CHAPTER XXIX

SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND

Nasta and her maid were brought back safely through the dusk by their

constellation of a boy, to whom the provident ladies had entrusted her.

They could not but note how short her syllables were. Her face was only

partly seen. They had returned refreshed from their drive on the populous

and orderly parade---so fair a pattern of their England!--after

discoursing of 'the dear child,' approving her manners, instancing proofs

of her intelligence, nay, her possession of 'character.' They did so,

notwithstanding that these admissions were worse than their growing love

for the girl, to confound established ideas. And now, in thoughtfulness

on her behalf, Dorothea said, 'We have considered, Nesta, that you may be

lonely; and if it is your wish, we will leave our card on your new

acquaintance.' Nesta took her hand and kissed it; she declined, saying,

'No,' without voice.

They had two surprises at the dinner-hour. One was the card of Dartrey

Fenellan, naming an early time next day for his visit; and the other was

the appearance of the Rev. Stuart Rem, a welcome guest. He had come to

meet his Bishop.

He had come also with serious information for the ladies, regarding the

Rev. Abram Posterley. No sooner was this out of his mouth than both

ladies exclaimed:

'Again!' So serious was it, that there had been a consultation at the

Wells; Mr. Posterley's friend, the Rev. Septimus Barmby, and his own

friend, the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had journeyed from London to sit

upon the case: and, 'One hoped,' Mr. Stuart Rem said, 'poor Posterley

would be restored to the senses he periodically abandoned.' He laid a

hand on Tasso's curls, and withdrew it at a menace of teeth. Tasso would

submit to rough caresses from Mr. Posterley; he would not allow Mr.

Stuart Rem to touch him. Why was that? Perhaps for the reason of Mr.

Posterley's being so emotional as perpetually to fall a victim to some

bright glance and require the rescue of his friends; the slave of woman

had a magnet for animals!

Dorothea and Virginia were drawn to compassionate sentiments, in spite of

the provokeing recurrence of Mr. Posterley's malady. He had not an income

to support a wife. Always was this unfortunate gentleman entangling

himself in a passion for maid or widow of the Wells and it was desperate,

a fever. Mr. Stuart Rem charitably remarked on his taking it so severely

because of his very scrupulous good conduct. They pardoned a little wound

to their delicacy, and asked: 'On this occasion?' Mr. Stuart Rem named a

linendraper's establishment near the pantiles, where a fair young woman

served. 'And her reputation?' That was an article less presentable

through plate-glass, it seemed: Mr. Stuart Rem drew a prolonged breath

into his nose.

'It is most melancholy!' they said in unison. 'Nothing positive,' said

he. 'But the suspicion of a shadow, Mr. Stuart Rem! You will not permit

it?' He stated, that his friend Buttermore might have influence. Dorothea

said: 'When I think of Mr. Posterley's addiction to ceremonial

observances, and to matrimony, I cannot but think of a sentence that fell

from Mr. Durance one day, with reference to that division of our Church:

he called it:--you frown! and I would only quote Mr. Durance to you in

support of your purer form, as we hold it to be--with the candles, the

vestments, Confession, alas! he called it, "Rome and a wife."'

Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent: he testily dismissed mention of

Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr. Posterley.

The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased, considerately

signified to him, that a young maiden was present.

The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum of

summer midges. She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any way.

She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time to time.

She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her. To-morrow

she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that prospect, for an escape

from the meshes of a painful hour--the most woeful of the hours she had

yet known-passed with Judith Marsett: which dragged her soul through a

weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still did it with her

ideas. It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much of the world's

flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended, and so coldly,

previous to Mrs. Marsett's lift of the veil in her story of herself: a

skipping revelation, terrible enough to the girl; whose comparison of the

previously suspected things with the things now revealed imposed the

thought of her having been both a precocious and a callous young woman: a

kind of 'Delphica without the erudition,' her mind phrased it airily over

her chagrin.--And the silence of Dudley proved him to have discovered his

error in choosing such a person--he was wise, and she thanked him. She

had an envy of the ignorant-innocents adored by the young man she

cordially thanked for quitting her. She admired the white coat of armour

they wore, whether bestowed on them by their constitution or by prudence.

For while combating mankind now on Judith Marsett's behalf, personally

she ran like a hare from the mere breath of an association with the very

minor sort of similar charges; ardently she desired the esteem of

mankind; she was at moments abject. But had she actually been aware of

the facts now known?

Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding

senses--and however vividly--require enlightenment of the audible and

visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them away

from a blushful dread and force the mind to know. As much as the wilfully

or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by touch:

only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse as our

society's matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized man--a

creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him--barbarously exacts.

The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is after all in

his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she appears as a

phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer; and he insists

upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he is to have sense

of surety. Many a young girl is misread by the amount she seems to know

of our construction, history, and dealings, when it is not more than her

sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the facts of life profuse

about her, and prompts her through one or other of the instincts, often

vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to her; or haply her

filly nature is having a fling at the social harness of hypocrisy. If you

(it is usually through the length of ears of your Novelist that the

privilege is yours) have overheard queer communications passing between

girls, and you must act the traitor eavesdropper or Achilles masquerader

to overhear so clearly, these, be assured, are not specially the signs of

their corruptness. Even the exceptionally cynical are chiefly to be

accused of bad manners. Your Moralist is a myopic preacher, when he

stamps infamy, on them, or on our later generation, for the kick they

have at grandmother decorum, because you do not or cannot conceal from

them the grinning skeleton behind it.

Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to love in return

for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not her lover

could love, she thought with grateful pride in the treasure she was to

pour out at his feet; as only one or two (and they were women) in the

world had ever loved. Her notion of the passion was parasitic: man the

tree, woman the bine: but the bine was flame to enwind and to soar,

serpent to defend, immortal flowers to crown. The choice her parents had

made for her in Dudley, behind the mystery she had scent of, nipped her

dream, and prepared her to meet, as it were, the fireside of a November

day instead of springing up and into the dawn's blue of full summer with

swallows on wing. Her station in exile at the Wells of the weariful rich,

under the weight of the sullen secret, unenlivened by Dudley's courtship,

subdued her to the world's decrees; phrased thus: 'I am not to be a

heroine.' The one golden edge to the view was, that she would greatly

please her father.

Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist's pressed weed. But

after hearing Judith Marsett's wild sobs, it had no place in her

cherishing. For, above all, the unhappy woman protested love to have been

the cause of her misery. She moaned of 'her Ned'; of his goodness, his

deceitfulness, her trustfulness; his pride and the vileness of his

friends; her longsuffering and her break down of patience. It was done

for the proof of her unworthiness of Nesta's friendship: that she might

be renounced, and embraced. She told the pathetic half of her story, to

suit the gentle ear, whose critical keenness was lost in compassion. How

deep the compassion, mixed with the girl's native respect for the

evil-fortuned, may be judged by her inaccessibility to a vulgar tang that

she was aware of in the deluge of the torrent, where Innocence and Ned

and Love and a proud Family and that beast Worrell rolled together in

leaping and shifting involutions.

A darkness of thunder was on the girl. Although she was not one to shrink

beneath it like the small bird of the woods, she had to say within

herself many times, 'I shall see Captain Dartrey to-morrow,' for a

recovery and a nerving. And with her thought of him, her tooth was at her

underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over men's views of her

sex, and how to bring a frank mind to meet him; to be sure of his not at

heart despising; until his character swam defined and bright across her

scope. 'He is good to women.' Fragments of conversation, principally her

father's, had pictured Captain Dartrey to her most manfully tolerant

toward a frivolous wife.

He came early in the morning, instantly after breakfast.

Not two minutes had passed before she was at home with him. His words,

his looks, revived her spirit of romance, gave her the very landscapes,

and new ones. Yes, he was her hero. But his manner made him also an

adored big brother, stamped splendid by the perils of life. He sat

square, as if alert to rise, with an elbow on a knee, and the readiest

turn of head to speakers, the promptest of answers, eyes that were a

brighter accent to the mouth, so vividly did look accompany tone. He

rallied her, chatted and laughed; pleased the ladies by laughing at

Colney Durance, and inspired her with happiness when he spoke of

England:--that 'One has to be in exile awhile, to see the place she

takes.'

'Oh, Captain Dartrey, I do like to hear you say so,' she cried; his voice

was reassuring also in other directions: it rang of true man.

He volunteered, however, a sad admission, that England had certainly lost

something of the great nation's proper conception of Force: the meaning

of it, virtue of it, and need for it. 'She bleats for a lesson, and will

get her lesson.'

But if we have Captain Dartrey, we shall come through! So said the

sparkle of Nesta's eyes.

'She is very like her father,' he said to the ladies.

'We think so,' they remarked.

'There's the mother too,' said he; and Nesta saw that the ladies

shadowed.

They retired. Then she begged him to 'tell her of her own dear mother.'

The news gave comfort, except for the suspicion, that the dear mother was

being worn by her entertaining so largely. 'Papa is to blame,' said

Nesta.

'A momentary strain. Your father has an idea of Parliament; one of the

London Boroughs.'

'And I, Captain Dartrey, when do I go back to them?'

'Your mother comes down to consult with you. And now, do we ride

together?'

'You are free?'

'My uncle, Lord Clan, lets me out.'

'To-day?'

'Why, yes!'

'This morning?'

'In an hour's time.'

'I will be ready.'

Nesta sent a line of excuse to Mrs. Marsett, throwing in a fervent

adjective for balm.

That fair person rode out with the troop under conduct of the hallowing

squire of the stables, and passed by Nesta on horseback beside Dartrey

Fenellan at the steps of a huge hotel; issuing from which, pretty Mrs.

Blathenoy was about to mount. Mrs. Marsett looked ahead and coloured, but

she could not restrain one look at Nesta, that embraced her cavalier.

Nesta waved hand to her, and nodded. Mrs. Marsett withdrew her eyes; her

doing so, silent though it was, resembled the drag back to sea of the

shingle-wave below her, such a screaming of tattle she heard in the

questions discernible through the attitude of the cavalier and of the

lady, who paused to stare, before the leap up in the saddle. 'Who is

she?--what is she?--how did you know her?--where does she come

from?--wears her hat on her brows!--huge gauntlets out of style!--shady!

shady! shady!' And as always during her nervous tumults, the name of

Worrell made diapason of that execrable uproar. Her hat on her brows had

an air of dash, defying a world it could win, as Ned well knew. But she

scanned her gauntlets disapprovingly. This town, we are glad to think,

has a bright repute for glove-shops. And Mrs. Marsett could applaud

herself for sparing Ned's money; she had mended her gloves, if they were

in the fashion.--But how does the money come? Hark at that lady and that

gentleman questioning Miss Radnor of everything, everything in the world

about her! Not a word do they get from Miss Radnor. And it makes them the

more inquisitive. Idle rich people, comfortably fenced round, are so

inquisitive! And Mrs. Marsett, loving Nesta for the notice of her,

maddened by the sting of tongues it was causing, heard the wash of the

beach, without consciousness of analogies, but with a body ready to jump

out of skin, out of life, in desperation at the sound.

She was all impulse; a shifty piece of unmercenary stratagem occasionally

directing it. Arrived at her lodgings, she wrote to Nesta: 'I entreat you

not to notice me, if you pass me on the road again. Let me drop, never

mind how low I go. I was born to be wretched. A line from you, just a

line now and then, only to show me I am not forgotten. I have had a

beautiful dream. I am not bad in reality; I love goodness, I know. I

cling to the thought of you, as my rescue, I declare. Please, let me

hear: if it's not more than "good day" and your initials on a post-card.'

The letter brought Nesta in person to her.