CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN ENDEAVOURING TO EXAMINE A

SPECTRE OF HIMSELF

Dudley rode back to Cronidge with his thunderstroke. It filled him, as in

those halls of political clamour, where explanatory speech is not

accepted, because of a drowning tide of hot blood on both sides. He

sought to win attention by submitting a resolution, to the effect, that

he would the next morning enter into the presence of Mr. Victor Radnor,

bearing his family's feelings, for a discussion upon them. But the

brutish tumult, in addition to surcharging, encased him: he could not

rightly conceive the nature of feelings: men were driving shoals; he had

lost hearing and touch of individual men; had become a house of angrily

opposing parties.

He was hurt, he knew; and therefore he supposed himself injured, though

there were contrary outcries, and he admitted that he stood free; he had

not been inextricably deceived.

The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a dust-whirl.

Reverting to the father and mother, his idea of a positive injury, that

was not without its congratulations, sank him down among his disordered

deeper sentiments; which were a diver's wreck, where an armoured livid

subtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wandered seriously light in

heaviness; trembling his hundredweights to keep him from dancing like a

bladder-block of elastic lumber; thinking occasionally, amid the mournful

spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with the world above,

whereby he was deafened yet sustained. One tug at it, and he was up on

the surface, disengaged from the hideous harness, joyfully no more that

burly phantom cleaving green slime, free! and the roaring stopped; the

world looked flat, foreign, a place of crusty promise. His wreck,

animated by the dim strange fish below, appeared fairer; it winked

lurefully when abandoned.

The internal state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as

heartily as the vulgarest of our gobblegobbets hate it, metaphor only can

describe; and for the reason, that he had in him just something more than

is within the compass of the language of the meat-markets. He had--and

had it not the less because he fain would not have had--sufficient stuff

to furnish forth a soul's epic encounter between Nature and Circumstance:

and metaphor, simile, analysis, all the fraternity of old lamps for

lighting our abysmal darkness, have to be rubbed, that we may get a

glimpse of the fray.

Free, and rejoicing; without the wish to be free; at the same time humbly

and sadly acquiescing in the stronger claim of his family to pronounce

the decision: such was the second stage of Dudley's perturbation after

the blow. A letter of Nesta's writing was in his pocket: he knew her

address. He could not reply to her until he had seen her father: and that

interview remained necessarily prospective until he had come to his exact

resolve, not omitting his critical approval of the sentences giving it

shape, stamp, dignity--a noble's crest, as it were.

Nesta wrote briefly. The apostrophe was, 'Dear Mr. Sowerby.' She had

engaged to send her address. Her father had just gone. The Miss Duvidneys

had left the hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing the sea.

According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack, and had that

morning trotted out to the downs with a riding-master and company, one of

whom was 'an agreeable lady.'

He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to the 'Delphica' of

Mr. Durance's incomprehensible serial story, or whatever it was; which,

as he had shown her, annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun; and

she had insisted on the fun; and he had painfully tried to see it or

anything of a meaning; and it seemed to him now, that he had been

humiliated by the obedience to her lead: she had offended by her harping

upon Delphica. However, here it was unmentioned. He held the letter out

to seize it in the large, entire.

Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable

lady on earth. Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived

in her--if she knew her position. She might be ignorant of it. And to

strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of the

loathsome name, was not materially important. Marriage altered the view.

He sided with his family.

He sided, edgeing away, against his family. But a vision of the earldom

coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which his

unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with

a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality. Who would

have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the

righteous? And she, the mother, a lady--quite a lady; having really a

sense of duty, sense of honour! That she must be a lady, Dudley was

convinced. He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal

respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him

drearly like a distant great mansion's conflagration across moorland at

midnight, of a lady's breach of bonds and plunge of all for love. How had

it been concealed? In Dudley's upper sphere, everything was exposed:

Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world. But

still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady. Handsome now, she

must have been beautiful. And a comprehensible pride (for so would Dudley

have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death: . . . grandly

silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man! Not in

time, though! Legitimacy evidently, by the mother's confession, cannot

protect where it is wanted. Dudley was optically affected by a round spot

of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.

He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her. The effort succeeded so

well, that he was presently striving to be insensible. The former state,

was the mounting of a wall; the latter, was a sinking through a chasm.

There would be family consultations, abhorrent; his father's agonized

amazement at the problem presented to a family of scrupulous principles

and pecuniary requirements; his mother's blunt mention of the abominable

name--mediaevally vindicated in champions of certain princely families

indeed, but morally condemned; always under condemnation of the Church: a

blot: and handed down: Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity,

crying out. A man in the situation of Dudley could not think solely of

himself. The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.

There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them

and the commonalty.

His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him: Edith Averst,

with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect

of six or so, excluding Sir John's estate, Carping, in Leicestershire; a

fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers as

they ripened. A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he wanted to

love. He was learning the trick from this other one, who had become

obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not extinct.

Sight of her was to be dreaded.

Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent. That constituted the

unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which had

his world's blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and

enthronement of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.

Can innocence issue of the guilty? He asked it, hopeing it might be

possible: he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws

governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them.

They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel. His

conservative mind, retiring in good order, occupied the next rearward

post of resistance. Secretly behind it, the man was proud of having a

heart to beat for the cause of the besiegeing enemy, in the present

instance. When this was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he

attributed his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair

face.--Oh, but more! spirit was in the sweet eyes. She led him--she did

lead him in spiritual things; led him out of common circles of thought,

into refreshing new spheres; he had reminiscences of his having relished

the juices of the not quite obviously comic, through her indications: and

really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl's education, she could boast

her acquirements; she was quick, startlingly; modest, too, in commerce

with a slower mind that carried more; though she laughed and was a needle

for humour: she taught him at times to put away his contempt of the

romantic; she had actually shown him, that his expressed contempt of it

disguised a dread: as it did, and he was conscious of the foolishness of

it now while pursuing her image, while his intelligence and senses gave

her the form and glory of young morning.

Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her

youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business,

exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary feminine

of himself. Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether the very

sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not at some

time or other show trace of the origin, surged up. If he could only have

been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous ardour, in

reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated Dudley to

quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of those

monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the House of

Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive the nameless

girl and prodigious heiress. His family's instruction of him, and his

inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped of the

clothing of the laws offensive down to devilish: we grant her certain

steps, upon certain conditions accompanied by ceremonies; and when she

violates them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary wicked old

beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices. An alliance with any of

her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an act of treason to his house, his

class, and his tenets. And nevertheless he was haunted by a cry of

criminal happiness for and at the commission of the act.

He would not decide to be 'precipitate,' and the days ran their course,

until Lady Grace Halley arrived at Cronidge, a widow. Lady Cantor spoke

to her of Dudley's unfathomable gloom. Lady Grace took him aside.

She said, without preface: 'You've heard, have you!'

'You were aware of it?' said he, and his tone was irritable with a

rebuke.

'Coming through town, for the first time yesterday. I had it--of all

men!--from a Sir Abraham Quatley, to whom I was recommended to go, about

my husband's shares in a South American Railway; and we talked, and it

came out. He knows; he says, it is not generally known; and he likes,

respects Mr. Victor Radnor; we are to keep the secret. Hum? He had heard

of your pretensions; and our relationship, etc.: "esteemed" it--you know

the City dialect--his duty to mention, etc. That was after I had spied on

his forehead the something I wormed out of his mouth. What are you going

to do?'

'What can I do!'

'Are you fond of the girl?'

An attachment was indicated, as belonging to the case. She was not a

woman to whom the breathing of pastoral passion would be suitable; yet he

saw that she despised him for a lover; and still she professed to

understand his dilemma. Perplexity at the injustice of fate and persons

universally, put a wrinkled mask on his features and the expression of

his feelings. They were torn, and the world was torn; and what he wanted,

was delay, time for him to define his feelings and behold a recomposed

picture of the world. He had already taken six days. He pleaded the shock

to his family.

'You won't have such a chance again,' she said. Shrugs had set in.

They agreed as to the behaviour of the girl's mother. It reflected on the

father, he thought.

'Difficult thing to proclaim, before an engagement!' Her shoulders were

restless.

'When a man's feelings get entangled!'

'Oh! a man's feelings! I'm your British Jury for, a woman's.'

'He has married her?'

She declared to not knowing particulars. She could fib smoothly.

The next day she was on the line to London, armed with the proposal of an

appointment for the Hon. Dudley to meet 'the girl's father.'