One of Our Conquerors. Complete

‘Superior to his official parasites, one supposes!’ Colney murmured.

The celebrities were unaffectedly interested in a literary failure having certain merits; they discussed it, to compliment the crownless author; and the fervider they, the more was he endowed to read the meanness prompting the generosity. Publication of a book, is the philosopher’s lantern upon one’s fellows.

Colney was caught away from his private manufactory of acids by hearing Simeon Fenellan relate to Victor some of the recent occurrences at Brighton. Simeon’s tone was unsatisfying; Colney would have the word; he was like steel on the grindstone for such a theme of our national grotesque-sublime.

‘That Demerara Supple-jack, Victor! Don’t listen to Simeon; he’s a man of lean narrative, fit to chronicle political party wrangles and such like crop of carcase prose: this is epical. In DRINK we have Old England’s organic Epic; Greeks and Trojans; Parliamentary Olympus, ennobled brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery to hand. Keep a straight eye on the primary motives of man, you’ll own the English produce the material for proud verse; they’re alive there! Dartrey’s Demerara makes a pretty episode of the battle. I haven’t seen it—if it’s possible to look on it: but I hear it is flexible, of a vulgar appearance in repose, Jove’s lightning at one time, the thong of AEacus at another. Observe Dartrey marching off to the Station, for the purpose of laying his miraculous weapon across the shoulders of a son of Mars, who had offended. But we have his name, my dear Victor! His name, Simeon?—Worrell; a Major Worrell: his offence being probably, that he obtained military instruction in the Service, and left it at his convenience, for our poor patch and tatter British Army to take in his place another young student, who’ll grow up to do similarly. And Dartrey, we assume, is off to stop that system. You behold Sir Dartrey twirling the weapon in preparatory fashion; because he is determined we shall have an army of trained officers instead of infant amateurs heading heroic louts. Not a thought of Beer in Dartrey!—always unpatriotic, you ‘ll say. Plato entreats his absent mistress to fix eyes on a star: eyes on Beer for the uniting of you English! I tell you no poetic fiction. Seeing him on his way, thus terribly armed, and knowing his intent, Venus, to shield a former favourite servant of Mars, conjured the most diverting of interventions, in the shape of a young woman in a poke-bonnet, and Skepsey, her squire, marching with a dozen or so, informing bedevilled mankind of the hideousness of our hymnification when it is not under secluding sanction of the Edifice, and challengeing criticism; and that was hard by, and real English, in the form of bludgeons, wielded by a battalion of the national idol Bungay Beervat’s boys; and they fell upon the hymners. Here you fill in with pastoral similes. They struck the maid adored by Skepsey. And that was the blow which slew them! Our little man drove into the press with a pair of fists able to do their work. A valiant skiff upon a sea of enemies, he was having it on the nob, and suddenly the Demerara lightened. It flailed to thresh. Enough to say, brains would have come. The Bungays made a show of fight. No lack of blood in them, to stock a raw shilling’s worth or gush before Achilles rageing. You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the ballad. We want only a few names of the fallen. It was the carving of a maitre chef, according to Skepsey: right-left-and point, with supreme precision: they fell, accurately sliced from the joint. Having done with them, Dartrey tossed the Demerara to Skepsey, and washed his hands of battle; and he let his major go unscathed. Phlebotomy sufficient for the day!’

Nesta’s ears hummed with the name of Major Worrell.

‘Skepsey did come back to London with a rather damaged frontispiece,’ Victor said. ‘He can’t have joined those people?’

‘They may suit one of your militant peacemakers,’ interposed Fenellan. ‘The most placable creatures alive, and the surest for getting-up a shindy.’

‘Suit him! They’re the scandal of our streets.’ Victor was pricked with a jealousy of them for beguiling him of his trusty servant.

‘Look at your country, see where it shows its vitality,’ said Colney. ‘You don’t see elsewhere any vein in movement-movement,’ he harped on the word Victor constantly employed to express the thing he wanted to see. ‘Think of that, when the procession sets your teeth on edge. They’re honest foes of vice, and they move:—in England! Pulpit-preaching has no effect. For gross maladies, gross remedies. You may judge of what you are by the quality of the cure. Puritanism, I won’t attempt to paint—it would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English frivolity, and you’ll admit it to be the best show you make. It may still be the saving of you—on the level of the orderly ox: I ‘ve not observed that it aims at higher. And talking of the pulpit, Barmby is off to the East, has accepted a Shoreditch curacy, Skepsey tells me.’

‘So there’s the reason for our not seeing him!’ Victor turned to Nesta.

‘Papa, you won’t be angry with Skepsey if he has joined those people,’ said Nesta. ‘I’m sure he thinks of serving his country, Mr. Durance.’

Colney smiled on her. ‘And you too?’

‘If women knew how!’

‘They’re hitting on more ways at present than the men—in England.’

‘But, Mr. Durance, it speaks well for England when they’re allowed the chance here.’

‘Good!’ Fenellan exclaimed. ‘And that upsets his placement of the modern national genders: Germany masculine, France feminine, Old England what remains.’

Victor ruffled and reddened on his shout of ‘Neuter?’

Their circle widened. Nesta knew she was on promotion, by her being led about and introduced to ladies. They were encouraging with her. One of them, a Mrs. Marina Floyer, had recently raised a standard of feminine insurrection. She said: ‘I hear your praises from Mr. Durance. He rarely praises. You have shown capacity to meditate on the condition of women, he says.’

Nesta drew a shorter breath, with a hope at heart. She speculated in the dark, as to whether her aim to serve and help was not so friendless. And did Mr. Durance approve? But surely she stood in a glorious England if there were men and women to welcome a girl to their councils. Oh! that is the broad free England where gentlemen and gentlewomen accept of the meanest aid to cleanse the land of its iniquities, and do not suffer shame to smite a young face for touching upon horrors with a pure design.

She cried in her bosom: I feel! She had no other expression for that which is as near as great natures may come to the conceiving of the celestial spirit from an emissary angel; and she trembled, the fire ran through her. It seemed to her, that she would be called to help or that certainly they were nearing to an effacement of the woefullest of evils; and if not helping, it would still be a blessedness for her to kneel thanking heaven.

Society was being attacked and defended. She could but studiously listen. Her father was listening. The assailant was a lady; and she had a hearing, although she treated Society as a discrowned monarch on trial for an offence against a more precious: viz., the individual cramped by brutish laws: the individual with the ideas of our time, righteously claiming expansion out of the clutches of a narrow old-world disciplinarian-that giant hypocrite! She flung the gauntlet at externally venerable Institutions; and she had a hearing, where horrification, execration, the foul Furies of Conservatism would in a shortly antecedent day have been hissing and snakily lashing, hounding her to expulsion. Mrs. Marina Floyer gravely seconded her. Colney did the same. Victor turned sharp on him. ‘Yes,’ Colney said; ‘we unfold the standard of extremes in this country, to get a single step taken: that’s how we move: we threaten death to get footway. Now, mark: Society’s errors will be admitted.’

A gentleman spoke. He began by admitting Society’s errors. Nevertheless, it so distinctly exists for the common good, that we may say of Society in relation to the individual, it is the body to the soul. We may wash, trim, purify, but we must not maim it. The assertion of our individuality in opposition to the Government of Society—this existing Society—is a toss of the cap for the erasure of our civilization, et caetera.

Platitudes can be of intense interest if they approach our case.—But, if you please, we ask permission to wash, trim, purify, and we do not get it.—But you have it! Because we take it at our peril; and you, who are too cowardly to grant or withhold, call-up the revolutionary from the pits by your slackness:—etc. There was a pretty hot debate. Both assailant and defendant, to Victor’s thinking, spoke well, and each the right thing and he could have made use of both, but he could answer neither. He beat about for the cause of this deficiency, and discovered it in his position. Mentally, he was on the side of Society. Yet he was annoyed to find the attack was so easily answerable when the defence unfolded. But it was absurd to expect it would not be. And in fact, a position secretly rebellious is equal to water on the brain for stultifying us.

Before the controversy was over, a note in Nataly’s handwriting called him home. She wrote: ‘Make my excuses. C. D. will give Nesta and some lady dinner. A visitor here. Come alone, and without delay. Quite well, robust. Impatient to consult with you, nothing else.’

Nesta was happy to stay; and Victor set forth.

The visitor? plainly Dudley. Nataly’s trusting the girl to the chance of some lady being present, was unlike her. Dudley might be tugging at the cord; and the recent conversation upon Society, rendered one of its gilt pillars particularly estimable.—A person in the debate had declared this modern protest on behalf of individualism to represent Society’s Criminal Trial. And it is likely to be a long one. And good for the world, that we see such a Trial!—Well said or not, undoubtedly Society is an old criminal: not much more advanced than the state of spiritual worship where bloody sacrifice was offered to a hungry Lord. But it has a case for pleading. We may liken it, as we have it now, to the bumping lumberer’s raft; suitable along torrent waters until we come to smoother. Are we not on waters of a certain smoothness at the reflecting level?—enough to justify demands for a vessel of finer design. If Society is to subsist, it must have the human with the logical argument against the cry of the free-flags, instead of presenting a block’s obtuseness. That, you need not hesitate to believe, will be rolled downward and disintegrated, sooner than later. A Society based on the logical concrete of humane considerateness:—a Society prohibiting to Mrs. Burman her wielding of a life-long rod....

The personal element again to confuse inquiry!—And Skepsey and Barmby both of them bent on doing work without inquiry of any sort! They were enviable: they were good fellows. Victor clung to the theme because it hinted of next door to his lost Idea. He rubbed the back of his head, fancying a throb there. Are civilized creatures incapable of abstract thought when their social position is dubious? For if so, we never can be quit of those we forsake.—Apparently Mrs. Burman’s unfathomed power lay in her compelling him to summon the devilish in himself and play upon the impish in Society, that he might overcome her.

Victor’s house-door stopped this current.

Nataly took his embrace.

‘Nothing wrong?’ he said, and saw the something. It was a favourable moment to tell her what she might not at another time regard as a small affair. ‘News in the City to-day of that South London borough being vacated. Quatley urges me. A death again! I saw Pempton, too. Will you credit me when I tell you he carries his infatuation so far, that he has been investing in Japanese and Chinese Loans, because they are less meat-eaters than others, and vegetarians are more stable, and outlast us all!—Dudley the visitor?’ ‘Mr. Sowerby has been here,’ she said, in a shaking low voice.

Victor held her hand and felt a squeeze more nervous than affectionate.

‘To consult with me,’ she added. ‘My maid will go at ten to bring Nesta; Mr. Durance I can count on, to see her safe home. Ah!’ she wailed.

Victor nodded, saying: ‘I guess. And, my love, you will receive Mrs. John Cormyn to-morrow morning. I can’t endure gaps. Gaps in our circle must never be. Do I guess?—I spoke to Colney about bringing her home.’

Nataly sighed: ‘Ah! make what provision we will! Evil—Mr. Sowerby has had a great deal to bear.’

‘A worldling may think so.’

Her breast heaved, and the wave burst: but her restraining of tears froze her speech.

‘Victor! Our Nesta! Mr. Sowerby is unable to explain. And how the Miss Duvidneys!… At that Brighton!’—The voice he heard was not his darling’s deep rich note, it had dropped to toneless hoarseness: ‘She has been permitted to make acquaintance—she has been seen riding with—she has called upon—Oh! it is one of those abandoned women. In her house! Our girl! Our Nesta! She was insulted by a man in the woman’s house. She is talked of over Brighton. The mother!—the daughter! And grant me this—that never was girl more carefully… never till she was taken from me. Oh! do not forget. You will defend me? You will say, that her mother did with all her soul strive… It is not a rumour. Mr. Sowerby has had it confirmed.’ A sob caught her voice.

Victor’s hands caressed to console: ‘Dudley does not propose to…?’

‘Nesta must promise… but how it happened? How! An acquaintance with—contact with!—Oh! cruel!’ Each time she ceased speaking, the wrinkles of a shiver went over her, and the tone was of tears coming, but she locked them in.

‘An accident!’ said Victor; ‘some misunderstanding—there can’t be harm. Of course, she promises—hasn’t to promise. How could a girl distinguish! He does not cast blame on her?’

‘Dear, if you would go down to Dartrey to-morrow. He knows:—it is over the Clubs there; he will tell you, before a word to Nesta. Innocent, yes! Mr. Sowerby has not to be assured of that. Ignorant of the character of the dreadful woman? Ah, if I could ever in anything think her ignorant! She frightens me. Mr. Sowerby is indulgent. He does me justice. My duty to her—I must defend myself—has been my first thought. I said in my prayers—she at least!… We have to see the more than common reasons why she, of all girls, should—he did not hint it, he was delicate: her name must not be public.’

‘Yes, yes, Dudley is without parallel as a gentleman,’ said Victor. ‘It does not suit me to hear the word “indulgent.” My dear, if you were down there, you would discover that the talk was the talk of two or three men seeing our girl ride by—and she did ride with a troop: why, we’ve watched them along the parade, often. Clear as day how it happened! I’ll go down early to-morrow.’

He fancied Nataly was appeased. And even out of this annoyance, there was the gain of her being won to favour Dudley’s hitherto but tolerated suit.

Nataly also had the fancy, that the calm following on her anguish, was a moderation of it. She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening comfort they gave. But no sooner was she alone than her torturing perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to Victor’s coming returned.

For a girl of Nesta’s head could not be deceived; she had come home with a woman’s intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it—a knowledge drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to probe to the depth of it. She had in her wounded breast the world’s idea, that corruption must come of the contact with impurity.

Nataly renewed her cry of despair: ‘The mother!—the daughter!’—her sole revelation of the heart’s hollows in her stammered speaking to Victor.

She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could repeat: ‘The mother!—the daughter!’ hearing the world’s words:—the daughter excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother unpitied for the bruiting of her brazen daughter’s name: but both alike consigned to the corners of the world’s dust-heaps. She cried out, that her pride was broken. Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to pieces. The tears she restrained in Victor’s presence, were called on to come now, and she had none. It might be, that she had not strength for weeping. She was very weak. Rising from bed to lock her door against Nesta’s entry to the room on her return at night, she could hardly stand: a chill and a clouding overcame her. The quitted bed seemed the haven of a drifted wreck to reach.

Victor tried the handle of a locked door in the dark of the early winter morning. ‘The mother!—the daughter!’ had swung a pendulum for some time during the night in him, too. He would rather have been subjected to the spectacle of tears than have heard that toneless voice, as it were the dry torrent-bed rolling blocks instead of melodious, if afflicting, waters.

He told Nesta not to disturb her mother, and murmured of a headache: ‘Though, upon my word, the best cure for mama would be a look into Fredi’s eyes!’ he said, embracing his girl, quite believing in her, just a little afraid of her.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN

Pleasant things, that come to us too late for our savour of the sweetness in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk to its end. Yesterday, before Dudley Sowerby’s visit, Nataly would have been stirred where the tears we shed for happiness or repress at a flattery dwell when seeing her friend Mrs. John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing her speak repentantly, most tenderly. Mrs. John said: ‘You will believe I have suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think’: and she did not set the smile of responsive humour moving; although these two ladies had a key of laughter between them. Nataly took her kiss; held her hand, and at the parting kissed her. She would rather have seen her friend than not: so far she differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to the dead in the insensibility to any change of light shining on one who best loved darkness and silence. She cried to herself wilfully, that her pride was broken: as women do when they spurn at the wounding of a dignity they cannot protect and die to see bleeding; for in it they live.

The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and after a certain space for recovery combative. She said:

Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not refuse; I would humble myself and bless heaven for being able to pay my debt—what I can of it. All I contend against is, injustice. And she sank into sensational protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud to phrase them.

Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter loneliness;—an outcast from her family; daily, and she knew not how, more shut away from the man she loved; now shut away from her girl;—seemed under the hand of the angel of God. The abandonment of her by friends, was merely the light to show it.

Midday’s post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves, entreating to be allowed to call on her next day.—We are not so easily cast off! Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the lady whose offending had not been so great. She wrote: ‘Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.’

Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the receipt of Priscilla’s empty letter: for her soul’s desire was to be doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance to herself of the courage to make amends.—I must have some strength, she said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.

Nesta’s being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation. Doubts of the girl’s possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth that could: and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting to reason: and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational leap, and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to the divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal spot for chastisement. She clasped her breast, and said: It is mortal. And that calmed her.

She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came! Therefore the blow was proved divine. Ought it not to be welcomed?—and she appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex! And brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!

Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice. She had denied herself to Nesta’s redoubled petition. Nesta knocking at the door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways: to have her girl on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge. She heard the voice of Dartrey Fenellan.

He was admitted. ‘No, dear,’ she said to Nesta; and Nesta’s, ‘My own mother,’ consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired, sprang a stinging tear to the mother’s eyelids.

Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.

‘Is it a very low woman?’ Nataly asked him in a Church whisper, with a face abashed.

‘It is not,’ said he, quick to meet any abruptness.

‘She must be cunning.’

‘In the ordinary way. We say it of Puss before the hounds.’

‘To deceive a girl like Nesta!’

‘She has done no harm.’

‘Dartrey, you speak to a mother. You have seen the woman? She is?—ah!’

‘She is womanly, womanly.’

‘Quite one of those…?’

‘My dear soul! You can’t shake them off in that way. She is one of us. If we have the class, we can’t escape from it. They are not to bear all the burden because they exist. We are the bigger debtors. I tell you she is womanly.’

‘It sounds like horrid cynicism.’

‘Friends of mine would abuse it for the reverse.’

‘Do not make me hate your chivalry. This woman is a rod on my back. Provided only she has not dropped venom into Nesta’s mind!’

‘Don’t fear!’

‘Can you tell me you think she has done no harm to my girl?’

‘To Nesta herself?—not any: not to a girl like your girl.’

‘To my girl’s name? Speak at once. But I know she has. She induced Nesta to go to her house. My girl was insulted in this woman’s house.’

Dartrey’s forehead ridged with his old fury and a gust of present contempt. ‘I can tell you this, that the fellow who would think harm of it, knowing the facts ‘s not worthy of touching the tips of the fingers of your girl.’

‘She is talked of!’

‘A good-looking girl out riding with a handsome woman on a parade of idlers!’

‘The woman is notorious.’ Nataly said it shivering.

He shook his head. ‘Not true.’

‘She has an air of a lady?’

‘She sits a horse well.’

‘Would she to any extent deceive me—impose on me here?’

‘No.’

‘Ah!’ Nataly moaned....

‘But what?’ said Dartrey. ‘There was no pretence. Her style is not worse than that of some we have seen. There was no effort to deceive. The woman’s plain for you and me to read, she has few of the arts; one or two tricks, if you like: and these were not needed for use. There are women who have them, and have not been driven or let slip into the wilderness.’

‘Yes; I know!—those ideas of yours!’ Nataly had once admired him for his knightliness toward the weakest women and the women underfoot. ‘You have spoken to this woman? She boasted of acquaintance with Nesta?’

‘She thanked God for having met her.’

‘Is it one of the hysterical creatures?’

Mrs. Marsett appeared fronting Dartrey.

He laughed to himself. ‘A clever question. There is a leaning to excitement of manner at times. It ‘s not hysteria. Allow for her position.’

Nataly took the unintended blow, and bowed to it; and still more harshly said: ‘What rank of life does the woman come from?’

‘The class educated for a skittish career by your popular Stage and your Book-stalls. I am not precise?’

‘Leave Mr. Durance. Is she in any degree commonly well bred?… behaviour, talk-her English.’

‘I trench on Mr. Durance in replying. Her English is passable. You may hear…’

‘Everywhere, of course! And this woman of slipshod English and excited manners imposed upon Nesta!’