journeyman, on the other hand, was nobody at
all, a ghost of the fancy.  Yet this Journeyman was as important an
individual, he was a dread reality; more important to Skepsey in the
light of patriot: and only in that light was he permitted of a scrupulous
conscience and modest mind to think upon himself when the immediate
subject was his master's interests.  For this Journeyman had not an
excuse for existence in Mr. Radnor's pronunciation: he was born of the
buzz of a troubled ear, coming of a disordered brain, consequent
necessarily upon a disorderly stomach, that might protest a degree of
comparative innocence, but would be shamed utterly under inspection of
the eye of a lady of principle.

What, then, was the value to his country of a servant who could not
accurately recollect his master's words!  Miss Graves within him asked
the rapid little man, whether indeed his ideas were his own after
draughts of champagne.

The ideas, excited to an urgent animation by his racing trot, were a
quiverful in flight over an England terrible to the foe and dancing on
the green.  Right so: but would we keep up the dance, we must be red iron
to touch: and the fighter for conquering is the one who can last and has
the open brain;--and there you have a point against alcohol.  Yes, and
Miss Graves, if she would press it, with her natural face, could be
pleasant and persuasive: and she ought to be told she ought to marry, for
the good of the country.  Women taking liquor: Skepsey had a vision of
his wife with rheumy peepers and miauly mouth, as he had once beheld the
creature:--Oh! they need discipline not such would we have for the
mothers of our English young.  Decidedly the women of principle are bound
to enter wedlock; they should be bound by law.  Whereas, in the opposing
case--the binding of the unprincipled to a celibate state--such a law
would have saved Skepsey from the necessitated commission of deeds of
discipline with one of the female sex, and have rescued his progeny from
a likeness to the corn-stalk reverting to weed.  He had but a son for
England's defence; and the frame of his boy might be set quaking by a
thump on the wind of a drum; the courage of William Barlow Skepsey would
not stand against a sheep; it would wind-up hares to have a run at him
out in the field.  Offspring of a woman of principle!  .  .  .  but there
is no rubbing out in life: why dream of it?  Only that one would not have
one's country the loser!

Dwell a moment on the reverse--and first remember the lesson of the
Captivity of the Jews and the outcry of their backsliding and
repentance:--see a nation of the honourably begotten; muscular men
disdaining the luxuries they will occasionally condescend to taste,
like some tribe in Greece; boxers, rowers, runners, climbers; braced,
indomitable; magnanimous, as only the strong can be; an army at word,
winning at a stroke the double battle of the hand and the heart: men who
can walk the paths through the garden of the pleasures.  They receive
fitting mates, of a build to promise or aid in ensuring depth of chest
and long reach of arm for their progeny.

Down goes the world before them.

And we see how much would be due for this to a corps of ladies like Miss
Graves, not allowed to remain too long on the stalk of spinsterhood.  Her
age might count twenty-eight: too long!  She should be taught that men
can, though truly ordinary women cannot, walk these orderly paths through
the garden.  An admission to women, hinting restrictions, on a ticket
marked 'in moderation' (meaning, that they may pluck a flower or fruit
along the pathway border to which they are confined), speedily, alas,
exhibits them at a mad scramble across the pleasure-beds.  They know not
moderation.  Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of Posterity
will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun it.

The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract, as men do.

But there are grounds for supposing that the example before them of a sex
exercising self-control in freedom, would induce women to pledge
themselves to a similar abnegation, until they gain some sense of touch
upon the impalpable duty to the generations coming after us thanks to the
voluntary example we set them.

The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey in the course of
conversational remonstrances with his wife;--that of getting the Idea of
Posterity into the understanding of its principal agent, might then be
mastered.

Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement: it manifestly
devolves upon them.  Let them at once take to rigorous physical training.
Women under compulsion, as vessels: men in their magnanimity,
patriotically, voluntarily.

Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed it; and it
plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not suffer him to escape
without ruefully feeling the feebleness of his vocabulary: and
consequently he made a reluctant appeal to figures, and it hung upon
the bolder exhibition of lists and tables as to whether he was beaten;
and if beaten, he was morally her captive; and this being the case,
nothing could be more repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of
his nature passively or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld
himself wearing a detestable 'ribbon,' for sign of an oath quite
needlessly sworn (simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him with nimbler
tongue), and blocking the streets, marching in bands beneath banners,
howling hymns.

Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging opinions
in argument, always fell back, frightened him.  As long as they had
no opponents of their own kind, they swept the field, they were
intelligible, as the word 'principle' had become.  But the appearance
of one body of Statistics invariably brought up another; and the strokes
and counterstrokes were like a play of quarter-staff on the sconce,
to knock all comprehension out of Skepsey.  Otherwise he would not
unwillingly have inquired to-morrow into the Statistics of the
controversy between the waters of the wells and of the casks, prepared
to walk over to the victorious, however objectionable that proceeding.
He hoped to question his master some day except that his master would
very naturally have a tendency to sum-up in favour of wine--good wine,
in moderation; just as Miss Graves for the cup of tea--not so
thoughtfully stipulating that it should be good and not too copious.
Statistics are according to their conjurors; they are not independent
bodies, with native colours; they needs must be painted by the different
hands they pass through, and they may be multiplied; a nought or so
counts for nothing with the teller.  Skepsey saw that.  Yet they can
overcome: even as fictitious battalions, they can overcome.  He shrank
from the results of a ciphering match having him for object, and was
ashamed of feeling to Statistics as women to giants; nevertheless he
acknowledged that the badge was upon him, if Miss Graves should beat her
master in her array of figures, to insist on his wearing it, as she
would, she certainly would.  And against his internal conviction perhaps;
with the knowledge that the figures were an unfortified display, and his
oath of bondage an unmanly servility, the silliest of ceremonies!  He was
shockingly feminine to Statistics.

Mr. Durance despised them: he called them, arguing against Mr. Radnor,
'those emotional things,' not comprehensibly to Skepsey.  But Mr.
Durance, a very clever gentleman, could not be right in everything.  He
made strange remarks upon his country.  Dr. Yatt attributed them to the
state of 'his digestion.

And Mr. Fenellan had said of Mr. Durance that, as 'a barrister wanting
briefs, the speech in him had been bottled too long and was an overripe
wine dripping sour drops through the rotten cork.'  Mr. Fenellan said it
laughing, he meant no harm.  Skepsey was sure he had the words.  He heard
no more than other people hear; he remembered whole sentences, and many:
on one of his runs, this active little machine, quickened by motion to
fire, revived the audible of years back; whatever suited his turn of mind
at the moment rushed to the rapid wheels within him.  His master's
business and friends, his country's welfare and advancement, these, with
records, items, anticipations, of the manlier sports to decorate, were
his current themes; all being chopped and tossed and mixed in salad
accordance by his fervour of velocity.  And if you would like a further
definition of Genius, think of it as a form of swiftness.  It is the
lively young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which
mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the
motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof is
multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your half-
lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then
Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius.  What do you say?

Without having a great brain, the measure of it possessed by Skepsey was
alive under strong illumination.  In his heart, while doing penance for
his presumptuousness, he believed that he could lead regiments of men.
He was not the army's General, he was the General's Lieutenant, now and
then venturing to suggest a piece of counsel to his Chief.  On his own
particular drilled regiments, his Chief may rely; and on his knowledge
of the country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills, dividing
rivers.  He had mapped for himself mentally the battles of conquerors in
his favourite historic reading; and he understood the value of a plan,
and the danger of sticking to it, and the advantage of a big army for
flanking; and he manoeuvred a small one cunningly to make it a bolt at
the telling instant.  Dartrey Fenellan had explained to him Frederick's
oblique attack, Napoleon's employment of the artillery arm preparatory to
the hurling of the cataract on the spot of weakness, Wellington's
parallel march with Marmont up to the hour of the decisive cut through
the latter at Salamanca; and Skepsey treated his enemy to the like,
deferentially reporting the engagement to a Chief whom his modesty kept
in eminence, for the receiving of the principal honours.  As to his men,
of all classes and sorts, they are so supple with training that they
sustain a defeat like the sturdy pugilist a knock off his legs, and up
smiling a minute after--one of the truly beautiful sights on this earth!
They go at the double half a day, never sounding a single pair of bellows
among them.  They have their appetites in full control, to eat when they
can, or cheerfully fast.  They have healthy frames, you see; and as the
healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that, under any title
you like, they profess the principles--into the bog we go, we have got
round to it!--the principles of those horrible marching and chanting
people!

Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable
country for habitation?

Here was a knot.

Skepsey's head dropped lower, he went as a ram.  The sayings of Mr.
Durance about his dear England: that 'her remainder of life is in the
activity of her diseases'--that 'she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise
as to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution': that
'she is animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly'; and so forth:--
charged on him during his wrestle with his problem.  And the gentlemen
had said, had permitted himself to say, that our England's recent history
was a provincial apothecary's exhibition of the battle of bane and
antidote.  Mr. Durance could hardly mean it.  But how could one answer
him when he spoke of the torpor of the people, and of the succeeding
Governments as a change of lacqueys--or the purse-string's lacqueys?
He said, that Old England has taken to the arm-chair for good, and thinks
it her whole business to pronounce opinions and listen to herself;
and that, in the face of an armed Europe, this great nation is living
on sufferance.  Oh!

Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.

'Feel quite up to it?' he was asked by his neighbour.

The mover of armed hosts for the defence of the country sat in a third-
class carriage of the train, approaching the first of the stations on the
way to town.  He was instantly up to the level of an external world, and
fell into give and take with a burly broad communicative man; located in
London, but born in the North, in view of Durham cathedral, as he thanked
his Lord; who was of the order of pork-butcher; which succulent calling
had carried him down to near upon the borders of Surrey and Sussex, some
miles beyond the new big house of a Mister whose name he had forgotten,
though he had heard it mentioned by an acquaintance interested in the
gentleman's doings.  But his object was to have a look at a rare breed of
swine, worth the journey; that didn't run to fat so much as to flavour,
had longer legs, sharp snouts to plump their hams; over from Spain, it
seemed; and the gentleman owning them was for selling them, finding them
wild past correction.  But the acquaintance mentioned, who was down to
visit t' other gentleman's big new edifice in workmen's hands, had a
mother, who had been cook to a family, and was now widow of a cook's
shop; ham, beef, and sausages, prime pies to order; and a good specimen
herself; and if ever her son saw her spirit at his bedside, there
wouldn't be room for much else in that chamber--supposing us to keep our
shapes.  But he was the right sort of son, anxious to push his mother's
shop where he saw a chance, and do it cheap; and those foreign pigs,
after a disappointment to their importer, might be had pretty cheap, and
were accounted tasty.

Skepsey's main thought was upon war: the man had discoursed of pigs.

He informed the man of his having heard from a scholar, that pigs had
been the cause of more bloody battles than any other animal.

How so?  the pork-butcher asked, and said he was not much of a scholar,
and pigs might be provoking, but he had not heard they were a cause of
strife between man and man.  For possession of them, Skepsey explained.
Oh! possession!  Why, we've heard of bloody battles for the possession of
women!  Men will fight for almost anything they care to get or call their
own, the pork-butcher said; and he praised Old England for avoiding war.
Skepsey nodded.  How if war is forced on us?  Then we fight. Suppose we
are not prepared?--We soon get that up. Skepsey requested him to state
the degree of resistance he might think he could bring against a pair of
skilful fists, in a place out of hearing of the police.

'Say, you!' said the pork-butcher, and sharply smiled, for he was a man
of size.

'I would give you two minutes,' rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently and
kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum vein.

'Rather short allowance, eh, master?' said the bigger man.  'Feel here';
he straightened out his arm and doubled it, raising a proud bridge of
muscle.

Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.

'Twice that, would not help without the science,' he remarked, and let
his arm be gripped in turn.

The pork-butcher's throat sounded, as it were, commas and colons,
punctuations in his reflections, while he tightened fingers along the
iron lump.  'Stringy.  You're a wiry one, no mistake.'  It was encomium.
With the ingrained contempt of size for a smallness that has not yet
taught it the prostrating lesson, he said: 'Weight tells.'

'In a wrestle,' Skepsey admitted.  'Allow me to say, you would not touch
me.'

'And how do you know I'm not a trifle handy with the maulers myself?'

'You will pardon me for saying, it would be worse for you if you were.'

The pork-butcher was flung backward.  'Are you a Professor, may I
inquire?'

Skepsey rejected the title.  'I can engage to teach young men, upon a
proper observance of first principles.'

'They be hanged!' cried the ruffled pork-butcher.  'Our best men never
got it out of books.  Now, you tell me--you've got a spiflicating style
of talk about you--no brag, you tell me--course, the best man wins, if
you mean that: now, if I was one of 'em, and I fetches you a bit of a
flick, how then?  Would you be ready to step out with a real Professor?'

'I should claim a fair field,' was the answer, made in modesty.

'And you'd expect to whop me with they there principles of yours?'

'I should expect to.'

'Bang me!' was roared.  After a stare at the mild little figure with the
fitfully dead-levelled large grey eyes in front of him, the pork-butcher
resumed: 'Take you for the man you say you be, you're just the man for my
friend Jam and me.  He dearly loves to see a set-to, self the same.  What
prettier?  And if you would be so obliging some day as to favour us with
a display, we'd head a cap conformably, whether you'd the best of it,
according to your expectations, or t' other way:--For there never was
shame in a jolly good licking as the song says: that is, if you take it
and make it appear jolly good.  And find you an opponent meet and fit,
never doubt.  Ever had the worse of an encounter, sir?'

'Often, Sir.'

'Well, that's good.  And it didn't destroy your confidence?'

'Added to it, I hope.'

At this point, it became a crying necessity for Skepsey to escape from
an area of boastfulness, into which he had fallen inadvertently; and he
hastened to apologize 'for his personal reference,' that was intended for
an illustration of our country caught unawares by a highly trained picked
soldiery, inferior in numbers to the patriotic levies, but sharp at the
edge and knowing how to strike.  Measure the axe, measure the tree; and
which goes down first?

'Invasion, is it?--and you mean, we're not to hit back?' the pork-butcher
bellowed, and presently secured a murmured approbation from an audience
of three, that had begun to comprehend the dialogue, and strengthened him
in a manner to teach Skepsey the foolishness of ever urging analogies of
too extended a circle to close sharply on the mark.  He had no longer a
chance, he was overborne, identified with the fated invader, rolled away
into the chops of the Channel, to be swallowed up entire, and not a rag
left of him, but John Bull tucking up his shirtsleeves on the shingle
beach, ready for a second or a third; crying to them to come on.

Warmed by his Bullish victory, and friendly to the vanquished, the pork-
butcher told Skepsey he should like to see more of him, and introduced
himself on a card Benjamin Shaplow, not far from the Bank.

They parted at the Terminus, where three shrieks of an engine, sounding
like merry messages of the damned to their congeners in the anticipatory
stench of the cab-droppings above, disconnected sane hearing; perverted
it, no doubt.  Or else it was the stamp of a particular name on his mind,
which impressed Skepsey, as he bored down the street and across the
bridge, to fancy in recollection, that Mr. Shaplow, when reiterating the
wish for self and friend to witness a display of his cunning with the
fists, had spoken the name of Jarniman.  An unusual name yet more than
one Jarniman might well exist.  And unlikely that a friend of the pork-
butcher would be the person whom Mr. Radnor first prohibited and then
desired to receive.  It hardly mattered:--considering that the Dutch Navy
did really, incredible as it seems now, come sailing a good way up the
River Thames, into the very main artery of Old England.  And what thought
the Tower of it?  Skepsey looked at the Tower in sympathy, wondering
whether the Tower had seen those impudent Dutch a nice people at home,
he had heard.  Mr. Shaplow's Jarniman might actually be Mr. Radnor's,
he inclined to think.  At any rate he was now sure of the name.




CHAPTER XI

WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF THEIR
SCOURGE

Fenellan, in a musing exclamation, that was quite spontaneous, had put a
picture on the departing Skepsey, as observed from an end of the
Lakelands upper terrace-walk.

'Queer little water-wagtail it is!'  And Lady Grace Halley and Miss
Graves and Mrs. Cormyn, snugly silken dry ones, were so taken with the
pretty likeness after hearing Victor call the tripping dripping creature
the happiest man in England, that they nursed it in their minds for a
Bewick tailpiece to the chapter of a pleasant rural day.  It imbedded the
day in an idea that it had been rural.

We are indebted almost for construction to those who will define us
briefly: we are but scattered leaves to the general comprehension of us
until such a work of binding and labelling is done.  And should the
definition be not so correct as brevity pretends to make it at one
stroke, we are at least rendered portable; thus we pass into the
conceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.
Anecdotes of England's happiest man were related, outlines of his
personal history requested.  His nomination in chief among the
traditionally very merry Islanders was hardly borne out by the tale of
his enchainment with a drunken yokefellow--unless upon the Durance
version of the felicity of his countrymen; still, the water-wagtail
carried it, Skepsey trotted into memories.  Heroes conducted up Fame's
temple-steps by ceremonious historians, who are studious, when the
platform is reached, of the art of setting them beneath the flambeau
of a final image, before thrusting them inside to be rivetted on their
pedestals, have an excellent chance of doing the same, let but the
provident narrators direct that image to paint the thing a moth-like
humanity desires, in the thing it shrinks from.  Miss Priscilla Graves
now fastened her meditations upon Skepsey; and it was important to him.

Tobacco withdrew the haunting shadow of the Rev. Septimus Barmby from
Nesta.  She strolled beside Louise de Seilles, to breathe sweet-sweet in
the dear friend's ear and tell her she loved her.  The presence of the
German had, without rousing animosity, damped the young Frenchwoman, even
to a revulsion when her feelings had been touched by hearing praise of
her France, and wounded by the subjects of the praise.  She bore the
national scar, which is barely skin-clothing of a gash that will not heal
since her country was overthrown and dismembered.  Colney Durance could
excuse the unreasonableness in her, for it had a dignity, and she
controlled it, and quietly suffered, trusting to the steady, tireless,
concentrated aim of her France.  In the Gallic mind of our time, France
appears as a prematurely buried Glory, that heaves the mound oppressing
breath and cannot cease; and calls hourly, at times keenly, to be
remembered, rescued from the pain and the mould-spots of that foul
sepulture.  Mademoiselle and Colney were friends, partly divided by her
speaking once of revanche; whereupon he assumed the chair of the
Moralist, with its right to lecture, and went over to the enemy; his talk
savoured of a German.  Our holding of the balance, taking two sides, is
incomprehensible to a people quivering with the double wound to body and
soul.  She was of Breton blood.  Cymric enough was in Nesta to catch any
thrill from her and join to her mood, if it hung out a colour sad or gay,
and was noble, as any mood of this dear Louise would surely be.

Nataly was not so sympathetic.  Only the Welsh and pure Irish are quick
at the feelings of the Celtic French.  Nataly came of a Yorkshire stock;
she had the bravery, humaneness and generous temper of our civilized
North, and a taste for mademoiselle's fine breeding, with a distaste for
the singular air of superiority in composure which it was granted to
mademoiselle to wear with an unassailable reserve when the roughness of
the commercial boor was obtrusive.  She said of her to Colney, as they
watched the couple strolling by the lake below: 'Nesta brings her out of
her frosts.  I suppose it's the presence of Dr. Schlesien.  I have known
it the same after an evening of Wagner's music.'

'Richard Wagner Germanized ridicule of the French when they were down,'
said Colney.  'She comes of a blood that never forgives.'

'"Never forgives" is horrible to think of!  I fancied you liked your
"Kelts," as you call them.'

Colney seized on a topic that shelved a less agreeable one that he saw
coming.  'You English won't descend to understand what does not resemble
you.  The French are in a state of feverish patriotism.  You refuse to
treat them for a case of fever.  They are lopped of a limb: you tell them
to be at rest!'

'You know I am fond of them.'

'And the Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries;
look at Ireland, look at Wales, and the Keltic Scot.  Have you heard them
talk?  It happened in the year 1400: it's alive to them as if it were
yesterday.  Old History is as dead to the English as their first father.
They beg for the privilege of pulling the forelock to the bearers of the
titles of the men who took their lands from them and turn them to the
uses of cattle.  The Saxon English had, no doubt, a heavier thrashing
than any people allowed to subsist ever received: you see it to this day;
the crick of the neck at the name of a lord is now concealed and denied,
but they have it and betray the effects; and it's patent in their
Journals, all over their literature.  Where it's not seen, another
blood's at work.  The Kelt won't accept the form of slavery.  Let him
be servile, supple, cunning, treacherous, and to appearance time-serving,
he will always remember his day of manly independence and who robbed him:
he is the poetic animal of the races of modern men.'

'You give him Pagan colours.'

'Natural colours.  He does not offer the other cheek or turn his back to
be kicked after a knock to the ground.  Instead of asking him to forgive,
which he cannot do, you must teach him to admire.  A mercantile community
guided by Political Economy from the ledger to the banquet presided over
by its Dagon Capital, finds that difficult.  However, there 's the secret
of him; that I respect in him.  His admiration of an enemy or oppressor
doing great deeds, wins him entirely.  He is an active spirit, not your
negative passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible.  And his faults, short
of ferocity, are amusing.'

'But the fits of ferocity!'

'They are inconscient, real fits.  They come of a hot nerve.  He is
manageable, sober too, when his mind is charged.  As to the French
people, they are the most mixed of any European nation; so they are
packed with contrasts: they are full of sentiment, they are sharply
logical; free-thinkers, devotees; affectionate, ferocious; frivolous,
tenacious; the passion of the season operating like sun or moon on these
qualities; and they can reach to ideality out of sensualism.  Below your
level, they're above it: a paradox is at home with them!'

'My friend, you speak seriously--an unusual compliment,' Nataly said,
and ungratefully continued: 'You know what is occupying me.  I want your
opinion.  I guess it.  I want to hear--a mean thirst perhaps, and you
would pay me any number of compliments to avoid the subject; but let me
hear:--this house!'

Colney shrugged in resignation.  'Victor works himself out,' he replied.

'We are to go through it all again?'

'If you have not the force to contain him.'

'How contain him?'

Up went Colney's shoulders.

'You may see it all before you,' he said, 'straight as the Seine chaussee
from the hill of La Roche Guyon.'

He looked for her recollection of the scene.

'Ah, the happy ramble that year!' she cried.  'And my Nesta just seven.
We had been six months at Craye.  Every day of our life together looks
happy to me, looking back, though I know that every day had the same
troubles.  I don't think I'm deficient in courage; I think I could meet
....  But the false position so cruelly weakens me.  I am no woman's
equal when I have to receive or visit.  It seems easier to meet the worst
in life-danger, death, anything.  Pardon me for talking so.  Perhaps we
need not have left Craye or Creckholt .  .  . ?' she hinted an
interrogation.  'Though I am not sorry; it is not good to be where one
tastes poison.  Here it may be as deadly, worse.  Dear friend, I am so
glad you remember La Roche Guyon.  He was popular with the dear French
people.'

'In spite of his accent.'

'It is not so bad?'

'And that you'll defend!'

'Consider: these neighbours we come among; they may have heard .  .  .'

'Act on the assumption.'

'You forget the principal character.  Victor promises; he may have learnt
a lesson at Creckholt.  But look at this house he has built.  How can I--
any woman--contain him!  He must have society.'

'Paraitre!'

'He must be in the front.  He has talked of Parliament.'

Colney's liver took the thrust of a skewer through it.  He spoke as in
meditative encomium: 'His entry into Parliament would promote himself and
family to a station of eminence naked over the Clock Tower of the House.'

She moaned.  'At the vilest, I cannot regret my conduct--bear what I may.
I can bear real pain: what kills me is, the suspicion.  And I feel it
like a guilty wretch!  And I do not feel the guilt!  I should do the same
again, on reflection.  I do believe it saved him.  I do; oh!  I do, I do.
I cannot expect my family to see with my eyes.  You know them--my brother
and sisters think I have disgraced them; they put no value on my saving
him.  It sounds childish; it is true.  He had fallen into a terrible
black mood.'

'He had an hour of gloom.'

'An hour!'

'But an hour, with him!  It means a good deal.'

'Ah, friend, I take your words.  He sinks terribly when he sinks at all.
--Spare us a little while.--We have to judge of what is good in the
circumstances: I hear your reply!  But the principal for me to study is
Victor.  You have accused me of being the voice of the enamoured woman.
I follow him, I know; I try to advise; I find it is wisdom to submit.
My people regard my behaviour as a wickedness or a madness.  I did save
him.  I joined my fate with his.  I am his mate, to help, and I cannot
oppose him, to distract him.  I do my utmost for privacy. He must
entertain.  Believe me, I feel for them--sisters and brother.  And now
that my sisters are married .  .  . My brother has a man's hardness.'

'Colonel Dreighton did not speak harshly, at our last meeting.'

'He spoke of me?'

'He spoke in the tone of a brother.'

'Victor promises--I won't repeat it.  Yes, I see the house!  There
appears to be a prospect, a hope--I cannot allude to it.  Craye and
Creckholt may have been some lesson to him.  Selwyn spoke of me kindly?
Ah, yes, it is the way with my people to pretend that Victor has been the
ruin of me, that they may come round to family sentiments.  In the same
way, his relatives, the Duvidney ladies, have their picture of the woman
misleading him.  Imagine me the naughty adventuress!'--Nataly falsified
the thought insurgent at her heart, in adding: 'I do not say I am
blameless.'  It was a concession to the circumambient enemy, of whom even
a good friend was apart, and not better than a respectful emissary.  The
dearest of her friends belonged to that hostile world.  Only Victor, no
other, stood with her against the world.  Her child, yes; the love of her
child she had; but the child's destiny was an alien phantom, looking at
her with harder eyes than she had vision of in her family.  She did not
say she was blameless, did not affect the thought.  She would have wished
to say, for small encouragement she would have said, that her case could
be pleaded.

Colney's features were not inviting, though the expression was not
repellent.  She sighed deeply; and to count on something helpful by
mentioning it, reverted to the 'prospect' which there appeared to be.
'Victor speaks of the certainty of his release.'

His release!  Her language pricked a satirist's gallbladder.  Colney
refrained from speaking to wound, and enjoyed a silence that did it.

'Do you see any possibility?--you knew her,' she said coldly.

'Counting the number of times he has been expecting the release, he is
bound to believe it near at hand.'

'You don't?' she asked: her bosom was up in a crisis of expectation for
the answer: and on a pause of half-a-minute, she could have uttered the
answer herself.

He perceived the insane eagerness through her mask, and despised it,
pitying the woman.  'And you don't,' he said.  'You catch at delusions,
to excuse the steps you consent to take.  Or you want me to wear the
blinkers, the better to hoodwink your own eyes.  You see it as well as I:
If you enter that house, you have to go through the same as at
Creckholt:--and he'll be the first to take fright.'

'He finds you in tears: he is immensely devoted; he flings up all to
protect "his Nataly."'

'No: you are unjust to him.  He would fling up all:'--

'But his Nataly prefers to be dragged through fire?  As you please!'

She bowed to her chastisement.  One motive in her consultation with him
came of the knowledge of his capacity to inflict it and his honesty in
the act, and a thirst she had to hear the truth loud-tongued from him;
together with a feeling that he was excessive and satiric, not to be read
by the letter of his words: and in consequence, she could bear the lash
from him, and tell her soul that he overdid it, and have an unjustly-
treated self to cherish.--But in very truth she was a woman who loved to
hear the truth; she was formed to love the truth her position reduced her
to violate; she esteemed the hearing it as medical to her; she selected
for counsellor him who would apply it: so far she went on the straight
way; and the desire for a sustaining deception from the mouth of a
trustworthy man set her hanging on his utterances with an anxious hope of
the reverse of what was to come and what she herself apprehended, such as
checked her pulses and iced her feet and fingers.  The reason being, not
that she was craven or absurd or paradoxical, but that, living at an
intenser strain upon her nature than she or any around her knew, her
strength snapped, she broke down by chance there where Colney was
rendered spiteful in beholding the display of her inconsequent if not
puling sex.

She might have sought his counsel on another subject, if a paralyzing
chill of her frame in the foreview of it had allowed her to speak: she
felt grave alarms in one direction, where Nesta stood in the eye of her
father; besides an unformed dread that the simplicity in generosity of
Victor's nature was doomed to show signs of dross ultimately, under the
necessity he imposed upon himself to run out his forecasts, and scheme,
and defensively compel the world to serve his ends, for the protection of
those dear to him.

At night he was particularly urgent with her for the harmonious duet in
praise of Lakelands; and plied her with questions all round and about it,
to bring out the dulcet accord.  He dwelt on his choice of costly
marbles, his fireplace and mantelpiece designs, the great hall, and
suggestions for imposing and beautiful furniture; concordantly enough,
for the large, the lofty and rich of colour won her enthusiasm; but
overwhelmingly to any mood of resistance; and strangely in a man who had
of late been adopting, as if his own, a modern tone, or the social and
literary hints of it, relating to the right uses of wealth, and the duty
as well as the delight of living simply.

'Fredi was pleased.'

'Yes, she was, dear.'

'She is our girl, my love.  "I could live and die here!"  Live, she may.
There's room enough.'

Nataly saw the door of a covert communication pointed at in that remark.
She gathered herself for an effort to do battle.

'She's quite a child, Victor.'

'The time begins to run.  We have to look forward now:--I declare, it's
I who seem the provident mother for Fredi!'

'Let our girl wait; don't hurry her mind to .  .  .  She is happy with
her father and mother.  She is in the happiest time of her life, before
those feelings distract.'

'If we see good fortune for her, we can't let it pass her.'

A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor, which would
be of necessity to do the avoided thing and roll up the forbidden curtain
opening on their whole history past and prospective, was met in Nataly's
bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she was not his match.
To speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the effort; and
hopelessly after being overborne by him.  There was not the anticipation
of a set contest to animate the woman's naturally valiant heart; he was
too strong: and his vividness in urgency overcame her in advance,
fascinated her sensibility through recollection; he fanned an
inclination, lighted it to make it a passion, a frenzied resolve--she
remembered how and when.  She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married sister,
containing no word of endearment or proposal for a meeting.  An
unregretted day, if Victor would think of the dues to others; that is,
would take station with the world to see his reflected position, instead
of seeing it through their self-justifying knowledge of the honourable
truth of their love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the
world bestows on its orderly subjects.

They had done evil to no one as yet.  Nataly thought that; not-
withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore
Victor Radnor's name: for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had
used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion.  If she had it,
the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness.  Her feeling was,
that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving
in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness.  She was frigid
because she knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power would
never have struck so meanly.  But the mainspring of the feeling in an
almost remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of
retrospective physical distaste on Victor's part;--hard to keep from a
short utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant
male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness,
to delight in:--these conjoined with a woman's unspoken pleading ideas
of her own, on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication
of Nature.

Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could argue
her case in her conscience--deep down and out of hearing, where women
under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do deliver
their minds.  She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature against
the Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of revel;
but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who was
designed by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed them
and when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit
Legitimate--virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy--
she had Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence.  It was
eloquent with her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to
the convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires within to
feel elementally.  The other voices within her issued of the acknowledged
dues to her family and to the world--the civilization protecting women:
sentences thereanent in modern books and Journals.  But the remembrance
of moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by name of Love
raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing, was, in a perpetual
struggle with a whirlpool, a constant support while she and Victor were
one at heart.  The sense of her standing alone made her sway; and a
thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions of the
abyss.

Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that he had
governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and he might
therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public men, expect a woman
blindfold to follow his lead.  But no; we may be rebels against our time
and its Laws: if we are really for Nature, we are not lawless.  Nataly's
untutored scruples, which came side by side with her ability to plead for
her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring of a young man
of social rank to espouse the daughter of a couple socially insurgent-
stained, to common thinking, should denunciation come.  The Nature
upholding her fled at a vision of a stranger entangled.  Pitiable to
reflect, that he was not one of the adventurer-lords of prey who hunt
and run down shadowed heiresses and are congratulated on their luck in a
tolerating country!  How was the young man to be warned?  How, under the
happiest of suppositions, propitiate his family!  And such a family,
if consenting with knowledge, would consent only for the love of money.
It was angling with as vile a bait as the rascal lord's.  Humiliation
hung on the scheme; it struck to scorching in the contemplation of it.
And it darkened her reading of Victor's character.

She did not ask for the specification of a 'good fortune that might
pass'; wishing to save him from his wonted twists of elusiveness, and
herself with him from the dread discussion it involved upon one point.

'The day was pleasant to all, except perhaps poor mademoiselle,' she
said.

'Peridon should have come?'

'Present or absent, his chances are not brilliant, I fear.'

'And Pempton and Priscy!'

'They are growing cooler!'

'With their grotesque objections to one another's habits at table!'

'Can we ever hope to get them over it?'

'When Priscy drinks Port and Pempton munches beef, Colney says.'

'I should say, when they feel warmly enough to think little of their
differences.'

'Fire smoothes the creases, yes; and fire is what they're both wanting
in.  Though Priscy has Concert-pathos in her voice:--couldn't act a bit!
And Pempton's 'cello tones now and then have gone through me--simply from
his fiddle-bow, I believe.  Don't talk to me of feeling in a couple,
within reach of one another and sniffing objections.--Good, then, for a
successful day to-day so far?'

He neared her, wooing her; and she assented, with a franker smile than
she had worn through the day.

The common burden on their hearts--the simple discussion to come of the
task of communicating dire actualities to their innocent Nesta--was laid
aside.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Admiration of an enemy or oppressor doing great deeds
Aristocratic assumption of licence
But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
Consent of circumstances
Continued trust in the man--is the alternative of despair
Critical fashion of intimates who know as well as hear
Despises hostile elements and goes unpunished
Dithyrambic inebriety of narration
Feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted
Fire smoothes the creases
Frankness as an armour over wariness
Half a dozen dozen left
Hard to bear, at times unbearable
Haremed opinion of the unfitness of women
He neared her, wooing her; and she assented
He never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it
He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion
He sinks terribly when he sinks at all
Heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy
If we are really for Nature, we are not lawless
In bottle if not on draught (oratory)
In the pay of our doctors
Intrusion of hard material statements, facts
Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries
Man with a material object in aim, is the man of his object
Nature and Law never agreed
Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence
Next door to the Last Trump
Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments
Once out of the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal
One wants a little animation in a husband
People of a provocative prosperity
Self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another
She was not his match--To speak would be to succumb
Slap and pinch and starve our appetites
Smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone
Smothered in its pudding-bed of the grotesque (obesity)
Snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer
State of feverish patriotism
Statistics are according to their conjurors
Subterranean recess for Nature against the Institutions of Man
Tale, which leaves the man's mind at home
The effects of the infinitely little
The old confession, that we cannot cook(The English)
They do not live; they are engines
They helped her to feel at home with herself
Thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions
Unshamed exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate
We cannot relinquish an idea that was ours
We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us


[The End]




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End of the Project Gutenberg etext of One of Our Conquerors, v1,
by George Meredith

