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.