CHAPTER XXVII

CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE CHIEF ACTOR

MAY DECIDE

Skepsey ushered Lady Grace into his master's private room, and

entertained her during his master's absence. He had buried his wife, he

said: she feared, seeing his posture of the soaping of hands at one

shoulder, that he was about to bewail it; and he did wish to talk of it,

to show his modest companionship with her in loss, and how a consolation

for our sorrows may be obtained: but he won her approval, by taking the

acceptable course between the dues to the subject and those to his

hearer, as a model cab should drive considerate equally of horse and

fare.

A day of holiday at Hampstead, after the lowering of the poor woman's

bones into earth, had been followed by a descent upon London; and at

night he had found himself in the immediate neighbourhood of a public

house, noted for sparring exhibitions and instructions on the first

floor; and he was melancholy, unable quite to disperse 'the ravens'

flocking to us on such days: though, if we ask why we have to go out of

the world, there is a corresponding inquiry, of what good was our coming

into it; and unless we are doing good work for our country, the answer is

not satisfactory--except, that we are as well gone. Thinking which, he

was accosted by a young woman: perfectly respectable, in every way: who

inquired if he had seen a young man enter the door. She described him,

and reviled the temptations of those houses; and ultimately, as she

insisted upon going in to look for the young man and use her persuasions

to withdraw him from 'that snare of Satan,' he had accompanied her, and

he had gone upstairs and brought the young man down. But friends, or the

acquaintances they call friends, were with him, and they were 'in drink,'

and abused the young woman; and she had her hand on the young man's arm,

quoting Scripture. Sad to relate of men bearing the name of

Englishmen--and it was hardly much better if they pleaded

intoxication!--they were not content to tear the young man from her

grasp, they hustled her, pushed her out, dragged her in the street.

'It became me to step to her defence: she was meek,' said Skepsey. 'She

had a great opinion of the efficacy of quotations from Scripture; she did

not recriminate. I was able to release her and the young man she

protected, on condition of my going upstairs to give a display of my

proficiency. I had assured them, that the poor fellows who stood against

me were not a proper match. And of course, they jeered, but they had the

evidence, on the pavement. So I went up with them. I was heavily

oppressed, I wanted relief, I put on the gloves. He was a bigger man;

they laughed at the little one. I told them, it depended upon a knowledge

of first principles, and the power to apply them. I will not boast, my

lady: my junior by ten years, the man went down; he went down a second

time; and the men seemed surprised; I told them, it was nothing but first

principles put into action. I mention the incident, for the extreme

relief it afforded me at the close of a dark day.'

'So you cured your grief!' said Lady Grace; and Skepsey made way for his

master.

Victor's festival-lights were kindled, beholding her; cressets on the

window-sill, lamps inside.

'Am I so welcome?' There was a pull of emotion at her smile. 'What with

your little factotum and you, we are flattered to perdition when we come

here. He has been proposing, by suggestion, like a Court-physician, the

putting on of his boxing-gloves, for the consolation of the

widowed:--meant most kindly! and it's a thousand pities women haven't

their padded gloves.'

'Oh! but our boxing-gloves can do mischief enough. You have something to

say, I see.'

'How do you see?'

'Tusk, tush.'

The silly ring of her voice and the pathless tattle changed; she talked

to suit her laden look. 'You hit it. I come from Dudley. He knows the

facts. I wish to serve you, in every way.'

Victor's head had lifted.

'Who was it?'

'No enemy.'

'Her mother. She did rightly!

'Certainly she did,' said Victor, and he thought that instantaneously of

the thing done. 'Oh, then she spoke to him! She has kept it from me. For

now nearly a week--six days--I've seen her spying for something she

expected, like a face behind a door three inches ajar. She has not been

half alive; she refused explanations;--she was expecting to hear from

him, of him:--the decision, whatever it's to be!'

'I can't aid you there,' said Lady Grace. 'He's one of the unreadables.

He names Tuesday next week.'

'By all means.'

'She?'

'Fredi?--poor Fredi!--ah, my poor girl, yes!--No, she knows nothing. Here

is the truth of it.--she, the legitimate, lives: they say she lives.

Well, then, she lives against all rules physical or medical, lives by

sheer force of will--it's a miracle of the power of a human creature to

. . . . I have it from doctors, friends, attendants, they can't guess what

she holds on, to keep her breath. All the happiness in life!--if only it

could benefit her. But it 's the cause of death to us. Do you see, dear

friend;--you are a friend, proved friend,' he took her hand, and held and

pressed it, in great need of a sanguine response to emphasis; and having

this warm feminine hand, his ideas ran off with it. 'The friend I need!

You have courage. My Nataly, poor dear--she can endure, in her quiet way.

A woman of courage would take her place beside me and compel the world to

do her homage, help;--a bright ready smile does it! She would never be

beaten. Of course, we could have lived under a bushel--stifled next to

death! But I am for light, air-battle, if you like. I want a comrade, not

a--not that I complain. I respect, pity, love--I do love her, honour:

only, we want something else--courage--to face the enemy. Quite right,

that she should speak to Dudley Sowerby. He has to know, must know; all

who deal closely with us must know. But see a moment: I am waiting to see

the impediment dispersed, which puts her at an inequality with the world:

and then I speak to all whom it concerns--not before: for her sake. How

is it now? Dudley will ask . . . you understand. And when I am forced to

confess, that the mother, the mother of the girl he seeks in marriage, is

not yet in that state herself, probably at that very instant the obstacle

has crumbled to dust! I say, probably: I have information--doctors,

friends, attendants--they all declare it cannot last outside a week. But

you are here--true, I could swear! a touch of a hand tells me. A woman's

hand? Well, yes: I read by the touch of a woman's hand:--betrays more

than her looks or her lips!' He sank his voice. 'I don't talk of

condoling: if you are in grief, you know I share it.' He kissed her hand,

and laid it on her lap; eyed it, and met her eyes; took a header into her

eyes, and lost himself. A nip of his conscience moved his tongue to say:

'As for guilt, if it were known . . . a couple of ascetics--absolutely!'

But this was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology

to his conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one

who was being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed

in enigmas. He righted immediately, under a perception of the

thoroughbred's contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught the

word 'guilt,' to hide the Philistine citizen's lapse, by relating

historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves

of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no

guilt. He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use

of it.

'Fiddle,' said Lady Grace. 'The thing happened. You have now to carry it

through. You require a woman's aid in a social matter. Rely on me, for

what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday? I will write. Be plain

with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark. Your Nesta has

no aversion?'

'Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.'

'Good enough beginning.' She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather

heavy. 'And if one proves to be of aid, you'll own that a woman has her

place in the battle.'

The fair black-clad widow's quick and singular interwreathing of the

evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind on

a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his chin,

her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.

Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian

shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct to

the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their

pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who

visibly likes the living? Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,

impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle with

the King of Terrors for the other poor harper's half-night capped

Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the solicitude,

a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call it a fact,

to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty youth in its

coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of the regiment

absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the cross of a

track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very much more,

and which affects us at times so much less than did the pressure of a

soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one. On the contrary, we

triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our pains; we

commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big fact.

The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,

and at the close, shutting her eyes. She stood cool in her blush, and

eyed him, like one gravely awakened. Having been embraced and kissed, she

had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness of

impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit nor

glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God

tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal of

them. He glowed transparently. He said: 'You are the woman to take a

front place in the battle!' With this woman beside him, it was a

conquered world.

Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,

favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised

stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,

that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.

She owned herself. Or did she? Some understanding of how the other woman

had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her. She would

have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as bring

her tongue to reproach. If we come to the den! she said to her thought of

reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent in his

nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness. And she had

come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a superior

being to direct and restrain a gambler's hand perhaps for the fee of a

temporary pressure.

'I may be able to help a little--I hope!' she fetched a breath to say,

while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her

inheritance of property in stocks and shares.

Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of

projects he entertained:--Parliament! 'But I have only to mention it at

home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.'

He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.

'You succeed in everything you do,' said she, and she cordially believed

it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating. Success folded

her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshipped the figure of Success.

'I can't consent to fail, it's true, when my mind is on a thing,' Victor

rejoined.

He looked his mind on Lady Grace. The shiver of a maid went over her.

These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is

perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.

Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice; and though

she did not step back, he bowed to the negation, and then she gave him a

grateful shadow of a smile, relieved, with a startled view of how greatly

relieved, by that sympathetic deference in the wake of the capturing

intrepidity.

'I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?' she suggested.

'At any hour he pleases to appoint.'

'A visit signifies . . .'

'Whatever it signifies!'

'I'm thinking of the bit of annoyance.'

'To me? Anything appointed, finds me ready the next minute.'

Her smile was flatteringly bright. 'By the way, keep your City people

close about you: entertain as much as possible; dine them,' she said.

'At home?'

'Better. Sir Rodwell Blachington, Sir Abraham Quatley: and their wives.

There's no drawing back now. And I will meet them.'

She received a compliment. She was on the foot to go.

But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.

The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting. Victor stated the figures; he

saluted her hand, and Lady Grace passed out, with her heart on the top of

them, and a buzz about it of the unexpected having occurred She had her

experiences to match new patterns in events; though not very many.

Compared with gambling, the game of love was an idle entertainment.

Compared with other players, this man was gifted.

Victor went in to Mr. Inchling's room, and kept Inchling from speaking,

that he might admire him for he knew not what, or knew not well what. The

good fellow was devoted to his wife. Victor in old days had called the

wife Mrs. Grundy. She gossiped, she was censorious; she knew--could not

but know--the facts; yet never by a shade was she disrespectful. He had a

curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his wife being

always in concert, entirely--whatever they might think in

private--devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not

originally sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak of

obscurity shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could

illumine to give him back splendid reflections. Inchling and his wife, it

was: because the two were one: and if one, and subservient to him,

knowing all the story, why, it foreshadowed a conquered world.

They were the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in his hand. So it

had been.

He rattled his views upon Indian business, to hold Inchling silent, and

let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the good faithful spouse, who had

no phosphorescent writing of a recent throbbing event on the four walls

of his room.

Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.

He felt and regretted this. He greeted her with a doubled

affectionateness. Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for

this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on

him for gentle treatment.

'You have not seen any one?' she asked.

'City people. And you, my love?'

'Mr. Barmby called. He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to

some friend there.' She added, in pain of thought: 'I have seen Dartrey.

He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects he

will have to take him to Brighton.'

'Brighton? What a life for a man like Dartrey, at Brighton!'

Her breast heaved. 'If I cannot see my Nesta there, he will bring her up

to me for a day:

'But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your wish to see

her.'

'It is becoming imperative that I should.'

'No hurry, no hurry: wait till the end of next week. And I must see

Dartrey, on business, at once!'

She gave the address in a neighbouring square. He had minutes to spare

before dinner, and flew. She was not inquisitive.

Colney Durance had told Dartrey that Victor was killing her. She had

little animation; her smiles were ready, but faint. After her interview

with Dudley, there had been a swoon at home; and her maid, sworn to

secrecy, willingly spared a tender-hearted husband--so good a master.