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THE WORKS OF
GEORGE MEREDITH

MEMORIAL EDITION

VOLUME

XVII

GEORGE MEREDITH

ONE OF
OUR CONQUERORS

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1910

f I : it Ahy

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A 90^B3(o

1,1 ll/iilCD

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE 1

II. THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE 10

HI. OLD VEUVE 17

IV. THE SECOND BOTTLE 25

V. THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD .... 36

VI. NATALY 47

VII. BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND

A PROFESSIONAL 58

VIII. SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS 71

IX. AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS .... 81

X. SKEPSEY IN MOTION 95

XI. WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF

LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE . . 109
XII. TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH
MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD HAVING ONE

HEART 122

XIII. THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN . . 129

XIV. DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS . . 142

vi ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

CHAP. ^ rAOV

XV. A PATRIOT ABROAD 157

XVI. ACCOUNTS FOE SKEPSEY's MISCONDUCT, SHOWING

HOW IT AFFECTED NATALY .... 166
XVU. CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAId's

IMAGININGS 177

XVIII. SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA . 188
XIX. TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND
THE DISSENSION BETWEEN THEM AND OF A
satirist's MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF
HIS COUNTRY 203

XX. THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS . . 223

XXI. DARTRE Y FENELLAN 238

XXII. CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN . . 258

XXIII. TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN

INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS EFFECTS PRODUCED

BY VERY MINOR CAUSES 268

XXIV. NESTA's ENGAGEMENT 284

XXV. NATALY IN ACTION 301

XXVI. IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLE-
MAN ENDEAVOURING TO EXAMINE A SPECTRE
OF HIMSELF . . . . . . . 313

XXVII. CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A
GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE CHIEF ACTOR
MAY DECIDE 320

CONTENTS vii

CHAP. PAGB

XXVIII. MRS. MARSETT 329

XXIX. SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD

CROSSING A virgin's MIND .... 344
XXX. THE BURDEN UPON NESTA .... 352
XXXI. SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S
SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO DO KNIGHTLY
CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES .... 365
XXXII. SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER
AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET HER
WEAPON 380

XXXIII. A PAIR OF WOOERS 389

XXXIV. CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS

OF FEELINGS 402

XXXV. IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD
LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN ABYSMAL DARK-
NESS 414

XXXVI. NESTA AND HER FATHER .... 422

XXXVII. THE MOTHER — THE DAUGHTER . . . 437

XXXVIII. NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN . 448

XXXIX. A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 461

XL. AN EXPIATION 478

XLI. THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED

SPEECH 490

XLIl. THE LAST 505

ILLUSTRATIONS

GEORGE MEREDITH, AGED 69 . . . Frontispiece

From a photograph taken by Mrs, H. P. Sturgis.

DEEDX, THE king's CHAPEL . . Facing page 156

This Mausoleum of the House of Orleans is situated
on rising ground above the town of Dreux in
Normandy, a neighbourhood much frequented by
the Author between the years 1865 and 1875.

ONE OF OUB CONQUEROES

ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

CHAPTER I

ACHOSS 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 passen-
gers, and now laid this one flat amid the shufile 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 in-
quiries of the first kind helper at his elbow; and it ap-
peared 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 thor-
oughly 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,

2 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

confound the fellow !' he said, with simple frankness,
and was humorously rufHed, having seen absurd blots of
smutty knuckles distributed over the maiden waistcoat.

His outcry was no more than the confidential communi-
cation 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. More-
over, 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-cen-
tury 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

ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE 3

ostentatious garment shall appear disdainful of our class
and ourself, and coin of the realm has not usurped com-
mand 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 hos-
tility, 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_mthjjDQem^^2jK^

mous"Beast"comprehensible only when it applauded him ;
a;rifl~besi3erTie~wisKe3rTE~vfiimly~w was good

for it ; plentiful dinners, country excursions, stout menag-
erie 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 pur-
pose, it would seem ; and they come in rattle-boxes, they

4 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 interro-
gations, 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 sug-
gested, 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 news-
paper 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

ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE 5

missed a step, or owned to the shortest of collapaea. Thifj
confession of deficiency in explosive repartee^T-using a
friend's terin for,thir^S£g2E:::SSaa anjpMjand^ajue^l
one with Victor Ra^ior. 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 imable 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 discem-
ibly 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 crea-
tures, 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 des-
tinies : especially upon England's grandeur, vitality,

6 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 sum-
moning 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
modem 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

ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE 7

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 fabu-
lously 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

8 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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
i quotable at festive boards. This he can promise to his

V^ S

"*-' f.

poets. As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce
invoked is a Goddess that will have the reek of those
(i ' gboards to fill her nostrils, and poet and alderman alike may
5/*-nbe 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 river-
side, 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 !
J 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 com-
pose 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 Com-
merce, we shoot scornfully past those blazing bellied win-
dows 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 hill-
ocks, and Death and Man are at grip for the haul.

ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE 9

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 bow-legs 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 sea-
men (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 wag.,an idea in it. . . . .

A short run or attempt at running after the idea, ended

ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

.,\:y-

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. Inch-
ling'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
Z^* , extirpation enemy of this idea, or she was by nature shy.
V / She was very feminine ; coming when she willed and fly-
^ ing when wanted. Not untU nigh upon the close of his
I history did she return, full-statured and embraceable, to
' M^ictor Radnor.

CHAPTER II

THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE

Mllllr

The fair dealing with readers demands of us, that a nar-
rative 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 considera-
tion 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

THROUGH VAGUE TO INFINITELY LITTLE 11

the man's mind at home while he performs the deeds be-
fitting him: he can indeed be rapid. Whether more
active, is a question asking for your notions of the govern-
ing element in the composition of man, and of his 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 whUe 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

.Egskaitm^ ,.,^^ " " "

After"Eis iSffectual 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 m fancy over the couple beseeching him, he loos-
ened the button across his defaced waistcoat, exposed a
large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on Nor-
wegian peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh — horrid

12 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 ttun-
bled hostj^aIi^h|hoiyig^y^iJigad„.MJ^^^^^ The

coursing ^Tns^Sod 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 suc-
cessive 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.

NaturaUyhe was ^among the^hagpiest of human crea-
tures ; { he wineHTTsoTwitlirconsent 6T"cifcums'tances ; a
""ISoist'effes^ consent, "as when votes are reckoned for a
lavouHte candidate : excepting on the part of a small
T5an3!''orBIacF"Sssentients 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? ShaJI
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,

THROUGH VAGUE TO INFINITELY LITTLE 13

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 dis-
tinctions, 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 f(
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 flewJiaifcJi.a.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 mem-
bers of it, had pushed him to the trial once or twice — or
had put on an air of doiag so; creating a temporary

14 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 homoeo-
pathic globule : and a playful fancy may do that or any-
thing. 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 slope where the
seas of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their

THROUGH VAGUE TO INFINITELY LITTLE 15

drift, he stood contemplating the not unamiable, repose-
fully-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 be-
hind 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, amo^tEose wheels ;
aM'""Eis~nerves~cIurcEe'g'' him; ltk§" a Irdop of hotiSehold
women7to"'Eep him from the hazard of an exposure to
the horrid cruncET'pi^iI^'ys tigef^^tBetKj and we"mSty
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 Fenel-
lan, knew the voice, and laughed: 'You?' He straight-
ened 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 untU they had reached the pave-
ment, when Mr. Fenellan said : ' I '11 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.

16 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'We '11 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 inti-
mation of a touch on domestic affairs caused sinkings
• ,f, I "in^^Es^vacuity," much as though EsTieart were having

'"'^ \£mZ. '"""""" "'

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.

OLD VEUVE 17

CHAPTER III

OLD VEUVE

They were known at the house of the turtle and the
attractive Old Veuve : a champagne of a sobered sweet-
ness, of a great year, a great age, counting up to the ex-
tremer 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 has 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 saccha-
rine : by miracle, one would say, were it not for our knowl-
edge 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 miravelment. For the subject
opens to deeper than cellars, and is a tree with vast rami-
fications 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

18 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be
asserted (assuming the great year for the wine, i.e. com-
binations 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 confi-
dently, be said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of aus-
picious 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 toler-
,-«''a,nce of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiver-
*'"" ings 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 comer, 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 sether), 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, eye-
ing 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.'

OLD VEUVE 19

'They '11 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 inspira-
tion 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 San-
fredini'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 mar-
vellous ! 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 grovmds 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

20 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 oflace.
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 sus-
picion 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.'

OLD VEUVE 21

'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 ediJSce.'

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 iato 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 partic-
ular 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 nationSj_whifih„SKDuld <■
not imitaite_a^awdusjyLionjto^^ Inces-

sanflly^they scream and sharpen talons.

'They crack the City bubbles and bladders, at all
events,' Mr. FeneUan 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.'

22 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'No, no ; it 's a niggardly national purse, not the jour-
nals,' 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 Parlia-
ment. 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
J 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 " individual-
ismus" being anothei>name for selfishness, and showing
the usual deficiency in external features ; it 's an individ-
ualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky,
each fellow his own way. Well, then, conscript them, and
they '11 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 guar-
antee a trusty army and navy under a contract, at two-
thirds of the present cost. We '11 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

OLD VEUVE 23

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
hght of his remarks and in opposition to them, after the
critical fashion of intimates who tiow 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 iaterview: — 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 Lake-
lands for good ! Nothing mortal moves me !'

24 ONE OF OUR CONQUEROES

'That butler of hers '

' Jamiman, you mean : he 's her butler, yes, the scoun-
drel— 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 Jamiman: 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 countrv. We
all three have theTeeling. 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 nightin-
gales 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 /aces 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

THE SECOND BOTTLE 25

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 aU 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 door-
way 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 illumi-
nation 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 le^,
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

26 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

not appear of national importance. Ladies are against.
They decline their signatures ; and ladies have great influ-
ence ; 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 Ex-
change 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 suppli-
cated 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

THE SECOND BOTTLE 27

that. And I am particular in proposing an exercise inde-
pendent 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, imsure of the signification of
monastic.

'I was a bit of a boxer once,' Mr. Fenellan said, con-
scious 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 sum-
mary 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.'

28 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

' 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 boast-
ing.

' 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 wiU 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 re-
treated 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^jag-
^op Doll, on the gallows ot over][H'oduction. 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.

THE SECOND BOTTLE 29

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
aflBrmed.

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 edifica-
tion of the admiring couple.

'Take heart, Benjamin,' said Mr. -Fenellan; 'it 's only

30 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 per-
petuate 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 ta
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

THE SECOND BOTTLE 31

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 '11 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
bmld 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 tUl 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.'

32 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'It looks as if she were only inexorably human,' said
Mr. FeneUan, 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 recimi-
bents 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 con-
sent 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
j/i'^ y/^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
sher, I could beg forgiveness.'

A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his fore-
head.

' 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

THE SECOND BOTTLE 33

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. Eigh-
teen— 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, hke 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 busi-
ness 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 pur-
poses 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 pvmiping 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.'

34 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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 utter-
ance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy.
u ii DartreyFenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed
i i <!' / and dishonoured him : and it was in Africa ! One would
" /' ^ have to go to Africa to be free of the galling. ButDartrey
ijMj'' ,/ had gone, and he was free! — ^The strange faint freaks of
f [ ,,■''' our sensations when struck to leap and throw off their load
, , 'j^, "' 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 ,rgUeyed of the jiumifitQUs drama
incessantly in the miodjaf-shackled-men.

It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine interven-
tion, 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, trusti-
ness, 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 con-
centrate an instant attention upon the substantial. 'You
dine with us. The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton,
Colney, Yatt, or Catkin: PriscUla Graves and Nataly:
the Rev. Septimus ; Cormyn and his wife : Young Dudley

THE SECOND BOTTLE 35

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 hope-
fully of his fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of
Dartrey's, ' I put it to you : would you say, that there is
anj^hing 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 happi-
ness 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 enter-
tain 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 stiU you
shall do the something more, which proves that the Wine-
god 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, whUe Simeon Fenellan

36 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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,

if" J, that partly explained the successful^jtonishing~caHer of

\)r Ji/' hiiftiend among a~jge^n]^^Eng™uTgent^ Jf unequal,

1 ' M^ ' ,. "H^^SlSF perpetually upm°stomacE 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 philosophi-
cal 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 Zoroas-
trian 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

THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD 37

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 singu-
lar people nourish their loyalty, since they cannot attest
to the continued being of the object in which they put their
faith. Hejs^informed by Msjjrostrate servant of a settled
habit they have of diligently^eeHngtheET^iyini'ty, hidden
above, below: and of copiously taSng 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. Worship-
ping, they march Eastward at mom. 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 leamt 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 commer-
cially, 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.

38 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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 appar-
ent 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 rnvtiud onion.

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 blueish
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 fain 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

THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD 39

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 com-
posure inside their persons, for drawing his Master's atten-
tion 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 'twioct 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, smok-
ing royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic
fray for possession of the portly dames. There is immen-
sity, swinging motion, collision, dusky richness of colour-
ing, 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-

40 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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
J 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 Artic^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 Conserva-
tism) would have them not to move on, that they may
preserve among beholders the impression of their hand-
some frontage. Night, however, will come; and they,
adoreing the decent face, are moved on, made to expose

THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD '4i,

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 discoimtenanced people
in their state of exposure. Up to the time of the explana-
tion 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-wLnged 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 sur-
face 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 Muiillo beggar is not more
precious than sight of London in any of the streets ad-
mitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sim'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 fo6ting, 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.

42 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

The figures of ^e hurtled fair ones in sk^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? Ex-
alted by the critics, they have, during the days of Exhibi-
tion, 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.

•^£Z§.Y5]l?iiEJ^?,?J2!ffilEr.Qi§£Solgifts,to the nation,
wETch would coat a sensitive name. Say, an ornameirtal
T^ty Square, flowers, fountains, afternoon bands of music :
comfortable seats in it, and a shelter, and a ready supply

THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD 43

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 ex-
cept for the sensitive social name, he was of single-minded
purpose.

Turning to the steps of a chemist's shop to get a prescrip-
tion 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 intima-
tions? 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 dis-
respectful 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

44 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the chemist's shop : and that belongs to the minor involu-
tions of circumstances and the will. It passed like a
river'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 ^ouple of Clowns and Pantaloons in our Panto-
mimes : 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 em-
brace 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 recon-
ciled 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

THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD 45

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. Not 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 arith-
metical column, down to a line of figures in addition, dur-
ing three paces of his feet. Dartrey Fenellan had said of
little Nesta once, that she had a nature pure and sparkhng
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
surroundingliou^J' and^e hada passion for the acquisi-
tion of money as a means. And it has to be confessed,
he had sacriticedTST 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

46 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 accept-
ance. 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 remorse-
lessly, 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

NATALY 47

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 for-
give.' A truly beautiful old phrase ! It thrilled one of
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 town-
house — unbeloved of the inhabitants, although by acknow-
ledgement 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

NATALT

'II segreto!' the girl cried commandingly, with a fore-
finger 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 iftast^^ave it, my papa ! unlock. I 've been spying
^e_Dird^on'its hedgerow nest so long ! "AndlES inoiTiiTi^
my own dear cunning papa, weren't you as bare as winter
twigs? ^'To^morrbyTpefEaps we willlKave a day in the

48 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

country." To go and see the nest? Only, please, not a
big one. A real nest ; where mama and I can wear dairy-
maid'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, itis . . .?'

'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?'

NATALY 49

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

'Then it is not a dear old house, like Craye and Creek-
holt?'

'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 miQutes, 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 siu-e.'

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 ia 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 longuig in the un-
blessed wife for a babe. For the secluded modest cottage
would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with
suspicions. . . .

50 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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 Tieard 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 imag-
ination 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 per-
fectly 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

NATALY 51

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 occasion-
ally 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 ab-
stract 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 unrea-
sonableness in the means — and the woman loving him

52 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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. JThere had
been occasions when her wish for the whole world to have~
^^ and exhibition of his greatness^ goodness, and sim-
plicity amidJLia„gif.ta^prompted hgr incitement of him
to sta,nd forth eminently ('lead a kingdom,' was the
phrase behind., the curtain within her shy bosom) ; and it
revealed her to herselfjUpon reflection, as being still
the Nataly who .drankJhe. jcup- with him,, to join her fatej
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
seeraed 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

NATALY 53

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 roUs 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,
wea£ingJiis^eyenkigjyhite.JiJ5EfiE over a more .open white
waistcoat ; and she was composed and uninquiring.
Their JNlestaTwas heard on the descent of the stairs, with
a rattle of Donizetti's II segreto to the skylights.

He performed his never-omitted lover's homage.

Nataly enfolded him in a homely smUe. 'A coimtry-
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 wiU
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, aJl 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?'

54 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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 any-
thing, 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

NATALY 55

"well. Fenellan has it from her lawyer — ^her lawyer! a
Mr. Carling ; a thoroughly trustworthy man.'

'Fenellan, as a reporter?'

"Thoroughly to be trusted on serious matters. I under-
stand 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 de-
ceiver 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 sincere-
ness, 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 possess-
ing 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 confi-
dence; 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 vague-
ness 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

56 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 FeneUan ; 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 neigh-
bour 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 FeneUan?'

NATALY 57

'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 actu-
ally a lucky fellow; and he would have mentioned the
circumstance confided to him by Simeon, but for a down-
right 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 Uttle country cottage which would have given her
such great happiness. She raised her eyes to him; she
could not check their filling; they were hke a river
carrying moonlight on the smooth roU 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 ravenous-
ness for facts. You must not expect to appease them
unless you administer sohds. 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.

58 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

CHAPTER VII

BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE 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 bub-
bling 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 privi-
leged; Mr. Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman's
conversation as he did, liked the warmth, and was flat-
tered 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. Carling said.

Fenellan fluted: 'Ah?' He had scent, in the eulogy
of a story grown flat as Election hats, of a good sort of

THE MAN OF THE WORLD 59

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 sUvery ring of the lady's laughter.

Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be con-
ferred 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 her-
self so boldly, but she had forgotten her bashful part and
spoilt the scene, though, lucidly for the damsel, her swain
was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, he
named the very next day of the year, and held her to it,
like the complimentary tjTant 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 wUl do what we can. You go Westward?'

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

'Perhaps by Co vent 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 an3^hing 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,

60 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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, touch-
ing 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 defer-
entially 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-honom-s. But she has the in-
dubitable 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.'

THE MAN OF THE WORLD 61

'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 per-
sonal attractions.

Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on
his wife to separate himself from a female pretender so
ludicrous ; he sought FeneUan'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 assur-
ance 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 char-
acters . . .'

' 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 in-
discriminate, where it mingled with the roar of London.

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

62 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'Many!'

' I back you, Mr. Carling.'

The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communi-
cation, 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 dispensa^
tions . . . 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 dis-
tribute 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 in-
debted 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.'

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

THE MAN OF THE WORLD 63

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

'By degrees, we may hope . . .'

'Society prudently shuns the topic ; and so '11 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 per-
sonally 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 fiddle-
string, 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

64 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 Romance ! 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 great-
est 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
kiad ... 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 MAN OF THE WORLD 65

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 '11 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
aJtar.'

'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 com-
binations 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 pros-
trating 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

66 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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.'

'HuUoa? — 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 '11 hope, you will be sitting with us
over a magnum of Victor Radnor's Romance Conti aged
thirty-one : a wine, you '11 say at the second glass, High
Priest for the celebration of the uncommon nuptials be-
tween the body and the soul of man.'

' You hit me rightly,' said Carling, tickled and touched ;
sensually excited by the bouquet of Victor Radnor's hos-
pitality 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.

THE MAN OF THE WORLD 67

I am Mrs. Burman 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 FeneUan, 'here's the case.
Miss Natalia Dreighton, of a good Yorkshire family — a
large one, reads an advertisement for the post of com-
panion 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 en-
couraged by Mrs. Burman 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. Burman cares to practise charity, she has only to
hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think 's
the name . . .'

Carling shrugged.

' Let her keep from striking, if she 's Christian,' pur-
sued FeneUan, '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. Carling !'

'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. —

68 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

And here 's London's garden of pines, bananas, oranges ;
all the droppings of the Hesperides here ! We don't re-
flect 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 '11 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 rec-
oncile 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, prov-
ing 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.'

Cariing 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 conse-
quently, that his exuberant flow could hardly be a mask;
and that an indication here and there of a trap in his talk,

THE MAN OF THE WORLD 69

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 Butter-
more! 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 our-
selves, they are men of the world.'

Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose
innermost imp burst out periodically, like a Dutch clock-
sentry, to trot on his own small groimds for thinking him-
self 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 ciu-ious — 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. Anj^hing you like ; but don't count on her. And
another thing — I 'm bound to say it of myself,' Carling

70 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

claimed close hearing of Fenellan over a shelf of salad-
stuff, '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 '11 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 JBiutter 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 '11 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 resi-
dence on the great Russell property, and the number of
the house, the hour of dinner next day. He then hung

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS 71

silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp
' WeU ? ' 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 doubt-
less knew as much of the wrong side of the worid 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 to-
gether 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 gener-
ally supposed. So she could determine to be cheerful in
the anticipation of an evening that would at least be rest^
ful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her heart, which was

72 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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. Physic-
ally 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 sur-
rounding 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

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS 73

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 sus-
picion that a quaint old high-frilled bleached and
puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts rose in
pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a descrip-
tion 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 benef-
icent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South
Africa, and his dealings with the natives in India, and his
Railways in South America, his establishment of Insur-
ance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the Stores
for the dispensing of soimd goods to the poor, attested it.
0 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 in-
comprehensible baseness.^ The dropping of acquaintance-
ship with him, after the taste oflts privHeges, sEe^ascribed,
in the void of any better elucidation^^to a_niania. of .aristo-
cratic conceit. It drove her, despite her youthful con-
tempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could find food

74 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even wlien 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 nobUity, in the naked-
ness 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 pene-
trated 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.

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS 75

'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 trans-
parent 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, FeneUan 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, manu-
facturer 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 oc-
casional clashes added a salient tastiness to the group :
of whom Nesta could say: 'Mama, was there ever such
a collection of dear good soiils with such contrary minds ? '
Her mother had the deepest of reasons for loving them.

76 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

so as not to wish to see the slightest change in their minds,
that the accustomed features making her nest of homeli-
ness 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 wineglasses. The
vegetarian gentleman's politeness forbore to direct atten-
tion 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 violon-
cello-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 Made-
moiselle 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 cousin-
ship 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 gam-
bling into the City, and that she had got herself into a

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS 77

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 nattire, 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 dis-
credited 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 be-
yond her stride, but if he was hiunorous, 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 ;

78 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 SeUles,
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 printed
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 in
hand, his mouth at the blow-stop was relieved of its
pained updraw by the form for puflSng; 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.

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS 79

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 capti-
vated Lady Grace. She said a word of it to FeneUan:
'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 raptiu-e; 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 pretend-
ing 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 com-
posure 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 imable to perceive, so as to
compute, the value of obscurer lights. Under the charm

80 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 pro-
visions 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 '11 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 after-
noon 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 trepida-
tion 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 Tun-
bridge Wells. By the way, they have a society down there
I want for Fredi. Sure, do you say, my dear? Per-
fectly sure. But the accumulation of invitations and
refusals in the end softens them, you will see. We shall
and must have them for Fredi.'

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS 81

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 be-
half 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 coloured 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

82 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 multifuderof
clashing sensations, and a throat-thicEening 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 abound-
ing 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 boast-
fully 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

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS 83

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.

Tredi'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 puflSng;
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 every-
body, everything; violently and universally love; and
so without intermission pay out the fat created by a rapid
assimilation of nutriment. Obeseness is the most sensi-
tive 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.

84 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

(i»J^, 'Our host is an instance in proof,' Colney said. He
i^\\ f, ^.'^^waved hand at the house. His meaning was hidden;
^^ (' If,^^-^',^ evidently he wanted victims. Sight of Lakelands had
d'^. t- gripped him with the fell satiric itch ; and it is a passion
I'i/v^ to sting and tear, on rational grounds. His face mean-
while, 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 — the
grand old English working with a wiIlT~as~EngIIshmen
do~wheh they come at last to heat; and they conquer,
• there is~then notEing thatTKey" cannot conquerT So the
y conqueror said.^T-And adniirable 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
slopes 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

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS 85

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, care-
fully 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^'^ yy ,
what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course) which \/^ V^
others cannot do ? Colney asks ; and he excludes cricket • \J'-i^^^
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 , j '

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 V ^
them to be. They give him so many opportunities. They L,V|
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, in-/
viting. Colney Durance allured them to the quag's edge ,
and plunged them in it, to writhe patriotically; and
although it maylje said, that theylelttFeir "situatTon 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;

86 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 in-
capacity 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 horns 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 PriscUla
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 aristo-
cratic 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 pro-
gressive in England than in other lands, but he was at
the disadvantage with the fair PriscUla, that eulogy of his

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS 87

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
snule, 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 re-
mark with a happy recognition of that which comes to
us from the hands of conquerors. Dr. Schlesien himself,
no antagonist to England, but Hke 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, oc-
casionally 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 cserulean Phryne.'

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

88 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

But Victor and Lady Grace rejected any play of con-
ceits 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 acqui-
escing to such a voice coming from such a garb. Conse-
quently, whenever Fenellan and Colney were at him,
drawing him this way and that for utterances cathedral
in sentiment and sonorousness, these ladies shed protect-
ing beams; insomuch that he was inspired to the agree-
able 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 Heffer-
stone, 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 Mari-
golds, 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

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS 89

proposed. Her countenance was inapprehensive. He per-
ceived 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 bill-
broker. But the fact is, close on London, we 're inde-
pendent 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 con-
gregations. 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 up-
raising 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.

90 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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

She repUed : '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, includ-
ing plantations, lake, outhouses.'

'Large enough; land paying as it does — that is, not
pajdng. We shall be having to gamble in the City system-
atically 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 wUl 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 comm(m to the loweF*
species of tEe^ace7j^^dmr£ling~a supm
or two ; which roigEFbepl^dedin 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.

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS 91

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 incom-
prehensible 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 bmld 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 HohenzoUerns !'

' It is true,' Dr. Schlesien called. ' No, but you learn dis-
cipline ; you build. I say wid you, not HohenzoUerns 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 iu
Music, in Jurisprudence, Chemistry, Scholarship, Beer,
Arms, Maimers.'

Dr. Schlesien puffed a tempest of tobacco and strode.

•92 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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 excel-
lent 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 '11 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 skirmish-
ing 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 Eis"campaignTo^om^^^^3]PoFi^^
'aM~argrear^bne. "He'lime^mBCTed^
tion ot theplan^all tEe^ements of it, the forward whirling
"oFTE77usF15e!ofeTEienfaironTCon35n~Bn^^
'Tess ofEs enlerpiTie laidTuc^TioId'oTETm ffial the smallest
of obstacles had a villanous aspect ; and when, as antici-
pated, Colney and Fenellan were sultry flies for whomso-
ever they could fret, he was blind to the reading of

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS 93

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 Due
d'Ariane's — ^finest in Em-ope. 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 waj^arer 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.

94 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 jhe recollected, that at the very edge of the fall he
had Armanoinestrongly inhis mind. She was to do her
part r Fenellan and Colney oh the surface, she below : and
hospitality was to do its part, and music was impressed
^^^^Finhoceht Concerns ; his wealth^alllus inventiveness
jyere to serve; — and merely, tp attract and win the tastes
of people, for a social support to Lakelands! Merely
that ? Much more :— -of JNataly 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 disap-
pointment, he perceived a meanness in the result, that was
astonishing and afflicting. _JBg,^had..Jiot~£v:.er„pi;e-viously
feltim^^tipL„sj^|:,^Qgj,|i„the vision of success. Victor_^
^TrniTyetibolearn, that the man with .§i„ro.aterial object .in
/ aim, is the^ gaian^ ofji^jobj ectj^and^the nearer to his mark,
S "oilen t£e farther is %,from a sober seIfT"Tie1Fm6fe' the^
/ arroworhis bow than bow to his arrow.^__This^we_payJor
[ 's^raS^T'^S^ic^^^^'^osfly; jye find we h^ve_pledged
tEe'T)etto'J,^r^r^KSJ^S^.to..j?lutdi to be re-

"cTeemed with the whole handful of our prize! He was,
Itowever, learmng 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 flap-
ping 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 be-
side her, on the descent to the terrace. Little Skepsey
hove in sight, coming swift as the point of an outrigger
over the flood.

SKEPSEY IN MOTION 95

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
Tate of speed, to do proper homage to the lady he so much
respected. He had left the railway-station on foot in-
stead of taking a fly, because of a calculation that he would
save three minutes ; which he had not lost for having to
oome 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

96 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the fragments of pic-nic, and poured champagne for him,
'lest his wife shoiild 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 haremecTopinion of
the unfitness of women in the Brave world of action. The
"^rSstence 6i 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 prompti-
tude 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

SKEPSEY IN MOTION 97

ladies had to keep down their anxious minds and allow him
to stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and salad.

Miss PriscUla 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 stiU 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, believ-
ing 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 p^ncigle, our eiiergies are refreshed ; we have a faith in
Jbhe country that was not with us' before the act ; and of a
real well-f6un3edTaiffi' come the gtowing thoughts which
we have at times: thoughts of England heading the
nations ; when. the smell of an English lane under showers /
challenge^^deriyl^Qd the threading of a London crowd ■' '*
"tunes discoTclFto 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 soimds :

98 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

but what we are to think of is, our own sad state of in-
efficiency 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, how-
ever pleasing it might be to a palate corrupted by indul-
gence 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 Jami-
man 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 want-
ing 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,

SKEPSEY IN MOTION 99

a ghost of the fancy. Yet this Journeyman was as import-
ant an individual, he was a dread reaUty; more import-
ant to Skepsey in the hght 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 pronuncia-
tion : 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 com-
parative 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
yovmg. 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 imprincipled
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

100 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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.

SKEPSEY IN MOTION 101

The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the ab-
stract, 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 Skep-
sey 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. ^iA

Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary move- A'^( j^
ment : it manifestly devolves upon them. Let them at uT ^
once take to rigorous physical training. Women under '>\ • >
compulsion, as vessels : men in their magnanimity, patri- t^^
otically, voluntarily.

Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him ; he
guessed it ; and it plimged him into a conflict with her,
that did not suffer him to escape without ruefuUy 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 himseK
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 argimient, always fell back,
frightened him. As long as they had no opponents of

102 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

their own kind, they swept the field, they were inteUigible,
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 ten-
dency to sum-up in favour of wine — good wine, in modera-
tion; 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 compre-
hensibly to Skepsey. But Mr. Durance, a very clever
gentleman, could not be right in everything. He made

SKEPSEY IN MOTION 103

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 coun-
try'sw'elfMaJjMjd^aJlfifiBafintt. these, withjecords, items,
anticl^iations, of tb^ manlier sportsjo dgcoratej were his
current themes: jill.hp.ing-chQPDfid,:aBdJassed-aiidjxiixed
"urialad 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 pos-
sessed by Skepsey was alive under strong illumination.
In his heart, while doing penance for his presumptuous-
ness, 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 suggesTa' piece of
cbunselTo'SsTEi^r" Un"£is own^articuIairdrineETfegi-
'idents, "EisTJhief may rely ; and on his knowledge of the
country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills.

104 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

dividing rivers. He had^m^^ecUor himseW ^ the

battles of conquerors in his favourite historic reading;
and heictM^mgmfffi§^valuel)r¥^^
sticking to it, and the acTvantage^f a big army for flank-
ing ; "and Ee"manoe{ivred"a small one cunningly to make it

^^•^^^^^"niLMiiSSJSS^SiR;^- Dartrey Fenellan had ex-
"plaineH~ToTlmFredenck'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 deci-
sive 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
tnily 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' ;

SKEPSEY IN MOTION 105

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 h\m when he spoke of the torpor of the i
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 cathe-
dral, 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 correc-
tion. 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 cooli's shop ; ham, beef, and sausages.

106 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 skUful 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.

SKEPSEY IN MOTION 107

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

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

'In a wrestle,' Skepsey admitted. 'AUow 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 princi-
ples 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

108 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Jarn 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 illustra-
tion 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. Mea-
sure 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 over-
borne, 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 shirt-
sleeves 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

SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE 109

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 hke 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 un-
likely that a friend of the pork-butcher would be the
person whom Mr. Radnor first pirohibited 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 sjTnpathy, wonder-
ing 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 THEIE SCOUEGB

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

110 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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 hap-
piest 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 con-
ceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.
Anecdotes of England's happiest man were related, out-
lines 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 ; stUl, the water-wagtaU
carried it, Skepsey trotted into memories. Heroes con-
ducted 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 pedes-
tals, 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 SeUles, to breathe sweet-sweet in the dear friend's ear
and tell her she loved her. The presence of the German

SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE 111

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 dis-
membered. Colney Durance could excuse the unreason-
ableness in her, for it had a dignity, and she controlled it,
and quietly suffered, trusting to the steady, tireless, con-
centrated aim of her France. In the Gallic mind of our
time, France appears as a prematurely buried_Glory, that
^^aves the^ mound-i3jqjressing^reath and cannot cease ;
and calls hourly, at times keenly, to be remembered,
"^escued^Jrogajhel^Ia-and-the -mHuld-spots~of'th'at' foul
Ijgpultarfi!^ Mademoiselle and Cokiey 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 sjTnpathetic. 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 civUized 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

112 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

of Dr. Schlesien. I have known it the same after an even-
ing 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 modem men.'

'"You~give hiS'PagaJa colours.'

' Natural colours. He does not offer the other cheek or

SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE 113

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 ban-
quet 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 nega-
tive passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible. And his faults,
short of ferocity, are amusing.'

'But the fits of ferocity 1'

'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 compli-
ment,' 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 hiU of La Roche Guyon.'

114 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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, any-
thing. Pardon me for talking so. Perhaps we need not
have left Craye or Creckholt . . .?' she hinted an inter-
rogation. '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 '11 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 — con-
tain 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 woxild 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 con-
duct— 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.

SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE 115

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 soimds 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 senti-
ments. In the same way, his relatives, the Duvidney
ladies, have their picture of the woman misleading him.
Imagine me the naughty adventuress !' — Nataly falsified

116 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the thought insurgent at her heart, in adding : 'I do not
say I am blameless.' It was a concession to the circum-
ambient enemy, of whom even a good friend was a part, 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 expres-
sion 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 gall-
bladder. 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 j'ou 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 '11 be the first to take
fright.'

SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE 117

'No.'

' He finds you in tears : he is immensely devoted ; he
flings up aU 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 con-
sultation 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 hearingliras"medicarto 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 direc-
tion, 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

118 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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; con-
cordantly 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

SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE 119

bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she
was not his match. To speak would be to succimib ; 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; notwithstanding 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 conscious-
ness. 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,

120 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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..asjthia,Y-dldjaQ-palpable wrong about them,
'<; j Nataly could argue her case in her conscience — deep down
ajid~out of Tiearing." where women under scourge of the
laws they have not helped decree may and do deliver their
mmds. She stood in thiat 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 circum-
stances, 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 appre-
hensions 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

Hir '

SIGHT OF THEIR SCOURGE 121

and its Laws : if we are really for Nature, we are not law-
less. 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 r
rank to espouse the daughter of a couple socially insur- fJ^A'
gent — stained, to common thinking, should denunciation
come. The Nature upholding her fled at ajpsipn 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 himg 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.'

122 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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 discus-
sion to come of the task of communicating dire actualities
to their innocent Nesta — ^was laid aside.

CHAPTER XII

TEEATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A
HOUSEHOLD HAVING ONE HEAKT

Two that live together in union are supposed to be inti-
mate on every leaf. Particularly when they love one an-
other and the cause they have at heart is common to them
in equal measure, the uses of a cordial familiarity forbid
reserves upon important matters between them, as we
think ; not thinking of an imposed secretiveness, beneath
the false external of submissiveness, which comes of an
experience of repeated inefficiency to maintain a case in
opposition, on the part of the loquently weaker of the
pair. In Constitutional Kingdoms a powerful Govern-
ment needs not to be tyrannical to lean oppressively;
it is more serviceable to party than agreeable to country ;
and where the alliance of men and women binds a loving
couple, of whom one is a torrent of persuasion, their

MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD 123

differings are likely to make the other resemble a log of
the torrent. It is borne along; it dreams of a distant
corner of the way for a determined stand ; it consents to
its whirling in anticipation of an midated hour when it
will no longer be neutral.

There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the
fellow breast, a mutually sensitive nerve to protest against
intrusion of light or soimd. The cloud over the name of
their girl could now strike Nataly and Victor dumb in
their taking of coimsel. She divined that his hint had
encouraged him to bring the crisis nearer, and he that her
comprehension had become tremblingly awake. They
shrank, each of them, the more from an end drawing
closely into view. All subjects glooming off or darkening
up to it were shunned by them verbally, and if they found
themselves entering beneath that shadow, conversation
passed to an involuntary gesture, more explicit with him,
significant of the prohibited, though not acknowledging it.

All the stronger was it Victor's purpose, leaping in his
fashion to the cover of action as an escape from per-
plexity, to burn and scheme for the wedding of their girl
— ^the safe wedding of that dearest, to have her protected,
secure, with the world warm about her.__AndJbe well
knew why his Nataly had her look of_a closed vault
i]^Iggj^^™g) i^IopgP^d, to tliunder~upon Life) when he
dropped his further hints. He chose to call it feminine
inconsistency, in a woman who walked abroad with a
basket of marriage-ties for the market on her arm. He
knew that she would soon have to speak the dark words
to their girl ; and the idea of any doing of it, caught at
his throat. Reasonably she dreaded the mother's task;
pardonably indeed. But it is for the mother to do, with
a girl. He deputed it lightly to the mother because he
could see himself stating the facts to a son. 'And, my
dear boy, you will from this day draw your five thousand

124 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

a year, and we double it on the day of your marriage,
living at Lakelands or where you will.'

His desire for his girl's protection by the name of one of
our great Families, urged him to bind Nataly to the fact,
with the argument, that it was preferable for the girl to
hear their story during her green early youth, while she
reposed her beautiful blind faith in the discretion of her
parents, and as an immediate step to the placing of her
hand in a husband's. He feared that her mother re-
quired schooling to tell the story vindicatingly and
proudly, in a manner to distinguish instead of degrading
or temporarily seeming to accept degradation.

The world would weigh on her confession of the weight
of the world on her child; she would want inciting and
strengthening, if one judged of her capacity to meet the
trial by her recent bearing ; and how was he to do it !
He could not imagine himself encountering the startled,
tremulous, nascent intelligence in those pure brown dark-
lashed eyes of Nesta ; he pitied the poor mother. Fanci-
fully directing her to say this and that to the girl, his
tongue ran till it was cut from his heart and left to wag
dead colourless words.

The prospect of a similar business of exposition, cer-
tainly devolving upon the father in treaty with the for-
tunate youth, gripped at his vitals a minute, so intense was
his pride in appearing woundless and scarless, a shining
surface, like pure health's, in the sight of men. Neverthe-
less he skimmed the story, much as a lecturer strikes his
wand on the prominent places of a map, that is to show
us how he arrived at the principal point, which we are all
agreed to find chiefly interesting. This with Victor was
the naming of Nesta's bridal endowment. He rushed to
it. ' My girl will have ten thousand a year settled on her
the day of her marriage.' Choice of living at Lakelands
was offered.

MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD 125

It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview.
At the same time, it moved him to a curious contempt
of the youth. He had to conjure-up an image of the
young man in person, to correct the sentiment : and it
remained as a kind of bruise only half cured.

Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose
presence would rectify such an abstract estimate of the
genus pursuer. He now came frequently of an evening,
to practise a duet for flutes with Victor; — as&Ierca|dajite<'
honeyed and flowing ; too honeyed to suit a style'tTiat7as
Fenellan characterized it to Nataly, went through the
music somewhat like an inquisitive tourist in a foreign
town, conscientious to get to the end of the work of
pleasure; until the notes had become familiar, when it
rather resembled a constable's walk along the midnight
streets into collision with a garlanded roysterer; and
the man of order and the man of passion, true to the
measure though they were, seeming to dissent, almost to
wrangle, in their diif erent ways of winding out the melody,
on to the last movement ; which was plainly a question
between home to the strayed reveller's quarters or off
to the lock-up. Victor was altogether the younger of
the two. But his vehement accompaniment was a tutor-
ship ; Mr. Sowerby improved ; it was admitted by Nesta
and mademoiselle that he gained a show of feeling; he
had learnt that feeling was wanted. Passion, he had
not a notion of : otherwise he would not be delaying ; —
the interview, dramatized by the father of the young bud
of womanhood, would be taking place, and the entry into
Lakelands calculable, for Nataly's comfort, as under the
segis of the Cantor earldom. Gossip flies to a wider circle
round the members of a great titled family, is inaudible ;
or no longer the diptherian whisper the commonalty hear
of the commonalty : and so we see the social uses of our
aristocracy survive. We do not want the shield of any

126 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

family; it is the situation that wants it; Nataly ought
to be awake to the fact. One blow and we have silenced
our enemy : Nesta's wedding-day has relieved her parents.

Victor's thoughts upon the instrument for striking that
blow, led him to suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditat-
ing on the extent of the young lady's fortune. He talked
randomly of money, in a way to shatter Nataly's concep-
tion of him. He talked of City affairs at table, as it had
been his practice to shun the doing ; and hit the resound-
ing note on mines, which have risen in the market like
the crest of a serpent, casting a certain spell upon the
mercantile understanding. 'Fredi's diamonds from her
own mine, or what once was — and she still reserves a
share,' were to be shown to Mr. Sowerby.

Nataly respected the young fellow for not displaying
avidity at the flourish of the bait, however it might be
affecting him; and she fancied that he did laboriously,
in his way earnestly, study her girl, to sound for harmony
between them, previous to a wooing. She was a closer
reader of social character than Victor; from refraining
to run on the broad lines which are but faintly illustrative
of the individual one in being common to all — ^unless we
have hit by chance on an example of the downright in
roguery or folly or simple goodness. Mr. Sowerby's
bearing to Nesta was hardly warmed by the glitter of
diamonds. His next visit showed him livelier in courtli-
ness, brighter, fresher; but that was always his way at
the commencement of every visit, as if his reflections on
the foregone had come to a satisfactory conclusion; and
the labours of the new study of the maiden ensued again
in due course to deaden him.

Gentleman he was. In the recognition of his quality as
a man of principle and breeding, Nataly was condemned
by thoughts of Nesta's future to question whether word or
act of hers should, if inclination on both sides existed,.

MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD 127

stand between her girl and a true gentleman. She coun-
selled herself, as if the counsel were in requisition, to be
passive; and so doing, she more acutely than Victor —
save in his chance flashes — discerned the twist of her very
nature caused by their false position. And her panacea
ioT ills, the lost little cottage, would not haveaverted it:
she would there_have hadthe same coveting desire to
name a man of breeding, ^ngur, station,-_for Nesta's
Jiusband. Perhaps in the cottage, choosing at leisure,
her consent to see the brilliant young creature tied to the
best of dull men would have been unready, without the
girl to push it. For the Hon. Dudley was lamentably
her pupil in liveliness; he took the second part, as it is
painful for a woman with the old-fashioned ideas upon
the leading of the sexes to behold ; resembling in his look
the deaf, who constantly require to have an observation
repeated; resembling the most intelligent of animals,
which we do not name, and we reprove ourselves for seeing
a likeness.

Yet the likeness or apparent likeness would suggest that
we have not so much to fear upon the day of the explana-
tion to him. Some gain is there. Shameful thought !
Nataly hastened her mind to gather many instances or
indications testifying to the sterling substance in young
Mr. Sowerby, such as a mother would pray for her son-in-
law to possess. She discovered herself feeling as the
burdened mother, not providently for her girl, in the
choice of a mate. The perception was clear, and not the
less did she continue working at the embroidery of Mr.
Sowerby on the basis of his excellent moral foundations,
all the while hoping, praying, that he might not be lured
on to the proposal for Nesta. But her subservience to
the power of the persuasive will in Victor — which was
like the rush of a conflagration — compelled her to think
realizingly of any scheme he allowed her darkly to read.

128 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

-J Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks
of timber before flame. Colney Durance had done her the
mischief we take from the pessimist when we are over-
weighted: in darkening the vision of external aid from
man or circumstance to one who felt herself mastered.
Victor could make her treacherous to her wishes, in revolt
against them, though the heart protested. .. His first
conquest of her was in her blood, to weaken a spirit of
resistance. _For,the precedent"oFsuEm^on' is a charm
u;pon the fain|4ieartedJhroughJove j^ it^ imwills

~lhem. Nataly resolved fixedly, that there must be a"3ay
for speaking; and she had her moral sustainment in the
resolve; she had also a tormenting consciousness of
material support in the thought, that the day was not
present, was possibly distant, might never arrive. Would
Victor's release come sooner? And that was a prospect
bearing resemblance to hopes of the cure of a malady
through a sharp operation. ^ \

These were matters going on Hpehind the curtain) as
wholly vital to her, and with him af~times almost as"3omi-
nant, as the spiritual in memory, when flesh has left but
its shining track in dust of a soul outwritten; and all
their talk related to the purchase of furniture, the ex-
peditions to Lakelands, music, public affairs, the pardon-
able foibles of friends created to amuse their fellows,
operatic heroes and heroines, exhibitions of pictures, the
sorrows of Crowned Heads, so serviceable ever to man-
kind as an admonition to the ambitious, a salve to the
envious ! — ^in fine, whatsoever can entertain or affect the
most social of couples, domestically without a care to
appearance. And so far they partially — dramatically —
^/ ^ deceived themselves by imposing on the world while they
talked and duetted; for the purchase of furniture from
a flowing purse is a cheerful occupation; also a City
issuing out of hospital, like this poor City of London,

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN 129

inspires good citizens to healthy activity. But the
silence upon what they were most bent on, had the
sinister effect upon Victor, of obscuring his mental hold
of the beloved woman, drifting her away from him. In
communicating Fenellan's news through the lawyer
Carling of Mrs. Burman's intentions, he was aware that
there was an obstacle to his being huggingly genial, even
candidly genial with her, until he could deal out further
news, corroborative and consecutive, to show the action
of things as progressive. Fenellan had sunk into his
usual apathy : — and might plead the impossibility of his
moving faster than the woman professing to transform
herself into beneficence out of malignity; — one could
hear him saying the words ! Victor had not seen him
since last Concert evening, and he deemed it as well to
hear the words Fenellan's mouth had to say. He called
at an early hour of the Westward tidal flow at the Insur-
ance Office looking over (the stormy square of the first of
SeamenJ

CHAPTER XIII

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN

After cursory remarks about the business of the Office
and his friend's contributions to periodical literature, in
which he was interested for as long as he had assurance
that the safe income depending upon official duties was
not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and
fro. FeneUan waited for him to lead.

'Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?'

'I have dined with Mr. Carling : — capital claret.'

Emptiness was in the reply.

Victor curbed himself and said : ' By the way, you 're

;-■•-

\ ^

130 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

not likely to have dealings with Blathenoy. The fellow
has a screw to the back of a shifty eye ; I see it at work
to fix the look for business. I shall sit on the Board of
my Bank. One hears things. He lives in style at
Wrensham. By the way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney
from Creckholt staying with her. You said of little
Mabsy — "Here she comes into the room all pink and
white, like a daisy." She 's the daisy still ; reminds us
of our girl at that age. — So, then, we come to another
dead block!'

'Well, no; it 's a chemist's shop, if that helps us on,'
said Fenellan, settling to a new posture in his chair.
* She 's there of an afternoon for hours.'

'You mean it 's sheV

'The lady. I '11 tell you. I have it from Carling,
worthy man; and lawyers can be brought to untruss a
point over a cup of claret. He 's a bit of a "Mackenzie
Man," as old aunts of mine used to say at home — a Man
of Feeling. Thinks he knows the world, from having
sifted and sorted a lot of our dustbins; as the modern
'"Realists imagine it 's an exposition of positive human
nature when they 've pulled down our noses to the worst
parts — ^if there 's a worse where all are useful : but the
Realism of the dogs is to have us by the nose : — excite it
and befoul it, and you 're fearfully credible ! You don't
read that olfactory literature. However, friend Carling
is a conciliatory carle. Three or four days of the week
the lady, he says, drives to her chemist's, and there she
sits in the shop; round the comer, as you enter; and
sees all Charing in the shop looking-glass at the back;
herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if Carling's picture
of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a
huge square green shade over her forehead. Sits hours
long, and cocks her ears at orders of applicants for drugs

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN

131

across the counter, and sometimes catches wind of a
prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she '11
try it herself. It 's a basket of medicine bottles driven
to Regent's Park pretty well every day.'

'Ha ! Regent's Park !' exclaimed Victor, and shook at
recollections of the district and the number of the house,
dismal to him. London buried the woman deep until
a mention of her sent her flaring over London. 'A
chemist's shop ! She sits there ? '

'Mrs. Burman. We pass by the shop.'

' She had always a turn for drugs. — Not far from here,
did you say ? And every day ! under a green shade ? '

' Dear fellow, don't be suggesting ballads ; we '11 go
now,' said Fenellan. 'It 's true it 's like sitting on the
banks of the Stygian waters.'

He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was
time to quit the oflSce.

'You 've done nothing?' Victor asked in a tone of no
expectation.

' Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.'

'Where did you hear?'

'Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady's
chemists. I called the day before yesterday, after you
were here at our last Board Meeting.'

'The Themison?'

' The great Dr. Themison ; who kiUs you kindlier than
most, and is much in request for it.'

'There 's one of your echoes of Colney !' Victor cried.
' One gets dead sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors.
They don't kill, you know very well. It 's not to their
interest to kill. They may take the relish out of life ; and
upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the patient
living!'

Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration Q*-. ,

travelling through his friend.

t*--

132 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'The City's mending; it's not the weary widow
woman of the day when we capsized the diurnal with your
royal Old Veuve,' he said, as they trod the pavement.
'Funny people, the English! They give you all the
primeing possible for amusement and jollity, and devil
a sentry-box for the exercise of it ; and if you shake a leg
publicly, partner or not, you 're marched off to penitence.
I complain, that they have no philosophical appreciation
of human nature.'

'We pass the shop?' Victor interrupted him.

' You 're in view of it in a minute. And what a square,
for recreative dancing ! And what a people, to be turning
it into a place of political agitation ! And what a country,
where from morning to night it 's an endless wrangle
about the first conditions of existence ! Old Colney seems
right now and then : — they 're the offspring of pirates, and
they 've got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and
the trick of quarrelling everlastingly over the booty. I 'd
have band-music here for a couple of hours, three days
of the week at the least ; and down in the East ; and that
forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist
South too. But just as those omnibus- wheels are the
miserable music of this London of ours, it 's only too sadly
true that the people are in the first rumble of the notion
of the proper way to spend their lives. Now you see the
shop : Boyle and Luckwort : there.'

etor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the
'^aistc^|> and swelled it, ahemming. 'That shop?'
said he. And presently : ' Fenellan, I 'm not super-
stitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the
day of our drinking Old Veuve together last — you re-
member it, — I walked home up this way across the square,
and I was about to step into that identical shop, for some
household prescription in my pocket, having forgotten
Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN 133

— I 'm stating a fact — I distinctly — I 'm sure of the shop
— ^felt myself plucked back by the elbow ; pulled back :
the kind of pull when you have to put a foot backward
to keep your equilibrium.' , /

So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute v "*
an additional item for the colouring of history.

He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed
amazement in amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed,
dismissing the incident, as being perhaps, if his hearer chose
to have it so, a gem of the rubbish tumbled into the dust-
cart out of a rather exceptional householder's experience.

Fenellan smiled indulgently. 'Queer things happen.
I recollect reading in my green youth of a clergyman, who
mounted a pulpit of the port where he was landed after
his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at midnight
in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had over-
night of the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his
ear from a Voice, when at his bed or bunk-side, about to
perform the beautiful ceremony of undressing: and the
Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full .uniform, not
so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted
twice ; and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor
feet ; and he jumped up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and
he got them providentially over the scuffling deck straight
at the first rush into the boat awaiting them, and had
them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon
of gratitude for the special deliverance. There was a
Warning ! and it might well be called, as he caUed it, from
within. We 're cared for, never doubt. Aide-toi. Be
ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity, or you '11 not
stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the
burnt. That sounds like the moral.' '

'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable v^'
suggestion. The idea of the recent propinc[uityjet hatred '- '^"^T\jU
in motion. i) i-^ (j

134 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

' Scarcely likely. I 'm told she sits looking on her lap,
under the beetling shade, until she hears an order for
tinctures or powders, or a mixture that strikes her fancy.
It 's possible to do more suicidal things than sit the after-
noons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get their
different passports to Orcus.'

Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the
bellied glass-urns of chemical wash. The woman might
be inside there now ! She might have seen his figure in
the shop-mirror ! And she there ! _The wonder of it all
seemed to be, that his pnvate_histor^/was not^IHiig the
streetS;^^ The thinness of the partition concealing "it^
"Eajdly guaranteed a day 's immunity : — because this
woman would live in London, in order to have her choice
of a central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly
imagination on the various recipes . . . and while it
would have been so much healthier for her to be living in a
recess of the country !

He muttered : 'Diseases — drugs !'

Those were the corresponding two strokes of the
pendulum which kept the woman going.

'And deadly spite.' That was the emanation of the

monotonous horrible conflict, for which, and by which, the

woman lived.

\ In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but

r^ think of her through the feelings of a man scorched by a

/^.%

urnacj

ittle further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He con-
fessed to himself, that latterly he had, he knew not why,
been impatient with her, rancorous in thought, as never
before. He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque toler-
ance of her vindictiveness ; under suffering, both at
Craye and Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving.
He accused her of dragging him down to humanity's
lowest.

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN 135

But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power
of a sort.

Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily,
appeared to him as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front ;
though it was only a short drive from the house in Regent's
Park; but having shaken-off that house, he had pushed
it back into mists, obliterated it. The woman certainly
had a power.

He shot away to the power he knew of in himself ; his
capacity for winning men in bodies, the host of them, when
it came to an effort of his energies : men and, individually,
women. Individually, the women were to be coimted on
as well ; warm supporters.

It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect
to enroll them collectively. Eyeing the men, he felt his
command of them. Glancing at congregated women, he
had a chill. The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly judicial
assembly : that is, the phantom of the offended collective
woman : that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our
concourse of civilized life to govern Society, and pronounce
on the orderly, the tolerable, the legal, and banish the
rebellious : these maintained an aspect of the stand
against him.

Did Nataly read the case : namely, that the crowned
collective woman is not to be subdued? And what are
we to say of the indefinite but forcible Authority, when we
see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
Nataly !

Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him /

by hard degrees to conceive it to be_^ie^mpalpaTD^ which
_hag_prevailing weight. Not many of our conquerors have
scored their victories on the road of that index : nor has
duration been granted them to behold the minute measure
of value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest
subsides. The passing by a shop where a broken old

136 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

woman might be supposed to sit beneath her green fore-
head-shade— Venetian-bhnd of a henbane-visage! — ^had
precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract
verity : and it opens on to new realms, which are a new
world to the practical mind. But he made no advance.
H£ stopped in a fever of sensibility, to contemplate the
powerful formless vapour foiling /rom^ a' source that was
"notHing other than yonder weak lonely woman.

In otEer~wOTdi7^thenEuiQan~nature of the" 'man was
dragged to the school of its truancy by circumstances, for
him to learn the commonest of sums done on a slate, in
regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the
creditor on the defaulter. Debtors are always paying:
like those who are guilty of the easiest thing in life, the
violation of Truth, they have made themselves bondmen
to pay, if not in substance, then in soul ; and the nipping
of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is
undischarged. You know the Liar • you must have seen
him diminishing, until he has become a face without fea-
tures, withdrawn to humanity's preliminary sketch (some
half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on our original
tapestry-web) ; and he who did the easiest of things, he
must from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inven-
tive nimbleness, up to the day when he propitiates Truth
by telling it again. There is a repentance that does recon-
stitute ! It may help to the traceing to springs of a fable
whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.
Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth ; that
he paid every debt with a scrupulous exactitude : money,
of course ; and prompt apologies for a short brush of his
temper. Nay, he had such a conscience for the smallest
eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a
friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London
Bridge, softened his retrospective view of the fall there,
more than once. Although this man was a presentation to

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN 137

mankind of the force in Nature which drives to unresting
speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen at its beating
after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for
the reverse of lawless : he inclined altogether tO-.gQod-citi-
zeniEIp. ScTsocial a man could j.ot otherwise^ mcline.
But when it came to the examination of accounts between
Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of physical revulsion,
loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out of
Court. To men, it was impossible for him to speak the
torments of those days of the monstrous alliance. The
heavens were cognizant. He pleaded his case in their
accustomed hearing: — a youngster tempted by wealth,
attracted, besought, snared, revolted, etc. And Mrs.
Burman, when roused to jealousy, had shown it by teazing
him for a confession of his admiration of splendid points in \
the beautiful Nataly, the priceless fair woman living under
their roof, a contrast of very life with the corpse and
shroud ; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her
breath about him, her voice iacessantly upon every chord
of his being !

He pleaded successfully. But the silence following the
verdict was heavy; the silence contained an unheard
thunder. It was the sound, as when out of Court the
public is dissatisfied with a verdict. Are we expected to
commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
public ? — Imagine it for a moment as done. Men are ours
at a word — or at least a word of invitation. Women we
woo ; fluent smooth versions of our tortures, mixed with
permissible courtship, wia the individual woman. And
that imreasomng collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns
the poor racked wretch who so much as remembers them !
She is the enemy of Nature. — ^Tell us how? She is the
slave of existing conventions. — ^And from what cause?
She is the artificial production of a state that exalts her so
long as she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.

138 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman^^i^he foe^ of
Nature : who, with her arts^and gold lures, has now posses-
"skSToT tKeLaw (the brass idol worshipped by the collec-
tive) to drive Nature into desolation.

He placed himieff~toTEe~nght of Mrs. Burman, for the
world to behold the couple': and he lent the world a sigh
of disgust.

What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to
rise above the situation, in a splendid survey and rapid
view of the means of reversing it. He was too social to be
a captain of the socially insurgent; imagination expired.

But having a courageous Nataly to second him ! — ^how
then? It was the succour needed. Then he would have
been ready to teach the world that Nature — honest
Nature — ^is more to be prized than Convention: a new
iEra might begin.

The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated
him springingly. It sank, excused for the flaccidity by
Nataly's want of common adventurous daring. She had
not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture
from a flowing purse with a heavy heart — unfeminine, one
might say ; she preferred to live obscurely ; she did not,
one had to think — but it was unjust : and yet the accusa-
tion, that she did not cheerfully make a strain and spurt
on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.

These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the
verberant twang of a musical instrument that has had a
smart blow, and wails away independent of the player's
cunning hand. He would have said, that he was more his
natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to
make him praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would
it have astonishedjiim to contemplate wjth assured per-
'ception in his._own person the Nature he inyoked. But
men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother
she in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN 139

persecutes. Men call on her for their defence, as a favour-
able witness : she is a note of their rhetoric. They are ^l^
not bettered by her sustainment ; they have not, as women i'-'" j
may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour. It is not an ,^|^ \ y
effort at epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she V ft
most supports. ^

An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.

' How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians !
Well, now, the Germans have their Emperor to head their
armies, and I say that the German emperor has done less
for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner has done.
He has affected the French too ; I trace him in Gounod's
Romeo et Juliette — and we don't gain by it; we have a
poor remuneration for the melody gone; think of the
little shepherd's pipeing in Mireille ; and there 's another
in Sapho — delicious. I held out against Wagner as long
as I could. The Italians don't much more than Wagnerize
in exchange for the loss of melody. They would be wiser
in going back to Pergolese, Campagnole. The Mefistofile
was good — of the school of the foreign master. Aida and
Otello, no. I confess to a weakness for the old barley-
sugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade. Aren't you
seduced by cadences? Never mind Wagner's tap of his
psedagogue's bMon — a cadence catches me still. Early
taste for barley-sugar, perhaps ! There 's a march in
Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I 'm in military
step when I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving
the Opera. Fredi takes little Mab Mountney to her first
Opera to-night. Enough to make us old ones envious !
You remember your first Opera, FeneUan? Sonnambula,
with me. I tell you, it would task the highest poetry —
say, require, if you like — showing all that 's noblest,
splendidest, in a young man, to describe its effect on me.
I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a year after.
The Huguenots to-night. Not the best suited for little

140 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Mabsy ; but she '11 catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera ;
we used to think it the best, before we had Tannhauser and
Lohengrin and the Meister singer.'

Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the
Third Act of the Huguenots. That sombre Chorus brought
Mrs. Burman before him. He drummed the Rataplan,
which seAt her flying. The return of a lively disposition
for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the
yoke of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the
chemist's shop ; save that a thought of drugs brought the
smell, and the smell the picture ; she threatened to be an
apparition at any moment pervading him through his
nostrils. He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a
need for it; singular in one whose appetite ran to the
stroke of the hour abreast with Armandine's kitchen-clock.
Fenellan proposed a glass of sherry and bitters at his Club
over the way. He had forgotten a shower of black-balls
(attributable to the conjurations of old At6) on a certain
past day. Without word of refusal, Victor entered a wine-
merchant's office, where he was unknown, and stating his
wish for bitters and dry sherry, presently received the glass,
drank, nodded to the administering clerk, named the
person whom he had obliged and refreshed, and passed out,
remarking to Fenellan : ' Colney on Clubs ! he 's right ;
they 're the mediaeval in modern times, our Baron's
castles, minus the Baron; dead against public life and
social duties. Business excuses my City Clubs; but I
shall take my name off my Club up West.'

'More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot,
and Whist for the services,' Fenellan said. 'Or taber-
nacles for the Chosen, and Grangousier playing Divinity
behind the veil. Well, they 're social.'

'Sectionally social, means anything but social, my
friend. However — and the monastery had a bell for the
wanderer ! Say, I 'm penniless or poundless, up and

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN 141

down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must feel, these
palaces — ^if we 're Christian, not Jews : not that the Jews
are uncharitable ; they set an example, in fact. . . . '

He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of
Fenellan, who thought of his pursuit of wealth and grand
expenditure.

Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond ,
the subject. He was nearing to the Idea he had seized "/
and lost on London Bridge.

The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit
Nataly, withdrew him from his ineffectual chase. He
had nought to deliver; on the contrary, a meditation
concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment:
which was the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent
to him.

He snatched at the name of Themison.

With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report
of progress to be made to Nataly; and not at all an
empty report.

Themison, then: he leaned on Themison. The
woman's doctor should have an influence approaching to
authority with her.

Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his
theme of discourse to Fenellan : let Banks beware.

Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his
head. ' Feel the wind ? ' he said.

Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep
tones, which at times he had : ' No : don't be alarmed ; I
feel the devil. If one has wealth and a desperate wish, he
will speak. All he does, is to make me more charitable to
those who give way to him. I believe in a devU.'

'Horns and tail?'

'Bait and hook.'

'I haven't wealth, and I wish only for dinner,' Fenellan
said.

142 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'You know that Armandine is never two minutes late.
By the way, you haven't wealth — you have me.' •

'And I thank God for you!' said Fenellan, acutely
reminiscent of his having marked the spiritual adviser of
Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, as a man
who might be useful to his friend.

CHAPTER XIV

DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DEIVE TO PABIS

A FORTNIGHT later, an extremely disconcerting circum-
stance occurred : Armandine was ten minutes behind the
hour with her dinner. But the surprise and stupefaction
expressed by Victor, after glances at his watch, were not
so profound as Fenellan's, on finding himself exchangeing
the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themi-
son. His friend's rapidity in pushing the combinations
he conceived, was known: Fenellan's wonder was not
so much that Victor had astonished him again, as that he
should be called upon again to wonder at his astonishment.
He did; and he observed the doctor and Victor and
Nataly: aided by dropping remarks. Before the even-
ing was over, he gathered enough of the facts, and
had to speculate only on the designs. Dr. Themison had
received a visit from the husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor
concerning her state of health. At an interview with the
lady, laughter greeted him; he was confused by her
denial of the imputation of a single ailment : but she, to
recompose him, let it be understood, that she was anxious
about her husband's condition, he being certainly over-
worked ; and the husband's visit passed for a device on
the part of the wife. She admitted a willingness to try a

A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS 143

change of air, if it was deemed good for her husband.
Change of air was prescribed to each for both. 'Why not
drive to Paris?' the doctor said, and Victor was taken
with the phrase.

He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had
heard, was by the sea, on the South coast. Which of her
maladies might be in the ascendant, he did not know.
He knew little. He fancied that Dr. Themison was un-
suspicious of the existence of a relationship between him
and Mrs. Burman : and FeneUan opined, that there had
been no communication upon private affairs. What, then,
was the object in going to Dr. Themison? He treated her
body merely ; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore ,
could be expected to impose upon her conduct. Fenellan
appreciated his own discernment of the superior uses to
which a spiritual adviser may be put, and he too agreeably
flattered himself for the corrective reflection to ensue, that
he had not done anj^hing. It disposed him to think a
happy passivity more sagacious than a restless activity.
We should let Fortune perform her part at the wheel in
working out her ends, should we not? — ^for, ten to one,
nine times out of ten we are thwarting her if we stretch
out a hand. And with the range of enjoyments possessed
by Victor, why this unceasing restlessness? Why, when
we are not near drowning, catch at apparent straws,
which may be instruments having sharp edges ? Themi-
son, as Mrs. Burman's medical man, might teU the lady
tales that would irritate her bag of venom.

Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the
shadow cast over his negligent hedonism by Victor's boil-
ing pressure, drove him into the seat of judgement. As
a consequence, he was rather a dull table-guest in the pres-
ence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked to
anticipate high entertainment from him. He did nothing
to bridge the crevasse and warm the glacier air at table

144 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

when the doctor, anecdotal intentionally to draw him out,
related a decorous but pungent story of one fair member of
a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed estab-
lishment of our chain-man marriage-tie. An anecdote of
immediate diversion was wanted, expected : and Fenellan
sat stupidly speculating upon whether the doctor knew of
a cupboard locked. So that Dr. Themison was carried
on by Lady Grace Halley's humourous enthusiasm for the
subject to dilate and discuss and specify, all in the irony
of a judicial leaning to the side of the single-minded
social adventurers, under an assumed accord with his
audience; concluding: 'So there 's an end of Divorce.'

'By the trick of multiplication,' Fenellan, now reas-
sured, was content to say. And that did not extinguish
the cracker of a theme ; handled very carefully, as a thing
of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young women
being present.

Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an
alertness shown by Mr. Sowerby to second her by cross-
ing the dialogue. As regarded her personal feelings, she
was hardened, so long as the curtains were about her to
keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition
upon one of its culprits. But her anxiety was vigilant
to guard her girl from an infusion of any of the dread
facts of life not coming through the mother's lips : and
she was a woman having the feminine mind's pudency in
that direction, which does not consent to the revealiag
of much. Here was the mother's dilemma: her girl —
Victor's girl, as she had to think in this instance, — the
most cloudless of the young women of earth, seemed, and
might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off
the table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to
terrific heights of surveyal; and there she rocked; and
only her youthful healthiness brought her down to grass
and flowers. She had once or twice received the electrical

A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS 145

stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of
facts in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal
evasions or the circuitous explanation of matters touching
sex in here and there a newspaper, harder to repress com-
pletely than sewer-gas in great cities : and her mother had
seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how wither-
ingly the scared young intelligence of the iimocent creature
shocked her sensibility. She foresaw the need to such a
flameful soul, as bride, wife, woman across the world, of
the very princeliest of men in gifts of strength, for her
sustainer and guide. And the provident mother knew
this peerless gentleman : but he had his wife.

Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be
feared for the imaginative Nesta ; though not so much as
that on some future day of a perchance miserable yoke-
mating — a subjection or an entanglement — the nobler
passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and
strike a line to make their logically estimable sequence
from a source not honourable before the public. Con-
stantly it had to be thought, that the girl was her father's
child.

At present she had no passions; and her bent to the
happiness she could so richly give, had drawn her saDing^
smoothly over the harbour-bar of maidenhood; where
many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of sim-
plicity. If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and
forecasts partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian
independence likened her somewhat in manner to the
Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her high,
physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked
for delivery carried her flowing over impediments of
virginal self-consciousness, to set her at her ease in the
talk with men; she had not gone through the various.
Nursery exercises in dissimulation ; she had no appearance
of praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being

146 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

woman ; and no tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on
the cheeks, or assumptions of the frigid mask, or indi-
cated reserve-cajoleries. Neither ignorantly nor advisedly
did she play on these or Other bewitching strings of "Eef
sex, after the fashion of jtJxe_gtajgapedjanocenti![^w;ho~a^
_tiie_boast of Englishmen_and^afaons^ and thrUl societies
with their winsome ingenuousness; and who sometimes
when unguarded meet an artful serenader, that is a cloaked
bandit, and is provoked by their performances, and knows
anthropologically the nature behind the devious show; a
sciential rascal ; as little to be excluded from our modem
circles as Eve's own old deuce from Eden's garden :
whereupon, opportunity inviting, both the fool and the
cunning, the pure donkey princess of insular eulogy, and
the sham one, are in a perilous pass.

Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be
ignorant utterly amid a world where the hints are hourly
scattering seed of the inklings; when vileness is not at
work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming its
existence with tableau and trumpet. Nataly encountered
her girl's questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy.
The questions had soon ceased. Excepting repulsive and
rejected details, there is little to be learnt when a little is
known : in populous communities, density only will keep
the little out. Only stupidity will suppose that it can be
done for the livelier young. English mothers forethought-
JulJor_their_giris,_have to take choice of how 'to~do~ba"ttle
with a rough-and-tumble Old England, that lumbers
bumping along, craving t|ie pfemouFthmgs, which canTbe
TKacTbut^ iETsemblance _under the conditions allowed by
laziness to subsist, and so curst of Its shffty inconsequence
'S^to^orshipjnlE^pncretejm^

abstract^ Nataly could smuggle or confiscate here and
there a newspaper; she could not interdict or withhold
every one of them, from a girl ardent to be in the race on

A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS 147

all topics of popular interest : and the newspapers are
occasionally naked savages; the streets are imperfectly
garmented even by day ; and we have our stumbling social
anecdotist, our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently
siUy woman ; our slippery one ; our slimy one, the Rahab
of Society ; not to speak of Mary the maid and the foot-
man William. A vigilant mother has to contend with
these and the like in an increasing degree. How best ?

There is a method : one that Colney Durance advocated.
The girl's intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it.
Since, as he argued, we cannot keep the poisonous matter
out, mothers should prepare and strengthen young women
for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil, baring the
world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight
they have to sustain ; and thereby preserve them further
from the spiritual collapse which follows the nursing of
a false ideal of our life in youth : — this being, Colney
said, the prominent feminine disease of the time, common
to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.

Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it
for English hearing, by making use of his dry compressed
sentences. Besides he was a bachelor; therefore but a
theorist. And his illustrations of his theory were gro-
tesque ; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to
consume, in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race
of man. The satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a
persuasive teacher. Nataly had excuses to cover her
reasons for not listening to him.

One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion
at the thought, that the day drew near for her speaking
fully to Nesta; when, between what she then said and
what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike the girl :
and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with
them then; — ^in softening and shading the edges of social

148 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

misconduct, it seemed painfully possible to be sowing in
the girl's mind something like the reverse of moral pre-
cepts, even to smoothing the way to a rebelliousness partly
or wholly similar to her own. But Nataly's chief and her
appeasing reason for pursuing the conventional system
with this exceptional young creature, referred to the
sentiments on that subject of the kind of young man whom
a mother elects from among those present and eligible, as
,y perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of good
' ' ■ ) t •' promise in the moral department. She had Mr. Dudley
''/' Sowerby under view; far from the man of her choice:

and still the practice of decorum, discretion, a pardonable
fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any forecast
of the behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they
see, to promise a future stability in the husband. Assur-
edly a Dudley Sowerby would be immensely startled to
find in his bride a young woman more than babily aware
of the existence of one particular form of naughtiness on
earth.

Victor was of no help : he had not an idea upon the
right education of the young of the sex. Repression and
mystery, he considered wholesome for girls ; and he con-
sidered the enlightening of them — to some extent — a pru-
dential measure for their defence ; and premature instruc-
tion is a fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding ;
and histrionic innocence is no doubt the bloom on corrup-
tion ; also the facts of current human life, in the crude of
the reports or the cooked of the sermon in the newspapers,
are a noxious diet for our daughters ; whom nevertheless
we cannot hope to be feeding always on milk : and there
is a time when their adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly
it exists out of noodledom, is harmful : — but how beauti-
ful the shining simplicity of our dear young English girls !
— He was one of the many men to whose minds women
come in pictures and are accepted much as they paint

A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS 149

themselves. Like his numerous fellows, too, he required
a conflict with them, and a worsting at it, to be taught,
that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to dispose
of for their good : — unless Love should interpose, he would
have exclaimed. He broke from his fellows in his holy
horror of a father's running counter to love. Nesta had
only to say, that she loved another, for Dudley Sowerby
to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants. But
love was unknown to the girl.

Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look
of Victor's traditional hospitality. Nataly smiled at her
incorrigibly lagging intelligence of him, on hearing that
he had invited a company : ' Lady Grace, for gaiety ;
Peridon and Catkin, fiddles ; Dudley Sowerby and myself,
flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by
the dear old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage,
as in old times ; towers of Dieppe in the morning-light ;
and the lovely road to the capital! Just three days in
Paris, and home by any of the other routes. It 's the
drive we want. Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we
have oiu- Concert — ^an hour at night and we 're sure of
sleep.' It had a sweet simple air, befitting him ; as when
in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children.
For travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave
her something of the child's inheritance of the wisdom of
life — the living ever so little ahead of ourselves ; about as far
as the fox in view of the hunt. That is the soul of us out
for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast ; and the
body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily
chase. Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, antic-
ipation a revival. She enraptured Victor with glimpses
of the domestic fun she had ceased to show sign of since
the revelation of Lakelands. Her only regret was on
account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the
party, because of happy memories associating him with

150 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the Seine-land, and also that his bilious criticism of his
countrymen was moderated by a trip to the Continent.
Fenellan reported Colney to be 'busy in the act of distil-
ling one of his Prussic acid essays.' Fenellan would have
jumped to go. He informed Victor, as a probe, that the
business of the Life Insurance was at periods 'fearfully
necrological.' Inexplicably, he was not invited. Did it
mean, that he was growing dull? He looked inside
instead of out, and lost the clue.

His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed
plainly what would have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the
expedition, had not he as well as Colney been excluded.
Two carriages and a cab conveyed the excursionists, as
they merrily called themselves, to the terminus. They
were Victor's guests; they had no trouble, no expense,
none of the nipper reckonings which dog our pleasures ; —
the state of pure bliss. Fenellan's enviousness drove him
at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter jumped to the
seat beside Nesta in her carriage. Mademoiselle de Seilles
and Mr. Sowerby facing them. Lady Grace Halley, in the
carriage behind, heard Nesta's laugh ; which Mr. Barmby
had thought vacuous, beseeming little girls, that laugh at
nothings. She questioned Fenellan.

'Oh,' said he, 'I merely mentioned that the Rev.
gentleman carries his musical instrument at the bottom
of his trunk.'

She smiled : ' And who are in the cab ? '

'Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and
Catkin. Those two would have writhed like head and tail
of a worm, at a division on the way to the station. Point
a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through the body.
They 're a fabulous couple.'

Victor cut him short. ' I deny that those two are absurd.'

'And Catkin's toothache is a galvanic battery upon
Peridon.'

A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS 151

Nataly strongly denied it. Peridon and Catkin per-
tained to their genial picture of the dear sweet nest in life ;
a dale never traversed by the withering breath they dreaded.

Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his
way as Colney, fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla
Graves and Mr. Pempton, with a pitchfork's exaltation
of the sacred attachment of the divergently meritorious
couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles
in the principles of each. The pair were offending the
amatory corner in the generous good sense of Nataly and
Victor ; they were not to be hotly protected, though they
were well enough liked for their qualities, except by Lady
Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandaliziag of
Miss Graves. Such a specimen of the Puritan middle
English as Priscilla Graves, was eastwiud on her skin,
nausea to her gorge. She wondered at having drifted into
the neighboiirhood of a person resembliag in her repellent
formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down
among those districts of suburban London or appalling
provincial towns passed now and then with a shudder,
where the funereal square bricks-up the Church, that
Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
are summoned to their roimd of penitential exercise by a
monosyllabic tribulation-bell. Fenellan's graphic sketch
of the teetotaller woman seeing her admirer pursued by
Eumenides flagons — abominations of emptiness — to the
banks of the black river of suicides, where the one most
wretched light is Inebriation's nose ; and of the vegetarian
violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of
the flocks and herds into his lady's melodious Ark of a
mouth, excited and delighted her antipathy. She was
amused to transports at the station, on hearing Mr.
Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark : ' No, I carry
no instrument.' The habitation of it at the bottom of his
trunk, was not forgotten when it sounded.

152 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night,
she said, just under Victor's ear : 'Where are those two?'

'Bid me select the couple,' said he.

She rejoined: 'Silly man'; and sleepily gave him her
hand for good night, and so paralyzed his arm, that he
had to cover the continued junction by saying more than
he intended : 'If they come to an understanding !'

'Plain enough on one side.'

'You think it suitable?'

'Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.'

'This is really my favourite route; I love the saltwater
and the night on deck.'

'Go on.'

'How?'

' Number your loves. It would tax your arithmetic'

'I can hate.'

'Not me?'

Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers
declared it ; and they broke the link, neither of them sen-
sibly hurt ; though a leaf or two of the ingenuities, which
were her thoughts, turned over in the phantasies of the
lady ; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a never
so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female
shoots within us both straight and far and round the
corners. There you have Nature, if you want her naked in
her elements, for a text. He loved his Nataly truly, even
fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked
about at no other woman; it happened only that the
touch of one, the chance warm touch, put to motion the
blind forces of our mother so remarkably surcharging him.
But it was without kindling. The lady, the much cooler
person, did nurse a bit of flame. She had a whimsical
liking for the man who enjoyed simple things when com-
manding the luxuries; and it became a fascination, by
extreme contrast, at the reminder of his adventurous

A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS 153

enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy.
Women who dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and
hear him talk his ball-room trifles to amuse, have similarly
a smell of gunpowder to intoxicate them.

For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies.
Nataly lay in the cabin. She used to be where Lady
Grace was lying. A sort of pleadable, transparent, harm-
less hallucination of the renewal of old service induced him
to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer's pillow, and
fix the tarpaulin over her silks and wraps ; and bend his
head to the soft mouth murmuring thanks. The women
who can dare the nuit blanche, and under stars ; and have
a taste for holiday larks after their thirtieth, are rare;
they are precious. Nataly nevertheless was approved for
guarding her throat from the nightwind. And a softer
southerly breath never crossed Channel ! The very
breeze he had wished for ! Luck was with him.

Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louisfe.
Mr. Sowerby in passing, exchanged a description of
printed agreement with her, upon the beauty of the night
— a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes :
not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a
vocabulary. Once he perceptibly washed his hands of
dutiful politeness, in addressing Mademoiselle de Seilles,
likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the French
lady, thinking — too conclusively from the breath on the
glass at the moment, as it is the Gallic habit — that if her
dear Nesta must espouse one of the uninteresting creatures
called men in her native land, it might as well be this as
another, agreed that the night was very beautiful.

'He speaks grammatical French,' Nesta commented on
his achievement. ' He contrives in his walking not to wet
his boots,' mademoiselle rejoined.

Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders,
despite an inferior pretension to accent. He burned to be

154 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

near these ladies, and he passed them but once. His
enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was notorious.
Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in
her demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual
contempt for the man who could not see that women, or
Frenchwomen, or eminently she among them, must have
their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales. And
say, that she is uprooted; — he does but roll a log. Mr.
Peridon's efforts to perfect himself in the French tongue
touched her.

A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a
deliberate wink of the eye of light. Mr. Barmby, an exUe
from the ladies by reason of an addiction to tobacco,
quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first greying.
Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey
astir for the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show
its warmer throbs. The gentle waves were just a stronger
grey than the sky, perforce of an interfusion that shifted
gradations ; they were silken, in places oily grey ; cold to
drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
refuge on any far fisher-sail.

Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips
mildly closed. The girl's cheeks held colour to match a
dawn yet unawakened though bom. They were in a nest
shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a languid
flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of
rich brown hair were alive over an eyebrow showing like a
seal upon the lightest and securest of slumbers.

Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly. Both the ladies were
in their oblivion; the younger quite saintly; but the
couple inseparably framed, elevating to behold; a re-
proach to the reminiscence of pipes. He was near; and
quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him. Her

A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS 155

look was grave, straight, uninquiring, soon accurately
perusing ; an arrow of Artemis for penetration. He went
by, with the sound in the throat of a startled bush-bird
taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as
if that young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof.
Man could not be more guiltless, yet her look had per-
turbed him; nails conspired; in his vexation, he exe-
crated tobacco. And ask not why, where reason never
was.

Nesta woke babbliug on the subject she had relinquished
for sleep. Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her
hair and hood during their sUvery French chimes.

Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with
encomiums, after they had been observing every variation
in it. He spoke happily of the pleasant passage, and of
the agreeable night ; particularly of the excellent idea of
the expedition by this long route at night ; the prospect
of which had disfigured him with his grimace of specula-
tion— apparently a sourness that did not exist. Nesta
had a singular notion, coming of a girl's mingled observa-
tion and intuition, that the impressions upon this
gentleman were iu arrear, did not strike him till late.
Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she
remembered to have noticed the same in many small
things. And it was a pointed perception.

Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to
hurry up and see sunlight over the waters. Nataly came ;
she looked, and the outer wakened the inner, she let the
light look iu on her, her old feelings danced to her eyes
like a string of bubbles in ascent. 'Victor, Victor, it
seems only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back
— was it? — and in May, and saw the shoal of porpoises,
and five minutes after, Dieppe in view. Dear French
people ! I share your love for France.'

'Home of our holidays ! — the "drives" ; and they may

156 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

be the happiest. And fifty minutes later we were off the
harbour; and Natata landed, a stranger; and at night
she was the heroine of the town.'

Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his
name to Nataly : ' Sir Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour
of Lakelands.' She understood that Lady Grace Halley
was acquainted with Sir Rodwell : — Whence this dash of
brine to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories,
and Victor evidently was pluming himself upon his usual
luck in the fortuitous encounter with an influential neigh-
bour of Lakelands. He told Sir Rodwell the story of how
they had met in the salle a manger of t!ie~Eoter'theT3IF-
1 "prSairworarSoncert in the town, who had in his hand the
I doctor's certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice
'\j to appear, and waved it, within a step of suicide. ' Well,
to be brief, my wife — "noble dame Anglaise," as the man
announced her on the Concert platform, undertook one of
the songs, and sang another of her own — ^pure contralto
voice, as you will say; with the result that there was a
perfect tumult of enthusiasm. Next day, the waiters of
the hotel presented her with a bouquet of Spring flowers,
white, and central violets. It was in the Paris papers,
under the heading: Une amie d^ outre Manche — I think
that was it ? ' he asked Nataly.

'I forget,' said she.

He glanced at her : a cloud had risen. He rallied her,
spoke of the old Norman silver cross which the manager
of the Concert had sent, humbly imploring her to accept
the small memento of his gratitude. She nodded an
excellent artificial brightness.

And there was the coast of France under young sunlight
over the waters. Once more her oft-petitioning wish
through the years, that she had entered the ranks of pro-
fessional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny is not so
microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into

A PATRIOT ABROAD 157

rock-caves, which have been filled before and left to empti-
ness, and will be left to emptiness again. Nataly had the
intimation visiting us when, in a decline of physical power,
the mind's ready vivacity to conjure illusions forsakes us ;
and it was, of a wall ahead,^nd a force impelling her
against it, and" no hope of ^deviation. And this isjhe
featureless" thing, Destiny ; not without eyes, if we have a
conscience to throw them into it to look at us.

Counsel to her to live in the hour, came, as upon others
on the vessel, from an active breath of the salt prompting
to healthy hunger ; and hardly less from the splendour of
the low full sunlight on the waters, the skimming and
dancing of the thousands of golden shells away from under
the globe of fire.

CHAPTER XV

A PATRIOT ABROAD

Nine days after his master's departure, Daniel Skepsey,
a man of some renown of late, as a subject of reports and
comments in the newspapers, obtained a passport, for the
identification, if need were, of his missing or misappre-
hended person in a foreign country, of the language of
which three unpronounceable words were knocking about
his head to render the thought of the passport a staff of
safety ; and on the morning that followed he was at speed
through Normandy, to meet his master rounding home-
ward from Paris, at a town not to be spoken as it is written,
by reason of the custom of the good people of the country,
with whom we would fain live on neighbourly terms : —
yes, and they had proof of it, not so very many years back,
when they were enduring the worst which can befall us :

158 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

— though Mr. Durance, to whom he was indebted for the
writing of the place of his destination large on a card, and
the wording of the French sound beside it, besides the
jotting down of trains and the station for the change of
railways, Mr. Durance could say, that the active form of
our sympathy consisted in the pouring of cheeses upon
them when they were prostrate and unable to resist !

A kind gentleman, Mr. Durance, as Daniel Skepsey had
recent cause to know, but often exceedingly dark ; not so
patriotic as desireable, it was to be feared; and yet,,
strangely indeed, Mr. Durance had said cogent things on
the art of boxing and on manly exercises, and he hoped
— ^he was emphatic in saying he hoped — we should be
regenerated. ^JHemust hayemeant, that boxing on a grand
scale would contribute to it. JHe Jaid, tEaFaHSIow jaow
V and then was wholesome for us all. He recommended a
montEiypffvate^ whipping for old gentlemen who decline
the use of the gloves, to disperse their humours ; not ex-
cluding Judges and Magistrates : — he could hardly be in
earnest. He spoke in a clergyman's voice, and said it
would be payment of good assurance money, beneficial to
their souls: he seemed to mean it. He said, that old
gentlemen were bottled vapours, and it was good for them
to uncork them periodically. He said, they should be
excused half the strokes if they danced nightly — they
resented motion. He seemed sadly wanting in venera-
tion.

But he might not positively intend what he said. Skep-
sey could overlook everything he said, except the girding-
at England. For where is a braver people, notwithstand-
ing appearances ! Skepsey knew of dozens of gallant
bruisers, ready for the cry to strip to the belt ; worthy,
with a little public encouragement, to rank beside their
grandfathers of the Ring, in the brilliant times when
royalty and nobility countenanced the manly art, our

A PATRIOT ABROAD 159

nursery of heroes, and there was not the existing unhappy
division of classes. He still trusted to convince Mr.
Durance, by means of argument and happy instances,
historical and immediate, that the English may justly
consider themselves the elect of nations, for reasons
better than their accumulation of the piles of gold — better
than 'usurers' reasons,' as Mr. Durance called them.
Much that Mr. Durance had said at intervals was, al-
though remembered almost to the letter of the phrase,
beyond his comprehension, and he put it aside, with
penitent blinking at his deficiency.

AU the while, he was hearing a rattle of voluble tongues
around him, and a shout of stations, intelligible as a wash
of pebbles, and blocks in a torrent. Generally the men
slouched when they were not running. At Dieppe he had
noticed muscular fellows; he admitted them to be
nimbler on the legs than ours ; and that may count both
ways, he consoled a patriotic vanity by thinking; in-
stantly rebuking the thought ; for he had read chapters
of Military History. He sat eyeing the front row of figures
ia his third-class carriage, musing on the kind of soldiers
we might, heaven designing it, have to face, and how to
beat them ; until he gazed on Rouen, knowing by the size
of it and by what Mr. Durance had informed him of the
city on the river, that it must be the very city of Rouen,
not so many years back a violated place, at the mercy of
a foreign foe. Strong pity laid hold of Skepsey. He
fortified the heights for defence, but saw at a glance that
it was the city for modem artUlery to command, crush
and enter. He lost idea of these afllicted people as foes,
merely complaining of their attacks on England, and
their menaces in their Journals and pamphlets; and he
renounced certain views of the country to be marched
over on the road by this route to Paris, for the dictation
of terms of peace at the gates of the French capital,

160 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

sparing them the shameful entry ; and this after the rout
of their attempt at an invasion of the Island!

A man opposite him was looking amicably on his lively
grey eyes. Skepsey handed a card from his pocket. The
man perused it, and crying : 'Dreux?' waved out of the
carriage-window at a westerly distance, naming Rouen as
not the place, not at all, totally other. Thus we are
taught, that a foreign General, ignorant of the language,
must confine himself to defensive operations at home ; he
would be a child in the hands of the commonest man he
meets. Brilliant with thanks in signs, Skepsey drew from
his friend a course of instruction in French names, for our
necessities on a line of march. The roads to Great
Britain's metropolis, and the supplies of forage and pro-
vision at every stage of a march on London, are marked
in the military offices of these people; and that, with
their barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify
a belligerent return for it. Only we pray to be let live
peacefully.

Fervently we pray it when this good man, a total
stranger to us, conducts an ignorant foreigner from one
station to another through the streets of Rouen, after a
short stoppage at the buffet and assistance in the identi-
fication of coins ; then, lifting his cap to us, retires.

And why be dealing wounds and death? It is a more
blessed thing to keep the Commandments. But how is it
possible to keep the Commandments if you have a vexa-
tious wife?

Martha Skepsey had given him a son to show the heredi-
tary energy in his crying and coughing ; and it was owing,
he could plead, to her habits and her tongue, that he some-
times, that he might avoid the doing of worse — for she
wanted correction and was improved by it — courted the
excitement of a short exhibition of skill, man to man, on
publicans' first floors. He could have told the magistrates

A PATRIOT ABROAD 161

so, in part apology for the circumstances dragging him the
other day, so recently, before his Worship ; and he might
have told it, if he had not remembered Captain Dartrey
Fenellan's words about treating women chivalrously;
which was interpreted by Skepsey as correcting them,
when called upon to do it, but never exposing them : —
only, if allowed to account for the circumstances pushing
us into the newspapers, we should not present so guilty a
look before the public.

Furthermore, as to how far it is the duty of a man to
serve his master, there is likewise question: whether is
he, whUe receiving reproof and punishment for excess of
zeal in the service of his master, not to mention the welfare
of the country, morally — without establishing it as a
principle — exonerated? Miss Graves might be asked:
save that one would not voluntarily trouble a lady on such
subjects. But supposing, says the opposing counsel, now
at work in Skepsey's conscience, supposing this act, for
which, contraveneing the law of the land, you are reproved
and punished, to be agreeable to you, how then? We
answer, supposing it — and we take uncomplainingly the
magistrate's reproof and punishment — morally justified :
can it be expected of us to have the sense of guilt, al-
though we wear and know we wear a guilty look before the
public ?

His master and the dear ladies would hear of it ; perhaps
they knew of it now ; with them would rest the settlement
of the distressing inquiry. The ladies would be shocked :
ladies cannot bear any semblance of roughness, not even
with the gloves : — and knowing, as they must, that our
practise of the manly art is for their protection.

Skepsey's grievous prospect of the hour to come under
judgement of a sex that was ever a riddle unread, clouded
him on the approach to Dreux. He studied the country
and the people eagerly; he forbore to conduct great

162 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

military operations. Mr. Durance had spoken of big
battles round about the town of Dreux ; also of a wonder-
ful Mausoleum there, not equally interesting. The little
man was in deeper gloom than a day sobering on crimson
dusk when the train stopped and his quick ear caught the
sound of the station, as pronounced by his friend at Rouen.
He handed his card to the station-master. A glance,
and the latter signalled to a porter, saying: 'Paradis';
and the porter laid hold of Skepsey's bag. Skepsey's
grasp was firm; he pulled, the porter pulled. Skepsey
heard explanatory speech accompanying a wrench. He
wrenched back with vigour, and in his own tongue ex-
claimed, that he held to the bag because his master's
letters were in the bag, all the way from England. For a
minute, there was a downright trial of muscle and will :
the porter appeared furiously excited, Skepsey had a look
of cooled steel. Then the Frenchman, requiring to shrug",
gave way to the Englishman's eccentric obstinacy, and
signified that he was his guide. Quite so, and Skepsey
showed alacrity and confidence in following; he carried
his bag. But with the remembrance of the kindly service-
able man at Rouen, he sought to convey to the porter,
that the terms of their association were cordial. A wav-
ing of the right hand to the heavens ratified the treaty on
the French side. Nods and smiles and gesticulations,
with across-Channel vocables, as it were Dover cliffs to
Calais sands and back, pleasantly beguiled the way down
to the Hotel du Paradis, under the Mausoleum heights,
where Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin current;
but the Frenchman, all shaken by a tornado of negation,
clapped him on the shoulder, and sang him a quatrain.
Skepsey had in politeness to stand listening, and blinking,
plunged in the contrition of ignorance, eclipsed. He took
it to signify something to the effect, that money should
not pass between friends. It was the amatory farewell

A PATRIOT ABROAD 163

address of Henri iv. to his Charmante Gabrielle; and
with —

' Perce de mille dards,
L'honnew m/appelle
Au champ de Mars,'

the Frenchman, in a backing of measured steps, apologized
for his enforced withdrawal from the stranger who had
captured his heart.

Skepsey's card was taken in the passage of the hotel.
A clean-capped maid, brave on the legs, like all he had seen
of these people, preceded him at quick march to an upper
chamber. When he descended, bag in hand, she flung
open the salon-door of a table d'hote, where a goodly
number were dining and chattering; waiters drew him
along to the section occupied by his master's party. A
chair had been kept vacant for him; his master waved
a hand, his dear ladies graciously smiled; he struck the
bag in front of a guardian foot, growing happy. He could
fancy they had not seen the English newspapers. And
his next observation of the table showed him wrecked
and lost : Miss Nesta's face was the oval of a woeful O at
his wild behaviour in England during their absence. She
smiled. Skepsey had nevertheless to consume his food —
excellent, very tasty soup — with the sour sauce of the
thought that he must be tongue-tied ia his defence for the
time of the dinner.

'No, dear Skips, please! you are to enjoy yourself,'
said Nesta.

He answered confusedly, trying to assure her that he
was doing so, and he choked.

His master had fixed his arrival for twenty minutes
earlier. Skepsey spoke through a cough of long delays at
stations. The Rev. Septimus Barmby, officially peace-
maker, sounded the consequent excuse for a belated

164 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

comer. It was final ; such is the power of sound. Looks
were cast from the French section of the table at the owner
of the prodigious organ. Some of the younger men, in-
tent on the charms of Albion's daughters, expressed in a
sign and a word or two alarm at what might be beneath
the flooring: and 'Pas encore LuH' and 'Son avant-
courrier!' and other flies of speech passed on a whiff,
imder politest of cover, not to give offence. But prodigies
claim attention.

Our English, at the close of the dinner, consented to say
it was good, without specifying a dish, because a selection
of this or that would have seemed to italicize, and commit
them, in the presence of ladies, to a notice of the matter-
of-course, beneath us, or the confession of a low sensual
enjoyment ; until Lady Grace Halley named the particu-
lar dressing of a tSte de veau approvingly to Victor ; and
he stating, that he had offered a suggestion for the menu of
the day, Nataly exclaimed, that she had suspected it:
upon which Mr. Sowerby praised the menu, Mr. Barmby,
Peridon and Catkin named other dishes, there was the
right after-dinner ring in Victor's ears, thanks to the
woman of the world who had travelled round to nature
and led the shackled men to deliver themselves heartily.
One tap, and they are free. That is, in the moments after
dinner, when nature is at the gates with them. Only, it
must be a lady and a prevailing lady to give the tap.
They need (our English) and will for the ages of the pro-
cess of their transformation need a queen.

Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master's
head and followed him.

He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during
his master's perusal of letters. Nataly had decreed that
he was not to be troubled; so Nesta and mademoiselle
besought him for a recital of his French adventures ; and
strange to say, he had nothing to tell. The journey,,

A PATRIOT ABROAD 165

pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was
absolutely blank at the termination. French people had
been very kind ; he could not say more. But there was y '
more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only he could
subordinate it to narrative. The httle man did not
know, that time was wanted for imagination to make the ,'>,
roadway or riverway of a true story, unless we press to
invent ; his mind had been too busy on the way for him
to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of inci-
dents at the call for them. Things had happened, numbers
of interesting minor things, but they all slipped as water
through the fingers ; and he being of the band of honest
creatures who wUl not accept a lift from fiction, drearily
he sat before the ladies, confessing to an emptiness he was
far from feeling.

Nesta professed excessive disappointment. ' Now, if it
had been in England, Skips !' she said, under her mother's
gentle gloom of brows.

He made show of melancholy submission.

'There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,'
Nataly said.

And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent
to prove to us that they can be a blessing ; instead of the
dreadful cry to Providence for the reason of the spread of
the race of man by their means ! He declared his readi-
ness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them, but for
his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their kind
aid in obtaining his master's forgiveness. Mr. Durance
had very considerately promised to intercede. Skepsey
dropped a hint or two of his naughty proceedings drily
aware that their untutored antipathy to the manly art
would not permit of warmth.

Nesta said: 'Do you know. Skips, we saw a grand
exhibition of fencing in Paris.'

He sighed. 'Ladies can look on at fencing! foils and

166 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

^masks ! Captain Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and
says, the French are our masters at it.' He bowed con-
strainedly to mademoiselle.

'You box, M. Skepsey!' she said.

His melancholy increased: 'Much discouragement
from Government, Society ! If ladies . . . but I do not
venture. They are not against Games. But these are
not a protection ... to them, when needed; to the
country. The country seems asleep to its position. Mr.
Durance has remarked on it : — though I would not always
quote Mr. Durance . . . indeed, he says, that England
has invested an Old Maid's All in the Millennium, and is
ruined if it delays to come. "Old Maid," I do not see.
I do not — if I may presume to speak of myself in the same
breath with so clever a gentleman, agree with Mr. Durance
in everything. But the chest-measurement of recruits,
the stature of the men enlisted, prove that we are losing
the nursery of our soldiers.'

' We are taking them out of the nursery. Skips, if you 're
for quoting Captain Dartrey,' said Nesta. 'We '11 never
haul down our flag, though, while we have him !'

'Ah ! Captain Dartrey !' Skepsey was refreshed by
the invocation of the name.

A summons to his master's presence cut short something
he was beginning to say about Captain Dartrey.

/"I..

I ' ' , .. ■.HP-

f4^"^""- CHAPTER XVI

'^fl 'accounts foe skepsey's misconduct, showing how
•^ / , A IT affected nataly

L- I I His master opened on the bristling business.
r^f^ ], r '' 'What 's this, of your name in the papers, your appear-
\^-^^ ing before a magistrate, and a fine ? Tell the tale shortly. '

'' JA^

SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT 167

Skepsey fell upon his attitude for dialectical defence:
the modest form of the two hands at rolling play and the
head deferentially sidecast. But knowing that he had
gratified his personal tastes in the act of serving his master's
interests, an interfusion of sentiments plunged him into
self-consciousness ; an unwonted state with him, clogging
to a simple story.

'First, sir, I would beg you to pardon the printing of
your name beside mine . . .'

'Tush: on with you.'

'Only to say, necessitated by the circumstances of the
case. I read, that there was laughter in the court at my
exculpation of my conduct — as I have to call it ; and there
may have been. I may have expressed myself. ... I
have a strong feeling for the welfare of the country.'

'So, it seems, you said to the magistrate. Do you tell
me, that the cause of your gross breach of the law, was a
consideration for the welfare of the country? Run on
the facts.'

'The facts — I must have begun badly, sir.' Skepsey
rattled the dry facts in his head to right them. From his
not having begun well, they had become dry as things
underfoot. It was an error to have led off with the senti-
ments. 'Two very, two very respectable persons — re-
spectable— were desirous to witness a short display of my,
my system, I would say ; of my science, they call it.'

'Don't be nervous. To the point; you went into a
field five miles out of London, in broad day, and stood in
a ring, the usual riff-raff about you !'

'With the gloves : and not for money, sir : for the trial
of skill; not very many people. I cannot quite see the
breach of the law.'

'So you told the magistrate. You were fined for
your inability to quite see. And you had to give
security.'

168 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'Mr. Durance was kindly responsible for me, sir: an
acquaintance of the magistrate.'

'This boxing of yours is a positive mania, Skepsey.
You must try to get the better of it — ^must ! And my
name too ! I 'm to be proclaimed, as having in my
service an inveterate pugilist — ^who breaks the law from
patriotism ! Male or female, these very respectable per-
sons— the people your show was meant for?'

' Male, sir. Females ! . . . that is, not the respectable
ones.'

'Take the opinion of the respectable ones for your
standard of behaviour in future.'

'It was a mere trial of skill, sir, to prove to one of the
spectators, that I could be as good as my word. I wished
I may say, to conciliate him, partly. He would not— he
judged by size — credit me with ... he backed my
adversary Jerry Scroom — a sturdy boxer, without the
knowledge of the first principles.'

'You beat him?'

'I think I taught the man that I could instruct, sir ; he
was complimentary before we parted. He thought I
could not have lasted. After the second round, the police
appeared.'

'And you ran!'

'No, sir; I had nothing on my conscience.'

' Why not have had your pugilistic display in a publican's
room in town, where you could have hammer-nailed and
ding-donged to your heart's content for as long as you
liked!'

'That would have been preferable, from the point of
view of safety from intrusion, I can admit — speaking
humbly. But one of the parties — I had a wish to gratify
him — is a lover of old English times and habits and our
country scenes. He wanted it to take place on green
grass. We drove over Hampstead in three carts and a gig,

SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT 169

as a company of pleasure — as it was. A very beautiful
morning. There was a rest at a public-house. Mr.
Shaplow traces the misfortune to that. Mr. Jarniman, I
hear, thinks it what he calls a traitor in the camp. I saw
no sign ; we were all merry and friendly.'

'Jarniman?' said Victor sharply. 'Who is the
Jamiman?'

' Mr. Jamiman is, I am to understand from the acquaint-
ance introducing us — a Mr. Shaplow I met in the train
from Lakelands one day, and again at the comer of a
street near Drury Lane, a ham and beef shop kept by a
Mrs. Jarniman, a very stout lady, who does the chief
carving in the shop, and is the mother of Mr. Jarniman :
he is ia a confidential place, highly trusted.' Skepsey
looked up from the hands he soaped: 'He is a curious
mixture; he has true enthusiasm for boxing, he believes
in ghosts. He mourns for the lost days of prize-fighting,
he thinks that spectres are on the increase. He has a
very large appetite, depressed spirits. Mr. Shaplow in-
forms me he is a man of substance, in the service of a
wealthy lady in poor health, expecting a legacy and her
appearance to him. He has the look — Mr. Shaplow
assures me he does not drink to excess: he is a slow
drinker.'

Victor straightened : 'Bad way of health, you said?'

'Mr. Jarniman spoke of his expectations, as being
immediate : he put it, that he expected her spirit to be
out for him to meet it any day — or night. He desires it.
He says, she has promised it — on oath, he says, and must
feel that she must do her duty to him before she goes, if
she is to appear to him with any coimtenance after. But
he is anxious for her in any case to show herself, and says,
he should not have the heart to reproach her. He has
principles, a tear for suffering ; he likes to be made to cry.
Mrs. Jamiman, his mother, he is not married, is much the

170 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

same so far, except ghosts ; she will not have them ; ex-
cept after strong tea, they come, she says, come to her bed.
She is foolish enough to sleep in a close-curtained bed.
But the poor lady is so exceedingly stout that a puff of
cold would carry her off, she fears.'

Victor stamped his foot. 'This man Jarniman serves
a lady now in a — serious, does he say? Was he precise?'

'Mr. Jarniman spoke of a remarkable number of
diseases ; very complicated, he says. He has no opinion
of doctors. He says, that the lady's doctor and the
chemist — ^she sits in a chemist's shop and swallows other
people's prescriptions that take her fancy. He says,
her continuing to live is wonderful. He has no reason
to hurry her, only for the satisfaction of a natural
curiosity.'

'He mentioned her name?'

'No name, sir.'

Skepsey's limpid grey eyes confirmed the negative to
Victor, who was assured that the little man stood clean
of any falsity.

'You are not on equal terms. You and the magistrate
have helped him to know who it is you serve, Skepsey.'

'Would you please to direct me, sir.'

'Another time. Now go and ease your feet with a run
over the town. We have music in half an hour. That
you like, I know. See chiefly to amusing yourself.'

Skepsey turned to go; he murmured, that he had en-
joyed his trip.

Victor checked him : it was to ask whether this Jarni-
man had specified one, any one of the numerous diseases
afflicting his aged mistress.

Now Jarniman had shocked Skepsey with his blunt
titles for a couple of the foremost maladies assailing the
poor lady's decayed constitution : not to be mentioned,
Skepsey's thought, in relation to ladies ; whose organs and

SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT 171

functions we, who pay them a proper homage by restrict-
ing them to the sphere so worthily occupied by their
mothers up to the very oldest date, respectfully curtain;
their accepted masters are chivalrous to them, deploring
their need at times for the doctors and drugs. He stood
looking most unhappy. ' She was to appear, sir, in a few
— ^perhaps a week, a month.'

A nod dismissed him.

The fun of the expedition (and Dudley Sowerby had
wound himself up to relish it) was at night in the towns,
when the sound of instrumental and vocal music attracted
crowds beneath the windows of the hotel, and they heard
zon, zon, violon, flute et basse ; not bad fluting, excellent
fiddling, such singing as a maestro, conducting his own
Opera, would have approved. So Victor said of his
darlings' voices. Nesta's and her mother's were a perfect
combination ; Mr. Barmby's trompe in union, sufficiently
confirmed the popular impression, that they were artistes.
They had been ceremoniously ushered to their carriages,
with expressions of gratitude, at the departure from
Rouen; and the Boniface at Gisors had entreated them
to stay another night, to give an entertainment. Victor
took his pleasure in letting it be known, that they were a
quiet English family, simply keeping-up the habits they
practiced in Old England : aU were welcome to hear them
while they were doing it; but they did not give enter-
tainments.

The pride of the pleasure of reversing the general idea of
English dulness among our neighbours, was perceived to
have laid fast hold of Dudley Sowerby at Dreux. He was
at the window from time to time, counting heads below.
For this reason or a better, he begged Nesta to supplant
the flute duet with the soprano and contralto of the Helena
section of the Mefistofele, called the Serenade: La Luna
immobile. She consulted her mother, and they sang it.

172 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

The crowds below, swoln to a block of the street, were dead
still, showing the instinctive good manners of the people.
Then mademoiselle astonished them with a Provengal or
Cevennes air, Huguenot, though she was Catholic ; but it
suited her mezzo-soprano tones; and it rang massively
-of the martial-religious. To what heights of spiritual
;grandeur might not a Huguenot France have marched !
Dudley Sowerby, heedlessly, under an emotion that could
be stirred in him with force, by the soul of religion issuing
through music, addressed his ejaculation to Lady Grace
Halley. She did nor shrug or snub him, but rejoined : 'I
«ould go to battle with that song in the ears.' She liked
iseeing him so happily transformed; and liked the effect
of it on Nesta when his face shone in talking. He was at
home with the girl's eyes, as he had never been. A song
'expressing in one of the combative and devotional, went to
the springs of his blood ; f orhe^asof an olBTwarrior race,
teneath the thick crust of imposed peacefuT maxims and
■commercial pursuits and habitual stiff correctness. As
much aFwmeTwill music bring out the native BeSfc of the
■civilized JBaanTjindowTiim^mtKIan^ too. He was
as if unlocked ; he met Nesta's eyes and ran in a voluble
interchange, that gave him flattering after-thoughts ; and
at the moment sensibly a new and assured, or to some
extent assured, station beside a girl so vivid; by which
the young lady would be helped to perceive his unvoiced
solider gifts.

Nataly observed them, thinking of Victor's mastering
subtlety. She had hoped (having clearly seen the sheep's
eye in the shepherd) that Mr. Barmby would be watchful
to act as a block between them; and therefore she had
stipulated for his presence on the journey. She remem-
bered Victor's rapid look of readiness to consent: — he
reckoned how naturally Mr. Barmby would serve as a
foil to any younger man. Mr. Barmby had tried all

SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT 173

along to perform his part : he had always been thwarted ;
notably once at Gisors, where by some cunning manage-
ment he and mademoiselle found themselves in the cell
of the prisoner's NaU-wrought work while Nesta had to
take Sowerby's hand for help at a passage here and there
along the narrow outer castle-walls. And Mr. Barmby,
upon occasions, had set that dimple in Nesta's cheek
quivering, though Simeon Fenellan was not at hand, and
there was no telling how it was done, beyond the evidence
that Victor willed it so.

From the day of the announcement of Lakelands, she
had been brought more into contact with his genius of
dexterity and foresight than ever previously: she had
bent to the burden of it more ; had seen herself and every-
body else outstripped — ^herself, of course; she did not
count in a struggle with him. But since that red dawn of
Lakelands, it was almost as if he had descended to earth
from the skies. She now saw his mortality in the mirac-
ulous things he did. The reason of it was, that through
the perceptible various arts and shifts on her level, an
opposing spirit had plainer view of his aim, to judge it.
She thought it a mean one.

The power it had to hurry her with the strength of a
torrent to an end she dreaded, impressed her physically ;
so far subduing her mind, in consequence, as to keep the
idea of absolute resistance obscure, though her bosom
heaved with the breath ; but what was her own of a mind
hung hovering above him, criticizing ; and involuntarily,
discomfortingly. She could have prayed to be led blindly
or blindly dashed on : she could trust him for success ;
and her critical mind seemed at times a treachery. Still
she was compelled to judge.

When he said to her at night, pressing both her hands :
' This is the news of the day, my love ! It 's death at last.
We shall soon be thanking heaven for freedom'; her

174 ONlE OF OUR CONQUERORS

fingers writhed upon his and gripped them in a torture of
remorse on his behalf. A shattering throb of her heart
gave her sight of herself as well. For so it is with the
woman who loves in subjection, she may be a critic of
the man, she is his accomplice.'

'You have a letter, Victor?'

' Confirmation all round : Fenellan, Themison, and now
Skepsey.'

He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring
it, as any interested animated conduit necessarily will.
Neither of them smiled.

The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her
back on credulity.

It might not be to-day or next week or month : but so
much testimony pointed to a day within the horizon, surely !

She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness. The
murderous hope stood up, stood out in forms and pictures.
There was one of a woman at her ease at last in the recep-
tion of guests ; contrasting with an ironic haunting figure
of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger of
scorn for a bold-faced impostor. Nataly's lips twitched
at the remembrance of quaint whimpers of complaint to
the Fates, for directing that a large instead of a rather
diminutive woman should be the social offender fearing
exposure. Majesty in the criminal's dock, is a confound-
ing spectacle. To the bosom of the majestic creature,
all her glorious attributes have become the executioner's
implements. She must for her soul's health believe that
a day of release and exoneration approaches

' Barmby ! — if my dear girl would like him best,'
Victor said, in tenderest undertones, observing the
shadowing variations of her face ; and pierced her cruelly,
past explanation or understanding; — not that she would
have objected to the Rev. Septimus as oflSciating clergy-
man.

SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT 175

She nodded. Down rolled the first big tear.

We cry to women ; Land, ho ! — a land of palms after
storms at sea ; and at once they mundate us with a deluge
of eye-water.

'Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,' Nataly said,
weeping, near on laughing over his look of wanton aban-
donment to despair at sight of her tears. 'Don't mind
me. I am rather like Fenellan's laundress, the tearful
woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and
a cake of soap. Skepsey has made his peace with you ? '

Victor answered: 'Yes, yes; I see what he has been
about. We 're a mixed lot, all of us — the best ! You 've
noticed, Skepsey has no laugh : however absurd the thing
he tells you, not a smile !'

' But you trust his eyes ; you look fathoms into them.
Captain Dartrey thinks him one of the men most in
earnest of any of his country.'

'So Nataly of course thinks the same. And he 's a
worthy little velocipede, as Fenellan calls him. One wishes
Colney had been with us. Only Colney ! — pity one can't
cut his talons for the space before they grow again.'

Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor
would not have been so encouraging, half boyishly caress-
ing, with Dudley Sowerby ! It was the very manner to
sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was to
her father. Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a
superstition, feeling it a certainty. We are easily prophets,
sure of being justified, when the cleverness of schemes
devoted to material ends appears most delicately perfect.
History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are with
us to inspire. In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her in-
efficiency for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's
sake needed it, was beginning to thunder at whiles as a
reproach of unfittingness in his mate, worse than a public
denunciation of the sin against Society.

176 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

' It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to
-J reconcilement. A pain previously thought of, never pre-
viously so realized, seized her at her next sight of Nesta.
She had not taken in her front mind the contrast of the
innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which
the guilty was by a transient ceremony released. Nature
could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty. Not a
word of vindicating eloquence rose up to clear the inno-
cent. Nothing that she could do; no devotedness, not
any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy to
come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child.
She dreamed of the succour in eloquence, to charm the
ears of chosen Juries while a fact spoke over the popula-
tion, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard word.
But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when
referred to Nesta. It seemed a cruel mystery. How was
it permitted by the Merciful Disposer! . . . Nataly's
intellect and her reverence clashed. They clash to the end
of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as a
remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring
about this or that issue, instead of being beside us, within
us, our breath, if we will ; marking on us where at each
step we sink to the animal, mount to the divine, we and
ours who follow, offspring of body or mind. She •KasJn
her error, from judgeing of the destinv of man bv the fate
I £i individuals. Chiefly her error was,^ try to^be thinking
at jlLaffiid' the BA^23kigis.flLifi3:-sensa^ -

A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was
thicker overhead when her warm blood had drawn her
p^ to some acceptance of the philosophy of existence, in a
savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal footing
with the world while yet she lived. She hated herself
for taking pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world
so hap-hazard, ill-balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly,
with such naturalness as not to be aware that it was irony

A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS 177

and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome the res-
torative ceremony because her largeness of person had a.
greater than common need of the protection.

CHAPTER XVII

CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID's
IMAGININGS

That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us. History
pleads for the pride of the great discrowned Family giving
her illumination there. The pride is reverently postured^
the princely mourning-cloak it wears becomingly braided
at the hem with fair designs of our mortal humility in the
presence of the vanquisher ; against whom, acknowledge-
ing a visible conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid
contention in coloured glass and marbles.

Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked
for having advised the curvature of the route homeward
to visit ' the spot of so impressive a monument ' : as it
was phrased by the Rev. Septimus Barmby; whose ex-
position to Nesta of the beautiful stained-glass pictures
of incidents in the life of the crusading St. Louis, was
toned to be likewise impressive : — Colney Durance not
being at hand to bewaU the pathos of his exhaustless
'whacking of the platitudes'; which still retain their
tender parts, but cry unheard when there is no cynic near.
Mr. Barmby laid-on solemnly.

Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous oa
such occasions than poetic fire. It robes us in the cloak
of the place, as at a funeral. Generally, Mr. Barmby
found, and justly, that it is in superior estimation among,
his countrymen of all classes. They are shown by-
example how to look, think, speak; what to do. Poets

178 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

are disturbing; they cannot be comfortably imitated,

, they are unsafe, not certainly the metal, unless you have

1 Jji^? Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and decorations ;

cn^j^H/^^^^ these are but one at a time — and a quotation may

•^ f^y^ remind us of a parody, to convulse the sacred dome!

^f^i Established plain prose officials do better for our English.

The audience moved round with heads of undertakers.

Victor called to recollection Fenellan's 'Rev. Glendo-
veer' while Mr. Barmby pursued his discourse, uninter-
rupted by tripping wags. And those who have schemes,
as well as those who are startled by the criticism in
laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it,
rejoice when wits are absent. Mr. Sowerby and Nesta
interchanged a comment on Mr. Barmby's remarks :
The Fate of Princes ! The Paths of Glory ! St. Louis
was a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the
young gentleman of Evangelical education could admire
him as a Crusader. St. Louis was for Nesta a figure in
the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness by
tears. She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint's
halo, that swam down to us to lift us through holy human
showers. She listened to Mr. Barmby, hearing few sen-
tences, lending his eloquence all she felt : he rolled forth
notes of a minster organ, accordant with the devotional
service she was holding mutely. Mademoiselle upon
St. Louis : 'Worthy to be named King of Kings !' swept
her to a fount of thoughts, where the thoughts are not yet
shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother emotions.
Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and
deeply moved. The girl had a heart of many strings, of
high pitch, open to be musical to simplest wandgpngairs
or to_ the galea.^ TEsl;ryp?"oriEe'recumbent sculptured
,- figures and the_coloured series ofacEsTnlEEFpassageorihe

^i,r crowned Saint ihrilledher„ag "with siglitj of flame on an

IP" . '^"alfar-piece of History. But this King in the lines of the

'^'

A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS 179

Crucifixion leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message
from death. With such a King, there would be union
of the old order and the new, cessation to political turmoil :
Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of things
with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the
venerable, obliterate the beautiful, leave a stoniness of
floods where field and garden were, would be appeased,
transfigured. She hoped, she prayed for that glorious
leader's advent.

On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not
intelligibly, not communicably : a subject thickly veiled;
one which struck at her through her sex and must, she
thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature saw
it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams
of a body rageing with fire behind the veil) : on this one
subject, her hopes and prayers were dumb in her bosom.
It signified shame. She knew not the how, for she had no
power to contemplate it : there was a torment of earth
and a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse.
But if the new crusading Hero were to come attacking
that— a some born prinp.fi Tinbly..TOfl.iiJigr>ii1(^ hpad t.hp jjfprld
to take awaythe withering scarletfromJJiaiafifiJiLwftmen,
"sKeTelf sEe coidd kiss the print of his feet upon thejiround.
TVleanwhile she haST enjoyment of her plunge into* the
inmost forest-weU of mediaeval imaginativeness, where
youthful minds of good aspiration through their obscurities
find much akin to them.

She had an eye for little Skepsey too : unaware that
these French Princes had hurried him off to Agincourt,
for another encounter with them and the old result — ^poor
dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly !
What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing
the slow parade, and sheer deference to his betters, as to
the signification of a holiday on arrested legs. Dudley
Sowerby's attention to him, in elucidating the scenes with

180 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

historical scraps, greatly pleased her. The Rev. Septimus
of course occupied her chiefly.

Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated
expressions of gratitude for the route she had counselled.
Without personal objections to a well-meaning orderly
man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming too
considerably higher than his head, she did but show him
the voluble muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips;
not a smile at all, and certainly no sign of hostility ; when
bowing to his reiterated compliment in the sentence of
French. Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong senti-
ment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert
immobility of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this
kind or that, in England : an all but imperceptible
shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon mention
of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at his
reading of a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding
Ceremony involving his favourite Bishop for bridegroom :
a report to make one glow like Hymen rollicking the
Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper. He
remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on
the slumbering features, at a statement, that his Bishop
was a widower, entering into nuptials in his fifty-fourth
year. Why not? But we ask it of Heaven and Man,
why not? Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young
or youngish; her own clergy were celibates, and — ^no,
he could not argue the matter with a young or youngish
person of her sex. Could it be a reasonable woman — a
woman! — who disapproved the holy nuptials of the
pastors of the flocks? But we are forbidden to imagine
the conducting of an argument thereon with a lady: —
Luther . . . but we are not in Luther's time: — Nature
... no, nor can there possibly be allusions to Nature.
Mr. Barmby wondered at Protestant parents taking a
Papistical governess for their young flower of English

A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS 181

womanhood. However, she venerated St. Louis; he
cordially also; there they met; and he admitted, that
she had, for a Frenchwoman, a handsome face, and
besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in the looks
which could be so politely dubious as to appear only
dubiously adverse.

The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English
ground ; and when her father and mother were comparing
their impressions, she could not but keep guard over the
deeper among her own. At the Chateau de Gisors, left-
ward off Vernon on Seine, it had been one of romance
and wonderment, with inquisitive historic soundings of
her knowledge and mademoiselle's, a reverence for the
prisoner's patient holy work, and picturings of his watchful
waiting daily. Nail in hand, for the heaven-sent sunlight
on the circular dungeon-waU through the slits of the
meurtri^res. But the Mausoleum at Dreux spake re-
ligiously ; it enfolded Mr. Barmby, his voice re-edified it.
The fact that he had discoursed there, though not a word
of the discourse was remembered, allied him to the spirit
of a day rather increasing in sacredness as it receded and
left her less the possessor of it, more the worshipper.

Mademoiselle had to say to herself: 'Impossible!'
after seeing the drift of her dear Nesta's eyes in the wake
of the colossal English clergyman. She fed her incredu-
lousness indignantly on the evidence confounding it.
Nataly was aware of unusual intonations, treble-stressed,
in the Bethesda and the Galilee of Mr. Barmby on Concert
eveninpT~as "it wer^TEe~towering wood-work of the
cathedral organ in quake under emission of its multitu-
dinous outroar. The 'Which?' of the Rev. Septimus,
addressed to Nesta, when song was demanded of him;
and her 'Either'; and his gentle hesitation, upon a gaze
at her for the directing choice, could not be unnoticed
by women.

182 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Did he know a certain thing ? — and dream of urging the
suit, as an indulgent skipper of parental pages ? —

Such haunting interrogations were the conspirators'
daggers out at any instant, or leaping in sheath, against
Nataly's peace of mind. But she trusted her girl's laugh-
ing side to rectify any little sentimental overbalancing.
She left the groimd where maternal meditations are
serious, at an image of Mr. Barmby knocking at Nesta's
heart as a lover. Was it worth inquiry ?

A feminine look was trailed across the eyes of made-
moiselle, with mention of Mr. Barmby's name.

Mademoiselle rippled her shoulders. 'We are at
present much enamoured of Bethesda.'

That watchfullest showing no alarm, the absurdity of
the suspicion smothered it.

Nataly had moreover to receive startling new guests :
Lady Rodwell Blachington : Mrs. Fanning, wife of the
General: young Mrs. Blathenoy, wife of the great bill-
broker: ladies of Wrensham and about. And it was a
tasking of her energies equal to the buffeting of recurrent
waves on deep sea. The ladies were eager for her entry
into Lakelands. She heard that Victor had appointed
Lady Blachington's third son to the coveted post of clerk
in the Indian house of Inchling and Radnor. These are
the deluge days when even aristocracy will cry blessings
on the man who procures a commercial appointment for
one of its younger sons offended and rebutted by the
barrier of Examinations for the Civil Service. 'To have
our Adolphus under Mr. Victor Radnor's protection, is a
step !' Lady Blachington said. Nataly was in an atmo-
sphere of hints and revealings. There were City Dinners,
to which one or other of the residents about Lakelands
had been taken before he sat at Victor's London table.
He was already winning his way, apparently without
effort, to be the popular man of that neighbourhood. A

A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS 183

subterranean tide or a slipping of earth itself seemed
bearing her on. She had his promise indeed, that he
would not ask of her to enter Lakelands imtil the day of
his freedom had risen ; but though she could trust to his
word, the heart of the word went out of it when she heard
herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who could so well
excuse her at such a time of occupation for not returning
her call, that she called in a friendly way a second time,
warmly to thank her) for throwing open the Concert
room at Lakelands in August, to an Entertainment in
assistance of the fimds for the purpose of erecting an
East of London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor
by day could play, and their parents pass a disengaged
evening. Doubtless a worthy Charity. Nataly was alive
to the duties of wealth. Had it been simply a demand for
a donation, she would not have shown that momentary
pucker of the brows, which Lady Blachington read as a
contrast with the generous vivacity of the husband.

Nataly read a leaf of her fate in this announcement.
Nay^^she^eheld herself as the outer world vexedly beholds
a creature swung _aIong to the doing of things against the
better mind. An outer world is thoughtless of situations
which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will
benumbed; — if we do not, as does that outer world,
belong to the party of the readily heroical. She scourged
her weakness : and the intimation of the truth stood over
her, more than ever manifest, that the deficiency affecting
her character lay in her want of language. A tongue to
speak and contend, would have helped her to carve a
clearer way. But then again, the tongue to speak must
be one which could reproach, and strike at errors ; fence,
and continually summon resources to engage the electrical
vitality of a man like Victor. It was an exultation of their
life together, a mark of his holiness for them both, that
they had never breathed a reproach upon one another.

184 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

She dropped away from ideas of remonstrance; faintly
seeing, in her sigh of submission, that the deficiency affect-
ing her character would have been supplied by a greater
force of character, pressing either to speech or acts. The
confessionM3La„£a.t£d.iaeMAabLe in the mind, is weakness
prostrate. She knew JL-,.. but, she,jjould_ppint _ to the
manner of man she was matched with ; and it was not a
poor excuse. ' "

Mr. Barmby, she thought, deserved her gratitude in
some degree for stepping between Mr. Sowerby and Nesta.
The girl not having inclinations, and the young gentleman
being devoid of stratagem, they were easily kept from the
dangerous count of two.

Mademoiselle would have said, that the shepherd also
had rarely if ever a minute quite alone with her lamb.
Incredulously she perceived signs of a shock. The secret
following the signs was betrayed by Nesta in return for a
tender grasp of hands and a droll flutter of eyelids. Out
it came, on a nod first ; then a dreary mention of a date,
and an incident, to bring it nearer to comprehension.
Mr. Barmby — and decide who will whether it is that Love
was made to elude or that curates impelled by his fires are
subtle as aether — ^had outwitted French watchfulness by
stealing minutes enough on a day at Lakelands to declare
himself. And no wonder the girl looked so forlorn : he
had shivered her mediaeval forest-palace of illuminated
glass, to leave her standing like a mountain hind, that
sniffs the tainted gale off the crag of her first quick leap
from hounds; her instincts alarmed, instead of rich
imagination colouring and fostering.

She had no memory for his words ; so, and truly, she
told her Louise : meaning that she had only a spiceless
memory ; especially for the word love in her ears from the
mouth of a man.

There had been a dream of it ; with the life-awakening

A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS 185

marvel it would be, the humbleness it would bring to her
soul beneath the golden clothing of her body : one of
those faint formless dreams, which are as the bend of
grasses to the breath of a still twilight. She lived too
spiritedly to hang on any dream; and had moreover a
muffled dread — shadow-sister to the virginal desire — of
this one, as of a fateful power that might drag her down,
disorder, discolour. But now she had heard it : the word,
.the very word itself ! in her own ears ! addressed to her !
in a man's voice ! The first utterance had been heard, and
it was over ; the chapter of the book of bulky promise of
the splendours and mysteries ; — ^the shimmering woods and
bushy glades, and the descent of the shape celestial, and
the recognition — ^the mutual cry of affinity; and over-
head the crimson outroUing of the flag of beneficent
enterprises hand in hand, all was at an end. These, then,
are the deceptions our elders tell of ! That masculine
voice should herald a new world to the maiden. The
,TOice~sEeTSg~5^Fd did "BuTTock Wjruin^ the world she
had been living in.

Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks
on his person or on his conduct. Nesta had nothing to
defend : she walked in a bald waste.

'Can I have been guilty of leading him to think . . .?'
she said, in a tone that writhed, at a second discussion of
this hapless affair.

'They choose to think,' mademoiselle replied. 'It is
he or another. My dear and dearest, you have entered
the field where shots fly thick, as they do to soldiers in
battle ; and it is neither your fault nor any one's, if you
are hit.'

Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of
' Louise.'

Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of en-
treaty. 'Has it happened to me? I am of the age of

186 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

eight and twenty ; passable, to look at : yes, my dear,
I have gone through it. To spare you the questions tor-
menting you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience
of our feelings comes nigh on a kind of resemblance. The
first gentleman who did me the honour to inform me of
his passion, was a hunchback.'

Nesta cried 'Oh !' in a veritable pang of sympathy, and
clapped hands to her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby's boom
of the terrific word attacking Louise from that deformed one.

Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears
derision. A girl of quick blood and active though un-
regulated intellect, she caught at the comic of young
women's hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.

'My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice
there is in the world for one like my Louise to have a
hunchback to be the first . . . !'

'But, my dear, it did me no harm.'

'But if it had been known !'

'But it was known!'

Nesta controlled a shuddering : 'It is the knowledge of
it in ourselves — that it has ever happened; — you dear
Louise, who deserve so much better ! And one asks — Oh,
why are we not left in peace ! And do look at the objects
it makes of us !' Mademoiselle^ could see, that the girl's
desperation had got hold of her humour for a life-buoy.
'It is really worse to have it unknown — ^when you are
compelled to be his partner in sharing the secret, and feel
as if it were a dreadful doll you conceal for fear that every-
body will laugh at its face.'

She resumed her seriousness: 'I find it so hard to be
vexed with him and really really like him. For he is a
good man ; but he will not let one shake him off. He dis-
tresses : because we can't quite meet as we did. Last
Wednesday Concert evening, he kept away; and I am
annoyed that I was glad.'

A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS 187

'Moths have to pass through showers, and keep their
pretty patterns from damage as best they can,' said
mademoiselle.

Nesta transformed herself into a disciple of Philosophy
on the spot. 'Yes, all these feelings of ours are moth-
dust! One feels them. I suppose they pass. They
must. But tell me, Louise, dear soul, was your poor dear
good little afflicted suitor — ^was he kindly pitied?'

' Conformably with the regulations prescribed to young
damsels who are in request to surrender the custody of
their hands. It is easy to commit a dangerous excess in
the dispensing of that article they call pity of them.'

'And he — did he? — vowed to you he could not take
No for an answer?'

At this ingenuous question, woefuUy uttered, made-
moiselle was pricked to smile pointedly. Nesta had a
tooth on her under-lip. Then, shaking vapours to the
winds, she said : ' It is an honour, to be asked ; and we
caimot be expected to consent. So I shall wear through
it. — Only I do wish that Mr. FeneHan would not call him
The Inchcape Bell !' She murmured this to herself.

Mr. Barmby was absent for two weeks. ' Can anything
have offended him?' Victor inquired, in some conster-
nation, appreciating the man's worth, and the grand basso
he was ; together with the need for him at the Lakelands
Concert in August.

Nataly wrote Mr. Barmby a direct invitation. She had
no reply. Her speculations were cut short by Victor, who
handed her a brief note addressed to him and signed by
the Rev. Septimus, petitioning for a private interview.

The formality of the request incensed Victor. 'Now,
dear love, you see Colney's meaning, when he says, there
are people who have no intimacy in them. Here 's a man
who visits me regularly once a week or more, has been
familiar for years — four, at least ; and he wants to speak

188 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

to me, and must obtain the "privilege" by special ap-
pointment ! What can be the meaning of it ? '

'You will hear to-morrow afternoon,' Nataly said, see-
ing one paved way to the meaning — a, too likely meaning.

'He hasn't been . . . nothing about Fredi, surely!'

'I have had no information.'

'Impossible! Barmby has good sense ; Bottesini can't
intend to come scraping on that string. But we won't
lose him ; he 's one of us. Barmby counts for more at a
Charity Concert than all the catalogue, and particularly
in the country. But he 's an excellent fellow — eh ? '

'That he is,' Nataly agreed.

Victor despatched a cheerful curt consent to see Mr.
Barmby privately on the late afternoon of the day to
follow.

Nesta, returning home from the park at that hour of
the interview, ignorant of Mr. Barmby's purpose though
she was, had her fires extinguished by the rolling roar
of curfew along the hall-passage, out of the library.

CHAPTER XVIII

SXHTOES FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA

When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer
Orpheus took that downward way, coming in sight of old
Cerberus centiceps, he astutely feigned inattention to the
hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and with a wave
of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke
raised voice. This much you know. It may be commu-
nicated to you, that there was then beheld the most
singular spectacle ever exhibited on the dizzy line of
division between the living and the dead. For those

SUITORS FOR HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA 189

unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our
sustaining air were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce
to the vitals of the faithful Old Dog before his offended
sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads against a
beggar of a mortal. The terrible sugariness which poured
into him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a
wrestling : his battery of jaws expressed it. They gaped.
At the same time, his eyeballs gave up. All the Dog,
that would have barked the breathing intruder an
hundredfold back to earth, was one compulsory centurion
yawn. Tears, issue of the frightful internal wedding of
the dulcet and the sour (a ravishing rather of the latter
by the former), rolled off his muzzles.

Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent
simile shall be composed of exactly the like notes in
another octave, you will catch the fine flavour of analogy
^jad_ be wafte J m a_beat of wings across tKe"scene"ofThe ^
application of the Rev. Septimus Barinby tcTror^ctor ^
Radnor, that he might enter the house in the^guise of
suitor for the hand of Nesta Victoria. It is the excelling
merit of similes and metaphors to spring us to vault over
gaps and thickets and dreary places. But, as with the
visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them.
Beware, moreover, of examining them too scrupulously :
they have a trick of wearing to vapour if closely scanned.
Let it be gratefully for their aid.

So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby
passed : he was at liberty to pursue his quest.

Victor could not explain how he had been brought to
grant it. He was at pains to conceal the bewilderment
Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make Nataly see the
smallness of the grant :— both of them were unwilling to
lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about
Fredi, he said; and why should not poor Barmby have
his chance with the others in the race ! — ^and his Nataly

190 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

knew that he hated to speak unkindly : he could cry the
negative like a crack of thimder in the City. But such
matters as these! and a man pleading merely for the
right to see the girl! — and pleading in a tone ... 'I
assure you, my love, he touched chords.'

* Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him ? '
Nataly asked smoothly.

'His passion — nothing else. Candid enough. And he
had a tone — ^he has a tone, you know. It 's not what
he said. Some allusion to belief in a favourable opinion
of him . . . encouragement ... on the part of the
mama. She would have him travelling with us ! I
foresaw it.'

' You were astonished when it came. '

'We always are.'

Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr.
Barmby.

She had thought in her heart — ^not seriously; on a
sigh of despondency — that Mr. Barmby espousing the
girl would smooth a troubled prospect: and a present
resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to detect
Victor's cunning to cover his own : a thing imaginable of
him previously in sentimental matters, yet never accu-
rately and so legibly printed on her mind. It did not draw
her to read him with a novel familiarity ; it drew her to
be more sensible of foregone intimations of the man he
was — ^irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive.
Nor did he seem in this instance humanely considerate :
if mademoiselle's estimate of the mind of the girl was not
wrong, then Mr. Bannby's position would be both a
ridiculous and a cruel one. She had some sUly final idea
that the poor man might now serve permanently to check
the more dreaded applicant : a proof that her ordinary
reflectiveness was blunted.

Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming

SUITORS FOR HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA 191

to have his weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-
accusation, of a loss of her natural cheerfulness, and
promised amendment, with a steely smile, that his lips
mimicked fondly ; and her smile softened. To strengthen
the dear soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received
the latest information, of Dr. Themison and surgeons ; —
little conscious of the tragic depths he struck or of the
burden he gave her heart to bear. Her look alarmed
him. She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tiugling
scalp, and was in a moment marble to sight and touch.
She looked like the old engravings of martyrs taking the
bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.

He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in
the awful grip of fingers from the outside of life.

The seizure was over before it could be called ominous.
When it was once over, and she had smUed again and re-
buked him for excessive anxiety, his apprehensions no
longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally in wrath
at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of
her ailments instantly to perish and spare this dear one
annoyance.

Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual ^ '

mental penance for it^ In consequence, the wrath, and \ . i'" ,
the wish, and the penitence, haiSled him, each swelling^ -„ ^ /> .
to possession of him in~turn~"TmtiITh"eylihitedTo~head a VK "■% '
plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the , t"
army of charges against Mrs. Burman. A ^

And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the
morbid indulgence in reflection : a disease never afliicting
him anterior to the stupid fall on London Bridge. He
rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and could
cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below,
half an inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist,
invited by Nataly in old days, had marked philo-pro-
genitiveness on his capacious and enviable cerebrum. He

192 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

knew well it was a fancy. , But^itjwas^Jact also, that
since the day of the f all_ (never, save in meresFgrimpses,
before tjiat^ jlay), hfL-had_tafeg^tonook behind ju^^
"^ffigh an eve had been knocked in the back of his head.

Then, was that day of the aiinbuncement~ot Ijakelancls
to Nataly, to be accounted a gloomy day ? He would not
have it so.

She was happily occupied with her purchases of furni-
ture, Fredi with her singing lessons, and he with his busi-
ness ; a grasp of many ribands, reining-in or letting loose ;
always enjoyable in the act. Recently only had he known
when at home, a relaxation, a positive pleasure in looking
forward to the hours of the City office. This was odd, but
so it was ; and looking homeward from the City, he had a
sense of disappointment when it was not Concert evening.
The Cormyns, the Yatts, and Priscilla Graves, and
Pempton, foolish fellow, and that bothering Barmby, and
Peridon and Catkin, were the lineing of his nest. Well,
and so they had been before Lakelands rose. What had
induced ! ... he suddenly felt foreign to himself. The
shrouded figure_.Qf his lost Idea on London Bridge went by.

A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him :
— Is it a truth, that if we are great owners of money, we
are so swoln with a force not native to us, as to be precipi-
tated into acts the downright contrary of our tastes ?

He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit
of unmeasured phrasing when they are displeased, and so
they yield no rational answer. Still he gave heed to
violent extraneous harpings against money. Epigrams of
Colney's; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist
orators reported in some newspaper corner; had him by
the ears.

They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who
entered his office to tell him she was leaving town for
Whinfold, her husband's family-seat, where the dear man

SUITORS FOR HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA 193

lay in evil case. She signified her resignation to the
decrees from above, saying generously :

'You look troubled, my friend. Any bad City news?'

'I look troubled?' Victor said laughing, and bethought
him of what the trouble might be. 'City news would
not cause the look. Ah, yes ; — I was talking in the street
to a friend of mine on horseback the other day, and he
kept noticing his horse's queer starts. We spied half a
dozen children in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one
of them plucking at a hair. "Please, sir, may I have a
hair out of your horse's taU?" said the mite. We
patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to pluck
at. Men come to the fathers about their girls. It 's my
belief that mothers more easily say no. If they learn the
word -as maids, you '11 say ! However, there 's no fear
about my girl. Fredi's hard to snare. And what brings
you Cityward?'

'I want to know whether I shall do right in selling out
of the Tiddler mine. '

'You have multiplied your investment by ten.'

'If it had been thousands !'

'Clearly, you sell; always jump out of a mounted
mine, unless you 're at the bottom of it.'

'There are City-articles against the mine this morning
—or I should have been on my way to Whinfold at this
moment. The shares are lower.'

'The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to
the ground, that you may quit it for them to ascend.
Tiddler has enemies, like the best of mines : or they may
be named lovers, if you like. And mines that have gone
up, go down for a while before they rise again ; it 's an
affair of undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy.
The stories are false, for the time. I had the latest from
Dartrey FeneUan yesterday. He 's here next month,
some time in August.'

194 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'He is married, is he not?'

'Was.'

Victor's brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.

'Is hie not a soldier?' she said.

'Soldiers and parsons !' Victor interjected.

Now she saw. She understood the portent of Mr.
Barmby's hovering offer of the choice of songs, and the
recent tremulousness of the welling Bethesda.

But she had come about her own business; and after
remarking, that when there is a prize there must be com-
petition, or England will have to lower her flag, she
declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming : 'It 's
only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream
of the past !'

'The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to
you,' said Victor.

She put out her hand to be taken. 'Not if you back
me here. It really is not gambling when yours is the
counsel I follow. And if I 'm to be a widow, I shall have
to lean on a friend, gifted like you. I love adventure,
danger; — well, if we two are in it ; just to see my captain
in a storm. And if the worst happens, we go down to-
gether. It 's the detestation of our deadly humdrum of
modem life ; some inherited love of fighting.'

'Say, brandy.'

'Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to
the brandy novel?'

'Colney may call it what he pleases. If I read fiction,
let it be fiction ; airier than hard fact. If I see a ballet,
my troop of short skirts must not go stepping like pave-
ment policemen. I can't read dull analytical stuff or
"stylists" when I want action — ^if I'm to give my
mind to a story. I can supply the reflections. I 'm
English — if Colney 's right in saying we always come
round to the story with the streak of supernaturalism.

SUITORS FOR HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA 195

I don't ask for bloodshed: that's what his "brandy"
means.'

'But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I
confess I expect it where there 's love ; it 's part of the
balance, and justifies one 's excitement. How otherwise
do you get any real crisis? I must read and live some-
thing unlike this flat life around us.'

'There 's the Adam life and the Macadam life, FeneUan
says. Pass it in books, but in life we can have quite
enough excitement coming out of our thoughts. No
brandy there! And no fine name for personal predilec-
tions or things done in domino !' Victor said, with his
very pleasant face, pressing her hand, to keep the act of
long holding it in countenance and bring it to a well-
punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the
other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed
a beaten visage despite — or with that poor kind of — trust
in her captain. But the thought was not guilty of drawing
comparisons. 'This is one that I could trust, as captain
or mate,' he pressed the hand again before dropping it.

'You judge entirely by the surface, if ygu take me for
a shifty person at the trial,' said Lady Grace.

Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and
she was reminded of trains and husbands.

She left Victor uncomfortably ruffled : and how ? for
she had none of the physical charms appealing pecuharly
to the man who was taken with grandeur of shape. She
belonged rather to the description physically distasteful
to him.

Itjs^a critical coinment on a civilization carelessly dis-
tiUed from the jealous Eastjj^Een'vIsrts^r'fair womeo^o
City offices can Save tiSa efFect^ _jf^the sexes are sepa-
rated for an hour, the place where one is excluded or not
TOmmon"'to see, becomes inflammable to that~appearing
spark. He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the

Kv^

U^\

196 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Vmonasticism of the Court of Law :) and he and she awaken
unhallowed emotions. Supposing, however, that western
men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions of her,
and dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman's voluble
tongue to sisterly occupation there in the midst of the
pleading Court, as in the domestic circle: very soon
would her eyes be harmless: — unless directed upon us
with intent.

That is the burning core of the great Question, our
Armageddon in Morality : Is she moral ? Does she mean
to be harmless? Is she not untamable Old Nature?
And when once on an equal footing with her lordly half,,
would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic
transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be
that wanton old thing — the empress of disorderliness ?
You have to recollect, as the Conservative acutely sug-
gests, that her timidities, at present urging her to support
Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence. The
party views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we
should remember, on an intimate acquaintance with her
in the situations where she is almost unrestrictedly free
and her laughter rings to confirm the sentences of classical
authors and Eastern sages. Conservatives know what
they are about when they refuse to flmg tEe~IisI~Iattice-
^^ aa'jiScrent "harem openTS" afr"an3''"sun^Ee " brutal
dispersers of mystery, ^^^ch would despbilin..ankle of its
flying winJk.
Li^'^ VictOT's opinions were those of the entrenched majority ;
rfi''''' , objecting to the occult power of women, as jEsJiaszfi. the
^L^^' ' women now, while legislating to maintain,lliem.-so ; and
^y^-'-'^ rfor"Bidding a step to a desperately wicked female world
^1^ ' lest the step should be to wickeder. His opinions were
in the background, rarely stirred; but the lady had
brought them forward ; and he fretted at his restlessness,
vexed that it should be due to the intrusion of the sex;

SUITORS FOR HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA 197

instead of to the charms of the individual. No sting of
the sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board
the Channel boat — ^nothing to speak of. 'Why does she
come here ! Why didn't she go to her husband ! She
gets into the City scramble blindfold, and catches at the
nearest hand to help her out ! Nice woman enough.'
Yes, but he was annoyed with her for springing sensations
that ran altogether heartless to the object, at the same
time that they were disloyal to the dear woman their
natural divinity. And between him and that dear woman,
since the communication made by Skepsey in the town of
Dreux, nightly the dividing spirit of Mrs. Burman lay:
cold as a corpse. They both felt her there. They kissed
coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.

Next afternoon the announcement by Skepsey of the
Hon. Dudley Sowerby, surprised Victor's eyebrows at
least, and caused him genially to review the visit of Lady
Grace.

Whether or not Colney Durance drew his description of
a sunken nobility from the 'sick falcon' distinguishing the
handsome features of Mr. Sowerby, that beaked invalid
was particularly noticeable to Victor during the statement
of his case, although the young gentleman was far from
being one, in Colney's words, to enliven the condition of
domestic fowl with an hereditary turn for 'preying';
eminently the reverse; he was of good moral repute, a
worker, a commendable citizen. But there was the
obligation upon him to speak — ^it is expected in such cases,
if only as a formality — of his 'love' : hard to do even
in view and near to the damsel's reddening cheeks: it
perplexed him. He dropped a veil on the bashful topic ;
his tone was the same as when he reverted to the material
points ; his present income, his position in the great Bank
of Shotts and Co., his prospects, the health of the heir to
the Cantor earldom. He considered that he spoke to a

198 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

member of the City merchants, whose preference for the
plain positive, upon the question of an alliance between
families by marriage, lends them for once a resemblance

, . to lords. When a person is not readjby diaracter, the
, A'-^ '^ position or profi^sion is c^Ied"on to supply raised pHnT"

^•fi/A-for the^nger-ends to spell.

Hard on poor Fredi ! was Victor's thought behind the
smile he bent on this bald Cupid. She deserved a more
poetical lover ! His paternal sympathies for the girl be-
sought in love, revived his past feelings as a wooer ; no-
thing but a dread of the influence of Mr. Barmby's toned
eloquence upon the girl, after her listening to Dudley
Sowerby's addresses, checked his contempt for the latter.
He could not despise the suitor he sided with against
another and seemingly now a more dangerous. Unable
quite to repress the sentiment, he proceeded immediately
to put it to his uses. For we have no need to be scrupu-
lously formal and precise in the exposition of circum-
stances to a fellow who may thank the stars if such a girl
condescends to give him a hearing. He had this idea
through the conception of his girl's generosity. And
furthermore, the cognizant eye of a Lucretian Alma Mater
having seat so strongly in Victor, demanded as a right an
effusion of the promising amorous graces on the part of
the acceptable applicant to the post of husband of that
peerless. These being absent, evidently non-existent, it
seemed sufficient for the present, after the fashion of the
young gentleman, to capitulate the few material matters
briefly.

They were dotted along with a fine disregard of the
stateliness of the sum to be settled on Nesta Victoria, and
with a distant but burning wish all the while, that the
suitor had been one to touch his heart and open it, in-
spiriting it — as could have been done — to disclose for
good and all the things utterable. Victor loved clear

SUITORS FOR HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA 199

honesty, as he loved light : and though he hated to be
accused of not showing a clean face in the light, he would
have been moved and lifted to confess to a spot by the
touch at his heart. Dudley Sowerby's deficiencies, how-
ever, were outweighed by the palpable advantages of his
birth, his prospects, and his good repute for conduct;
add thereto his gentlemanly manners. Victor sighed
again over his poor Fredi; and in telling Mr. Sowerby
that the choice must be left to her, he had the regrets of
a man aware of his persuasive arts and how they would
be used, to think that he was actually making the
choice.

Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine

,ot It; he IS no longer the man of his tastes or "pf his prin-

_ci£lesjHeJson^ Ime ot rails Tor'a termrQus"; "and he may
cast Tangmshing"eyes~aFfos's~waysid"es^ To~ngEt" and "left,

Jhe^iias doomed hunself _to_proceedj with a seTf^devouring
hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at
the "embrace of it. Thfs ihay be of not, but Nature has

~3ecreed to hSoTthe forfeit of pleasure. She bids us count
the passage of a sober day for the service of the morrow ;
that is her system; and she would have us adopt it, to
keep in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the guarantee
of enjoyment : doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one
or other of the furious matrix instincts ; we are blunt to
aU else.

Yoimg Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with
Miss Radnor; he alluded to her virtues, her accomplish-
ments. He was waxing to fervidness. He said he must
expect competitors; adding, on a start, that he was to
say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to
present Miss Radnor at Court. . . .

Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though his
head had come out of hot water. He sacrificed Royalty
to his necessities, under a kind of sneer at its functions :

200 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'Court! my girl? But the arduous duties are over for
the season. We are a democratic people retaining the
seductions of monarchy, as a friend says ; and of course
a girl may like to count among the flowers of the kingdom
for a day, in the list of Court presentations; no harm.
Only there 's plenty of time . . . very young girls have
their heads turned — though I don't say, don't imagine,
my girl would. By and by perhaps.'

Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and intro-
duced to the figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Penner-
gate, and Radnor: a respectable City merchant indeed,
whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse of the downright
contrast to his partner. He had heard casual remarks on
the respectable City of London merchant from Colney
Durance. A short analytical gaze at him, helped to an
estimate of the powers of the man who kept him up. Mr.
Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a line of
City merchants, having features for a wife to identify ; as
drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their
round-bellied beasts. Formerly the leader of the Firm,
he was now, after dreary fits of restiveness, kickings, false
prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient cart-horse. He
sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when,
like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for
shoals of good things to fatten it : a tale of English pros-
perity in quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the
by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to make it
our national Poem.

Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden
oats were still somehow constantly allotted to him. His
wife believed in Victor, and deemed the loss of the balanc-
ing Pennergate a gain. Since that lamentable loss, Mr.
Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory of
Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven,
racing like mad against his will and the rival nations now

SUITORS FOR HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA 201

in the field to force the pace ; a name for enterprise ; the
close commercial connection of a man who speculated —
"who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits ; hurried onward
and onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at
satisfaction, in perplexity of the gratitude which is appre-
hensive of black Nemesis at a turn of the road, to con-
found so wUd a whip as Victor Radnor. He had never
forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous
purchase of Cotton many years back, and which he had
repudiated, though not his share of the hundreds of
thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the bargain
had come to Victor. Mr. Inchling dated his first in-
digestion from that disquieting period. He assented to
the praise of Victor's genius, admitting behefitsj^hfeiheart
refused to pardon, and consequently his head wholly to
"^n^ the man wEoTobbed"himTorHis"qi;Q^amIcamfort-
"aBIeTeding of security. And if you will imagine the sprite
■ of the aggregateTSglish Taxpayer personifying Steam as
the malignant who has despoiled him of the blessed
Safety-Assurance he once had from his God Neptune
against invaders, you will comprehend the state of
Mr. InchliQg's mind in regard to his terrific and bountiful,
but very disturbing partner.

He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had no-
thing to do with North American or South American mines
and pastures or with South Africa and gold and diamonds :
and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her inward
comparisons. Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on
this example of the island energy. Mr. Inchling was not
permitted by his wife to be much the guest of the Radnor
household, because of the frequent meeting there with
Colney Durance; Colney's humour for satire being in-
stantly in bristle at sight of his representative of English
City merchants : 'over whom,' as he wrote of the vener-
able body, 'the disciplined and instructed Germans not

202 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

deviously march; whom acute and adventurous Ameri-
cans, with half a cock of the eye in passing, compassion-
ately outstrip.' He and Dr. Schlesien agreed upon Mr.
Inchling. Meantime the latter gentleman did his part
at the tables of the wealthier City Companies, and re-
tained his appearance of health; he was beginning to
think, upon a calculation of the increased treasures of
those Companies and the country, that we, the Taxpayer,
ought not to leave it altogether to Providence to defend
them; notwithstanding the watchful care of us hitherto
shown by our briny Providence, to save us from anxiety
and expense. But there are, he said, 'difficulties'; and
the very word could stop him, as commonly when our
difficulty lies in the exercise of thinking.

Victor's African room, containing large wall-maps of
auriferous regions, was inspected; and another, where
clerks were busy over miscellaneous Continents. Dudley
Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.

He and Victor walked in company Westward. The
shop of Boyle and Luckwort, chemists, was not passed on
this occasion. Dudley grieved that he had to be absent
from the next Concert for practise, owing to his engage-
ment to his mother to go down to the family seat near
Tunbridge Wells. Victor mentioned his relatives, the
Duvidney maiden ladies, residing near the Wells. They
measured the distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge,
the two houses, as for half an hour on horseback.

Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had
been observed confidentially arm in arm, and conversing
so profoundly.

'Who, do you think, was the topic?' Victor asked.

She would not chase the little blue butterfly of a guess.

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 203

CHAPTER XIX

TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSEN-
SION BETWEEN THEM AND OF A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY
IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS COUNTRY

There is at times ia the hearts of all men of active life
a vivid wild moment or two of dramatic dialogue between
the veteran antagonists, Nature and Circumstance, when
they, whose business it should be to be joyfully one,
furiously split; and the Dame is up with her shrillest
querulousness to inquire of her offspring, for the distinct
original motive of his conduct. Why did he bring her to
such a pass ! And what is the gain ? If he be not an
alienated issue of the great Mother, he wiU strongly in-
cline to her view, that he put himself into harness to join
with a machine going the dead contrary way of her wel-
fare; and thereby wrote himself donkey, for his present
reading. Soldiers, heroes, even the braided, even the
wearers of the gay cock's feathers, who get the honours
and the pocket-pieces, know the moment of her electrical
eloquence. They have no answer for her, save an index
at the machine pushing them on yet farther under the
enemy's line of fire, where they pluck the golden wreath
or the livid, and in either case listen no more. They
glorify her topping wisdom while on the march to con-
found it. She is wise in her way. But it is asked by
the disputant. If we had followed her exclusively, how
far should we have travelled from our startiag-point ?
We of the world and its prizes and duties must do her an
injury to make her tongue musical to us, and her argument
worthy of attention. So it seems. How to keep the
proper balance between those two testy old wrarfglers,

204 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

that rarely pull the right way together, is as much the
task for men in the grip of the world, as for the wanton
youthful fry under dominion of their instincts ; and prob-
ably, when it is done, man will have attained the golden
age of his retirement from service.

Why be scheming? Victor asked. Unlike the gallant
soldiery, his question was raised in the blush of a success,
from an examination of the quality of the thing won;
although it had not changed since it was first coveted ; it
was demonstrably the same: and an astonishing dry
stick he held, as a reward for perpetual agitations and
perversions of his natural tastes. Here was a Dudley
iSowerby, the direct issue of the conception of Lakelands ;
if indeed they were not conceived together in one; and
the young gentleman had moral character, good citizen
substance, and station, rank, prospect of a title; and
the grasp of him was firm. Yet so far was it from hearty,
t^^l]?^^£SiiSSS^£-&-P^''^^^^^^ satirist li^"~C^^ Durance
remark on the decorous manner of Dudley's transparent
courtship 'oT the girl, under his look of an awakened ap-
proval of himself, that he appeared to be asking every-
^dy :— ^0 you not'tEinFrBid fair for an^excellentTather
of Philistines ? — Victor had a nip of_ spite_at_the_thought
"of Dudley's dfagging him Bodily to bejjie_grandfathe
iPoor Fredi, too l^necessajily the mother : condemned
by her EarcrfatetqTeerproud of Phillstiiie babies"! ""'Though
"womSTsoon get reconciled to it! Or do they? They
did once. What if his Fredi turned out one of the modern
young women, who have drunk of ideas? He caught
himself speculating on that, as on a danger. The
alliance with Dudley really seemed to set him facing
backward.

Colney might not have been under prompting of Nataly
Tvhen he derided Dudley ; but Victor was at war with the
pictifre of her, in her compression of a cruel laugh, while

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 205

her eyelids were hard shut, as if to exclude the young
patriarch of Philistiues' ridiculous image.

He hearkened to the Nature interrogating him, why
had he stepped on a path to put division between himself
and his beloved? — ^the smallest of gaps; and still the
very smallest between nuptial lovers is a division — and
that may become a mortal wound to their one life. Why
had he roused a slumbering world? Glimpses of the
world's nurse-like, old-fashioned, mother-nightcap benev-
olence to its kicking favourites; its long-suffering
tolerance for the heroic breakers of its rough-cast laws,
whUe the decent curtain continues dropped, or lifted only
5,nkle-high ; together with many scenes, lively suggestions,
of the choice of ways he liked best, told of things, which
were better things, incomprehensibly forfeited. So that
the plain sense of value insisted on more than one weigh-
ing of the gain in hand : a dubious measure.

He was as little disposed to reject it as to stop his course
at a goal of his aim. Nevertheless, a gain thus poorly
estimated^__could not conimand__him to do a deed of
TumiEatlon on account of it. The speaEng"lo this dry
'^ung Dudley was not imperat^^^P,^^^^^- ^ "word
would do in the day to come.

Nataly was busy with her purchases of furniture, and
the practise for the great August Concert. He dealt her
liberal encouragements, up to the verge of Dr. Themison's
latest hummed words touching Mrs. Burman, from which
he jumped in alarm lest he should paralyze her again :
the dear soul's dreaded aspect of an earthy pallor was
a spectre behind her cheeks, ready to rush forth. Fenellan
brought Carling to dine with him; and Themison was
confirmed by Carliag, with incidents in proof ; Carliag by
Jamiman, also with incidents ; one very odd one — or so
it seemed, in the fury of the first savour of it : — she in-
formed Jamiman, Skepsey said his friend Jarniman said,

206 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

that she had dreamed of making her appearance to him on
the night of the 23rd August, and of setting the date on
the calendar over his desk, when she entered his room :
'Sitting-room, not bedroom; she was always quite the
lady,' Skepsey reported his Jarniman. Mrs. Burman, as
a ghost, would respect herself; she would keep to her
character. Jarniman quite expected the dream to be
verified ; she was a woman of her word : he believed she
had received a revelation of the approaching fact : he was
preparing for the scene.

Victor had to keep silent and discourse of general pros-
perity. His happy vivaciousness assisted him to feel it by
day. Nataly heard him at night, on a moan: 'Poor
soul!' and loudly once while performing an abrupt
demi- vault from back to side: 'Perhaps now!' in a
voice through doors. She schooled herself to breathe
equably.

Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of
comfort he was charged with, he swallowed it himself;
and these were the consequences. And an uneasy sleep
was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the Radnor
family. The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia,
would have cited ancestral names, showing it to be the
worst of intimations.- At night, lying on his back beneath
a weight of darkness, one heavily craped figure, distin-
guishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black pad,
accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind
was dragged to go through the whole case by morning
light; and the compassionate man appealed to common
sense, to stamp and~pagin^delectablg jophigtQes7 as,
that it was his intense humaneness, which exposed him
'to'an acci^a^ioE^oTmE^amtyyiiK^
"Best toTEappen, which anticipated Mrs. Burman's expiry.
They were simple sophistries, fabricated to suit Eis'nBeds,
readily taking and bearing the imprimatur of common

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 207

sense. They refreshed him, as a chemical scent a crowded
room.

^1 because he could not open his breast to Nataly^.t)y
reason of her feebleness ; or feel enthusiasm in the piosses-
sion of'voung Dudley"! A Hry^itick irideeJ^beside him on
the walk Westward. Good quality wood, no doubt, but
dry, varnished for conventional uses. Poor dear Fredi
would have to crown it like the May-day posy of the
urchins of Craye Farm and Creckholt !

Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate
him as a diligent student of commercial matters : rivalries
of Banks ; Foreign and Municipal Loans, American Rails,
and Argentine ; new Companies of wholesome appearance
or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or
born to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a
ditch; Trusts and Founders; Breweries bursting vats
upon the markets, and England prone along the gutters,
gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the possession
of certain of them. But when, as Colney says, a grateful
England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he
gratefully hands-over the establishment to his country;
and both may disregard the howls of a Salvation Army
of shareholders. — Beaten by the Germans in Brewery,
too ! Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow. We were
ahead of them, and they came and studied us, and they
studied Chemistry as well; while we went on down our
happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire their
young Professors, and then to import their beer.

Have the Germans more brains than we English?
Victor's blood up to the dome of his craniiun knocked the
patriotic negative. But, as old Colney says (and bother
him, for constantly intruding !), the comfortably suc-
cessful have the hahit of sitting, and that dulls the brain
yet more than it eases the person: hence are we out-
paced; we have now to know we are racing. Victor

208 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

scored a mark for one of his projects. _ A well-conducted
Journal of the sharpest pensjn thejand^might, aTasa'cri-
fice o! money grandly sunk, expose to his English how
and to what degree their sports, and their fierce feastings,
and their opposition to ideas, and their timidity in regard
to change, and their execration of criticism applied to
themselves, and their unanimous adoption of it for a
weapon against others, are signs of a prolonged indul-
gence in the cushioned seat. Victor saw it. But would
the people he loved? He agreed with Colney, forgetting
the satirist's venom: to- wit, that the journalists should
be close under their editor's rod to put it in sound bold
English; — ^no metaphors, no similes, nor flowery in-
substantiality : "FutTionest Baxon manger stuff : and
piit it repeatedly, in contempt of the disgustjrf iteration ;
hammering so a, soft place on the j^glican skull, which
is rubbed in consequence, and taught at last through sore-
ness to reflect. — A Journal? — with Colney Durance for
TE'ditor? — and called, conformably THE'^'V^ippiNG-Top?
"Why not, if it exactly hits the signification of the Journal
and that which it would have the country do to itself,
to keep it going and truly topping? For there is no
vulgarity in a title strongly signifying the intent. Victor
wrote it at night, naming Colney for Editor, with a sum
of his money to be devoted to the publication, in a form
of memorandum; and threw it among the papers in his
desk.

Young Dudley had a funny inquisitiveness about Dartrey
Fenellan ; owing to Fredi's reproduction or imitation of
her mother's romantic sentiment for Dartrey, doubtless :
a bit of jealousy, indicating that the dry fellow had his
feelings. Victor touched-off an outline of Dartrey's
history and character: — the half-brother of Simeon,
considerably younger, and totally different. 'Dartrey's
mother was Lady Charlotte Kiltome, one of the

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 209-

Clanconans ; better mother than wife, perhaps ; and no
reproach on her, not a shadow; only she made the-
General's Bank-notes fly black paper. And — if you 're
for heredity — ^the queer point is, that Simeon, whose
mother was a sober-minded woman, has always been the
spendthrift. Dartrey married one of the Hennen
women, all an odd lot, all handsome. I met her once.
Colney said, she came up here with a special commission
from the Prince of Darkness. There are women who stir
the imholy in men — whether they mean it or not, you
know.'

Dudley pursed to remark, that he could not say he did
know. And good for Fredi if he did not know, and had
his objections to the knowledge ! But he was like the
men who escape colds by wrapping in comforters instead
of trusting to the spin of the blood.

'She played poor Dartrey pranks before he buried — ^he
behaved well to her ; and that says much for him ; he has.
a devil of a temper. I 've seen the blood in his veins
mount to cracking. But there 's the man : because she
was a woman, he never let it break out with her. And,
by heaven, he had cause. She couldn't be left. She
tricked him, and she loved him — passionately, I believe.
You don't understand women loving the husband they
drag through the mire?'

Dudley did not. He sharpened his mouth.

'Buried, you said, sir? — ^a widower?'

' I 've no positive information ; we shall hear when he
comes back,' Victor replied hurriedly. 'He got a drench-
ing of aU the damns in the British service from his
Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a trooper's negli-
gence— button or stock missing, or something; and off
goes Dartrey to his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends .
in his resignation. Good soldier lost. And I can't
complain; he has been a right-hand man to me over in

210 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Africa. But a man ought to have some control of his
temper, especially a soldier.'

Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.

' Worse than that temper of Dartrey's, he can't forgive
an injury. He bears a grudge against his country.
You 've heard Colney Durance abuse old England. It 's
three parts factitious — literary exercise. It 's milk beside
the contempt of Dartrey's shrug. He thinks we 're a
dead people, if a people; "subsisting on our fat," as
Colney says.'

'I am not of opinion that we show it,' observed
Dudley.

'We don't,' Victor agreed. He disrelished his com-
panion's mincing tone of a monumental security, and
yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to be at his
elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly
citizens, who little imagined the treacherous revolt from
y him in the bosom of the gentleman cordially signifying
full agreement. But Dudley was not gifted to read be-
hind words and looks.

^ They were in the' Park of the dwindling press of
carriages, and here was this young Dudley saying, quite
commendably : ' It 's a pity we seem to have no means of
keeping our parks select.'

Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought. He
remembered a fable of Fenellan's, about a Society of the
Blest, and the salt it was to them to discover an intruder
from below, and the consequent accelerated measure in
their hymning.

'Have you seen anything offensive to you?' he asked.

'One sees notorious persons.'

Dudley spoke aloof from them — 'out of his cold attics,'
Fenellan would have said.

Victor approved : with the deadened feeling common to
us when first in sad earnest we consent to take life as it is.

ny-

.ly

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 211

Hejgrceived^to(X-tb£..comicali.tv.-Q£..his . ha.Ying to -resign
^E^iIL*£j^Lfelfe§diLfiClbracejaiLgoodaess. ^ .•A"'

Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the ' ^^^
kernel of Lakelands. If he had only been intellectually a (^^
little flexible ia his morality ! But no ; he wore it cap h
pie, like a mediaeval knight his armour. One had to
approve. And there was no getting away from him.
He was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the
opening overture of the amateurs, and the flute-duet,
when his family were looking for him at Tunbridge Wells ;
and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him at a
comer of the Strand.

Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of inter-
ception armed with Colney Durance, for whom he had
called ia the Temple, bent on self-defence, although
Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to Dudley's.
Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in
the presence^ of goodness, let us hopej and stilT an im-
personation of conventional goodness perpetually about
ui~depresses7" TTuHIey" Hrove him to Colney for relief,
besides Tt~pleased Nataly that he should be bringing
Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting
Dudley to critical inspection before he decided a certain
question much, and foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul.
That quieted her. And another thing, she liked him jo
be with Colney, for_a_clogjon him ; as it were, a tuning-
T6r£T(^the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also,
she seemed to ^EEe^^probably as an appeasement after
hearing, and having to share, high flights. And she was,
in her queer woman's way, always reassured by his endur-
ance of Colney's company : — she read it to mean, that he
could bear Colney's perusal of him, and satiric stings.
Victor had seen these petty matters among the various
which were made to serve his double and treble purposes ;
now, thanks to the operation of young Dudley within him.

212 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

he felt them. Preferring Fenellan's easy humour to
Colney's acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter's
antidote to Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition
in the abstract.

For Victor Radnor and Colney Durancgwere the
Optimist and Pessimist of their society. They might

.5F^^""^^'^^^?Il^^i3^'l§5l'™3^^ At "a period

wEen~the^ omnibus of the world" appears to its quaint
occupants to be going faster, men are shaken into the
acceptation, if not performance, of one part or the other
as it is dictated to them by their temperaments. Com-
pose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of the
Nineteenth Century : the mother of these gosling affirma-
tives and negatives divorced from harmony and awakened
by the slight increase of incubating motion to vitality.
Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the
rosy and the saturnine since the former cheerfully slaved
for a small stipend in the City of his affection, and the
latter entered on an inheritance counted in niggard
hundreds, that withdrew a briefless barrister disposed for
scholarship from the forlornest of seats in the Courts.
They had foretold of one another each the unfulfilled;
each claimed the actual as the child of his prediction.
Victor was to have been ruined long back; Colney the
prey of independent bachelors. Colney had escaped his
harpy, and Victor could be called a millionaire and more.
Prophesy was crowned by Colney's dyspepsia, by Victor's
ticklish domestic position. Their pity for one another,
their warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of
different temperaments; and we have to distinguish,
that in many estimable and some gifted human creatures,
it is the quality of the blood which directs the current
of opinion.

Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal
satisfaction, and to lull Nataly and make her laugh ; but

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 213

he could not, as she hoped he was doing, take Colney into
his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist, impelled by
his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and
does things ; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic,
with the deUvery of a censor, generally an undoer of things.
Our Optimy has his instinct to tell him of the cast of
Pessimy's coimtenance at the confession of a dilemma —
foreseen ! He hands himself to Pessimy, as it were a
sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack
with the wood. But he cannot perform his part in re-
turn ; he gets no compensation : Pessimy is invulnerable.
You waste your time in hurling a common tu-quoque at
one who hugs the worst.

The three walking in the park, with their bright view,
and black view, and neutral vtsW~Df life, were a comical
"Trio. TheF^Tia3^"T6'me'~upoBr"tEe days~oF"tEe~ imfanned
electric furnace, proper to London's early August when
it is not pipeing March. Victor complacently bore heat
as well as cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and
Colney a drug to refresh it ; and why was he stewing in
London? It was for this young Dudley, who resembled
a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome
pavements and blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a
water-cart spirting a stale water: or a London of the
farewell dinner-parties, where London's professed anec-
dotist lays the dust with his ten times told. Why was
not Nataly relieved of her dreary roimd of the purchases
of furniture ! They ought all now to be in Switzerland or
Tyrol. Nesta had of late been turning over leaves of an
Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after a run through
the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and
she and Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker,
Haspinger; and wrath had filled them at the meanness of
the Corsican, who posed after it as victim on St. Helena's
rock ; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua's fortress-walls

214 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes
for his pathetic subhme.

Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the
mouthpiece of his darlings. But he had in memory
prominently now the many glorious pictures of that
mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth
from the London oven : — ^lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags
with livid peaks and snow lining shelves and veins of the
crevices ; and folds of pine-wood undulations closed by a
shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a dazzling
pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it
shooting aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge,
and wide-armed in its pure white shroud beneath ; tranced,
but all motion in immobility, to the heart iu the eye ; a
splendid image of striving, up to crowned victory. And
see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows and
maize, and lower vineyards and central tall green spires !
Walking beside young Dudley, conversing, observing too,
Victor followed the trips and twists of a rill, that was
lured a little further down through scoops, ducts, and
scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.

He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water: a
wren-robin-thrush on the dance down of a faun; till it
was caught and muted, and the silver foot slid along the
channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an air
of 'Whither you will, so it be on' ; happy for service as in
freedom. Then the yard of the inn below, and the rill-
water twirling rounded through the trout-trough, subdued,
still lively for its beloved onward : dues to business, dues
to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest on
earth : — eh ? like some one we know, and Nataly has
made the comparison. Fresh forellen for lunch : rhyming
to Fenellan, he had said to her; and that recollection
struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined
military captain living on a literary quill at the time ; and

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 215

Nataly's tender pleading, 'Could you not help to give
him another chance, dear Victor?' — signifying her
absolute trust in his abUity to do that or more or anything,
had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office;
which he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previ-
ously an untutored rill of the mountains, if ever was one.

Useless to be dwelling on holiday pictures : Lakelands
had hold of him !

Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes,
the greater the slaves we become. — But we must have an
aim, my friend, and success must be the aim of any aim !
— Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the dis-
appointing miss, which saved you from being damned by
your bullet on the centre. — You 're dead against Nature,
old Colney. — ^That is to carry the flag of Liberty. — By
clipping a limb !

Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-
Court. He entertained a pronounced dissension with
bachelors pretending to independence. It could not be
argued publicly, and the more the pity: — ^for a slight
encouragement, he would have done it : his outlook over
the waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly
constrained) spinsters — and another outlook, midnight
upon Phlegethon to the thoughts of men, made him deem
it urgent. And it helped the plea in his own excuse, as
Colney pointed out to the son of Nature. That, he had
to admit, was true. He charged it upon Mrs. Burman,
for twistiag the most unselfish and noblest of his thoughts ;
and he promised himself it was to cease on the instant
when the circumstance, which Nature was remiss in not
bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass.
He could see his Nataly's pained endurance beneath her
habitual submission. Her effort was a poor one, to con-
ceal her dread of the day of the gathering at Lakelands.

On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison

216 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

accompanied the amateurs by rail to Wrensham, to hear
'trial of the acoustics' of the Concert-hall. They were
a goodly company; and there was fun in the railway-
carriage over Colney's description of Fashionable London's
vast octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor
fly to the tether of its longest filament for an hour, plying
suckers on him the while. He had the look, to general
perception, of a man but half-escaped : and as when the
notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set
down upon tablets in the head behind. Victor observed
his look at Nataly. The look was like a door aswing,
revealing in concealing. She was not or did not appear
struck by it : perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy
professional gentleman's holiday reckoning of the hours
before the return train to his harness, and his arrange-
ments for catching it. She was, as she could be on a day
of trial, her enchanting majestic self again — defying
suspicions. She was his true mate for breasting a world
honoured in uplifting her.

Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr.
Themison's very warm applause. He named the greatest
of contraltos. Colney did better service than Fenellan at
the luncheon-table: he diverted Nataly and captured
Dr. Themison's ear with the narrative of his momentous
expedition of European Emissaries, to plead the cause of
their several languages at the Court of Japan : a Satiric
Serial tale, that hit incidentally the follies of the countries
of Europe, and intentionally, one had to think, those of
Old England. Nesta set him going. Just when he was
about to begin, she made her father laugh by crying out
in a rapture, 'Oh! Delphica!' For she was naughtily
aware of Dudley Sowerby's distaste for the story and
disgust with the damselC^^^^^

Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the
grand object of the expedition : indeed one of the eminent

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 217

ones of the world ; matter for an Epic ; though it is to be
feared, that our part in it wUl not encourage a Cis- Atlantic
bard. To America the honours from beginning to end
belong.

So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language,
for the adoption of the language it may choose among the
foremost famous European tongues. Japan becomes the
word for miraculous transformations of a whole people at
the stroke of a wand ; and let our English enrol it as the
most precious of the powerful verbs. An envoy visits the
principal Seats of Learning in Europe. He is of a gravity
to match that of his unexampled and all but stupefjdng
mission. A fluent linguist, yet an Englishman, the slight
American accent contracted during a lengthened residence
in the United States is no bar to the patriotism urging
him to pay his visit of exposition and invitation from the
Japanese Court to the distinguished Doctor of Divinity
Dr. Bouthoin. The renown of Dr. Bouthoin among the
learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to him ;
a scholar endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive
eloquence to cite and instance as well as illustrate the
superior advantages to Japan and civilization in the filial
embrace of mother English. 'For to this it must come
predestinated,' says the astonishing applicant. 'We
seem to see a fitness in it,' says the cogitative Rev. Doctor.
'And an Island England in those waters, will do wonders
for Commerce,' adds the former. 'We think of things
more pregnant,' concludes the latter, with a dry gleam of
ecclesiastical knowingness. And let the Editor of the
Review upon his recent pamphlet, and let the prelate
reprimanding him, and let the newspapers criticizing his
pure Saxon, have a care !

Funds, imiversally the most convincing of credentials,
are placed at Dr. Bouthoin's disposal : only it is requested,
that for the present the expedition be secret. 'Better so,'

218 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

says pure Saxon's champion. On a day patented for
secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent
through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the
patent, the Rev. Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate,
the Rev. Mancate Semhians, stumbling across portman-
teaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and other
tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths
in the ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive,
for the biggest adventure ever embarked on by a far-
thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic pair speaking pure
Saxon or other.

Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the
custom of our period (called the Realistic) to create, when
casual opportunity offers, a belief in the narrative by pro-
moting nausea in the audience. He passed under veil
the Rev. Doctor's acknowledgement of Neptune's power,
and the temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians. Proceeding
at once to the comments of these high-class missionaries
on the really curious inquisitiveness of certain of the
foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the
indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing,
arrogant, pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentle-
man. Dr. Gannius, reeking of the Teutonic Professor, as
a library volume of its leather. With him is his fair-
haired artless daughte^^eTphicaP An interesting couple
for the beguilement ol~ a" voyage : she so beautifully
moderates his irascible incisiveness ! Yet there is a
strange tone that they have. What, then, of the polite,
the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages
the young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating
outside them to say a word? What of that outpouring,
explosive, equally voluble, uncontrolled M. Bobinikine, a
Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued like the pot-boiled,
round and tight young dumpling of our primitive boyhood,
which smokes on the dish from the pot? And what of

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 219

another, hitherto unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked
vulturine, whose name transpires as Pisistratus Mytharete ?
He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some lines of Homer, and
beseeches him for the designation of that language. Greek,
is it ? Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning
of the poetic chants ? Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation.
Dr. Bouthoin caps himself with the offended Don. Mr.
Semhians opens half an eye and a whole mouth. There
must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another in
privacy. Delphica draws Mr. Semhians aside.

Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labra-
dor at the transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo,
Mr. Semhians faintly tells of a conversation he has had
with the ingenuous fair one ; and she ardent as he for the
throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths
of the races of mankind. Strange ! — she partly suspects
the Frenchman, the Russian, the attentive silent Greek,
to be all of them bound for the Court of Japan. Con-
currents? Can it be? We are absolutely to enter on a
contention with rivals? Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr.
Gannius. He is astonished, he says; he could not have
imagined it !

'Have you ever imagined anything?' Dr. Gannius
asks him. Entomologist, botanist, palaeontologist, philol-
ogist, and at soimd of horn a ready regimental corporal,
Dr. Gannius wears good manners as a pair of bath-slippers,
to rally and kick his old infant of an Englishman ; who,
in awe of his later renown and manifest might, makes it a
point of discretion to be ultra-amiable; for he certainly
is not in training, he has no alliances, and he must diploma-
tize ; and the German is a strong one ; a relative too ; he
is the Saxon's cousin, to say the least. This German has
the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his argumen-
tative war into the enemy's country : and he presents on
aU sides a solid rampart of recent great deeds done, and

220 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

mailed readiness for the doing of more, if we think of
assaihng him in that way. We are really like the poor
beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless flesh
to his beak. So we are cousinly.

Whether more amused than amazed, we know not, Dr.
Gannius hears from 'our simpleton of the pastures,' as he
calls the Rev. Doctor to his daughter, that he and Mr.
Semhians have absolutely pushed forth upon this most
mighty of enterprises naked of any backing from their
Government ! Babes in the Wood that they are ! h la
grace de dieu at every turn that cries for astutia, they
show no sign or symbol of English arms behind them, to
support — and with the grandest of national prizes in view !
— ^the pleading oration before the Court of the elect,
erudites, we will call them, of an intelligent, yet half
barbarous, people; hesitating, these, between eloquence
and rival eloquence, cunning and rival cunning. Why,
in such a case, the shadow-nimbus of Force is needed to
decide the sinking of the scales. But have these English
never read their Shakespeare, that they show so barren an
acquaintance with human, to say nothing of semi-barbaric,
nature ? But it is here that we Germans prove our claim
to being the sons of his mind. — Dr. Gannius, in contempt,
throws off the mask : he also is a concurrent. And not
only is he the chosen by election of the chief Universities
of his land, he has behind him, as Athene dilating Achilles,
the clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and lightning
of his time. German, Japan shall be.! he publicly swears
before them all. M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest
smile; M. Bobinikine double-dimples his puddingest;
M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his beak; Dr. Bou-
thoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such
is the masterful effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one
party shows his hand, the others find the reverse of con-
cealment in hiding their own.

OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE 221

_J)r. Bouthoin and Mr. Semhians are compelled to sus-
pect themselves to be gnconigassed with rivals, pre-
sumptively supported by tbeir Goveminents. The
"worthy gentlemen had hoped to tumble into good fortune,
"as In tEe blessed old English manner. 'It has even been
TEus~with us : unhelped we do it !' exclaims the Rev.
Doctor. He is roused from dejection by hearing Mr.
Semhians shyly (he has published verse) teU of the fair-
tressed Delphica's phosphorial enthusiasm for our galaxy
of British Poets. Assisted by Mr. Semhians, he begins
to imagine, that he has, in the person of this artless dev-
otee an ally, who will, through her worship of our poets
(by treachery to her sire — a small matter) sacrifice her
guttural tongue, by enabling him (through the exercise
of her arts, charms, intrigues — also a small matter) to
obtain the first audience of the Japanese erudites. —
Delphica, with each of the rivals in turn, is very pretty
Comedy. She is aware that M. Falarique is her most
redoubtable adversary, by the time that the vast fleet of
steamboats (containing newspaper reporters) is beheld
from the decks of the Polypheme pufi&ng past Sandy Hook.

There Colney left them, for the next instalment of the
serial.

Nesta glanced at Dudley Sowerby. She liked him for
his pained frown at the part his countrymen were made to
play, but did wish that he would keep from expressing it
in a countenance that suggested a worried knot; and
mischievously she said : ' Do you take to Delphica ? '

He replied, with an evident sincerity, 'I cannot say I do.'

Had Mr. Semhians been modelled on him ?

'One bets on the German, of course — with Colney
Durance,' Victor said to Dr. Themison, leading him over
the grounds of Lakelands.

'In any case, the author teaches us to feel an interest in
the rivals. I want to know what comes of it,' said the doctor.

222 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'There 's a good opportunity, one sees. But, mark me,
it will all end in satire upon poor Old England. Accord-
ing to Colney, we excel in nothing.'

'I do not think there is a country that could offer the
entertainment for which I am indebted to you to-day.'

'Ah, my friend, and you like their voices? The con-
tralto?'

' Exquisite.'

Dr. Themison had not spoken the name of Radnor.

'Shall we see you at our next Concert-evening in town?'
said Victor; and hearing 'the privilege' mentioned, his
sharp bright gaze cleared to limpid. 'You have seen
how it stands with us here !' At once he related what
indeed Dr. Themison had begun speculatively to think
might be the case.

Mrs. Burman Radnor had dropped words touching a
husband, and of her desire to communicate with him, in
the event of her being given over to the surgeons : she had
said, that her husband was a greatly gifted man ; setting
her head in a compassionate swing. This revelation of
the husband soon after, was filling. And this Mr. Radnor's
comrade's manner of it, was winning: a not too self-
justifying tone; not void of feeling for the elder woman;
with a manly eulogy of the younger, who had flung away
the world for him and borne him their one dear child.
Victor took the blame wholly upon himself. 'It is right
that you should know,' he said to the doctor's thoughtful
posture ; and he stressed the blame ; and a flame shot
across his eyeballs. He brought home to his hearer the
hurricane of a man he was in the passion : indicating the
subjection of such a temperament as this Victor Radnor's
to trials of the moral restraints beyond his human power.

Dr. Themison said: 'Would you — we postpone that
as long as we can : but supposing the poor lady . . .?'

Victor broke in : 'I see her wish : I will.'

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 223

The clash of his answer rang beside Dr. Themison's
faltering query.

We are grateful when spared the conclusion of a sen-
tence bom to stammer. If for that only, the doctor
pressed Victor's hand warmly.

'I may, then, convey some form of assurance, that a
request of the kind will be granted?' he said.

'She has but to call me to her,' said Victor, stiffening
his back.

CHAPTER XX

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS

Round the neighbourhood of Lakelands it was known that
the day of the great gathering there had been authori-
tatively foretold as fine, by Mr. Victor Radnor; and he
delivered his prophecy in the teeth of the South-western
gale familiar to our yachting month; and he really in-
spired belief or a kind of trust ; some supposing him to
draw from reserves of observation, some choosing to con-
fide in the singularly winged sparkle of his eyes. Lady
Rodwell Blachington did; and young Mrs. Blathenoy;
and Mrs. Fanning; they were enamoured of it. And
when women stand for Hope, and any worshipped man
for Promise, nothing less than redoubled confusion of him
dissolves the union. Even then they cling to it, under an
ejaculation, that it might and should have been other-
wise ; fancy partly has it otherwise, in her cserulean home
above the weeping. So it is good at all points to prophecy
with the aspect of the radiant day foretold.

A storm, bearing battle overhead, tore the night to
pieces. Nataly's faith in the pleasant prognostic wavered
beneath the crashes. She had not much power of heart

224 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

to desire anything save that which her bosom disavowed.
Uproar rather appeased her, calmness agitated. She
wished her beloved to be spared from a disappointment,
thinking he deserved all successes, because of the rigours
inflicted by her present tonelessness of blood and being.
Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack of
fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness. The tender feel-
ing, under privations imwillingly imposed, though will-
ingly shared, now suffused her reflections, owing to a
gratitude induced by a novel experience of him ; known,
as it may chance, and as it does not always chance, to both
sexes in wedded intimacy here and there; known to
women whose mates are proved quick to compliance with
delicate intuitions of their moods of nature. A constant,
almost visible, image of the dark thing she desired, and
'was bound not to desire, and was remOTsefiiTToF'desiTiSg,
oppressed herj^a perpetual consequent jajf are""oF her
spirit andTthe nature subject toTthe thousand sensational
hypocrisies invoked for concealment orits"reviIed brutish
"SaTseness, held the woman suspeMe^^omJier emotions.
EKecoldlyTeiFthat a caress would have melted her, woxfld
have been the temporary rapture. Coldly she had the
knowledge that the considerate withholding of it helped
her spirit to escape a stain. Less coldly, she thanked at
heart her beloved, for being a gentleman in their yoke.
It plighted them over flesh.

He talked to her on the pillow, just a few sentences;
and, unlike himself, a word of City affairs : 'That fellow
Blathenoy, with his increasing multitude of bills at the
Bank : must watch him there, sit there regularly. One
rather likes his wife. By the way, if you see him near
me to-morrow, praise the Spanish climate ; don't forget.
He heads the subscription list of Lady Blachington's
Charity.'

Victor chuckled at Colney's humping of shoulders and

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 225

mouth, while the tempest seemed echoing a sulphurous
pessimist. ' If old Colney had listened to me, when India
gave proof of the metal and South Africa began heaving,
he 'd have been a fairly wealthy man by now ... ha !
it would have geniaJized him. A man may be a cur-
mudgeon with money : the rule is for him to cuddle him-
self and take a side, instead of dashing at his countrymen
aU round and getting hated. Well, Colney popular, can't
be imagined') but entertaining guests would have diluted
his acid. He has the six hundred or so a year he started
old bachelor on; add his miserable pay for Essays.
Literature ! Of course, he sours. But don't let me hear
of bachelors moralists. There he sits at his Temple
Chambers hatching epigrams . . . pretends to have the
office of critic ! Honest old feUow, as far as his condition
permits. I tell him it will be fine to-morrow.'

'You are generally right, dear,' Nataly said.

Her dropping breath was audible.

Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with
heaven's blessing on her and a dose of soft nursery prattle.

He squeezed her hand. He kissed her lips by day.
She heard him sigh settling himself into the breast of
night for milk of sleep, like one of the world's good
children. She could have turned to him, to show him she
was in harmony with the holy night and loving world,
but for the fear founded on a knowledge of the man he
was ; it held her frozen to the semblance of a tombstone
lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror kindles
pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. , ,
VerDy it was the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, 4 4
between them.

Meanwhile the sxm of Victor Radnor's popularity was
already up over the extended circle likely to be drenched
by a falsification of his daring augury, though the scud
flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks roared

226 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths. Fine to-
morrow, to a certainty ! he had been heard to say. The
doubt weighed for something; the balance inclined with
the gentleman who had become so popular; for he had
done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard;
and was a real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs sell-
ing for sixpence and hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at
nine times out of ten. The reasoning went — and it some-
what affected the mansion as well as the c(5ttage, — that
if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion,
after making one of the biggest fortunes of modern times,
he might, he must, have secret gifts. 'You can't foretell
weather!' cried a pothouse sceptic. But the workmen
at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it. Sceptics
among the common folk were quaintly silenced by other
tales of him, being a whiff from the delirium attending any
mention of his name.

How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in
the mind of Mr. Caddis, the sitting Member for the divi-
sion of the county (said to have the seat in his pocket), a
particular inquisitiveness to know the bearing of his
politics ? Mr. Radnor was rich, true : but these are days
when wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always
prove faithful to their class ; some of them are cunning to
bid for the suffrages of the irresponsible, recklessly
enfranchised, corruptible masses. Mr. Caddis, if he had
the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class
trusting him to support its interests : he could count on
the landowners, on the clergy, on the retired or retiring
or comfortably cushioned merchants resident about
Wrensham, on the many obsequious among electoral
shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he
subscribed, patronized, did what was expected; and he
was not popular; he was unpopular. Why? But why
was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its rise

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 227

royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of
cloud, more agreeable to earth's populations than his
pinched appearance of the poor mopped red nose and
melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day! Un-
doubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet.
Yet his popularity would have survived the continuance
of the storm and deluge. He did this : — ^and the mystery
puzzling the suspicious was nothing wonderful : — in addi-
tion to a transparent benevolence, he spread a sort of
assurance about him, that he thought the better of the
people for their thinking well of themselves. It came
first from the workmen at his house. 'The right sort,
and no humbug: Kkes you to be men.* Such a report
made tropical soil for any new seed.

Now, it is a postulate, to strengthen all poor commoners,
that not even in comparison with the highest need we be
small unless we jaeld to think it of ourselves. Do but
stretch a hand to the touch of earth in you, and you spring
upon combative manhood again, from the basis where all
are equal. Humanity's historians, however, tell us, that
the exhilaration bringing us consciousness of a stature,
is gas which too frequently has to be administered.
Certes the cocks among men do not require the process ;
they get it off the sight of the sun arising or a simple hen
submissive: but we have our hibernating bears among
men, our yoked oxen, cab horses, beaten dogs ; we have
on large patches of these Islands, a Saxon population,
much wanting assistance, if they are not to feel themselves
"beaten, driven, caught bv the neckV^yoked "and'Eeavy-
¥eaded. Rlest, then, iajhe who gives them a sense^fthe
pride of standing on legs. Beer, ordinarily their solitary
helper beneath the iron canopy of wealth, is known to
them as a bitter usurer; it knocks them flat in their
persons and their fortunes, for the short spell of recreative
exaltation. They send up their rough glory round the

('^

228 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

name of the gentleman — a stranger, but their friend : and
never is friend to be thought of as a stranger — ^who
manages to get the holiday for Wrensham and there-
about, that they may hurl away for one jolly day the old
hat of a doddered humbleness, and trip to the strains of
the internal music he has unwound.

Says he : Is it a Charity Concert ? Charity begins at
home, says he : and if I welcome you gentry on behalf of
the poor of London, why, it follows you grant me the
right to make a beginning with the poor of our parts down
here. He puts it so, no master nor mistress neither could
refuse him. Why, the workmen at his house were nigh
pitching the contractors all sprawling on a strike, and
Mr. Radnor takes train, harangues 'em and rubs 'em
smooth ; ten minutes by the clock, they say ; and return
train to his business in town ; by reason of good sense and
feeling, it was ; poor men don't ask for more. A working
man, all the world over, asks but justice and a little relax-
ation— ^just a collar of fat to his lean.

Mr. CaddiSf M.P.^ pursuing the riddle of popularity,
which irritated and repelled as constantly as it attracted
him, would have come nearer to an instructive present-
ment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than he
was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day.
The remarks of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled,
though they be eulogistic to extravagance, are vapourish
when we court them for nourishment ; substantially, they
are bones to the cynical. He heard enumerations of Mr.
) Radnor's riches, eclipsing his own past compute. A
^; / merchant, a holder of mines. Director of a mighty Bank,
n, . \ - projector of running rails, a princely millionaire, and de-
(i fV'^ v termined to be popular — what was the aim of the man?
It is the curse of modern times, that we never can be sure
of our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our
pockets ! The Romans have left us golden words with

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 229

regard to the fickleness of the populace; we have our
Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson ; and in this
vaunted age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves
into the hands of the populace ! Panem et circenses !
Mr. Caddis repeated it, after his fathers ; his fathers and
he had not headed them out of that original voracity.
There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their
appetites. And it was an article of his legislation, to keep
them there.

Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert,
rather openly, in an envelope of humour, confessed to the
bait of the Radnor bread with bit of fun. Savoury
rumours were sweeping across Wrensham. Mr. Radnor
had borrowed footmen of the principal houses about.
Cartloads of provisions had been seen to come. An imme-
diate reward of a deed of benevolence, is a thing sensibly
heavenly ; and the five-shilling tickets were paid for as if
for a packet on the counter. Unacquainted with Mr.
Radnor, although the reports of him struck a summons to
their gastric juices, resembling in its effect a clamorous
cordiality, they were chilled, on their steps along the half-
rolled new gravel-roads to the house, by seeing three tables
of prodigious length, where very evidently a feast had
raged: one to plump the people — perhaps excessively
courted by great gentlemen of late; shopkeepers, the
villagers, children. These had been at it for two merry - J ^
hours. They had risen. They were beef and pudding on ii ^^ h^""
legs ; in some quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to } _.^
the flourishes of a military band. Boys, who had shaken W
room through their magical young corporations for fresh
stowage, darted out of a chasing circle to the crumbled
cornucopia regretfully forsaken fifteen minutes back, and
buried another tart. Plenty stUl reigned: it was the
will of the Master that it should.

We divert our attention, resigned in stoic humour, to

230 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the bill of the Concert music, handed us with our tickets
at the park-gates : we have no right to expect refreshment ;
we came for the music, to be charitable. Signora Bianca
Luciani : of whom we have read almost to the hearing her ;
enough to make the mistake at times. The grand violinist
Durandarte : forcibly detained on his way to America.
Mr. Radaor sent him a blank cheque : — no ! — so Mr.
Radnor besought him in person: he is irresistible; a
great musician himself; it is becoming quite the
modern style. .We have now English noblemen who
play the., horn, the fif e^the drum, some say ! Wejmay
/ y^y be"~yCTerfie™"Englandyagam^^^
the lead."^--^

England's nobles as a musical band at the head of a
marching and dancing population, pictured happily an old
Conservative country, that retained its members of aris-
tocracy in the foremost places whUe subjecting them to
downright uses. Their ancestors, beholding them there,
would be satisfied on the point of honour; perhaps en-
livened by hearing them at fife and drum. —

But middle-class pedestrians, having paid five shillings
for a ticket to hear the music they love, and not having
full assurance of refreshment, are often, latterly, satirical
upon their superiors; and, over this country at least,
require the refreshment, that the democratic sprouts in
them may be reconciled with aristocracy. Do not listen
to them further on the subject. They vote safely enough
when the day comes, if there is no prseternaturally strong
pull the other way.

They perceive the name of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby,
fourth down the Concert-bill ; marked for a flute-duet with
Mr. Victor Radnor, Miss Nesta Victoria Radnor accom-
panying at the piano. It may mean? ... do you want
\| a whisper to suggest to you what it may mean? The
. father's wealth is enormous; the mother is a beautiful

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 231

majestic woman in her prime. And see, she sings : a
wonderful voice. And lower down, a duet with her
daughter : violins and clarionet ; how funny ; something
Hungarian. And in the Second Part, Schubert's Ave
Maria — Oh ! when we hear that, we dissolve. She was a
singer before he married her, they say : a lady by birth :
one of the first County families. But it was a gift, and she
could not be kept from it, and was going, when they met —
and it was love! the most perfect duet. For him she
abandoned the Stage. You must remember, that in their
young days the Stage was many stages beneath the esteem
entertained for it now. Domestic Concerts are got up to
gratify her : a Miss Fredericks : good old English name.
Mr. Radnor calls his daughter, Freddy ; so Mr. Taplow,
the architect, says. They are for modern music and
ancient. Tannhduser, Wagner, you see. Pergolese.
Flute-duet, Mercadante. Here we have him ! — Duran-
darte : Air Basque, variations — ^his own. Again, Senor
Durandarte, Mendelssohn. Encore him, and he plays
you a national piece. A dark little creature a Life-
guardsman could hold-up on his outstretched hand for the
fifteen minutes of the performance; but he fills the hall
and thrills the heart, wafts you to heaven ; and does it as
though he were conversing with his Andalusian lady-love
in easy whispers about their mutual passion for Spanish
chocolate all the while : so the musical critic of the Tirra^
Lirra says. Express trains every half hour from London ;
^ the big people of the city. _Mr. Radnor commands
them, like Royalty. .^Totally, differerit from^that old
figure of the wealthy City merchant; young, vigorous,
elegant, a man of taste, highest culture, speaks the lan-
guages of Europe, patron of the Arts, a perfect gentlema^.
His moTEer was one of the Montgorderys, Mr. Taplow says.
And it was General Radnor, a most distinguished officer,
dying knighted. But Mr. Victor Radnor would not take

232 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

less than a Barony — and then only with descent of title
to his daughter, in her own right.

Mr. Taplow had said as much as Victor Radnor chose
that he should say.

Carriages were in flow for an hour : pedestrians formed
a wavy coil. Judgeing by numbers, the entertainment
was a success; would the hall contain them? Marvels
were told of the hall. Every ticket entered and was
enfolded ; almost all had a seat. Chivalry stood. It is a
breeched abstraction, sacrificeing voluntarily and genially
to the Fair, for a restoring of the balance between the
sexes, that the division of good things be rather in the fair
ones' favour, as they are to think : with the warning to
them, that the establishment of their claim for equality
puts an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats.
Women must be mad, to provoke such a warning; and
the majority of them submissively show their good sense.
They send up an incense of perfumery, all the bouquets of
the chemist commingled ; most nourishing to the idea of
woman in the nose of man. They are a forest foliage-
rustle of silks and muslins, magic interweaving, or the
mythology, if you prefer it. See, hear, smell, they are
Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you. We must have poetry with
them ; otherwise they are better in the kitchen. Is there
— but there is not ; there is not present one of the chival-
rous breeched who could prefer the shocking emancipated
gristly female, which imposes propriety on our sensations
and inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of
them.

Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme. He
is a coloneToFTJompanies. But those are his diversion,
as the British Army has been to the warrior. Puellis
idoneiis, he is professedly a lady's man, a rose-beetle, and
a fine specimen of a common kind : and he has been that
thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 233

of years, necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine
crystals preserving him, to conceal the muster. He has
to be fascinating, or he would look outworn, forlorn. On
one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other, Lady
Swanage ; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of
England's conservatory. Their lords (an Earl, a Baron)
are of the lords who go down to the City to sow a title for
a repair of their poor incomes, and are to be commended
for frankly accepting the new dispensation while they
retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient.
Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down.
Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway
magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet
persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral
spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our
sphere) ; holders of Shares in gold mines. Shares in Afric's
blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw for English
beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist;
Bankers and wives of Bankers. Victor passed among
them, chatting right and left.
Lady Carmine asked him : ' Is Durandarte counted on ? '
He answered : 'I made sure of the Luciani.'
She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people,
with a Bohemian instead of the titular glitter for the be-
wildering of moralists; as paste will pass for diamonds
where the mirror is held up to Nature by bold super-
numeraries.

He wished to introduce Nesta. His girl was on the
raised orchestral flooring. Nataly held her fast to a
music-scroll.

Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of
Louise de Seilles, — ^summoned in the morning abruptly to
Bourges, where her brother lay with his life endangered
by an accident at ArtOlery practise, — Mr. Peridon was
generally conductor. Victor was to lead the full force of

234

ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

y
^

3(^'

amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa. He perceived a
movement of Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon. 'They have
come,' he said; he jumped on the orchestra boards and
hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in the
retiring-room.

His departure raised the whisper that he would wield
the bMon. An opinion was unuttered. His name for the
flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley Sowerby had not pro-
voked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole, a
pretty thing in him to condescend to do : the sentiment
he awakened was not flustered by it. But the act of
leading, appeared as an official thing to do. Our souffle of
sentiment will be seen subsiding under a breath, without
a repressive word to send it down. Sir Rodwell Blaching-
ton would have preferred Radnor's not leading or playing
either. Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider
such conduct English, in a man of station . . . notwith-
standing Royal Highnesses, who are at least partly
English : partly, we say, under our breath, remembering
our old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to
German tastes. It is true, that the whole country is
changeing, decomposing !

The colonel fished for Lady Carmine's view. — And Lady
Swanage too? Both of the distinguished ladies approved
of Mr. Radnor's leading — ^for a leading off. Women are
pleased to see their favourite in the place of prominence
— as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should
say, unbattered, up the mounting wave. Besides these
ladies had none of the colonel's remainder of juvenile Eng-
lish sense of the manly, his adolescent's intolerance of
the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any supposed
affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly prac-
tised to subdue the sex. And you cannot wield a b^ton
without looking affected. And at one of the Colonel's
Clubs in town, only five years back, an English musical

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 235

composer, who had not then made his money — now by
the mystery of events knighted ! — had been (he makes
now fifteen thousand a year) black-balled. 'Fiddler?
no ; can't admit a Fiddler to associate on equal terms with
gentlemen.' Only five years back : and at present we are
having the Fiddler everjrwhere.

A sprinkling of the minor ladies also would have been
glad if Mr. Radnor had kept himself somewhat more
exclusive. Dr. Schlesien heard remarks, upon which his
weighty Teutonic mind sat crushingly. Do these English
care one bit for miisic ? — ^f or anything finer than material
stuHsT— what that man Durance calls, 'their beef, their
beer, and their pew in eternity'? His wrath at their
babble and petty brabble doubted that they did.

But they do. _„Art hasAholdxiLfchem. ..- They pay for it ; ^

and the thing purchased grapples. It will get to their , ^^
bosoms to breathe from them in time : entirely overcom- v^^'^ \\
JngtEeTaste for feudalism, which still a little objects to see \ J//'
their bom gentleman acting as I^er of musiciajos. A^ U^
people of slow mbveinentT" developing tardily, their \ff
country is wanting in the distincter features, from being
always in the transitional state, like certain sea-fish rolling
head over — you know not head from tail. Without the
Welsh, Irish, Scot, in their composition, there would not
be much of the yeasty ferment: but it should not be
forgotten that Welsh, Irish, Scot, are now largely of their
'numbers^ and The' taste~toF elegance, and "ToPspiritual
utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, ^_therejmong them,
though Tresis not everywhere cover a rocky surface to
bewitch the eyes of aliens ; — ^like Louise de SeiUes and Dr.
Schlesien, for example; aliens having no hostile disposi-
tion toward the people they were compelled to criticize;
honourably granting, that this people has a great history.
Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber
of his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our

236 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

emergence from wildness as the unsocial spectacle pre-
sented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or mated ; with
hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint
is beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert's pasture.
Nevertheless,, where Strength is, there is hope : — ^it may
be said more truly than of the breath of Life ; which is
perhaps but the bucket of breath, muddy with the sedi-
ment of the well : whereas we have in Strength a hero, if a
malefactor ; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light
he will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown
him his uncleaimess. ^ And when Strength is not exercis-

Dozens, foreijga^and domestic, ye on the back of Old Eng-
land ; a tribute to our qualitv if at the same time an irri-
tating scourge. The domestic are in excess ; and let us
own that their view of the potentate, as an apathetic beast
of power, who will neither show the power nor woo the
graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above
the beast, and posturing in an inefl&cient mimicry of the
civilized, excites to satire. Colney Durance had his
excuses. He could point to the chief creative minds of
the country for generations, as beginning their survey
genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating
unreason and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called
social, around them. Viola under his chin, he gazed
along the crowded hall, which was to him a rich national
pudding of the sycophants, the hypocrites, the burlies,
the idiots ; dregs of the depths and froth of the surface ;
bowing to one, that they may scorn another ; instituting a
Charity, for their poorer fawning fellows to relieve their
purses and assist them in tricking the world and their
Maker :— and so forth, a tiresome tirade : and as it was not
on his lips, but in the stomach of the painful creature, let
him grind that hurdy-gurdy for himself. His friend
Victor set it stirring : Victor had here what he aimed at !

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS 237

How Success derides Ambition ! And for this he imper^
Hied the happiness of the worthy woman he loved ! Ex-r\ J «x^

posed her to our fen-fogs and foul snakes — of whom one ■\Ly^-yr^''
or more might be in the assembly now : all because of his (/^ \j l'^
insane itch to be the bobbing cork on the wave of the /
minute ! Colney's rapid interjections condensed upon the
habitual shrug at human folly, j ust when Victor, fronting the
glassy stare of Colonel Corfe, tapped to start his orchestra
through the lively first bars of the overture to Zampa.

We soon perceive that the post Mr. Radnor fills he thor-
oughly fills, whatever it may be. Zampa takes horse from
the opening. We have no amateur conductor riding
ahead : violins, 'cellos, piano, wind-stops : Peridon,
Catkin, Pempton, Yatt, Cormyn, Colney, Mrs. Cormyn,
Dudley Sowerby : they are spirited on, patted, subdued,
muted, raised, rushed anew, away, held in hand, in both
hands. Not earnestness worn as a cloak, but issuing, we
see; not simply a leader of musicians, a leader of men.
The halo of the millionaire behind, assures us of a develop-
ment in the character of England's merchant princes.
The homage we pay him flatters us. A delightful overture,
masterfully executed; ended too soon; except that the
programme forbids the ordinary interpretation of pro-
longed applause. Mr. Radnor is one of those who do
everything consummately. And we have a monition
within, that a course of spiritual enjoyment will rouse the
call for bodOy refreshment. His genial nod and laugh and
word of commendation to his troop persuade us oddly, we
know not how, of provision to come. At the door of the
retiring-room, see, he is congratulated by Luciani and
Durandarte. Miss PriscUla Graves is now to sing a
Schumann. Down later, it is a duet with the Rev.
Septimus Barmby. We have nothing to be ashamed of in
her, before an Italian Operatic singer ! Ices after the first
part is over.

238 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
CHAPTER XXI

DAETBEY FENELLAN

Had NataJy and Nesta known who was outside helping
Skepsey to play ball with the boys, they would not have
worked through their share of the performance with so
graceful a composure. Even Simeon Fenellan was un-
aware that his half-brother Dartrey had landed in England.
Dartrey went first to Victor's oflGice, where he found
Skepsey packing the day's letters and circulars into the
bag for the delivery of them at Lakelands. They sprang
a chatter, and they missed the last of the express trains :
which did not greatly signify, Skepsey said, 'as it was
a Concert.' To hear his, hero talk, was the music for
him; and he richly enjoyed the pacing along the
raUway-platform.

Arrived on the grounds, they took opposite sides in a
game of rounders, at that moment tossing heads or tails
for innings. These boys were slovenly players, and were
made unhappy by Skepsey's fussy instructions to them in
smartness. They had a stupid way of feeding the stick,
and they ran sprawling; it concerned Great Britain for
them to learn how to use their legs. It was pitiful for
the country to see how lumpish her younger children were.
Dartrey knew his little man and laughed, after warning
him that his English would want many lessons before
they stomached the mixture of discipline and pleasure.
So it appeared : the pride of the boys in themselves, their
confidence, enjoyment of the game, were all gone ; and all
were speedily out but Skepsey ; who ran for the rounder,
with his coat off, sharp as a porpoise, and would have got
it, he had it in his grasp, when, at the jump, just over the

DARTREY FENELLAN 239

line of the goal, a clever fling, if ever was, caught him a \

crack on(thgit part of the human frame where sound is best ,

achieveS^ Then were these young lumps transformed to

limber, Ether, merry fellows. They rejoiced Skepsey's

heart; they did everything better, ran and dodged and

threw in a style to win the nod from the future official

inspector of Games and Amusements of the common

people ; a deputy of the Government, proposed by Skep-

sey to his hero with a deferential eagerness. Dartrey rL

clapped him on the shoulder, softly laughing. L<a>

^'System — Mr. Durance is right— they mtfs^ have '^^ ,<M"
system, if they are to appreciate a holiday,' Skepsey said; \1'}J/^,
anJ^FsenTawretched gaze around,"at the justification of "c-n^
some of the lurid views of Mr. Durance, in signs of the f^
holiday wasted ; — ^impoverishing the country's manhood : r
in a small degree, it may be argued, but we ask, can thet|'^
country afford it, while foreign nations are drining their
youth, teaching them to be ready to move in squads or
masses, like the fist of a pugilist. Skepsey left it to his
look to speak his thought. He saw an enemy in tobacco.
The drowsiness of beer had stretched various hulks under
trees. Ponderous cricket lumbered half-alive. Flabby
fun knocked-up a yell. And it was rather vexatious to see
girls dancing in good time to the band-music. One had a
male-partner, who hopped his loutish burlesque of the
thing he could not do.

Apparently, too certainly, none but the girls had a
notion of orderly muscxilar exercise. Of what use are
girls ! Girls have their one mission on earth ; and let
them be healthy by all means, for the sake of it ; only,
they should not seem to prove that old England is better
represented on the female side. Skepsey heard, with a
nip of spite at his bosom, a small body of them singing in
chorus as they walked in step, arm in arm, actually
marched : and to the rearward, none of these girls heeding,

240 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

there were the louts at their burlesque of jigs and fisti-
cuffs ! 'Cherry Ripe,' was the song.

'It 's delightful to hear them !' said Dartrey.

Skepsey muttered jealously of their having been
trained.

The song, which drew Dartrey Fenellan to the quick of
an English home, planted him at the same time in Africa
to hear it. Dewy on a parched forehead it fell, England
the shedding heaven.

He fetched a deep breath, as of gratitude for vital re-
freshment. He had his thoughts upon the training of our
English to be something besides the machinery of capital-
ists, and upon the country as a blessed mother instead of
the most capricious of maudlin stepdames.

He flicked his leg with the stick he carried, said : 'Your
master 's the man to make a change among them, old
friend!' and strolled along to a group surrounding two
fellows who shammed a bout at single-stick. Vacuity in
the attack on either side, contributed to the joint success
of the defense. They paused under inspection; and
Dartrey said : ' You 're burning to give them a lesson,
Skepsey.'

Skepsey had no objection to his hero's doing so,
though at his personal cost.

The sticks were handed to them ; the crowd increased ;
their rounders boys had spied them, and came trooping to
the scene. Skepsey was directed to hit in earnest. His
defensive attitude flashed, and he was at head and right
and left leg, and giving point, recovering, thrusting
madly, and again at shoulder and thigh, with bravos for
reward of a man meaning business ; until a topper on his
hat, a cut over the right thigh, and the stick in his middle-
rib, told the spectators of a scientific adversary; and
loudly now the gentleman was cheered. An undercurrent
of warm feeling ran for the plucky little one at it hot again

DARTREY FENELLAN 241

in spite of the strokes, and when he fetched his master a
handsome thud across the shoulder, and the gentleman
gave up and complimented him, Skepsey had applause.

He then begged his hero to put the previous couple in
position, through a few of the opening movements. They
were horribly sheepish at first. Meantime two boys had
got hold of sticks, and both had gone to work in Skepsey's
gallant style; and soon one was howling. He excused
himself, because of the funny-bone, situated, in his case,
higher than usual up the arm. And now the pair of men
were giving and taking cuts to make a rhinoceros caper.

' Very well ; begin that way ; try what you can bear,'
said Dartrey.

Skepsey watched them, in felicity for love of the fray,
pained by the disregard of science.

Comments on the pretty play, indicatiag a reminiscent
acquaintance with it, and the capacity for critical observa-
tions, were started. Assaults, wonderful tricks of a slash-
ing Life-Guardsman, one spectator had witnessed at an
exhibition in a London hall. Boxing too. You may see
displays of boxing still in places. How about a prize-
fight?— With money on it? — Eh, but you don't expect
men to stand up to be knocked into rumpsteaks for no-
thing?— No, but it 's they there bets! — Right, and that 's
a game gone to ruin along of outsiders. — But it always
was and it always wUl be popular with Englishmen !

Great English names of young days, before the wintry
shadow of the Law had blighted them, received their
withered laurels. Emulous boys were in the heroic pos-
ture. Good! sparring does no hurt: Skepsey seized a
likely lad, Dartrey another. Nature created the Ring for
them. Now then, arms and head well up, chest hearty,
shoulders down, out with the right fist, just below the level
of the chin ; out with the left fist farther, right out, except
for that bit of curve; so, and draw it slightly back for

242 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

wary — pussy at the spring. Firm you stand, feeling the
muscles of both legs, left half a pace ahead, right planted,
both stringy. None of your milk-pail looks ; show us jaw,
you bull-dogs. Now then, left from the shoulder, straight
at right of head. — Good, and alacrity called on vigour in
Skepsey's pupil ; Dartrey's had the fist on his mouth be-
fore he could parry right arm up. 'Foul blow!' Dar-
trey cried. Skepsey vowed to the contrary. Dartrey
reiterated his charge. Skepsey was a figure of negation,
gesticulating and protesting. Dartrey appealed tem-
pestuously to the Ring; Skepsey likewise, in a tone of
injury. He addressed a remonstrance to Captain Dartrey.

'Hang your captain, sir! I call you a coward; come
on,' said the resolute gentleraan, already in ripe form for
the attack. His blue eyes were like the springing sunrise
over ridges of the seas; and Skepsey jumped to his
meaning.

Boys and men were spectators of a real scientific set-to,
a lovely show. They were half puzzled, it seemed so
deadly. And the little one got in his blows at the gentle-
man, who had to be hopping. Only, the worse the gentle-
man caught it, the friendlier his countenance became.
That was the wonder, and that gave them the key. But
it was deliciously near to the real thing.

Dartrey and Skepsey shook hands.

'And now, you fellows, you 're to know, that this is
one of the champions ; and you take your lesson from him
and thank him,' Dartrey said, as he turned on his heel to
strike and greet the flow from the house.

'Dartrey come !' Victor, Fenellan, Colney, had him by
the hand in turn. Pure sweetness of suddenly awakened
joy sat in Nataly's eyes as she swam to welcome him,
Nesta moved a step, seemed hesitating, and she tripped
forward. 'Dear Captiain Dartrey !'

He did not say : 'But what a change in you !'

DARTREY FENELLAN 243

'It is blue-butterfly, all the same,' Nataly spoke to his
look.

Victor hurriedly pronounced the formal introduction
between the Hon. Dudley Sowerby and Captain Dartrey
Fenellan. The bronze face and the mUky bowed to one
another ceremoniously ; the latter faintly flushing.

'So here you are at last,' Victor said. 'You stay with
us.'

'To-morrow or later, if you '11 have me. I go down to
my people to-night.'

'But you stay in England now?' Nataly's voice
wavered on the question.

'There 's a chance of my being off to Upper Burmah
before the week 's ended.'

'Ah, dear, dear!' sighed Fenellan; 'and out of good
comes evil ! — as grandfather Deucalion exclaimed, when
he gallantly handed up his dripping wife from the mud of
the Deluge waters. Do you mean to be running and Jew-
ing it on for ever, with only a nod for friends. Dart?'

'Lord, Simmy, what a sound of home there is in your
old nonsense !' Dartrey said.

His eyes of strong dark blue colour and the foreign
swarthiness of his brows and cheeks and neck mixed the
familiar and the strange, in the sight of the women who
knew him.

The bill-broker's fair-tressed yoimg wife whispered of
curiosity concerning him to Nataly. He dressed like a
sailor, he stood like a soldier : and was he married? Yes,
he was married.

Mrs. Blathenoy imagined a something in Mrs. Radnor's
tone. She could accoimt for it ; not by the ordinary read-
ing of the feminine in the feminine, but through a husband
who professed to know secrets. She was young in years
and experience, ten months wedded, disappointedly awak-
ened, enlivened by the hour, kindled by a novel figure of

244 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

man, fretful for a dash of imprudence. This Mrs. Radnor
should be the one to second her very innocent turn for a
galopade ; her own position allowed of any little diverting
jig or reel, or plunge in a bath — she required it, for the
domestic Jacob Blathenoy was a dry chip : proved such,
without a day's variation during the whole of the ten
wedded months. Nataly gratified her spoken wish.
Dartrey Fenellan bowed to the lady, and she withdrew
him, seeing composedly that other and greater ladies had
the wish ungratified. Their husbands were not so rich
as hers, and their complexions would hardly have pleased
the handsome brown-faced officer so well.

Banquet, equal to a blast of trumpet, was the detaining
word for the multitude. It circulated, one knows not
how. Eloquent as the whiffs to the sniffs (and nowhere
is eloquence to match it, when the latter are sharpened
from within to without), the word was very soon over the
field. Mr. Carling may have helped; he had it from
Fenellan ; and he was among the principal groups, claim-
ing or making acquaintances, as a lawyer should do. The
Concert was complimentarily a topic: Durandarte
divine! — did not everybody think so? Everybody did,
in default of a term for overtopping it. Our language
is poor at hyperbole; our voices are stronger. Gestures
and heaven-sent eyeballs invoke to display the ineffable.
Where was Durandarte now? Gone; already gone; off
with the Luciani for evening engagements; he came
simply to oblige his dear friend Mr. Radnor. Cheque
fifty guineas : hardly more on both sides than an exchange
of smiles. Ah, these merchant-princes ! What of Mr.
Radnor's amateur instrumentalists ? Amateurs, they are
not to be named : perfect musicians. Mr. Radnor is the
perfection of a host. Yes, yes; Mrs. Radnor; Miss
Radnor too : delicious voices ; but what is it about Mr.
Radnor so captivating ! He is not quite English, yet he is

DARTREY FENELLAN 245

not at all foreign. Is he very adventurous in business, as
they say?

'Soundest head in the City of London,' Mr. Blathenoy
remarked.

Sir Rodwell Blachington gave his nod.

The crowd interjected, half-sighing. We ought to be
proud of such a man ! Perhaps we are a trifle exaggerat-
ing, says its heart. But that we are wholly grateful to
him, is a distinct conclusion. And he may be one of the
great men of his time : he has a quite Ludividual style of
dress.

Lady Rodwell Blachington observed to Colney Durance :
'Mr. Radnor bids fair to become the idol of the English
people.'

'If he can prove himself to be sufliciently the dupe of
the English people,' said Colney.

'Idol — dupe?' interjected Sir Rodwell, and his eye-
brows fixed at the perch of Colney's famous ' national in-
terrogation' over vacancy of understanding, as if from
the pull of a string. He had his audience with him ; and
the satirist had nothing but his inner gush of acids at sight
of a planted barb.

Colney was asked to explain. He never explained. He
performed a series of astonishing leaps, hke the branchy
baboon above the traveller's head in the tropical forest,
and led them into the trap they assisted him to prepare for
them. ' No humour, do you say ? The English have no
humour?' a nephew of Lady Blachington's iaquired of
him, with polite pugnacity, and was cordially assured,
that 'he vindicated them.'

'And Altruistic ! another specimen of the modem coin-
age,' a classical Church dignitary, in grammarian disgust,
remarked to a lady, as they passed.

Colney pricked-up his ears. It struck him that he
might fish for suggestions in aid of the Grand Argmnent

246 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

before the Elders of the Court of Japan. Dr. Wardan,
whose recognition he could claim, stated to him, that the
lady and he were enumerating words of a doubtfully legiti-
mate quality now being inflicted upon the language.

'The slang from below is perhaps preferable?' said
Colney.

'As little — ^less.'

'But a pirate-tongue, cut-off from its roots, must con-
tinue to practise piracy, surely, or else take re-inforce-
ments in slang, otherwise it is inexpressive of new ideas.'

'Possibly the new ideas are best expressed in slang.'

'If insular. They will consequently be incommunicable
to foreigners. You would, then, have us be trading with
tokens instead of a precious currency ? Yet I cannot per-
ceive the advantage of letting our ideas be clothed so racy
of the obscener soil; considering the pretensions of the
English language to become the universal. If we refuse
additions from above, they force themselves on us from
below.'

Dr. Wardan liked the frame of the observations, disliked
the substance.

'One is to understand that the English language has
these pretensions ? ' he said : — he minced in his manner,
after the well-known mortar-board and tassel type; the
mouthing of a petrifaction : clearly useless to the pleadings
of the patriotic Dr. Bouthoin and his curate.

He gave no grip to Colney, who groaned at cheap Don-
nish sarcasm, and let him go, after dealing him a hard
pellet or two in a cracker-covering.

There was Victor all over the field netting his ephemerae !
And he who feeds on them, to pay a price for their con-
gratulations and flatteries, he is one of them himself !

Nesta came tripping from the Rev. Septimus Barmby.
'Dear Mr. Durance, where is Captain Dartrey?'

Mrs. Blathenoy had just conducted her husband through

DARTREY FENELLAN 247

a crowd, for an introduction of him to Captain Dartrey.
That was perceptible.

Dudley Sowerby followed Nesta closely: he struck
across the path of the Rev. Septimus : again he had the
hollow of her ear at his disposal.

'Mr. Radnor was excellent. He does everything con-
summately : really, we are all sensible of it. I am. He
must lead us in a symphony. These light "champagne
overtures" of French composers, as Mr. Fenellan caUs
them, do not bring out his whole ability: — Zampa, Le
Pre aux clercs, Masaniello, and the like.'

'Your duet together went well.'

' Thanks to you — to you. You kept us together.'

'Papa was the runaway or strain-the-leash, if there was
one.'

'He is impetuous, he is so fervent. But, Miss Radnor,
I could not be the runaway — with you . . . with you at
the piano. Indeed, I . . . shall we stroll down? I love
the lake.'

'You will hear the bell for your cold dinner very soon.'

'I am not hungry. I would so much rather talk — ^hear
you. But you are hungry? You have been singing:
twice : three times ! Opera singers, they say, eat hot
suppers; they drink stout. And I never heard your
voice more effective. Yours is a voice that . . . some-
thing of the feeling one has in hearing cathedral voices :
carry one up. I remember, in Dresden, once, a Fraulein
Kiihnstreich, a prodigy, very young, considering her
accomplishments. But it was not the same.'

Nesta wondered at Dartrey Fenellan for staying so long
with Mr. and Mrs. Blathenoy.

'Ah, Mr. Sowerby, if I am to have flattery, I cannot
take it as a milliner's dumb figure wears the beautiful
dress ; I must point out my view of some of my merits.'

'Oh! do, I beg. Miss . . . You have a Christian name :

248 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

and I too : and once . . . not Mr. Sowerby : yes, it was
Dudley !'

'Quite accidentally, and a world of pardons entreated.'

'And Dudley begged Dudley might be Dudley always !'

He was deepening to the Barmby intonation — appar-
ently Cupid's; but a shade more airily Pagan, not so
fearfully clerical.

Her father had withdrawn Dartrey Fenellan from Mr.
and Mrs. Blathenoy. Dr. Schlesien was bowing with
Dartrey.

'And if Durandarte would only — but you are one with
Miss Graves to depreciate my Durandarte, in favour of
the more classical Jachimo; whom we all admire; but
you shall be just,' said she, and she pouted. She had
seen her father plant Dartrey Fenellan in the midst of
a group of City gentlemen.

Simeon touched among them to pluck at his brother.
He had not a chance; he retired, and swam into the
salmon-net of seductive Mrs. Blathenoy's broad bright
smile.

' It 's a matter of mines, and they 're hovering in the
attitude of the query, like corkscrews over a bottle,
profoundly indifferent to blood-relationships,' he said to
her.

'Pray, stay and be consoled by me,' said the fair young
woman. ' You are to point me out all the distinguished
people. Is it true, that your brother has left the army ? '

' Dartrey no longer wears the red. Here comes Colonel
Corfe, who does. England has her army still !'

'His wife persuaded him?'

'You see he is wearing the black.'

'For her? How very very sad! Tell me — what a
funnily dressed woman meeting that gentleman !'

'Hush — a friend of the warrior. Splendid weather.
Colonel Corfe.'

DARTREY FENELLAN 249

'Superb toilettes!' The colonel eyed Mrs. Blathenoy
dilatingly, advanced, bowed, and opened the siege.

She decided a calculation upon his age, made a wall of
it, smilingly agreed with his encomium of the Concert,
and toned her voice to Fenellan's comprehension: 'Did
it occur recently?'

'Months; in Africa; I haven't the date.'

'Such numbers of people one would wish to know!
Who are those ladies holding a Court, where Mr. Radnor
is?'

'Lady Carmiue, Lady Swanage — if it is your wish?'
interposed the colonel.

She dealt him a forgiving smile. 'And that pleasant-
looking old gentleman?'

Colonel Corfe drew-up. Fenellan said: 'Are we
veterans at forty or so?'

'Well, it's the romance, perhaps!' She raised her
shoulders.

The colonel's intelligence ran a dog's nose for a lady's
interjections. ' The romance ? ... at forty, fifty ?
gone? Miss Julinks, the great heiress and a beauty, has
chosen him over the heads of all the young men of his
time. Cranmer Lotsdale. Most romantic history !'

' She 's in love with that, I suppose.'

'Now you direct my attention to him,' said Fenellan,
' the writing of the romantic history has made the texture
look a trifle thready. You have a terrible eye.'

It was thrown to where the person stood who had first
within a few minutes helped her to form critical estimates
of men, more consciously to read them.

' Your brother stays in England ? '

'The fear is, that he 's off again.'

'Annoying for you. If I had a brother, I would not let
him go.'

'How would you detain him?'

250 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'Locks and bolts, clock wrong, hands and arms, kneel-
ing— the fourth act of the Huguenots!'

'He went by way of the window, I think. But that
was a lover.'

'Oh! well!' she flushed. She did not hear the
neglected and astonished colonel speak, and she sought
diversion in saying to Fenellan: 'So many people of
distinction are assembled here to-day ! Tell me, who is
that pompous gentleman, who holds his arms up doubled,
as he walks?'

' Like flappers of a penguin : and advances in jerks : he
is head of the great Firm of Quatley Brothers : Sir
Abraham : finances or farms one of the South American
Republics: we call him. Pride of Port, He consumes
it and he presents it.'

'And who is that little man, who stops everybody?'

'People of distinction indeed! That little man — ^is
your upper lip underrateing him? . . . When a lady's
lip is erratically disdainful, it suggests a misuse of a
copious treasury, deserving to be mulcted, punished —
how? — who can say? — that little man, now that little
man, with a lift of his little finger, could convulse the
Bacon Market !'

Mrs. Blathenoy shook. Hearing Colonel Corfe exclaim :
'Bacon Market !' she let fly a peal. Then she turned to
a fresh satellite, a roimd and a ruddy, ' at her service ever,'
Mr. Beaves Urmsing, and repeated Fenellan's words. He,
in unfeigned wonderment at such unsuspected powers,
cried : 'Dear me !' and stared at the little man, making
the pretty lady's face a twinkling dew.

He had missed the Concert. Was it first-rate?
Ecstasy answered in the female voice.

'Hem'd fool I am to keep appointments !' he muttered.

She reproved him : ' Fie, Mr. Urmsing ; it 's the making
of them, not the keeping !'

DARTREY FENELLAN 251

'Ah, my dear ma'am, if I 'd had Blathenoy's luck when
he made a certain appointment. And he was not so much
older than me? The old ones get the prizes !'

Mr. Beaves Urmsing prompted Colonel Corfe to laugh
in triumph. The colonel's eyebrows were up in fixity over
sleepy lids. He brightened to propose the conducting of
the pretty woman to the banquet.

'We shall see them going in,' said she. 'Mr. Radnor
has a French cook, who does wonders. But I heard him
asking for Mr. Beaves Urmsing. I 'm sure he expected
The Marigolds at his Concert.'

'Anything to oblige the company,' said the nistic ready
chorister, clearing his throat.

The lady's feet were bent in the direction of a grassy
knoll, where sunflowers, tulips, dahlias, peonies, of the
sex eclipsed at a distance its roses and lilies. Fenellan
saw Dartrey, still a centre of the merchantmen, strolling
thither.

'And do you know, your brother is good enough to dine
with us next week, Thursday, down here,' she murmured.
'I could venture to command? — if you are not induced.'

'Whichever word applies to a faithful subject.'

'I do so wish your brother had not left the army !'

'You have one son of Mars.'

Her eyes took the colonel up to cast him down : he was
not the antidote. She said to him: 'Luciani's voice
wears better than her figure.'

The colonel replied : 'I remember,' and corrected him-
self, 'at Eton, in jackets: she was not so particularly
slim ; never knew how to dress. You beat Italians there !
She moved one as a youngster.'

'Eton boys are so susceptible !'

'Why, hulloa, don't I remember her coming out! — and
do you mean to tell me,' Mr. Beaves Urmsing brutally
addressed the colonel, 'that you were at Eton when . . .

252 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

why, what age do you give the poor woman, then !' He
bellowed, ' Eh ? ' as it were a bull crowing.

The colonel retreated to one of his defensive comers.
'I am not aware that I meant to tell you anything.'

Mr. Beaves Urmsing turned square-breasted on
Fenellan : 'Fellow 's a bom donkey !'

'And the mother lived?' said Fenellan.

Mr. Beaves Urmsing puffed with wrath at the fellow.

Five minutes later, in the midst of the group surround-
ing and felicitating Victor, he had sight of Fenellan con-
versing with fair ones, and it struck a light in him ; he
went three steps backward, with shouts. 'Dam funny
fellow ! eh ? who is he ? I must have that man at my
table. Worth fifty Colonel Jackasses ! And I 've got
a son in the Guards : and as much laugh in him, he 's got,
as a bladder. But we '11 make a party, eh, Radnor?
with that friend o' yours. Dam funny fellow! and
precious little of it going on now among the young lot.
They 're for seeing ghosts and gaping their jaws ; all for
the quavers instead of the capers.'

He sounded and thrummed his roguish fling-off for the
capers. A second glimpse of Fenellan agitated the anec-
dote, as he called it, seizing Victor's arm, to have him out
of earshot of the ladies. Delivery, not without its throes,
was accomplished, but imperfectly, owing to sympathetic
convulsions, under which Mr. Beaves Unnsing's coun-
tenance was crinkled of many colours, as we see the Spring
rhubarb-leaf. Unable to repeat the brevity of Fenellan's
rejoinder, he expatiated on it to convey it, swearing that
it was the kind of thing done in the old days, when men
were witty dogs : — ' pat ! and pat back ! as in the
pantomime.'

'Repartee!' said Victor. 'He has it. You shall
know him. You 're the man for him.'

'He for me, that he is! — "Hope the mother's doing

DARTREY FENELLAN 253

well? My card": — eh? Grave as an owl! Look,
there goes the donkey, lady to right and left, all ears for
him — ^ha ! ha ! I must have another turn with your
friend. "Mother lived, did she?" Dam funny fellow,
all of the olden time ! And a dinner, bachelor dinner,
six of us, at my place, next week, say Wednesday, haK-
past six, for a long evening — ^flowing bowl — eh, shall it
be?'

Nesta came looking to find her Captain Dartrey.

Mr. Beaves Urmsing grew courtly of the olden time.
lie spied Colonel Oorfe anew, and 'Donkey !' rose to split
the roar at his mouth, and full of his anecdote, he pursued
some congenial acquaintances, crying to his host : 'Wed-
nesday, mind! eh? by George, your friend's gizzarded
me for the day !'

Plumped with the rich red stream of life, this last of
the squires of oldJEligland—thvunped along among the
■gu^ts, a ve^Tuning-fork to keep them at their pitch of
enthusiasm. He encountered Mr. Caddis, and it was an
encounter. Mr. Caddis represented his political opinions ;
but here was this cur of a Caddis whineing his niminy note
from his piminy nob, when he was asked for his hearty
echo of the praises of this jolly good fellow come to waken
the neighbourhood, to be a blessing, a blazing hearth, a
fall of manna : — and thank the Lord for him, you desert-
dog ! ' He 's a merchant prince, and he 's a prince of a
man, if you're for titles. Eh? you "assent to my en-
comiums." You '11 be calling me Mr. Speaker next.
Hang me. Caddis, if those Parliamentary benches of yours
aren't freezing you from your seat up, and have got to
your jaw — my belief !'

Mr. Caddis was left reflecting, that we have, in the dis-
pensations of Providence, when we have a seat, to submit
to castigations from butcherly men unaccountably com-
missioned to solidify the seat. He could have preached

254 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

a discourse upon Success, to quiet the discontentment
of the unseated. And our world of seats oddly gained,
quaintly occupied, maliciously beset, insensately envied,
needs the discourse. But it was not delivered, else would
it have been here written down without mercy, as a
medical prescript, one of the grand specifics. He met
Victor, and, between his dread of him and the counsels
of a position subject to stripes, he was a genial thaw.
Victor beamed; for Mr. Caddis had previously stood
eminent as an iceberg of the Lakelands' party. Mr.
Inchling and Mr. Caddis were introduced. The former
in Commerce, the latter in Politics, their sustaining boast
was, the being our stable Englishmen ; and at once, with
cousinly minds, they fell to chatting upon the nothings
agreeably and seriously. Colney Durance forsook a set
of ladies for fatter prey, and listened to them. What he
said, Victor did not hear. The effect was always to be
seen, with Inchling under Colney. Fenellan did better
service, really good service.

Nataly played the heroine she was at heart. Why
think of her as having to act a character! Twice had
Carling that afternoon, indirectly and directly, stated
Mrs. Burman to be near the end we crape a natural, a
defensible, satisfaction to hear of: — ^not wishing it: —
poor woman! — but pardonably, before man and all the
angels, wishing, praying for the beloved one to enter into
her earthly peace by the agency of the other's exit into
her heavenly.

Fenellan and Colney came together, and said a word
apiece of their friend.

' In his element ! The dear old boy has the look of a
goldfish, king of his globe.'

' The dear old boy has to me the look of a pot on the fire,
with a loose lid.'

I may have the summons from Themison to-morrow.

DARTREY FENELLAN 255

Victor thought. The success of the day was a wine that
rocked the soberest of thoughts. For, strange to confess,
ever since the fall on London Bridge, his heart, influenced
in some degree by Nataly's depression perhaps, had been
shadowed by doubts of his infallible instinct for success.
Here, at a stroke, and before entering the house, he had
the whole neighbourhood about him : he could feel that
he and Nataly stood in the minds of the worthy people
variously with the brightness if not with the warmth
distinguishable in the bosom of Beaves Urmsing — ^the
idea of whom gave Lakelands an immediate hearth-glow.

Armandine was thirteen minutes, by his watch, behind
the time she had named. Small blame to her. He ex-
cused her to Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage, Lady Blach-
ington, Mrs. Fanning, Sir Abraham Quatley, Mr. Danny
(of Bacon fame) and the rest of the group surrounding
Nataly on the moimd leftward of the white terraces de-
scending to the lake ; where she stood beating her foot fret-
fully at the word brought by Nesta, that Dartrey Fenellan
had departed. It was her sunshine departed. But she
went through her task of conversing amiably. Colney,
for a wonder, consented to be useful in assisting Fenellan
to relate stories of French Cooks ; which were, like the
Royal Hanoverian oyster, of an age for offering acceptable
flavour to English hearers. Nesta drew her mother's
attention to Priscilla Graves and Skepsey; the latter
bending head and assenting. Nataly spoke of the charm
of PrisciUa's voice that day, in her duet with the Rev.
Septimus. Mr. Pempton looked; he saw that Priscilla
was prosels^izing. She was perfection to him but for one
blotting thing. With grief on his eyelids, he said to
Nataly or to himself : 'Meat !'

'Dear friend, don't ride your hobby over us,' she replied.

'But it 's with that object they mount it,' said Victor.

The greater ladies of the assembly were quite ready to

256 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

accuse the sections, down to the individuals, of the social
English (reserving our elect) of an itch to be tyrants.

Colney was apologizing for them, with his lash : ' It 's
merely the sensible effect of a want of polish of the surface
when they rub together.'

And he heard Carling exclaim to Victor : ' How comes
the fellow here!'

Skepsey had rushed across an open space to intercept a
leisurely progressive man, whose hat was of the shape
Victor knew ; and the man wore the known black gaiters.
In appearance, he had the likeness of a fallen parson.

Carling and Victor crossed looks that were questions
carrjdng their answers.

Nataly's eyes followed Victor's. 'Who is the man?'
she said ; and she got no reply beyond a perky sparkle in
his gaze.

Others were noticing the man, who was trying to pass
by Skepsey, now on his right side, now on his left.

'There'll be no stopping him,' Carling said, and he
slipped to the rear.

At this juncture, Armandine's mellow bell proclaimed
her readiness.

Victor rubbed the back of his head. Nataly asked
him : 'Dear, is it that man?'

He nodded scantly: 'Expected, expected. I think
we have our summons from Armandine. One moment —
poor soul ! poor soul ! Lady Carmine — Sir Abraham
Quatley. Will you lead? Lady Blachington, I secure
you. One moment.'

He directed Nataly to pair a few of the guests; he
hurried down the slope of sward.

Nataly applied to Colney Durance. ' Do you know the
man ? — is it that man ? '

Colney rejoined : 'The man's name is Jarniman.'

Armandine's bell swung melodiously. The guests had

DARTREY FENELLAN 257

grouped, thickening for the stream to procession. Mrs.
Blathenoy claimed Fenellan; she requested him to tell
her whether he had known Mrs. Victor Radnor many
years. She mused. ' You like her ? '

' One likes one's dearest of friends among women, does
one not?'

The lady nodded to his response. 'And your
brother?'

'Dartrey is devoted to her.'

'I am sure,' said she, 'your brother is a chivalrous
gentleman. I hke her too.' She came to her sentiment
through the sentiment of the chivalrous gentleman. Sink-
ing from it, she remarked that Mr. Radnor was handsome
still. Fenellan commended the subject to her, as one to
discourse of when she met Dartrey. A smell of a trap-
hatch, half-open, afflicted and sharpened him. It was
Blathenoy's breath: husbands of young wives do these
villanies, for the sake of showing their knowledge. Fen-
ellan forbore to praise Mrs. Victor: he laid his colours
on Dartrey. The lady gave ear till she reddened. He
meant no harm, meant nothing but good; and he was
lighting the most destructive of our lower fires.

Visibly, that man Jamiman was disposed of with ease.
As in the street-theatres of crowing Punch, distance en-
listed pantomime to do the effective part of the speeches.
Jamiman's hat was off, he stood bent, he delivered his
message. He was handed over to Skepsey's care for the
receiving of meat and drink. Victor returned; he had
Lady Blachington's hand on his arm; he was all hers,
and in the heart of his company of guests at the same
time. Eyes that had read him closely for years, were
unable to spell a definite signification on his face, below
the overflowing happiaess of the hospitable man among
contented guests. He had in fact something within to
enliven him; and that was the more than suspicion,

258 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

amounting to an odour of certainty, that Annandine in-
tended one of her grand surprises for her master, and for
the hundred and fifty or so to be seated at her tables in
the unwarmed house of Lakelands.

CHAPTER XXII

CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN

Aemandine did her wonders. There is not in the wide
range of the Muses a more responsive instrument than
man to his marvellous cook ; and if his notes were but as
flowing as his pedals are zealous, we should be carried on
the tale of the enthusiasm she awakened, away from the
rutted highroad, where History now thinks of tightening
her girdle for an accelerated pace.

The wonders were done: one hundred and seventy
guests plenteously fed at tables across the great Concert
Hall, down a length of the conservatory-glass, on soups,
fish, meats, and the kitchen-garden, under play of creative
sauces, all in the persuasive steam of savouriness ; every
dish, one may say, advancing, curtseying, swimming to
be your partner, instead of passively submitting to the
eye of appetite, consenting to the teeth, as that rather
melancholy procession of the cold, resembling established
spinsters thrice-corseted in decorum, will appear to do.
Whether Annandine had the thought or that she simply
acted in conformity with a Frenchwoman's direct good
sense, we do require to smell a sort of animation in the
meats we consume. We are still perhaps traceably
related to the Adamite old-youngster just on his legs, who
betrayed at every turn his Darwinian beginnings, and
relished a palpitating unwillingness in the thing refreshing

CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN 259

him ; only we young-oldsters cherish the milder taste
for willingness, with a throb of the vanquished in
it. And a seeming of that we get from the warm
roast. The banquet to be fervently remembered, should
smoke, should send out a breath to meet us. Victor's
crowded saloon-carriage was one voice of eulogy, to
raise Armandine high as the finale rockets bursting
over Wrensham Station at the start Londonward. How
had she managed? We foolishly question the arts of
magicians.

Mr. Pempton was an apparent dissentient, as the man
must be who is half a century ahead of his fellows in
humaneness, and saddened by the display of slaughtered
herds and their devourers. He had picked out his vege-
table and farinaceous morsels, wherever he could get them
uncontaminated ; enough for sustenance; and the
utmost he could show was, that he did not complain.
When mounted and ridden by the satirist, in wrath at
him for systematically feasting the pride of the martyr
on the maceration of his animal part, he put on his
martyr's pride, which assumed a perfect contentment in
the critical depreciation of opposing systems : he was
drawn to state, as he had often done, that he considered
our animal part shamefully and dangerously over-
nourished, and that much of the immorality of the world
was due to the present excessive indulgence in meats.
'Not in drink?' Miss Graves inquired. 'No,' he said
boldly; 'not equally; meats are more insidious. I say
nothing of taking life — of fattening for that express
purpose : diseases of animals : bad blood made : cruelty
superinduced: — it will be seen to be, it will be looked
back on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism.
Let that pass. I say, that for excess in drinking, the
penalty is paid instantly, or at least on the morrow.'

'Paid by the dnmkard's wife, you should say.'

260 ONE OF OUR CONQUEROES

' Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitution-
ally, more spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole,
gluttony is the least-generous of the vices.'

Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the
vices to declare, that it brutalized ; and stammeringly to
adopt the suggestion, that our breeding of English ladies
— those lights of the civilized world — can hardly go with a
feeding upon flesh of beasts. Priscilla regretted that
champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of im-
pertinences to her sex. They were both combative,
nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict wounds; and they
were set to shudder openly at one another's practises ; they
might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal
sections of his English had the vaster conceit of superiority
in purity; they were baring themselves, as it were with
a garment flung-ofif at each retort. He reproached them
for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff
panics demanded blood of animals to restore them ; and
their periods of bragging, -that they should brandif y their
wits to imagine themselves Vikings.

Nataly interposed. She was vexed with him. He let
his eyelids drop : but the occasion for showing the prickli--
ness of the bristly social English, could not be resisted.
Dr. Peter Yatt was tricked to confess, that small annoy-
ances were, in his experience, powerful on the human
frame; and Dr. John Cormyn was very neatly brought
round to assure him he was mistaken if he supposed the
homoeopathic doctor who smoked was exercising a de-
structive influence on the eflicacy of the infinitesimal doses
he prescribed; Dr. Yatt chuckled a laugh at globules;
Dr. Cormyn at patients treated as horses; while Mr.
Catkin was brought to praise the smoke of tobacco as
our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr. Peridon quietly
denied, that the taking of it into his nostrils from the puffs
of his friend caused him sad sUences. Nesta flew to

CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN 261

protect the admirer of her beloved Louise. Her subsiding
young excitement of the day set her doating on that moony
melancholy in Mr. Peridon.

No one could understand the grounds for Colney's more
than usual waspishness. He trotted out the fulgent and
tonal Church of the Rev. Septimus; the skeleton of
worship, so truly showing the spirit, in that of Dudley
Sowerby's family; maliciously admiring both; and he
had a spar with FeneUan, ending in a snarl and a shout.
Victor said to him : 'Yes, here, as much as you like, old
Colney, but I teU you, you 've staggered that poor woman
Lady Blachington to-day, and her husband too ; and I
don't know how many besides. What the pleasure of
it can be, I can't guess.'

' Nor I,' said Fenellan, ' but I '11 own I feel envious ;
like the girl among a family of boys I knew, who were all
of them starved in their infancy by a miserly father, that
gave them barely a bit of Graves to eat and not a drop
of Pempton to drink ; and on the afternoon of his funeral,
I found them in the drawing-room, four lank fellows,
heels up, walking on their hands, from long practice ; and
the girl informed me, that her brothers were able so to
send the little blood they had in their bodies to their
brains, and always felt quite cheerful for it, happy, and
empowered to deal with the problems of the universe;
as they couldn't on their legs ; but she, poor thing, was
forbidden to do the same ! And I 'm like her. I care
for decorum too much to get the brain to act on Colney's
behaviour ; but I see it eiu-aptures him and may be com-
prehensible to the topsy-turvy.'

Victor rubbed hands. It was he who filled Colney's
bag of satiric spite. In addition to the downright lunacy
of the courting of country society, by means of the cajole-
ments witnessed this day, a suspicion that Victor was
wearing a false face over the signification of Jamiman's

262 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

visit and meant to deceive the trustful and too-devoted
loving woman he seemed bound to wreck, irritated the best
of his nature. He had a resolve to pass an hour with the
couple, and speak and insist on hearing plain words before
the night had ended. But Fenellan took it out of him.
Victor's show of a perfect contentment emulating Pemp-
ton's, incited Colney to some of his cunning rapier-thrusts
with his dancing adversary ; and the heat which is planted
in us for the composition of those cool epigrams, will
not allow plain words to follow. Or, handing him over
to the police of the Philistines, you may put it, that a
habit of assorting spices will render an earnest simplicity
distasteful. He was invited by Nataly to come home
with them; her wish for his presence, besides personal,
was moved by an intuition, that his counsel might
specially benefit them. He shrugged; he said he had
work at his chambers.

'Work!' Victor ejaculated: he never could reach to
a right comprehension of labour, in regard to the very
unremunerative occupation of literature. Colney he did
not want, and he let him go, as Nataly noticed, with-
out a sign of the reluctance he showed when the others,
including Fenellan, excused themselves.

' So ! we 're alone ? ' he said, when the door of the hall
had closed on them. He kept Nesta talking of the success
of the day until she, observing her mother's look, simu-
lated the setting-in of a frenzied yawn. She was kissed,
and she tripped to her bed.

' Now we are alone,' Nataly said.

' Well, dear, and the day was, you must own . . . ' he
sought to trifle with her heavy voice; but she recalled
him: 'Victor!' and the naked anguish in her cry of
his name was like a foreign world threatening the one he
filled.

'Ah, yes; that man, that Jamiman. You saw him, I

CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN 263

remember. You recollected him? — stouter than he was.
In her service ever since. Well, a little drop of bitter,
perhaps : no harm, tonic'

'Victor, is she very ill?'

'My love, don't feel at your side: she is ill, ill,
not the extreme case : not yet : old and ill. I told
Sk^sey to give the man refreshment: he had to do
his errand.'

'What? why did he come?'

'Curious; he made acquaintance with Skepsey, and
appears to have outwitted poor Skepsey, as far as I see \
it. But if that woman thinks of intimidating me now ! — ' j^

His eyes brightened; he had sprung from evasions. \f ,
'living in flagrant sin, she says: you and I! She will jjM^ V*^
not have it; warns me. Heard this day at noon of -^
company at Lakelands. Jamiman off at once. Are to
live in obscurity ; — you and I ! if together ! Dictates
from her death-bed — I suppose her death-bed.' /^

'Dearest,' Nataly pressed hand on her left breast,
'may we not think that she may be right?'

'An outrageous tyranny of a decrepit woman naming
herself wife when she is only a limpet of vitality, with
drugs for blood, hanging-on to blast the healthy and
vigorous ! I remember old Colney's once, in old days,
calling that kind of marriage a sarcophagus. It was to
me. There I lay — see myself lying ! wasting ! Think
what you can good of her, by all means ! From her bed !
despatches that Jamiman to me from her bedside, with
the word, that she cannot in her conscience allow — ^what
imposition was it I practised? . . . flagrant sin? — ^it
would have been an infinitely viler. . . . She is the cause
of suffering enough : I bear no more from her ; I 've come
to the limit. She has heard of Lakelands : she has taken
one of her hatreds to the place. She might have written,
might have sent me a gentleman, privately. No : it

264 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

must be done in dramatic style — for effect : her confi-
dential— ^lawyer? — doctor? — butler ! Perhaps to frighten
me : — the boy she knew, and — ^poor soul ! I don't
mean to abuse her: but such conduct as this is down-
right brutal. I laugh at it, I snap my fingers. I can
afford to despise it. Only I do say it deserves to be called
abominable.'

' Victor, has she used a threat ? '

'Am I brought to listen to any of her threats ! — Funny
thing, I 'm certain that woman never can think of me
except as the boy she knew. I saw her first when she
was first a widow. She would keep talking to me of the
seductions of the metropolis — kept informing me I was
a young man . . . shaking her head. I 've told you.
She — ^well, I know we are mixtures, women as well as men.
I can, I hope, grant the same — I believe I can — allowances
to women as to men; we are poor creatures, all of us —
in one sense : though I won't give Colney his footing ;
there 's a better way of reading us. I hold fast to Nature.
No violation of Nature, my good Colney ! We can live
the lives of noble creatures; and I say that happiness
was meant for us : — ^just as, when you sit down to your
dinner, you must do it cheerfully, and you make good
blood : otherwise all 's wrong. There 's the right answer
to Colney ! But when a woman like that . . . and
marries a boy : well, twenty-one — ^not quite that : and
an innocent, a positive innocent — ^it may seem incredible,
after a term of school-life: it was a fact: I can hardly
understand it myself when I look back. Marries him !
And then sets to work to persecute him, because he has
blood in his veins, because he worships beauty ; because
he seeks a real marriage, a real mate. And, I say it ! —
let the world take its own view, the world is wrong ! —
because he preferred a virtuous life to the kind of life she
would, she must — why, necessarily ! — have driven him

CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN 265

to, with a mummy's grain of nature in his body. And I
am made of flesh, I admit it.'

'Victor, dearest, her threat concerns only your living
at Lakelands/'

'Pray, don't speak excitedly, my love,' he replied to
the woman whose tones had been subdued to scarce more
than waver. 'You see how I meet it : water off a duck's
back, or Indian solar beams on the skin of a Hindoo ! I
despise it — ^hardly worth contempt; — But, come: our
day was a good one. Fenellan worked well. Old Colney
was Colney Durance, of course. He did no real mischief.'

'And you will not determine to enter Lakelands — ^not
yet, dear?' said Nataly.

'My own girl, leave it all to me.'

'But, Victor, I must, must know.'

'See the case. You have lots of courage. We can't
withdraw. Her intention is mischief. I believe the
woman keeps herself alive for it : we 've given her another
lease ! — ^though it can only be for a very short time ;
Themison is precise; Carling too. If we hold back — I
have great faith in Themison — the woman's breath on us
is confirmed. We go down, then; complete the furnish-
ing, quite leisurely; accept — Glisten — accept one or two
invitations : impossible to refuse ! — but they are ac-
cepted!— ^and we defy her: — a crazy old creature:
imagines herself the wife of the ex-Premier, widow of
Prince Le Boo, engaged to the Chinese Ambassador, et
csetera. Leave the tussle with that woman to me. No,
we don't repeat the error of Craye Farm and Creckholt.
And here we have stout friends. Not to speak of Beaves
Urmsing: a picture of Old Christmas England! You
took to him ? — must have taken to Beaves Urmsing !
The Marigolds ! And Sir Rodwell and Lady Blachington
are altogether above the mark of Sir Hmnphrey and Lady
Pottil, and those half and half Mountneys. There 's a

266 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

warm centre of home in Lakelands. But I know my
Nataly : she is thinking of our girl. Here is the plan :
We stand our ground : my dear soul won't forsake me :
only there 's the thought of Fredi, in the event . . . ■ im-
probable enough. I lift Fredi out of the atmosphere
awhile ; she goes to my cousins the Duvidney ladies.'

Nataly was hit by a shot. 'Can you imagine it,
Victor?'

'Regard it as done.'

'They will surely decline !'

'Their feeling for General Radnor is a worship.'

'All the more . . .?'

'The son inherits it. He goes to them personally.
Have you ever known me personally fail? Fredi stays
at Moorsedge for a month or two. Dorothea and Virginia
Duvidney wUl give her a taste of a new society ; good for
the girl. All these little shiftings can be turned to good.
Meantime, I say, we stand our ground : but you are not
to be worried ; for though we have gone too far to recede,
we need not and we will not make the entry into Lake-
lands until — you know : that is, auspiciously, to suit you
in every way. Thus I provide to meet contingencies.
What one may really fancy is, that the woman did but
threaten. There 's her point of view to be considered :
sUly, crazy; but one sees it. We are not sure that she
struck a blow at Craye or Creckholt. I wonder she never
wrote. She was frightened, when she came to manage
her property, of signing her name to anything. Absurd,
that sending of Jarniman ! However, it 's her move ;
we make a corresponding disposition of our chessmen.'

'And I am to lose my Nesta for a month?' Nataly said,
after catching here and there at the fitful gleams of truce
or comfort dropped from his words. And simultaneously,
the reproach of her mind to her nature for again and so
constantly yielding to the domination of his initiative —

CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN 267

unable to j&nd the words, even the ideas, to withstand
him, — brought big tears. Angry at herself both for the
internal feebleness and the exhibition of it, she blinked
and begged excuse. There might be nothing that should
call her to resist him. She could not do much worse than
she had done to-day. The reflection, that to-day she had
been actually sustained by the expectation of a death
to come, diminished her estimate of to-morrow's burden
on her endurance, in making her seem a less criminal
woman, who would have no such expectation^ — which
was virtually ar^aBraF"aTenow"creature's future. Her
head was acute to work in the direction of the casuistries
and the sensational webs and films. Facing Victor, it
was a block.

But the thought came: how could she meet those
people about Lakelands, without support of the recent
guilty whispers ! She said coldly, her heart shaking
her : ' You think there has been a recovery ? '

'Invalids are up and down. They are — well, no; I
should think she dreads the . . .' he kept 'surgeon' out
of hearing. ' Or else she means this for the final stroke :
"though I'm lying here, I can still make him feel."
That, or — poor woman — she has her notions of right and
wrong.'

'Could we not now travel for a few weeks, Victor?'

'Certainly, dear; we will, after we have kept our en-
gagements to dine — ^I accepted — with the Blathenoys, the
Blachingtons, Beaves Urmsing.'

Nataly's vision of the peaceful lost little dairy cottage
swelled to brilliance, like the large tear at the fall ; darken-
ing under her present effort to comprehend the necessity
it was for him to mix and be foremost with the world.
Unable to grasp it perfectly in mind, her compassionate
love embraced it : she blamed herself, for being the ob-
struction to him.

268 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'Very well/ she said on a sigh. 'Then we shall not
have to let our girl go from us ? '

' Just a few weeks. In the middle of dinner, I scribbled
a telegram to the Duvidneys, for Skepsey to take.'

'Speaking of Nesta?'

'Of my coming to-morrow. They won't stop me. I
dine with them, sleep at the Wells ; hotel for a night. We
are to be separated for a night.'

She laid her hand in his and gave him a passing view of
her face : ' For two, dear. I am . . . that man's visit —
rather shaken : I shall have a better chance of sleeping if
I know I am not disturbing you.'

She was firm ; and they kissed and parted. Each had

y ar"'"'^ £t.>K^n unphrased speculation upon the power of Mrs. Burman
*^^ c^'t to put division between them.

CHAPTER XXIII

TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOB AN INSTANCE
OF MOMENTOUS EFFECTS PEODUCED BY VERY MINOR

CAUSES

The maiden ladies Dorothea and Virginia Duvidney were
thin-sweet old-fashioned grey gentlewomen, demurely
conscious of their excellence and awake to the temptation
in the consciousness, who imposed a certain reflex primness
on the lips of the world when addressing them or when
alluding to them. For their appearance was picturesque
of the ancestral time, and their ideas and scrupulousness
of delivery suggested the belated in ripeness; orchard
apples under a snow-storm ; or any image that will cere-
moniously convey the mind's profound appreciation to-
gether with the tooth's panic dread of tartness. They

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 269

were by no means tart ; only, as you know, the tooth is
apprehensively nervous ; an uninviting sign will set it on
edge. Even the pen which would sketch them has a spell
on it and must don its coat of office, walk the liveried
footman behind them.

_Their wealthy their deeds of charity, their modesty,
their built grey locks, their high^repute ; a ' Chippendale
elegance' in a quaintly formal correctness, that thej had,
as Colney Durance called it; gave them some queenli-
ness, and allowed them to claim the ear as an oracle and
banish rebellious argument. Intuitive knowledge, as-
sisted by the Rev. Stuart Rem and the Rev. Abram
Posterley, enabled them to pronounce upon men and
things ; not without effect ; their coimtry owned it ; the
foreigner beheld it. Nor were they corrupted by the
servility of the surrounding ear. They were good women,
striving to be himibly good. They might, for all the little
errors they nightly unrolled to their perceptions, have
stood before the world for a study in the white of our
humanity. And this may be but a washed wall, it is true :
revolutionary sceptics are measuring the depths of it.
But the hue refreshes, the world admires ; and we know
it an object of aim to the bettennost of the wealthy. If,
happily, complacent circumstances have lifted us to the
clean paved platform out of grip of puddled clay and be-
spattering wheeltracks, we get our chance of coming to it.
Possessing, for example, nine thousand pounds per
annum in Consols, and not expending the whole of it upon
our luxuries, we are, without further privation, near to
kindling the world's enthusiasm for whiteness. Yet
there, too, we find, that character has its problems to
solve ; there are shades in salt. We must be charitable,
but we should be just; we give to the poor of the land,
but we are eminently the friends of our servants ; duty
to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our

270 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

dog; and with a pathetic sorrow for sin, we discard it
from sight and hearing. We hate dirt. Having said so
much, having shown it, by seaHng the mouth of Mr.
Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley,
in relation to a dreadful public case and a melancholy
private, we have a pleased sense of entry into the world's
ideal.

At the same time, we protest our unworthiness. Ac-
knowledgeiag that they were not purely spotless, these
ladies genuinely took the tiny fly-spot for a spur to purifi-
cation; and they viewed it as a patch to raise in relief
their goodness. They gazed on it, saw themselves in it,
and veiled it : warned of the cunning of an oft-defeated
Tempter.

To do good and sleep well, was their sowing and their
reaping. Uneasy consciences could not have slept. The
sleeping served for proof of an accurate reckoning and an
expungeing of the day's debits. They differed in opinion
now and then, as we see companion waves of the river,
blown by a gust, roll a shadow between them ; and almost
equally transient were their differences with a world that
they condemned when they could not feel they (as an em-
bodiment of their principles) were leading it. The English
world at times betrayed a restiveness in the walled path-
way of virtue ; for, alas, it closely neighbours the French ;
only a Channel, often dangerously smooth, to divide : but
it is not perverted for long; and the English Funds are
always constant and a tower. Would they be suffered to
be so, if libertinism were in the ascendant ?

Colney Durance was acquainted with the Duvidney
ladies. Hearing of the Journey to them and the purport of
it, he said, with the mask upon glee : ' Then Victor has
met his match!' Nataly had sent for him to dine with
her in Victor's absence : she was far from grieved, as to
the result, by his assurance to her, that Victor had not a

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 271

chance. Colney thought so. ' Just like him ! to be off
gaily .to try and overcome or come over the greatest power
in England.' They were England herself ; the squat old
woman she has become by reason of her overlapping
nimibers of the comfortable fund-holder annuitants : a
vast body of passives and negatives, Uving by precept,
according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves
to be righteously guided because of their continuing un-
disturbed. Them he branded, as hvpocritical materialists,
and thej30untryJor_gride,.ift,ier^weetmeat plethora of
them :_-:7mixed with an ancient Hebrew^ fear of offence to
^anJnscnitablfiJLi(ml>..fiP.r.entrically^ the

dreary .iter ation ol the litanY„Qf sinfulness,. „ He was near
a truth ; and he had the heat of it onhim.

Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if
they could be moved to moral distinctness, mental in-
tention, with a preference of strong plain speech over the
crack of their whips. Colney could not or would not
praise our modern adventurous, experimental, heroic,
tramping active, as opposed to yonder pursy passives
and negatives; he had occasions for flicking the fellow
sharply : and to speak of the Lord as our friend present
with us, palpable to Reason, perceptible to natural piety
solely through the reason, which justifies punishment;
that would have stopped his mouth upon the theme of
God-forsaken creatures. Our satirist is an executioner
by profession, a moralist in excuse, or at the taU of it;
though he thinks the position reversed, when he moralizes
angrily to have his angry use of the scourge condoned.
Nevertheless, he fills a serviceable place; and certainly
he is not happy in his business. Colney suffered as
heavily as he struck. If he had been no more than a mime
in the motley of satire, he would have sucked compensa-
tion from the acid of his phrases, for the failure to prick
and goad, and work amendment.

272 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

He dramatized to Nataly some of the scene going on at
the Wells : Victor's petition ; his fugue in urgency of it ;
the brief reply of Miss Dorothea and her muted echo Miss
Virginia. He was rather their apologist for refusing.
But, as when, after himself listening to their 'views,' he
had deferentially withdrawn from the ladies of Moorsedge,
and had then beheld their strangely-hatted lieutenants
and the regiments of the toneless respectable on the
pantiles and the mounts, the curse upon the satirist im-
pelled him to generalize. The quiet good ladies were
multiplied: they were 'the thousands of their sisters,
petticoated or long-coated or buck-skinned ; comfortable
annuitants under clerical shepherding, close upon out-
numbering the labourers they paralyze at home and
stultify abroad.' Colney thumped away. The country's
annuitants had for type 'the figure with the helmet of the
Owl-Goddess and the trident of the Earth-shaker, seated
on a wheel, at the back of penny-pieces; in whom you
see neither the beauty of nakedness nor the charm of
drapery ; not the helmet's dignity or the trident's power ;
but she has patently that which stops the wheel; and
poseing for representative of an imperial nation, she helps
to pass a penny.' So he passed his epigram, heedless of
the understanding or attention of his hearer; who tem-
porarily misjudged him for a man impelled by the vanity
of literary point and finish, when indeed it was hot satiric
spite, justified of its aim, which crushed a class to extract
a drop of scathing acid, in the interests of the country,
mankind as well. Nataly wanted a picture painted,
colours and details, that she might get a vision of the
scene at Moorsedge. She did her best to feel an omen
and sound it, in his question 'whether the yearly in-
creasing army of the orderly annuitants and their para-
sites does not demonstrate the proud old country as a
sheath for pith rather than of the vital run of sap.'

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 273

Perhaps it was patriotic to inquire ; and doubtless she was
the weakest of women; she could follow no thought; her
heart was beating blindly beside Victor, hopeing for the
refusal painful to her through his disappointment.

'You think me foolish/ she made answer to one of
Colney's shrugs ; 'and it has come to that pitch with me,
that I cannot be sensible of a merit except in being one
with him — obeying, is the word. And I have never yet
known him fail. That terrible Lakelands wears a different
look to me, when I think of what he can do; though I
would give half my days to escape it.'

She harped on the chord of feverish extravagance ; the
more hateful to Colney because of his perceiving, that she
simulated a blind devotedness to stupefy her natural
pride ; and he was divided between stamping on her for
an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her
situation rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn to-
morrow what Victor has done,' he said, and thought how
the simple words carried the bitterness.

That was uttered within a few minutes of midnight,
when the ladies of Moorsedge themselves, after an ex-
hausting resistance to their dearest relative, were at the
hall-door of the house with Victor, sajdng the good-night,
to which he responded hurriedly, cordially, dumbly, a
baffled man. They clasped hands. Miss Dorothea said :
'You, Victor, always.' Miss Virginia said: 'You will -^

be sure of welcome.' He walked out upon the moonless X '^ It
night ; and for lack of any rounded object in the smother-yr J^
ing darkness to look at, he could nowhere take moorings ^ ""^^A^
to gather himself together and define the man who had/^
undergone so portentous a defeat. He was glad or
quarters at an hotel, a solitary bed, absence from his
Nataly.

For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered. They
had no triumph in their victory : the weight of it bore

274 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

them down. They closed, locked, shot the bolts and
fastened the chain of the door. They had to be remmded
by the shaking of their darling dog Tasso's curly silky
coat, that he had not taken his evening's trot to notify
malefactors of his watchfulness and official wrath at
sound of footfall or a fancied one. Without consultation,
they imbolted the door, and Tasso went forth, to 'com-
pose his vesper hymn,' as Mr. Posterley once remarked
amusingly.

Though not pretending to the Muse's crown so far, the
little dog had qualities to entrance the spinster sex. His
mistresses talked of him ; of his readiness to go forth ; of
the audible first line of his hymn or sonnet; of his in-
stinct telling him that something was wrong in the estab-
lishment. For most of the servants at Moorsedge were
prostrated by a fashionable epidemic; a slight attack,
the doctor said; but Montague, the butler, had with-
drawn for the nursing of his wife ; Perrin, the footman,
was confined to his chamber ; Manton, the favourite maid,
had appeared in the morning with a face that caused her
banishment to bed ; and the cook, Mrs. Bannister, then
sighingly agreed to send up cold meat for the ladies'
dinner. Hence their melancholy inhospitality to their
cousin Victor, who had, in spite of his errors, the right
to claim his place at their table, was 'of the blood,' they
said. He was recognized as the living prince of it. His
every gesture, every word, recalled the General. The
trying scene with him had withered them, they did not
speak of it; each had to the other the look of a vessel
that has come out of a gale. Would they sleep ? They
scarcely dared ask it of themselves. They had done
rightly; silence upon that reflection seemed best. It
was the silence of an inward agitation; still they knew
the power of good consciences to summon sleep.

Tasso was usually timed for five minutes. They were

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 275

astonished to discover by the clock, that they had given
him ten. He was very quiet : if so, and for whatever he
did, he had his reason, they said : he was a dog endowed
with reason: endowed — and how they wished that Mr.
Stuart Rem would admit it ! — with, their love of the little
dog believed (and Mr. Posterley acquiesced), a soul. Do
but think it of dear animals, and any form of cruelty to
them becomes an impossibility, Mr. Stuart Rem! But
he would not be convinced: ungenerously indeed he
named Mr. Posterley a courtier. The ladies could have
retorted, that Mr. Posterley had not a brother who was
the celebrated surgeon Sir Nicholas Rem.

Usually Tasso came running in when the hall-door was
opened to him. Not a sound of him could be heard. The
ladies blew his familiar whistle. He trotted back to a third
appeal, and was, unfortunately for them, not caressed ; he
received reproaches from two forefingers directed straight
at his reason. He saw it and felt it. The hug of him was
deferred to the tender good-night to him in his basket at
the foot of the ladies' beds.

On entering their spacious bed-chamber, they were so
fatigued that sleep appeared to their minds the compen-
sating logical deduction. Miss Dorothea suppressed a
yawn, and inflicted it upon Miss Virginia, who returned it,
with an apology, and immediately had her sister's hand
on her shoulder, for an attempted control of one of the
irresistibles ; a spectacle imparting bitter shudders and
shots to the sympathetic jawbones of an observer. Hand
at mouth, for not in privacy would they have been guilty
of exposing a grimace, they signified, under an interim
smile, their maidenly submission to the ridiculous force
of nature: after which. Miss Virginia retired to the
dressing-room, absorbed in woeful recollection of the
resolute No they had been compelled to reiterate, in
response to the most eloquent and, saving for a single

276 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

instance, admirable man, their cousin, the representative
of 'the blood,' supplicating them. A recreant thank-
fulness coiled within her bosom at the thought, that
Dorothea, true to her office of speaker, had tasked herself
with the cruel utterance and repetition of the word.
Victor's wonderful eyes, his voice, yet more than his
urgent pleas ; and also, in the midst of his fiery flood of
speech, his gentleness, his patience, pathos, and a man's
tone through it all ; were present to her.

Disrobed, she knocked at the door.

'I have called to you twice,' Dorothea said; and she
looked a motive for the call.

'What is it?' said Virginia, with faltering sweetness,
with a terrible divination.

The movement of a sigh was made. 'Are you aware of
anything, dear?'

Virginia was taken with the contrary movement of a
sniff. But the fear informing it prevented it from being
venturesome. Doubt of the pure atmosphere of their
bed-chamber, appeared to her as too heretic even for
the positive essay. In affirming, that she was not
aware of anything, her sight fell on Tasso. His eye-
balls were those of a little dog that has been awfully
questioned.

'It is more than a suspicion,' said Dorothea; and
plainly now, while open to the seductions of any pleasing
infidel testimony, her nose in repugnance convicted him
absolutely.

Virginia's nose was lowered a few inches; it inhaled
and stopped midway. 'You must be mistaken, dear.
He never . . . '

'But are you insensible to the . . .' Dorothea's eye-
lids fainted.

Virginia dismissed the f orlornest of efforts at incredulity.
A whiff of Tasso had smitten her. 'Ah !' she exclaimed

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 277

and fell away. ' Is it Tasso ! How was it you noticed
nothing before undressing, dear?'

' Thinking of what we have gone through to-night ! I
forgot him. At last the very strange . . . The like of it
I have not ever ! . . . And upon that thick coat ! And,
dear, it is late. We are in the morning hours.'

'But, my dear — Oh, dear, what is to be done with
him?'

That was the crucial point for discussion. They had no
servant to give them aid ; Manton, they could not dream
of disturbing. And Tasso's character was in the estimate ;
he hated washing ; it balef ully depraved his temper ; and
not only, creature of habit that he was, would he decline
to lie down anywhere save in their bedroom, he would
lament, plead, insist unremittingly, if excluded; terrify-
ing every poor invalid of the house. Then again, were
they at this late hour to dress themselves, and take him
downstairs, and light a fire in the kitchen, and boil suffi-
cient water to give him a bath and scrubbing? Cold
water would be death to him. Besides, he would ring
out his alarum for the house to hear, pour out all his
poetry, poor dear, as Mr. Posterley called it, at a touch
of cold water. The catastrophe was one to weep over,
the dilemma a trial of the strongest intelligences.

In addition to reviews of their solitary alternative — the
having of a befouled degraded Httle dog in their chamber
through the night, they were subjected to a conflict of
emotions when eyeing him : and there came to them
the painful, perhaps irreverent, perhaps uncharitable,
thought : — that the siuner who has rolled in the abomin-
able, must cleanse him and do things to polish him and
perfume before again embraced even by the mind : if
indeed we can ever have our old sentiment for him again !
Mr. Stuart Rem might decide it for them. Nay, before
even the heart embraces him, he must completely purify

278 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

himself. That is to say, the ordinary human sinner —
save when a relative. Contemplating Tasso, the hearts
of the ladies gushed out in pity of an innocent little dog,
knowing not evil, dependent on his friends for help to be
purified ; — ^necessarily kept at a distance : the very look
of him prescribed extreme separation, as far as practicable.
But they had proof of a love almost greater than it was
previous to the offence, in the tender precautions they
took to elude repulsion.

He was rolling on the rug, communicating contagion.
Flasks of treble-distilled lavender water, and their
favourite, traditional in the family, eau d' Arquebusade,
were on the toilet-table. They sprinkled his basket,
liberally sprinkled the rug and the little dog. Perfume-
pastilles were in one of the sitting-rooms below; and
Virginia would have gone down softly to fetch a box, but
Dorothea restrained her, in pity for the servants, with
the remark : 'It would give us a nightmare of a Roman
Catholic Cathedral !' A bit of the "window was lifted by
Dorothea, cautiously, that prowling outsiders might not
be attracted. Tasso was wooed to his basket. He
seemed inquisitive; the antidote of his naughtiness
excited him; his tail circled after his muzzle several
times; then he lay. A silken scarf steeped in eau
d' Arquebusade was flung across him.

Their customary devout observances concluded, lights
were extinguished, and the ladies kissed, and entered
their beds.

Their beds were not homely to them. Dorothea
thought that Virginia was long in settling herself. Vir-
ginia did not like the sound of Dorothea's double sigh.
Both listened anxiously for the doings of Tasso. He
rested.

He was uneasy ; he was rounding his basket once more ;
unaware of the exaggeration of his iniquitous conduct,

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 279

poor innocent, he shook that dreadful coat of his ! He
had displaced the prophylactic cover of the scarf.

He drove them ia a despair to speculate on the con-
tention between the perfume and the stench in junction,
with such a doubt of the victory of which of the two, as
drags us to fear our worst. It steals into our nostrils,
possesses them. As the History of Mankind has in-
formed us, we were led up to our civilization by the nose.
But Philosophy warns us on that eminence, to beware of
trusting exclusively to our conductor, lest the mind of
us at least be plunged back into barbarism. The ladies
hated both the cause and the consequence, they had a
revulsion from the object, of the above contention. But
call it not a contention : there is nobility in that. This
was a compromise, a degrading union, with very sickening
results. Whether they came of an excess of the sprink-
ling, could not well be guessed. The drenchiag at least
was righteously intended.

Beneath their shut eyelids, they felt more and more the
oppression of a darkness not laden with slumber. They
saw it insolidity; themselves as restless billows, driven
dashing to the despondent sigh. Sleep was denied them.

Tasso slept. He had sinned unknowingly, and that is
not a spiritual sin ; the chastisement confers the pardon.

But why was this ineffable blessing denied to them?
Was it that they might have a survey of aU the day's
deeds and examine them under the cruel black beams of
Insomnia?

Virginia said : ' You are wakeful.'

'Thoughtful,' was the answer.

A century of the midnight rolled on.

Dorothea said : 'He behaved very beautifully.'

'I looked at the General's portrait while he besought
us,' Virginia replied.

' One sees him in Victor, at Victor's age. Try to sleep.'

280 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'I do. I pray that you may.'

Silence courted slumber. Their interchange of speech
from the posture of bodies on their backs, had been low
and deliberate, in the tone of the vaults. Dead silence
recalled the strangeness of it. The night was breathless ;
their open window a peril bestowing no boon. They were
mutually haunted by sound of the gloomy query at the
nostrils of each when drawing the vital breath. But for
that, they thought they might have slept.

Bed spake to bed :

'The words of Mr. Stuart Rem last Sunday !'

'He said : "Be just." Could one but see direction !'

'In obscurity, feeling is a guide.'

'The heart.'

'It may sometimes be followed.'

' When it concerns the family.'

'He would have the living, who are seeking peace, be
just.'

'Not to assimie the seat of justice.'

Again they lay as tombstone effigies, that have com-
mitted the passage of affairs to another procession of the
Ages.

There was a gentle sniff, in hopeless confirmation of the
experience of its predecessors. A sister to it ensued.

' Could Victor have spoken so, without assurance in his
conscience, that his entreaty was righteously addressed
to us? that we . . .'

' And no others ! '

' I think of his language. He loves the child.'

' In heart as in mind, he is eminently gifted ; acknowl-
edgeing error.'

'He was very young.'

The huge funereal minutes conducted their sonorous
hearse, the hour.

It struck in the bed-room Three.

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 281

No more than three of the clock, it was the voice telling
of half the precious restorative nighthours wasted.

Now, as we close our eyelids when we would go to sleep,
so must we, in expectation of the peace of mind granting
us the sweet oblivion, preliminarily do something which
invokes, that we may obtain it.

'Dear,' Dorothea said.

'I know indeed,' said Virginia.

'We may have been!'

'Not designingly.'

'Indeed not. But harsh it may be named, if the one
innocent is to be the sufferer.'

'The child can in no sense be adjudged guilty.'

'It is Victor's child.'

'He adores the child.'

Wheels were in mute motion within them; and
presently the remark was tossed-up :

'In his coming to us, it is possible to see paternal
solicitude.'

Thence came fruit of reflection :

'To be instrumental as guides to a tender young life !'

Reflection heated with visions :

' Once our dream ! '

They had the happier feeling of composure, though
Tasso possessed the room. Not Tasso, but a sublimated
offensiveness, issue of the antagonistically combined,
dispersed to be the more penetrating; insomuch that it
seemed to them they could not ever again make use of
eau d'Arquebusade without the vitiating reminder. So
true were the words of Mr. Stuart Rem : ' Half measures
to purification are the most delusive of our artifices.'
Fatigue and its reflections helped to be peacefuller. Their
souls were mounting to a serenity above the nauseating de-
gradation, to which the poor little dog had dragged them.

'Victor gave his promise.'

^/^i

282 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'At least, concession would not imply contact with the
guilty.'

Both sighed as they took up the burden of the vaporous
Tasso to drop him; with the greater satisfaction in the
expelling of their breath.

'It might be said, dear, that concession to his entreaty
does not in any way countenance the sin.'

' I can see, dear, how it might be read as a reproof.'

Their exchange of sentences followed meditative
pauses ; Dorothea leading.

' To one so sensitive as Victor ! '

'A month or two of oiu" society for the child !'

'It is not the length of time.'

'The limitation assures against maternal claims.'

'She would not dare.'

'He used the words: "her serious respect" for us. I
should not wish to listen to him often.'

'We listen to a higher.'

'It may really be, that the child is like him.'

' Not resembling Mr. Stuart Rem's Clementina !'

' A week of that child gave us our totally sleepless night.'

' One thinks more hopefully of a child of Victor's.'

'He would preponderate.'

'He would.'

They sighed ; but it was now with the relief of a light-
ened oppression.

'If, dear, in truth the father's look is in the child, he
has the greater reason to desire for her a taste of our
atmosphere.'

' Do not pursue it. Sleep.'

'One prayer!'

'Your mention of oiu" atmosphere, dear, destroys my
power to frame one. Do you, for two. But I would
cleanse my heart.'

'There is none purer.'

THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO 283

'Hush.'

Virginia spoke a more fervent word of praise of her
sister, and had not the hushing response to it. She heard
the soft regular breathing. Her own was in downy fellow-
ship with it a moment later.

At the hour of nine, in genial daylight, sitting over the
crumbs of his hotel breakfast, Victor received a little note
that bore the handwriting of Dorothea Duvidney.

' Dear Victor, we are prepared to receive the child for a
month. In haste, before your train. Our love. D.
and V.'

His face flashed out of cloud.

A more precious document had never been handed to
him. It chased back to midnight the doubt hovering over
his belief in himself; — phrased to say, that he was no
longer the Victor Radnor known to the world. And it
extinguished a corpse-like recollection of a baleful dream
in the night. Here shone radiant witness of his being the
very man; save for the spot of his recent confusion in
distinguishing his identity or in feeling that he stood
whole and solid. — Because of two mature maiden ladies ?
Yes, because of two maiden ladies, my good fellow. And
friend Colney, you know the ladies, and what the getting
round them for one's purposes really means.

The sprite of Colney Durance had struck him smartly
overnight. Victor's internal crow was over Colney now.
And when you have the optimist and pessimist acutely
opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively conversations
at one another across the gulf of distance, even of time.
For a principle is involved, besides the knowledge of the
other's triumph or dismav. The couple-aie-SGales.oL^
balance; and not before last night had Victor ever con- i ,
sented to think of Colnev ascending while he dropped low '
to graze the pebbles.

284 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

He left his hotel for the station, singing the great aria
of the fourth Act of the Favorita : neglected since that
mighty German with his Rienzi, and Tannhduser, and
Tristan and Isolda, had mastered him, to the displacement
of his boyhood's beloved sugary -inis and -antes and
-zettis; had clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had
wafted him up to a new realm, invigorating if severer.
But now his youth would have its voice. He travelled
up to town with Sir Abraham Quatley and talked, and
took and gave hints upon City and Commercial affairs,
whUe the honeyed Italian of the conventional, gloriously
*4 , 1 animal, stress and flutter had a revel in his veins, now
V' \'' land then mutedly ebullient at the mouth: honeyed,
I golden, rich in visions; — having surely much more of
L I Nature's encouragement to her children?

A/T' ^

CHAPTER XXIV

nesta's engagement

A WOBD in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man
Blathenoy, set the wheels of Victor's brain at work upon
his defences, for a minute, on the walk Westward. Who
knew ? — who did not know ! He had a torpid conscious-
ness that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the
great monster to hold off in ignorance; and the next in-
stant, he had caught its miserable spies by the lurcher
neck and was towering. He dwelt on his contempt of
them, to curtain the power they could stir.
'The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?'
Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a
second statement, thought 'there was the look of it.'
'Well, we must watch over her. Dartrey! — but

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 285

Dartrey's an honest fellow with women. But men are
men. Very few men spare a woman when the mad fit is on
her. A little woman — pretty little woman ! — wife to
Jacob Blathenoy ! She mustn't at her age have any
close choosing — under her hand. And Dartrey 's just
the figure to strike a spark in a tinder-box head.'

' With a husband who 'd reduce Minerva's to tinder,
after a month of him !'

'He spent his hone5Tnoon at his place at Wrensham;
told me so.' Blathenoy had therefore then heard of the
building of Lakelands by the Victor Radnor of the City ;
and had then, we guess — in the usual honeymoon boast-
ing of a windbag with his bride — ^wheezed the foul gossip,
to hide his emptiness and do duty for amusement of the
pretty little "aged bird. Probably so. But Victor knew
that Blathenoy needed him and feared him. Probably
the wife had been enjoined to keep silence; for the
Blachingtons, Fannings and others were, it could be sworn,
blank and unscratched folio sheets on the subject : — as
yet ; unless Mrs. Burman had dropped venom.

'One pities the little woman, eh, Fenellan?'

'Dartrey won't be back for a week or so; and
they 're off to Switzerland, after the dinner they give.
I heard from him this morning; one of the Clanconans
is ill.'

'Lucky. But wherever Blathenoy takes her, he must
be the same "arid bore," as old Colney says.'

' A domestic simoom,' said Fenellan, booming it : and
Victor had a shudder.

'Awful thing, marriage, to some women! We chain
them to that domestic round ; most of them haven't the
means of independence or a chance of winning it ; and all
that 's open to them, if they 've made a bad cast for a
mate — and good Lord ! how are they to know before it 's
too late !— they haven't a choice except to play tricks or

286 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

jump to the deuce or sit and "drape in blight," as Colney
has it; though his notion of the optional marriages,
broken or renewed every seven years ! — ^if he means it.
You never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt
of savage irony. It 's donkey nonsense, eh ? '

'The very hee-haw of nonsense,' Fenellan acquiesced.

'Ceme, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have
shown wisdom,' Victor said, rather leaning to the theme
of a fretfulness of women in the legal yoke. 'They 're
donkeys till we know them for prophets. Who can tell !
Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.'

Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although
the loneliness of his lodgeings was known, and also, that
he played whist at his Club. Victor had grounds for turn-
ing to him at the door and squeezing his hand warmly, by
way of dismissal. In ascribing them to a weariness at
Fenellan's perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on
them, and he stamped it with a repudiation of the charge,
that Colney's views upon the great Marriage Question
were the 'very hee-haw of nonsense.' They were not the
hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they
were for discussion ; there was no bray about them. • He
could not feel them to be absurd while Mrs. Burman's
tenure of existence barred the ceremony. Anything for
a phrase ! he murmured of Fenellan's talk ; calling him,
Dear old boy, to soften the slight.

Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey;
so she continued to be uninformed of her hero's release ;
and that was in the order of happy accidents. She had
hardly to look her interrogation for the news ; it radiated.
But he stated such matter-of-course briefly. 'The good
ladies are ready to receive our girl.'

Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled
pride, in the idea, that he who tamed everybody to sub-
mission, might well have command of her.

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 287

The note, signed D. and V., was shown.

There stood the words. And last night she had been
partly of the opinion of Colney Durance. She sank down
among the unreasoning abject; — ^not this time with her
perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety
under compression. _-Eor she had not quite comprehended V
why Nesta should go. This readiness of the Duvidney
Jadies to receive ^e girl, stopped her mental inquiries.

She begged for a week'sdefay ; ' beforeThe parting '^; as
her dear old silly mother's pathos whimpered it, of the
separation for a month ! and he smiled and hummed plea-
santly at any small .petition, thinking her in error to expect
Dartrey's return to town before the close of a week ; and
then wondering at women, mildly denouncing in his heart
the mothers who ran risk of disturbing their daughters'
bosoms with regard to particular heroes married or not.
Dartrey attracted women : he was one of the men who do
it without effort. Victor's provident mind blamed the
mother for the indiscreetness of her wish to have him
among them. But Dudley had been making way bravely
of late ; he improved ; he began to bloom, like a Spring
flower of the garden protected from frosts under glass;
and Fredi was the sheltering and nourishing bestower of
the lessons. One could see, his questions and other little
points revealed, that he had a certain lover's dread of
Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy : Victor understood
the feeling. To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man
elsewhere in another ; though she may know she never can
wed the man, and has not the hope of it ; is torment to the
lover quailing, as we do in this terrible season of the price-
less deliciousness, stripped against aU the winds that blow ;
skinless at times. One gets up a sympathy for the poor
shy dependent shivering lover. Nevertheless, here was
young Dudley waking, visibly becoDQiiig^plder^__A^in the /
flute-duets, he gained fire from concert. The distance

288 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

between Cronidge and Moorsedge was two miles and a
quarter.

Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted
four days, which embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John
Cormyn's on the last of the days, when Nesta was engaged
to sing with her mother a duet of her own composition,
the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from
rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in
letting it pass : eulogy, coming from him. So Victor
heard, and he doated on the surprise to come for him, in a
boyish anticipation. The girl's little French ballads under
tutelage of Louise de Seilles promised, though they were
\imitative. If Strauscher let this pass . . . Victor saw
Grand Opera somewhere to follow ; England's claim to be
a creative musical nation vindicated; and the genius of
the fair sex as well.

He heard the duet at Mrs. Cormyn's ; and he imagined
a hearing of his Fredi's Opera, and her godmother's delight
in it ; the once famed Sanfredini's consent to be the diva
at a rehearsal, and then her compelling her hidalgo duque
to consent further : an event not inconceivable. For here
was downright genius.; the flowering aloe of the many
years in formation; and Colney admitted the song to
have a streak of genius ; though he would pettishly and
stupidly say, that our modern newspaper Press is able now
to force genius for us twenty or so to the month, excluding
Sundays — our short pauses for the incubation of it. Real
rare genius was in that_song, nothing forced ; andexqui-
sitemelody ; "one of those melodies which "fling gold chains
^j about us and lead us off, lead us back into Eden. Victor
hummed at bars of it on the drive homeward. His darlings
had to sing it again in the half-lighted drawing-room.
The bubble-happiness of the three was vexed only by
tidings heard from Colney during the evening of a renewed
instance of Skepsey's misconduct. Priscilla Graves had

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 289

hurried away to him at the close of Mr. John Cormyn's
Concert, in consequence; in grief and in sympathy.
Skepsey was to appear before the magistrate next morning,
for having administered physical chastisement to his wife
during one of her fits of drunkenness. Colney had seen
him. His version of the story was given, however, in the
objectionable humorous manner: none could gather
from it of what might be pleaded for Skepsey. His
'lesson to his wife in the art of pugilism, before granting
her Captain's rank among the Defensive Amazons of Old
England,' was the customary patent absurdity. But it
was odd, that Skepsey always preferred his appeal for help
to Colney Durance. Nesta proposed following Priscilla
that night. She had hinted her wish, on the way home ;
she was urgent, beseeching, when her father lifted praises
of her : she had to start with her father by the train at
seven in the morning, and she could not hear of poor
Skepsey for a number of hours. She begged a day's delay ;
which would enable her, she said, to join them in dining
at the Blachingtons', and seeing dear Lakelands again.
'I was invited, you know.' She spoke in childish style,
and under her eyes she beheld her father and mother ex-
change looks. He had a fear that Nataly might support
the girl's petition. Nataly read him to mean, possible
dangers among the people at Wrensham. She had seemed
hesitating. After meeting Victor's look, her refusal was
firm. She tried to make it one of distress for the use of
the hard word to her own dear girl. Nesta spied beneath.

But what was it ? There was a reason for her going !
She had a right to stay, and see and talk with Captain
Dartrey, and she was to be deported !

So now she set herself to remember little incidents at
Creckholt : particularly a conversation in a very young
girl's hearing, upon Sir Humphrey and Lady PottU's
behaviour to the speakers, her parents. She had then,

290 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

and she now had, an extraordinary feeUng, as from a wind
striking upon soft summer weather off regions of ice, that
she was in her parents' way. How? The feeling was
irrational; it could give her no reply, or only the multi--
tudinous which are the question violently repeated. She
slept on it.

She and her father breakfasted by the London birds'
first twitter. They talked of Skepsey. She spoke of her
going as exile. ' No,' said he, ' you 're sure to meet
friends.'

Her cheeks glowed. It came wholly through the sud-
denness of the recollection, that the family-seat of one
among the friends was near the Wells.

He was allowed to fancy, as it suited him to fancy, that
a vivid secret pleasure laid the colour on those ingenuous
fair cheeks.

' A solitary flute for me, for a month ! I shall miss my
sober comrade : got the habit of duetting : and he 's
gentle, bears with me.'

Tears lined her eyelids. 'Who would not be, dearest
dada ! But there is nothing to bear except the honour.'

'You like him? You and I always have the same
tastes, Fredi.'

Now there was a reddening of the sun at the mount ; all
the sky aflame. How could he know that it was not the
heart in the face ! She reddened because she had perused
his wishes ; had detected a scheme striking off from them,
and knew a man to be the object of it; and because she
had at the same time the sense of a flattery in her quick
divination ; and she was responsively emotional, her blood
virginal ; often it was a tropical lightning.

It looked like the heart doing rich painter's work on
maiden features. Victor was naturally as deceived as he
wished to be.

From his being naturally so, his remarks on Dudley had

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 291

an air of embracing him as one of the family. 'His
manner to me just hits me.'

' I like to see him with you,' she said.

Her father let his tongue run : ' One of the few young
men I feel perfectly at home with ! I do like dealing with
a gentleman. I can confide in a gentleman: honour,
heart, whatever I hold dearest.'

There he stopped, not too soon. The girl was mute,
fully agreeing, slightly hardening. She had a painful
sense of separation from her dear Louise. And it was now
to be from her mother as well : she felt the pain when
kissing her mother in bed. But this was moderated by
the prospect of a holiday away out of reach of Mr.
Barmby's pursuing voice, whom her mother favoured:
and her mother was concealing something from her;
so she could not make the confidante of her mother.
Nataly had no forewamings. Her simple regrets filled
her bosom. AU night she had been taking her chastise-
ment, and in the morning it seemed good to her, that
she should be denuded, for her girl to learn the felicity
of having relatives.

For some reason, over which Nataly mused in the suc-
ceeding hours, the girl had not spoken of any visit her
mother was to pay to the Duvidney ladies or they to her.
Latterly she had not alluded to her mother's family. It
might mean, that the beloved and dreaded was laying
finger on a dark thing in the dark ; reading syllables by
touch; keeping silence over the communications to a
mind not yet actively speculative, as it is a way with
young women. 'With young women educated for the
market, to be timorous, consequently secretive, rather
snaky,' Colney Durance had said. Her Nesta was not one
of the 'framed and glazed' description, cited by him, for
an example of the triumph of the product; 'exactly
harmonious with the ninny male's ideal of female

292 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

innocence.' No ; but what if the mother had opened her
heart to her girl ? It had been of late her wish or a dream,
shaping hourly to a design, now positively to go through
that furnace. Her knowledge of Victor's objection,
restrained an mpjilje Jhat^ad not won spring enough
to act against his counsel or vivify an intelligence grown
dull in slavery under him, with regard to the one seeming
ji^t_cquree, J!h§, adoption „Q|jjt„wQuldLKavC wounded
him^tiieref ore her. She had thought of him first; she
had also~tEought of herself, and she blamed herself now.
She went so far as to think, that Victor was guilty of the
schemer's error of counting human creatures arithmeti-
cally, in the sum, without the estimate of distinctive quali-
ties and value here and there. His return to a shivering
sensitiveness on the subject of his girl's enlightenment
'just yet,' for which Nataly pitied and loved him, sharing
it, with humiliation for doing so, became finally her ex-
cuse. We must have some excuse, if we would keep to
life.

Skepsey's case appeared in the evening papers. He con-
fessed, 'frankly,' he said, to the magistrate, that, 'acting
under temporary exasperation, he had lost for a moment a
man's proper self-command.' He was as frank in stating,
that he ' occupied the prisoner's place before his Worship a
second time, and was a second time indebted to the gentle-
man, Mr. Colney Durance, who so kindly stood by him.'
There was hilarity in the Court at his quaint sententious
envelopment of the idiom of the streets, which he delivered
with solemnity: 'He could only plead, not in absolute
justification — an appeal to human sentiments — the feel-
ings of a man of the humbler orders, returning home in the
evening, and his thoughts upon things not without their
importance, to find repeatedly the guardian of his house-
hold beastly drunk, and destructive.' Colney made the
case quite intelligible to the magistrate; who gravely

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 293

robed a strain of the idiomatic in the officially awful, to
keep in tune with his delinquent. No serious harm had
been done to the woman. Skepsey was admonished and
released. His wife expressed her willingness to forgive
him, now he had got his lesson ; and she hoped he would
understand, that there was no need for a woman to learn
pugilism. Skepsey would have explained; but the case
was over, he was hustled out.

However, a keen young reporter present smelt fun for
copy ; he followed the couple ; and in a particular evening
Journal, laughable matter was printed concerning Skep-
sey's view of the pugilism to be imparted to women for
their physical'protection in extremity, and the distinction of
it from the blow conveying the moral lesson to them ; his
wife having objected to the former, because it annoyed her
and he pestered her ; and she was never, she said, ready to
stand up to him for practice, as he called it, except when
she had taken more than he thought wholesome for her : —
he had no sense. There was a squabble between them,
because he chose to scour away to his master's office in-
stead of conducting her home with the honours. Nesta
read the young reporter's version, with shrieks. She led
the ladies of Moorsedge to discover amusement in it.

At first, as her letter to her mother described them, they
were like a pair of pieces of costly China, with the settled
smile, and cold. She saw but the outside of them, and she
continued reporting the variations, which steadily deter-
mined the warmth. On the night of the third day, they
kissed her tenderly ; they were human figures.

No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the
good ladies in receiving her : Victor's child ; but, as their
phrase would have run, had they dared to give it utterance
to one another, a child of sin. How foreign to them, in
that character, how strange, when she was looked on as an
inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate ;

294 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

until the timorous estimation, from gradually swelling,
suddenly sank; nature invaded them; they could dis-
card the alienating sense of the taint; and not only did
they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or
Mr. Posterley might call for evening tea, but they con-
sulted upon inviting the married one of those gentlemen,
to 'divert dear Nesta.' Every night she slept well. In
all she did, she proved she was ' of the blood.' She had
Victor's animated eyes ; she might have, they dreaded to
think, his eloquence. They put it down to his eloquence
entirely, that their resistance to his petition had been over-
come, for similarly with the treatment of the private acts
of royal personages by lacquey History, there is, in the
minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that any event
having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all
hazards recorded with the utmost nicety in decency. By
such means, they preserve the ceremonial self-respect,
which is a necessity of their existence ; and so they main-
tain the regal elevation over the awe-struck subjects of
their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down,
scatter, dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest,
the most vital to them. A democratic evil spirit is abroad,
generated amongcongregations, often perilously conununi-
"cating its wanton laughter to the desperate wickedness
they know (not solely through the monition of^f. Stuart
Rem) to lurk within. Ithas to be excluded : on certain
,jcJ^^ points they must not think. TEe~mght of Tasso was-^
ftf i,'-darkly clouded in the minds of the pure ladies : a rift
\J\^ would have seized their Ealf-slumbering sense" of smell, to
revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of
their iatelligencgS;___

Victor's eloquence, Victor's influence, Victor's child:
he carried them as a floodstream, insomuch, that their
reception of this young creature of the blot on her birth,
was regarded by them in the unmentioned abstract, and

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 295

the child's presence upon earth seen with the indulgence
(without the naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English
for the numerous offspring of the peccadillos of their
monarchs. These things pass muster from being ' Britan-
nically cocooned in the purple,' says our irreverent satirist ;
and the maiden ladies' passion of devotion to 'the blood'
helped to blind them ; but stiU more so did the imperious
urgency to ciu-tain closely the night of Tasso, throwing all
its consequences upon Victor's masterful tongue. Whence
it ensued (and here is the danger for illogical individuals
as well as vast communities, who continue to batten upon
fiction when the convenience of it has taken the place of
pleasure), that they had need to exalt his eloquence, for a
cloak to their conduct ; and doing it, they feU into a habit
of jrielding to him ; they disintegrated under him ; rules,
principles, morality, were shaken to some confusion. And
still proceeding thus, they now and then glanced back,
more wonderingly than convicted sinners upon their days
of early innocence, at the night when successfully they
withstood him. They who had doubted of the rightness
of letting Victor's girl come into collision with two clerical
gentlemen, one of whom was married, permitted him now
to bring the Hon. Dudley Sowerby to their house, and
make appointments to meet Mr. Dudley Sowerby under a
roof that sheltered a young lady, evidently the allurement
to the scion of aristocracy; of whose family Mr. Stuart
Rem had spoken in the very kindling hushed tones, proper
to the union of a sacerdotal and an English citizen's
veneration.

How would it end ? And if some day this excellent Mr.
Dudley Sowerby reproached them! He could not have
a sweeter bride, one more truly a lady in education and
manners ; but the birth ! the child's name ! Their
trouble was emitted in a vapour of interjections. Very
perplexing was it fdr the good ladies of strict principles to

296 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

reflect, as dimly they did, that the concrete presence of
dear Nesta silenced and overcame objections to her being
upon earth. She seemed, as it were, a draught of redoubt-
able Nature inebriating morality. But would others be
similarly affected? Victor might get his release, to do
justice to the mother: it would not cover the child.
Prize as they might the quality of the Radnor blood
(drawn from the most ancient of original Britain's
princes), there was also the Cantor blood for considera-
tion ; and it was old, noble, proud. Would it be satisfied
in matching itself with great wealth, a radiant health, and
the good looks of a young flower? For the sake of the
dear girl, the ladies hoped that it would; and they en-
larged the outline of their wedding present, while, in their
minds, the noble English family which could be satisfied
so, was lowered, partaking of the taint they had personally
ceased to recognize.

Of one thing they were sure, and it enlisted them : the
gentleman loved the girl. Her love of him, had it been
prominent to view, would have stirred a feminine sigh, not
more, except a feminine lecture to follow. She was quite
uninflamed, fresh and cool as a spring. His ardour had no
disguise. They measured him by the favourite fiction's
heroes of their youth, and found him to gaze, talk, comport
himself, according to the prescription ; correct grammar,
finished sentences, all that is expected of a gentleman
enamoured; and ever with the watchful intentness for
his lady's faintest first dawn of an inclining to a wish.
Mr. Dudley Sowerby's eye upon Nesta was really an
apprentice. There is in Love's young season a magna-
nimity in the male kind. Their superior strength and
knowledge are made subservient to the distaff of the
weaker and shallower : they crown her queen ; her look
is their mandate. So was it when Sir Charles and Sir
Rupert and the estimable Villiers Davenant touched

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 297

maidenly hearts to throb: so is it now, with the Hon.
Dudley Sowerby.

Very haltingly, the ladies were guilty of a suggestion to
Victor. ' Oh ! Fredi ? ' said he ; ' admires her, no doubt ;
and so do I, so we all do ; she 's one of the nice girls ; but
as to Cupid's darts, she belongs to the cucumber family,
and he shoots without fireing. We shall do the mischief
if we put an interdict. Don't you remember the green
days when obstacles were the friction to light that
match?' Their pretty nod of assent displayed the virgin
pride of the remembrance : they dreamed of having once
been exceedingly wilful ; it refreshed their nipped natures ;
and dwelling on it, they forgot to press their suggestion.
Incidentally, he named the sum his Fredi would convey
to her husband; with, as was calculable, the further
amount his only child would inherit. A curious effect
was produced on them. Though they were not imagina-
tively mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth
commonly are, they talked of the sum over and over in
the solitude of their chamber. 'Dukes have married for
less.' Such an heiress, they said, might buy up a Princi-
pality. Victor had suppUed them with something of an
apology to the gentleman proposing to Nesta iu their
house.

The chronicle of it is, that Dudley Sowerby did this on
the fifteenth day of September; and that it was not
known to the damsel's parents before the twenty-third;
as they were away on an excursion in South Tyrol : — away,
flown, with just a word of the hurried departure to their
envious, exiled girl ; though they did not tell her of new
constructions at the London house partly causing them to
fly. Subject to their consent, she wrote, she had given
hers. The letter was telegramic on the essential point.
She wrote of Mr. Barmby's having visited Mr. Posterley
at the Wells, and she put it just as flatly. Her principal

298 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

concern, to judge by her writing, was, to know what Mr.
Durance had done, during her absence, with the group of
emissary-advocates of the various tongues of Europe on
board the steam-Liner conducting them the first stage of
their journey to the Court of Japan.

Mr. Simeon Fenellan had written his opinion, that all
these delegates of the different European nationalities
were nothing other than dupes of a New- York Syndicate
of American Humorists, not without an eye on the main-
chance; and he was sure they would be set to debate
publicly, before an audience of high-priced tickets, in the
principal North American Cities, previous to the embarca-
tion for Japan at San Francisco. Mr. Fenellan eulogized
the immense astuteness of Dr. Gannius in taking his
daughter Delphica with him. Dr. Gannius had singled
forth poor Dr. Bouthoin for the object of his attacks ; but
Nesta was chiefly anxious to hear of Delphica's proceed-
ings; she was immensely interested in Delphica, and
envied her ; and the girl's funny speculations over the play
of Delphica's divers arts upon the Greek, and upon the
Russian, and upon the Enghsh curate Mr. Semhians, and
upon M. Falarique — set Gallically pluming and crowing
out of an Alsace-Lorraine growl — were clever. Only, in
such a letter, they were amazing.

Nataly received it at Campiglio, when about to start for
an excursion down the Sarca Valley to Arco. Her letter
of reply was delayed. One to Victor from Dudley
Sowerby, awaited them, on their return. 'Confirms
Fredi,' he said, showing it, and praising it as commendable,
properly fervid. She made pretence to read, she saw the
words.

Her short beat of wings was over. She had joined her-
self with Victor's leap for a change, thirsting for the
scenery of the white peaks in heaven, to enjoy through his
enjoyment, if her own capacity was dead : and she had

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT 299

found it revive, up to some recovery of her old songful
readiness for invocations of pleasure. Escape and beauty
beckoned ahead; behind were the chains. These two
letters of the one fact plucked her back. The chained
body bore the fluttering spirit: or it was the spirit in
bonds, that dragged the body. Both were abashed before
the image of her girl. Out of the riddle of her strange
Nesta, one thing was clear : she did not love the man :
and Nataly tasted gladness in that, from the cup of
poisonous regrets at the thought. Her girl's heart would
not be broken. But if he so strongly loved her, as to hold
to this engagement? ... It might then be worse. She
dropped a plumb-line into the young man, sounding him
by what she knew of him and judged. She had to revert
to Nesta's charm, for the assurance of his anchored attach-
ment.

Her holiday took the burden of her trouble, and amid
the beauty of a disenchanted scene, she resumed the
London incubus.

'You told him of her being at the Wells? in the neigh-
bourhood, Victor?'

' Didn't you know, my dear, the family-seat is Cronidge,
two miles out from the Wells? — and particularly pretty
country.'

'I had forgotten, if I ever heard. You will not let him
be in ignorance?'

'My dear love, you are pale about it. This is a matter
between men. I write, thanMng for the honour and so
forth ; and I appoint an interview ; and I show him my
tablets. He must be told, necessarily. Incidents of this
kind come in their turn. If Dudley does not account him-
self the luckiest young feUow in the kingdom, he 's not
worthy of his good fortune. I wish they were both here
now, honejmaooning among these peaks, seeing the crescent
over one, as we did last night !'

300 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

' Have you an idea, in reading Nesta's letter ? '

'Seems indifferent? — mere trick to hide the blushes.
And I, too, I 'm interested in Delphica. Delphica and
Falarique will be fine stage business. Of course, Dr.
Bouthoin and his curate ! — we know what Old England
has to expect from Colney.'

'_At_any rate, JMr. Durance hurts no one. You wUl, in
your letter, appoint the day of the Interview ? '

' Hurts himself ! Yes, dearest ; appoint for — ten days
homeward — eleventh day from to-day. And you to Fredi :
a bit of description — as you can, my Nataly ! Happy to
be a(dolomitfe, to be painted by Nataly's pen.'

Th^-^^gir^ evil, when we have a vexatious ringing in
the ear of some small piece of familiar domestic chatter,
and subject it to scrutiny, hang on it, worry and magnify
it. What will not creatures under sway of the sensa-
tional life, catch at to emphasize and strengthen distaste,
until distaste shall have a semblance of reason, in the
period of the mind's awakening to revolt ! Nataly shrank
from the name o$:;go^Q2e? detested the name, though the
scenes regained thSFEeauty or something of it beneath her
showery vision. • Every time Victor spoke of dolomites on
the journey homeward, she had at heart an accusation of
her cowardice, her duplicity, frailty, treachery to the
highest of her worship and sole support of her endurance
in the world : not much blaming him : but the degrading
view of herself sank them both. On a shifty soilLdown
goe£jhej^doLJjQtJjiixi-sh
she could not.

The smello? the Channel brine inspirited her suflGiciently
to cast off the fit and make it seem, in the main, a bodily
depression ; owing to causes, of which she was beginning
to have an apprehensive knowledge : and they were not
so fearful to her as the gloom they displaced.

NATALY IN ACTION 301

CHAPTER XXV

NATALY IN ACTION

A TtrcKET of herald newspapers told the world of Victor's
returning to his London. Pretty Mrs. Blathenoy was
Nataly's first afternoon visitor, and was graciously re-
ceived; no sign of inquiry for the cause of the lady's
alacrity to greet her being shown. Colney Durance came
in, bringing the rumour of an Australian cantatrice to
kindle Europe ; Mr. Peridon, a seeker of tidings from the
city of Bourges; Miss Priscilla Graves, reporting of
Skepsey, in a hoUday Sunday tone, that his alcoholic
partner might at any moment release him ; Mr. Septimus
Barmby, with a hanged heavy look, suggestive of a
wharfside crane swinging the ponderous thing he had to
say. 'I have seen Miss Radnor.'

' She was well ? ' the mother asked, and the grand basso
pitched forth an affirmative.

'Dear sweet girl she is !' Mrs. Blathenoy exclaimed to
Colney.

He^wed. ' Very sweet. And can let fly on you, like
a ^ag^, for a scratch.'

She laughed, glad of an escape from the conversational
formalities imposed on her by this Mrs. Victor Radnor's
mighty manner. ' But what girl worth anything ! . . .
We all can do that, I hope, for a scratch !'

Mr. Barmby's Profession dissented.

Mr. Catkin appeared; ten minutes after his Peridon.
He had met Victor near the Exchange, and had left him
humming the non fu sogno of Ernani.

\Ahj when Victor takes to Verdi, it 's a flat City, and
wants a burst of drum and brass,' Colney said; and he

302 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

hummed a few bars of the march in Attila, and shrugged.
He and Victor had once admired that blatancy.

Mr. Pempton appeared, according to anticipation. He
sat himself beside Priscilla. Entered Mrs. John Cormyn,
volumiaous; Mrs. Peter Yatt, effervescent; Nataly's
own people were about her and she felt at home.

Mrs. Blathenoy pushed a small thorn into it, by speaking
of Captain Fenellan, and aside, as if sharing him with her.
Nataly heard that Dartrey had been the guest of these
Blathenoys. Even Dartrey was but a man !

Rather lower under her voice, the vain little creature
asked : 'You knew her?'

'Her?'

The cool counter-interrogation was disregarded. 'So
sad ! In the desert ! a cup of pure water worth more than
barrow-loads of gold ! Poor woman !'

'Who?'

'His wife.'

'Wife!'

'They were married?'

Nataly could have cried : Snake ! Her play at brevity
had certainly been foiled. She nodded gravely. A load
of dusky wonders and speculations pressed' at her bosom.
She disdained to question the mouth which had bitten her.

Mrs. Blathenoy, resolving, that despite the jealousy she
excited, she would have her friend in Captain Fenellan,
whom she liked — ^liked, she was sure, quite as innocently
as any other woman of his acquaintance did, departed :
and she hugged her innocence defiantly, with the mourn-
ful pride which will sometimes act as a solvent.

A remark or two passed among the company upon her
pretty face.

Nataly murmured to Colney: 'Is there anything of
Dartrey's wife?'

'Dead,' he answered.

IIIV

NATALY IN ACTION 303

'When''

'Months back. I had it from Simeon. You didn't ^

hear?' V w,w,i,.

She shook her head. Her ears buzzed. If he had it ^V\ J-*
from Simeon Fenellan, Victor must have known it. ^^^^

Her duties of hostess were conducted with the official <^
smile.

As soon as she stood alone, she dropped on a chair, like
one who has taken a shot in the heart, and that hideous
tumult of wild cries at her ears blankly ceased. Dartrey,
Victor, Nesta, were shifting figures of the might-have-been :
for whoin~awretched erriag woman, washed clean of her
guilt by"He^E7Tn^ala£land,_had^^ vaLoly

gone: "and now -apotlipr was .here, a figure of wood,_ in
man's shape, coniured up by one of the three, to divide the
two others ; likely to be fatal to her or to them : to her.
she hoped, if the choice was to be : and beneath^ thefleaden)
hope, her heart set to a rapid beating, avfaintein a( c^f\at
the core." ^ ^

She snatched for breath. She shut her eyes, and with
open lips, lay waiting; prepared to thank the kindness
about to hurry her hence, out of the seas of pain, without
pain.

Then came sighs. The sad old servant in her bosom
was resuming his labours.

But she had been near it — ^very near it? A gush of
pity for Victor, overwhelmed her hardness of mind.

Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and
tottered to the door, touched along to the stairs, and de-
scended them, thinking strangely upon such a sudden
weakness of body, when she would no longer have thought
herself the weak woman. Her aim was to reach the
library. She sat on the stairs midway, pondering over
the length of her journey : and now her head was clearer ;
for she was travelling to get Railway-guides, and might

304 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

have had them from the hands of a footman, and imagined
that she had considered it prudent to hide her investiga-
tion of those books: proofs of an understanding fallen
backward to the state of infant and having to begin our
drear ascent again.

A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her. She be-
trayed no infirmity of footing as she walked past Arlington
in the hall; and she was alive to the voice of Skepsey
presently on the door-steps. Arlington brought her a note.

Victor had written : ' My love, I dine- with Blathenoy
in the City, at the Walworth. Business. Skepsey for
clothes. Eight of us. Formal. A thousand embraces.
Late.'

Skepsey was ushered in. His wife had expired at noon,
he said ; and he postured decorously the grief he could not
feel, knowing that a lady would expect it of him. His wife
had fallen down stone steps; she died in hospital. He
wished to say, she was no loss to the country ; but he was
advised within of the prudence of abstaining from com-
ment and trusting to his posture, and he squeezed a drop
of conventional sensibility out of it, and felt unproved.

Nataly sent a line to Victor: 'Dearest, I go to bed
early, am tired. Dine well. Come to me in the morning.'

She reproached herself for coldness to poor Skepsey,
when he had gone. The prospect of her being alone until
the morning had been so absorbing a relief.

She found a relief also in work at the book of the
trains. A walk to the telegraph-station strengthened her.
Especially after despatching a telegram to Mr. Dudley
Sowerby at Cronidge, and one to Nesta at Moorsedge, did
she become stoutly nerved. The former was requested to
meet her at Penhurst station at noon. Nesta was to be at
the station for the Wells at three o'clock.

From the time of the flying of these telegrams, up to the
tap of Victor's knuckle on her bed-room door next morning,

NATALY IN ACTION 305

she was not more reflectively conscious than a packet
travelling to its destination by pneumatic tube. Nor was
she acutely impressionable to the features and the voice
she loved.

'You know of Skepsey?' she said.

'Ah, poor Skepsey!' Victor frowned and heaved.

'One of us ought to stand beside him at the funeral.'

'Colney or Fenellan?'

'I will ask Mr. Durance.'

'Do, my darling.'

'Victor, you did not tell me of Dartrey's wife.'

'There again! They all get released! Yes, Dartreyl
Dartrey has his luck too.'

She closed her eyes, with the desire to be asleep.

'You should have told me, dear.'

'Well, my love! Well — poor Dartrey! I fancy I
hadn't a confirmation of the news. I remember a horrible
fit of envy on hearing the hint : not much more than a
hint : serious illness, was it ? — or expected event. Hardly
worth whUe to trouble my dear soul, till certain. Any-
thing about wives, forces me to think of myself — ^my better
self!'

'I had to hear of it first from Mrs. Blathenoy.'

' You 've heard of duels in dark rooms : — ^that was the
case between Blathenoy and me last night for an hour.'

She feigned somnolent fatigue over her feverish weari-
ness of heart. He kissed her on the forehead.

Her spell-boxmd intention to speak of Dudley Sowerby
to him, was broken by the sounding of the hall-door, thirty
minutes later. She Jiad lain in a trance.

Life surged to her with the thought, that she could
decide and take her step. Many were the years back since
she had taken a step ; less independently then than now ;
unregretted, if fatal. Her brain was heated for the larger
view of things and the swifter summing of them. It could

306 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

put the man at a remove from her and say, that she had
lived with him and suffered intensely. It gathered him to
her breast rejoicing in their union : the sharper the scourge,
the keener the exultation. But she had one reproach to
deafen and beat down. This did not come on her from the
world : she and the world were too much foot to foot on
the antagonist's line, for her to listen humbly. It came of
her quick summary survey of him, which was unnoticed
by the woman's present fiery mind as being new or strange
in any way: simply it was jLJaC-t.she now-xead^—andJt
directed her to reproach herself for j,n abasement beneath
B[s^lea,dership, a blind subserviency and surrender of her
"faculties to his''^ater powers, such asjaosoirof-aJjreath-
inglSoHy should yidd to man : JBotJo_th£hi^bLest, joot^to

j the Titan, not to the most Godlike of men. UndeiLcIoak,

they demand it. They demand their bane.
^^^ And Victor ! ... She had seen into him.

TEeTepixJach on her was, that she, in her worship, had
been slave, not helper. Scarcely was she irreproachable
in the character of slave. If it had been utter slave!
she phrased the words, for a further reproach. She re-
membered having at times murmured, dissented. And it
would have been a desperate proud thought to comfort a
slave, that never once had she known even a secret oppo-
sition to the will of her lord.

But she had: she recalled instances. Up they rose;
up rose everything her mind ranged over, subsiding imme-
diately when the service was done. She had not con-
ceivfiti^her beloved to be infallible, surest of guides in all
^ eaWEIy^atters. Her intellect had sometimes protested.

WEa£, then, ha,d moved her to swampJ^X—.

HieF'^eafr'^SSwere3! Aud that heart also was ar-
raigned: and the heart's fleshly habitation acting on it
besides : so flagellant of herself was she : covertly, how-
ever, and as the chaste among women can consent to let

NATALY IN ACTION 307

our animal face them. Not grossly, still perceptibly to
her penetrative hard eye on herself, she saw the senses of
the woman mider a charm. She saw, and swam whirling
with a pang of revolt from her personal being and this
mortal kind.

Her rational intelligence righted her speedily. She
could say in truth, by proof, she loved the man : nature's
love, heart's love, soul's love. She had given him her life.

It was a happy cross-current recollection, that the very
beginning and spring of this wild cast of her Hfe, issued
from something he said and did (merest of airy gesEm-esj'to
signify~^e]|^^pf Ti^^hgw JfiMlahdrTair It jsT" A
drooping mood in her had been struck ; he had a look like
the winged lyric up in blue heavens : he raised the headpT
the ygungjlowfir from its oontiRrnpTaitinrijQLgcayfiTmould. '^
That was when he had much to bear : Mrs. Burman pres- \^
ent : and when the stranger in their household had begun
to pity him and have a dread of her feehngs. The lucent
splendour of his eyes was memorable, a light above the
rolling oceans of Time.

She had given him her life, Httle aid. She might have
closely counselled, wound in and out with his ideas. Sen-
sible of capacity, she confessed to the having been morally
subdued, physically as well ; swept onward ; and she was
arrested now by an accident, like a waif of the river-floods
by the dip of a branch. Time that it should be ! But was
not Mr. Durance, inveighing against the favoured system
for the education of women, right when he declared them
to be unfitted to speak an opinion on any matter external
to the household or in a crisis of the household? She had
not agreed with him: he presented stinging sentences,
which irritated more than they enlightened. Now it
seemed to her, that the mod^l wnmRn nf yf;p Tna.Vp..p1^a.c!-
ant slaves, not true mates : they lack the worldly training
to know themselves or take a grasp of circumstances.

308 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

There is an exotic fostering of the senses for women, not
the strengthening breath of vital common air. If good
fortune is with them, all may go well: the stake of
their fates is upon the perpetual smooth flow of good
fortune. She had never joined to the cry of the
women. Few among them were having it in the
breast as loudly.

Hard on herself, too, she perceived how the social rebel
had reduced her mind to propitiate a simulacrum, reflected

' from out, of an enthroned Society within it, by an advo-
cacy of the existing laws and rules and habits. Eminently
servile is the tolerated lawbreaker : none so conservative.

( Not until we are driven back upon an imviolated Nature,
do we calHo the intellectJojbMn.k^radic^Ily : .and^theq, jve

' begip. to think of our fellows.

Or when we have set ourselves in motion direct for the
doing of the right thing : have quitted the carriage at the
station, and secured the ticket, and entered the train,
counting the passage of time for a simple rapid hour before
we have eased heart in doing justice to ourself and to
another ; then likewise the mind is lighted for radiation.
That doing of the right thing, after a term of paralysis,
cowardice^any~evir"naine^^is one^'ortEelgiighty reliefs,
equaf to happiness, of longer duration. ""

NataJy hadit. But her mSnSTwas actually radiating,
and the comfort to her heart evoked the image of Dartrey
Fenellan. She saw a possible reason for her bluntness
to the coming scene with Dudley.

At once she said. No ! and closed the curtain ; knowing
what was behind, counting it nought. She repeated
almost honestly her positive negative. How we are mixed
of the many elements ! she thought, as an observer ; and
self-justifyingly thought on, and with truth, that duty
m-ged her upon this journey; and proudly thought, that
she had not a shock of the painful great organ in her

NATALY IN ACTION 309

breast at the prospect at the end, or any apprehension of
its failure to carry her through.

Yet the need of peace or some solace needed to prepare
her for her interview turned her imagination burningly on
Dartrey. She would not allow herself to meditate over

hopes and schemes: — Nesta free: Dartrey free. She

vowed to her soul sacredly— and she was_Qne-of those in
whom the Divinity lives, that thev mav-_da .Sfl^jmLio /
speak a word for the influencing of Dudley save the ^
one fact. Consequently, forapersonal indulgence, she
mused ; she caressed maternally the object of her musing ;
of necessity, she excluded Nesta; but in tenderness she
gave Dartrey a fair one to love him.

The scene was waved away. That one so loving him,
partly worthy of him, ready to traverse the world now
beside him — who could it be other than she who knew and
prized his worth? Foolish! It is one of the hatefuller
scourges upon women whenever, a little shaken them-
selves, they muse upon some man's image, that they
cannot put in motion the least bit of drama without letting
feminine self play a part; generally to develop into a
principal part. The apology makes it a melancholy part.

Dartrey's temper of the caged lion dominated by his^
tamer, served as keynote for any amount of saddest ^- ■

colouring. He controlled the brute : but he held the , JT ' V
contempt of danger, the love of strife, the passion for p < ^"^
adventure ; he had crossed the desert of human anguish.
He of all men required a devoted mate, merited her. Of
all men living, he was the hardest to match with a woman^
— ^with a woman deserving him.

The train had quitted London. Now for the country,
now for free breathing ! She who two days back had come
from Alps, delighted in the look on flat green fields. It
was under the hallucination of her saying in flight adieu to
them, and to England; and, that somewhere hidden, to

310 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

be found in Asia, Africa, America, was the man whose
ideal of life was higher than enjoyment. His caged brute
of a temper offered opportunities for delicious petting;
the sweetest a woman can bestow: it lifts her out of
timidity into an adoration still palpitatingly fearful. Ah,
but familiarity, knowledge, confirmed assurance of his
character, lift her to another stage, above the pleasures.
May she not prove to him how really matched with him
she is, to disdain the pleasures, cheerfully accept the bur-
dens, meet death, if need be ; readily face it as the quietly
grey to-morrow : at least, show herself to her hero for a
woman — the incredible being to most men — who treads
the terrors as well as the pleasures of humanity beneath
her feet, and may therefore have some pride in her stature.
Ay, but only to feel the pride of standing not so shamefully
below his level beside him.

Woods were flying past the carriage-windows. Her
solitary companion was of the class of the admiring gentle-
men. Presently he spoke. She answered. He spoke
again. Her mouth smiled, and her accompanying look of
abstract benevolence arrested the tentative allurement to
conversation.

New ideas were set revolving in her. Dartrey and
Victor grew to a likeness ; they became hazily one man,
and the mingled phantom complimented her on her pre-
serving a good share of the beauty of her youth. The face
perhaps : the figure rather too well suits the years ! she
replied. To reassure her, this Dartrey- Victor drew her
close and kissed her ; and she was confused and passed
into the breast of Mrs. Burman expecting an operation
at the hands of the surgeons. The train had stopped.
'Penhurst?' she said.

'Penhurst is the next station,' said the gentleman.
Here was a theme for him ! The stately mansion, the
noble grounds, and Sidney ! He discoursed of them.

NATALY IN ACTION 311

The handsome lady appeared interested. She was inter-
ested also by his description of a neighboiu-ing village,
likely one hundred years hence to be a place of pUgrimage
for Americans and for Australians. Age, he said, im-
proves true beauty ; and his eyelids indicated a levelling
to perform the soft intentness. Mechanically, a ball rose
in her throat ; the remark was illuminated by a saying of
Colney's, with regard to his countrymen at the play of
courtship. No laughter came. The gentleman talked on.

All fancies and internal conununications left her. Slow-
ness of motion brought her to the plain piece of work she
had to do, on a colourless earth, that seemed foggy ; but
one could see one's way. Resolution is a form of lights our
native light in this dubious world-
Dudley Sower by opened her carriage-door. They
greeted.

'You have seen Nesta?' she said.

'Not for two days. You have not heard? The Miss
Duvidneys have gone to Brighton.'

'They are rather in advance of the Season.'

She thanked him for meeting her. He was grateful for
the summons.

Informing the mother of his betrothed, that he had
ridden over from Cronidge, he speculated on the place to
select for her luncheon, and he spoke of his horse being led
up and down outside the station. Nataly inquired for the
hour of the next train to London. He called to one of the
porters, obtained and imparted the time ; evidently now,
as shown by an unevenness of his lifted brows, expecting
news of some little weight.

'Your husband is quite weU?' he said, in affection for
the name of husband.

' Mr. Radnor is well ; I have to speak to you ; I have
more than time.'

'You will lunch at the inn?'

312 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

' I shall not eat. We will walk.'

They crossed the road and passed under trees.

' My mother was to have called on the Miss Duvidneys.
They left hurriedly ; I think it was unanticipated by Nesta.
I venture . . . you pardon the liberty . . . she allows
me to entertain hopes. Mr. Radnor, I am hardly too bold
in thinking ... I trust, in appealing to you ... at
least I can promise.'

' Mr. Sowerby, you have done my daughter the honour
to ask her hand in marriage.'

He said: 'I have,' and had much to say besides, but
deferred : a blow was visible. The father had been more
encouraging to him than the mother.

' You have not known of any circumstance that might
cause hesitation in asking?'

'Miss Radnor?'

' My daughter : — you have to think of your family.'

'Indeed, Mrs. Radnor, I was coming to London to-
morrow, with the consent of my family.'

' You address me as Mrs. Radnor. I have not the legal
right to the name.'

' Not legal ! ' said he, with a catch at the word.

He spun round in her sight, though his demeanour was
manfully rigid.

'Have I understood, madam . . .?'

'You would not request me to repeat it. Is that your
horse the man is leading?'

' My horse : it must be my horse.'

'Mount and ride back. Leave me: I shall not eat.
Reflect, by yourself. You are in a position of one who
is not allowed to decide by his feelings. Mr. Radnor you
know where to find.'

'But surely, some food? I cannot have misappre-
hended?'

' I cannot eat. I think you have understood me clearly.'

A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN 313

'You wish me to go?'

'I beg.'

'It pains me, dear madam.'

'It relieves me, if you will. Here is your horse.'

She gave her hand. He touched it and bent. He
looked at her. A surge of impossible questions roUed to
his mouth and rolled back, with the thought of an incred-
ible thing, that her manner, more than her words, held
him from doubting.

'I obey you,' he said.

'You are kind.'

He mounted horse, raised hat, paced on, and again bow-
ing, to one of the wayside trees, cantered. The man was
gone ; but not from Natal v's .vision fthat face of wet chalk"
imder one of the shades of firej

CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN ENDEAV-
OURING TO EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF

Dudley rode back to Cronidge with his thunderstroke.
It filled him, as in those halls of political clamour, where
explanatory speech is not accepted, because of a drowning
tide of hot blood on both sides. He sought to win atten-
tion by submittiug a resolution, to the effect, that he would
the next morning enter into the presence of Mr. Victor
Radnor, bearing his family's feelings, for a discussion upon
them. But the brutish tumult, in addition to surcharging,
encased hiTn : he could not rightly conceive the nature of
feelings : men were driving shoals ; he had lost hearing
and touch of individual men; had become a house of
angrily opposing parties.

314 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

He was hurt, he knew ; and therefore he supposed him-
self injured, though there were contrary outcries, and he
admitted that he stood free ; he had not been inextricably
deceived.

The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a
dust-whirl. Reverting to the father and mother, his idea
of a positive injury, that was not without its congratula-
tions, sank him down among his disordered deeper senti-
ments; which" were a divers wreck, where an armoured
livid^ubtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wan-
dered seriously light in heaviness ; trembling his hundred-
weights to keep him from dancing like a bladder-block of
elastic lumber ; thinking occasionally, amid the mournful
spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with
the world above, whereby he was deafened yet sustained.
One tug at it, and he was up on the surface, disengaged
from the hideous harness, joyfully no more that burly
phantom cleaving green slime, free ! and the roaring
stopped ; the world looked flat, foreign, a place of crusty
promise. His wreck, animated by the dim strange fish
below, appeared fairer; it winked lurefully when aban-
doned.

' The internal state of a gentleman who detested intan-
gibIemgtaphor~as heartily as the vulgarest of our gobble-
gobbets hate it, metaphor only can describe ; and'forTEe
reason, that he had in him just something more than is
within the compass of the language of the meat-markets.
He had — and had it not the less because he fain would not
have had — sufficient stuff to furnish forth a soul's epic en-
counter between Nature and Circumstance : and metaphor,
simile, analysis^.^lLtheJi^teautj^at-oldJampaJQ3LligLhting
^ur abysmal darkness, have to be rubbed, that we may get
a glimpse of tEelray. ~~

1^'ree, and rejoicing; "without the wish to be free ; at the
same time humbly and sadly acquiescing in the stronger

A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN 315

claim of his family to pronounce the decision : such was
the second stage of Dudley's perturbation after the blow.
A letter of Nesta's writing was in his pocket : he knew her
address. He could not reply to her until he had seen her
father : and that interview remained necessarily prospec-
tive until he had come to his exact resolve, not omitting
his critical approval of the sentences giving it shape,
stamp, dignity — a noble's crest, as it were.

Nesta wrote briefly. The apostrophe was, 'Dear Mr.
Sowerby.' She had engaged to send her address. Her
father had just gone. The Miss Duvidneys had left the
hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing the sea.
According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack,
and had that morning trotted out to the downs with a
riding-master and company, one of whom was ' an agree-
able lady.'

He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to
the 'Delphica' of Mr. Durance's incomprehensible serial
story, or whatever it was ; which, as he had shown her,
annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun ; and she
had insisted on the fun ; and he had painfully tried to see
it or anything of a meaning ; and it seemed to him now,
that he had been humiliated by the obedience to her lead :
she had offended by her harpiag upon Delphica. How-
ever, here it was unmentioned. He held the letter out to
seize it in the large, entire.

Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the
most agreeable lady on earth. Dudley did not blame her
for letting the lady be deceived in her — ^if she knew her
position. She might be ignorant of it. And to strangers,
to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of
the loathsome name, was not materially important.
Marriage altered the view. He sided with his fanuly.

He sided, edgeing away, against his family. But a
vision of the earldom coming to him, stirred reverential

316 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

objections, composed of all which his unstained family
could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with a
stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immo-
rality. Who would have imagined Mr. Radnor a private
sinner flaunting for one of the righteous? And she, the
mother, a lady — quite a lady; having really a sense of
duty, sense of honour ! That she must be a lady, Dudley
was convinced. He beheld through: a porous crape,
woven of formal respectfulness, with threads ^ personal
disgust, the scene, striking^him drearly llEe a distant
great maiiion's conflagrationacross moorland at midni^t,
of^a"lady's_breach of Bonds and. plunge _5f^alI,f,or_loye.
How. had it been concealed? In Dudley's upper sphere,
everyCEing was^Kcposed": Scandal walked naked and un-
ashamed— ^figurante of the polite world. But still this
lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady. Handsome
now, she must have been beautiful. And a comprehen-
sible pride (for so would Dudley have borne it) keeps the
forsaken man silent up to death: . . . grandly silent;
but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man ! Not
in time, though ! Legitimacy evidently, by the mother's
confession, cannot protect where it is wanted. Dudley
was optically affected by a round spot of the world swing-
ing its shadow over Nesta.

He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her. The effort
succeeded so well, that he was presently striving to be in-
sensible. The former state, was the mounting of a wall ;
the latter, was a sinking through a chasm. There would
be family consultations, abhorrent ; his father's agonized
amazement at the problem presented to a famUy of
scrupulous principles and pecuniary requirements; his
mother's blunt mention of the abominable name —
medisevally vindicated in champions of certain princely
families indeed, but morally condemned; always under
condemnation of the Church : a blot : and handed down :

A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN 317

Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity, crying
out. A man in the situation of Dudley could not think
solely of ]Wmself;__The^ nobles of Jlie Jand are bound in
honour to their posterity^_jrbgrejou' have one of _the
promment permanent"~cBstinctions between t£em and
the commonalty.^ " ~~~™" — ~

His mother ^ould again propose her chosen bride for
him: Edith AveiM, with the dowry of a present one
thousand pounds per annum, and prospect of six or so,
excluding Sir John's estate, Carping, in Leicestershire ; a
fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized
her brothers as they ripened. A fair girl too; only
Dudley did not love her; he wanted to love. He was
learning the trick from this other one, who had become
obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her;
yet not extinct. Sight of her was to be dreaded.

Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent. That
constituted the unhappy invitation to him to swallow one
half of his feelings, which had his world's blessing on it,
for the beneficial enlargement and enthronement of the
baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted. Can
innocence issue of the guilty? He asked it, hopeing it
might be possible : he had been educated in his family to
believe, that the laws governing huhian institutions are
divine — until History has altered them. They afe^altered, ^''*^ •^•
to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel. His con- l" A, J

servative mind, retiring in gooToHer, occupied^ the next ^'^^'^^
rearward post of resistance. Secretly b'ehuid it, the man ^
was proud of having a heart to beat for the cause of the
besiegeing enemy, in the present instance. When this
was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he attributed
his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair face.
— Oh, but more ! spirit w^s in the sw^st eyes. She led
him— she did lead him in fepiritual jfchiags)LJedJuni.£(Ut-of ] J
common circles of_ thoughViuto refreshing new spheres.;

318 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

4ie had reminiscences of hishaving relished the juices of the

f not quite obviously comic A through her indications: and

' really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl's education, she

could boast her acquirements ; she was quick, startlingly ;

modest, too, in commerce with a slower mind that carried

more ; though she laughed and was a needle for humour :

Si she taught him at times to put away his contempt of the

^ " romantic [ she had actually shown huB^that his expressed

,. contemp_t_ofjt_^sguise^~a dread : as ifdiaT^hd he"was

(; conscious of the foolishness oTTt now while pursuing her

image, whUe his intelligence and senses gave her the form

and glory of young morning.

Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the
play of her youth ; and also the disposition of a man in
harness of business, exaggeratingly to prize an imagined
finding of the complementary feminine of himself. Ven-
erating purity as he did, the question, whether the very
sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin,
must not at some time or other show trace of the origin,
surged up. If he could only have been sure of her moral
exemption from taint, a generous ardour, in reserve behind
his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated Dudley to
quench disapprobation and brave the world under a
buckler of those monetary advantages, which he had but
stoutly to plead with the House of Cantor, for the speedy
overcoming of a reluctance to receive the nameless girl
and prodigious heiress. _ His family's instruction of him,
andjy^s.Jinherited[_tastes, rendered the aspect of ^Nature
stripped of the clotBng of the Iaws_offensiye_ down to
devilish : we granT her certain steps, upon certain condi-
tions accompanied by ceremonies ; and when she violates
them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary wicked
old beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices. An
alliance with any of her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an
acTof treason to irfs^house, his class,"an3~IiisTenets. And

A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN 319

nevertheless lie was haunted by a cry of criminal happiness
for and at the commission of the act.

He would not decide to be 'precipitate,' and the days
ran their course, until Lady Grace Halley arrived at Cron-
idge, a widow. Lady Cantor spoke to her of Dudley's
unfathomable gloom. Lady Grace took him aside.

She said, without preface: 'You've heard, have you!'

' You were aware of it ? ' said he, and his tone was irri-
table with a rebuke.

' Coming through town, for the first time yesterday. I
had it — of all men! — ^from a Sir Abraham Quatley, to
whom I was recommended to go, about my husband's
shares in a South American Railway ; and we talked, and
it came out. He knows; he says, it is not generally
known ; and he likes, respects Mr. Victor Radnor ; we are
to keep the secret. Hum? He had heard of your pre-
tensions; and our relationship, etc.: "esteemed" it —
you know the City dialect — his duty to mention, etc.
That was after I had spied on his forehead the something
I wormed out of his mouth. What are you going to do ? '

'What can I do!'

'Are you fond of the girl?'

An attachment was indicated, as belonging to the case.
She was not a woman to whom the breathing of pastoral
passion would be suitable ; yet he saw that she despised
him for a lover ; and still she professed to understand his
dilemma. Perplexity at the injustice of fate and persons
universally, put a wrinkled mask on his features and the
expression of his feelings. They were torn, and the world
was torn ; and what he wanted, was delay, time for him
to define his feelings and behold a recomposed picture of
the world. He had already taken six days. He pleaded
the shock to his family.

' You won't haye such a chance again,' she said. Shrugs
had set in.

320 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

They agreed as to the behaviour of the gu-l's mother. It
reflected on the father, he thought.

' Difficult thing to proclaim, before an engagement ! '
Her shoulders were restless.

'When a man's feelings get entangled !'

' Oh ! a man's feelings ! I 'm your British Jury for a
woman's.'

'He has married her?'

She declared to not knowing particulars. She could fib
smoothly.

The next day she was on the line to London, armed
with the proposal of an appointment for the Hon. Dudley
to meet 'the girl's father.'

CHAPTER XXVII

CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A 6HEAT, AS THE
SOUL OF THE CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE

Skepsey ushered Lady Grace into his master's private
room, and entertained her during his master's absence.
He had buried his wife, he said: she feared, seeing his
posture of the soaping of hands at one shoulder, that he
was about to bewail it ; and he did wish to talk of it, to
show his modest companionship with her in loss, and how
a consolation for our sorrows may be obtained: but he
won her approval, by taking the acceptable course be-
tween the dues to the subject and those to his hearer, as a
model cab should drive considerate equally of horse and
fare.

A day of holiday at Hampstead, after the lowering of
the poor woman's bones into earth, had been followed by
a descent upon London ; and at night hg had found him-
self in the immediate neighbourhood of a public house,

A SMALL THING OR A GREAT 321

noted for sparring exhibitions and instructions on the first
floor; and he was melancholy, unable quite to disperse
'the ravens' flocking to us on such days: though, if we
ask why we have to go out of the world, there is a corre-
sponding inquiry, of what good was our coming into it;
and unless we are doing good work for our country, the
answer is not satisfactory — except, that we are as well
gone. Thinking which, he was accosted by a young
woman: perfectly respectable, in every way: who in-
quired if he had seen a young man enter the door. She
described him, and reviled the temptations of those
houses ; and ultimately, as she insisted upon going in to
look for the young man and use her persuasions to with-
draw him from 'that snare of Satan,' he had accompanied
her, and he had gone upstairs and brought the young man
down. But friends, or the acquaintances they call friends,
were with him, and they were 'in drink,' and abused the
young woman ; and she had her hand on the young man's
arm, quoting Scripture. Sad to relate of men bearing the
name of Englishmen — and it was hardly much better if
they pleaded intoxication ! — they were not content to tear
the young man from her grasp, they hustled her, pushed
her out, dragged her in the street.

'It became me to step to her defence : she was meek,'
said Skepsey. 'She had a great opinion of the efficacy
of quotations from Scripture ; she did not recriminate. I
was able to release her and the young man she protected,
on condition of my going upstairs to give a display of
my proficiency. I had assured them, that the poor fellows
who stood against me were not a proper match. And of
course, they jeered, but they had the evidence, on the
pavement. So I went up with them. I was heavily
oppressed, I wanted relief, I put on the gloves. He was
a bigger man ; they laughed at the little one. I told them,
it depended upon a knowledge of first principles, and the

322 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

power to apply them. I will not boast, my lady: my
junior by ten years, the man went down ; he went down a
second time ; and the men seemed surprised ; I told them,
it was nothing but first principles put into action. I men-
tion the incident, for the extreme relief it afforded me at
the close of a dark day.'

' So you cured your grief ! ' said Lady Grace ; and Skep-
sey made way for his master.

Victor's festival-lights were kindled, beholding her;
cressets on the window-sill, lamps inside.

'Am I so welcome?' There was a pull of emotion at
her smile. ' What with your little factotum and you, we
are flattered to perdition when we come here. He has
been proposing, by suggestion, like a Court-physician, the
putting on of his boxing-gloves, for the consolation of the
widowed : — meant most kindly ! and it 's a thousand
pities women haven't their padded gloves.'

'Oh! but our boxing-gloves can do mischief enough.
You have something to say, I see.'

' How do you see ? '

'Tush, tush.'

The silly ring of her voice and the pathless tattle
changed ; she talked to suit her laden look. ' You hit it.
I come from Dudley. He knows the facts. I wish to
serve you, in every way.'

Victor's head had lifted.

'Who was it?'

'No enemy.'

'Who?'

'Her mother. She did rightly.'

'Certainly she did,' said Victor, and he thought that
instantaneously of the thing done. 'Oh, then she spoke
to him ! She has kept it from me. For now nearly a
week — six days — I 've seen her spying for something she
expected, like a face behind a door three inches ajar. She

A SMALL THING OR A GREAT 323

has not been half alive; she refused explanations; — she
was expecting to hear from him, of him: — the decision,
whatever it 's to be ! '

'I can't aid you there,' said Lady Grace. 'He 's one
of the uureadables. He names Tuesday next week.'

'By all means.'

'She?'

'Fredi? — poor Fredi! — ah, my poor girl, yes! — No,
she knows nothing. Here is the truth of it: — she, the
legitimate, lives: they say she lives. Well, then, she
lives against all rules physical or medical, lives by sheer
force of will — ^it 's a miracle of the power of a human crea-
ture to ... I have it from doctors, friends, attendants,
they can't guess what she holds on, to keep her breath.
— ^All the happiness in life ! — ^if only it could benefit her.
But it 's the cause of death to us. Do you see, dear friend ;
— you are a friend, proved friend,' he took her hand, and
held and pressed it, in great need of a sanguine response
to emphasis; and having this warm feminine hand, his
ideas ran off with it. 'The friend I need! You have
courage. My Nataly, poor dear — she can endure, in her
quiet way. A woman of courage would take her place
beside me and compel the world to do her homage, help ;
— a bright ready smile does it ! She would never be
beaten. Of course, we could have lived under a bushel —
stifled next to death ! But I am for light, air — battle, if
you like. I want a conu-ade, not a ^not that I com-
plain. I respect, pity, love — I do love her, honour : only,
we want something else — coiu-age — ^to face the enemy.
Quite right, that she should speak to Dudley Sowerby.
He has to know, must know; all who deal closely with
us must know. But see a moment : I am waiting to see
the impediment dispersed, which puts her at an inequality
with the world : and then I speak to all whom it concerns :
not before : for her sake. How is it now? Dudley will

324 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

ask . . . you understand. And when I am forced to con-
fess, that the mother, the mother of the girl he seeks in
marriage, is not yet in that state herself, probably at that
very instant the obstacle has crumbled to dust ! I say,
probably: I have information — doctors, friends, attend-
ants— they all declare it cannot last outside a week. But
you are here — true, I could swear ! a touch of a hand tells
me. A woman's hand ? Well, yes : I read by the touch
of a woman's hand :^betrays more than her looks or her
lips ! ' He sank his voice. * I don't talk of condoling : if
you are in grief, you know I share it.' He kissed her
hand, and laid it on her lap; eyed it, and met her eyes;
took a header into her eyes, and lost himself. A nip of
his conscience moved his tongue to say: 'As for guilt, if
it were known ... a couple of ascetics — absolutely!'
But this was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was
merely the apology to his conscience in communion with
the sprite of a petticoated fair one who was being sub-
jected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed in
enigmas. He righted immediately, under a perception of
the thoroughbred's contempt for the barriers of wattled
sheep ; and caught the word ' guilt,' to hide the Philistine
citizen's lapse, by relating historically, in abridgement, the
honest beauty of the passionate loves of the two whom the
world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no guilt.
He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first
use of it.

'Fiddle,' said Lady Grace. 'The thing happened.
You have now to carry it through. You require a
woman's aid in a social matter. Rely on me, for
what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday?
I will write. Be plain with him; not forgetting the
gilding, I need not remark. Your Nesta has no
aversion?'

' Admires, respects, likes ; is quite — is wUling.'

A SMALL THING OR A GREAT 325

'Good enough beginning.' She rose, for the atmo-
sphere was heated, rather heavy. 'And if one proves to
be of aid, you '11 own that a woman has her place in the
battle.'

The fair black-clad widow's quick and singular inter-
wreathing of the evanescent pretty pouts and frowns
dimpled like the brush of the wind on a sunny pool in a
shady place ; and her forehead was close below his chin,
her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.
Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over ex-
tremely to the Stygian shore, with the complexions of the
drugs which expedited the defunct to the ferry, provoke
the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What
of the widow who visibly likes the living? Compassion,
sympathy, impulse ; and gratitude, impulse again, living
warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle with the
King of Terrors for the other poor harper's haJf-night-
capped Eurydice ; and a thirst, sudden as it is over- '
powering; and the solicitude, a reflective soUcitude, to
put the seal on a thing and call it a fact, to the astonish-
ment of history ; and a kick of our naughty youth in its
coflBn; — all the insiu^gencies of Nature, with her colonel
of the regiment absent, and her veering trick to drive
two vessels at the cross of a track into collision, combine
for doing that, which is very much more, and which
affects us at times so much less than did the pressure of
a soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one.
On the contrary, we trimnph, we have the rich flavour
of the fruit for our pains; we commission the historian
to write in hieroglyphs a round big fact.

The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening
her shoulders, and at the close, shutting her eyes. She
stood cool in her blush, and eyed him like one gravely
awakened. Having been embraced and kissed, she had

326 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neat-
ness of impetuosity in the deed ; and he was neither apolo-
gizing culprit nor glorying bandit when it was done, but
something of the lyric God tempering his fervours to a
pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal of them. He
glowed transparently. He said : ' Yoii^ethe jwoman to
, / take a front place m.the_,bMtle.!J^,jyithtMs^ woman
JB^HeBm^ it. w.as_AJiQnq,uered. world.

Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her
class and set, favoured him ; for she disliked enterprising
libertines and despised stumbling youths ; and the genial
simple glow of his look assured her, that the vanished fiery
moment would not be built on by a dating master. She
owned herself. Or did she ? Some understanding of how
the other woman had been won to the leap with him, was
drawing in about her. She would have liked to beg for
the story; and she could as little do^that as bring her
tongue to reproach. If we come to the den ! she said to
her thought of reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it
a den, where a scent in his nostrils will spring the half-
tamed animal away to wildness. And she had come un-
anticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a
superior being to direct and restrain a gambler's hand :
perhaps for the fee of a temporary pressure.

'I may be able to help a little — I hope !' she fetched a
breath to say, while her eyelids mildly sermonized ; and
immediately she talked of her inheritance of property in
stocks and shares.

Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them,
^ and talked of projects he entertained :— Parliament !
' But I have only to mention it at home, and my poor girl
will set in for shrinking.'

He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman
of the world.

'You succeed in everything you do,' said she, and she

A SMALL THING OR A GREAT 327

cordially believed it; and that belief set the neighbour
memory palpitating. Success folded her waist, was warm
upon her lips : she worshipped the figure of Success.

' I can't consent to fail, it 's true, when my mind is on
a thing,' Victor rejoined.

He looked his mind on Lady Grace. The shiver of a
maid went over her. These transparent visages, where
the thought which is half design is perceived as a light-
ning, strike lightning into the physically feebler. Her
hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice ;
and though she did not step back, he bowed to the nega-
tion, and then she gave him a grateful shadow of a smile,
relieved, with a startled view of how greatly relieved, by
that sympathetic deference in the wake of the capturing
intrepidity.

'I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?' she suggested.

'At any hour he pleases to appoint.'

'A visit signifies . . .'

' Whatever it signifies ! '

* I 'm thinking of the bit of annoyance.'

'To me? Anj^hing appointed, finds me ready the next
minute.'

Her snule was flatteringly bright. 'By the way, keep
your City people close about you : entertain as much as
possible; dine them,' she said.

'At home?'

'Better. Sir Rod well Blachington, Sir Abraham
Quatley : and their wives. There 's no drawing back
now. And I will meet them.'

She received a compliment. She was on the foot to go.

But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.

The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting. Victor
stated the figures ; he saluted her hand, and Lady Grace
passed out, with her heart on the top of them, and a buzz
about it of the unexpected having occurred. She had her

-''' >

828 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

experiences to match new patterns in events; though
not very many. Compared with gambling, the_game of
love was an JdQejentertainment. _jCo^gaj^^ otii^^
players, this man was_gifted.

VictOT weiiFin to Mr. Inchling's room, and kept Inch-
ling from speaking, that he might admire him for he
knew not what, or knew not well what. The good fellow,
was devoted to his wife. Victor in old days had called
the wife Mrs. Grundy. She gossiped, she was censorious,;
she knew — could not but know — the facts ; yet never by
a shade was she disrespectful. He had a curious recollec-
tion of how his knowledge of Inchling and his wife being
always in concert, entirely — whatever they might think in
private — devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it
had not originally sprung, his resolve to cast ofif the pesti-
lential cloak of obscurity shortening his days, and emerge
before a world he could illumine to give him back splendid
t, reflections. _ Inchling and his wife, it was : because the
, , ^/] two were ons: ajid it one,' and subserviMrWlKmrE5ow^~
c,i" "^ '^ "ihgall tEeitory, why, it fofeshadoweda'conciuer&cf'world !
They were^the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in
his hand. So it had' been. '

He faFEIed'hrs views upon Indian business, to hold Inch-
ling silent, and let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the
good faithful spouse, who had no phosphorescent writing
of a recent throbbing event on the four walls of his room.

Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.

He felt and regretted this. He greeted her with a
doubled affectionateness. Her pitiable deficiency of
courage, excusing a man for this and that small matter
in the thick of the conflict, made demands on him for
gentle treatment.

' You have not seen any one ? ' she asked.

' City people. And you, my love ? '

'Mr. Barmby called. He has gone down to Tunbridge

MRS. MARSETT 329

Wells for a week, to some friend there.' She added, in
pain of thought : ' I have seen Dartrey. He has brought
Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects
he wiU have to take him to Brighton.'

'Brighton? What a life for a man like Dartrey, at
Brighton!'

Her breast heaved. 'If I cannot see my Nesta there,
he will bring her up to me for a day.'

' But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your
wish to see her.'

'It is becoming imperative that I should.'

' No hurry, no hurry : wait till the end of next week.
And I must see Dartrey, on business, at once !'

She gave the address in a neighbouring square. He had
minutes to spare before dinner, and flew. She was not
inquisitive.

Colney Durance had told Dartrey that Victor was kill-
ing her. She had httle animation ; her snules were ready,
but faint. After her interview with Dudley, there had
been a swoon at home ; and her maid, sworn to secrecy,
willingly spared a tender-hearted husband — so good a
master.

CHAPTER XXVIII

MES. MARSETT

Little acts of kindness were not beyond the range of
Colney Durance, and he ran down to Brighton, to give
the exiled Nesta some taste of her friendly London circle.
The Duvidney ladies knew that the dreaded gentleman
had a regard for the girl. Their own, which was becoming
warmer than they liked to think, was impressed by his
manner of conversing with her. ' Child though she was,'

330 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

he paid her the comphment of a sober as well as a satirical
review of the day's political matter and recent publica-
tions ; and the ladies were introduced, in a wonderment, to
the damsel Delphica. They listened placidly to a discourse
upon her performances, Japanese to their understandings.

At New York, behold, another adventurous represen-
tative and advocate of the European tongues has joined
the party : Signor Jeridomani : a philologer, of course ;
a politician in addition ; Macchiavelli redivivus, it seems
to fair Delphica. The speech he delivers at the Ss^idicate
Delmonico Dinner, is justly applauded by the New York
Press as a masterpiece of astuteness. He appears to be
the only one of the party who has an eye for the dark.
She fancies she may know a more widely awake in the
abstract. But now, thanks to jubilant Journals and
Homeric laughter over the Continent, the secret is out, in
so far as the concurrents are all unmasked and exposed for
the edification of the American public. Dr. Bouthoin's
eyebrows are up, Mr. Semhians disfigures his name by
greatly gaping. Shall they return to their Great Britain
indignant? Patriotism, with the sauce of a luxurious
expedition at no cost to the private purse, restrains them.
Moreover, there is no sign of any one of the others intend-
ing to quit the expedition ; and Mr. Semhians has done a
marvel or two in the cricket-field : Old England looks up
where she can. _What is painfully extraordinary to our
couple, they find~inTKeTrigid_a$^
toward their 'common tongue.'.; -tQg£tker_mth_the_rumom"
of a design to despatch an American rival emissary to Japan.

Nesta listened, inquired, commented, TaugEe37~~Qie
ladies could not have a doubt that she was interested
and understood. She would have sketches of scenes
between Delphica and M. Falarique, with whom the young
Germania was cleverly ingenuous indeed — a seminary
C^limene; and between Delphica and M. Mytharete,

MRS. MARSETT 331

with whom she was archaeological, ravishingly amoebaean
of Homer. Dr. Gamiius holds a trump card in his artless
daughter, conjecturally, for the establishment of the lan-
guage of the gutturals in the far East. He has now a
suspicion, that the inventive M. Falarique, melted down
to sobriety by misfortune, may some day startle their
camp by the cast of more than a crow into it, and he is bent
on establishing aUiances; frightens the supple Signer
Jeridomani to lingual fixity; eulogizes Football, with
Dr. Bouthoin ; and retracts, or modifies, his dictum upon
the English, that, 'masculine brawn they have in their
bodies, but muscle they have not in their feminine minds' ;
to exalt them, for a signally clean, if a dense, people :

'Amousia, not Alousia, is their enemy.' — How, when
we have the noblest crop of poets? — 'You have never
heartily embraced those aliens among you until you learnt
from us, that you might brag of them.' — Have they not
endowed us with the richest of languages? — 'The words
of which are used by you, as old slippers, for puns.' Mr.
Semhians has been superciliously and ineffectively pvm-
ning in foreign presences : he and his chief are inwardly
shocked by a new perception ;-^;:What if, now that we
have the populace for paymaster, subservience to the
literary tastes of the populace should reduce jEeloafioh
to its lowest mental level, and render us not only unable ^f-"^'

to compete with thejoreigner, but iin jntelligible .to hi_m, li^^ ^
"althougEso proudly paid at home ! Is it not thus that -t^
nations are seen of the Highest to be devouring thSselves ?
"" 'For,' says DrrOanmus, as if"3CvxSn^"them, ' 'this
excessive and applauded productiveness, both of your
juvenile and your semle, in your modern literature, is it
ever a crop? Is it even the restorative perishable stuff
of the markets? Is it not rather your street-pavement's
patter of raindrops, incessantly in motion, and as fruit-
ful?' Mr. Semhians appeals to Delphica. 'Genius you

332 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

have,' says she, stiffening his neck-band, 'genius in super-
abundance' : — he throttles to the complexion of the
peony: — 'perhaps criticism is wanting.' Dr. Gannius
adds: 'Perhaps it is the drill-sergeant everywhere want-
ing for an unrivalled splendid rabble !'

Colney left the whole body of concurrents on the raised
flooring of a famous New York Hall, clearly entrapped,
and incited to debate before an enormous audience, as to
the merits of their respective languages. 'I hear,' says
Dr. Bouthoin to Mr. Semhians (whose gape is daily ex-
tending), 'that the tickets cost ten dollars !'

There was not enough of Delphica for Nesta.

Colney asked : ' Have you seen any of our band ? '

' No,' she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful,
conscious of a funny reason for the wish to hear of the
fictitious creature disliked by Dudley. A funny and a
naughty reason, was it? Not so very naughty: but it
was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley,
without an inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.

Colney brought his viola for a duet ; they had a pleasant
musical evening, as in old days at Creckholt ; and Nesta,
going upstairs with the ladies to bed, made them share
her father's amused view of the lamb of the flock this
bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious in-
strument tucked under his chin. He was a guest for the
night. Dressing in the early hour, Nesta saw him from
her window on the parade, and soon joined him, to hear
him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine. 'These
lengths of blank-faced terraces fronting sea!' were the
satirist's present black beast. ' So these moneyed English
shoulder to the front place ; and that is the appearance
they goffer to their commercial God!' He gazed along
the miles of 'English countenance,' drearily laughing.
Changeful ocean seemed to laugh at the spectacle. Some
Orphic joke inspired his exclamation : 'Capital !'

MRS. MARSETT 333

'Come where the shops are,' said Nesta.
'And how many thousand parsons have you here?'
'Ten, I think,' she answered in his vein, and wanned
him ; leading him. contemplatively to scrutiaize her ad-
mirers : the Rev. Septimus ; Mr. Sowerby.
'News of our friend of the whimpering flute?'
'Here? no. I have to imderstand you !'
Colney cast a weariful look backward on the 'regi-
ments of An^lq-jJhihese'^ Tepreaehted to him by the

moneyed terraces., and ^jdQ jll^^^ ^^^® -^^ * ^t^RP^^
watchPythe only meaning it has is past date.'

He k^d no liking for I)udley"Sowerby. But it might
have been an allusion to the general view of the houses.
But again, 'the meaning of it past date,' stuck in her
memory. A certain face close on handsome, had a fatal
susceptibility to caricature.

She spoke of her 'exile': wanted Skepsey to come
down to her; moaned over the loss of her Louise. The
puzzle of the reason for the long separation from her
parents, was evident in her mind, and unmentioned.

They turned on to the pier.

Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to
celebrate her visit to the place when she was a child :

' " And then along the pier we sped,
And there we saw a Whale :
He seemed to have a Normous Head,
And not a bit of Tail!"'

'Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly
inverse condition rules,' Colney said.

' " And then we scampered on the beach.
To chase the foaming wave ;
And when we ran beyond its reach
We all became more brave. " '

Colney remarked : ' I was a poet — for once.'

334 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

A neat-legged Parisianly-booted lady, having the sea-
winds very enterprising with her dark wavy locks and
jacket and skirts, gave a cry of pleasure and a silvery
'You dear !' at sight of Nesta; then at sight of one of us,
moderated her tone to a propriety equalling the most
conventional. 'We ride to-day?'

'I shall be one,' said Nesta.

'It would not be the commonest pleasure to me, if you
were absent.'

'Till eleven, then!'

'After my morning letter to Ned.'

She sprinkled silvery sound on that name or on the
adieu, blushed, blinked, frowned, sweetened her lip-lines,
bit at the underone, and passed in a discomposure.

'The lady?' Colney asked.

'She is — ^I meet her in the troop conducted by the
riding-master : Mrs. Marsett.'

'And who is Ned?'

'It is her husband, to whom she writes every morning.
He is a captain in the army, or was. He is in Norway,
fishing.'

'Then the probability is, that the English officer con-
tinues his military studies.'

' Do you not think her handsome, Mr. Durance ? '

' Ned may boast of his possession, when he has trimmed
it and toned it a little.'

' She is different, if you are alone with her.'

'It is not unusual,' said Colney.

At eleven o'clock he was in London, and Nesta rode
beside Mrs. Marsett amid the troop.

A South-easterly wind blew the waters to shifty gold-
leaf prints of brilliance under the sun.

'I took a liberty this morning, I called you "Dear"
this morning,' the lady said. ' It 's what I feel, only I
have no right to blurt out everything I feel, and I was

MRS. MARSETT 335

ashamed. I am sure I must have appeared ridiculous.
I got quite nervous.'

'You would not be ridiculous to me.'

' I remember I spoke of Ned.'

' You have spoken of him before.'

'Oh! I know: to you alone. I should like to pluck
out my heart and pitch it on the waves, to see whether it
would sink or swim. That 's a fimny idea, isn't it ! I
tell you everythiug that comes up. What shall I do when
I lose you ! You always make me feel you 've a lot of
poetry ready-made in you.'

'We will write. And you will have your husband
then.'

'When I had finished my letter to Ned, I dropped my
head on it and behaved like a fool for several minutes. I
can't bear the thought of losing you !'

'But you don't lose me,' said Nesta; 'there is no
ground for your supposing that you will. And your wish
not to lose me, binds me to you more closely.'

'If you knew!' Mrs. Marsett caught at her slippery
tongue, and she carolled : ' If we all knew everything, we
should be wiser, and what a naked lot of people we
should be!'

They were crossLug the passage of a cavalcade of gentle-
men, at the end of the East Cliff. One among them, large
and dominant, with a playful voice of brass, cried out:
'And how do you do, Mrs. Judith Marsett — ha? Beauti-
ful morning?'

Mrs. Marsett's figure tightened ; she rode stonily erect,
looked level ahead. Her woman's red mouth was shut
fast on a fighting underlip.

'He did not salute you,' Nesta remarked, to justify
her for not having responded.

The lady breathed a low thunder : 'Coward !'

'He cannot have intended to insult you,' said Nesta.

336 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'That man knows I will not notice him. He is a beast.
He will learn that I carry a horsewhip.'

'Are you not taking a little incident too much to
heart?'

The sigh of the heavily laden came from Mrs. Marsett :
'Am I pale? I dare say. I shall go on my knees to-
night hating myself that I was bom "one of the frail
sex." We are, or we should ride at the coward and strike
him to the groimd. Pray, pray do not look distressed !
Now you know my Christian name. That dog of a man
barks it out on the roads. It doesn't matter.'

'He has offended you before?'

'You are near me. They can't hurt me, can't touch
me, when I think that I'm talking with you. How I
envy those who call you by your Christian name !'

'Nesta,' said smiling Nesta. The smile was forced,
that she might show kindness, for the lady was jarring on
her.

Mrs. Marsett opened her lips : 'Oh, my God, I shall be
crying ! — ^let 's gallop. No, wait, I '11 tell you. I wish
I could! I will tell you of that man. That man is Major
Worrell. One of the majors who manage to get to their
grade. A retired warrior. He married a handsome
woman, above him in rank, with money ; a good woman.
She was a good woman, or she would have had her venge-
ance, and there was never a word against her. She
must have loved that — Ned calls him, full-blooded ox.
He spent her money and he deceived her. — ^You innocent !
Oh, you dear ! I 'd give the world to have your eyes.
I've heard tell of "crystal clear," but eyes like yours
have to tell me how deep and clear. Such a world for
them to be in ! I did pray, and used your name last night
on my knees, that you — ^I said Nesta — ^might never have
to go through other women's miseries. Ah me ! I have
\j to tell you he deceived her. You don't quite understand.'

MRS. MARSETT 337

'I do understand,' said Nesta.

'God help you! — I am excited to-day. That man is
poison to me. His wife forgave him three times. On
three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave him. He
is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them. She
walked out one November afternoon and met him riding
along with a notorious creature. You know there are bad
women. They passed her, laughing. And look there,
Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.' Mrs. Marsett
pointed her whip hard out. 'The poor lady went down
from the height here; she walked into that rough water
— ^look ! — steadying herself along it, and she plunged ;
she never came out alive. A week after her burial, Major
Worrell — I 've told you enough.'

'We '11 gallop now,' said Nesta.

Mrs. Marsett's talk, her presence hardly less, affected
the girl with those intimations of tumult shown upon
smooth waters when the great elements are conspiring.
She felt that there was a cause why she had to pity, did
pity her. It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one
who was of inferior station, and his wife had to bear blows
from cruel people. The supposition seemed probable.
The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as the gathering of
the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence. What?
She did not reflect. Her quick physical sensibility curled
to some breath of heated atmosphere brought about her
by this new acquaintance: not pleasant, if she had
thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of our life at
the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants.
But she was unreflectiug, feeling only a beyond and hidden.

Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in
the dark, getting to have the sight whichjperuses darknessT
she touched the door of a mystery that denied her its kev^
but showed the lock :..and her life was be^naingJbftMow
of hours that frettfiJL her to recklessness. Her friend

338 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Louise was absent : she had so few friends — owing to that
unsolved reason: she wanted one, of any kind, if only-
gentle : and this lady seemed to need her : and she flat-
tered ; Nesta was in the mood for swaUowing and digest-
ing and making sweet blood of flattery.

At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in
musing on her, wishing her well, having said the adieu.
For it was wearisome to hear praises of 'innocence' ; and
women can do so little to cure that 'wickedness of men,'
among the lady's conversational themes; and 'love'
too: it may be a 'plague,' and it may be 'heaven' : it
is better left unspoken of. But there were times when
Mrs. Marsett's looks and tones touched compassion to
press her hand : an act that had a pledgeing signification
in the girl's bosom : and when, by the simple avoidance
of ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett's quieted good looks
had a shadow of a tender charm, more pathetic than her
outcries were.

These had not always the sanction of polite usage : and
her English was guilty of sudden lapses to the Thames-
water English of commerce and drainage instead of the
upper wells. But there are many uneducated ladies in
the land. Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature
betray now and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta's maid
Mary's. Mrs. Marsett liked love, blood, and adventure.
She had, moreover, a favourite noble poet, and she begged
Nesta's pardon for naming him, and she would not name
him, and told her she must not read him until she was a
married woman, because he did mischief to girls. There-
upon she fell into one of her silences, emerging with a
cry of hate of herself for having ever read him. She did
not blame the bard. And, ah, poor bard ! he fought his
battle : he shall not be named for the brand on the name.
He has lit a sulphur match for the lover of nature through
many a generation ; and to be forgiven by sad frail souls

MRS. MARSETT 339

who could accuse him of pipeing devil's agent to them at
the perilous instant — poor girls too ! — is chastisement
enough. This it is to be the author of imholy sweets : a
Posterity sitting in judgement will grant, that they were
part of his honest battle with the hypocrite English Philis-
tine, without being dupe of the plea or at all the thirsty
swallower of his sugary brandy. Mrs. Marsett expressed
aloud her gladness of escape in never having met a man
like him; followed by her regret that 'Ned' was so
utterly unlike; except 'perhaps' — and she hummed;
she was off on the fraternity in wickedness.

Nesta's ears were fatigued. 'My mother writes of
you,' she said, to vary the subject.

Mrs. Marsett looked. She sighed downright : ' I have
had my dream of a friend ! — It was that gentleman with
you on the pier ! Your mother obj ects ? '

'She has inquired, nothing more.'

' I am not twenty-three : not as old as I should be, for
a guide to you. I know I would never do you harm.
That I know. I would walk into that water first, and
take Mrs. Worrell's plunge : — the last bath ; a thorough
cleanser for a woman ! Only, she was a good woman and
didn't want it, as we — as lots of us do : — ^to wash off all
recollection of having met a man ! Your mother would
not like me to call you Nesta ! I have never begged you
to call me Judith. Damnable name !' Mrs. Marsett
revelled in the heat of the curse on it, as a relief to torture
of the breast, untU a sense of the girl's alarmed hearing
sent the word reverberating along her nerves and shocked
her with such an exposure of our Shaggy wild one on a
lady's lips. She murmured: 'Forgive me,' and had
the passion to repeat the epithet in shrieks, and scratch
up male speech for a hatefuller ; but the twitch of Nesta's
brows made her say : ' Do pardon me. I did something
in Scripture. Judith could again. Since that brute

340 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Worrell crossed me riding with you, I loathe my name;
I want to do things. I have offended you.'

'We have been taught differently. I do not use those
words. Nothing else.'

'They frighten you.'

'They make me shut; that is all.'

'Supposing you were some day to discover . . . ta-ta-
ta, all the things there are in the world.' Mrs. Marsett
let fly an artificial chirrup. 'You must have some ideas
of me.'

'I think you have had unhappy experiences.'

'Nesta . . . just now and then ! the first time we rode
out together, coming back from the downs, I remember, I
spoke, without thinking — I was enraged — of a case in the
newspapers ; and you had seen it, and you were not afraid
to talk of it. I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she 's
bold! I thought you knew more than a girl ought to
know : until — you did — you set my heart going. You
spoke of the poor women like an angel of compassion.
You said, we were all mixed up with their fate — ^I forget
the words. But no one ever heard in Church anything
that touched me so. I worshipped you. You said, you
thought of them often, and longed to find out what you
could do to help. And I thought, if they could hear you,
and only come near you, as I was — ah, my heaven! —
Unhappy experiences ? Yes. But when men get women
on the slope to their perdition, they have no mercy, none.
They deceive, and they lie; they are false in acts and
words ; they do as much as murder. They 're never
hanged for it. They make the Laws ! And then they
become fathers of families, and point the finger at the
"wretched creatures." They have a dozen names against
women, for one at themselves.'

'It maddens me at times to think . . . !' said Nesta,
burning with the sting of vile names.

MRS. MARSETT 341

Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men: but
men have the power and the lead, and they take ad-
vantage of it ; and then they turn round and execrate us
for not having what they have robbed us of !'

'I blame women — ^if I may dare, at my age,' said
Nesta, and her bosom heaved. 'Women should feel for
their sex ; they should not allow the names ; they should
go among their unhappier sisters. At the worst, they are
sisters ! I am sure, that fallen cannot mean — Christ
shows it does not. He changes the tone of Scripture.
The women who are made outcasts, must be hopeless and
go to utter ruin. We should, if we pretend to be better,
step between them and that. There cannot be any good-
ness unless it is a practiced goodness. Otherwise it is
nothing more than paint on canvas. You speak to me
of my innocence. What is it worth, if it is only a picture
and does no work to help to rescue ? I fear I think most
of the dreadful names that redden and sicken us. — ^The
Old Testament ! — ^I have a French friend, a Mademoiselle
Louise de Seilles — you should hear her : she is intensely
French, and a Roman Cathohc, everjrthing which we are
not : but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her
sex ! I love her. It is love. She wUl never marry imtil
she meets a man who has the respect for women, for all
women. We both think we cannot separate ourselves
from our sisters. She seems to me to wither men, when
she speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and
their cruelty when they have succeeded. She is right,
it is the — ^brute : there is no other word.'

'And French and good!' Mrs. Marsett ejaculated.
' My Ned reads French novels, and he says, their women.
. . . But your mademoiselle is a real one. If she says
all that, I could kneel to her, French or not. Does she
talk much about men and women?'

' Not often : we lose our tempers. She wants women to

342 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

have professions ; at present they have not much choice
to avoid being penniless. Poverty, and the sight of
luxury ! It seems as if we produced the situation, to
create an envious thirst, and cause the misery. Things
are improving for them; but we groan at the slowness
of it.'

Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were
nearly quite as bad as men. 'I don't think I could take
up with a profession. Unless to be a singer. Ah ! Do
you sing?'

Nesta smiled : ' Yes, I sing.'

' How I should like to hear you ! My Ned's a thorough
Englishman — gentleman, you know : he cares only for
sport; Shooting, Fishing, Hunting; and Football,
Cricket, Rowing, and matches. He 's immensely proud
of England in those things. And such muscle he has ! —
though he begins to fancy his heart 's rather weak. It 's
digestion, I tell him. But he takes me to the Opera some-
times— ^Italian Opera; he can't stand German. Down
at his place in Leicestershire, he tells me, when there 's
company, he has — I 'm sure you sing beautifully. When
I hear Iseautiful singing, even from a woman they tell
tales of, upon my word, it 's true, I feel my sins all melting
out of me and I 'm new-made : I can't bear Ned to speak.
"Would you one day, one afternoon, before the end of next
week? — ^it would do me such real good, you can't guess
how much ; if I could persuade you ! I know I 'm
asking something out of rules. For just half an hour!
I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do
me good — ^good — good to hear you sing. There is a
tuned piano — a cottage; I don't think it sounds badly.
You would not see any great harm in calling on me? —
once !'

'No,' said Nesta. And it was her nature that pro-
jected the word. Her awakened wits were travelling to

MRS. MARSETT 343

her from a distance, and she had an mtimation of their
tidings; and she could not have said what they were;
or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would
come. Her vision of the reahty of tilings w^-'' witbnnt
written titles, to put the stamp of the world on it. She
ielt this lady to be one encompassed"angTii the hiig of the
elementary forces^ which are the terrors to inexperienced
pure young women. But she looked at her, and dared
trust those lips, those eyes. She saw, through whatever
might be the vessel, the spirit of the woman ; as the upper
nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis mixed
of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature
cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots
of accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all mis-
fortune's issue, if we but see the one look upward, fall
away. Reason is not excluded from these blind throbs
of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the Fates.
Nesta did not err in her divination of the good and the bad
incarnate beside her, though both good and bad were
behind a curtain; the latter sparing her delicate senses,
appealing to chivalry, to the simply feminine claim on
her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of the flames
pf the forge where^ we ^^fflire^ vTTought," told her surely >
that the good predominated. She had the heart which is '
at our primal fireswEmnature speaks. .

She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing
to her.

'An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?' she was asked,
and she said : 'This afternoon, if you hke.'

So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the
thrill of deUght she felt in the prospect.

The ladies Dorothea and Virginia consulted, and pro-
nounced the name of Marsett to be a reputable County
name. 'There was a Leicestershire baronet of the name
of Marsett.' They arranged to send their button-blazing

344 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

boy at Nesta's heels. Mrs. Marsett resided in a side-street
not very distant from the featureless but washed and
orderly terrace of the glassy stare at sea. "

CHAPTER XXIX

shows one op the shadows of the world crossing a
virgin's mind

Nesta and her maid were brought back safely through
the dusk by their constellation of a boy, to whom the
provident ladies had entrusted her. They could not but
note how short her syllables were. Her face was only
partly seen. They had returned refreshed from their
drive on the populous and orderly parade — ^so fair a pat-
tern of their England! — after discoursing of 'the dear
child,' approving her manners, instancing proofs of her
intelligence, nay, her possession of 'character.' They
did so, notwithstanding that these admissions were worse
than their growing love for the girl, to confound estab-
lished ideas. And now, in thoughtfulness on her behalf,
Dorothea said, * We have considered, Nesta, that you may
be lonely ; and if it is your wish, we will leave our card on
your new acquaintance.' Nesta took her hand and kissed
it; she declined, saying, 'No,' without voice.

They had two surprises at the dinner-hour. One was
the card of Dartrey Fenellan, naming an early time next
day for his visit ; and the other was the appearance of the
Rev. Stuart Rem, a welcome guest. He had come to meet
his Bishop.

He had come also with serious information for the
ladies, regarding the Rev. Abram Posterley. No sooner
was this out of his mouth than both ladies exclaimed:

ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD 345

'Again!' So serious was it, that there had been a con-
sultation at the Wells; Mr. Posterley's friend, the Rev.
Septimus Barmby, and his own friend, the Rev. Grose-
man Buttermore, had journeyed from London to sit upon
the case: and, 'One hoped,' Mr. Stuart Rem said, 'poor
Posterley would be restored to the senses he periodically
abandoned.' He laid a hand on Tasso's curls, and with-
drew it at a menace of teeth. Tasso would submit to
rough caresses from Mr. Posterley; he would not allow
Mr. Stuart Rem to touch him. Why was that ? Perhaps
for the reason of Mr. Posterley's being so emotional as
perpetually to fall a victim to some bright glance and
require the rescue of his friends ; the slave of woman had
a magnet for animals !

Dorothea and Virginia were drawn to compassionate
sentiments, in spite of the provokeing recurrence of Mr.
Posterley's malady. He had not an income to support a
wife. Always was this imfortimate gentleman entan-
gling himself in a passion for maid or widow of the Wells :
and it was desperate, a fever. Mr. Stuart Rem charitably
remarked on his taking it so severely because of his very
scrupulous good conduct. They pardoned a little wound
to their delicacy, and asked: 'On this occasion?' Mr.
Stuart Rem named a linendraper's establishment near the
pantiles, where a fair young woman served. 'And her
reputation?' That was an article less presentable
through plate-glass, it seemed : Mr. Stuart Rem drew a
prolonged breath into his nose.

'It is most melancholy!' they said in unison. 'No-
thing positive,' said he. 'But the suspicion of a shadow,
Mr. Stuart Rem! You ^Uiljaot permitit ?^ ""He stated,
"t^at his friend Buttermore might have influence. Doro-
thea said : ' When I think of Mr. Posterley's addiction to
ceremonial observances, and to matrimony, I cannot but
think of a sentence that fell from Mr. Durance one day.

346 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

with reference to that division of our Church : he called it :
— ^you frown ! and I would only quote Mr. Durance to you
in support of your purer form, as we hold it to be : — with
the candles, the vestments, Confession, alas ! he called it,
"Rome and a wife."'

Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent : he testily
dismissed mention of Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr.
Posterley.

The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity ap-
peased, considerately signified to him, that a young maiden
was present.

The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such
small gossip a hum of summer midges. She did not imag-
ine the dialogue concerned her in any way. She noticed
Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time to
time. She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things
about her. To-morrow she was to see Captain Dartrey.
She dwelt on that prospect, for an escape from the meshes
of a painful hour — the most woeful of the hours she had yet
known — passed with Judith Marsett : which dragged her
soul through a weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and
over, still did it with her ideas. It shocked her neverthe-
less to perceivejhow much of the world's ilayed^ife and
"Trajsh~~anat^y she had apprehended, and so coldly,
previous to Mrs. Marsett'sTirt'of the veiTln Tier story of
H(^elf:_a. skipping revelation, terrible fiiiongh toihegirl;
whose comparison of the previously suspected things with
the thin^now revealed imposed the thought of lief"Eavmg
been both a precocious and a callous young woman ; a kind
of 'DelphicajOTthoutjthe erudition,' he^^ mind phrased it
airily over her chagrin. — ^And the silence of Dudley proved
him to have discovered his error in choosing such a person :
he was wise, and she thanked him. She had an envy of
the ignorant-innocents adored by the young man she
cordially thanked for quitting her. She admired the white

ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD 347

coat of armour they wore, whether bestowed on them by
their constitution or by prudence. For while combating
mankind now on Judith Marsett's behalf, personally she
ran like a hare from the mere breath of an association
with the very minor sort of similar charges ; ardently she
desired the esteem of mankind; she was at moments
abject. But had she actually been aware of the facts now
known ?

Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness
by their budding senses — and however vividly — require
enlightenment of the audible and visible before their
sterner feelings can be heated to break them away from a
blushful dread and force the mind to know. As much as
the wilfully or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest
have to learn by touch : only, their understandings cannot
meanwhile be so wholly obtuse as. our society's matron,
acting to please the tastes of the civilized man — a creature
that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him — ^barbarously
exacts. The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman,
who is after all in his language ; but when it comes to read-
ing the maiden, she appears as a phosphorescent hiero-
glyph to some speculative Egyptologer; and he insists
upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he
is to have sense of surety. Many a young girl is misread
by the amount she seems to know of our construction,
history, and dealings, when it is not more than her sincere
ripeness of nature, that has gathered the facts of life pro-
fuse about her, and prompts her through one or other of
the instincts, often vanity, to show them to be not entirely
strange to her ; or haply her filly nature is having a fling
at the social harness of h3^ocrisy. If you (it is usually
through the length of ears of your Novelist that the privi-
lege is yours) have overheard queer communications pass-
ing between girls, — and you must act tflb traitor eaves-
dropper or Achilles masquerader to overhear so clearly, —

348 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

these, be assured, are not specially the signs of their
corruptness. Even the exceptionally cynical are chiefly
to be accused of bad manners. Your Moralist is a myopic
preacher, when he^tamps infamy on thenij or on our later
generation, for the lack they have at grandmother decorum,
because ]^ou do not or cannot conceal from them the
grinning sKeletonHeEin J it. """

NestiTonceTiad'dreams of her being loved: and she was
to love in return for a love that excused her for loving
double, treble ; as not her lover could love, she thought
with grateful pride in the treasure she was to pour out at
his feet ; as only one or two (and they were women) in the
world had ever loved. Her notipn of the passion was
parasitic_^jnasJLej3:efi,_5Eoman4he-bine.;„ Jbut the bine
wasllame to enwind. and jtoLSjaai,. serpent to defend, im-
mortal flowers to crqjra. The choice her parents had
made for her in Dudley, behind the mystery she had scent
of, nipped her dream, and prepared her to meet, as it were,
the fireside of a November day instead of springing up and
into the dawn's blue of full summer with'swallows^bh wing.
"Her station in exile at thie Wells of the weariful rich, under
the weight of the sullen secret, unenlivened by Dudley's
courtsh^, subdued her to the world^ decrees; phrased
thus : i'l am..iiot to be a heroine.? The one golden
edge to~the view was, that she would greatly please her
father.

Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist's
pressed weed. But after hearing Judith Marsett's wild
sobs, it had no place in her cherishing. For, above all, the
unhappy woman protested love to have been the cause of
her misery. She moaned of 'her Ned' ; of his goodness,
his deceitfulness, her trustfulness ; his pride and the vile-
ness of his friends ; her longsuffering and her break down
of patience. It^as done for the proof of her unworthiness
of Nesta's friendship : that she might be renounced, and

ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD 349

embraced. She told the pathetic half of her story, to suit
the gentle ear, whose critical keenness was lost in compas-
sion. How deep the compassion, mixed with the girl's
native respect for the evil-fortuned, may be judged by her
inaccessibility to a vulgar tang that she was aware of in the
deluge of the torrent, where Innocence and Ned and Love
and a proud Family and that beast Worrell rolled together
in leaping and shifting involutions.

A darkness of thunder was on the girl. Although she
was not one to shrink beneath it like the small bird of the
woods, she had to say within herself many times, ' I shall
see Captain Dartrey to-morrow,' for a recovery and a
nerving. And with her thought of him, her tooth was at
her underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over
men's views of her sex, and how to bring a frank mind to
meet him ; to be sure of his not at heart despising ; until
his character swam defined and bright across her scope.
'He is good to women.' Fragments of conversation,
principally her father's, had pictured Captain Dartrey to
her most manfully tolerant toward a frivolous wife.

He came early in the morning, instantly after breakfast.

Not two minutes had passed before she was at hom%
with him. His wordSj, Jtiis loioks, revived^ her spirit of
romance, gave her the very landscapes^ and new ones.
"S'es7 he was her hero. But Ills manner made him also an
adoredhig brotheiTstamped splendid by the perils of life.
He sat square, as if alert to rise, with an elbow on a knee,
and the readiest turn of head to speakers, the prompt-
est of answers, eyes that were a brighter accent to the
mouth, so vividly did look accompany tone. He rallied
her, chatted and laughed ; pleased the ladies by laughing
at Colney Durance, and inspired her with happiness when
he spoke of England : — that ' One has to be in exile awhile,
to see the place she takes.*

' Oh, Captain Dartrey, I do like to hear you say so,' she

350 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

cried ; his voice was reassuring also in other directions : it
rang of true man.

He volunteered, however, a sad admission, that England
had certainly lost something of the great nation's proper
conception of Force : the meaning of it, virtue of it, and
need for it. 'She bleats for a lesson, and will get her
lesson.'

But if we have Captain Dartrey, we shall come through !
So said the sparkle of Nesta's eyes.

' She is very like her father,' he said to the ladies.

'We think so,' they remarked.

'There 's the mother too,' said he; and Nesta saw that
the ladies shadowed.

They retired. Then she begged him to 'tell her of her
own dear mother.' The news gave comfort, except for
the suspicion, that the dear mother was being worn by
her entertaining so largely. 'Papa is to blame,' said
Nesta.

'A momentary strain. Your father has an idea of
Parliament; one of the London Boroughs.'

'And I, Captain Dartrey, when do I go back to them?'

'Your mother comes down to consult with you. And
now, do we ride together?'

'You are free?'

'My uncle. Lord Clan, lets me out.'

'To-day?'

'Why, yes!'

'This morning?'

'In an hour's time.'

'I will be ready.'

Nesta sent a line of excuse to Mrs. Marsett, throwing in
a fervent adjective for balm.

That fair person rode out with the troop under conduct
of the hallowing squire of the stables, and passed by Nesta
on horseback beside Dartrey Fenellan at the steps of a

ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD 351

huge hotel; issuing from which, pretty Mrs. Blathenoy
was about to mount. Mrs. Marsett looked ahead and
coloured, but she could not restrain one look at Nesta, that
embraced her cavalier. Nesta waved hand to her, and
nodded. Mrs. Marsett withdrew her eyes ; her doing so,
silent though it was, resembled the drag back to sea of the
shingle-wave below her, such a screaming of tattle she
heard in the questions discernible through the attitude of
the cavaUer and of the lady, who paused to stare, before
the leap up in the saddle. 'Who is she? — what is she? —
how did you know her? — ^where does she come from? —
wears her hat on her brows ! — ^huge gauntlets out of style !
— shady! shady! shady!' And as always during her
nervous tumults, the name of Worrell made diapason of
that execrable uproar. Her hat on her brows had an air
of dash, defying a world it could win, as Ned well knew.
But she scanned her gauntlets disapprovingly. This town,
we are glad to think, has a bright repute for glove-shops.
And Mrs. Marsett could applaud herself for sparing Ned's
money ; she had mended her gloves, if they were in the
fashion. — But how does the money come? Hark at that
lady and that gentleman questioning Miss Radnor of every-
thing, everything in the world about her ! Not a word do
they get from Miss Radnor. And it makes them the more
inquisitive. Idle rich people, comfortably fenced round,
are so inquisitive! And Mrs. Marsett, loving Nesta for
the notice of her, naaddeneTby the sting of tongues it was
causing, heard the 5?iiE~of ^^e beach/without "conscious- ,
ness^ofjinalogie^but with a body rea^to jump out of
sTohTout of life,-in desperation at the sound.

She was all impulse; a shifty piece of unmercenary
stratagem occasionally directing it. Arrived at her
lodgings, she wrote to Nesta : ' I entreat you not to notice
me, if you pass me on the road again. Let me drop, never
mind how low I go. I was born to be wretched. A line

352 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

from you, just a line now and then, only to show me I am
not forgotten. I have had a beautiful dream. I am not
bad in reality; I love goodness, I know. I cling to the
thought of you, as my rescue, I declare. Please, let me
hear : if it 's not more than "good day" and your initials
on a post-card.'
The letter brought Nesta in person to her.

CHAPTER XXX

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA

Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett
with Captain Dartrey? — Nesta timidly questioned her
heart : she knocked at an iron door shut upon a thing alive.
The very asking froze her, almost to stopping her throbs of
pity for the woman. With Captain Dartrey, if with any
one ; but with no one. Not with her mother even. To-
ward her mother, she felt guilty of knowing. Her mothgr
had a horror of that curtain. Nesta had seen it, and had
takenher impressions ;~she, too, sHfahk from it J_the more
"when impelled to draw near it. Louise de Seilles would
¥ave~Heen~anotHer self; Louise was away; when to
return, the dear friend could not state. Speaking in her
ear, would have been possible; the theme precluded
writing.

It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for
a girl to hold unaided. In the presence of the simple
silvery ladies Dorothea and Virginia, she had qualms, as if
she were breaking out in spots before them. The ladies
fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly of
the girl ; and that he might have meant, she appeared a
little too cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley's malady

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA 353

— as girls in these terrible days, only too frequently, too
brazenly, are. They discoursed to her of the degeneracy
of the manners, nay, the morals of young Englishwomen,
once patterns ! They sketched the young English gentle-
woman of their time ; indeed a beauty ; with round red
cheeks, and rounded open eyes, and a demure shut mouth,
a puppet's divine ignorance; inoffensive in the highest
degree, rightly worshipped. They were earnest, and Nesta
struck at herself. She wished to be as they had been, re-
serving her painful independence.

They were good: they were the ideal women of our
country ; which demands if it be but the semblance of the
sureness of stationary excellence; such as we have in
Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth as ever
by the morning's flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of
accidents — accidents must be kept away; but enviable,
admirable, we think, when we are not thinking of seed
sown or help given to the generations to follow. Nesta
both envied and admired; she revered them; yet her
sharp intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of
thought coming of strange crimson-lighted new knowledge,
discerned in a dimness what blest conditions had fixed
them on their beautiful barren eminence.^ Without
challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for
our evil-fortuned of the world ;,jfche. creaturesJn the Jbattle,
the wounded, trodden, mud-stained : and it alarmed her
^|KSlEglSul(02ajiiJb£aiLfln.e^u.i,ol.the fold.

She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and
increasing with the pulsations of a compassion that she
took for her reflective survey. The next time she saw
Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the
man who might be spoken to ; and by a woman : though
not by a girl ; not spoken to by her. The throb of the
impiilse precipitating speech subsided to a dmnb yearning.
He noticed her look : he was unaware of the human sun in

354 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the girl's eyes taking an image of him for permanent habi-
tation in her breast. That face of his, so clearly lined,
quick, firm, with the blue smile on it like the gleam of a
sword coming out of sheath, did not mean hardness, she
could have vowed. 0 that some woman, other than the
unhappy woman herself, would speak the words denied to
a girl ! He was the man who would hearken and help.
Essential immediate help was to be given besides the noble
benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness and the
world's need for it were printed on her understanding.
For what could women do in aid of a good cause ! She
fawned: she deemed herself very despicably her hero's
inferior. The thought of him enclosed her. In a prison,
the gaoler is a demi-God — ^hued bright or black, as it may
be; and, by the present arrangement between the sexes,
she, whom the world allowed not to have an intimation
from eye or ear, or from nature's blood-ripeness in com-
mune with them, of certain matters, which it suffers to be
notorious, necessarily directed her appeal almost in wor-
ship to the man, who was the one man endowed to relieve,
and who locked her mouth for shame.

Thus was she, too, being put into her woman's harness
of the bit and the blinkers, and taught to knowTieSelfTor
the weak thing, the gentle parasite, which the fiction of
our civilization expects her, caressingly and contemptu-
ously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of her —
0 Comedy of Clowns ! — that in the passive she be a rock-
fortress impregnable, not to speak of magically encircled.
She must also have her feelings ; she must not be an un-
natural creature. And she must have a sufficient intelli-
gence; for her stupidity does not flatter the possessing
man. It is not an organic growth that he desires in his
mate, but a happy composition. You see the world
which comes of the pair.

This burning Nesta, Victor's daughter, tempered by

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA 355

Nataly's milder blood, was a girl in whom the hard shocks
of the knowledge of life, perforce of the hardness upon pure
metal, left a strengthening for generous imagination. She
did not sit to brood on her injured senses or set them
through speculation touching heat ; they were taken up
and consumed by the fire of her mind. Nor had she
leisure for the abhorrences, in a heart all flowing to give aid,
and uplift and restore.^^ Self was as urgent in her as in
most of the young; but the gift of humour, which had
previously diverted it, was now jthe quick f eeUng for her
sisterhood, through the one_Biteous example_she knew; \j
and broadening it, through her insurgent abasement on
their behalf ijy^^fwas her scourged pride of sex. She but
faintly thought of blaming the men whom her soul be-
sought for justice, for common kindness, to women.
There was the danger, that her aroused young ignorance
would charge the whole of the misery about and abroad
upon the stronger of those two : and another danger, that
the vision of the facts below the surface would discolour
and disorder her views of existence. But she loved, she
sprang to, the lighted world ; and she had figures of male
friends, to which to cling ; and they helped in animating
glorious historical figures on the world's library-shelves or
imder yet palpitating earth. Promise of a steady balance
of her nature, too, was shown in the absence of any irritable
urgency to be doing, when her bosom bled to help. Be-
yond the resolve, that she would not abandon the woman
who had made confession to her, she formed no con-
scious resolutions. ^Far ahead down her journey of the
years to come, she did see muffled things she might hope
anH^oind^strive'lo do. They^ were chrysalis shapes.
Above^all, sEe^wher blind_qmckened hearton the wings . i >
oifanimaginative force ; and those of the young who can ,
doHiat, are in their blood incorruptible by dark knowledge.
Irradiated S3er~3ajknessTn the mind. Let but the throb

356 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

be kept for others. That is the one secret, for redemption,
if not for preservation.

Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his
girl, full of regrets at Fredi's absence from the great whirl
'overhead,' as places of multitudinous assembly, where he
shone, always appeared to him. But it was not to last
long ; she would soon be on the surface again ! At the
first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song. He
challenged her to duet before the good ladies, and she
kindled, she was caught up by his gaiety, wondering at
herself; faintly aware of her not being spontaneous.
And she made her father laugh, just in the old way ; and
looked at herself in his laughter, with the thought, that she
could not have become so changed ; by which the girl was
helped to jump to her humour. Victor turned his full
front to Dorothea and Virginia, one sunny beam of delight :
and- although it was Mr. Stuart Rem who was naughty
Nesta's victim, and although it seemed a trespass on her
part to speak in such a manner of a clerical gentleman,
they were seized; they were the opposite partners of a
laughing quadr01e, lasting till they were tired out.

Victor had asked his girl, if she sang on a Sunday. The
ladies remembered, that she had put the question for per-
mission to Mr. Stuart Rem, who was opposed to secular
singing.

'And what did he say?' said Victor.

Nesta shook her head : ' It was not what he said, papa ;
it was his look. His duty compelled him, though he loves
music. He had the look of a Patriarch putting his hand-
maiden away into the desert.'

Dorothea and Virginia, in spite of protests within,
laughed to streams. They recollected the look; she had
given the portrait of Mr. Stuart Rem in the act of repudiat-
ing secular song.

Victor conjured up a day when this darling Fredi, a

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA 357

child, stood before a famous picture in the Brera, at Milan ;
when he and her mother noticed the child's very studious
graveness ; and they had talked of it ; he remarking, that ^
she disapproved of the Patriarch; and Nataly, that she ^
was taken with Hagar's face.

~B[e~seemecl~SUrprtggd~at "her not having heard from
Dudley.

'How is that?' said he.

'Most probably because he has not written, papa.'

He paused after the cool reply. She had no mournful
gaze at all ; but in the depths of the clear eyes he knew so
well, there was a coil of something animate, whatever it
might be. And twice she drew a heavy breath.

He mentioned it in London. Nataly telegraphed at
night for her girl to meet her next day at Dartrey's hotel.

Their meeting was incomprehensibly joyless to the
hearts of each, though it was desired, and had long been
desired, and mother was mother, daughter daughter,
without diminution of love between them. They held
hands, they kissed and clasped, they showered their
tender phrases with full warm truth, and looked into eyes

and surely saw one another. But the heart Jif each- was

in a battle of its own, taking wounds orcrying for supports.
Whether to speaE to her girl at once, despite the now
vehement contrary counsel of Victor, was Nataly's de-
liberation, under the thought of the young creature's per-
plexity in not seeing her at the house of the Duvidney
ladies: while Nesta conjitfed in a flash the past impres- {
sions of hermotEer's shrinking distaste from any such \
hectic themes as this which burdened_and absorbed _her ; j
aSJ she was 3most joining to it, through sympathy with
any thought or feeling of one in whom she had such pride ;
she had the shudder of revulsion. Further, Nataly put
on rather cravenly an air of distress, or she half design-
ingly permitted her trouble to be seen, by way of affecting

358 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

her girl's recollection when the confession was to come,
that Nesta might then understand her to have been re-
strained from speaking, not evasive of her duty. The
look was interpreted by Nesta as belonging to the social
annoyances dating, in her calendar, from Creckholt, appre-
hensively dreaded at Lakelands. She hinted asking, and
her mother nodded ; not untruthfully ; but she put on a
briskness after the nod; and a doubt was driven into
Nesta's bosom.

Her dear Skepsey was coming down to her for a holiday,
she was glad to hear. Of Dudley, there was no word.
Nataly shunned his name, with a superstitious dread lest
any mention of him should renew pretensions that she
hoped, and now supposed, were quite withdrawn. So she
had told poor Mr. Barmby only yesterday, at his hmnble
request to know. He had seen Dudley on the pantiles,
walking with a young lady, he said. And 'he feared,' he
said; using a pardonable commonplace of deceit. Her
compassion accounted for the 'fear' which was the wish,
and caused her not to think it particularly strange, that he
should imagine Dudley to have quitted the field. Now
that a disengaged Dartrey Fenellan was at hand, poor
Mr. Barmby could have no chance.

Dartrey came to her room by appointment. She wanted
to see him alone, and he informed her, that Mrs. Blathenoy
was in the hotel, and woxild certainly receive and amuse
Nesta for any length of time.

'I will take her up,' said Nataly, and rose, and she sat
immediately, and fluttered a hand at her breast. She
laughed: 'Perhaps I 'm tired!'

Dartrey took Nesta.

He returned, saying : 'There 's a lift in the hotel. Do
the stairs affect you at all?'

She fenced his sharp look. ' Laziness, I fancy ; age is
coming on. How is it Mrs. Blathenoy is here?'

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA 359

'Well! how?'

'Foolish curiosity?'

'I think I have made her of service. I did not bring
the lady here.'

'Of service to whom?'

'Why, to Victor!'

'Has Victor commissioned you?'

'You can bear to hear it. Her husband knows the story.
He has a grudge . . . commercial reasons. I fancy it is,
that Victor stood against his paper at the table of the
Bank. Blathenoy vowed blow for blow. But I think the
little woman holds him in. She says she does.'

'Victor prompted you?'

'It occurred as it occurred.'

'She does it for love of us? — Oh! I can't trifle.
Dartrey !'

'Tell me.'

' First, you haven't let me know what you think of my
Nesta.' ■

' She 's a dear good girl.'

'Not so interesting to you as a flighty little woman !'

' She has a speck of some sort on her mind.'

Nataly spied at Dudley's behaviour, and said: 'That
will wear away. Is Mr. Blathenoy much here?'

'As often as he can come, I believe.'

'That is . . .?'

'I have seen him twice.'

'His wife remains?'

'Fixed here for the season.'

'My friend!'

'No harm, no harm !'

'But— to her!'

'You have my word of honour.'

' Yes : and she is doing you a service, at your request ;
and you occasionally reward her with thanks; and she

360 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

sees you are a man of honour. Do you not know
women?'

Dartrey blew his pooh-pooh on feminine suspicions.
'There's very little left of the Don Amoroso in me.
Women don't worship stone figures.'

' They do : — ^like the sea-birds. And what do you say to
me, Dartrey? — ^I can confess it: I am one of them: I
love you. When last you left England, I kissed your hand.
It was because of your manly heart in that stone figure.
I kept from crying : you used to scorn us English for the
"whimpering fits" you said we enjoy and must have — ^in
books, if we can't get them up for ourselves. I could have
prayed to have you as brother or son. I love mY„ j[ictor
the better forjiis love of you. Oh ! — poor soul — ^how he
is perverted since that buUdmg of Lakelands ! He cannot
take soundings of the things he does. Formerly he con-
Bded in me, in all things : now not one ;— I am the chief
person to deceive. __If only he had waited ! We are in a
network of intrigues and schemes, every artifice, id London
— tempting one to hate simple worthy people, who natur-
ally have their views, and see me an impostor, and tolerate
me, fascinated by him: — or bribed — ^it has to be said.
There are ways of bribeing. I trust he may not have in
the end to pay too heavily for succeeding. He seems a
man p^us^hed__b;LDmMnx.;„MLJn§§ESmM
responsible than most. He is desperately tempted by his
never failing! Whatever he does ! ... it is true ! And
it sets me thinking of those who have never had an ailment,
up to a certain age, when the killing blow comes. Latterly
I have seen into him : I never did before. Had I been
stronger, I might have saved, or averted. . . . But, you
will say, the stronger woman would not have occupied my
place. I must have been blind too. I did not see, that
his nature shrinks from the thing it calls up. He dreads
the exposure he courts — or has to combat with all his

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA 361

powers. It has been a revelation to me of him — ^life as
well. Nothing stops him. Now it is Parliament — a
vacant London Borough. He counts on a death : Ah !
terrible ! I have it like a snake's bite night and day.'

Nataly concluded : 'There : it has done me some good
to speak. I feel so base.' She breathed heavily.

Dartrey took her hand and bent his lips to it. ' Happy
the woman who has not more to speak ! How long will
Nesta stay here?'

'You will watch over her, Dartrey? She stays — ^her
father wishes — ^up to ... ah ! We can hardly be in such
extreme peril. He has her doctor, her lawyer, and her
butler — a favourite servant — to check, and influence, her.
She— you know who it is ! — does not. I-am Juow-fionvinced, J
mean persecution, ^^e was never a mean-minded woman.
Oh! I could wish shewere. "Theysay^Ke is going. Then
I am to be made an "honest woman of." Victor wants
Nesta, now that she is away, to stay until . . . You under-
stand. He feels she is safe from any possible kind of harm
with those good ladies. And I feel she is the safer for
having you near. Otherwise, how I should pray to have
you with us ! Daily I have to pass through, well, some-
thing like the ordeal of the red-hot ploughshares — and
without the innocence, dear friend ! But it 's best that
my girl should not have to be doing the same ; though she
would Jiave the innocence. But __she_ writhes under any ^
3f a blot. And for her to learn the things that are

would ^a-i
/^shadow')of
^SThe^wo

"the^vrorld, through her mother's history ! — and led to
know it by the falling away of friends, or say, acquaint-
ances ! However ignorant at present, she learns from a
mere nothing. I dread ! ... In a moment, she is a
blaze of light. There have been occurrences. Only
Victor could have overcome them ! I had to think it
better for my girl, that she was absent. We are in such
a whirl up there ! Sol work round agaia to ' ' how long ? ' '

362 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

and the picture of myself counting the breaths of a dying
woman. The other day I was told I was envied !'

'Battle, battle, battle; — ^for all of us, in every position !'
said Dartrey sharply, to clip a softness: 'except when
one 's attending on an invalid uncle. Then it 's peace ;
rather like extinction. And I can't be crying for the end
either. I bite my moustache and tap foot on the floor,
out of his hearing ; make believe I 'm patient. Now I '11
fetch Nesta.'

Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta's
shoulder. She held a telegram, and said to Nataly:
'What can this mean? It 's from my husband ; he puts
"Jacob": my husband's Christian name: — so like my
husband, where there 's no concealment ! There — ^he says :
"Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow." Can
it signify, affairs are bad with my husband in the city? '

It had that signification to Nataly's understanding. At
the same time, the pretty little woman's absurd lisping
repetition of 'my husband' did not seem without design
to inflict the wound it caused.

In reality, it was not malicious ; it came of the bewitch-
ment of a silly tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be
controlled: and after contrasting her fortunes with
Nataly's, on her way downstairs, she had comforted her-
self by saying, that at least she had a husband. She was
not aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a
small consolation in the indulgence : for Captain Dartrey
Fenellan admired this commanding figure of a woman,
who could not legally say that which the woman he
admired less, if at all, legally could say.

'I must leave you to interpret,' Nataly remarked.

Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style.
For this reason, she abstained from an intended leading
up to mention of the 'singular-looking lady' seen riding
with Miss Radnor more than once; and as to whom.

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA 363

Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just
now, when questioned, spoken very clearly. So the
mother's alarms were not raised.

And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey
subsequently; finding him colder than before Mrs.
Radnor's visit ; it was a pity, because a yoimg woman in
Miss Radnor's position should not by any possibility be
seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful
appearance.

She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the
championship bitter to her. Dartrey would not deliver an
opinion on Miss Radnor's conduct. He declined, more-
over, to assist in elucidating the telegram by ' looking here,'
and poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek. He was
petulantly whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted
at. And it was then — and then only or chiefly through
Nataly's recent allusion — that the man of honour had his
quaMngs in view of the quagmire, where he was planted
on an exceedingly narrow causeway, not of the firmest.
For she was a pretty Httle woman, one of the prize gifts of
the present education of women to the men who are for
having them quiescent domestic patterns ; and_her_arti-
ficial ingenuousness or candid frivolitii^ came Jo^ her by
gature'"t6~EEdle the nature of the gentleman on the other
bank of~lffie^ stream, and witch him to" the plunge, sof ''
greatly' mutuairy^regretted"'after takeir: an'oId^aUet to '
tEe^moon. ~

Dartrey escaped to the Club, where he had a friend.
The friend was Colonel Sudley, one of the modem studious
officers, not in good esteem with the authorities. He had
not forgiven Dartrey for the intemperateness which cut
off a brilliant soldier from the service. He was reduced to
acknowledge, however, that there was a sparkling defence
for him to reply with, in the shape of a f ortime gained :
and where we have a Society forcing us to live up to an

364 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

expensive level, very trying to a soldier's income, a fortune
gained will offer excuses for misconduct short of disloyal
or illegal. They talked of the state of the Army : we are
moving. True, and at the last Review, the 'march past'
was performed before a mounted generalissimo profoundly
asleep, head on breast. Our English military 'moving'
may now be likened to Somnolency on Horseback. ' Oh,
come, no rancour,' said the colonel ; ' you know he 's a
kind old boy at heart ; nowhere a more affectionate man
alive!'

'So the sycophants are sure of posts !'
' Come, I say ! He 's devoted to the Service.'
'Invalid him, and he shall have a good epitaph.'
' He 's not so responsible as the taxpayer.'
'There you touch home. Mother Goose can't imagine
the need for defence until a hand 's at her feathers.'
'What about her shrieks now and then?'
' Indigestion of a surfeit ? '

They were in a laughing wrangle when two acquaint-
ances of the colonel's came near. One of them recognized
Dartrey. He changed a prickly subject to one that is
generally as acceptable to the servants of Mars. His
companion said: 'Who is the girl out with Judith
Marsett?' He flavoured eulogies of the girl's good looks
in easy garrison English. She was praised for sitting her
horse well. One had met her on the parade, in the after-
noon, walking with Mrs. Marsett. Colonel Sudley had
seen them on horseback. He remarked to Dartrey:
'And by the way, you're a clean stretch ahead of us.
I 've seen you go by these windows, with the young lady
on one side, and a rather pretty woman on the other too.'
'Nothing is unseen in this town!' Dartrey rejoined.
Strolling to his quarters along the breezy parade at
night, he proposed to himself, that he would breathe an
immediate caution to Nesta. How had she come to know

SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 365

this Mrs. Marsett? But he was more seriously thinking
of what Colney Durance called 'The Mustard Plaster';
the satirist's phrase for warm relations with a married
fair one : and Dartrey, clear of any design to have it at
his breast, was beginning to take intimations of pricks
and burns. They are an almost positive cure of inflam-
matory internal conditions. They were really hard on
him, who had none to be cured.

The hour was nigh midnight. As he entered his hotel,
the porter ran off to the desk in his box, and brought him
a note, saying, that a lady had left it at half-past nine. —
Left it? — ^Then the lady could not be the alarming lady.
He was relieved. The words of the letter were cabalistic ;
these, beneath underlined address : —

' I beg you to call on me, if I do not see you this even-
ing. It is urgent; you will excuse me when I explain.
Not late to-morrow. I am sure you will not fail to come.
I could write what would be certain to bring you. I
dare not trust any names to paper.'

The signature was, Judith Marsett.

CHAPTER XXXI

SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A OONQUEROR's SERVICE
HAVE AT TIMES. TO DO KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF

THEMSELVES

By the very earliest of the trains shot away to light and
briny air from London's November gloom, which knows
the morning through increase of gasjets, httle Skepsey
was hurried over suburban chimneys, in his friendly third-
class carriage; where we have reminders of ancient
pastoral times peculiar to our country, as it may chance;

366 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

but where a man may speak to his neighbour right off
without being deemed offensive. That is homely. A
social fellow knitting closely to his fellows when he meets
them, enjoys it, even at the cost of imcushioned seats :
he can, if imps are in him, merryandrew as much as he
pleases ; detested punctilio does not reign there ; he can
proselytize for the soul's welfare; decry or uphold the
national drink; advertize a commercial Firm deriving
prosperity from the favour of the multitude; exhort to
patriotism. All is accepted. Politeness is the rule,
according to Skepsey's experience of the Southern part
of the third-class kingdom. And it is as well to mark the
divisions, for the better knowledge of our countrymen.
The North requires volumes to itself.

The hard-grained old pirate-stock Northward has built
the land, and is to the front when we are at our epic work.
Meanwhile it gets us a blowzy character, by shouldering
roughly among the children of civilization. Skepsey,
journeying one late afternoon up a Kentish line, had, in
both senses of the word, encountered a long-limbed navvy ;
an intoxicated, he was compelled by his manly modesty
to desire to think; whose loathly talk, forced upon the
hearing of a decent old woman opposite him, passed
baboonish behaviour; so much so, that Skepsey civilly
intervened; subsequently inviting him to leave the
carriage and receive a lesson at the station they were
nearing. Upon his promising faithfully, that it should
be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this
pygmy spark to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant
war in due sincerity; and he as faithfully, all honour,
promising not to let it bring about a breakage of the laws
of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed. So
they went forth.

Skepsey alluded to the incident, for an example of the
lamentable deficiency in science betrayed by most of our

SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 367

strong men when put to it ; and the bitter thought, that
he could count well nigh to a certainty on the total absence
of science in the long-armed navvy, whose fist on his nose
might have been as the magnet of a pin, was chief among
his reminiscences after the bout, destroying pleasure for
the lover of Old England's might. One blow would have
sent Skepsey travelling. He was not seriously struck once.
They parted, shaking hands ; the navvy confessing him-
self to have ' drunk a drop ' ; and that perhaps accounted
for his having been ' topped by a dot on him.'

He declined to make oath never to repeat his offence ;
but said, sending his vanquisher to the deuce, with an
amicable push at his shoulder, 'Damned if I ever forget
five foot five stretched six foot flat !'

Skepsey counted his feet some small amount higher;
but our hearty rovers' sons have their ballad moods when
giving or taking a thrashing. One of the third-class
passengers, a lad of twenty, became Skepsey's pupil, and
turned out clever with the gloves, and was persuaded to
enter the militia, and grew soon to be a corporal. Thus
there was profit of the affair, though the naArvy sank out
of sight. Let us hope and pray he will not insult the hear-
ing of females again. If only females knew how necessary
it is, for their sakes, to be able to give a lesson now and
then ! Ladies are positively opposed. And Judges too,
who dress so like them. The manhood of our country is
kept down, in consequence. Mr. Durance was right, when
he said something about the state of war_bgi^"^anted ^
to weld our races together: and yet we are always pray-
ing for the state of peace, which causes cracks and gaps
among jigj Was"that whatTie" meant by illogical? It
seemed to Skepsey — oddly, considering his inferior esti-
mate of the value of the fair sex — ^that a young woman
with whom he had recently made acquaintance; and
who was in Brighton now, upon mis'sionary work; a

368 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

member of the 'Army,' an ofi&cer of advancing rank,
Matilda Pridden, by name; was nearer to the secret
of the right course of conduct for individual citizens and
the entire country than any gentleman he knew.

Yes, nearer to it than his master was ! Thinking of
Mr. Victor Radnor, Skepsey fetched a sigh. He had
knocked at his master's door at the oJQfice one day, and
imagining the call to enter, had done so, and had seen a
thing he could not expunge. Lady Grace Halley was
there. From matters he gathered, Skepsey guessed her
to be working for his master among the great folks, as he
did with Jarniman, and Mr. Fenellan with Mr. Carling.
But is it usual, he asked himself— his natural veneration
framing the rebuke to his master thus — to repay the ser-
vices of a lady so warmly ? — We have all of us an ermined
owl within us to sit in judgement of our superiors as well
as our equals ; and the little man, notwithstanding a ser-
vant's bounden submissiveness, was forced to hear the
judicial pronouncement upon his master's behaviour. His
master had, at the same time, been saying most weighty
kind words more and more of late : one thing : — that, if
he gave all he had to his fellows, and did all he could,
he should still be in their debt. And he was a very
wealthy gentleman. What are we to think? The ways
of our superiors are wonderful. We do them homage:
still we feel, we painfully feel, we are beginning to worship
elsewhere. It is the pain of a detachment of the very
roots of our sea-weed heart from a rock. Mr. Victor
Radnor was an honour to his country. Skepsey did not
place the name of Matilda Pridden beside it or in any way
compare two such entirely different persons. At the
same time and most earnestly, while dreading to hear, he
desired to have Matilda Pridden's opinion of the case
;' ' / ' n distressing him. He never could hear it, because he could
■ ' never be allowed to expound the case to her. Skepsey

•I

■.)

SQXHRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 369

sighed again : he as much as uttered : Oh, if we had a
few thousands like her ! — ^But what if we do have them ?
They won't marry ! There they are, all that the coxmtry
requires in wives and mothers; and like Miss Priscilla
Graves, they won't marry !

He looked through sad thoughts across the benches of
the compartments to the farther end of the carriage,
where sat the Rev. Septimus Barmby, looking at him
through a meditation as obscure if not so mournful. Few
are the third-class passengers outward at that early hour
in the winter season, and Skepsey's gynuiastics to get
beside the Rev. Septimus were unimpeded; though a
tight-packed carriage of us poor joumaliers would not
have obstructed thein with as much as a sneer. Mr.
Barmby and Skepsey greeted. The latter said, he had a
holiday, to pay a visit to Miss Nesta. The former said,
he hoped he should see Miss Nesta. Skepsey then rapidly
brought the conversation to a point where Matilda Pridden
was comprised. He discoursed of the 'Army' and her
position in the Army, giving instances of her bravery, the
devotion shown by her to the cause of morality, in aU
its forms. Mr. Barmby had his fortunes on his hands at
the moment, he could not lend an attentive ear ; and he
disliked this Army, the title it had taken, and the mixing
of women and men in its ranks ; not to speak of a pre-
sumption in its proceedings, and the public marching and
singing. Moreover, he enjoyed his one or two permissible
glasses : he doubted that the Chiefs of the Army had
conmion benevolence for the inoffensive pipe. But the
cause of moraUty was precious to him; morality and a
fit of softness, and the union of the happiest contrast of
voices, had set him for a short while, before the dawn of
Nesta's day, hankering after Priscilla Graves. Skepsey's
narrative of Matilda Pridden's work down at the East of
London, was effective ; it had the ring to thrill a responsive

S70 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

chord in Mr. Barmby, who mused on London's East,
and martyrly service there. His present expectations
were of a very different sort; but a beautiful bride,
bringing us wealth, is no misleading beam, if we direct
the riches rightly. Septimus, a solitary minister in those
grisly haunts of the misery breeding vice, must needs
accomplish less than a Septimus the husband of one of
England's chief heiresses : — only not the most brilliant,
owing to circumstances known to the Rev. Groseman
Buttermore: strangely, and opportunely, revealed: for
her exceeding benefit, it may be hoped. She is no longer
the ignorant girl, to reject the protecting hand of one
whose cloth is the best of cloaking. A glance at Dudley
Sowerby's defection, assures our worldly wisdom too,
that now is the time to sue.

Several times while Mr. Barmby made thus his pudding
of the desires of the flesh and the spirit, Skepsey's tales
of Matilda Pridden's heroism caught his attention. He
liked her deeds; he disliked the position in which the
young woman placed herself to perform- them ; and he
said so. Women are to be women, he said.

Skepsey agreed : ' If we could get men to do the work,
sir!'

Mr. Barmby was launching forth : Plenty of men ! — His
mouth was blocked by the reflection, that we count the
men on our fingers ; often are we, as it were, an episcopal
thumb surveying scarce that number of followers ! He
diverged to censure of the marchings and the street-
singing: the impediment to traffic, the annoyance to a
finely musical ear. He disapproved altogether of Matilda
Pridden's military display, pronouncing her to be,
' Doubtless a worthy young person.'

'Her age is twenty-seven,' said Skepsey, spying at the
number of his own.

' You have known her long ? ' Mr. Barmby asked.

SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 371

'Not long, sir. She has gone through trouble. She
believes very strongly in the will : — If I will this, if I will
that, and it is the right will, not wickedness, it is done —
as good as done ; and force is quite superfluous. In her
sermons, she exhorts to prayer before action.'

'Preaches?'

' She moves a large assembly, sir.'

'It would seem, that England is becoming American-
ized!' exclaimed the Conservative in Mr. Barmby. Al-
most he groaned ; and his gaze was fish-like in vacancy,
on hearing the little man speak of the present intrepid
forwardness of the sex to be pubEcly doing~ It is for
men^theJ^sFmcBgest^ of our century : one that

by contrast throws an overearthly holiness on^our de-
coroiS^ dutiful mothers, who contentedly worked below
the surface while^men unjeniittin^ly _atteflded to jtheir
iSterests above.

"" Bkepsey"^^ forth a paper-covered shilling-book: a
translation from the French, under a yelling title of savage
hate of Old England and cannibal glee at her doom. Mr.
Barmby dropped ms eyelashes on it, without comment;
nor did he reply to Skepsey's forlorn remark : ' We let
them think they could do it !'

Behold the downs. Breakfast is behind them. Miss
Radnor likewise : if the poor child has a name. We pro-
pose to supply the deficiency. She does not declare war
upon tobacco. She has a cultured and a beautiful voice.
We abstain from enlargeing on the charms of her person.
She has resources, which representatives of a rival creed
would plot to secure. -

' Skepsey, you have your quarters at the house of Miss
Radnor's relatives?' said Mr. Barmby, as they emerged
from tunnelled chalk. 'Mention, that I think of calling
in the course of the day.'

A biscuit had been their breakfast without a name.

■^

372 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

They parted at the station, roused by the smell of salt to
bestow a more legitimate title on the day's restorative
beginning. Down the hill, along by the shops, and
Skepsey, in sight of Miss Nesta's terrace, considered it
still an early hour for a visitor ; so, to have the sea about
him, he paid pier-money, and hurried against the briny
wings of a South-wester; green waves, curls of foam,
flecks of silver, under low-flying grey-dark cloud-curtains
shaken to a rift, where at one shot the sun had a line of
Nereids nodding, laughing, sparkling to him. Skepsey
enjoyed it, at the back of thoughts military and naval.
Visible sea, this girdle of Britain, inspired him to exul-
tations in reverence. He wished Mr. Durance could
behold it now and have such a breastful. He was wishing
he knew a song of Britain and sea, rather fancying Mr.
Durance to be in some way a bar to patriotic poetical
recollection, when he saw his Captain Dartrey mounting
steps out of an iron anatomy of the pier, and looking like
a razor off a strap.

'Why, sir!' cried Skepsey.

'Just a plunge and a dozen strokes,' Dartrey said;
'and you '11 come to my hotel and give me ten minutes of
the "recreation"; and if you don't come wiUingly, I
shall insult your country.'

' Ah ! I wish Mr. Durance were here,' Skepsey rejoined.

'It would upset his bumboat of epigrams. He rises at
ten o'clock to a queasy breakfast by candlelight, and pro-
ceeds to composition. His picture of the country is a
portrait of himself by the artist.'

'But, sir, Captain Dartrey, you don't think as Mr.
Durance does of England!'

'There are lots to flatter her, Skepsey! A drilling
can't do her harm. You 're down to see Miss Nesta.
Ladies don't receive quite so early. And have you break-
fasted? Come on with me quick.' Dartrey led him on,

SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 373

saying : 'You have an eye at my stick. It was a legacy
to me, by word of mouth, from a seaman of a ship I sailed
in, who thought I had done him a service; and he died
after all. He fell overboard drunk. He perished of the
Villain stuff. One of his messmates handed me the stick
in Cape Town, sworn to deliver it. A good knot to grasp ;
and it 's flexible and strong ; stick or rattan, whichever
you please; it gives point or caresses the shoulder;
there 's no break in it, whack as you may. They call it
a Demerara supple-jack. I 'U leave it to you.'

Skepsey declared his intention to be the first to depart.
He tried the temper of the stick, bent it a bit, and admired
the prompt straightening.

'It would give a good blow, sir.'

'Does its business without braining.'

Perhaps for the reason, that it was not a handsome in-
strument for display on fashionable promenades, Dartrey
chose it among his collection by preference ; as ugly dogs
of a known fidelity are chosen for companions. The
Demerara supple-jack surpasses biiU-dogs in its fashion of
assisting the master; for when once at it, the clownish-
looking thing reflects upon him creditably, by developing
a refined courtliness of style, while in no way showing a
diminution of jolly ardour for the fray. It will deal you
the stroke of a bludgeon with the playfulness of a cane.
It bears resemblance to those accomplished natural
actors, who conversationally present a dramatic situation
in two or three spontaneous flourishes, and are themselves
again, men of the world, the next minute.

Skepsey handed it back. He spoke of a new French
rifle. He mentioned, in the form of query for no answer,
the translation of the barking little volume he had shown
to Mr. Barmby: he slapped at his breast-pocket, where
it was. Not a ship was on the sea-line ; and he seemed
to deplore that vacancy.

374 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'But it tells both ways,' Dartrey said. 'We don't
want to be hectoring in the Channel. All we want, is to
be sure of our power, so as not to go hunting and fawning
for alliances. Up along that terrace Miss Nesta lives.
Brighton would be a choice place for a landing.'

Skepsey temporized, to get his national defences, by
pleading the country's love of peace.

'Then you give-up your portion of the gains of war —
an awful disgorgement,' said Dartrey. 'If you are really
for peace, you toss all your spare bones to the war-dogs.
Otherwise, Quakerly preaching is taken for hypocrisy.'

'I 'm afraid we are illogical, sir,' said Skepsey, adopt-
ing one of the charges of Mr. Durance, to elude the
abominable word.

'In you run, my friend.' Dartrey sped him up the
steps of the hotel.

A little note lay on his breakfast-table. His invalid
uncle's valet gave the morning's report of the night.

The note was from Mrs. Blathenoy : she begged Cap-
tain Dartrey, in double underlinings of her brief words, to
mount the stairs. He debated, and he went.

She was excited, and showed a bosom compressed to ex-
plode : she had been weeping. ' My husband is off. He
bids me follow him. What would you have me do?'

'Go.'

' You don't care what may happen to your friends, the
Radnors ? '

' Not at the cost of your separation from your husband.'

'You have seen him !'

'Be serious.'

' Oh, you cold creature ! You know — you see : I can't
conceal. And you tell me to go. "Go!" Gracious
heavens ! I 've no claim on you ; I haven't been able to
do much ; I would have — ^never mind ! believe me or not.
And now I 'm to go : on the spot, I suppose. You 've

SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 375

seen the man I 'm to go to, too. I would bear it, if it

were not away from . . . out of sight of I 'm a fool

of a woman, I know. There 's frankness for you ! and
I could declare you're saying "impudence" in your
heart — or what you have for one. Have you one?'

'My dear soul, it's a flint. So just think of your
duty.' Dartrey played the horrid part of executioner
with some skill.

Her bosom sprang to descend into abysses.

'And never a greater fool than when I sent for you to
see such a face as I 'm showing !' she cried, with hps that
twitched and fingers that plucked at her belt. ' But you
might feel my hatred of being tied to — dragged about over
the Continent by that . . . perhaps you think a woman
is not sensible of vulgarity in her husband ! I 'm bother-
ing you? I don't say I have the slightest claim. You
never made love to me, never ! Never so much as pressed
my hand or looked. Others have — ^as much as I let them.
And before I saw you, I had not an idea of another man
but that man. So you advise me to go?'

'There 's no other course.'

' No other course. I don't see one. What have I been
dreaming of ! Usually a woman feeling ..." she struck
at her breast, 'has had a soft word in her ear. "Go !"
I don't blame you, Captain Dartrey. At least, you 're not
the man to punish a woman for stripping herself, as I 've
done. I call myself a fool — ^I 'm a lunatic. Trust me
with your hand.'

'There you are.'

She grasped the hand, and shut her eyes to make a long
age of the holding on to him. ' Oh, you dear dear f eUow !
— don't think me imwomanly ; I must tell you now : I am
naked and can't disguise. I see you are ice — ^feel : and
if you were different, I might be. You won't be hurt by
hearing you 've made yourself dear to me — ^without

376 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

meaning to, I know ! It began that day at Lakelands ;
I fell in love with you the very first minute I set eyes on
you ! There 's a confession for a woman to make ! —
and a married woman ! I 'm married, and I no more feel
allegiance, as they call it, than if there never had been a
ceremony and no Jacob Blathenoy was in existence. And
why I should go to him ! — But you shan't be troubled.
I did not begin to live, as a woman, before I met you. I
can speak all this to you because — we women can't be
deceived in that — you are one of the men who can be
counted on for a friend.'

'I hope so,' Dartrey said, and his mouth hardened as
nature's electricity shot sparks into him from the touch
and rocked him.

'No, not yet : I will soon let it drop,' said she, and she
was just then thrillingly pretty; she caressed the hand,
placing it at her throat and moving her chin on it, as
women fondle birds. 'I am positively to go, then?'

'Positively, you are to go ; and it 's my command.'

'Not in love with any one at all?'

'Not with a soul.'

'Not with a woman?'

'With no woman.'

'Nor maid?'

'No! and no to everything. And an end to the
catechism!'

' It is really a flint that beats here ? ' she said, and with
a shyness in adventurousness, she struck the point of her
forefinger on the rib. 'Fancy me in love with a flint!
And running to be dutiful to a Jacob Blathenoy, at my
flint's command. I 'm half in love with doing what I
hate, because this cold thing here bids me do it. I believe
I married for money, and now it looks as if I were to have
my bargain with poverty to bless it.'

'There I may help,' said Dartrey, relieved at sight of a

SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 377

loophole, to spring to some initiative out of the paralysis
cast on him by a pretty little woman's rending of her veil.
A man of honour alone with a woman who has tossed J
concealment to the wm95^ is aTndgiedrtarget iiSee"d"r he is
"TrnpEeSTtotEe peril of cajoleing, that he may esc^ie from
the torment and the ridicule ; he is tempted to sigh for the
gallant spirit of his naughty adolescence. 'Come to me
— wiU you? — ^apply to me, if there 's ever any need. I
happen to have money. And forgive me for naming it.'

She groaned : ' Don't ! I 'm sure, and I thought it
from the first, you 're one of the good men, and the woman
who meets you is lucky, and wretched, and so she ought
to be ! Only to you should 1 1 ... do believe that ! I
won't speak of what excuses I 've got. You 've seen.'

'Don't think of them : there '11 be danger in it.'

'Shall you think of me in danger?'

' Silly, silly ! Don't you see you have to do with a flint !
I 've gone through fire. And if I were in love with you,
I should start you off to your husband this blessed day.'

'And you 're not the slightest wee wee bit in love with
me!'

'Perfectly true; but I like you; and if we're to be
hand in hand, in the time to come, you must walk firm at
present.'

'I 'm to go to-day?'

'You are.'

'Without . . . one? I dare say we shan't meet
again.'

The riddled target kicked. Dartrey contrasted Jacob
Blathenoy with the fair wife, and commiseratingly exon-
erated her; he lashed at himself for continuing to be in
this absurdest of postures, and not absolutely secure for
all that. His head shook. ' Friends, you '11 find best.'

'Well !' she sighed, 'I feel I 'm doomed to go famished
through life. There 's never to be such a thing as love, for

378 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

me ! I can't tell you — no woman could : though you '11
say I 've told enough. I shall bum with shame when I
think of it. I could go on my knees to have your arms
round me once. I could kill myself for saying it ! — ^I
should feel that I had one moment of real life. — I know
I ought to admire you. They say a woman hates if she 's
refused. I can't : I wish I were able to. I could have
helped the Radnors better by staying here and threaten-
ing never to go to him unless he swore not to do them
injury. He 's revengeful. Just as you like. You say
" Go," and I go. There. I may kiss your hand ? '

'Give me yours.'

Dartrey kissed the hand. She kissed the mark of his
lips. He got himself away, by promising to see her to the
train for Paris. Outside her door, he was met by the
reflection, coming as a thing external, that he might vera^
ciously and successfully have pleaded a passionate hunger
for breakfast : nay, that he would have done so, if he had
been downright in earnest. For she had the prettiness to
cast a spell ; a certain curve at the lips, a fluttering droop
of the eyelids, a comer of the eye, that led long distances
away to forests and nests. This little woman had the
rosy-peeping June bud's plumpness. What of the man
who refused to kiss her once? Cold antecedent immer-
sion had to be thanked ; and stringent vacuity ; perhaps
a spotting ogre-image of her possessor. Some sense of
right-doing also, we hope. Dartrey angrily attributed
his good conduct to the lowest motives. He went so far
as to accuse himself of having forborne to speak of break-
fast, from a sort of fascinated respect for the pitch of a
situation that he despised and detested. Then again,
when beginning to eat, his good conduct drew on him a
chorus of the jeers of all the martial comrades he had
known. But he owned he would have had less excuse
than they, had he taken advantage of a woman's inability,

SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE 379

at a weak moment, to protect herself : or rather, if he had
not behaved in a manner to protect her from herself. He
thought of his buried wife, and the noble in the base of
that poor soul ; needing constantly a present helper, for
the nobler to conquer. Be true man with a woman, she
must be viler than the devil has yet made one, if she does
not follow a strong right lead : — but be patient, of course.
And the word patience here means more than most men
contain. Certainly a man Uke Jacob Blathenoy was a
mouthful for any woman : and he had bought his wife, he
deserved no pity. Not? Probably not. That view,
however, is unwholesome and opens on slides. Pity of his
wife, too, gets to be fervidly active with her portrait,
fetches her breath about us. As for condemnation of the
poor little woman, her case was not unexampled, though
the sudden flare of it startled rather. Mrs. Victor could
read men and women closely. Yes, and Victor, when he
schemed — ^but Dartrey declined to be throwing blame
right or left. More than by his breakfast, and in a pre-
ferable direction, he was refreshed by Skepsey's narrative
of the deeds of Matilda Pridden.

'The right sort of girl for you to know, Skepsey,' he
said. 'The best in life is a good woman.'

Skepsey exhibited his book of the Gallic howl.

'They have their fits now and then, and they 're soon
over and forgotten,' Dartrey said. 'The worst of it is,
that we remember.'

After the morning's visit to his uncle, he peered at half
a dozen sticks in the comer of the room, grasped their
handles, and selected the Demerara supple-jack, for no
particular reason ; the curved knot was easy to the grasp.
It was in his mind, that this person signing herself Judith
Marsett, might have something to say, which intimately
concerned Nesta. He fell to brooding on it, until he
wondered why he had not been made a trifle anxious by

380 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the reading of the note overnight. Skepsey was left at
Nesta's house.

Dartrey found himself expected by the servant waiting
on Mrs. Marsett.

CHAPTER XXXII

SHOWS HOW TEMPER, MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AH
INDIGNANT WOMAN GET HER WEAPON

Judith Marsett stood in her room to receive Nesta's
hero. She was flushed, and had thinned her lips for utter-
ance of a desperate thing, after the first severe formalities.

Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum. She
was at the same time burning to speak out furious wrath,
in words of savage rawness, if they should come, as a
maimer of slapping the world's cheek for the state to
which it reduces its women; whom one of the superior
creatures can insult, and laugh.

Men complaining of the 'peace which is near their ex-
tinction,' have but to shuffle with the sex; they will
experience as remarkable a change as if they had passed
off land on to sea.

Dartrey had some flitting notion of the imtamed
original elements women can bring about us, in his short
observant bow to Mrs. Marsett, following so closely upon
the scene with Mrs. Blathenoy.

But this handsome woman's look of the dull red line of
a sombre fire, that needed only stir of a breath to shoot
the blaze, did not at all alarm him. He felt refreshingly
strung by it.

She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic
member of regions where the senses perpetually simifier
when they are not boiling. The talk at the Club recurred

HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER 381

to him. How could Nesta have come to -know the
woman? His questioning of the chapter of marvellous
accidents, touched Nesta simply, as a young girl to be
protected, without abhorrently involving the woman.
He had his ideas of the Spirit of Woman stating her case
to the One Judge, for lack of an earthly just one : a story
different from that which is proclaimed pestilential by
the body of censors under conservatory glass; where
flesh is delicately nurtured, highly prized; spirit not so
much so; and where the pretty tricking of the flesh is
taken for a spiritual ascendancy.

In spite of her turbulent breast's biu-den to deliver, Mrs.
Marsett's feminine acuteness was aUve upon Dartrey,
confirming here and there Nesta's praises of him. She
liked his build and easy carriage of a muscular frame :
her Ned was a heavy man. More than Dartrey's figure,
as she would have said, though the estimate came second,
she liked his manner with her. Not a doubt was there,
that he read her position. She could impose upon some :
not upon masculine eyes like these. They did not
scrutinize, nor ruffle a smooth surface with a snap at
petty impressions ; and they were not cynically intimate
or dominating or tentatively amorous : clear good fellow-
ship was in them. And it was a blessedness (whatever
might be her feeling later, whenTslie^caimeTo" thank him
at heart) to be in the presence of a man whose appearance
breatEed~of off enng~Eer' common "ground", whereon to
meet and speak together, unburdened by t£e hunting
world, and by the stoneing world. Such common ground
seems a kind of celestial to the better order of those
excluded from it.

Dartrey relieved her midway in a rigid practice of the
formalities: 'I think I may guess that you have some-
thing to tell me relating to Miss Radnor?'

'It is.' Mrs. Marsett gathered up for an immediate

382 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

plunge, and deferred it. 'I met her — ^we went out with
the riding-master. She took to me. I like her — ^I could
say' (the woman's voice dropped dead low, in a tremble),
'I love her. She is young: — I could kneel to her. Do
you know a Major Worrell?'

'Worrell? no.'

'He is a — calls himself a friend of my — of Captain
Marsett's. He met us out one day.'

'He permitted himself to speak to Miss Radnor?'

She rejoiced in Dartrey's look. 'Not then. First let
me tell you. I can hardly tell you. But Miss Radnor
tells me you are not like other men. You have made your
conclusions already. Are you asking what right I had to
be knowing her? It is her goodness. Accident began
it ; I did not deceive her ; as soon as ever I could I — I
have Captain Marsett's promise to me : at present he 's
situated, he — but I opened my heart to her : as much as
a woman can. It came ! Did I do very wrong?'

'I 'm not here to decide : continue, pray.'

Mrs. Marsett aimed at formal speech, and was driving
upon her natural in anger. 'I swear I did it for the best.
She is an umocent girl . , . young lady: only she has
a head ; she soon reads things. I saw the kind of cloud
in her. I spoke. I felt bound to: she said she would
not forsake me. — I was bound to ! And it was enough to
break my heart, to think of her despising me. No, she
forgave, pitied ;|;she was kind. Those are the angels who
cause us to think of changeing. I don't care for sermons,
but when I meet charity: — ^I won't bore you !'

'You don't.'

'My . . . Captain Marsett can't bear — ^he calls it
Psalmody. He thinks things ought always to be as they
are, with women and men ; and women preachers he does
detest. She is not one to preach. You are waiting to
hear what I have to tell. That man Major Worrell has

HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER 383

tried to rob me of everything I ever had to set a value
on : — ^love, I 'd say ; — he laughs at a woman like me
loving.'

Dartrey nodded, to signify a known sort of fellow.

'She came here.' Mrs. Marsett's tears had risen. 'I
ought not to have let her come. I invited her — ^for once :
I am lonely. None of my sex — ^none I could respect ! I
meant it for only once. She promised to sing to me.
And, Oh! how she sings! You have heard her. My
whole heart came out. I declare I believe girls exist
who can hear our way of life — ^and I 'm not so bad except
compared with that angel, who heard me, and was and is,
I could take oath, no worse for it. Some girls can ; she
is one. I am all for bringing them up in complete inno-
cence. If I was a great lady, my daughters should never
know anything of the world until they were married.
But Miss Radnor is a young lady who cannot be hurt.
She is above us. Oh ! what a treasure for a man ! — and
my God ! for any man born of woman to insult a saint,
as she is ! — ^He is a beast !'

'Major Worrell met her here?'

' Blame me as much as you like : I do myself. Half
my rage with him is at myself for putting her in the way
of such a beast to annoy. Each time she came, I said it
was to be the last. I let her see what a mercy from
heaven she was to me. She would come. It has not
been many times. She wishes me either to . . . Captain
Marsett has promised. And nothing seems hard to me
when my own God's angel is by. She is ! I 'm not such
a bad woman, but I never before I. knew her knasLlhe
meaning of the word virtue. There is the young lady
that man worried with his insulting remarks ! though
he must have known she was a lady : — because he found
her in my rooms.'

'You were present when, as you say, he insulted her?'

384 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'I was. Here it commenced; and he would see her
downstairs.'

'You heard?'

' Of course, I never left her.'

'Give me a notion . . .'

'To get her to make an appointment: to let him con-
duct her home.'

'She was alone?'

'Her maid was below.'

'And this happened . . .?'

'Yesterday, after dark. My Ned — Captain Marsett
encourages him to be familiar. I should be the lowest of
women if I feared the threats of such a reptile of a man.
I could tell you more. I can't always refuse his visits,
though if Ned knew the cur he is ! Captain Marsett is
easy-going.'

'I should like to know where he lives.'

She went straight to the mantelpiece, and faced about
with a card, handing it, quite aware that it was a charge
of powder.

Desperate things to be done excused the desperate
said ; and especially they seemed a cover to the bald and
often spotty language leaping out of her, against her better
taste, when her temper was up.

'Somewhere not very distant,' said Dartrey perusing.
'Is he in the town to-day, do you know?'

'I am not sure; he may be. Her name . . ,'

'Have no fear. Ladies' names are safe.'

'I am anxious that she may not be insulted again.'

'Did she show herself conscious of it?'

' She stopped speaking : she looked at the door. She
may come again — or never ! through that man !'

'You receive him, at his pleasure?'

'Captain Marsett wishes me to. He is on his way
home. He calls Major Worrell my pet spite. All I want

HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER 385

is, not to hear of the man. I swear he came yesterday on
the chance of seeing — ^for he forced his way up past my
servant ; he must have seen Miss Radnor's maid below.'

'You don't mean, that he insulted her hearing?'

' Oh ! Captain Fenellan, you know the style.'

'Well, I thank you,' Dartrey said. 'The young lady
is the daughter of my dearest friends. She 's one of
the precious — you 're quite right. Keep the tears
back.'

'I will.' She heaved open-mouthed to get physical
control of the tide. 'When you say that of her! — ^how
can I help it ? It 's I fear, because I fear , . . and I 've
no right to expect ever . . . but if I 'm never again to
look on that dear face, tell her I shall — I shall pray for
her in my grave. Tell her she has done all a woman can,
an angel can, to save my soul. I speak truth : my very
soul ! I could never go to the utter bad after knowing
her. I don't — you know the world — I 'm a poor helpless
woman! — don't swear to give up my Ned if he does
break the word he promised once; I can't see how I
could. I haven't her courage. I haven't — what it is ! —
You know her : it 's in her eyes and her voice. If I had
her beside me, then I could starve or go to execution — I
could, I am certain. Here I am, going to do what you
men hate. Let me sit.'

'Here's a chair,' said Dartrey. 'I've no time to
spare; good day, for the present. You will permit me
to call.'

'Oh! come'; she cried, out of her sobs, for excuse.
They were genuine, or she would better have been able to
second her efforts to catch a distinct vision of his retreat-
ing figure.

She beheld him, when he was in the street, turn for the
district where Major Worrell had his lodgeings. That set
her mind moving, and her tears fell no longer.

386 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Major Worrell was not at home. Dartrey was in-
formed that he might be at his Club.

At the Club he heard of the major as having gone to
London and being expected down in the afternoon.
Colonel Sudley named the train: an early train; the
major was engaged to dine at the Club. Dartrey had
information supplied to him concerning Major Worrell and
Captain Marsett, also Mrs. Marsett. She had a history.
Worthy citizens read the description of history with
interest when the halo of Royalty is round it. They may,
if their reading extends, perceive, that it has been the main
turbid stream in old Mammon's train since he threw his
bait for flesh. They might ask, too, whether it is likely
to cease to flow whUe he remains potent. The lady's
history was brief, and bore recital in a Club; came off
quite honourably there. Regarding Major Worrell, the
tale of him showed him to have a pass among men. He
managed cleverly to get his pleasures out of a small income
and a 'fund of anecdote.' His reputation indicated an
anecdotist of the table, prevailing in the primitive
societies, where the art of conversing does not come by
nature, and is exercised in monosyllabic undertones or
grunts until the narrator's well-masticated popular
anecdote loosens a digestive laughter, and some talk
ensues. He was Marsett's friend, and he boasted of not
letting Ned Marsett make a fool of himself.

Dartrey. wasjMJ6Bg.JiILgll^^ :

Worrell belonged to the male birds of upper air, who
mangle what female prey th^^re forBi3den"To~dev5ur.
And he Fad"MlssTRiHnor's~name: "he had sp^inTfier
name at the Club overnight. He had roused a sensation,
because of a man being present, Percy Southweare, who
was related to a man as good as engaged to marry her.
The major never fell into a quarrel with sons of nobles,
if he could help it, or there might have been a pretty one.

HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER 387

So Colonel Sudley said.

Dartrey spoke musing: 'I don't know how he may
class me ; I have an account to square with him.'

'It won't do in these days, my good friend. Come
and cool yourself ; and we '11 lunch here. I shan't leave
you.'

' By all means. We '11 lunch, and walk up to the
station, and you will point him out to me.'

Dartrey stated Major Worrell's offence. The colonel
was not astonished; but evidently he thought less of
Worrell's behaviour to Miss Radnor in Mrs. Marsett's
presence than of the mention of her name at the Club :
and that, he seemed to think, had a shade of excuse
against the charge of monstrous. He blamed the young
lady who could go twice to visit a Mrs. Marsett; partly
exposed a suspicion of her. Dartrey let him talk. They
strolled along the parade, and were near the pier.

Suddenly saying : ' There, beside our friend in clerical
garb : here she comes ; judge if that is the girl for the
foulest of curs to worry, no matter where she's found.'
Dartrey directed the colonel's attention to Nesta and
Mr. Barmby turning off the pier and advancing.

He saluted. She bowed. There was no contraction of
her eyelids; and her face was white. The mortal life
appeared to be deadened in her cold wide look ; as when
the storm-wind banks a leaden remoteness, leaving blown
space of sky.

The colonel said : ' No, that 's not the girl a gentleman
would offend.'

'What man !' cried Dartrey. 'If we had a Society for
the trial of your gentleman! — but he has only to call
himself gentleman to get grant of licence : and your
Society protects him. It won't punish, and it won't let
you. But you saw her : ask yourself — what man could
offend that girl !'

388 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

' Still, my friend, she ought to keep clear of the
Marsetts.'

' When I meet him, I shall treat him as one out of the
law.'

'You lead on to an ultimate argument with the hang-
man.'

' We '11 dare it, to waken the old country. Old Eng-
land will count none but Worrells in time. As for discreet,
if you like! — the young lady might have been more
discreet. She 's a girl with a big heart. If we were all
everlastingly discreet !'

Dartrey may have meant, that the consequence of a
prolonged conformity would be the generation of stenches
to shock to purgeing tempests the tolerant heavens over
such smooth stagnancy. He had his ideas about move-
ment; about the good of women, and the health of his
England. The feeling of the hopelessness of pleading
Nesta's conduct, for the perfect justification of it to son
or daughter of our impressing conventional world — even
to a friend, that friend a true man, a really chivalrous
man! — drove him back in a silence upon his natural
brotherhood with souls that dare do. It was a wonder,
to think of his finding this kinship jn a woman. In a
"girl ? — and~The world holding that virgin spirit to be
unclean or s"EaHowedIhe.fi&lliSe..Jtg. rays were shed on foul
places? He clasped the girl. Her smitten clear face,
tHeTace of the second sigh after torture, bent him in
devotion to her image.

The clasping and the worshipping were independent of
personal ardours: quaintly mixed with semi-paternal
recollections of the little 'blue butterfly' of the days
at Craye Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of
Dudley Sowerby's pretensions to; her hand. Nesta's
youthfulness cast double age on him from the child's
past. He pictured the child ; pictured the girl, with her

A PAIR OF WOOERS 389

look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate wide
world, where her noble compassion for a woman had
unexpectedly, painfully, almost by transubstantiation,
rack-screwed her to woman's mind. And above sorrow-
ful, holy were those eyes.

They held sway over Dartrey, and lost it some steps
on; his demon temper urgeing him to strike at Major
Worrell, as the cause of her dismayed expression. He was
not the happier for dropping to his nature; but we
proceed more easily, all of us, when the strain which lifts
us a foot or two off our native level is relaxed.

CHAPTER XXXm

A PAIR OF WOOERS

That ashen look of the rise out of death from one of our
mortal wounds, was caused by deeper convulsions in
Nesta's bosom than Dartrey could imagine.

She had gone for the walk with Mr. Barmby, reading
the omen of his tones in the request. Dorothea and
Virginia would have her go. The clerical gentleman, a
friend of the Rev. Abram Posterley; and one who de-
plored poor Mr. Posterley's infatuation ; and one besides
who belonged to Nesta's musical choir in London;
seemed a safe companion for the child. The grand organ
of Mr. Barmby's voice, too, assured them of a devout
seriousness in him, that arrested any scrupulous little
questions. They could not conceive his uttering the non-
sensical empty stuff, compliments to their beauty and
what not, which girls hear sometimes from inconsiderate
gentlemen, to the having of their heads turned. More-
over, Nesta had rashly promised her father's faithful

390 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

servant Skepsey to walk out with him in the afternoon;
and the ladies hoped she would find the morning's walk to
have been enough ; good little man though Skepsey was,
they were sure. But there is the incongruous for young
women of station on a promenade.

Mr. Barmby headed to the pier. After pacing up and
down, between the briny gulls and a polka-band, he made
his way forethoughtfuUy to the glass-sheltered seats front-
ing East : where, as his enthusiasm for the solemnity of
the occasion excited him to say, 'We have a view of the
terraces and the cliffs'; and where not more than two
"enwrapped invalid figures were ensconsed. Then it was,
that Nesta recalled her anticipation of his possible design ;
forgotten by her during their talk of her dear people:
Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, and the Yatts, and
Simeon Fenellan, Peridon and Catkin, and Skepsey like-
wise; and the very latest news of her mother. She
wished she could have run before him, to spare him. He
would not notice a sign. Girls must wait and hear.

It was an oratorio. She watched the long wave roll on
to the sinking into its fellow; and onward again for the
swell and the weariful lapse; and up at last bursting to
the sheet of white. The far-heard roar andjihs-near-com^
mingled^_giving_Mr.""^Barmby j, aembTance JiD- the .pQwers
oFocean,

At the first direct note, the burden of which necessi-
tated a pause, she petitioned him to be her friend, to
think of himself as her friend.

But a vessel laden with merchandize, that has crossed

, J wild seas for this particular port, is hardly to be debarred

from discharging its goods on the quay by simple intima-

, tions of their not being wanted. We are precipitated

\yj] « ''^ both by the aim and the tedium of the lengthened voyage

^ jf> to insist that they be seen. We believe perforce in their

-.'-' temptingness ; and should allurement fail, we fall back

A PAIR OF WOOERS 391

to the belief in our eloquence. An eloquence to expose
the qualities they possess, is the testification in the
promise of their excellence. She is to be induced by
feeling to see it. We are asking a yovmg lady for the
precious gift of her hand. We respect her; and because
of our continued respect, despite an obstruction, we have
come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude ; could
she but be led to understand how different we are from
some other man ! — ^from one hitherto favoured among
them, imworthy of this prize, however personally exalted
and meritorious.

The wave of wide extension rolled and sank and rose,
heaving lifeless variations of the sickly streaks on its dull
green back.

Dudley Sowerby's defection was Mated at and ac-
counted for, by the worldly test of worldly considerations.

What were they? — Nesta glanced.

An indistinct comparison was modestly presented, of
one immoved by worldly considerations.

But what were they? She was wakened by a lamp,
and her darkness was aU inflammable to it.

'Oh! Mr. Barmby, you have done me the honour to
speak before ; you know my answer,' she said.

'You were then subject to an influence. A false, I may
say wicked, sentiment upholding celibacy.'

'My poor Louise? She never thought of influencing
me. She has her views, I mine. Our friendship does not
depend on a "treaty of reciprocity." We are one at
heart, each free to judge and act, as it should be in friend-
ship. I heard from her this morning. Her brother will
be able to resume his military duties next month. Then
she will return to me.'

'We propose!' rejoined Mr. Barmby.

Beholding the involuntary mercurial rogue-dimple he
had started from a twitch at the corner of her lips, the

392 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

good gentleman pursued : 'Can we dare write our designs

for the month to come ? Ah ! — I will say — Nesta ! give

me the hope I beg to have. See the seriousness. You

are at liberty. That other has withdrawn his pretensions.

We will not blame him. He is in expectation of exalted

rank. Where there is any shadow . . . !' Mr. Barmby

paused on his outroU of the word ; but immediately, not

intending to weigh down his gentle hearer with the

significance in it, resumed at a yet more sonorous depth :

'He is under the obligation to his family; an old, a

venerable family. In the full blaze of public opinion!

His conduct can be palliated by us, too. There is a right

and wrong in minor things, independent of the higher

rectitude. We pardon, we can partly support, the

worldly view.'

J 'There is a shadow?' said^ Nesta; and her voice was

I " lufefuHy' encouraging. ' "

\i'^Ij»^ 1/ He" was dii the footing where men are precipitated by

tj- what is within them to blunder. 'On you — ^no. On

^ you personally, not at all. No. It could not be deemed

so. Not by those knowing, esteeming — ^not by him who

loves you, and would, with his name, would, with his

whole strength, envelop, shield . . . certainly, certainly not.'

' It is on my parents ? ' she said.

' But to me nothing, nothing, quite nought ! To con-
found the innocent with the guilty! . . . and excuses
may exist. We know but how little we know !'

'It is on both my parents?' she said ; with a simplicity
that induced him to reply : 'Before the world. But not,
I repeat . . .'

The band-instruments behind the sheltering glass flour-
ished on their termination of a waltz.

She had not heeded their playing. Now she said:
'The music is over; we must not be late at lunch' ; and
she stood up and moved.

A PAIR OF WOOERS 393

He sprang to his legs and obediently stepped out :
'I shall have your answer to-day? this evening?
Nesta !'

' Mr. Barmby, it will be the same. You will be kind to
me in not asking me again.'

He spoke further. She was dumb.

Had he done ill or well for himself and for her when he
named the shadow on her parents? He dwelt more on
her than on himself : he would not have wounded her to
win the blest afl&rmative. Could she have been entirely
ignorant? — ^and after Dudley Sowerby's defection? For
such it was : the Rev. Stuart Rem had declared the union
between the almost designated head of the Cantor family
and a young person of no name, of worse than no birth,
impossible: 'absolutely and totally impossible,' he had
said, in his impressive fashion, speaking from his know-
ledge of the family, and an acquaintance with Dudley.
She must necessarily have learnt why Dudley Sowerby
withdrew. No parents of an attractive daughter should
allow her to remain unaware of her actual position in the
world. It is criminal, a reduplication of the criminality !
Yet she had not spoken as one astonished. She was
mysterious. Women are so : young women most of all.
It is undecided still whether they do of themselves con-
ceive principles, or should submit to an imposition of the
same upon them in terrorem. — Mysterious truly, but most
attractive ! As Lady Boimtiful of a district, she would
have in her maturity the majestic stature to suit a dis-
pensation of earthly good things. And, strangely, here
she was, at this moment, rivalling to excelling all others
of her sex (he verified it in the crowd of female faces pass-
ing), when they, if they but knew the facts, would visit
her very appearance beside them on a common footing
as an intrusion and a scandal. To us who know, such
matters are indeed wonderful !

394 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Moved by reflective compassion, Mr. Barmby resumed
the wooer's note, some few steps after he had responded
to the salutation of Dartrey Fenellan and Colonel Sudley.
She did not speak. She turned her forehead to him;
and the absence of the world from her eyes chilled his
tongue.

He declined the pleasure of the lunch with the Duvidney
ladies. He desired to be alone, to question himself fast-
ing, to sound the deed he had done ; for he had struck on
a suspicion of selfishness in it: and though Love must
needs be an egoism, Love is no warrant for the doing of
a hurt to the creature beloved. Thoughts upon Skepsey
and the tale of his Matilda Pridden's labours in poor
neighbourhoods, to which he had been inattentive during
the journey down to the sea, invaded him; they were
persistent. He was a worthy man, having within him
the spiritual impulse curiously ready to take the place
where a material disappointment left vacancy. The
vulgar sort embrace the devil at that stage. Before the
day had sunk, Mr. Barmby's lowestjvish_was, to be a
jl5|jL,^Jk6„iMtgiffienlj)£]S£SE3rrgh.ii^
\/^ amid the haunts of sin and jUme,jt£ such^jglain souls^as

'/a'' ; 'Y- Daniel Skepsey j^ndMatUdaPridden. And he could still
^.^^ I be that, if Nesta, in the chapters of the future, changed

^? ' ',1,^^'^^^'' naind. She might; for her good she would; he
reserved the hope. His light was one to burn beneath an

extinguish^.

At the luncheon table of the Duvidney ladies, it was
a pain to Dorothea and Virginia to witness how poor
the appetite their Nesta brought in from the briny blowy
walk. They prophesied against her chances of a good
sleep at night, if she did not eat heartily. Virginia
timidly remarked on her paleness. Both of them put
their simple arts in motion to let her know, that she was
dear to them : so dear as to make them dread the hour

A PAIR OF WOOERS 395

of parting. They named their dread of it. They had
consulted in private and owned to one another, that they
did really love the child, and dared not look forward to
what they would do without her. The dear child's pale-
ness and want of appetite (they remembered they were
observing a weak innocent girl) suggested to them
mutually the idea of a young female heart sickening, for
the old unhappy maiden reason. But, if only she might
return with them to the Wells, the Rev. Stuart Rem
would assure her to convince her of her not being quite
quite forsaken. He, or some one having sanction from
Victor, might ultimately (the ladies waiting anxiously
in the next room, to fold her on the warmth of their
bosoms when she had heard) impart to her the know-
ledge of circumstances, which would, under their further
tuition concerning the particular sentiments of great
families and the strict duties of the scions of the race,
help to account for and excuse the Hon. Dudley Sowerby's
behaviour.

They went up to the drawing-room, talking of Skepsey ^ ^'^

and his tale of Miss Pridden, for Nesta's amusement.
Any talk of her Skepsey usually quickened her lips to p'
remmiscent_srnil^^nd speechrnNow she^T^^Id on to J^
gazeing; and sadly, it seemed; as if some object were ' ojuV^'
"noT present. I

For a vague encouragement, Dorothea said: 'One
week, and we are back home at Moorsedge !' — not so
far from Cronidge, was implied, for the administering of
some foolish temporary comfort. And it was as when a /
fish on land springs its hollow sides in alien air for the
sustaining element; the girl panted; she clasped Doro-
thea's hand and looked at Virginia : 'My mother — ^I must
see her !' she said. They were slightly stupefied by the
unwonted mention of her mother. They made no reply.
They never had done so when there was allusion to her

396 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

mother. Their silence now struck a gong at the girl's
bosom.

Dorothea had it in mind to say, that if she thirsted for
any special comfort, the friends about her would offer
consolation for confidence.

Before she could speak, Perrin the footman entered,
bearing the card of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby.

Mr. Dudley Sowerby begged for an immediate inter-
view with Miss Radnor.

The ladies were somewhat agitated, but no longer per-
plexed as to their duties. They had quitted Moorsedge
to avoid the visit of his family. If he followed, it signi-
fied that which they could not withstand: — 'The Tivoli
falls !' as they named the fateful tremendous human
passion, from the reminiscences of an impressive day on
their travels in youth; when the leaping torrent had
struck upon a tale of love they were reading. They
hurriedly entreated Nesta to command her nerves;
peremptorily requested her to stay where she was;
showed her spontaneously, by way of histrionic adjura-
tion, the face to be worn by young ladies at greetings
on these occasions; kissed her and left her; Virginia
whispering : 'He is true !'

Dudley entered the drawing-room, charged with his
happy burden of a love that had passed through the fur-
nace. She stood near a window, well in the light; she
hardly gave him welcome. His address to her was
hurried, rather uncertain, coherent enough between the
drop and the catch of articulate syllables. He found
himself holding his hat. He placed it on the table, and
it rolled foolishly; but soon he was by her side, having
two free hands to claim her one.

'You are thinking, you have not heard from me! I
have been much occupied,' he said. 'My brother is ill,
very ill. I have your pardon?'

A PAIR OF WOOERS 397

'Indeed you have — if it has to be asked.'

'I have it?'

'Have I to grant it?'

'I own to remissness.'

'I did not blame you.'

'Nesta . . .!'

Her coldness was unshaken.

He repeated the call of her name. 'I should have
written — I ought to have written! — ^I could not have
expressed . . . You do forgive? So many things !'

'You come from Cronidge to-day?'

'From my family — to you.'

She seemed resentful. His omissions as a correspondent
were explicable in a sentence. It had to be deferred.

Reviewing for a moment the enormous internal con-
flict undergone by him during the period of the silence
between them, he wondered at the vastness of the love
which had conquered objections, to him so poignant.

There was at least no seeing of the public blot on her
birth when looking on her face. Nor when thinking of
the beauty of her character, in absence or in presence,
was there any. He had mastered distaste to such a
degree, that he forgot the assistance he had received from
the heiress for enabling him to appreciate the fair young
girl. Money is the imperious requirement of superior
station; and more money and more: in these our
modern days of the merchant's wealth, and the miner's,
and the gigantic American and Australian millionaires,
high rank is of necessity vowed, in peril of utter eclipse,
to the possession of money. StiU it is, when assured, a
consideration far to the rear with a gentleman in whose
bosom love and the buzzing world have fought their battle
out. He could believe it thoroughly fought out, by the
prolonged endurance of a contest lasting many days and
nights; in the midst of which, at one time, the task of

398 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

writing to tell her of his withdrawal from the engagement,
was the cause of his omission to write.

As to her character, he dwelt on thg fiha^T" "f her rp-
coyered featurgs^jbo^rgpire^.anJlMlk'.aMYR dread,.,flfjgffig
intrepigiorce b§jmd it^ JlaliJM'.ghjLbe.j^
^ver^^e^e^the^extenj^Llineaments,. Her features, her
present aristocratic deficiency of colour, greatly pleased
him; her character would submit to moulding. Of all
young ladies in the world, she should be the one to shrink
from a mental independence and hold to the guidance of
the man ennobling her. Did she? Her eyes were read-
ing him. She had her father's limpid eyes, and when
they concentrated rays, they shot.

' Have you seen my parents, Mr. Sowerby ? '

He answered smilingly, for reassuringly : ' I have seen
them.'

'My mother?'

' From your mother first. But am I not to be Dudley ? '

' She spoke to you ? She told you?'

'And yesterday your father — a second time.'

Some remainder of suspicion in the dealing with
members of this family, urged Dudley to say : ' I under-
stood from them, you were not? . . . that you were
quite . . .?'

' I have heard : I have guessed : it was recently — this
morning, as it happened. I wish to go to my mother
to-day. I shall go to her to-morrow.'

'I might offer to conduct you — now !'

'You are kind; I have Skepsey.' She relieved the
situation of its cold-toned strain in adding : ' He is a host.'

'But I may come? — ^now! Have I not the right?
You do not deny it me?'

'You are very generous.'

'I claim the right, then. Always. And subsequently,
soon after, my mother hopes to welcome you at Cronidge.

A PAIR OF WOOERS 399

She will be glad to hear of your naming of a day. My
father bids me ... he and all our family.'

'They are very generous.'

'I may send them word this evening of a day you
name?'

'No, Mr. Sowerby.'

'Dudley?'

' I cannot say it. I have to see my parents.'

'Between us, surely?'

'My whole heart thanks you for your goodness to me.
I am unable to say more.'

He had again observed and he slightly crisped imder
the speculative look she directed on him : a simple un-
strained look, that had an air of reading right in, and was
worse to bear with than when the spark leaped upon some
thought from her eyes : though he had no imagination of
anything he concealed or exposed, and he would have set
it down to her temporary incredulousness of his perfect
■ generosity or power to overcome the world's opinion of
certain circumstances. That had been a struggle ! The
peculiar look was not renewed. She spoke warmly of
her gratitude. She stated, that she must of necessity see
her parents at once. She submitted to his entreaty to
conduct her to them on the morrow. It was in the manner
of one who yielded step by step, from inability to contend.

Her attitude continuing unchanged, he became sensible
of a monotony in the speech with which he assailed it,
and he rose to leave, not dissatisfied. She, at his urgent
request, named her train for London in the early morning.
He said it was not too early. He would have desired to be
warmed ; yet he liked her the better for the moral senti-
ment controlling the physical. He had appointments
with relatives or connections in the town, and on that
pretext he departed, hoping for the speedy dawn of the
morrow as soon as he had turned his back on the house.

400 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

No, not he the man to have pity of women underfoot ! —
That was the thought, unrevolved, unphrased, all but un-
conscious, in Nesta: and while her heart was exalting
him for his generosity. Under her present sense of the
chilling shadow, she felt the comfort there was in being
grateful to him for the golden beams which his generosity
cast about her. But she had an intelligence sharp to
pierce, vir^njhoughshe yg^ ; and. with the^arinBTagSt,
^Howeverj3^istant, she struck it, unerring as an Artemis for
jjlood of beaL§t§j_J!kose-..§hrewd ...jmim^ \Srs7 WjEKeToolf-
out to find a champion^ athirst for help upon a desolate
road, were°Kard as any judicial to pronounce the sentSice
upon Dudley m that respect. She raised hmi high; she
pIace3~^r5eIfTow7" slie "Md*^
he had gone thrpugTij; l9vei;_of lliL^^
Jbelieyed. And she was melted ; and not the less did the
girl's ™P]^jggMe^intuition read with the Keenness oFeye'
of a man^of thejffo„rfd^j^j_ Wu where

warm humanity stopjjfidjshart at thej^aJLoLaQcial concrete
forming a part^ofjthis rightly esteemed ^^wSS^i^i^^^-
she, too, was divided : she was at his feet ; and she re-
buked herself for daring to judge — or rather, it was, for
having a reserve in her mind upon a man proving so

, generous with her. She was pulled this way and that by
sensibilities both inspiring to blind gratitude and quicken-

■; ing her penetrative view. The certainty of an unerring

I perception remained.

Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below,
waiting for their carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the
Hon. Dudley's departure; soon after, Nesta entered to
them. She swam up to Dorothea's lap, and dropped her
head on it, kneeling.

The ladies feared she might be weeping. Dorothea
patted her thick brown twisted locks of hair. Unhappi-
ness following such an interview, struck them as an ill sign.

A PAIR OF WOOERS 401

Virginia bent to the girl's ear, and murmured: 'All
well?'

She replied : 'He has been very generous.'

Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that
had darkened her on the descent of stairs. For sensibili-
ties sharp as Nesta's, are not to be had without their
penalties : and she who had gone nigh to summing in a
flash the_ nature of JDufflej, sank suddenly ^underthM.
affliction often besetting ^e ypung^jidventurqus Boind,
crushing to young women: — the fascination exercised , /
jipon them bxA-Bfisitiyfi,adyexse.maacuUne attitude and ^
opinion. Young men know well what it is : and if young
women have by chance overcome their timidity, to the
taking of any step out of the trim pathway, they shrink,
with a sense of forlomest isolation. It becomes a subjuga^
tion; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight to cast off.
Soon it assumed its material form for the contention be-
tween her and Dudley, in the figure of Mrs. Marsett. The
Nesta who had been instructed to know herself to be under
a shadow, heard, she almost justified Dudley's reproaches
to her, for having made the acquaintance of the unhappy
woman, for having visited her, for having been, though
but for a minute, at the mercy of a coarse gentleman's
pursuit. The recollection was a smart buffet.

Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjur-
ing of Dudley's words, should news of her relations ^th
Mrs. Marsett reach him : — ^and she would have to tell him.
Would he not say : 'I have borne with the things concern-
ing your family. All the greater reason why I must insist
. . . ' he would assuredly say he insisted (her humour
caught at the word, as being the very word one could fore-
see and clearly see him uttering in a fit of vehemence) on
her immediate abandonment of 'that woman.'

And with Nesta's present enlightenment by dusky
beams, upon her parentage, she listened abjectly to

402

ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Dudley, or the opinion of the majority. Would he not
say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Marsett put them
under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its
option to class them together?

These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined
to be a battle-field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of
them, while the girl's face was hidden on Dorothea's lap,
and her breast heaved and heaved.

She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must
instantly see her mother.

They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and
Dorothea said : 'Yes, dear; any day you like.'

'To-morrow — I must go to her to-morrow !'

A suggestion of her mother's coming down, was faintly
spoken by one lady, echoed in a quaver by the other.

Nesta shook her head. To quiet the kind souls, she en-
treated them to give their promise that they would invite
her again.

Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both
ladies embraced her : not entirely 3delding-up their hearts
to her, by reason of the pernicious new ideas now in the
world to sap our foundations of morality ; which warned
/\ /them of their duty to uphold mentally his quite justifiable
y»'A Tbehaviour, even when compassionating the sufferings of
the guiltless creature loved by them.

CHAPTER XXXIV

CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS
OP FEELINGS

All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed
indifference to meals by continuing absent : and he was
the one with whom Nesta would have felt at home ; more

EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS 403

at home than with her parents. He and the cool world he
moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind ; even
to his giving of some portion of it, when she had the dear
little man present to her in a vivid image of a fish in a glass-
globe, wandering round and round, now and then shooting
across, just as her Skepsey did : he carried his head semi-
horizontally at his arrowy pace ; plain to read though he
was, he appeared, under that image created of him, ani-
mated by motives inducing to speculation.

She thought of him tiU she could have reproached him
for not returning and helping her to get away from the
fever of other thoughts : — ^this anguish twisting about her
parents, and the dreadful trammels of gratitude to a man
afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated people.

The latter was the least of evils ; she had her charges
to bring against them for injustice: uncited, unstirred
charges, they were effective as a muffled force to sustain
her : and the young who are of healthy lively Iflopd and
^lean consci&ft£a.Mm either .jemotion- or -jmagjnatlon to
fold them defensively Jrom an enemy world ^jwhose \jfi •'

power to drive them forth into the wilderness they |)jr \fN-
'acknowledge. BuiTin. the__wilderness jiheir .souls are not Ur <4^

beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight -i
flame there up to the parent Spirit. ;

ahe could not fancy herself flying thither; — ^where to \^
be shorn and naked and shivering is no hardship, for the \
solitude clothes, and the sole true life in us resolves to that
steady flame ; — she was restrained by Dudley's generosity,
which held her fast to have the forgiveness for her uncom-
mitted sin dashed in her face. He surprised her ; the \ux-
expected quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared
her fast : and she did not obtain release after seeing behind
it; — seeing it, by the light of what she demanded, per- ,
sonal, shallow, a lover's pnerosity. So her keen/Stefl^ v
saw it ; and her youna'IblSoHT^or the youthful ar&-tfiua

404 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

divided) thrUled in thinking it must be love ! The name
of the sacred passion lifted it out of the petty cabin of the
individual into a quiring cathedral universal, and subdued
her. It subdued her with an unwelcome touch of tender-
ness when she thought of it as involving tenderness for her
mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother. Could he
love the daughter without some little, which a more inti-
mate knowledge of her dear mother would enlarge ? The
girl's heart flew to her mother, clung to her, vindicated her
dumbly. It would not inquire, and it refused to hear,
hungering the while. She sent forth her flights of stories
in elucidation of the hidden ; and they were like white bird
after bird winging to covert beneath a thundercloud ; until
her breast ached for the voice of the thunder : harsh facts :
sure as she was of her never losing her filial hold of the
beloved. She and her jnother grew together, they were
one. Accepti^the sha;dow, theyjwere the closer one be-
"neatKltT^She nad neither vision nor active thought of her
TatESFTm whomh^p,^^^^^^ """~"

At tlie Iiour of ten, the ladies retired for the enjoyment
of their sweet reward. Manton, their maid, came down to
sit with Nesta on the watch for Skepsey. Perrin, the foot-
man, returning, as late as twenty minutes to eleven, from
his tobacco promenade along the terrace, reported to
Manton 'a row in town'; and he repeated to Nesta the
policeman's opinion and his own of the 'Army' fellows,
and the way to treat them. Both were for rigour.

'The name of "Army" attracts poor Skepsey so, I am
sure he would join it, if they would admit him,' Nesta said.

'He has an immense respect for a young woman, who
belongs to his "Army" ; and one doesn't know what may
have come,' said Manton.

Two or three minutes after eleven, a feeble ring at the
bell gained admission for some person : whispering was
heard in the passage. Manton played eavesdropper, and

EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS 405

suddenly bursting on Skepsey, arrested him when about to
dash upstairs. His young mistress's voice was a sufficient
command; he yielded; he pitched a smart sigh and
stepped into her presence for his countenance to be seen,
or the show of a countenance, that it presented.

'Skepsey wanted to rush to bed without saying good
night to me?' said she; leaving unnoticed, except for
woefulness of tone, his hurried shuffle of remarks on 'his
appearance,' and 'little accidents'; ending with an in-
clination of his disgraceful person to the doorway, and
a petition: 'If I might. Miss Nesta?' The implied
pathetic reference to a surgically-treated nose under a
cross of strips of plaster, could not obtain dismissal for him.
And he had one eye of sinister hue, showing beside its
lighted-grey fellow as if a sullen punished dragon-whelp
had couched near some quick wood-pigeon. The two
eyes blinked rapidly. He was a picture of Guilt in the
nude, imploring to be sent into concealment.

The cruelty of detaining him was evident.

'Yes, if you must,' Nesta said. 'But, dear Skepsey,
will it be the magistrate again to-morrow ? '

He feared it would be ; he fancied it would needs be. He
concluded by stating, that he was boimd to appear before
the magistrate in the morning ; and he begged assistance
to keep it from the knowledge of the Miss Duvidneys, who
had been so kind to him.

'Has there been bailing of you again, Skepsey?'

' A good gentleman, a resident,' he replied ; ' a military
gentleman ; indeed, a colonel of the cavalry ; but, it may so
be, retired ; and anxious about our vast possessions ; though
he thinks a translation of a French attack on England
unimportant. He says, the Germans despise us most.'

'Then this gentleman thinks you have a good case?'

'He is a friend of Captain Dartrey's.'

Hearing that name, Nesta said: 'Now, Skepsey, you

406 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

must tell me everjrthing. You are not to mind your looks.
I believe, I do always believe you mean well.'

'Miss Nesta, it depends upon the magistrate's not being
prejudiced against the street-processionists.'

'But you may expect justice from the magistrate, if
your case is good?'

'I would not say no, Miss Nesta. But we find, the
opinion of the public has its effect with magistrates — ^their
sentences. They are severe on boxing. They have
latterly treated the "Army" with more consideration,
owing to the change in the public view. I myself have
changed.'

'Have you joined it?'

'I cannot say I am a member of it.'

'You walked in the ranks to-day, and you were mal-
treated? Your friend was there?'
! 'I walked with Matilda Pridden; that is, parallel, along
^ the pavement.'

'I hope she came out of it unhurt?'

'It is thanks to Captain Dartrey, Miss Nesta?'

This time Nesta looked her question.

Manton interposed : 'You are to speak, Mr. Skepsey' ;
and she stopped a flood of narrative, that was knocking in
his mind to feel its head and to leap — an uninterrupted
half-minute more would have shaped the story for the
proper flow.

He began, after attending to the throb of his bruises in a
manner to correct them rather than solace ; and the begin-
ning was the end : ' Captain Dartrey rescued us, before
Matilda Pridden suffered harm, to mention — the chin,
slight, teeth unshaken ; a beautiful set. She is angry with
Captain Dartrey, for having recourse to violence in her
defence: it is against her principles. "Then you die,"
she says ; and our principles are to gain more by death.
She says, we are alive in them ; but worse if we abandon

EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS 407

them for the sake of living. — ^I am a little confused ; she
is very abstruse. — Because, that is the corruptible life, she
says. I have found it quite impossible to argue with her ;
she has always a complete answer ; wonderful. In case j
of Invasion, we are to lift our voices to the Lord ; and the
Lord's will shall be manifested. If we are robbed, we ask.
How came we by the goods? It is unreasonable; it
strikes at rights of property. But I have to go on thinking.
When in danger, she sings without excitement. When
the blow struck her, she stopped singing only an instant.
She says, no one fears, who has real faith. She will not
let me call her brave. She cannot admire Captain Dartrey.
Her principles are opposed. She said to him, "Sir, you
did what seemed to you right." She thinks every blow
struck sends us back to the state of the beasts. Her
principles . . .'

'How was it Captain Dartrey happened to be present,
Skepsey?'

'She is very firm. You cannot move her. — Captain
Dartrey was on his way to the station, to meet a gentleman
from London, Miss Nesta. He carried a stick — a remark-
able stick — ^he had shown to me in the morning, and he has
given it me now. He says, he has done his last with it.
He seems to have some of Matilda Pridden's ideas about
fighting, when it 's over. He was glad to be rid of the
stick, he said.'

' But who attacked you? What were the people ? '

' Captain Dartrey says, England may hold up her head
while she breeds young women like Matilda Pridden : —
right or wrong, he says : it is the substance.'

Hereupon Manton, sick of Miss Pridden, shook the little
man with a snappish word, to bring him to attention. She
got him together sufficiently for him to give a lame version
of the story ; flat imtil he came to his heroine's behaviour,
when he brightened a moment, and he sank back absorbed

408 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

in her principles and theories of life. It was understood by
Nesta, that the processionists, going at a smart pace,
found their way blocked and were assaulted in one of the
side-streets ; and that Skepsey rushed to the defence of
Matilda Pridden; and that, while they were engaged.
Captain Dartrey was passing at the end of the street, and
recognized one he knew in the thick of it and getting the
worst of it, owing to numbers. 'I will show you the
stick he did it with, Miss Nesta' ; said Skepsey, regardless
of narrative ; and darted out of the room to bring in the
Demerara supple-jack ; holding which, he became inspired
to relate something of Captain Dartrey's deeds.

They gave no pleasure to his young lady, as he sadly
perceived : — thus it is with the fair sex ever, so fond of
heroes ! She shut her eyes from the sight of the Demerara
supple-jack descending right and left upon the skulls of a
couple of bully lads. 'That will do — you were rescued.
And now go to bed, Skepsey ; and be up at seven to break-
fast with me,' Nesta said, for his battle-damaged face
would be more endurable to behold after an interval, she
hoped; and she might in the morning dissociate its evil
look from the deeds of Captain Dartrey.

The thought of her hero taking active part in a street-
fray, was repulsive to her; it swamped his brilliancy.
And this distressed her, by withdrawing the support
which the thought of him had been to her since mid-day.
She lay for sleepless hours, while nursing a deeper pain,
under oppression of repugnance to battle-dealing, blood-
shedding men. It was long before she grew mindful of the
absurdity of the moan recurring whenever reflection
wearied. Translated into speech, it would have run:
'In a street of the town! with a stick!' — ^The vulgar
picture pursued her to humiliation; it robbed her or
dimmed her possession of the one bright thing she had
remaining to her. So she deemed it during the heavy

EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS 409

sighs of night ; partly conscious, that in some strange way
it was as much as tossing her to the man who never could
have condescended to the pugnacious using of a stick in a
street. He, on the contrary, was a cover to the shame-
faced.

Her heart was weak that night. She hovered above it,
but not so detached as to scorn it for fawniag to one — any
one — who would offer her and her mother a cover from
scorn. And now she exalted Dudley's generosity, now
clung to a low idea of a haven in her father's wealth ; and
she was unaware, that the second mood was deduced from
the first. She did know herself cowardly : she had, too, a
critic in her clear head, to spurn at the creature who could
think of purchasing the world's respect. Dudley's gen^-
osity sprang up to silence the voice. She could prais^nim^
on a review of it, for delicacy, moreovCTj" jndjheldislfcscy

Taid^her under a more positive obligation. Her sense of

TTwas not without a toneless quaint faint savour of the i
romantic, that her humour little humorously caught at,

"to paint her a pic?ufe'brKrmer_ heroes of^ction, who win
their trying lady By their perfection of good conduct on a
backgroufld~bf~EgBrbirtTi ;~ and who are not seen to be
wooden 5efgre~the' volume closes. Her fatigue of sleep-

Tessness plunged her iuto the period of poke-bonnets and
peaky hats to admire him ; giving her the Mnd of sweet-
ness we may imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired
horse munching hay. If she had gone to her bed with a
noble or simply estimable plain image of one of her friends
in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been thus
abject. Skepsey's discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey's
behaviour behind it, threw her upon Dudley's generosity,
as being the shield for an outcast. Girls, who see^a
time of need their ideaL.ejxtangiuahed,. in^ita-.appearing
tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing
suitor. Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning

410 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the best she could think of to glorify Dudley, that she
might not feel so doomed.

According to an agreement overnight, she went to the
bedroom of Dorothea and Virginia, to assure them of her
having slept well, and say the good-bye to them and their
Tasso. The little dog was the growl of a silken ball in
a basket. His mistresses excused him, because of his
being unused to the appearance of any person save Manton
in their bedroom. Dorothea, kissing her, said : ' Adieu,
dear child; and there is home with us always, remember.
And, after breakfast, however it may be, you will, for our
greater feeling of security, have — she has our orders —
Manton — your own maid we consider too young for a
guardian — to accompany you. We will not have it on
our consciences, that by any possibility harm came to you
while you were under our charge. The good innocent girl'
we received from the hands of your father, we return to
him ; we are sure of that.'

Nesta said : ' Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.'

'However it may be,' Dorothea repeated her curtaining
phrase.

Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso's temper :
he enjoyed ordinarily a slumber of half an hour's longer
duration. He was, Dorothea feelingly added, regularity
itself. Virginia murmured: 'Except once!' and both
were appalled by the recollection of that night. It had,
nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart
Rem's published beautiful sermon On Dirt ; the words of
which were an antidote to the night of Tasso in the nostrils
of I^emosyne"; so that Dorothea could reply to her sister,
slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart Rem at
his loftiest : '"Let us not bring into the sacred precincts
Dirt from the roads, but have a care to spread it where it
is a fructification."' Virginia produced the sequent sen-
tence, likewise weighty. Nesta stood between the thin

EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS 411

division of their beds, her right hand given to one, her
left to the other. They had the semblance of a haven out
of storms.

She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that
the residing with them had been a means of casting her —
it was an effort to remember how — upon the world where
the tree of knowledge grows. She had eaten; and she
might be the worse for it ; but she was raised to a height
that would not let her look with envy upon peace and com-
fort. Luxurious quiet people were as ripening glass-house
fruits. Her bitter gathering of the knowledge of life had
sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even in the
young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than
fallow soU. But for the fountain of hmnan warmth at her
breast, she might have been snared by the conceit of intel-
lect, to despise the simple and conventional, or shed the
pity which is charity's contempt. She had only to think
of the kindness of the dear good ladies ; her heart jumped
to them at once. And when she fancied hearing those
innocent souls of women embracing her and reproachiag
her for the knowledge of life she now bore, her words
down deep in her bosom were : It has helped me to bear
the shock of other knowledge! How would she have
borne it before she knew of the infinitely evU? Saving
for the tender compassion weeping over her mother, she
had not much acute personal grief.

For this world condemning her birth, was the world
tolerant of that infinitely evil ! Her intellect fortified her
to be combative by day, after the night of imagination ;
which splendid power is not so serviceable as the logical
mind in patoful seasons: for night revealed the world
snorting Dragon's breath at a girl guilty of knowing its
vilest. More than she liked to recall, it had driven her
scorched, half withered, to the shelter of Dudley. The
dayUght, spreading thin at the windows, restored her from

412 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

that weakness. 'We will quit England,' she said, think-
ing of her mother and herself, and then of her father's
surely following them. She sighed thankfully, half way
through the breakfast with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by
the clock ; she was hurriedly sentient of the puzzle of her
feelings, when she guessed at a chance that Dudley would
be delayed. She supposed herself as possibly feeling not
so well able to keep every thought of her head brooding
on her mother in Dudley's company.

Skepsey's face was just sufferable by light of day, if one
pitied reflecting on his honest intentions ; it ceased to dis-
colour another. He dropped a few particulars of his hero
in action ; but the heroine eclipsed. He was heavier than
ever with his Matilda Pridden. At the hour for departure,
Perrin had a conveyance at the door. Nesta sent off
Skepsey with a complimentary message to Captain Dar-
trey. Her maid Mary begged her to finish her breakfast ;
Manton suggested the waiting a further two or three
minutes. ' We must not be late,' Nesta said ; and when
the minute-hand of the clock marked ample time for the
drive to the station, she took her seat and started, keeping
her face resolutely set seaward, having at her ears the ring
of a cry that was to come from Manton. But Manton was
dumb ; she spied no one on the pa.vement who signalled to
stop them. And no one was at the station to greet them.
They stepped into a carriage where they were alone.
Dudley with his dreaded generosity melted out of Nesta's
thoughts, like the vanishing steam-wreath on the dip
between the line and the downs.

She passed into music, as she always did under motion
of carriages and trains, whether in happiness or sadness :
and the day being one that had a sky, the scenic of music
swung her up to soar. None of her heavy burdens en-
chained, though she knew the weight of them, with those
of other painful souls. The pipeing at her breast gave

EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS 41

wings to large and small of the visible; and along th
downs went stateliest of flowing dances ; a copse lengtt
ened to forest; a pool of cattle-water caught grey fo
flights through enchantment. Cottage-children, whereve
seen in groups, she wreathed above with angels to watc
them. Her mind all the while was busy upon earth, em
bracing her mother, eyeing her father. Imagination an
our earthly met midway, and still she. flew, until she wa
brought to the groimd by a shot. She struggled to ris(
uplifting Judith Marsett: a woman not so very muc
older than her own teens, in the count of years, and age
older ; and the world pulling at her heels to keep her low
That unhappiest had no one but a sisterly girl to help her
and how she clung to the slender help ! Who else wa
there?

The good and the bad in the woman struck separat
blows upon the girl's resonant nature. She perceived th
good, and took it into her reflections. The bad sh
divined : it approached like some threat of inflammatioi
Natures resonant as that which animated this girl, ar
quick at the wells of imderstanding : and she had he
intimations of the world's wisdom in withholding cot
tagious presences from the very many of the yoimg, wh
may not have an aim, or ideal or strong human compaj
sion, for a preservative. She was assured of her possessin
it. She asked herself in her mother's voice, and answere
mutely. She had the certainty: for she rebuked th
slavish feverishness of the passion, as betrayed by Mn
Marsett ; and the woman's tone, as of strung wires ringin
on a rage of the wind. Then followed her cry for the ma
who could speak to Captain Marsett of his duty in honoui
An image of one, accompanying the faster beats of he
heart, beguiled her to think away from the cause. He, th
one man known to her, would act the brother's part o
behalf of the hapless creature.

414 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Nesta just imagined her having supplicated him, and at
once imagination came to dust. She had to thank him :
she knelt to him. For the first time of her life she found
herself seized with her sex's shudder in the blood.

CHAPTER XXXV

IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS
FOR LIGHTING AN ABYSMAL DARKNESS

And if Nesta had looked out of her carriage-window soon
after the train began to glide, her eagle of imagination
would have reeled from the heights, with very different
feelings, earlier, perhaps a captive, at sight of the tardy
gentleman rushing along the platform, and bending ear to
the footman Perrin, and staring for one lost.

The snaky tail of the train imparted to Dudley an appre-
hension of the ominous in his having missed her. It
wound away, and left regrets, which raised a chorus of
harsh congratulations from the opposite party of his
internal parliament.

Neither party could express an opinion without rousing
the other to an uproar.

He had met his cousin Southweare overnight. He had
heard, that there was talk of Miss Radnor. Her name was
in the mouth of Major Worrell. It was coupled with the
name of Mrs. Marsett. A military captain, in the succes-
sion to be Sir Edward Marsett, bestowed on her the shadow
of his name.

It could be certified, that Miss Radnor visited the woman
at her house. What are we to think of Miss Radnor, save
that daughters of depraved parents ! . . . A torture un-
deserved is the Centaur's shirt for driving us to lay about

OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING A DARKNESS i\

in all directions. He who had swallowed so much —
thunderbolt: a still undigested discharge from the pej
plexing heavens — ^jumped frantic under the pressure upo
him of more, and worse. A girl getting herself talked of a
a Club ! And she of all young ladies should have been th
last to draw round her that buzz of tongues. On such
subject ! — ^The parents pursuing their career of cynics
ostentation in London, threw an evil eye of heredity o
their offspring in the egg; making anything credible
pointing at tendencies.

An alliance with her was impossible. So said disgusi
Anger came like a stronger beast, and extinguished th
safety there was in the thing it consumed, by growing s
excessive as to require tempering with drops of compas
sion; which prepared the way for a formal act of col
forgiveness ; and the moment that was conceived, he ha
a passion to commit the horrible magnanimity, and did i
on a grand scale, and dissolved his heart ia the grandeui
and enslaved himself again.

Far from expungeing the doubt of her, forgiveness gav
it a stamp and an edge. His renewed enslavement set hii
perusiug his tyrant keenly, as nauseated captives do ; am
he saw, that forgiveness was beside the case. For thi
Nesta Victoria Radnor would not crave it or accept it. H
had mentally played the woman to her superior vivaciou£
ness too long for him to see her taking a culprit's attitude
What she did, she intended to do. The mother would nc
have encouraged her. The father idolized her; and th
father was a frank hedonist, whose blood . . . speculatio
on horseback gallops to barren extremes. Eyes like hei
— ^if there had not been the miserable dupes of girls
Conduct is the sole guide to female character. That like
wise may be the hj^ocrite's mask.

Popular artists, intent to gratify the national taste fc
effects called realistic, have figured iu scenes of battle th

416 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

raying fragments of a man from impact of a cannon-ball on
his person. Truly thus it may be when flesh contends.
But an image of the stricken and scattered mind of the
inanshouldj though deficient, jn, the attraction, have a
greater significance, forMmuch as itjtoes. not exhiljit , him
e^ireb^Jiguefied and showered intojgacej^ it leayesjiim
"Klslegs for the taking of further steps.„ DucJQey, standing
Ton the platform of Nesta's train, one half minute too late,
according to his desire before he put himself in motion, was
as wildly torn as the vapour shredded streaming to fingers
and threads off the upright columnar shot of the shriek
from the boiler. He wished every mad antagonism to his
wishes : that he might see her, be blind to her ; embrace,
discard ; heal his wound, and tear it wider. He thanked
her for the grossness of an offence precluding excuses. He
was aware of a glimmer of advocacy in the very grossness.
He conjured-up her features, and they said, her innocence
was the sinner; they scoffed at him for the dupe he was
willing to be. She had enigma's mouth, with the eyes of
morning.

More than most girls, she was the girl-Sphinx to him :
because of her having ideas — or what he deemed ideas.
She struck a toneing warmth through his intelligence, not
dissimilar to the livelier circulation of the blood in the
frame breathing mountain air. She really helped him,
incited him to go along with this windy wild modern time
more cheerfully, if not quite hopefully. For she had been
the book of Romance he despised when it appeared as a
printed volume: and which might have educated the
young man to read some among our riddles in the book of
humanity. The white he was ready to take for silver:
the black were all black ; the spotted had received corrup-
tion's label. Her youthful French governess Mademoiselle
de Seilles was also peculiarly enigmatic at the mouth:
conversant, one might expect, with the disintegrating

OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING A DARKNESS 417

literature of her country. In public, the two talked
of St. Louis. One of them in secret visits a Mrs.
Marsett. The Southweare women, the Hennen women,
and Lady Evelina Reddish, were artless candid creatures
in their early days, not transgressing in a glance. Lady
Grace Halley had her fit of the devotional previous to
marriage. No girl known to Dudley by report or acquaint-
ance had committed so scandalous an indiscretion as Miss
Radnor's : it pertained to the insolently vile.

And on that ground, it started the voluble defence. For
certain suspected things will dash suspicion to the rebound,
when they are very dark. As soon as the charge against
her was moderated, the defence expired. He heard the
world delivering its judgement upon her; and he sorrow-
fully acquiesced. She passed from him.

When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a
remembered saying of hers, with the full melody of her
voice. One day, treating of modern Pessimism, he had
draped a cadaverous view of our mortal being in a quota-
tion of the wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor : "To set
one's love upon the swallow is a futility.' And she,
weighing it, nodded, and replied : ' May not the pleasure
for us remain if we set our love upon the beauty of the
swallow's flight?'

There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that :
meaning, of course, the picture we are to have of the bird's
wings in motion ; — it has often been admired. Oh ! not
much of an idea in itself : — feminine and vague. But it
was pertinent, opportune ; in this way she stimulated.

And the girl who could think it, and caU on a Mrs. Mar-
sett, was of the class of mixtures properly to be handed
over to chemical experts for analysis !

She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex : she and
Mademoiselle de SeUles discussed them ; women were to
do this, do that : — ^necessarily a means of instructing a girl

418 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

to learn what they did do. If the lower part of her face
had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have
put a reluctant faith in the puremindedness of these as-
pirations, without reverting to her origin, and also to re-
cent rumours of her father and Lady Grace Halley. As it
was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an intellectual
precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the
state of women, did not rather more than suggest the exist-
ence of urgent senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty,
had an interest in public matters, and she called on a Mrs.
Marsett. To plead her simplicity, was to be absolutely
ignorant of her.

He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interro-
gation relating to Nesta's precqciousness of the intelligence.
For, as they say in 4|^ylomancy, the 'psychical' of
women are not disposea in tESr sensitive early days to
dwell upon the fortunes of their sex : a thought or two
turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver.
They worship at a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid
imputing some share of foulness to them that are for
scouring the chamber ; and the civUized male, keeping his
own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's view.
The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are
likely to be drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as
often as by base : Nature at flood being the cause in either
instance. This young Nature of the good and the bad, is
the blood which runs to power of heart as well as to thirsts
of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves, to dis-
cover how much of Nature their abstract honourable con-
ception or representative eidolon of young women will bear
without going to pieces ; and it will not be much, unless
they shall have taken instruction from the poet's pen : —
for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the slough,
when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If
they have learnt of Nature's priest to respect her, they wUl

OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING A DARKNESS 419

less distrust those rare daughters of hers who are moved
by her warmth to lift her out of slime. It is by her own
live warmth that it has to be done : cold worship at a
niche in the wall will not do it. — Well, there is an index,
for the enlargement of your charity. ^

But facts were Dudley's teachers. Physically, morally, ^
mentally, he read the world through facts; — that is to
say, through the facts he encountered : and he was in >'
consequence foredoomed to a succession of bumps; all i
the heavier from his being, unlike the homed kind, not
unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience. /
Even at his darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of
the misconduct of her parents, which denied to a certain
still small advocate within him the right to raise a voice :
that good fellow struck the attitude for pleading, and had
to be silent ; for he was Instinct ; at best a stammering
speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts. Instinct of this
Nesta Radnor's character would have said a brave word,
but for her deeds bearing witness to her inheritance of a
lawlessly adventurous temperament.

What to do ? He was no nearer to an answer when the
wintry dusk had fallen on the promenading crowds. To
do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have seen fools
perish. Facts had not taught him, that the doing nothing,
for a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was
the reason of how it came that Nesta knitted closer her
acquaintance with the 'agreeable lady' she mentioned in
her letter to Cronidge. Those excellent counsellors of a
mercantile community gave him no warnings, that the
'masterly inactive' part, so greatly esteemed by him for
the conduct of public affairs, might be perilous in dealings
with a vivid girl : nor a hint, that when facts continue un-
digested, it is because the sensations are as violent as
hysterical females to block them from the understanding.
His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable at a

420 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst's consumptive
brothers waved faded hands at her chances of inheriting
largely. Superb for the chances: but what of her off-
spring? And the other was a girl such as the lusty Dame
Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the
heir of the House's honours for the perpetuation of his race.
No doubt : and the venerable Dame (beautiful in her old-
lace frame, or say foliage, of the Ages backward, temp :
Ed: III.) inflated him with a thought of her: and his
readings in modern books on heredity, pure blood,
physical regeneration, pronounced approval of Nesta
Radnor : and thereupon instinct opened mouth to speak ;
and a lockjaw seized it under that scowl of his presiding
mistrust of Nature.

He clung to his mistrust the more because of a warning
he had from the silenced natural voice : somewhat as we
may behold how the Conservatism of a Class, in a world
of all the evidences showing that there is no stay to
things, comes of the intuitive discernment of its finality.
His mistrust was his own ; and Nesta was not ; not yet ;
though a step would make her his own. Instinct prompt-
ing to the step, was a worthless adviser. It spurred him,
nevertheless.

He called at the Club for his cousin Southweare, with
whom he was not in sympathy; and had information
that, Southweare said, 'made the girl out all right.' Girls
in these days do things which the sainted stay-at-homes
preceding them would not have dreamed of doing. Some-
thing had occurred, relating to Major Worrell : he
withdrew Miss Radnor's name, acknowledged himself
mistaken or amended his report of her, in some way,
not quite intelligible. Dudley was accosted by Simeon
Fenellan; subsequently by Dartrey. There was gossip
over the latter gentleman's having been up before the
magistrate, talk of a queer kind of stick, and Dartrey

OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING A DARKNESS 42

said, laughing, to Simeon: 'Rather lucky I bled th
rascal'; — whatever the meaning. She nursed one of hi
adorations for this man, who had yesterday, apparently
joined in a street-fray ; so she partook of the stain of th
turbid defacing all these disorderly people.

At his hotel at breakfast the next morning, a news
paper furnished an account of Captain Dartrey Fenellan'
participation in the strife, after mention of him as nephe^
of the Earl of Clanconan, ' now a visitor to our town' ; an
his deeds were accordant with his birth. Such writin
was enough to send Dudley an eager listener to Colne
Durance. What a people !

Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's card compelled Dudley prei
ently to receive him.

Dartrey, not debarred by considerations, that an allusio
to Miss Radnor could be conveyed only in the mo£
delicately obscure manner, spared him no more than th
plain English of his relations with her. Requested t
come to the Club, at a certain hour of the afternoon, tha
he might hear Major Worrell's personal contradiction c
scandal involving the young lady's name, together wit
his apology, etc., Dudley declined : and he was obliged t
do it curtly ; words were wanting. They are hard to fin
for woimded sentiments rendered complex by an infusio
of policy. His present mood, with the something nei
to digest, held the going to Major Worrell a wrong step
he behaved as if the speaking to Dartrey Fenellan pledge
him hardly less. And besides he had a physical abhoj
rence, under dictate of moral reprobation, of the broad
shouldered sinewy man, whose look of wiry alertnes
pictured the previous day's gory gutters.

Dartrey set sharp eyes on him for an instant, bowec
and went.

422 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

CHAPTER XXXVI

NESTA AND HER FATHER

The day of Nesta's return was one of a number of late
when Victor was robbed of his walk Westward by Lady
Grace Halley, who seduced his politeness with her various
forms of blandishment to take a seat in her carriage ; and
she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world
when she had him there^ Perhaps she_was right jnj^ng
— though she had no right to say — ^that he "and she to-
getKCTmight hav£^^worH^^^aer"tfiSf"Teet7' It was one
of ffiose irritating suggestions whicE'expedite us up to a
bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder's tight
extension upon emptiness. It moved him to examine
the poor value of his aim, by'fying himto'the contemptible
'means. ^One estimate involved theTother, whichever came
"Erst. Somewhere^ he had an idea, that would lift and
cleanse all degradatior5^.~™But it'drd~seem~as if he" were
not enjoying: things pleasant enough in the passage of
them were barren, if not prickly, in the retrospect.

He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp
round it, in the gloom of the girdle of lights, to recover
his deadened relish of the thin phantasmal strife to win
an intangible prize. His dulled physical system asked,
as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in
the hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to
get, and what was the substance of his gains : what ! if
other than a precipitous intimacy, a deep crumbling over
deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of a
whimsical nudity; hardly more. Nay, not more! he
said ; and at the end of twenty paces, he saw much more ;
the campaign gathered a circling suggestive brilliancy,

NESTA AND HER FATHER 42

like the lamps about the winter park ; the Society, lure
with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishin
picture; the little woman was esteemed as a serviceabl
lieutenant ; and her hand was a small soft one, agreeab]
to fondle — and avaimt! But so it is in war: we mu£
pay for our allies. What if it had been, that he and sh
together, with their imited powers . . .? He dashe
the sUly vision aside, as vainer than one of the bubbh
empires blown by boys ; and it broke, showing no heai
in it. His heart was Nataly's.

Let Colney hint his worst; NataJy bore the straii
always did bear any strain coming in the round of he
duties : and if she would but walk, or if she danced a
parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency besettin
the phlegmatic, like this day's breeze the morning fog
or as he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.

Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighte
London, with its ocean-voice of the heart at beat alon
the lighted outer ring, Victor entered at his old door c
the two houses he had knocked into one: — a surpris
for Fredi! — ^and heard that his girl had arrived in th
morning.

'And could no more endure her absence from he
Mammy 0 !' The songful satirical line spouted in hin
to be flung at his girl, as he ran upstairs to the boudo:
off the drawing-room.

He peeped iu. It was dark. Sensible of presence
he gradually discerned a thick blot. along the couch t
the right of the door, and he drew near. Two were lyin
folded together; mother and daughter. He bent ove
them. His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi's
she spoke ; she said tenderly : ' Father.' Neither of th
two made a movement. He heard the shivering rise of
sob, that fell. The dry sob going to the waste breath wa
Nataly's. His girl did not speak again.

424 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

He left them. He had no thought until he stood in his
dressing-room, when he said 'Good!' For those two
must have been lying folded together during the greater
part of the day: and it meant, that the mother's heart
had opened ; the girl knew. Her tone : ' Father,' sweet,
was heavy, too, with the darkness it came out of.

So she knew. Good. He clasped them both in his
heart; tempering his pity of those dear ones with the
thought, that they were of the sex which finds enjoyment
in a day of the mutual tear ; and envying them ; he strained
at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.

All of his girl's loving soul flew to her mother; and
naturally !

She would not be harsh on her father. She would say :
— ^he loved ! And true : he did love, he does love ; loves
no woman but the dear mother.

He flicked a short wring of the hand having taken pres-
sure from an alien woman's before Fredi pressed it, and
absolved himself in the act ; thinking. How little does a
woman know how true we can be to her when we smell at
a flower here and there! — ^There they are, stationary;
^ women the flowers, we jtEe bee; and we are faTtEfuTih
iii.c^ 'bur seeming volatility; faftKKiTTo 3Ke"~Tiive T— -And if
\/S^ women aire to be stationary, the reasoning is not so bad.
Funny, however, if they here and there imitatively
spread a wing, and treat men in that way ? It is a breach
of the convention; we pay them our homage, that they
may serve as flowers, not to be volatile tempters. Nataly
never had been one of the sort : Lady Grace was. No
necessity existed for compelling the world to bow to Lady
Grace, while on behalf of his Nataly he had to . . .
Victor closed the curtain over a gulf revealed by an in-
vocation of Nature, and showing the tremendous force
he partook of so largely, in her motive elements of the
devourer. Horrid to behold, when we need a gracious

NESTA AND HER FATHER 42

presentation of the circumstances. She is a splendi
power for as long as we confine her between the banks
but she has a passion to discover cracks ; and if we gi\
her headway, she wUl find one, and drive at it, and h
through, uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unles
we labour body and soul like Dutchmen at the dam. Hei
she was, and not desired, almost detested! Natui
detested ! It had come about through the battle fc
Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman's tenacious hoi
of the filmy thread she took for life and was enabled t
use as a means for the perversion besides bar to tt
happiness of creatures really living. We may well marv(
at the Fates, and tell them they are not moral agents !

Victor's reflections came across Colney Durance, wh
tripped and stopped them.

Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited fc
Nesta, to show her the lighted grand double drawing
room : a further proof of how Fortune favoured him :-
she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish fc
greater space, and was informed on the next, that th
neighbour house was being vacated, and the day follov\
ing he was in treaty for the purchase of it; retumin
from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.

Nesta came. Her short look at him was fond, her voic
not faltering ; she laid her hand under his arm and walke
round the spacious room, praising the general desigi
admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes, hangings, an
the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the fin
grates and plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutn
colour that, as in sound, muted splendour. He told he
it was a reception night, with music : and added : '
miss my . . . seen anybody lately?'

'Mr. Sowerby?' said she. 'He was to have escorte
me back. He may have overslept himself.'

She spoke it plainly ; when speaking of the dear goo

426 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

ladies, she set a gentle humour at play, and comforted him,
as she intended, with a souvenir of her lively spirit, want-
ing only in the manner of gaiety.

He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.

More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her
voice, in her look, in her phrasing of speech, an older,
■j \i' much older daughter than the Fredi whom he had con-
ducted to Moorsedge. 'Kiss me,' he said.

She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek
and left, and his forehead, saying : ' My love ! my papa !
my own dear dada !' all the words of her girlhood in her
new sedateness ; and smiling : like the moral crepuscular
of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday
London street.

He strained her to his breast. 'Mama soon be here?'

'Soon.'

That was well. And possibly at the present moment
applying, with her cunning hand, the cosmetics and
powders he could excuse for a concealment of the traces
of grief.

Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy
to see more than the world would when Nataly entered
the dining-room at the quiet family dinner. She per-
formed her part for his comfort, though not prattling;
and he missed his Fredi's delicious warble of the prattle
running rUl-like over our daily humdrum. Simeon
Fenellan would have helped. Then suddenly came en-
livenment : a recollection of news in the morning's paper.
' No harm before Fredi, my dear. She 's a young woman
now. And no harm, so to speak — at least, not against
the Sanfredini. She has donned her name again, and a
vUla on Como, leaving her duque; — paragraph from a
Milanese musical Journal; no particulars. Now, mark
me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer. If
only we could have her now !'

NESTA AND HER FATHER 42

'It would be a pleasure,' said Nataly. Her heart ha
a blow in the thought, that a lady of this kind woul
create the pleasure by not bringing criticism.

'The godmother?' he glistened upon Nesta.

She gave him low half-notes of the little blue buttei
fly's imitation of the superb contralto; and her han
and head at turn to hint the theatrical operatic attitudi

'Delicious!' he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at th
vision of the three of them planted in the past ; and hei
again, out of the dark wood, where something had n
quired to be said, and had been said ; and all was happU
over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the tw
dear innocents ; — whom heaven bless ! Jealousy of thei
naturally closer heart-at-heart, had not a whisper for him
part of their goodness and sweetness was felt to be in th
not excluding him.

Nesta engaged to sing one of the old duets with he
mother. She saw her mother's breast lift in a mechanic£
effort to try imaginary notes, as if doubtful of her capacit)
more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell to. He
mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to th
thoughts of the girl, overcoming wonderment at th
extreme submissiveness.

She put a screw on her mind to perceive the rations
object there might be for causing her mother to g
through tortures in receiving and visiting; and she wa
arrested by the louder question, whether she could thin'
such a man as her father irrational.

People with resounding names, waves of a stead;
stream, were annoimced by Arlington, just as in the days
that seemed remote, before she went to Moorsedge ; onl;
they were more numerous, and some of the titles hai
ascended a stage. There were great lords, there wer
many great ladies; and Lady Grace Halley shufflin
amid them, like a silken shimmer in voluminous robes

428 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

They crowded about their host where he stood. 'He is
their LawV Colney said, speaking unintelligibly, in the
absence of the Simeon Fenellan regretted so loudly by
Mr. Beaves Urmsing. They had an air of worshipping,
and he of swimming.

There were also City magnates, and Lakelands' neigh-
bours : the gentleman representing Pride of Port, Sir
Abraham Quatley ; and Colonel Corfe ; Sir Rodwell and
Lady Blachington; Mrs. Fanning; Mr. Caddis. Few
young men and maids were seen. Dr. John Cormyn
came without his wife, not mentioning her. Mrs. Peter
Yatt touched the notes for voices at the piano. Priscilla
Graves was a vacancy, and likewise the Rev. Septimus
Barmby. Peridon and Catkin, and Mr. Pempton took
their usual places. There was no fluting. A famous
Canadian lady was the principal singer. A Galician
violinist, zig-zagging extreme extensions and contractions
of his corporeal frame in execution, and described by
Colney as 'Paganini on a wall,' failed to supplant Duran-
darte in Nesta's memory. She was asked by Lady Grace
for the latest of Dudley. Sir Abraham Quatley named
him with handsome emphasis. Great dames caressed
her ; openly approved ; shadowed the future place among
them.

Victor alluded at night to Mrs. John Connyn's absence.
He said : 'A homoeopathic doctor's wife !' nothing more ;
and by that little, he prepared Nesta for her mother's
explanation. Th^ great London people, ignorant or not,
were caught by the strong tide he created, and carried on
it. But there was a bruiting of the secret among their
set ; and the one to fall away from her, Nataly marvel-
lingly named Mrs. John Cormyn; whose marriage was
of her making. She did not disapprove Priscilla's be-
haviour. Priscilla had come to her and, protesting
affection, had openly stated, that she required time and

NESTA AND HER FATHER 4i

retirement to recover her proper feelings. Nataly smil(
a melancholy criticism of an inconsequent or capricioi
woman, in relating to Nesta certain observations PriscO
had dropped upon poor faithful Mr. Pempton, because
his concealment from her of his knowledge of thing
for this faithful gentleman had been one of the few n(
ignorant. The rumour was traceable to the City.

'Mother, we walk on planks,' Nesta said.

Nataly answered : ' You will grow used to it.'

Her mother's habitual serenity in martyrdom was d
ceiving. Nesta had a transient suspicion, that she hs
grown, from use, to like the whirl of company, for oblivic
in the excitement; and as her remembrance of her ow
station among the crowding people was a hot flush, tl
difference of their feelings chiUed her.

Nataly said : ' It is to-morrow night again ; we do n(
rest.' She smiled; and at once the girl read woman
armour on the dear face, and asked herself. Could I be s
brave? The question following was a speechless way
that surged at her'fatherT^She tried to fathom the schen
"Ee entertained. The attempt obgfi.uaeji her conception i
the man hF was. She could not grasp him, being t(
_youiig^for jmowing, that yovmg heads cannot obtain
critical hold upon one whom they see graJSH^ succeedinj
it is the sun's bnlEance to their eyes.

Mother and daughteFHepT'^gether that night, ar
their embrace was their world.

Nesta delighted her father the next day by waJkii
beside him into the City, as far as the end of the Embanl
ment, where the carriage was in waiting with her maid 1
bring her back ; and at his mere ejaculation of a wish, tl
hardy girl drove down in the afternoon for the walk hon
with him. Lady Grace Halley was at the office. 'I ':
an incorrigible Stock Exchange gambler,' she said.

'Only,' Victor bade her beware, 'Mines are undulatit

430 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

in movement, and their heights are a preparation for
their going down.'

She said she 'liked a swing.'

Nesta looked at them in turn.

The day after and the day after, Lady Grace was
present. She made play with Dudley's name.

This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of
walking back in winter weather with her father, struck
her as ambiguous : either a jealous foolish mother's
device, or that of a weak man beating about for pro-
tection. But the woman of the positive world soon read
to the contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt.
She read rather too much to the contrary, and took the
pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in her tastes, when
Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by the
lady's departure. Her mother, without sympathy for
the lady, was too great of soul for jealousy. Victor had
his Nataly before him at a hint from Lady Grace : and
he went somewhat further than the exact degree when
affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was in-
capable of suspecting. — Nataly could perceive things with
a certain accuracy : she would not stoop to a meanness.
— 'Plot? Nataly?' said he, and shrugged. In fact,
the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected
upon Nataly. He might have seen as tragic as ever
dripped on Stage, had he looked.

But the walk Westward with his girl, together with
pride in a daughter who clove her way through all
weathers, won his heart to exultation. He told her:
'Fredi does her dada so much good'; not telling her in
what, or opening any passage to the mystery of the man
he was. She was trying to be a student of life, with her
eyes down upon hard earth, despite of her winged young
head; she would have compassed him better had he
dUated in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal

NESTA AND HER FATHER 43

of a man of power by the simpleness of his enjoyment c
small things coming in his way; — the lighted shops, th
crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting nea
midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankmem
and dark Thames magnificently coroneted over his grim
flow. There is no grasping of one who quickens us.

His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feelin
of personal value; it permeated her nourishingly froi
the natural breath of him that it was.

At times he touched deep in humaneness ; and he se
her heart leaping on the flash of a thought to lay it bare
with the secret it held, for his help. That was a drean
She could more easily have uttered the words to Captai
Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremou
of the vision of doing it and casting herself on nobles
man's compassionateness ; and her imagined thousan
emotions ; — a rolling music within her, a wreath of clouc
glory in her sky ; — which had, as with virgins it may b(
plighted her body to him for sheer urgency of soul ; draw
her by a single unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blooc
shy curl outward of the sheathing leaf to the flowering c
woman to him; even to the shore of that strange sei
where the maid stands choosing this one man for he
destiny, as in a trance. So are these young ones unfoldec
shade by shade; and a shade is all the difference wit
them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the in
mensity of vitality in ' the shadow of a shade.'

Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking t
him of Mrs. Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogisti
allusions to Dudley Sowerby: the 'perfect gentlemai
good citizen'; prospective heir to an earldom besides
She bowed to Dudley's merits ; she read off the honorifi
pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign t
herself that she passed it.

She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did nc

432 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

know how coldly unjust. For among the exorbitant
requisitions upon their fellow-creatures made by the
young, is the demand, that they be definite: no mercy
is in them for the transitional. And Dudley — ^and it
was under her influence, and painfully, not ignobly — was
in process of development: interesting to philosophers,
if not to maidens.

Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney
Durance's epigrams upon their friends. He quite joined
with his English world in its opinion, that epigrams are
poor squibs when they do not come out of great guns.
Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest
of popgun paper pellets. The English kick at the inso-
lence, when they are not in the mood for pelleting them-
selves, or when the armed Foreigner is overshadowing
and braceing. Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric
Prose Epic of 'The Rival Tongues,' particularly
oflFended him, as being a clever aim at no hitting; and
sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid friend's collapse.
How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such a

spiteful diatribe! The sujdde of Dr. Bouthoin at San

Francisco was the finishing stroke.i^3E£,cKances^
"of "Hie" Serial ; — although we are promised splendid evolu-
tions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who, after brilliant
achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons
of Old England's modem renown, for a determined
wrestle with our English pronunciation of words, and
rescue of the spelling of them from the printer. His head-
ache over the present treatment of the verb 'To bid,' was
a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before
Japanese, and who acknowledged now 'in contrition of
spirit,' that in formerly opposing the scheme for an
Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language
to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public.
Further, he discovered in astonishment the subordination

NESTA AND HER FATHER 433

of all literary Americans to the decrees of their literary
authorities ; marking a Transatlantic point of departure,
and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders —
'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways,
in all the porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.'
After a week's privation of bat and ball, he is, lighted or
not, a gas-jet of satire upon his countrymen. As for the
'pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr. Bouthoin,'
Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over-
dose of the pathos; and the same might be suspected
in Britaimia's elegy upon him, a strain of hot eulogy
throughout. Mr. Semhians, all but treasonably, calls it,
Papboat and Brandy : — ' our English literary diet of the
day' : stimulating and not nourishing. Britannia's
mournful anticipation, that 'The shroud enwinding this
my son is mine ! ' — should the modern generation depart
from the track of him who proved himself the giant in
mainly supporting her glory — ^was, no doubt, a high
pitch of the note of Conservatism. But considering, that
Dr. Bouthoin 'committed suicide jmder a depression of
mind produced_by^ a surfeit of unaccustomed dishes,
upon a physical_ system inspired by jthe^Jraditions of
exercise, and no longer relieved by the practice' — to
"translate from Dr. Gannius ;r— we^are. again at' war with
_the_wnte£s revermtiaLtone^aajL we .iaott oot what to
think: except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat-
market's butcher m the "Satiric "ArtT"' ' —-"-—»— ■"™

Nestafoun3 it pleasanteFlo^e him than to hear of his
work : which, to her present feeling, was inhuman. As
little as our native pubUc, had she then any sympathy
for the working in the idea : she wanted throbs, visible
aims, the Christian incarnate ; she would have preferred
the tale of slaughter — periodically invading all English
classes as a flush from the undrained lower. Vikings all —
to frigid sterile Satire. And truly it is not a fruit-bearing ^

434 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

rod. Colney had to stand on the defence of it against
the damsel's charges. He thought the use of the rod,
while expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion
between him and those noble heathens, beneficial for
boys ; but in relation to their seniors, and particularly for
old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest rod to cut
the skin was the sole saving of them. Insensibility to
Satire, he likened to the hard-mouthed horse; which is
doomed to the worser thing in consequence. And conse-
quently upon the lack of it, and of training to appreciate
it, he described his country's male venerables as being
distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in present-
ing themselves forked.

'He is unsuccessful and embittered,' Victor said to
Nesta. ' Colney will find in the end, that he has lost his
game and soured himself by never making concessions.
Here 's this absurd Serial — it fails, of coxu-se ; and then he
has to say, it 's because he won't tickle his English, won't
enter into a "frowzy complicity" with their tastes.'

'But — I think of Skepsey — ^honest creatures respect
Mr. Durance, and he is always ready to help them,' said
Nesta.

'If he can patronize.'

' Does he patronize me, dada ? '

'You are one of his exceptions. Marry a title and
live in state — and then hear him ! I am successful, and
the result of it is, that he won't acknowledge wisdom in
anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge the
success. It is "a dirty road to success," he says. So
that, if successful, I must have rolled myself in mire. I
compelled him to admit he was wrong about your being
received at Moorsedge : a bit of a triumph !'

Nesta 's walks with her father were no loss of her to
Nataly ; the girl came back to her bearing so fresh and so
full a heart ; and her father was ever prouder of her : he

NESTA AND HER FATHER 435

presented new features of her in his quotations of her say-
ings, thoughtful sayings. 'I declare she helps one to
think,' he said. ' It 's not precocity ; it 's healthy in-
quiry. She brings me nearer ideas of my own, not yet
examined, than any one else does. I say, what a wife for
a man ! '

'She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not
quite strong,' said Nataly. 'You have not seen . . .?'

'Dudley Sowerb];2__He^^ at Cronid^eJL beUeye. His
elderbrother"'s in a bad way.^ Bad business, this looking
'toTa deatF.' °™"

Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.

Let it be cast on Society, then ! A Society opposing
Nature forces us to these murderous looks upon impedi-
ments. But what of a Society in the dance with Nature ?
Victor did not approve of that. He began, under the
influence of Nesta's companionship, to see the Goddess
Nature there is in a chastened nature. And this view
shook the curtain covering his lost Idea. He felt sure he
should grasp it soon and enter into its daylight : a
muffled voice within him said, that he was kept waiting
to do so by the inexplicable tardiness of a certain one to
rise ascending to her spiritual roost. She was now harm-
less to strike : Themison, Carling, Jarniman, even the
Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had been won to the cause of
humanity. Her ascent, considering her inability to do
further harm below, was_^most_ mysteriously delayed.
Owing to it, m a manner almost as mysterious, he was
^pt crowing a bridge having a slippery bit_on it. Thanks
to his gallant !Ffedi, he had found his feet again. But
there was a bruise where, to his honour, he felt tenderest.
And Fredi away, he might be down again — for no love
of a slippery bit, proved slippery, one might guess, by a
predecessor or two. Ta-ta-ta-ta and mum ! Still, in
justice to the little woman, she had been serviceable.

436 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

She would be still more so, if a member of Parliament
now on his back — ^here we are with the murder-eye again !
Nesta's never speaking of Lakelands clouded him a
little, as an intimation of her bent of mind.

'And does my girl come to her dada to-day?' he said,
on the fifth morning since her return; prepared with a
villanous resignation to hear, that this day she abstained,
though he had the wish for her coming.

' Why, don't you know,' said she, ' we all meet to have
tea in Mr. Durance's chambers; and I walk back with
you, and there we are joined by mama; and we are to
have a feast of literary celebrities.'

' Colney's selection of them ! And Simeon Fenellan, I
hope. Perhaps Dartrey. Perhaps . . . eh ? '

She reddened. So Dudley Sowerby's unspoken name
could bring the blush to her cheeks. Dudley had his
excuses in his brother's condition. His father's health,
too, was — ^but this was Dudley calculating. Where there
are coronets, calculations of this sort must needs occur ;
just as where there are complications. Odd, one fancies
it, that we Nvalking along^ the. paypftg250I53lied" life,
*? should be perpetually summoningfOrcusjto^our aid, for
' tEe"s^§jorge^mg"a clear course. "^"^"--^

'And supposing aT'fog, my Heaxie?' he said.
' The daughter in search of her father carries a lamp to
light her to him through densest fogs as well as over
deserts,' etc. She declaimed a long sentence, to set the
ripple running in his features ; and when he left the room
v^ for a last word with Armandine, she flung arms round
^<^ her mother's neck, murmuring : ' Mother ! mother ! ' a
^ ^ , - cry equal to ' I am sure I do right,' and understood so by

\f^ \ Jj^ Nataly approving it ; she too on the line of her instinct,
■^ , without an object in sight.

'J'

THE MOTHER— THE DAUGHTER 437
CHAPTER XXXVII

THE MOTHER — THE DAUGHTER

Taking Nesta's hand, on her entry into his chambers
with her father, Colney Durance bowed over it and kissed
it. The unusual performance had a meaning; she felt
she was praised. It might be because she made herself
her father's companion. 'I can't persuade him to put on
a great-coat,' she said. 'You woul^, defeat his aim at the
particula^waistcoat of_his amMtion/)said Colney, goaded v
to speak, iR)¥iamous"to Be heard. '

He kept her beside him, leading her about for intro-
ductions to multiform celebrities of both sexes; among
them the gentleman editing the Magazine which gave out
serially The Rival Tongues: and there was talk of a
dragon-throated public's queer appetite in Letters. The
pained Editor deferentially smiled at her cheerful mention
of Delphica. 'In book form, perhaps!' he remarked,
with plaintive resignation; adding: 'You read it?'
And a lady exclaimed : ' We all read it ! '

But we are the elect, who see signification and catch
flavour; and we are reminded of an insatiable monster
how sometimes capricious is his gorge. ' He may happen
to be in the humour for a shaking ! ' Colney's poor con-
solation it was to say of the prospects of his published
book : for the funny monster has been known to like a
shaking.

'He takes it kinder tickled,' said Fenellan, joining
the group and grasping Nesta's hand with a warmth
that thrilled her and set her guessing. 'A taste of his
favourite Cayenne lollypop, Colney; it fetches the tear
he loves to shed, or it gives him digestive heat in the bag

438 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

^ of his literary receptacle — fearfully relaxed and enormous !

And no wonder; his notion of the attitude for reading,

is to lie him down on his back ; and he has in a jiffy the

funnel of the Libraries inserted into his mouth, and he

s* feels the publishers pouring their gallons through it un-

limitedly ; never crjang out, which he can't ; only swell-

-^'■''^ ing, which he 's obliged to do, with a non-nutritious in-

'^ fe flation; and that 's his intellectual enjoyment; bearing

:t^ !•' ^ likeness to the horrible old tortiu-e of the baillir d'eau ;

and he 's doomed to perish in the worst book-form of

dropsy. You, my dear Colney, have offended his police or

excise, who stand by the funnel, in touch with his palate,

to make sure that nothing above proof is poured in ; and

there 's your misfortune. He 's not half a bad fellow,

you find when you haven't got to serve him.'

'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 Olym-
pus, ennobled brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery

THE MOTHER— THE DAUGHTER 439

to hand. Keep a straight eye on the primary motives of
man, you '11 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 iEacus at another. Observe Dartrey
marching off to the Station, for the purpose of laying his
miraculous weapon across the shoiilders 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 in- " f
struction 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 '11 grow up to do simi-
larly. And Dartrey, we assimie, is off to stop that system.
You behold Sir Dartrey twirling the weapon in prepara-
tory 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 '11 say. Plato entreats his absent mis-
tress to fix eyes on a star : eyes on Beer for the vmiting 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 favomite servant of Mars, cour
jured 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 man-
kind 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

440 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 flaUed 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, accu-
rately 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 move-
ment— movement,' he harped on the word Victor con-
stantly 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 mala-
dies, 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

THE MOTHER— THE DAUGHTER 441

spectacle of English frivolity, and you '11 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 mas-
culine, France feminine, Old England what remains.'

Victor ruffled and reddened on his shout of 'Neuter?'

Their circle widened. Nesta knew she was on promo-
tion, 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 gentle-
women accept of the meanest aid to cleanse the land

442 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 ex-
pression for that which is as near as great natures may-
come to the conceiving of the celestial spirit from an emis-
sary 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 woe-
fullest 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 takenT: 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 com-
mon 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

THE MOTHER— THE DAUGHTER 443

Society — this existing Society — is a toss of the cap for
the erasure of our civilization, et csetera.

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
^i3e 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 con-
versation upon Society, rendered one of its gilt pillars
particularly estimable. — ^A person in the debate had de-
clared 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

•

444 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 reflect-
ing level? — enough to justify demands for a vessel of finer
design. If Soiiie.tY,isJ:.a,siibsist..-it-m.i.ist,.hay,eL.th.e,,h,»maTi
with the logical argument against the. cry of the free-flags,
instead of presenting a block's obtuseness. That, you need
y^ "n^Eesitate to believe, will be rolled downward and dis-
':( Ij^ integrated, sooner than later. __A_.Spciety based on the

jf'u -T .'.logical^ concrete .oLbJlimane.jCQM!ieia±eae£§_;c=a- Society

' V*"^^^-^" pTohiHting to Mrs. Burman her wielding of a life-long

IT "I' jod. . . .

P\- \\M The personal element again to confuse inquiry ! — And
\)c ^ f Sfcepsey and Barmby both of them bent on doing work

ji\ ~^P 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 crea-
tures incapable of abstract thought when their social posi-
tion 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 infatua-
tion so far, that he has been investing in Japanese and
Chinese Loans, because they are less meat-eaters than

THE MOTHER— THE DAUGHTER 445

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 re-
straining of tears froze her speech.

'Victor! Our Nesta! Mr. Sowerby is unable to ex-
plain. 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 . . .?'

446 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'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
V 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 "in-
dulgent." 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 '11 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

THE MOTHER— THE DAUGHTER 447

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, , f'
hard knowledge of it — a knowledge drawn from foul \i'
wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to . '
probe to the depth of it. She had in her wounded breast ^ J ''
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!' hear-
ing the world's words : — the daughter excused, by reason
of her having such a mother ; the mother impitied 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 re-
strained 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 daugh-
ter!' 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 miu-mured

448 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

of a headache : ' Though, upon my word, the best cure for
mama would be a look into Fredi's eyes !' he said, embrac-
ing his girl, quite beheving in her, just a little afraid of her.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

NATALY, NBSTA, 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 see-
ing 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 haye^efia,her frienAlb&n, not : ,&o far she differed
from^a corpse; but she was near the Jjkeness tojthe^ead
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 pro-
tect 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 con-
tend against is, injustice. And she sank into sensational

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN 449

protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud
to phrase them.

Her one great affiction, 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 easUy 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 limch 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 Pris-
cUla'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 bold-
ness 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 emo-
tions; all ran counterthreads, that produced a mad
pattern iu 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.

450 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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.'

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN 451

' 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, is 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

452 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 !'

'It would not be my opinion.'

'Did not impose on her!'

' N6t 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 ;

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN 453

I say it. You have heard the story from one of your
conveptional-g^iLtlfimen.'

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 '11 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 imction.
Many ? — I won't say all ; but men who consent to hear
black words pitched at them, and help to set good women p
facing away from them, are pious dolts or rascal dogs of
hypocrites. They, if you '11 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 '11 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 y
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

454 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 cer-
tain oflScials. 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
,t'"- 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.'

Natalysaid: '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 '11
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 pro-
tect the woman from a happier sister's judgement, to save
you from alarm concerning Nesta: — quite groundless, if
you '11 believe me. Come, there 's plenty of benevolent
writing abroad on these topics now : facts are more looked

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN 455

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 un-
protected 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 but-
terfly ! 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 chUd'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 shotdd give him. Seeing her, the light of what he
now knew of her was an eimobling equal to celestial. For
this fair girl was one of the active souls of the world — his \/
dream to discover in woman's form. Shejthelittle N^ta,
"thenEalTpufe-eyed girlBelofe Trfm, 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. Shejvas not of the order of young women
who, in sheer ignorance or in voluntary, consent to the ^
""P^ce with evilj and., are^ kept externally safe from the
smirch of evil, .aad-Jia the_om^Q,gnts of their country,
glory of a country prizing ornaments higher than qualities.

456 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 remem-
bered 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 SowerByT""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 draw-
ing her to be able to speak of scarlet matter, was personally
worshipped.

He attributed the full rose upon her cheeks to the for-
bidding subject.

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

'Oh, Captain Dartrey!'

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN 457

'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.'

'EI could!'

' But the fellow is not a captain : and he is a friend, an
old friend, very old friend : he '11 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 con-
sidered 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.

458 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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.

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN 459

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 vmbendingness 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 flighting, they are '
the wedded^^e.

WStaTfelt 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^d_^l so give her joul.

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 mUes 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
pla}Tng 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

460 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 unblushing-
ness. 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 com-
monly 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.

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 461

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 hxisband a man whose char-
acter and station guaranteed protection instead of in-
citing 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 light-
nings as Nesta was.

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

CHAPTER XXXIX

A CHAPTEE 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 white-
ness. 'Only these telegrams,' she said, in apology.

462 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

' 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: 'Dar-
trey 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 un-
ceasing 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

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 463

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 peni-
tential 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 frightfuUer than any ever heard.

Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl's em-
brace, 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 de-
scended to them. Yet she saw the girl's heart brimming,
either with some word spoken to her or for Joy of an

464 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

unmaidenly confession. During dinner they talked, with-
out 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 re-
main. '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

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 465

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 inca-
pacity 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 groimds
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 Christ-
mas ; 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.

466 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

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 insti-
tution. 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 friU,
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

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 467

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.'

'Ay, and your country squires and your manufacturers
contrive to give the army a body of consumptive louts fit
for nothing else than to take the shilling — and not worth
it,' said Dartrey.

'Sounds like old Colney,' Victor remarked to himself.
'But, believe me, I 'm ashamed of the number of servants
who wait on me. It wouldn't so much matter, as Skepsey
says, if they were trained to arms and self-respect. That
little fellow Skepsey 's closer to the right notion, and the
right practice, too, than any of us. With his Matilda
Pridden ! He has jumped out of himself to the proper
idea of women, too. And there 's a man who has been
up three times before the magistrates, and is considered
a disorderly subject — one among the best of English
citizens, I declare ! I never think of Skepsey with- [
out the most extraordinary, witless kind of envy — as
n he~^re putting iiTactroif^n idesb I once had_ and
never quite got hold of again. The match for him
is Predi. She threatens to be just as devoted, just as
simple, as he. I positively doubt whether any of us
could stop her, if she had set herself to do a thing she
thought right.'

'I should not like to think our trying it possible,' said
Dartrey.

'All very well, but it 's a rock ahead. We shall have to
alter our course, my friend. You know, I dined with that
couple, after the private twenty minutes with Marsett : — •

468 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

he formally propounded the invitation, as we were close on
his hour, rather late : and I wanted to make the woman
happy, besides putting a seal of cordiality on his good in-
tentions— politic! And subsequently I heard from her,
that — you '11 think nothing of it ! — Fredi promised to
stand by her at the altar.'

Dartrey said, shrugging : ' She needn't do that.'

' So we may say. You 're dealing with Nesta Victoria.
Spare me a contest with that girl; I undertake to manage
any man or woman living.'

'When the thing to be done is thought right by her.'

'But can we always trust her judgement, my dear
Dartrey?'

'In this case, she would argue, that her resolution to
keep her promise would bind or help to bind Marsett to
fulfil his engagement.'

' Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of
that fellow Dudley Sowerby ! I don't complain ; it
suits; but one thinks — eh? — women!'

'Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you
insist on having women rooted to the bed of the river,
they '11 veer with the tides, like water-weeds, and no
wonder.'

'Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey.
We can't have women independent.'

'Then don't be exclaiming about their vagaries.'

Victor mused : ' It 's wonderful : that little girl of
mine ! — good height now : but what a head she has !
Oh, she '11 listen to reason : only mark what I say : — with
that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young fellow, will
imagine she 's the most docile of wives in the world.
And as to wife, I 'm not of the contrary opinion. But
qu& individual female, supposing her to have laid fast
hold of an idea of duty, it 's he who '11 have to turn the
comer second, if they 're to trot in the yoke together. Or

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 469

it may be an idea of service to a friend — or to her sex !
That Mrs. Marsett says she feels for — "bleeds" for her
sex. The poor woman didn't show to advantage with
me, because she was in a fever to please : — talks in jerks,
hot phrases. She holds herself well. At the end of the
dinner she behaved better. Odd, you can teach women
with hints and a lead. But Marsett 's Marsett to the
end. Rather touching ! — ^the poor fellow said : Deuce
of a bad look-out for me if Judith doesn't have a child !
First-rate sportsman, I hear. He should have thought
of his family earlier. You know, Dartrey, the case is to
be argued for the family as well. You won't listen. And
for Society too ! Off you go.'

A battery was opened on that wall of composite.

'Ah, well,' said Victor. 'But I may have to beg your
help, as to the so-called promise to stand at the altar. I
don't mention it upstairs.'

He went to Nataly's room.

She was considerately treated, and was aware of being
dandled, that she might have sleep.

She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic. — ^Those
women invade us — we cannot keep them out ! was her
inward cry: with a reverberation of the unfailing
accompaniment : — ^The world holds you for one of
them!

Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness
to doat upon his girl for whatever she did, set him exalt-
ing Nesta's conduct. She thought: Was Nesta so sym-
pathetic with her mother of late by reason of a moral
insensibility to the offence?

This was her torture through the night of a labouring
heart, that travelled to one dull shock, again and again
repeated : — the apprehended sound, in fact, of Dudley
Sowerby's knock at the street door. Or sometimes a foot-
man handed her his letter, courteously phrased to withdraw

470 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

from the alliance. Or else he came to a scene with
Nesta, and her mother was dragged into it, and the in-
tolerable subject steamed about her. The girl was
visioned as deadly. She might be indifferent to the
protection of Dudley's name. Robust, sanguine, Victor's
child, she might — her mother listened to a devil's whisper :
— but no ; Nesta's aim was at the heights ; she was pure
in mind as in body. No, but the world would bring
the accusation ; and the world would trace the cause :
Heredity, it would say. Would it say falsely? Nataly
harped on the interrogation until she felt her existence
dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and she found
herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that
another would follow, specvJating on the cruel force which
keeps us to the act of breathing. — ^Though I could draw
wild blissful breath if I were galloping across the moors !
her worn heart said to her youth : and out of ken of the
world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem. —
Nature thereat renewed her old sustainment with gentle
murmurs, that were supported by Dr. Themison's account
of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the yoke on
behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the
ideal. Nataly's brain had a short gallop over moorland.
It brought her face to face with Victor's girl, and she
dropped once more to her remorse in herself and her re-
proaches of Nesta. The girl had inherited,, from ..Jier
father something of the gataract'siorce which, won ita. way
"by catching or by mastering, uprooting^mlninE !

In the morning she was heavily asleep. Victor left
word with Nesta, that the dear mother was not to be dis-
turbed. Consequently, when Dudley called to see Mrs.
Victor Radnor, he was informed that Miss Radnor would
receive him.

Their interview lasted an hour.

Dudley came to Victor in the City about luncheon time.

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 471

His perplexity of countenance was eloquent. He had,
before seeing the young lady, digested an immense deal :
more, as it seemed to him, than any English gentleman
should be asked to consume. She now referred him to her
father, who had spent a day in Brighton, and would, she
said, explain whatever there was to be explained. But
she added, that if she was expected to abandon a friend,
she could not. Dudley had argued with her upon the
nature of friendship, the measurement of its various
dues ; he had lectured on the choice of friends, the im-
possibility for young ladies, necessarily inexperienced, to
distinguish the right class of friends, the dangers they ran
in selecting friends unwarranted by the stamp of honour-
able families.

'And what did Fredi say to that?' Victor inquired.

' Miss Radnor said — I may be dense, I cannot compre-
hend— that the precepts were suitable for seminaries of
Pharisees. When it is a question of a young lady associat-
ing with a notorious woman !'

'Not notorious. You spoil your case if you "speak
extremely," as a friend says. I saw her yesterday. She
worships "Miss Radnor."'

'Nesta will know when she is older; she will thank
me,' said Dudley hurriedly. 'As it is at present, I may
reckon, I hope, that the association ceases. Her name —
I have to consider my family.'

' Good anchorage ! You must fight it out with the girl.
And depend upon this — you 're not the poorer for being
the husband of a girl of character; unless you try to
bridle her. She belongs to her time. I don't mind own-
ing to you, she has given me a lead. — Fredi '11 be merry
to-night. Here 's a letter I have from the Sanfredini,
dated Milan, fresh this morning ; invitation to bring the
god-child to her villa on Como in May ; desirous to em-
brace her. She wrote to the office. Not a word of her

472 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

duque. She has pitched hun to the winds. You may
like to carry it off to Fredi and please her.'

'I have business,' Dudley replied.

'Away to it, then!' said Victor. 'You stand by me?
— we expect our South London borough to be open in
January ; early next year, at least ; may be February.
You have family interest there.'

'Personally, I will do my best,' Dudley said; and he
escaped, feeling, with the universal censor's angry spite,
that the revolutions of the world had made one of the
wealthiest of City men the head of a set of Bohemians.
And there are eulogists of the modern time! And the
man's daughter was declared to belong to it ! A visit in
May to the Italian cantatrice separated from her husband,
would render the maiden an accomplished flinger of caps
over the windmills.

At home Victor discovered, that there was not much
more than a truce between Nesta and Nataly. He had
a medical hint from Dr. Themison, and he counselled his
girl to humour her mother as far as could be : particularly
in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike,
after opposing, strongly favoured. How are we ever
to get a clue to the labyrinthine convolutions and change-
ful motives of the sex ! Dartrey's theories were absurd.
Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman?
The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her
veering.

' Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,' said Nesta.

'Mr. Sowerby! My dear, he is bound, bound in
honour, bound at heart. You did not dismiss him?'

'I repeated the word he used. I thought of mother.
The blood leaves her cheeks at a disappointment now.
She has taken to like him.'

'Why, you like him!'

'I could not vow.'

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 473

'Tush.'

'Ah, don't press me, dada. But you will see, he has
disengaged himself.'

He had done it, though not in formal speech. Slow
digestion of his native antagonism to these Bohemians,
to say nothing of his judicial condemnation of them,
brought him painfully round to the writing of a letter to
Nataly ; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his
instinct told him he had the strongest hold.

She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter form-
ing Dudley's grievance and her own with Nesta ; and it
was a woeful half-hour for them. But Nataly was not
the weeper.

Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor.
Dudley bore no resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused
to take the word no from her, and had taken it, and had
gone to do holy work, for which she revered him. Dudley
took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once
more her mother or her father, inspired by him, came
interceding, her mother actually supplicating. So that
the reality of Dudley's love rose to conception like a
London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, de-
cently, positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an
ill-visaged problem. She glanced in soul at Dartrey
Fenellan for help; she had her wild thoughts._^ Having
once called him Dartrey, thejvirginal barrier to thoughts /'
was broken ;_. and 'but jfcrLTQYajQLher.fathBi, .for love
"and pity of her mother, she would have ventured the step
tioihakelhelman who had her whole being in charge accept
'oFTeject~h^efr~"NotBing"'eIse appeared in prospect. Her
father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley;
and the sensitive gentleman presented himseK to receive
his wound and to depart with it. But always he returned.
At last, as if imder tuition, he refrained from provoking a
wound ; he stood there to win her upon any terms ; and

474 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel
to be increasing in good looks as more and more his
pretensions became distasteful to her. The slight cast of
sourness on his lower features had almost vanished, his
nature seemed to have enlarged. He complimented her
for her 'generous benevolence,' vaguely, yet with evident
sincereness; he admitted, that the modem world is
'attempting diflSculties with at least commendable in-
tentions'; and that the position of women demands
improvement, consideration for them also. He said
feelingly: 'They have to bear extraordinary burdens!'
There he stopped.

The sharp intelligence fronting him understood, that
this compassionate ejaculation was the point where she,
too, must cry halt. He had, however — still under tuition,
perhaps — withdrawn his voice from the pursuit of her;
and so she in gratitude silenced her critical mind beneath
a smooth conceit of her having led him two steps to a
broader tolerance. Susceptible as she was, she did not
influence him without being affected herself in other
things than her vanity : his prudishness affected her. .
Only when her heart flamed did she disdain that real
haven of refuge, with its visionary mount of superiority,
offered by Society to its effect, in the habit of ignoring the
sins it fosters under cloak; — not less than did the naked
barbaric time, and far more to the vitiation of the
soul. He fancied he was moulding her; therefore
winning her. It followed, that he had the lover's
desire for assurance of exclusive possession; and re-
flecting, that he had greatly pardoned, he grew exacting.
He mentioned his objections to some of Mr. Dartrey
Fenellan's ideas.

Nesta replied: 'I have this morning had two letters
to make me happy.'

A provoking evasion. He would rather have seen

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 475

antagonism bridle and stiffen her figure. 'Is one of them
from that gentleman?'

'One is from my dear friend Louise de Seilles. She
comes to me early next month.'

'The other?'

'The other is also from a friend.'

'A dear friend?'

' Not so dear. Her letter gives me happiness. '

' She writes — not from France : from . . . ? you tempt
me to guess.'

'She writes to tell me, that Mr. Dartrey Fenellan has
helped her in a way to make her eternally thankful.'

'The place she writes from is . . .?'

The drag of his lips betrayed his enlighteimaent. He
insisted on doubting. He demanded assurance.

'It matters in no degree,' she said.

Dudley ' thought himself excusable for inquiring.'

She bowed gently.

The stings and scorpions and degrading itches of this
nest of wealthy Bohemians enraged him.

'Are you — I beg to ask — are you still : — I can hardly
think it — Nesta! — I surely have a claim to advise: — ^it
cannot be with your mother's consent : — in communi-
cation, in correspondence with . . .?'

Again she bowed her head ; saying : ' It is true.'

'With that person?'

He could not but look the withering disgust of the
modem world in a conservative gentleman who has been
lured to go with it a little way, only to be bitten. 'I
decline to believe it,' he said with forcible sound.

' She is married,' was the rather shameless, exasperating
answer.

'Married or not!' he cried, and murmured: 'I have
borne — . These may be Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's ideas;
they are not mine. I have — Something at least is due to

476 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

me. Ask any lady: — there are clergymen, I know,
clergymen who are for uplifting — quite right, but not
associating: — to call one of them a friend! Ask any
lady, any ! Your mother . . . '

'I beg you will not distress my mother,' said Nesta.

'I beg to know whether this correspondence is to con-
tinue?' said Dudley.

' All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.'

' You are.' He added hastily : ' Counsels of prudence :
— there is not a lady living who would tell you otherwise.
At all events, in public opinion, if it were known — and it
would certainly be known, — a lady, wife or spinster,
would suffer — would not escape the — ^at least shadow of
defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy
with . . . hard words are wholesome in such a case: —
"touch pitch," yes ! My sense is coherent.'

'Quite,' said Nesta.

'And you do not agree with me?'

'I do not.'

'Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?'

'In this instance, better.'

'Then I retire. I cannot retain my place here. You
may depend upon it, the world is not wrong when it
forbids young ladies to have cognizance of women
leading disorderly lives.'

'Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?'

'Men, too, of course.'

'You do not exclude the men from Society.'

'Oh ! one reads that kind of argument in books.'

' Oh ! the worthy books, then. I would read them, if I
could find them.'

'They are banned by self-respecting readers.'

'It grieves me to think differently.'

Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl ; and
contrasting her with the foulness of the subject she dared

IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT 477

discuss, it seemed to him, that a world which did not puff
at her and silence, if not extinguish, was in a state of
liquefaction.

Remembering his renewed repentances in absence, he
said : * I do hope you may come to see, that the views
shared by your mother and me are not erroneous.'

'But do not distress her,' Nesta implored him. 'She
is not well. When she has grown stronger, her kind heart
will move her to receive the lady, so that she may not be
deprived of the society of good women. I shall hope she
will not disapprove of me. I cannot forsake a friend.'

'I beg to say good-bye,' said Dudley.

She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke ; and so
little startling was it, that she might have fancied it
expected, save for her knowing herself too serious to have
played at wiles to gain her ends.

He 'wished her prudent advisers.'

She thanked him. 'In a few days, Louise de Seilles
wUl be here.'

A Frenchwoman and Papist ! was the interjection of his
twist of brows.

Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had
covered his farewell under a salutation regretful in
frostiness.

A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and
Armandine was made happy with a piece of Parisian
riband.

Winter was rapidly in passage: changes were visible
everywhere ; Earth and House of Commons and the South
London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman was the
sole exception. To the stupefaction of physicians, in a
manner to make a sane man ask whether she was not being
retained as an instrument for one of the darker purposes
of Providence — and where are we standing if we ask such
things? — she held on to her thread of life.

478 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

February went by. And not a word from Themison;
nor from Carling, nor from the Rev. Groseman Butter-
more, nor from Jamiman. That is to say, the two former
accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were
interested; but they had apparently grown to consider
Mrs. Burman as an establishment, one of our fixtures. On
the other hand, there was nothing to be feared from her.
Lakelands feared nothing : the entry into Lakelands was
decreed for the middle of April. Those good creatures
enclosed the poor woman and nourished her on comfort-
able fiction. So the death of the member for the South
London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran
in maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by
no possibility lead to an exposure of the private history
of the candidate for his vacant seat.

CHAPTER XL

AN EXPIATION

Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no
companionship save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it
rather than try at healing. So rational a mind as she had
was not long in outliving mistaken impressions ; she could
distinguish her girl's feeling, and her aim ; she could speak
on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exalta-
tion of Nesta. Mademoiselle, however, by means of a
change of tone and look when Dudley Sowerby and Dar-
trey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced
preference of the more unstable one : — or rather, the man
adventurous out of the world's highways, whose image, as

AN EXPIATION 479

husband of such a daughter as hers, smote the wounded
mother with a chillness. Mademoiselle's occasional thrill
of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have tempted
a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for
the young Frenchwoman's novel tenderness to England, of
which Nesta proudly, very happily boasted. The sus-
picion proposed itself, and was rejected : for not even the
fever of an insane body could influence Nataly's generous
character, to let her moods divert and command her
thoughts of persons.

Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon
everything about her; with the one exception of the
reason why she had come to favour Dudley, and how it was
she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to see
herself in her position altogether with the world's relent-
less, unexamining hard eyes. Bitterness added, of Mrs.
Marsett : She is made an honest woman ! — ^And there was
a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach the girl for
causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded. Other-
wise her mind was open ; she was of aid to Victor in his
confusion over some lost Idea he had often touched on
latterly. And she was the one who sent him ahead at a
trot under a light, by saying : ' You would found a new
and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' :
when he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior
weapon. That being, in fact, as Colney Durance had
pointed out to him, the weapon of self-conquest used by
them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.' Was it his
Idea ? He fancied an aching at the back of his head when
he speculated. But his Idea had been surpassingly
luminous, alive, a creation ; and this came before him with
the yellow skin of a Theory, bred, born of books. Though
Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of self-denying dis-
cipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.

Nesta likewise helped : but more in what she did than

480 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

in what she said : she spoke intelligently enough to make
him feel a certain increase of alarm, amounting to a
cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her dealings
with Dudley and with himself. She so quietly displaced
the lady visiting him at the City offices. His girl's dis-
regard of hostile weather, and her company, her talk,
delighted him : still he remonstrated, at her coming daily.
She came : nor was there an instigation on the part of her
mother, clearly none : her mother asked him once whether
he thought she met the dreadful Brighton woman. His
Fredi drove constantly to walk back beside him Westward,
as he loved to do whenever it was practicable ; and exceed-
ing the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter,
her conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment
caused by the defeat and entire exclusion of the lady visit-
ing him so complimentarily for his advice on stocks,
shares, mines, et caetera. The lady resisted; she was
vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple appari-
tion of daylight.

His Fredi was like the daylight to him ; she was the very
daylight to his mind, whatsoever their theme of converse :
for by stimulating that ready but vagrant mind to quit the
leash of the powerful senses and be sethereally excursive,
she gave him a new enjoyment ; which led to reflections —
a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the
verge of a doubt. Are we, in fact, harmonious with the
Great Mother when we yield to the pressure of our natures
for indulgence? Is she, when translated into us, solely
the imperious appetite? Here was Fredi, his little Fredi
— ^stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all
her fun and her sail on wings — ^lifting him to pleasures not
followed by clamorous, andjperfectly satisfactory, yet dis-
composingly violent, appeals to Nature. They could be
vindicated. Or could they, when they would not bear a
statement of the case? He could not imagine himself

AN EXPIATION 481

stating it namelessly to his closest friend — ^not to Simeon
?enellan. As for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him
T\riith shivers : — Young Dudley would have seemed a more
possible confidant : — and he represented the Puritan
world. — And young Dudley was getting over Fredi's
infatuation for the woman she had rescued : he was be-
ginning to fancy he saw a right enthusiasm in it ; — in the
abstract ; if only the fair maid would drop an unseemly
acquaintance. He had called at the office to say so.
Victor stammered the plea for him.

'Never, dear father,' came the smooth answer: a
shocking answer in contrast with the tones. Her English
was as lucid as her eyes when she continued up to the
shock she dealt : ' Do not encourage a good man to waste
his thoughts upon me. I have chosen my mate, and I may
never marry him. I do not know whether he would marry
me. He has my soul. I have no shame in saying I love
him. It is to love goodness, greatness of heart. He is a
respecter of women — of all women ; not only the fortunate.
He is the friend of the weaker everywhere. He has been
proved in fire. He does not sentimentalize over poor
women, as we know who scorns people for doing: — and
that is better than hardness, meaning kindly. He is not
one of the unwise advocates. He measures the forces
against .them. He reads their breasts. He likes me. He
is with me in my plans. He has not said, has not shown,
he loves me. It is too high a thought for me until I
hear it.'

'Has your soul !' was all that Victor could reply, while
the whole conception of Lakelands quaked under the
crumbling structure.

Remonstrance, argument, a word for Dudley, swelled to
his lips and sank in dumbness. Her seeming intuition —
if it was not a perception — of the point where submission
to the moods of his nature had weakened his character, and

482 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

required her defence of him, struck Victor with a serious
fear of his girl : and it was the more illuminatingly damna-
tory for being recognized as the sentiment which no father
should feel. He tried to think she ought not to be so wise
of the things of the world. An effort to imagine a reproof,
showed him her spirit through her eyes : in her deeds too :
she had already done work on the road : — Colney Durance,
Dartrey Fenellan, anything but sentimentalists either of
them, strongly backing her, upholding her. Victor could
no longer so naturally name her Fredi.

He spoke it hastily, under plea of some humorous tender-
ness, when he ventured. When Dudley, calling on him in
the City to discuss the candidature for the South London
borough, named her Fredi, that he might regain a vantage
of familiarity by imitating her father, it struck Victor as
audacious. It jarred in his recollection, though the heir of
the earldom spoke in the tone of a lover, was really at high
pitch. He appeared to be appreciating her, to have
suffered stings of pain ; he offered himself ; he made but
one stipulation. Victor regretfully assured him, he feared
he could do nothing. The thought of his entry into Lake-
lands, with Nesta Victoria refusing the foundation stone of
the place, grew dim.

But he was now canvassing for the Borough, hearty at
the new busiiiess as the braced swimmer on seas, which
instantly he became, with an end in view to be gained.

Late one April night, expecting Nataly to have gone to
bed, and Nesta to be waiting for him, he reached home,
and found Nataly in her sitting-room alone. ' Nesta was
tired,' she said: 'we have had a scene; she refuses Mr.
Sowerby; I am sick of pressing it; he is very much in
earnest, painfully; she blames him for disturbing me;
she will not see the right course : — a mother reads her
daughter ! If my girl has not guidance ! — she means
rightly, she is rash.'

AN EXPIATION 483

Nataly could not utter all that her insaneness of feeling
made her think with regard to Victor's daughter —
daughter also of the woman whom her hard conscience
accused of inflammability. 'Here is a note from Dr.
Themison, dear.'

Victor seized it, perused, and drew the big breath.

' From Themison,' he said ; he coughed.

'Don't think to deceive me,' said she. 'I have not
read the contents, I know them.'

'The invitation at last, for to-morrow, Sunday, four p.m.
Odd, that next day at eight of the evening I shall be
addressing our meeting in the Theatre. Simeon speaks.
Beaves Urmsing insists on coming, Tory though he is.
Those Tories are jollier fellows than — well, no wonder !
There will be no surgical . . . the poor woman is very low.
A couple of days at the outside. Of course, I go.'

' Hand me the note, dear.'

It had to be given up, out of the pocket.

'But,' said Victor, 'the mention of you is merely
formal.'

She needed sleep : she bowed her head.

Nataly was the first at the breakfast-table in the morn-
ing, a fair Sunday morning. She was going to Mrs. John
Cormyn's Church, and she asked Nesta to come with her.

She returned five minutes before the hour of lunch,
having left Nesta with Mrs. John. Louise de SeUles imder-
took to bring Nesta home at the time she might choose.
Fenellan, Mr. Pempton, Peridon and Catkin, lunched and
chatted. Nataly chatted. At a quarter to three o'clock
Victor's carriage was at the door. He rose; he had to
keep an appointment. Nataly said to him pubhcly: 'I
come too.' He stared and nodded. In the carriage, he
said : 'I 'm driving to the Gardens, for a stroll, to have a
look at the beasts. Sort of relief. Poor crazy woman ! —
However, it 's a comfort to her: so . . . !'

484 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'I like to see them/ said Nataly. 'I shall see her. I
have to do it.'

Up to the gate of the Gardens Victor was arguing to dis-
suade his dear soul from this very foolish, totally unneces-
sary, step. Alighting, he put the matter aside, for good
angels to support his counsel at the final moment.

Bears, lions, tigers, eagles, monkeys : they suggested no
more than he would have had from prints ; they sprang
no reflection, except, that the coming hour was a matter of
indifference to them. They were about him, and exer-
cised so far a distraction. He took very kindly to an old
mother monkey, relinquishing her society at sight of
Nataly's heave of the bosom. Southward, across the park,
the dread house rose. He began quoting Colney Durance
with relish while sarcastically confuting the cynic, who
found much pasture in these Gardens. Over Southward,
too, he would be addressing a popular assembly to-morrow
evening. Between now and then there was- a ditch to
jump. He put on the sympathetic face of grief. 'After
all, a caged wild beast hasn't so bad a life,' he said. — To be
well fed while they live, and welcome death as a release
from the maladies they develop in idleness, is the condition
of wealthy people : — creatures of prey ? horrible thought !
yet allied to his Idea, it seemed. Yes, but these good
caged beasts here set them an example, in not troubling
relatives and friends when they come to the gasp ! Mrs.
Burman's invitation loomed as monstrous — a final act of
her cruelty. His skin pricked with dews. He thought of
Nataly beside him, jumping the ditch with him, as a relief
— ^if she insisted on doing it. He hoped she would not, for
the sake of her composure.

It was a ditch void of bottom. But it was a mere
matter of an hour, less. The state of health of the invalid
could bear only a few minutes. In any case, we are sure
that the hour wiU pass. Our own arrive? Certainly.

AN EXPIATION 485

'Capital place for children!' he exclaimed. And here
startlingly before him in the clusters of boys and girls, was
the difference between young ones and their elders feeling
quite as young : the careless youngsters have not to go
and sit in the room with a virulent old woman, and express
penitence and what not, and hear words of pardon, after
their holiday scamper and stare at the caged beasts.

Attention to the children precipitated him upon ac-
quaintances, hitherto cleverly shunned. He nodded them
off, after the brightest of greetings.

Such anodyne as he could squeeze from the incarcerated
wUd creatures, was exhausted. He fell to work at
Nataly's 'aristocracy of the contempt of luxury'; signi-
fying, that we the wealthy wUl not exist to pamper flesh,
but we live for the promotion of brotherhood : — ay, and
that our England must make some great moral stand, if she
is not to fall to the rear and down. Unuttered, it caught
the skirts of the Idea : it evaporated when spoken. Still,
this theme was almost an exorcism of Mrs. Burman. He
consulted his watch. ' Thirteen minutes to four. I must
be punctual,' he said. Nataly stepped faster.

Seated in the carriage, he told her he had never felt the
horror of that place before. ' Put me down at the comer
of the terrace, dear : I won't drive to the door.'

'I come with you, Victor,' she replied.

After entreaties and reasons intermixed, to melt her
resolve, he saw she was firm: and he asked himself,
whether he might not be constitutionally better adapted
to persuade than to dissuade. The question thumped.
Having that house of drugs in view, he breathed more
freely for the prospect of feeling his Nataly near him
beneath the roof.

' You really insist, dear love ? ' he appealed to her : and
her answer : ' It must be,' left no doubt : though he chose
to say : ' Not because of standing by me ? ' And she said :

486 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

'For my peace, Victor.' They stepped to the pavement.
The carriage was dismissed.

Seventeen houses of the terrace fronting the park led to
the funereal one : and the bell was tolled in the breast of
each of the couple advancing with an air of calmness to the
inevitable black door.

Jarniman opened it. 'His mistress was prepared to see
them.' — Not like one near death. — ^They were met in the
hall by the Rev. Groseman Buttermore. ' You will find a
welcome,' was his reassurance to them, gently delivered,
on the stoop of a large person. His whispered tones were
more agreeably deadening than his words.

Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.

'Can she bear it?' Victor said, and heard : 'Her wish :
ten minutes.'

'Soon over,' he murmured to Nataly, with a compas-
sionate exclamation for the invalid.

They rounded the open door. They were in the draw-
ing-room. It was furnished as in the old time, gold and
white, looking new; all the same as of old, save for a
division of silken hangings; and these were pale blue:
the colour preferred by Victor for a bedroom. He glanced
at the ceiling, to bathe in a blank space out of memory.
Here she lived,^here she slept, behind the hangings. There
was refreshingly that little difference in the arrangement
of the room. The comer Northward was occupied by the
grand piano ; and Victor had an inquiry in him : — tuned?
He sighed, expecting a sight to come through the hangings.
Sensible that Nataly trembled, he perceived the Rev.
Groseman Buttermore half across a heap of shawl-swathe
on the sofa.

Mrs. Burman was present; seated. People may die
seated; she had always disliked the extended posture;
except for the night's rest, she used to say; imagining
herself to be not inviting the bolt of sudden death, in her

AN EXPIATION 487

attitude when seated by day : — and often at night the
poor woman had to sit up for the qualms of her dyspepsia !
— But I 'm bound to think humanely, be Christian, be kind,
benignant, he thought, and he fetched the spirit required,
to behold her face emerge from a pale blue sUk veiluig ; as
it were, the inanimate wasted led up from the mould by
morning.

Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.

Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for
sunken eyes was distinguishable as the one once known.
If the world could see it and hear, that it called itself a
man's wife ! She looked burnt out.

Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa. Execution
there ! Victor thought, and he garrotted the unruly miad
of a man really feeling devoutness in the presence of the
shadow thrown by the dread Shade.

'Ten minutes,' Mr. Buttermore said low, after obligingly
placing them on the chairs.

He went. They were alone with Mrs. Burman.

No voice came. They were unsure of being seen by the
floating grey of eyes patient to gaze from their vast dis-
tance. Big drops fell from Nataly's. Victor heard the
French time-piece on the mantel-shelf, where a famDiar
gilt Cupid swung for the seconds : his own purchase. The
time of day on the clock was wrong; the Cupid swung.

Nataly's mouth was taking breath of anguish at
moments. More than a minute of the terrible length of the
period of torture must have gone : two, if not three.

A quaver sounded. ' You have come.' The voice was
articulate, thinner than the telephonic, trans-Atlantic by
deep-sea cable.

Victor answered : 'We have.'

Another minute must have gone in the silence. And
when we get to five minutes we are on the descent, rapidly
counting our way out of the house, into the fresh air.

488 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

where we were half an hour back, among those happy
beasts in the pleasant Gardens !

Mrs. Burman's eyelids shut. 'I said you would come.'

Victor started to the fire-screen. 'Your sight requires
protection.'

She dozed. 'And Natalia Dreighton!' she next said.

They were certainly now on the five minutes. Now for
the slide downward and outward ! Nataly should never
have been allowed to come.

'The white waistcoat !' struck his ears.

'Old customs with me, always!' he responded. 'The
first of April, always. White is a favourite. Pale blue,
too. But I fear — I hope you have not distressing nights?
In my family we lay great stress on the nights we pass.
My cousins, the Miss Duvidneys, go so far as to judge of
the condition of health by the nightly record.'

'Your daughter was in their house.'

She knew everything !

' Very fond of my daughter — the ladies,' he remarked.

'I wish her well.'

'You are very kind.'

Mrs. Burman communed within or slept. 'Victor,
Natalia, we will pray,' she said.

Her trembling hands crossed their fingers. Nataly
slipped to her knees.

The two women mutely prasdng, pulled Victor into the
devotional hush. It acted on him like the silent spell
of service in a Church. He forgot his estimate of the
minutes, he formed a prayer, he refused to hear the Cupid
swinging, he droned a sound of sentences to deaden his
ears. Ideas of eternity rolled in semblance of enormous
clouds. Death was a black bird among them. The piano
rang to Nataly's young voice and his. The gold and white
of the chairs welcomed a youth suddenly enrolled among
the wealthy by an enamoured old lady on his arm. Cupid

AN EXPIATION 489

tick-ticked. — Poor soul ! poor woman ! How little we
mean to do harm when we do an injury ! An incompre-
hensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top. We
get on fairly at the centre. Yet it is there that we do the
mischief making such a riddle of the bottom and the top.
What is to be said ! Prayer quiets one. Victor peered
at Nataly fervently on her knees and Mrs. Bunnan bowed
over her knotted fingers. The earnestness of both en-
forced an effort at a phrased prayer in him. Plungeing
through a wave of the scent of Mar6chale, that was a
tremendous memory to haul hiTn backward and forward,
he beheld his prayer dancing across the furniture; a
diminutive thin black figure, elvish, irreverent, appall-
ingly unlike his proper emotion ; and he brought his hands
just to touch, and got to the edge of his chair, with split
knees. At once the figure vanished. By merely looking
at Nataly, he passed into her prayer. A look at Mrs.
Bunnan made it personal, his own. He heard the cluck
of a horrible sob coming from him. After a repetition of
his short form of prayer deeply stressed, he thanked him-
self with the word 'sincere,' and a queer side-thought on
our human susceptibility to the influence of posture. We
are such creatures.

Nataly resumed her seat. Mrs. Burman had raised
her head. She said: 'We are at peace.' She presently
said, with effort: 'It cannot last with me. I die in
nature's way. I would bear forgiveness with me, that I
may have it above. I give it here, to you, to all. My
soul is cleansed, I trust. Much was to say. My strength
wUl not. Unto God, you both !'

The Rev. Groseman Buttermore was moving on
slippered step to the back of the sofa. Nataly dropped
before the unseeing, scarce breathing, lady for an instant.
Victor murmured an adieu, grateful for being spared the
ceremonial shake of hands. He turned away, then

490 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

turned back, praying for power to speak, to say that he
had found his heart, was grateful, would hold her in
memory. He fell on a knee before her, and forgot he had
done so when he had risen. They were conducted by the
rev. gentleman to the hall-door: he was not speechless.
Jamiman uttered something.
That black door closed behind them.

CHAPTER XLI

THE NIGHT OF THE GBEAT UNDELIVEEED SPEECH

To a man issuing from a mortuary where a skull had
voice, London may be restorative as air of Summer Alps.
It is by contrast blooming life. Observe the fellowship of
the houses shoulder to shoulder ; and that straight ascend-
ing smoke of the preparation for dinner; and the good
policeman yonder, blessedly idle on an orderly Sabbath
evening; and the families of the minor people trotting
homeward from the park to tea ; here and again an amiable
carriage of the superimposed people driving to pay visits ;
they are so social, friendly, inviting to him; they strip
him of the shroud, sing of the sweet old world. He cannot
but be moved to the extremity of the charitableness neigh-
bouring on tears.

A stupefaction at the shock of the positive reminder,
echo of the fact still shouting in his breast, that he had
seen Mrs. Burman, and that the interview was over — the
leaf turned and the book shut — ^held Victor in a silence
until his gratefulness to London City was borne down by
the more human burst of gratitude to the dying woman,
who had spared him, as much as she could, a scene of the
convulsive pathetic, and had not called on him for any

NIGHT OF GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH 491

utterance of penitence. That worm-like thread of voice
came up to him still from sexton-depths: it sounded a
larger forgiveness without the word. He felt the sorrow
of it all, as he told Nataly ; at the same time bidding her
smell 'the marvellous oxygen of the park.' He declared
it to be quite equal to Lakelands.

She slightly pressed his arm for answer. Perhaps she
did not feel so deeply ? She was free of the horrid associa-
tions with the scent of Mar^chale. At any rate, she had
comported herself admirably !

Victor fancied he must have shuddered when he passed
by Jarniman at the door, who was almost now seeing his
mistress's ghost — would have the privilege to-morrow.
He called a cab and drove to Mrs. John Cormyn's, at
Nataly 's request, for Nesta and mademoiselle: enjoying
the Londonized odour of the cab. Nataly did not respond
to his warm and continued eulogies of Mrs. Burman;
she rather disappointed him. He talked of the gold and
white furniture, he Just alluded to the Cupid : reserving
his mental comment, that the time-piece was all astray,
the Cupid regular on the swing: — strange, touching,
terrible, if really the silly gUt figure symbolized ! . . .
And we are a sUly figure to be sitting in a cab imagining
such things ! — When Nesta and mademoiselle were
opposite, he had the pleasure to see Nataly take Nesta's
hand and hold it until they reached home. Those two
talking together in the brief words of their deep feeling,
had tones that were singularly alike : the mezzo-soprano
filial to the divine maternal contralto. Those two dear
ones mounted to Nataly's room.

The two dear ones showed themselves heart in heart
together once more; each looked the happier for it.
Dartrey was among their dinner-guests, and Nataly took
him to her little blue-room before she went to bed. He
did not speak of their conversation to Victor, but

492 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

counselled him to keep her from excitement. 'My dear
fellow, if you had seen her with Mrs. Burman !' Victor
said, and loudly praised her coolness. She was never
below a situation, he affirmed.

He followed his own counsel to humour his Nataly.
She began panting at a word about Mr. Barmby's ready
services. When, however, she related the state of affairs
between Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each of them
to her, he said, embracing her : ' Your wisdom shall guide
us, my love,' and almost extinguished a vexation by con-
cealing it.

She sighed : ' If one could think, that a girl with Nesta's
revolutionary ideas of the duties of women, and their
powers, would be safe — or at all rightly guided by a man
who is both one of the noblest and the wildest in the ideas
he entertains !'

Victor sighed too. He saw the earldom, which was to
dazzle the gossips, crack on the sky in a futile rocket-
bouquet.

She was distressed ; she moaned : ' My girl ! my girl !
I should wish to leave her with one who is more fixed — the
old-fashioned husband. New ideas must come in politics,
but in Society ! — and for women ! And the young having
heads, are the most endangered. Nesta vows her life to it !
Dartrey supports her!'

'See Colney,' said Victor. 'Odd, Colney does you
good; some queer way he has. Though you don't care
for his Rival Tongues, — and the last number was funny,
with Semhians on the Pacific, impressively addressing a
farewell to his cricket-bat, before he whirls it away to
Neptune — and the blue hand of his nation's protecting
God observed to seize it ! — Dead failure with the public,
of course ! However, he seems to seem wise with you.
The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics
monthly. See Colney to-morrow, my love. Now go to

NIGHT OF GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH 493

sleep. We have got over the worst. I speak at my
Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of notes
and points for them.'

His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep : or he thought
so, when awaking to the conception of a people solidified,
rich and poor, by the common pride of simple manhood.
But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe : and the
people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to
meet the Future. It looked like a paragraph in a news-
paper, upon which a Leading Article sits, dutifully arous-
ing the fat worm of sarcastic humour imder the ribs of
cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.
He would not have it laughed at ; stiU he could not admit
it as more than a skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let
none think him a mere City merchant, millioimaire,
boonfellow, or music-loving man of the world. He had
ideas to shoot across future Ages; — provide against the
shrinkage of our Coal-beds ; against, and for, if you like,
the thickening, jumbling, threatening excess of population
in these Islands, in Europe, America, all over our habitable
sphere. Now that Mrs. Bimnan, on her way to bliss, was
no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show
himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of
the enjo3Tnents, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended
impressing himseK upon the world as a factory of ideas.
Colney's insolent charge, that the English have no imag-
ination— a doomed race, if it be true ! — ^would be con-
futed. For our English require but the hghted leadership
to come into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant har-
moniously the song of their benevolent aim. And that
astral head giving, as a commencement, example of the
right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of
the future solved.

Surely he had here the Idea? He had it so warmly,
that his bath-water heated. Only the vision was wanted.

494 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

On London Bridge he had seen it — a great thing done to
the flash of brUHant results. That was after a fall.

There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.

Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications
and significations in the fall ! — But there had certainly
been a moral fall, fully to the level of the physical, in the
maintaining of that scheme of Lakelands, now ruined by
his incomprehensible Nesta — who had saved him from
falling further. His bath- water chilled. He jumped out
and rubbed furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes,
chasing the Idea for simple warmth, to have Something
inside him, to feel just that sustainment ; with the cry:
But no one can say I do not love my Nataly ! And he
tested it to prove it by his readiness to die for her : which
is heroically easier than the devotedly living, and has a
weight of evidence in our internal Courts for surpassing
the latter tedious performance.

His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces. Except
for the making of money, the whole year of an erected
Lakelands, notwithstanding uninterrupted successes, was
a blank. Or rather we have to wish it were a blank. The
scheme departs : payment for the enlisted servants of it is
in prospect. A black agent, not willingly enlisted, yet
pointing to proofs of service, refuses payment in ordinary
coia ; and we tell him we owe him nothing, that he is not
a man of the world, has no understanding of Nature : and
still the fellow thumps and alarums at a midnight door we
are astonished to flnd we have in our daylight house.
How is it? Would other men be so sensitive to him?
Victor was appeased by the assurance of his possession of
an exceptionally scrupulous conscience; and he settled
the debate by thinking : ' After all, for a man like me,
battling incessantly, a kind of Vesuvius, I must have —
can't be starved, must be fed — though, pah ! But I 'm
not to be questioned like other men. — But how about an

NIGHT OF GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH 495

aristocracy of the contempt of distinctions? — But there
is no escaping distinctions ! my aristocracy despises indul-
gence.— And indulges? — Say, an exceptional nature! —
Supposing a certain beloved woman to pronounce on the
case? — She cannot : no woman can be a just judge of it.'
— He cried: My love of her is testified by my having
Barmby handy to right her to-day, to-morrow, the very
instant the clock strikes the hour of my release !

Mention of the clock swung that silly gilt figure. Victor
entered into it, condemned to swing, and be a thrall. His
intensity of sensation launched him on an eternity of the
swinging in ridiculous nakedness to the measure of time
gone crazy. He had to correct a reproof of Mrs. Burman,
as the cause of the nonsense. He ran down to breakfast,
hopeing he might hear of that clock stopped, and that
sickening motion with it.

Another letter from the Sanfredini in Milan, warmly
inviting to her villa over Como, acted on him at breakfast
like the waving of a banner. 'We go,' Victor said to
Nataly, and flattered-up a smile about her lips — too much
a resurrection smUe. There was talk of the Meeting at
the theatre: Simeon FeneUan had spoken there in the
cause of the deceased Member, was known, and was likely
to have a good reception. Fun and enthusiasm might be
expected.

'And my darling will hear her husband speak to-night,'
he whispered as he was departing ; and did a mischief, he
had to fear, for a shadowy knot crossed Nataly's forehead,
she seemed paler. He sent back Nesta and mademoiselle,
in consequence, at the end of the Green Park.

Their dinner-hour was early ; Simeon Fenellan, Golney
Durance, and Mr. Peridon — ^pleasing to Nataly for his
faithful siege of the French fortress — were the only
guests. When they rose, Nataly drew Victor aside. He
came dismayed to Nesta. She ran to her mother. ' Not

496 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

hear papa speak? Oh, mother, mother! Then I stay
with her. But can't she come ? He is going to unfold
ideas to us. There!'

'My naughty girl is not to poke her fun at orators,'
Nataly said. 'No, dearest; it would agitate me to go.
I 'm better here. I shall be at peace when the night is
over.'

'But you will be all alone here, dear mother.'

Nataly's eyes wandered to fall on Colney. He pro-
posed to give her his company. She declined it. Nesta
ventured another entreaty, either that she might be
allowed to stay or have her mother with her at the Meeting.

' My love,' Nataly said, ' the thought of the Meeting '

She clasped at her breast ; and she murmured : ' I shall
be comforted by your being with him. There is no danger
there. But I shall be happy, I shall be at peace when
this night is over.'

Colney persuaded her to have him for companion. Mr.
Peridon, who was to have driven with Nesta and made-
moiselle, won admiration by proposing to stay for an hour
and play some of Mrs. Radnor's favourite pieces. Nesta
and Yictor overbore Nataly's objections to the lover's
generosity. So Mr. Peridon was left. Nesta came hurry-
ing back from the step of the carriage to kiss her mother
again, saying : ' Just one last kiss, my own ! And she 's
not to look troubled. I shall remember everything to
tell my own mother. It will soon be over.'

Her mother nodded; but the embrace was passionate.

Nesta called her father into the passage, bidding him
prohibit any delivery to her mother of news at the door.
'She is easily startled now by trifles — you have noticed?'

Victor summoned his recollections and assured her he
had noticed, as he believed he had. 'The dear heart of
her is fretting for the night to be over ! And think ! —
seven days, and she is in Lakelands. A fortnight, and

NIGHT OF GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH 497

we "have our first Concert. Durandarte ! Oh, the dear
heart 'U be at peace when I tell her of a triumphant Meet-
ing. Not a doubt of that, even though Colney turns the
shadow of his back on us.'

' One critic the less for you !' said Nesta. Skepsey was
to meet her carriage at the theatre.

Ten minutes later, Victor and Simeon Fenellan were
proceeding thitherward on foot.

'I have my speech,' said Victor. 'You prepare the
way for me, following our influential friend Dubbleson;
Colewort winds up; any one else they shout for. We
shall have a great evening. I suspect I shall find Themison
or Jarniman when I get home. You don't believe in
intimations ? I 've had crapy processions all day before
my eyes. No wonder, after yesterday !'

'Dubbleson mustn't drawl it out too long,' said
Fenellan.

' We '11 drop a hint. Where 's Dartrey ? '

' He '11 come. He 's in one of his black moods : not
temper. He 's got a notion he killed his wife by dragging
her to Africa with him. She was not only ready to go,
she was glad to go. She had a bit of the heroine in her
and a certainty of tripping to the deuce if she was left to
herself.'

'Tell Nataly that,' said Victor. 'And tell her about
Dartrey. Harp on it. Once she was all for him and
our girl. But it 's a woman — though the dearest ! I defy
any one to hit on the cause of their changes. We must
make the best of things, if we 're for swimming. The task
for me to-night wiU be, to keep from rolling out all I 've
got in my head. And I 'm not revolutionary, I 'm for
stability. Only I do see, that the firm stepping-place asks
for a long stride to be taken. One can't get the English
to take a stride — unless it 's for a foot behind them : —
bother old Colney ! Too timid, or too scrupulous, down

498 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

we go into the mire. There ! — But I want to say it ! I
want to save the existing order. I want Christianity,
instead of the Mammonism we 're threatened with.
Great fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to
stalk the land: or mediseval Barons. Dispersion of
wealth, is the secret. Nataly's of that mind with me.
A decent poverty ! She 's rather wearying, wants a
change. I 've a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month
on the Mediterranean. All our set. She likes quiet. I
believe in my political recipe for it.'

He thumped on a method he had for preserving aris-
tocracy— true aristocracy, amid a positively democratic
flood of riches.

' It appears to me, you 're on the road of PriscDla
Graves and Pempton,' observed Simeon. 'Strike off
Priscilla's viands and friend Pempton's couple of glasses,
and there 's your aristocracy established ; but with rather
a dispersed recognition of itself.'

'Upon my word, you talk like old Colney, except for a
twang of your own,' said Victor. 'Colney sours at every
fresh number of that Serial. The last, with Delphica de-
tecting the plot of Falarique, is really not so bad. The
four disguised members of the Com^die Frangaise on board
the vessel from San Francisco, to declaim and prove the
superior merits of the Gallic tongue, jumped me to bravo
the cleverness. And Bobinikine turning to the complexion
of the remainder of cupboard dumplings discovered in an
emigrant's house-to-let! And Semhians — I forget what:
and Mytharete's forefinger over the bridge of his nose, like
a pensive vulture on the skull of a desert camel ! But, I
complain, there 's nothing to make the English love the
author ; and it 's wasted, he 's basted, and the book '11
have no sale. I hate satire.'

'Rough soap for a thin skin, Victor. Does it hurt our
people much?'

NIGHT OF GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH 499

'Not a bit; doesn't touch them. But I want my
friends to succeed!'

Their coming upon Westminster Bridge changed the
theme. Victor wished the Houses of ParUament to catch
the beams of sunset. He deferred to the suggestion, that
the Hospital's doing so seemed appropriate.

'I 'm always pleased to find a decent reason for what
is,' he said. Then he queried: 'But what is, if we look
at it, and while we look, Simeon ? She may be going — or
she 's gone already, poor woman ! I shall have that
scene of yesterday everlastingly before my eyes, like a
drop-curtain. Only, you know, Simeon, they don't feel
the end, as we in health imagine. Colney would say, we
have the spasms and they the peace. I 've a inind to
send up to Regent's Park with inquiries. It would look
respectful. God forgive me ! — the poor woman perverts
me at every turn. Though I will say, a certain horror of
death I had — she whisked me out of it yesterday. I don't
feel it any longer. What are you jerking at?'

' Only to remark, that if the thing 's done for us, we
haven't it so much on our sensations.'

' More, if we 're sympathetic. But that compels us to
be philosophic — or who could Uve! Poor woman!'

'Waft her gently, Victor!'

' Tush ! Now for the South side of the Bridges ; and
I tell you, Simeon, what I can't mention to-night : I
mean to enliven these poor dear people on their forsaken
South of the City. I 've my scheme. Elected or not, I
shall hardly be accused of bribery when I put down my
first instalment.'

Fenellan went to work with that remark in his brain for
the speech he was to deliver. He could not but reflect
on the genial man's willingness and capacity to do deeds
of benevolence, constantly thwarted by the position into
which he had plunged himself.

500 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

They were received at the verge of the crowd outside
the theatre-doors by Skepsey, who wriggled, tore and clove
a way for them, where all were obedient, but the numbers
lumped and clogged. When finally they reached the
stage, they spied at Nesta's box, during the thunder of the
rounds of applause, after shaking hands with Mr. Dubble-
son, Sir Abraham Quatley, Dudley Sowerby, and others ;
and with Beaves Urmsing — a politician 'never of the
opposite party to a deuce of a funny fellow ! — go any-
where to hear him,' he vowed.

' Miss Radnor and Mademoiselle de Seilles arrived quite
safely,' said Dudley, feasting on the box which contained
them and no Dartrey Fenellan in it.

Nesta was wondering at Dartrey's absence. Not before
Mr. Dubbleson, the chairman, the 'gentleman of local
influence,' had animated the drowsed wits and respiratory
organs of a packed audience by yielding place to Simeon,
did Dartrey appear. Simeon's name was shouted, in
proof of the happy explosion of his first anecdote, as
Dartrey took seat behind Nesta. ' Half an hour with the
dear mother,' he said.

Nesta's eyes thanked him. She pressed the hand of a
demure young woman sitting close behind Louise de
Seilles. 'You know Matilda Pridden.'

Dartrey held his hand out. ' Has she forgiven me ? '

Matilda bowed gravely, enfolding her affirmative in an
outline of the no need for it, with perfect good breeding.
Dartrey was moved to think Skepsey's choice of a woman
to worship did him honom-. He glanced at Louise. Her
manner toward Matilda Pridden showed her sisterly with
Nesta. He said: 'I left Mr. Peridon playing. — A little
anxiety to hear that the great speech of the evening is
done ; it 's nothing else. I '11 run to her as soon as it 's
over.'

'Oh, good of you! And kind of Mr. Peridon!' She

NIGHT OF GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH 501

turned to Louise, who smiled at the simple art of the
exclamation, assenting.

Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the wav-
ing of a hand to than, and his delight at Simeon's ringing
points : which were, to Dartrey's mind, vacuously clever
and crafty. Dartrey despised effects of oratory, save
when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark — or citizens
nerved to stand for their country.

Nesta dived into her father's brilliancy of appreciation,
a trifle pained by Dartrey's aristocratic air when he sur-
veyed the herd of heads agape and another cheer rang
round. He smiled with her, to be with her, at a hit here
and there; he would not pretend an approval of this
manner of winning electors to consider the country's
interests and their own. One fellow in the crowded pit,
affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that permitted the
taking of liberties with the orator's Christian name,
mildly amused him. He had no objection to hear
'Simmy' shouted, as Louise de SeUles observed. She
was of his mind, in regard to the rough machinery of
Freedom.

Skepsey entered the box.

'We shall soon be serious. Miss Nesta,' he said, after
a look at Matilda Pridden.

There was a prolonged roaring — on the cheerful side.

' And another word about security that your candidate
wUl keep his promises,' continued Simeon: 'You have
his word, my friends!' And he told the story of the
old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned
the usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he
laid his Hidalgo hand on a cataract of Kronos-beard
across his breast, and pulled forth three white hairs, and
presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious
Jews as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was
accepted ! '

502 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator
fell upon the question of political specifics: — Mr. Victor
Radnor trusted to English good sense too profoundly to
be offering them positive cures, as they would hear the
enemy say he did. Yet a bit of a cure may be offered,
if we 're not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science
of specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably
Spanish, who had no practice, and wished for leisure to
let him prosecute his anatomical and other investigations
to discover his grand medical nostrum. So to get him
fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for dyspepsia — ^the
resource of starving doctors. And sure enough his
patient came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be
when we carry more of the deciduously mortal than of the
scraggy vital upon our persons. Any one at a glance
would have prescribed water-cresses to him : water-cresses
exclusively to eat for a fortnight. And that the good
physician did. Away went his patient, returning at the
end of the fortnight, lean, and with the appetite of a
Toledo blade for succulent slices. He vowed he was the
man. Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him,
pinched his tender parts ; and making him swear he was
really the man, and had eaten nothing whatever but un-
adulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized on him in
an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the
surgery, knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and
enjoyed the feHcity of exposing to view the very healthiest
patient ever seen under dissecting hand, by favour of the
fortunate discovery of the specific for him. All to further
science ! — to which, in spite of the petitions of all the scien-
tific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the
scaffold, poor gentleman ! But we know politics to be no
such empirical science.

Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy. He brought
it home to Beaves Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone

NIGHT OF GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH 503

of apology out of it. Yet the orator was asked: 'Do
you take politics for a joke, Simmy?'

He countered his questioner : ' Just to liberate you
from your moribund state, my friend.' And he told the
story of the wrecked sailor, found lying on the sands,
flung up from the foimdered ship of a Salvation captain ;
and how, that nothing could waken him, and there he lay
fit for interment ; until presently a something of a voice
grew down into his ears ; and it was his old chum Polly,
whom he had tied to a board to give her a last chance in
the surges ; and Polly shaking the wet from her feathers,
and shouting : ' Polly tho dram dry ! ' — which struck on
the nob of Jack's memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks
of the cabin under Salvationism, and he began heaving,
and at last he shook in a lazy way, and then from sputter
to sputter got his laugh loose ; and he sat up, and cried :
'That did it! Now to business!' for he was hungry.
'And when I catch the ring of this world's laugh from
you, my friend . . . ! ' Simeon's application of the story
was drowned.

After the outburst, they heard his friend again inter-
ruptingly : ' You keep that tongue of yours from wagging,
as it did when you got roimd the old widow woman for her
money, Simmy!'

Victor leaned forward. Simeon towered. He bellowed :
'And you keep that tongue of yours from committing
incest on a lie !'

It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre. The man
went imder. Simeon flowed. Conscience reproached him
with the little he had done for Victor, and he had now his
congenial opportunity.

Up in the box, the powers of the orator were not so
cordially esteemed. To Matilda Pridden, his tales were
barely decently the flesh and the devU smothering a holy
occasion to penetrate and exhort. Dartrey sat rigid, as

504 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

with the checked impatience for a leap. Nesta looked at
Louise when some one was perceived on the stage bending
to her father. It was Mr. Peridon ; he never once raised
his face. Apparently he was not intelligible or audible :
but the next moment Victor sprang erect. Dartrey
quitted the box. Nesta beheld her father uttering hurried
words to right and left. He passed from sight, Mr,
Peridon with him ; and Dartrey did not return.

Nesta felt her father's absence as light gone : his eyes
rayed light. Besides she had the anticipation of a speech
from him, that would win Matilda Pridden. She fancied
Simeon Fenellan to be rather under the spell of the
hilarity he roused. A gentleman behind him spoke in
his ear; and Simeon, instead of ceasing, resumed his
flow. Matilda Pridden's gaze on him and the people was
painful to behold : Nesta saw her mind. She set herself
to study a popular assembly. It could be serious to the
call of better leadership, she believed. Her father had
been telling her of late of a faith he had in the English,
that they (or so her intelligence translated his remarks)
had power to rise to spiritual ascendancy, and be once
more the Islanders heading the world of a new epoch ab-
juring materialism: — some such idea; very quickening
to her, as it would be to this earnest young woman wor-
shipped by Skepsey. Her father's absence and the con-
tinued shouts of laughter, the insatiable thirst for fun,
darkened her in her desire to have the soul of the good
working sister refreshed. They had talked together;
not much : enough for each to see at either's breast the
wells from the founts of life.

The box-door opened, Dartrey came in. He took her
hand. She stood-up to his look. He said to Matilda
Pridden : ' Come with us ; she will need you.'

'Speak it,' said Nesta.

He said to the other: 'She has courage.'

THE LAST 505

'I could trust to her/ Matilda Pridden replied.

Nesta read his eyes. 'Mother?'

His answer was in the pressure.

'HI?'

'No longer.'

'Oh! Dartrey.'

Matilda Pridden caught her fast.

'I can walk, dear,' Nesta said.

Dartrey mentioned her father.

She understood : 'I am thinking of him.'

The words of her mother : 'At peace when the night is
over,' rang. Along the gassy passages of the back of the
theatre, the sound coming from an applausive audience
was as much a thunder as rage would have been. It was
as void of hiunan meaning as a sea.

CHAPTER XLII

THE LAST

In the still dark hour of that April morning, the Rev.
Septimus Barmby was roused by Mr. Peridon, with a
scribbled message from Victor, which he deciphered by
candlelight held close to the sheet of paper, between short
inquiries and communications, losing more and more the
sense of it as his intelligence became aware of what dread
blow had befallen the stricken man. He was bidden come
to fulfil his promise instantly. He remembered the bear-
ing of the promise. Mr. Peridon's hurried explanatory
narrative made the request terrific, out of tragically
lamentable. A semblance of obedience had to be put on,
and the act of dressing aided it. Mr. Barmby prayed at
heart for guidance further.

506 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

The two gentlemen drove Westward, speaking little;
they had the dry sob in the throat.

'Miss Radnor?' Mr. Barmby asked.

' She is shattered ; she holds up ; she would not break
down.'

'I can conceive her to possess high courage.'

' She has her friend Mademoiselle de SeUles.'

Mr. Barmby remained humbly sUent. Affectionate
deep regrets moved him to say : ' A loss irreparable. We
have but one voice of sorrow. And how sudden! The
dear lady had no suffering, I trust.'

'She fell into the arms of Mr. Durance. She died in
his arms. She was unconscious, he says. I left her
straining for breath. She said "Victor"; she tried to
smile : — I understood I was not to alarm him.'

'And he too late!'

'He was too late, by some minutes.'

'At least I may comfort. Miss Radnor must be a bless-
ing to him.'

'They cannot meet. Her presence excites him.'

That radiant home of all hospitality seemed opening on
from darker chambers to the deadly dark. The immo-
rality in the moral situation could not be forgotten by one
who was professionally a moralist. But an incorruptible
beauty in the woman's character claimed to plead for her
memory. Even the rigorous in defence of righteous laws
are softened by a sinner's death to hear excuses, and may
own a relationship, haply perceive the faint nimbus of the
saint. Death among us proves us to be still not so far
from the Nature saying at every avenue to the mind:
Earth makes all sweet.

Mr. Durance had prophesied a wailful end ever to the
carol of Optimists ! Yet it is not the black view which is
the right view. There is one between : the path adopted
by Septimus Barmby : — if he could but induce his

THE LAST 507

brethren to enter on it ! The dreadful teaching of circum-
stances might help to the persuading of a fair young
woman, under his direction . . . having her hand dis-
engaged.— ^Mr. Barmby started himself in the dream of
his uninterred passion for the maiden: he chased it,
seized it, hurled it hence, as a present sacrilege : — con-
stantly, and at the pitch of our highest devotion to serve,
are we assailed by the tempter! Is it, that the love of
woman is our weakness ? For if so, then would a celibate
clergy have grant of immunity. But, alas, it is not so
with them ! We have to deplore the hearing of reports
too credible. Again we are pushed to contemplate woman
as the mysterious obstruction to the perfect purity of
soul. Nor is there a refuge in asceticism. No more
devilish nourisher of pride do we find than in pain volun-
tarily embraced. And strangely, at the time when our
hearts are pledged to thoughts upon others, they are led
by woman to glance revolving upon ourself, our vile self !
Mr. Barmby clutched it by the neck.

Light now, as of a strong memory of day along the
street, assisted him to forget himseK at the sight of the
inanimate houses of this London, all revealed in a quiet-
ness not less immobile than tombstones of an unending
cemetery, with its last ghost laid. Did men but know
it! — The habitual necessity to amass matter for the
weekly sermon, set him noting his meditative exclama-
tions, the noble army of platitudes under haloes, of good
use to men : justifiably turned over in his mind for their
good. He had to think, that this act of the justifying of
the act reproached him with a lack of due emotion, in
sympathy with agonized friends truly dear. Drawing
near the hospitable house, his official and a cordial
emotion united, as we see sorrowful crape-wreathed coun-
tenances. His heart struck heavily when the house was
visible.

508 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Could it be the very house? The look of it belied
the tale inside. But that threw a ghostliness on the
look.

Some one was pacing up and down. They greeted
Dudley Sowerby. His ability to speak was tasked.
They gathered, that mademoiselle and 'a Miss Pridden'
were sitting with Nesta, and that their services in a crisis
had been precious. At such times, one of them reflected,
woman has indeed her place: when life's battle waxes
red. Her soul must be capable of* mounting to the level
of the man's, then? It is a lesson !

Dudley said he was waiting for Dr. Themison to come
forth. He could not tear himself from sight of the house.

The door opened to Dr. Themison departing, Colney
Durance and Simeon Fenellan bare-headed. Colney
showed a face with stains of the lashing of tears.

Dr. Themison gave his final counsels. 'Her father
must not see her. For him, it may have to be a specialist.
We will hope the best. Mr. Dartrey Fenellan stays beside
him : — good. As to the ceremony he calls for, a form of
it might soothe: — any soothing possible! No music.
I will return in a few hours.'

He went on foot.

Mr. Barmby begged advice from Colney and Simeon
concerning the message he had received — the ceremony
requiring his oflicial presidency. Neither of them replied.
They breathed the morning air, they gave out long-drawn
sighs of relief, looking on the trees of the park.

A man came along the pavement, working slow legs
hurriedly. Simeon ran down to him.

'Humour, as much as you can,' Colney said to Mr.
Barmby. 'Let him imagine.'

'Miss Radnor?'

'Not to speak of her.'

'The daughter he so loves?'

THE LAST 509

Mr. Barmby's tender inquisitiveness was unanswered.
Were they inducing him to mollify a madman ? But was it
possible to associate the idea of madness with Mr. Radnor?

Simeon ran back. 'Jarniman/ he remarked. 'It's
over !'

'Now!' Colney's shoulders expressed the comment.
'Well, now, Mr. Barmby, you can do the part desired.
Come in. It 's morning !' He stared at the sky.

All except Dudley passed in.

Mr. Barmby wanted more advice, his dilemma being
acute. It was moderated, though not more than moder-
ated, when he was informed of the death of Mrs. Burman
Radnor ; an event that occurred, according to Jarniman's
report, forty-five minutes after Skepsey had a second time
called for information of it at the house in Regent's Park :
five hours and a half, as Colney made his calculation, after
the death of Nataly. He was urged by some spur of
senseless irony to verify the calculation and correct it in
the minutes.

Dudley crossed the road. No sign of the awful Interior
was on any of the windows of the house either to deepen
awe or relieve. They were blank as eyeballs of the
mindless. He shivered. Death is our common cloak;
but Calamity individualizes, to set the unwounded specu-
lating whether indeed a stricken man, who has become
the cause of woeful trouble, may not be pointing a moral.
Pacing on the Park side of the house, he saw Skepsey
drive up and leap out with a gentleman, Mr. Radnor's
lawyer. Could it be, that there was no WUl written?
Could a Will be executed now? The moral was more
forcibly suggested. Dudley beheld this Mr. Victor Radnor
successful up all the main steps, persuasive, popular,
brightest of the elect of Fortune, felled to the ground
within an hour, he and all his house ! And if at once to
pass beneath the ground, the blow would have seemed

510 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

merciful for him. Or if, instead of chattering a mixture
of the rational and the monstrous, he had been heard to
rave like the utterly distraught. Recollection of some
of the things he shouted, was an anguish : — A notion
came into the poor man, that he was the dead one of the
two, and he cried out : ' Cremation ? No, Colney 's
right, it robs us of our last laugh. I lie as I fall.' He
' had a confession for his Nataly, for her only, for no one
else.' He had 'an Idea.' His begging of Dudley to
listen without any punctilio (putting a vulgar oath before
it), was the sole piece of unreasonableness in the explana-
tion of the idea : and that was not much wilder than the
stuff Dudley had read from reports of Radical speeches.
He told Dudley he thought him too young to be 'best
man to a widower about to be married,' and that Barmby
was 'coming all haste to do the business, because of no
time to spare.'

Dudley knew but the half, and he did not envy Dartrey
Fenellan his task of watching over the wreck of a splendid
intelligence, humouring and restraining. According to
the rumours, Mr. Radnor had not shown the symptoms
before the appearance of his daughter. For awhile he
hung, and then fell, like an icicle. Nesta came with a cry
for her father. He rose : Dartrey was by. Hugged fast
in iron muscles, the unhappy creature raved of his being a
caged lion. These things Dudley had heard in the house.

There are scenes of life proper to the grave-cloth.

Nataly's dead body was her advocate with her family,
with friends, with the world. Victor had more need of a
covering shroud to keep calamity respected. Earth makes
all sweet : and we, when the privilege is granted us, do
well to treat the terribly stricken as if they had entered
to the bosom of earth.

That night's infinite sadness was concentrated upon
Nesta. She had need of her strength of mind and body.

THE LAST 511

The night went past as a year. The year followed it as
a refreshing night. Slowly lifting her from our abysses,
it was a good angel to the girl. Permission could not be
given for her to see her father. She had a home in the
modest home of Louise de SeUles on the borders of
Dauphin6 ; and with French hearts at their best in win-
ningness around her, she learned again, as an art, the
natural act of breathing calmly; she had by degrees a
longing for the snow-heights. When her imagination
could perch on them with love and pride, she began to
recover the throb for a part in human action. It set her
nature flowing to the mate she had chosen, who was her
counsellor, her supporter, and her sword. She had
awakened to new life, not to sink back upon a breast of
love, though thoughts of the lover were as blows upon
strung musical chords of her bosom. Her union with
Dartrey was for the having an ally and the being an ally,
in resolute vision of strife ahead, through the veiled
dreams that bear the blush. This was behind a maidenly
demureness. Are not young women hypocrites? Who
shall fathom their guile ! A girl with a pretty smUe, a
gentle manner, a liking for wUd flowers up on the rocks ;
and graceful with resemblances to the swelling propor-
tions of garden-fruits approved in young women by the
connoisseur eye of man; distinctly designed to embrace
the state of marriage, that she might (a girl of singularly
lucid and receptive eyes) the better give battle to men
touching matters which they howl at an eccentric matron
for naming. So it was. And the yielding of her hand to
Dartrey, would have appeared at that period of her revival,
as among the baser compliances of the fleshly, if she had not
seen iu him, whom she owned for leader, her fellow soldier,
warrior friend, hero, of her own heart's mould, but a
greater.

She was on Como, at the villa of the Signora Giulia

512 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

Sanfredini, when Dudley's letter reached her, with the
supplicating offer of the share of his earldom. An English
home meanwhile was proposed to her at the house of his
mother the Countess. He knew that he did not write to
a brilliant heiress. The generosity she had always felt
that he possessed, he thus proved in figures. They are
convincing and not melting. But she was moved to tears
by his. goodness in visiting her father, as well as by the
hopeful news he sent. He wrote delicately, withholding
the title of her father's place of abode. There were expec-
tations of her father's perfect recovery; the signs were
auspicious ; he appeared to be restored to the ' likeness to
himself' in the instances Dudley furnished : — ^his appoint-
ment with him for the flute-duet next day ; and particu-
larly his enthusiastic satisfaction with the largeness and
easy excellent service of the residence 'in which he so
happily found himself established.' He held it to be, 'on
the whole, superior to Lakelands.' The smile and the tear
rolled together in Nesta reading these words. And her
father spoke repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi,
of the joy her last letter had given him, of his intention to
send an immediate answer : and he showed Dudley a pile
of manuscript ready for the post. He talked of public
affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccen-
tricity in the views he took ; notably when he alluded to
his envy of little Skepsey. He said he really did envy;
and his daughter believed it and saw fair prospects in it.

Her grateful reply to the young earl conveyed all that
was perforce ungentle, in the signature of the name of
Nesta Victoria Fenellan: — a name he was to hear cited
among the cushioned conservatives, and plead for as he
best could under a pressure of disapprobation, and com-
pelled esteem, and regrets.

The day following the report of her father's wish to see
her, she and her husband started for England. On that

THE LAST 513

day, Victor breathed his last. Dudley had seen the not
hopeful but an ominous illumiuation of the stricken man ;
for whom came the peace his Nataly had in earth. Often
did Nesta conjure up to vision the palpitating form of the
beloved mother with her hand at her mortal wound in
secret through long years of the wearing of the mask to
keep her mate inspirited. Her gathered knowledge of
things and her ruthless penetrativeness made it sometimes
hard for her to be tolerant of a world, whose tolerance of
the iafinitely evil stamped blotches on its face and
shrieked ia stains across the sMn beneath its gallant garb.
That was only when she thought of it as the world con-
demning her mother. She had a husband able and ready,
in return for corrections of his demon temper, to trim an
ardent young woman's fanatical overflow of the sisterly
sentiments; scholarly frieads, too, for such restrainings
from excess as the mind obtains in a lamp of History
exhibiting man's original sprouts to growth and fitful
continuation of them. Her first experience of the grief
that is in pleasure, for those who have passed a season, was
when the old Concert-set assembled round her. When she
heard from the mouth of a living woman, that she had
saved her from going under the world's waggon-wheels,
and taught her to know what is actually meant by the good
living of a shapely life, Nesta had the taste of a harvest
happiness richer than her recollection of the bride's,
though never was bride in fuller flower to her lord than she
who brought the dower of an equal valiancy toDartrey
FeneUan. You are aware of the reasons, the many, why
a courageous young woman requires of high heaven, far
more than the commendably timid, a doughty husband.
She had him; otherwise would that puzzled old world,
which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge it,
and could not blast her personal reputation, have com-
missioned a paw to maul her character, perhaps instructing

514 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

the gossips to murmur of her parentage. Nesta Victoria
Fenellan had the husband who would have the world
respectful to any brave woman. This one was his wife.

Daniel Skepsey rejoices in service to his new master,
owing to the scientific opinion he can at any moment of the
day apply for, as to the military defences of the country ;
instead of our attempting to arrest the enemy by vocifera-
tions of persistent prayer : — the sole point of difference
between him and his Matilda; and it might have been
fatal but that Nesta 's intervention was persuasive. The
two members of the Army first in the field to enrol and
give rank according to the merits of either, to both sexes,
were made one. Colney Durance (practically cynical
when not fancifully, men said) stood by Skepsey at the
altar. His published exercises in Satire produce a flush of
the article in the Reviews of his books. Meat and wine in
turn fence the Hymen beckoning Priscilla and Mr. Pemp-
ton. The forms of Religion more than the Channel's
division of races keep Louise de SeUles and Mr. Peridon
asunder : and in the uniting of them Colney is interested,
because it would have so pleased the woman of the loyal
heart no longer beating. He let Victor's end be his expia-
tion and did not phrase blame of him. He considered the
shallowness of the abstract Optimist exposed enough in
Victor's history. He was reconciled to it when, looking
on their chUd, he discerned, that for a cancelling of the
errors chargeable to them, the father and mother had kept
faith with Nature.

THE END

*■ .

'. *.

■* '"ij*'*'

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Full text of "The works of George Meredith"

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