CHAPTER XIX

TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN THEM AND OF

A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS COUNTRY

There is at times in the hearts of all men of active life a vivid wild

moment or two of dramatic dialogue between the veteran antagonists,

Nature and Circumstance, when they, whose business it should be to be

joyfully one, furiously split; and the Dame is up with her shrillest

querulousness to inquire of her offspring, for the distinct original

motive of his conduct. Why did he bring her to such a pass! And what is

the gain? If he be not an alienated issue of the great Mother, he will

strongly incline to her view, that he put himself into harness to join

with a machine going the dead contrary way of her welfare; and thereby

wrote himself donkey, for his present reading. Soldiers, heroes, even the

braided, even the wearers of the gay cock's feathers, who get the honours

and the pocket-pieces, know the moment of her electrical eloquence. They

have no answer for her, save an index at the machine pushing them on yet

farther under the enemy's line of fire, where they pluck the golden

wreath or the livid, and in either case listen no more. They glorify her

topping wisdom while on the march to confound it. She is wise in her way.

But, it is asked by the disputant, If we had followed her exclusively,

how far should we have travelled from our starting-point? We of the world

and its prizes and duties must do her an injury to make her tongue

musical to us, and her argument worthy of attention. So it seems. How to

keep the proper balance between those two testy old wranglers, that

rarely pull the right way together, is as much the task for men in the

grip of the world, as for the wanton youthful fry under dominion of their

instincts; and probably, when it is done, man will have attained the

golden age of his retirement from service.

Why be scheming? Victor asked. Unlike the gallant soldiery, his question

was raised in the blush of a success, from an examination of the quality

of the thing won; although it had not changed since it was first coveted;

it was demonstrably the same: and an astonishing dry stick he held, as a

reward for perpetual agitations and perversions of his natural tastes.

Here was a Dudley Sowerby, the direct issue of the conception of

Lakelands; if indeed they were not conceived together in one; and the

young gentleman had moral character, good citizen substance, and station,

rank, prospect of a title; and the grasp of him was firm. Yet so far was

it from hearty, that when hearing a professed satirist like Colney

Durance remark on the decorous manner of Dudley's transparent courtship

of the girl, under his look of an awakened approval of himself, that he

appeared to be asking everybody:--Do you not think I bid fair for an

excellent father of Philistines?--Victor had a nip of spite at the

thought of Dudley's dragging him bodily to be the grandfather. Poor

Fredi, too!--necessarily the mother: condemned by her hard fate to feel

proud of Philistine babies! Though women soon get reconciled to it! Or do

they? They did once. What if his Fredi turned out one of the modern young

women, who have drunk of ideas? He caught himself speculating on that, as

on a danger. The alliance with Dudley really seemed to set him facing

backward.

Colney might not have been under prompting of Nataly when he derided

Dudley; but Victor was at war with the picture of her, in her compression

of a cruel laugh, while her eyelids were hard shut, as if to exclude the

young patriarch of Philistines' ridiculous image.

He hearkened to the Nature interrogating him, why had he stepped on a

path to put division between himself and his beloved?--the smallest of

gaps; and still the very smallest between nuptial lovers is a

division--and that may become a mortal wound to their one-life. Why had

he roused a slumbering world? Glimpses of the world's nurse-like,

old-fashioned, mother-nightcap benevolence to its kicking favourites; its

long-suffering tolerance for the heroic breakers of its rough-cast laws,

while the decent curtain continues dropped, or lifted only ankle-high;

together with many scenes, lively suggestions, of the choice of ways he

liked best, told of things, which were better things, incomprehensibly

forfeited. So that the plain sense of value insisted on more than one

weighing of the gain in hand: a dubious measure.

He was as little disposed to reject it as to stop his course at a goal of

his aim. Nevertheless, a gain thus poorly estimated, could not command

him to do a deed of humiliation on account of it. The speaking to this

dry young Dudley was not imperative at present. A word would do in the

day to come.

Nataly was busy with her purchases of furniture, and the practise for the

great August Concert. He dealt her liberal encouragements, up to the

verge of Dr. Themison's latest hummed words touching Mrs. Burman, from

which he jumped in alarm lest he should paralyze her again: the dear

soul's dreaded aspect of an earthy pallor was a spectre behind her

cheeks, ready to rush forth. Fenellan brought Carling to dine with him;

and Themison was confirmed by Carting, with incidents in proof; Caning by

Jarniman, also with incidents; one very odd one--or so it seemed, in the

fury of the first savour of it:--she informed Jarniman, Skepsey said his

friend Jarniman said, that she had dreamed of making her appearance to

him on the night of the 23rd August, and of setting the date on the

calendar over his desk, when she entered his room: 'Sitting-room, not

bedroom; she was always quite the lady,' Skepsey reported his Jarniman.

Mrs. Burman, as a ghost, would respect herself; she would keep to her

character. Jarniman quite expected the dream to be verified; she was a

woman of her word: he believed she had received a revelation of the

approaching fact: he was preparing for the scene.

Victor had to keep silent and discourse of general prosperity. His happy

vivaciousness assisted him to feel it by day. Nataly heard him at night,

on a moan: 'Poor soul!' and loudly once while performing an abrupt

demi-vault from back to side: 'Perhaps now!' in a voice through doors.

She schooled herself to breathe equably.

Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of comfort he was

charged with, he swallowed it himself; and these were the consequences.

And an uneasy sleep was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the

Radnor family. The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia, would have

cited ancestral names, showing it to be the worst of intimations. At

night, lying on his back beneath a weight of darkness, one heavily craped

figure, distinguishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black pad,

accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind was dragged to

go through the whole case by morning light; and the compassionate man

appealed to common sense, to stamp and pass his delectable sophistries;

as, that it was his intense humaneness, which exposed him to an

accusation of inhumanity; his prayer for the truly best to happen, which

anticipated Mrs. Burman's expiry. They were simple sophistries,

fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing the imprimatur

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

All because he could not open his breast to Nataly, by reason of her

feebleness; or feel enthusiasm in the possession of young Dudley! A dry

stick indeed beside him on the walk Westward. Good quality wood, no

doubt, but dry, varnished for conventional uses. Poor dear Fredi would

have to crown it like the May-day posy of the urchins of Craye Farm and

Creckholt!

Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate him as a diligent

student of commercial matters: rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal

Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome

appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born

to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and

Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England prone

along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the

possession of certain of them. But when, as Colney says, a grateful

England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he gratefully

hands-over the establishment to his country; and both may disregard the

howls of a Salvation Army of shareholders.--Beaten by the Germans in

Brewery, too! Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow. We were ahead of them,

and they came and studied us, and they studied Chemistry as well; while

we went on down our happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire their

young Professors, and then to import their beer.

Have the Germans more brains than we English? Victor's blood up to the

dome of his cranium knocked the patriotic negative. But, as old Colney

says (and bother him, for constantly intruding!), the comfortably

successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain yet more

than it eases the person: hence are we outpaced; we have now to know we

are racing. Victor scored a mark for one of his projects. A

well-conducted Journal of the sharpest pens in the land might, at a

sacrifice of money grandly sunk, expose to his English how and to what

degree their sports, and their fierce feastings, and their opposition to

ideas, and their timidity in regard to change, and their execration of

criticism applied to themselves, and their unanimous adoption of it for a

weapon against others, are signs of a prolonged indulgence in the

cushioned seat. Victor saw it. But would the people he loved? He agreed

with Colney, forgetting the satirist's venom: to-wit; that the

journalists should be close under their editor's rod to put it in sound

bold English;--no metaphors, no similes, nor flowery insubstantiality:

but honest Saxon manger stuff: and put it repeatedly, in contempt of the

disgust of iteration; hammering so a soft place on the Anglican skull,

which is rubbed in consequence, and taught at last through soreness to

reflect.--A Journal?--with Colney Durance for Editor?--and called

conformably THE WHIPPING-TOP? Why not, if it exactly hits the

signification of the Journal and that which it would have the country do

to itself, to keep it going and truly topping? For there is no vulgarity

in a title strongly signifying the intent. Victor wrote it at night,

naming Colney for Editor, with a sum of his money to be devoted to the

publication, in a form of memorandum; and threw it among the papers in

his desk.

Young Dudley had a funny inquisitiveness about Dartrey Fenellan; owing to

Fredi's reproduction or imitation of her mother's romantic sentiment for

Dartrey, doubtless: a bit of jealousy, indicating that the dry fellow had

his feelings. Victor touched--off an outline of Dartrey's history and

character:--the half-brother of Simeon, considerably younger, and totally

different. 'Dartrey's mother was Lady Charlotte Kiltorne, one of the

Clanconans; better mother than wife, perhaps; and no reproach on her, not

a shadow; only she made the General's Bank-notes fly black paper. And--if

you 're for heredity--the queer point is, that Simeon, whose mother was a

sober-minded woman, has always been the spendthrift. Dartrey married one

of the Hennen women, all an odd lot, all handsome. I met her once. Colney

said, she came up here with a special commission from the Prince of

Darkness. There are women who stir the unholy in men--whether they mean

it or not, you know.'

Dudley pursed to remark, that he could not say he did know. And good for

Fredi if he did not know, and had his objections to the knowledge! But he

was like the men who escape colds by wrapping in comforters instead of

trusting to the spin of the blood.

'She played poor Dartrey pranks before he buried--he, behaved well to

her; and that says much for him; he has: a devil of a temper. I 've seen

the blood in his veins, mount to cracking. But there's the man: because

she was a woman, he never let it break out with her. And, by heaven, he

had cause. She couldn't be left. She tricked him, and she loved

him-passionately, I believe. You don't understand women loving the

husband they drag through the mire?'

Dudley did not. He sharpened his mouth.

'Buried, you said, sir?--a widower?'

'I've no positive information; we shall hear when he: comes back,' Victor

replied hurriedly. 'He got a drenching of all the damns in the British

service from his. Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a trooper's

negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes Dartrey to

his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation. Good soldier

lost. And I can't complain; he has been a right-hand man to me over in

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

soldier.'

Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.

'Worse than that temper of Dartrey's, he can't forgive an injury. He

bears a grudge against his country. You've heard Colney Durance abuse old

England. It's three parts factitious-literary exercise. It 's milk beside

the contempt of Dartrey's shrug. He thinks we're a dead people, if a

people; "subsisting on our fat," as Colney says.'

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

'We don't,' Victor agreed. He disrelished his companion's mincing tone of

a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to be

at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens, who

little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the

gentleman cordially signifying full agreement. But Dudley was not gifted

to read behind words and looks.

They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was

this young Dudley saying, quite commendably: 'It's a pity we seem to have

no means of keeping our parks select.'

Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought. He remembered a fable of

Fenellan's, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to

discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure

in their hymning.

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

'One sees notorious persons.'

Dudley spoke aloof from them--'out of his cold attics,' Fenellan would

have said.

Victor approved: with the deadened feeling common to us when first in sad

earnest we consent to take life as it is.

He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the

fatherly embrace of goodness.

Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of

Lakelands. If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his

morality! But no; he wore it cap a pie, like a mediaeval knight his

armour. One had to approve. And there was no getting away from him. He

was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture

of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for him

at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him at a

corner of the Strand.

Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed with

Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on

self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to

Dudley's. Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in the

presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of

conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses. Dudley drove him

to Colney for relief. Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be

bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley to

critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and

foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul. That quieted her. And another thing,

she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a

tuning-fork for the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also, she

seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having to

share, high flights. And she was, in her queer woman's way, always

reassured by his endurance of Colney's company:--she read it to mean,

that he could bear Colney's perusal of him, and satiric stings. Victor

had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve

his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young

Dudley within him, he felt them. Preferring Fenellan's easy humour to

Colney's acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter's antidote to

Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.

For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of

their society. They might have headed those tribes in the country. At a

period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants to

be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not performance,

of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their temperaments.

Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of the Nineteenth

Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and negatives divorced

from harmony and awakened by the slight increase of incubating motion to

vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the rosy and

the saturnine since the former cheerfully slaved for a small stipend in

the City of his affection, and the latter entered on an inheritance

counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew a briefless barrister disposed

for scholarship from the forlornest of seats in the Courts. They had

foretold of one another each the unfulfilled; each claimed the actual as

the child of his prediction. Victor was to have been ruined long back;

Colney the prey of independent bachelors. Colney had escaped his harpy,

and Victor could be called a millionaire and more. Prophesy was crowned

by Colney's dyspepsia, by Victor's ticklish domestic position. Their pity

for one another, their warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of

different temperaments; and we have to distinguish, that in many

estimable and some gifted human creatures, it is the quality of the blood

which directs the current of opinion.

Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal satisfaction, and

to lull Nataly and make her laugh; but he could not, as she hoped he was

doing, take Colney into his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist,

impelled by his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and

does things; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic, with the

delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things. Our Optimy has his

instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy's countenance at the

confession of a dilemma-foreseen! He hands himself to Pessimy, as it were

a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack with the

wood. But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no compensation:

Pessimy is invulnerable. You waste your time in hurling a common

'tu-quoque' at one who hugs the worst.

The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view,

and neutral view of life, were a comical trio. They had come upon the

days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London's early August

when it is not pipeing March. Victor complacently bore heat as well as

cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it;

and why was he stewing in London? It was for this young Dudley, who

resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and

blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale

water: or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London's

professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told: Why was not

Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture! They

ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol. Nesta had of late been

turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after a

run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she and

Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath had

filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it as victim

on St. Helena's rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua's fortress-walls

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

sublime.

Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of his

darlings. But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious pictures

of that mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth from the

London oven:--lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags with livid peaks and snow

lining shelves and veins of the crevices; and folds of pinewood

undulations closed by a shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a

dazzling pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it shooting

aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge, and wide-armed in its

pure white shroud beneath; tranced, but all motion in immobility, to the

heart in the eye; a splendid image of striving, up to crowned victory.

And see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows and maize, and

lower vineyards and central tall green spires! Walking beside young

Dudley, conversing, observing too, Victor followed the trips and twists

of a rill, that was lured a little further down through scoops, ducts,

and scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.

He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water: a wren-robin-thrush on

the dance down of a faun; till it was caught and muted, and the silver

foot slid along the channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an

air of 'Whither you will, so it be on'; happy for service as in freedom.

Then the yard of the inn below, and the rillwater twirling rounded

through the trout-trough, subdued, still lively for its beloved onward:

dues to business, dues to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest

on earth:-eh? like some one we know, and Nataly has made the comparison.

Fresh forellen for lunch: rhyming to Fenellan, he had said to her; and

that recollection struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined

military captain living on a literary quill at the time; and Nataly's

tender pleading, 'Could you not help to give him another chance, dear

Victor?'--signifying her absolute trust in his ability to do that or more

or anything, had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office; which

he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previously an untutored

rill of the mountains, if ever was one.

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

Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes, the greater the

slaves we become.--But we must have an aim, my friend, and success must

be the aim of any aim!--Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the

disappointing miss, which saved you from being damned by your bullet on

the centre.--You're dead against Nature, old Colney.--That is to carry

the flag of Liberty.--By clipping a limb!

Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-Court. He

entertained a pronounced dissension with bachelors pretending to

independence. It could not be argued publicly, and the more the

pity:--for a slight encouragement, he would have done it: his outlook

over the waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly

constrained) spinsters--and another outlook, midnight upon Phlegethon to

the thoughts of men, made him deem it urgent. And it helped the plea in

his own excuse, as Colney pointed out to the son of Nature. That, he had

to admit, was true. He charged it upon Mrs. Burman, for twisting the most

unselfish and noblest of his thoughts; and he promised himself it was to

cease on the instant when the circumstance, which Nature was remiss in

not bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass. He could see

his Nataly's pained endurance beneath her habitual submission. Her effort

was a poor one, to conceal her dread of the day of the gathering at

Lakelands.

On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the amateurs

by rail to Wrensham, to hear 'trial of the acoustics' of the

Concert-hall. They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the

railway-carriage over Colney's description of Fashionable London's vast

octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of

its longest filament for an hour, plying suckers on him the while. He had

the look, to general perception, of a man but half-escaped: and as when

the notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set down upon

tablets in the head behind. Victor observed his look at Nataly. The look

was like a door aswing, revealing in concealing. She was not or did not

appear struck by it; perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy

professional gentleman's holiday reckoning of the hours before the return

train to his harness, and his arrangements for catching it. She was, as

she could be on a day of trial, her enchanting majestic self

again--defying suspicions. She was his true mate for breasting a world

honoured in uplifting her.

Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr. Themison's very warm

applause. He named the greatest of contraltos. Colney did better service

than Fenellan at the luncheon-table: he diverted Nataly and captured Dr.

Themison's ear with the narrative of his momentous expedition of European

Emissaries, to plead the cause of their several languages at the Court of

Japan: a Satiric Serial tale, that hit incidentally the follies of the

countries of Europe, and intentionally, one had to think, those of Old

England. Nesta set him going. Just when he was about to begin, she made

her father laugh by crying out in a rapture, 'Oh! Delphica!' For she was

naughtily aware of Dudley Sowerby's distaste for the story and disgust

with the damsel Delphica.

Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the grand object of the

expedition: indeed one of the eminent ones of the world; matter for an

Epic; though it is to be feared, that our part in it will not encourage a

Cis-Atlantic bard. To America the honours from beginning to end belong.

So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language, for the adoption of

the language it may choose among the foremost famous European tongues.

Japan becomes the word for miraculous transformations of a whole people

at the stroke of a wand; and let our English enrol it as the most

precious of the powerful verbs. An envoy visits the principal Seats of

Learning in Europe. He is of a gravity to match that of his unexampled

and all but stupefying mission. A fluent linguist, yet an Englishman, the

slight American accent contracted during a lengthened residence in the

United States is no bar to the patriotism urging him to pay his visit of

exposition and invitation from the Japanese Court to the distinguished

Doctor of Divinity Dr. Bouthoin. The renown of Dr. Bouthoin among the

learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to him; a scholar

endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive eloquence to cite and

instance as well as illustrate the superior advantages to Japan and

civilization in the filial embrace of mother English. 'For to this it

must come predestinated,' says the astonishing applicant. 'We seem to see

a fitness in it,' says the cogitative Rev. Doctor. 'And an Island England

in those waters, will do wonders for Commerce,' adds the former. 'We

think of things more pregnant,' concludes the latter, with a dry gleam of

ecclesiastical knowingness. And let the Editor of the Review upon his

recent pamphlet, and let the prelate reprimanding him, and let the

newspapers criticizing his pure Saxon, have a care!

Funds, universally the most convincing of credentials, are placed at Dr.

Bouthoin's disposal: only it is requested, that for the present the

expedition be secret. 'Better so,' says pure Saxon's champion. On a day

patented for secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent

through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the patent, the Rev.

Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate, the Rev. Mancate Semhians,

stumbling across portmanteaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and

other tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths in the

ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive, for the biggest

adventure ever embarked on by a far-thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic

pair speaking pure Saxon or other.

Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the custom of our period

(called the Realistic) to create, when casual opportunity offers, a

belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience. He passed

under veil the Rev. Doctor's acknowledgement of Neptune's power, and the

temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians. Proceeding at once to the comments of

these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness of

certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the

indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant,

pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking

of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him

is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for

the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his irascible

incisiveness! Yet there is a strange tone that they have. What, then, of

the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages the

young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating outside them to say

a word? What of that outpouring, explosive, equally voluble, uncontrolled

M. Bobinikine, a Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued like the

pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive boyhood,

which smokes on the dish from the pot? And what of another, hitherto

unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name transpires

as Pisistratus Mytharete? He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some lines of

Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language. Greek, is

it? Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of the poetic

chants? Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation. Dr. Bouthoin caps himself with

the offended Don. Mr. Semhians opens half an eye and a whole mouth. There

must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another in privacy. Delphica

draws Mr. Semhians aside.

Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labrador at the

transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo, Mr. Semhians faintly tells

of a conversation he has had with the ingenuous fair one; and she ardent

as he for the throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths of

the races of mankind. Strange!--she partly suspects the Frenchman, the

Russian, the attentive silent Greek, to be all of them bound for the

Court of Japan. Concurrents? Can it be? We are absolutely to enter on a

contention with rivals? Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr. Gannius. He is

astonished, he says; he could not have imagined it!

'Have you ever imagined anything?' Dr. Gannius asks him. Entomologist,

botanist, palaeontologist, philologist, and at sound of horn a ready

regimental corporal, Dr. Gannius wears good manners as a pair of

bath-slippers, to rally and kick his old infant of an Englishman; who, in

awe of his later renown and manifest might, makes it a point of

discretion to be ultra-amiable; for he certainly is not in training, he

has no alliances, and he must diplomatize; and the German is a strong

one; a relative too; he is the Saxon's cousin, to say the least. This

German has the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his

argumentative war into the enemy's country: and he presents on all sides

a solid rampart of recent great deeds done, and mailed readiness for the

doing of more, if we think of assailing him in that way. We are really

like the poor beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless

flesh to his beak. So we are cousinly.

Whether more amused than amazed, we know not, Dr. Gannius hears from 'our

simpleton of the pastures,' as he calls the Rev. Doctor to his daughter,

that he and Mr. Semhians have absolutely pushed forth upon this most

mighty of enterprises naked of any backing from their Government! Babes

in the Wood that they are! 'a la grace de dieu' at every turn that cries

for astutia, they show no sign or symbol of English arms behind them, to

support--and with the grandest of national prizes in view!--the pleading

oration before the Court of the elect, erudites, we will call them, of an

intelligent, yet half barbarous, people; hesitating, these, between

eloquence and rival eloquence, cunning and rival cunning. Why, in such a

case, the shadow-nimbus of Force is needed to decide the sinking of the

scale. But have these English never read their Shakespeare, that they

show so barren an acquaintance with human, to say nothing of

semi-barbaric, nature? But it is here that we Germans prove our claim to

being the sons of his mind.--Dr. Gannius, in contempt, throws off the

mask: he also is a concurrent. And not only is he the chosen by election

of the chief Universities of his land, he has behind him, as Athene

dilating Achilles, the clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and

lightning of his time. German, Japan shall be! he publicly swears before

them all. M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile; M. Bobinikine

double-dimples his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his

beak; Dr. Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such is the

masterful effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one party shows his

hand, the others find the reverse of concealment in hiding their own.

Dr. Bouthoin and Mr. Semhians are compelled to suspect themselves to be

encompassed with rivals, presumptively supported by their Governments.

The worthy gentlemen had hoped to tumble into good fortune, as in the

blessed old English manner. 'It has even been thus with us: unhelped we

do it!' exclaims the Rev. Doctor. He is roused from dejection by hearing

Mr. Semhians shyly (he has published verse) tell of the fairtressed

Delphica's phosphorial enthusiasm for our galaxy of British Poets.

Assisted by Mr. Semhians, he begins to imagine, that he has, in the

person of this artless devotee an ally, who will, through her worship of

our poets (by treachery to her sire-a small matter) sacrifice her

guttural tongue, by enabling him (through the exercise of her arts,

charms, intrigues--also a small matter) to obtain the first audience of

the Japanese erudites. Delphica, with each of the rivals in turn, is very

pretty Comedy. She is aware that M. Falarique is her most redoubtable

adversary, by the time that the vast fleet of steamboats (containing

newspaper reporters) is beheld from the decks of the Polypheme puffing

past Sandy Hook.

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

Nesta glanced at Dudley Sowerby. She liked him for his pained frown at

the part his countrymen were made to play, but did wish that he would

keep from expressing it in a countenance that suggested a worried knot;

and mischievously she said: 'Do you take to Delphica?'

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

Had Mr. Semhians been modelled on him?

'One bets on the German, of course--with Colney Durance,' Victor said to

Dr. Themison, leading him over the grounds of Lakelands.

'In any case, the author teaches us to feel an interest in the rivals. I

want to know what comes of it,' said the doctor.

'There's a good opportunity, one sees. But, mark me, it will all end in

satire upon poor Old England. According to Colney, we excel in nothing.'

'I do not think there is a country that could offer the entertainment for

which I am indebted to you to-day.'

'Ah, my friend, and you like their voices? The contralto?'

'Exquisite.'

Dr. Themison had not spoken the name of Radnor.

'Shall we see you at our next Concert-evening in town?' said Victor; and

hearing 'the privilege' mentioned, his sharp bright gaze cleared to

limpid. 'You have seen how it stands with us here!' At once he related

what indeed Dr. Themison had begun speculatively to think might be the

case.

Mrs. Burman Radnor had dropped words touching a husband, and of her

desire to communicate with him, in the event of her being given over to

the surgeons: she had said, that her husband was a greatly gifted man;

setting her head in a compassionate swing. This revelation of the husband

soon after, was filling. And this Mr. Radnor's comrade's manner of it,

was winning: a not too self-justifying tone; not void of feeling for the

elder woman; with a manly eulogy of the younger, who had flung away the

world for him and borne him their one dear child. Victor took the blame

wholly upon himself. 'It is right that you should know,' he said to the

doctor's thoughtful posture; and he stressed the blame; and a flame shot

across his eyeballs. He brought home to his hearer the hurricane of a man

he was in the passion: indicating the subjection of such a temperament as

this Victor Radnor's to trials of the moral restraints beyond his human

power.

Dr. Themison said: 'Would you--we postpone that as long as we can: but

supposing the poor lady . . . ?'

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

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

We are grateful when spared the conclusion of a sentence born to stammer.

If for that only, the doctor pressed Victor's hand warmly.

'I may, then, convey some form of assurance, that a request of the kind

will be granted?' he said.

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