One of Our Conquerors. Complete

‘It would not be my opinion.’

‘Did not impose on her!’

‘Not many would impose on Nesta Radnor for long.’

‘Think what that says, Dartrey!’

‘You have had a detestable version of the story.’

‘Because an excited creature thanks God to you for having met her!’

‘She may. She’s a better woman for having met her. Don’t suppose we’re for supernatural conversions. The woman makes no show of that. But she has found a good soul among her sex—her better self in youth, as one guesses; and she is grateful—feels farther from exile in consequence. She has found a lady to take her by the hand!—not a common case. She can never go to the utterly bad after knowing Nesta. I forget if she says it; I say it. You have heard the story from one of your conventional gentlemen.’

‘A true gentleman. I have reason to thank him. He has not your ideas on these matters, Dartrey. He is very sensitive… on Nesta’s behalf.’

‘With reference to marriage. I’ll own I prefer another kind of gentleman. I ‘ve had my experience of that kind of gentleman. Many of the kind have added their spot to the outcasts abominated for uncleanness—in holy unction. Many?—I won’t say all; but men who consent to hear black words pitched at them, and help to set good women facing away from them, are pious dolts or rascal dogs of hypocrites. They, if you’ll let me quote Colney Durance to you to-day—and how is it he is not in favour?—they are tempting the Lord to turn the pillars of Society into pillars of salt. Down comes the house. And priests can rest in sight of it!—They ought to be dead against the sanctimony that believes it excommunicates when it curses. The relationship is not dissolved so cheaply, though our Society affects to think it is. Barmby’s off to the East End of this London, Victor informs me:—good fellow! And there he’ll be groaning over our vicious nature. Nature is not more responsible for vice than she is for inhumanity. Both bad, but the latter’s the worse of the two.’

Nataly interposed: ‘I see the contrast, and see whom it’s to strike.’

Dartrey sent a thought after his meaning. ‘Hardly that. Let it stand. He ‘s only one with the world: but he shares the criminal infamy for crushing hope out of its frailest victims. They’re that—no sentiment. What a world, too, look behind it!—brutal because brutish. The world may go hang: we expect more of your gentleman. To hear of Nesta down there, and doubt that she was about good work; and come complaining! He had the privilege of speaking to her, remonstrating, if he wished. There are men who think—men!—the plucking of sinners out of the mire a dirty business. They depute it to certain officials. And your women—it’s the taste of the world to have them educated so, that they can as little take the humane as the enlightened view. Except, by the way, sometimes, in secret;—they have a sisterly breast. In secret, they do occasionally think as they feel. In public, the brass mask of the Idol they call Propriety commands or supplies their feelings and thoughts. I won’t repeat my reasons for educating them differently. At present we have but half the woman to go through life with—and thank you.’

Dartrey stopped. ‘Don’t be disturbed,’ he added. ‘There’s no ground for alarm. Not of any sort.’

Nataly said: ‘What name?’

‘Her name is Mrs. Marsett.’

‘The name is…?’

‘Captain Marsett: will be Sir Edward. He came back from the Continent yesterday.’

A fit of shuddering seized Nataly. It grew in violence, and speaking out of it, with a pause of sickly empty chatter of the jaws, she said: ‘Always that name?’

‘Before the maiden name? May have been or not.’

‘Not, you say?’

‘I don’t accurately know.’

Dartrey sprang to his legs. ‘My dear soul! dear friend—one of the best! if we go on fencing in the dark, there’ll be wounds. Your way of taking this affair disappointed me. Now I understand. It’s the disease of a trouble, to fly at comparisons. No real one exists. I wished to protect the woman from a happier sister’s judgement, to save you from alarm concerning Nesta:—quite groundless, if you’ll believe me. Come, there’s plenty of benevolent writing abroad on these topics now: facts are more looked at, and a good woman may join us in taking them without the horrors and loathings of angels rather too much given to claim distinction from the luckless. A girl who’s unprotected may go through adventures before she fixes, and be a creature of honest intentions. Better if protected, we all agree. Better also if the world did not favour the girl’s multitude of enemies. Your system of not dealing with facts openly is everyway favourable to them. I am glad to say, Victor recognizes what corruption that spread of wealth is accountable for. And now I must go and have a talk with the—what a change from the blue butterfly! Eaglet, I ought to have said. I dine with you, for Victor may bring news.’

‘Would anything down there be news to you, Dartrey?’

‘He makes it wherever he steps.’

‘He would reproach me for not detaining you. Tell Nesta I have to lie down after talking. She has a child’s confidence in you.’

A man of middle age! he said to himself. It is the particular ejaculation which tames the senior whose heart is for a dash of holiday. He resolved, that the mother might trust to the discretion of a man of his age; and he went down to Nesta, grave with the weight his count of years should give him. Seeing her, the light of what he now knew of her was an ennobling equal to celestial. For this fair girl was one of the active souls of the world—his dream to discover in woman’s form. She, the little Nesta, the tall pure-eyed girl before him, was, young though she was, already in the fight with evil: a volunteer of the army of the simply Christian. The worse for it? Sowerby would think so. She was not of the order of young women who, in sheer ignorance or in voluntary, consent to the peace with evil, and are kept externally safe from the smirch of evil, and are the ornaments of their country, glory of a country prizing ornaments higher than qualities.

Dartrey could have been momentarily incredulous of things revealed by Mrs. Marsett—not incredulous of the girl’s heroism: that capacity he caught and gauged in her shape of head, cut of mouth, and the measurements he was accustomed to make at a glance:—but her beauty, or the form of beauty which was hers, argued against her having set foot of thought in our fens. Here and far there we meet a young saint vowed to service along by those dismal swamps: and saintly she looks; not of this earth. Nesta was of the blooming earth. Where do we meet girl or woman comparable to garden-flowers, who can dare to touch to lift the spotted of her sex? He was puzzled by Nesta’s unlikeness in deeds and in aspect. He remembered her eyes, on the day when he and Colonel Sudley beheld her; presently he was at quiet grapple with her mind. His doubts cleared off. Then the question came, How could a girl of heroical character be attached to the man Sowerby? That entirely passed belief.

And was it possible his wishes beguiled his hearing? Her tones were singularly vibrating.

They talked for a while before, drawing a deep breath, she said: ‘I fancy I am in disgrace with my mother.’

‘You have a suspicion why?’ said he.

‘I have.’

She would have told him why: the words were at her lips. Previous to her emotion on the journey home, the words would have come out. They were arrested by the thunder of the knowledge, that the nobleness in him drawing her to be able to speak of scarlet matter, was personally worshipped.

He attributed the full rose upon her cheeks to the forbidding subject.

To spare pain, he said: ‘No misunderstanding with the dear mother will last the day through. Can I help?’

‘Oh, Captain Dartrey!’

‘Drop the captain. Dartrey will do.’

‘How could I!’

‘You’re not wanting in courage, Nesta.’

‘Hardly for that!’

‘By-and-by, then.’

‘Though I could not say Mr. Fenellan.’

‘You see; Dartrey, it must be.’

‘If I could!’

‘But the fellow is not a captain: and he is a friend, an old friend, very old friend: he’ll be tipped with grey in a year or two.’

‘I might be bolder then.’

‘Imagine it now. There is no disloyalty in your calling your friends by their names.’

Her nature rang to the implication. ‘I am not bound.’ Dartrey hung fast, speculating on her visibly: ‘I heard you were?’

‘No. I must be free.’

‘It is not an engagement?’

‘Will you laugh?—I have never quite known. My father desired it: and my desire is to please him. I think I am vain enough to think I read through blinds and shutters. The engagement—what there was—has been, to my reading, broken more than once. I have not considered it, to settle my thoughts on it, until lately: and now I may suspect it to be broken. I have given cause—if it is known. There is no blame elsewhere. I am not unhappy, Captain Dartrey.’

‘Captain by courtesy. Very well. Tell me how Nesta judges the engagement to be broken?’

She was mentally phrasing before she said: ‘Absence.’

‘He was here yesterday.’

All that the visit embraced was in her expressive look, as of sight drawing inward, like our breath in a spell of wonderment. ‘Then I understand; it enlightens me.

My own mother!—my poor mother! he should have come to me. I was the guilty person, not she; and she is the sufferer. That, if in life were direct retribution! but the very meaning of having a heart, is to suffer through others or for them.’

‘You have soon seen that, dear girl,’ said Dartrey.

‘So, my own mother, and loving me as she does, blames me!’ Nesta sighed; she took a sharp breath. ‘You? do you blame me too?’

He pressed her hand, enamoured of her instantaneous divination and heavenly candour.

But he was admonished, that to speak high approval would not be honourable advantage taken of the rival condemning; and he said: ‘Blame? Some think it is not always the right thing to do the right thing. I’ve made mistakes, with no bad design. A good mother’s view is not often wrong.’

‘You pressed my hand,’ she murmured.

That certainly had said more.

‘Glad to again,’ he responded. It was uttered airily and was meant to be as lightly done.

Nesta did not draw back her hand. ‘I feel strong when you press it.’ Her voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing thin at the filling, ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged. How was he to relax the pressure!—he had to give her the strength she craved: and he vowed it should be but for half a minute, half a minute longer.

Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of sunlight in shower.

‘Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,’ he said; and her gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.

He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud lighting it for a revealment, that allowed as little as it retained of a shadow of obscurity.

The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood with blood to quicken slumbering seeds of passion.

But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which calls to honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to guard the gunlock. He stopped the word at his mouth. It was not in him to stop or moderate the force of his eyes. She met them with the slender unbendingness that was her own; a feminine of inspirited manhood. There was no soft expression, only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying as much as is borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun. And when such an exchange has come between the two, they are past plighting, they are the wedded one.

Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved. She was his. She had not a thought of the word of love or the being beloved. Showers of painful blissfulness went through her, as the tremours of a shocked frame, while she sat quietly, showing scarce a sign; and after he had let her hand go, she had the pressure on it. The quivering intense of the moment of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day and of all days coming. That is how Love slays Death. Never did girl so give her soul.

She would have been the last to yield it unreservedly to a man untrusted for the character she worshipped. But she could have given it to Dartrey, despite his love of another, because it was her soul, without any of the cravings, except to bestow.

He perceived, that he had been carried on for the number of steps which are countless miles and do not permit the retreat across the desert behind; and he was in some amazement at himself, remindful of the different nature of our restraining power when we have a couple playing on it. Yet here was this girl, who called him up to the heights of young life again: and a brave girl; and she bled for the weak, had no shrinking from the women underfoot: for the reason, that she was a girl sovereignly pure, angelically tender. Was there a point of honour to hold him back?

Nataly entered the room. She kissed Nesta, and sat silent.

‘Mother, will you speak of me to him, if I go out?’ Nesta said.

‘We have spoken,’ her mother replied, vexed by the unmaidenly allusion to that theme.

She would have asked, How did you guess I knew of it?—but that the Why should I speak of you to him? struck the louder note in her bosom: and then, What is there that this girl cannot guess!—filled the mother’s heart with apprehensive dread: and an inward cry, What things will she not set going, to have them discussed. And the appalling theme, sitting offensive though draped in their midst, was taken for a proof of the girl’s unblushingness. After standing as one woman against the world so long, Nataly was relieved to be on the side of a world now convictedly unjust to her in the confounding of her with the shameless. Her mind had taken the brand of that thought:—And Nesta had brought her to it:—And Dudley Sowerby, a generous representative of the world, had kindly, having the deputed power to do so, sustained her, only partially blaming Nesta, not casting them off; as the world, with which Nataly felt, under a sense of the protection calling up all her gratitude to young Dudley, would have approved his doing.

She was passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously strained, who are being more than commonly tried—persecuted, as they say when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for aid. The world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it and behaviour toward it until it ceases to encourage the growth of hypocrites.

These are moments when the faces we are observing drop their charm, showing us our perversion internal, if we could but reflect, to see it. Very many thousand times above Dudley Sowerby, Nataly ranked Dartrey Fenellan; and still she looked at him, where he sat beside Nesta, ungenially, critical of the very features, jealously in the interests of Dudley; and recollecting, too, that she had once prayed for one exactly resembling Dartrey Fenellan to be her Nesta’s husband. But, as she would have said, that was before the indiscretion of her girl had shown her to require for her husband a man whose character and station guaranteed protection instead of inciting to rebellion. And Dartrey, the loved and prized, was often in the rebel ranks; he was dissatisfied with matters as they are; was restless for action, angry with a country denying it to him; he made enemies, he would surely bring down inquiries about Nesta’s head, and cause the forgotten or quiescent to be stirred; he would scarcely be the needed hand for such a quiver of the lightnings as Nesta was.

Dartrey read Nataly’s brows. This unwonted uncomeliness of hers was an indication to one or other of our dusky pits, not a revealing.

CHAPTER XXXIX. A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT

He read her more closely when Arlington brought in the brown paper envelope of the wires—to which the mate of Victor ought to have become accustomed. She took it; her eyelids closed, and her features were driven to whiteness. ‘Only these telegrams,’ she said, in apology.

‘Lakelands on fire?’ Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered: ‘I should not be sorry.’

Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.

Dartrey interposed: ‘I’m sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.’

‘That ranks low among the worries,’ Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.

Nesta touched her arm: ‘Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will let me!’—she turned to him: ‘before…’ at the end of her breath she said: ‘Dartrey Fenellan. You shall see my whole heart, mother.’

Her mother looked from her at him.

‘Victor returns by the last train. He telegraphs, that he dines with—’ She handed the paper to Dartrey.

‘Marsett,’ he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for not knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.

‘It’s to tell you he has done what he thought good,’ said Dartrey. ‘In other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter’s work. So we won’t talk about it till he comes. You have no company this evening?’

‘Oh! there is a pause to-night! It’s nearly as unceasing as your brother Simeon’s old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom, till they danced her to pieces. I do get now and then an hour’s repose,’ Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story had applied.

‘My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,’ the owner of the name said to Nesta.

Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for the directest of the bare statements. She could have protested, that her love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her regard for decency was livelier. Pass the deficiency in a man. But a girl who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett—of the existence of a Mrs. Marsett—in the presence of a man: and he excusing, encouraging: and this girl her own girl;—it seemed to her, that the world reeled; she could hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential admission of her sin’s having found her out.

She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable to endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at Dartrey’s nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night. It was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a manner of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and an offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they are!

For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known, that Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the abominable Mrs. Marsett’s friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.

Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl’s embrace, against whom her door was jealously locked. She hoped those two would talk much, madly if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible, through any short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially glowing in Nesta, ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth. But both of them were mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear, that they might fall on her to capture her and hurry her along with them perforce of the allayed, once fatal, inflammable element in herself, shook the warmth from her limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a ragged hoarseness, very strangely: Every thought of mine now has a physical effect on me!

They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them. Yet she saw the girl’s heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or for joy of an unmaidenly confession. During dinner they talked, without distressful pauses. Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another drop in Nesta’s foolish happy cup. Could it be all because Dartrey Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman? The mother had lost hold of her. The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.

Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the truth of man’s list of charges against her sex, starting from their capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it. This led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts, and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and the thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again, and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where she stood. She heard Dartrey’s praise of Nesta’s voice for tearing her mother’s bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.

At last, after midnight Victor arrived.

Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain. ‘Pray, go, dear,’ her mother said. Victor kissed his Fredi. ‘Some time to-morrow,’ said he; and she forbore to beseech him.

He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey’s hand for the good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.

Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do another? Nataly could merely observe. A voice pertaining to no one present, said in her ear:—Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter’s faces for less than that!—It was the voice of her incapacity to cope with the girl. She watched Nesta’s passage from the room, somewhat affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.

‘And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!’ Victor exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl. ‘I promised Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps. You remember, mama?—down in the West Highlands. Fancy the dear bit of bundle, Dartrey!—we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or eight; and there she lay wide awake. “What ‘s Fredi thinking of?”—“I’m thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada.”—She could climb them now; she has the legs.’

Nataly said: ‘You have some report to make. You dined with those people?’

‘The Marsetts: yes:—well-suited couple enough. It’s to happen before Winter ends—at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring. Fredi’s doing! He has to manage, arrange.—She’s a good-looking woman, good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too: she won’t make a bad Lady Marsett. Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to her eyelids.’

‘Come to me before you go to bed,’ Nataly said, rising, her voice foundering; ‘Good-night, Dartrey.’

She turned to the door; she could not trust herself to shake hands with composure. Not only was it a nauseous mixture she was forced to gulp from Victor, it burned like a poison.

‘Really Fredi’s doing—chiefly,’ said Victor, as soon as Dartrey and he were alone, comfortably settled in the smoking-room. ‘I played the man of pomp with Marsett—good heavy kind of creature: attached to the woman. She’s the better horse, as far as brains go. Good enough Lady Marsett. I harped on Major Worrell: my daughter insulted. He knew of it—spoke of you properly. The man offered all apologies; he has told the Major he is no gentleman, not a fit associate for gentlemen:—quite so—and has cut him dead. Will marry her, as I said, make her as worthy as he can of the honour of my daughter’s acquaintance. Rather comical grimace, when he vowed he’d fasten the tie. He doesn’t like marriage. But, he can’t give her up. And she’s for patronizing the institution. But she is ready to say good-bye to him “rather than see the truest lady in the world insulted”—her words. And so he swallows his dose for health, and looks a trifle sourish. Antecedents, I suppose: has to stomach them. But if a man’s fond of a woman—if he knows he saves her from slipping lower—and it’s an awful world, for us to let a woman be under its wheels:—I say, a woman who has a man to lean on, unless she’s as downright corrupt as two or three of the men we’ve known:—upon my word, Dartrey, I come round to some of your ideas on these matters. It’s this girl of mine, this wee bit of girl in her little nightshirt with the frill, astonishes me most:—“thinking of the tops of the mountains at night!” She has positively done the whole of this work-main part. I smiled when I left the house, to have to own our little Fredi starting us all on the road. It seems, Marsett had sworn he would; amorous vow, you know; he never came nearer to doing it. I hope it’s his better mind now; I do hope the man won’t have cause to regret it. He speaks of Nesta—sort of rustic tone of awe. Mrs. Marsett has impressed him. He expects the title soon, will leave the army—the poor plucked British army, as you call it!—and lead the life of a country squire: hunting! Well, it’s not only the army, it’s over Great Britain, with this infernal wealth of ours!—and all for pleasure—eh?—or Paradise lost for a sugar plum! Eh, Dartrey? Upon my word, it appears to me, Esau’s the Englishman, Jacob the German, of these times. I wonder old Colney hasn’t said it. If we’re not plucked, as your regiments are of the officers who have learnt their work, we’re emasculated:—the nation’s half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle.’