CHAPTER XVIII

SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA

When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that

downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely

feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and

with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke

raised voice. This much you know. It may be communicated to you, that

there was then beheld the most singular spectacle ever exhibited on the

dizzy line of division between the living and the dead. For those

unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our sustaining air

were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce to the vitals of the faithful

Old Dog before his offended sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads

against a beggar of a mortal. The terrible sugariness which poured into

him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling: his battery

of jaws expressed it. They gaped. At the same time, his eyeballs gave up.

All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an hundredfold

back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn. Tears, issue of the

frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour (a ravishing rather

of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.

Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be

composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch the

fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across the scene

of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor Radnor, that

he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for the hand of Nesta

Victoria. It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring us

to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places. But, as with the

visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them. Beware, moreover,

of examining them too scrupulously: they have a trick of wearing to

vapour if closely scanned. Let it be gratefully for their aid.

So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed: he was at

liberty to pursue his quest.

Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it. He was at

pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make

Nataly see the smallness of the grant:--both of them were unwilling to

lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said; and

why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the

race!--and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly: he could cry

the negative like a crack of thunder in the City. But such matters as

these! and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!--and

pleading in a tone . . . 'I assure you, my love, he touched chords.'

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

smoothly.

'His passion--nothing else. Candid enough. And he had a tone--he has a

tone, you know. It 's not what he said. Some allusion to belief in a

favourable opinion of him . . . encouragement . . . on the part of the

mama. She would have him travelling with us! I foresaw it.'

'You were astonished when it came.'

'We always are.'

Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.

She had thought in her heart--not seriously; on a sigh of

despondency--that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled

prospect: and a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to

detect Victor's cunning to cover his own: a thing imaginable of him

previously in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly

printed on her mind. It did not draw her to read him with a novel

familiarity; it drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of

the man he was--irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive. Nor

did he seem in this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle's

estimate of the mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby's

position would be both a ridiculous and a cruel one. She had some silly

final idea that the poor man might now serve permanently to check the

more dreaded applicant: a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was

blunted.

Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his

weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her

natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that

his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened. To strengthen the dear

soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,

of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he

struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear. Her look alarmed him.

She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a

moment marble to sight and touch. She looked like the old engravings of

martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.

He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip of

fingers from the outside of life.

The seizure was over before it could be called ominous. When it was once

over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety, his

apprehensions no longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally in wrath

at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her ailments

instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.

Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental penance for

it. In consequence, the wrath, and the wish, and the penitence, haunted

him, each swelling to possession of him in turn; until they united to

head a plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the army of

charges against Mrs. Burman.

And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid indulgence in

reflection: a disease never afflicting him anterior to the stupid fall on

London Bridge. He rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and could

cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below, half an

inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by Nataly in

old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious and enviable

cerebrum. He knew well it was a fancy. But it was a fact also, that since

the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses, before that day), he

had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had been knocked in the

back of his head.

Then, was that day of the announcement of Lakelands to Nataly, to be

accounted a gloomy day? He would not have it so.

She was happily occupied with her purchases of furniture, Fredi with her

singing lessons, and he with his business; a grasp of many ribands,

reining-in or letting loose; always enjoyable in the act. Recently only

had he known when at home, a relaxation, a positive pleasure in looking

forward to the hours of the City office. This was odd, but so it was; and

looking homeward from the City, he had a sense of disappointment when it

was not Concert evening. The Cormyns, the Yatts, and Priscilla Graves,

and Pempton, foolish fellow, and that bothering Barmby, and Peridon and

Catkin, were the lineing of his nest. Well, and so they had been before

Lakelands rose. What had induced! . . . he suddenly felt foreign to

himself. The shrouded figure of his lost Idea on London Bridge went by.

A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him:--Is it a truth, that

if we are great owners of money, we are so swollen with a force not

native to us, as to be precipitated into acts the downright contrary of

our tastes?

He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit of unmeasured

phrasing when they are displeased, and so they yield no rational answer.

Still he gave heed to violent extraneous harpings against money. Epigrams

of Colney's; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist orators

reported in some newspaper corner; had him by the ears.

They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who entered his office

to tell him she was leaving town for Whinfold, her husband's family-seat,

where the dear man lay in evil case. She signified her resignation to the

decrees from above, saying generously:

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

'I look troubled?' Victor said laughing, and bethought him of what the

trouble might be. 'City news would not cause the look. Ah, yes;--I was

talking in the street to a friend of mine on horseback the other day, and

he kept noticing his horse's queer starts. We spied half a dozen children

in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one of them plucking at a hair.

"Please, sir, may I have a hair out of your horse's tail?" said the mite.

We patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to pluck at. Men

come to the fathers about their girls. It's my belief that mothers more

easily say no. If they learn the word as maids, you'll say! However,

there's no fear about my girl. Fredi's hard to snare. And what brings you

Cityward?'

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

mine.'

'You have multiplied your investment by ten.'

'If it had been thousands!'

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

the bottom of it.'

'There are City-articles against the mine this morning--or I should have

been on my way to Whinfold at this moment. The shares are lower.'

'The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to the ground, that you

may quit it for them to ascend. Tiddler has enemies, like the best of

mines: or they may be named lovers, if you like. And mines that have gone

up, go down for a while before they rise again; it's an affair of

undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy. The stories are false, for

the time. I had the latest from Dartrey Fenellan yesterday. He's here

next month; some time in August.'

'He is married, is he not?'

'Was.'

Victor's brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.

'Is he not a soldier?' she said.

'Soldiers and parsons!' Victor interjected.

Now she saw. She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby's hovering offer of

the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling

Bethesda.

But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when

there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have to lower

her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming: 'It's

only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream of the past!'

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

She put out her hand to be taken. 'Not if you back me here. It really is

not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow. And if I'm to be a

widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you. I love

adventure, danger;--well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain in

a storm. And if the worst happens, we go down together. It 's the

detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of

fighting.'

'Say, brandy.'

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

'Colney may call it what he pleases. If I read fiction, let it be

fiction; airier than hard fact. If I see a ballet, my troop of short

skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen. I can't read dull

analytical stuff or "stylists" when I want action--if I'm to give my mind

to a story. I can supply the reflections. I'm English--if Colney 's right

in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of

supernaturalism.

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

'But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it

where there's love; it's part of the balance, and justifies one's

excitement. How otherwise do you get any real crisis? I must read and

live something unlike this flat life around us.'

'There's the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says. Pass it in

books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our

thoughts. No brandy there! And no fine name for personal predilections or

things done in domino!' Victor said, with his very pleasant face,

pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and

bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the

other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage

despite--or with that poor kind of--trust in her captain. But the thought

was not guilty of drawing comparisons. 'This is one that I could trust,

as captain or mate,' he pressed the hand again before dropping it.

'You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person at

the trial,' said Lady Grace.

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

trains and husbands.

She left Victor uncomfortably rufed: and how? for she had none of the

physical charms appealing peculiarly to the man who was taken with

grandeur of shape. She belonged rather to the description physically

distasteful to him.

It is a critical comment on a civilization carelessly distilled from the

jealous East, when visits of fair women to City offices can have this

effect. If the sexes are separated for an hour, the place where one is

excluded or not common to see, becomes inflammable to that appearing

spark. He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the monasticism of the Court

of Law: and he and she awaken unhallowed emotions. Supposing, however,

that western men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions of her, and

dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman's voluble tongue to sisterly

occupation there in the midst of the pleading Court, as in the domestic

circle: very soon would her eyes be harmless: unless directed upon us

with intent.

That is the burning core of the great Question, our Armageddon in

Morality: Is she moral? Does she mean to be harmless? Is she not

untamable Old Nature? And when once on an equal footing with her lordly

half, would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic

transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be that wanton old

thing--the empress of disorderliness? You have to recollect, as the

Conservative acutely suggests, that her timidities, at present urging her

to support Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence. The party

views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we should remember, on an

intimate acquaintance with her in the situations where she is almost

unrestrictedly free and her laughter rings to confirm the sentences of

classical authors and Eastern sages. Conservatives know what they are

about when they refuse to fling the last lattice of an ancient harem open

to air and sun-the brutal dispersers of mystery, which would despoil an

ankle of its flying wink.

Victor's opinions were those of the entrenched majority; objecting to the

occult power of women, as we have the women now, while legislating to

maintain them so; and forbidding a step to a desperately wicked female

world lest the step should be to wickeder. His opinions were in the

background, rarely stirred; but the lady had brought them forward; and he

fretted at his restlessness, vexed that it should be due to the intrusion

of the sex instead of to the charms of the individual. No sting of the

sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board the Channel

boat-nothing to speak of. 'Why does she come here! Why didn't she go to

her husband! She gets into the City scramble blindfold, and catches at

the nearest hand to help her out! Nice woman enough.' Yes, but he was

annoyed with her for springing sensations that ran altogether heartless

to the object, at the same time that they were disloyal to the dear woman

their natural divinity. And between him and that dear woman, since the

communication made by Skepsey in the town of Dreux, nightly the dividing

spirit of Mrs. Burman lay cold as a corpse. They both felt her there.

They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.

Next afternoon the announcement by Skepsey of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby,

surprised Victor's eyebrows at least, and caused him genially to review

the visit of Lady Grace.

Whether or not Colney Durance drew his description of a sunken nobility

from the 'sick falcon' distinguishing the handsome features of Mr.

Sowerby, that beaked invalid was particularly noticeable to Victor during

the statement of his case, although the young gentleman was far from

being one, in Colney's words, to enliven the condition of domestic fowl

with an hereditary turn for 'preying'; eminently the reverse; he was of

good moral repute, a worker, a commendable citizen. But there was the

obligation upon him to speak--it is expected in such cases, if only as a

formality--of his 'love': hard to do even in view and near to the

damsel's reddening cheeks: it perplexed him. He dropped a veil on the

bashful topic; his tone was the same as when he reverted to the material

points; his present income, his position in the great Bank of Shotts and

Co., his prospects, the health of the heir to the Cantor earldom. He

considered that he spoke to a member of the City merchants, whose

preference for the plain positive, upon the question of an alliance

between families by marriage, lends them for once a resemblance to lords.

When a person is not read by character, the position or profession is

called on to supply raised print for the finger-ends to spell.

Hard on poor Fredi! was Victor's thought behind the smile he bent on this

bald Cupid. She deserved a more poetical lover! His paternal sympathies

for the girl besought in love, revived his past feelings as a wooer;

nothing but a dread of the influence of Mr. Barmby's toned eloquence upon

the girl, after her listening to Dudley Sowerby's addresses, checked his

contempt for the latter. He could not despise the suitor he sided with

against another and seemingly now a more dangerous. Unable quite to

repress the sentiment, he proceeded immediately to put it to his uses.

For we have no need to be scrupulously formal and precise in the

exposition of circumstances to a fellow who may thank the stars if such a

girl condescends to give him a hearing. He had this idea through the

conception of his girl's generosity. And furthermore, the cognizant eye

of a Lucretian Alma Mater having seat so strongly in Victor, demanded as

a right an effusion of the promising amorous graces on the part of the

acceptable applicant to the post of husband of that peerless. These being

absent, evidently non-existent, it seemed sufficient for the present,

after the fashion of the young gentleman, to capitulate the few material

matters briefly.

They were dotted along with a fine disregard of the stateliness of the

sum to be settled on Nesta Victoria, and with a distant but burning wish

all the while, that the suitor had been one to touch his heart and open

it, inspiriting it--as could have been done--to disclose for good and all

the things utterable. Victor loved clear honesty, as he loved light: and

though he hated to be accused of not showing a clean face in the light,

he would have been moved and lifted to confess to a spot by the touch at

his heart. Dudley Sowerby's deficiencies, however, were outweighed by the

palpable advantages of his birth, his prospects, and his good repute for

conduct; add thereto his gentlemanly manners. Victor sighed again over

his poor Fredi; and in telling Mr. Sowerby that the choice must be left

to her, he had the regrets of a man aware of his persuasive arts and how

they would be used, to think that he was actually making the choice.

Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no

longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of

rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across waysides to

right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a self-devouring

hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at the embrace of it.

This may be or not, but Nature has decreed to him the forfeit of

pleasure. She bids us count the passage of a sober day for the service of

the morrow; that is her system; and she would have us adopt it, to keep

in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the guarantee of enjoyment:

doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or other of the furious matrix

instincts; we are blunt to all else.

Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor; he

alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments. He was waxing to fervidness.

He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start, that he was to

say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to present Miss

Radnor at Court . . . .

Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out

of hot water. He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of

sneer at its functions: 'Court! my girl? But the arduous duties are over

for the season. We are a democratic people retaining the seductions of

monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count among

the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court presentations;

no harm. Only there's plenty of time . . . very young girls have their

heads turned--though I don't say, don't imagine, my girl would. By and by

perhaps.'

Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and introduced to the

figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a

respectable City merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse

of the downright contrast to his partner. He had heard casual remarks on

the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance. A short

analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man

who kept him up. Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a

line of City merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as

drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their round-bellied

beasts. Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of

restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient

cart-horse. He sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when,

like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good

things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated

interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to

make it our national Poem.

Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still

somehow constantly allotted to him. His wife believed in Victor, and

deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain. Since that lamentable

loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory of

Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad

against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the

pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who

speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and

onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in

perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a

turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor. He had

never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase of

Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share

of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the

bargain had come to Victor. Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion from

that disquieting period. He assented to the praise of Victor's genius,

admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently his

head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam comfortable

feeling of security. And if you will imagine the sprite of the aggregate

English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the malignant who has despoiled

him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once had from his God Neptune

against invaders, you will comprehend the state of Mr. Inchling's mind in

regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very disturbing partner.

He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had nothing to do with North

American or South American mines and pastures or with South Africa and,

gold and diamonds: and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her inward

comparisons. Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on this example of the

island energy. Mr. Inchling was not permitted by his wife to be much the

guest of the Radnor household, because of the frequent meeting there with

Colney Durance; Colney's humour for satire being instantly in bristle at

sight of his representative of English City merchants: 'over whom,' as he

wrote of the venerable body, 'the disciplined and instructed Germans not

deviously march; whom acute and adventurous Americans, with half a cock

of the eye in passing, compassionately outstrip.' He and Dr. Schlesien

agreed upon Mr. Inchling. Meantime the latter gentleman did his part at

the tables of the wealthier City Companies, and retained his appearance

of health; he was beginning to think, upon a calculation of the increased

treasures of those Companies and the country, that we, the Taxpayer,

ought not to leave it altogether to Providence to defend them;

notwithstanding the watchful care of us hitherto shown by our briny

Providence, to save us from anxiety and expense. But there are, he said,

'difficulties'; and the very word could stop him, as commonly when our

difficulty lies in the exercise of thinking.

Victor's African room, containing large wall-maps of auriferous regions,

was inspected; and another, where clerks were busy over miscellaneous

Continents. Dudley Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.

He and Victor walked in company Westward. The shop of Boyle and Luckwort,

chemists, was not passed on this occasion. Dudley grieved that he had to

be absent from the next Concert for practise, owing to his engagement to

his mother to go down to the family seat near Tunbridge Wells. Victor

mentioned his relatives, the Duvidney maiden ladies, residing near the

Wells. They measured the distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge, the two

houses, as for half an hour on horseback.

Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had been observed

confidentially arm in arm, and conversing so profoundly.

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

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