liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like
his being both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IX. AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS

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

The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a rise of road
fronting an undulation, where our modern English architect's fantasia
in crimson brick swept from central gables to flying wings, over pents,
crooks, curves, peaks, cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections,
away to a red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious
in irregularity; and 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 on the wind.
Nataly looked. Her next look was at Colney Durance. She sent the
expected nods to Victor's carriage. She would have given the whole
prospect for the covering solitariness of her chamber. A multitude of
clashing sensations, and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled
her to summon so as to force herself to feel a groundless anger,
directed against none, against nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only
resource for keeping down the great wave surgent at her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Admiration was the common note, in the various keys. The station
selected for the South-eastward aspect of the dark-red gabled pile on
its white shell-terrace, backed by a plantation of tall pines, a mounded
and full-plumed company, above the left wing, was admired, in files and
in volleys. Marvellous, effectively miraculous, was the tale of the vow
to have the great edifice finished within one year: and the strike of
workmen, and the friendly colloquy with them, the good reasoning, the
unanimous return to duty; and the doubling, the trebling of the number
of them; and the most glorious of sights--O the grand old English
working with a will! as Englishmen do when they come at last to heat;
and they conquer, there is then nothing that they cannot conquer. So
the conqueror said.--And admirable were the conservatories running three
long lines, one from the drawing-room, to a central dome for tropical
growths. And the parterres were admired; also the newly-planted Irish
junipers bounding the West-walk; and the three tiers of stately descent
from the three green terrace banks to the grassy 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 the planting at wide intervals; and the
French system of training peach, pear, and plum trees on the walls to
win length and catch sun, we much admire. We admire the gardener. We are
induced temporarily to admire the French people. They are sagacious
in fruit-gardens. They have not the English Constitution, you think
rightly; but in fruit-gardens they grow for fruit, and not, as Victor
quotes a friend, for wood, which the valiant English achieve. We hear
and we see examples of sagacity; and we are further brought round to
the old confession, that we cannot cook; Colney Durance has us there; we
have not studied herbs and savours; and so we are shocked backward
step by step until we retreat precipitately into the nooks where waxen
tapers, carefully tended by writers on the Press, light-up mysterious
images of our national selves for admiration. Something surely we do, or
we should not be where we are. But what is it we do (excepting cricket,
of course) which others cannot do? Colney asks; and he excludes cricket
and football.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He comforted her. Nesta smiled on him thankfully.

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

Fenellan and Colney thought so:

'Like mice at a cupboard.'

'Beetles in a kitchen.'

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

She summoned her smile and nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'You we count on here, Lady Grace.'

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

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

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

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

He in turn was presently heard.

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

'We are Islanders!' Colney shrugged in languishment.

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

'We build great houses, to employ our bricks'

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

'Scarcely long enough to warm them.'

'What do you... fiddle!'

'They are not Hohenzollerns!'

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

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

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

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

Dr. Schlesien puffed a tempest of tobacco and strode.

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

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

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

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

'Manners?'

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

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

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

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

'It's to exercise his muscles.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER X. SKEPSEY IN MOTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skepsey's grey eyes came out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Down goes the world before them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here was a knot.

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

Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I should expect to.'

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

'Often, Sir.'

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

'Added to it, I hope.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'You know I am fond of them.'

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

'You give him Pagan colours.'

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

'But the fits of ferocity!'

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

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

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

'We are to go through it all again?'

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

'How contain him?'

Up went Colney's shoulders.

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

He looked for her recollection of the scene.

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

'In spite of his accent.'

'It is not so bad?'

'And that you'll defend!'

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

'Act on the assumption.'

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

'Paraitre!'

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

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

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

'He had an hour of gloom.'

'An hour!'

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

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

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

'He spoke of me?'

'He spoke in the tone of a brother.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Fredi was pleased.'

'Yes, she was, dear.'

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

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

'She's quite a child, Victor.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Peridon should have come?'

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

'And Pempton and Priscy!'

'They are growing cooler!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII. TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
HAVING ONE HEART

Two that live together in union are supposed to be intimate on every
leaf. Particularly when they love one another 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
Government 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 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 undated 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 sound.
The cloud over the name of their girl could now strike Nataly and
Victor dumb in their taking of counsel. 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 perplexity, 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. And he well knew why
his Nataly had her look of a closed vault (threatening, if opened, to
thunder 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 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 required 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 darklashed eyes of
Nesta; he pitied the poor mother. Fancifully 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, certainly devolving
upon the father in treaty with the fortunate 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.
Nevertheless 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.

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;--a
Mercadante, honeyed and flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as
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 different 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 lockup. Victor was
altogether the younger of the two. But his vehement accompaniment was
a tutorship; 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 aegis 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 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 meditating on the extent of the young
lady's fortune. He talked randomly of money, in a way to shatter
Nataly's conception of him. He talked of City affairs at table, as it
had been his practice to shun the doing; and hit the resounding 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'g bearing
to Nesta was hardly warmed by the glitter of diamonds. His next visit
showed him livelier in courtliness, 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, stand between her girl and a true gentleman.
She counselled 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 for ills, the lost little cottage, would not
have averted it: she would there have had the same coveting desire to
name a man of breeding, honour, station, for Nesta's husband. 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 likeness.

Yet the likeness or apparent likeness would suggest that we have not so
much to fear upon the day of the explanation 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.

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 overweighted: 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 of submission is a
charm upon the faint-hearted through love: it unwinds, unwills them.
Nataly resolved fixedly, that there must be a day 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 behind the curtain; as wholly vital to her,
and with him at times almost as dominant, 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 expeditions
to Lakelands, music, public affairs, the pardonable foibles of
friends created to amuse their fellows, operatic heroes and heroines,
exhibitions of pictures, the sorrows of Crowned Heads, so serviceable
ever to mankind 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, 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
Insurance Office looking over the stormy square of the first of Seamen.

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.
Fenellan 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 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 she?'

'The lady. I 'll 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 corner, 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 across the counter, and sometimes catches wind
of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she 'll 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'll 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
office.

'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 kills 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 travelling through
his friend.

'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.'

Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
swelled it, ahemming. 'That shop?' said he. And presently: 'Fenellan,
I'm not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day
of our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember 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--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 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 dustcart 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 overnight
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 called it, from within.
We're cared for, never doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help
yourself in a calamity, or you'll 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 suggestion. The
idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.

'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 afternoons 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 private history was not walking the streets.
The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly 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 think of her through
the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.

A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed 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
tolerance 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.

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 counted 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 the impalpable which has 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 woman might be supposed to
sit beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind 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. He stopped in a fever of
sensibility, to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a
source that was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.

In other words, the human 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 features, 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 inventive
nimbleness, up to the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it
again. There is a repentance that does reconstitute! 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 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 good citizenship.
So social a man could not otherwise incline. 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 incessantly 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, win the individual woman.
And that unreasoning 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.

Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with
her arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.

He placed himself to the right 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 Era
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 accusation, 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 astonished him
to contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
invoked. But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes. Men call
on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of
their rhetoric. They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not,
as women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour. It is not an effort
at epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she 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 Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
master. Aida and Otello, no. I confess to a weakness for the old
barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade. Aren't you seduced by
cadences? Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--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, Fenellan? 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
Mabsy; but she'll catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera; we used to
think it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
Meistersinger.'

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 sent 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 Ate) 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 tabernacles 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 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 devil.'

'Horns and tail?'

'Bait and hook.'

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

'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 DRIVE TO PARIS

A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance 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. Themison.
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 evening 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 overworked;
and the husband's visit passed for a device on the part of the wife. She
admitted a willingness to try a 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 unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
Burman: and Fenellan 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 anything. 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? Themison, as Mrs. Burman's medical man, might tell
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 boiling pressure, drove him
into the seat of judgement. As a consequence, he was rather a dull
table-guest in the presence 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 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
establishment of our chain-mail 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