CHAPTER XXXIV

CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS

All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed indifference to

meals by continuing absent: and he was the one with whom Nesta would have

felt at home; more at home than with her parents. He and the cool world

he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his giving

of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present to her in

a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and round, now

and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did: he carried his head

semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he was, he

appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motives inducing

to speculation.

She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning

and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:--this

anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of

gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated

people.

The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against

them for injustice: uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as a

muffled force to sustain her: and the young who are of healthy lively

blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold

them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth

into the wilderness they acknowledge. But in the wilderness their souls

are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there

up to the parent Spirit.

She could not fancy herself flying thither;--where to be shorn and naked

and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole true

life in us resolves to that steady flame;--she was restrained by Dudley's

generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for her

uncommitted sin dashed in her face. He surprised her; the unexpected

quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast: and she did not

obtain release after seeing behind it;--seeing it, by the light of what

she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover's generosity. So her keen

intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus divided)

thrilled in thinking it must be love! The name of the sacred passion

lifted it out of the petty cabin of the individual into a quiring

cathedral universal, and subdued her. It subdued her with an unwelcome

touch of tenderness when she thought of it as involving tenderness for

her mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother. Could he love the

daughter without some little, which a more intimate knowledge of her dear

mother would enlarge? The girl's heart flew to her mother, clung to her,

vindicated her dumbly. It would not inquire, and it refused to hear,

hungering the while. She sent forth her flights of stories in elucidation

of the hidden; and they were like white bird after bird winging to covert

beneath a thundercloud; until her breast ached for the voice of the

thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of her never losing her filial hold

of the beloved. She and her mother grew together, they were one.

Accepting the shadow, they were the closer one beneath it. She had

neither vision nor active thought of her father, in whom her pride was.

At the hour of ten, the ladies retired for the enjoyment of their sweet

reward. Manton, their maid, came down to sit with Nesta on the watch for

Skepsey. Perrin, the footman, returning, as late as twenty minutes to

eleven, from his tobacco promenade along the terrace, reported to Manton

'a row in town'; and he repeated to Nesta the policeman's opinion and his

own of the 'Army' fellows, and the way to treat them. Both were for

rigour.

'The name of "Army" attracts poor Skepsey so, I am sure he would join it,

if they would admit him,' Nesta said.

'He has an immense respect for a young woman, who belongs to his "Army";

and one doesn't know what may have come,' said Manton.

Two or three minutes after eleven, a feeble ring at the bell gained

admission for some person: whispering was heard in the passage.

Manton played eavesdropper, and suddenly bursting on Skepsey, arrested

him when about to dash upstairs. His young mistress's voice was a

sufficient command; he yielded; he pitched a smart sigh and stepped into

her presence for his countenance to be seen, or the show of a

countenance, that it presented.

'Skepsey wanted to rush to bed without saying good night to me?' said

she; leaving unnoticed, except for woefulness of tone, his hurried

shuffle of remarks on 'his appearance,' and 'little accidents'; ending

with an inclination of his disgraceful person to the doorway, and a

petition: 'If I might, Miss Nesta?' The implied pathetic reference to a

surgically-treated nose under a cross of strips of plaster, could not

obtain dismissal for him. And he had one eye of sinister hue, showing

beside its lighted-grey fellow as if a sullen punished dragonwhelp had

couched near some quick wood-pigeon. The two eyes blinked rapidly. He was

a picture of Guilt in the nude, imploring to be sent into concealment.

The cruelty of detaining him was evident.

'Yes, if you must,' Nesta said. 'But, dear Skepsey, will it be the

magistrate again to-morrow?'

He feared it would be; he fancied it would needs be. He concluded by

stating, that he was bound to appear before the magistrate in the

morning; and he begged assistance to keep it from the knowledge of the

Miss Duvidneys, who had been so kind to him.

'Has there been bailing of you again, Skepsey?'

'A good gentleman, a resident,' he replied; 'a military gentleman;

indeed, a colonel of the cavalry; but, it may so be, retired; and anxious

about our vast possessions; though he thinks a translation of a French

attack on England unimportant. He says, the Germans despise us most.'

'Then this gentleman thinks you have a good case?'

'He is a friend of Captain Dartrey's.'

Hearing that name, Nesta said: 'Now, Skepsey, you must tell me

everything. You are not to mind your looks. I believe, I do always

believe you mean well.'

'Miss Nesta, it depends upon the magistrate's not being prejudiced

against the street-processionists!

'But you may expect justice from the magistrate, if your case is good?'

'I would not say no, Miss Nesta. But we find, the opinion of the public

has its effect with magistrates--their sentences. They are severe on

boxing. They have latterly treated the "Army" with more consideration,

owing to the change in the public view. I myself have changed.'

'Have you joined it?'

'I cannot say I am a member of it.'

'You walked in the ranks to-day, and you were maltreated? Your friend was

there?'

'I walked with Matilda Pridden; that is, parallel, along the pavement.'

'I hope she came out of it unhurt?'

'It is thanks to Captain Dartrey, Miss Nesta?'

This time Nesta looked her question.

Manton interposed: 'You are to speak, Mr. Skepsey'; and she stopped a

flood of narrative, that was knocking in his mind to feel its head and to

leap--an uninterrupted half-minute more would have shaped the story for

the proper flow.

He began, after attending to the throb of his bruises in a manner to

correct them rather than solace; and the beginning was the end: 'Captain

Dartrey rescued us, before Matilda Pridden suffered harm, to mention--the

chin, slight, teeth unshaken; a beautiful set. She is angry with Captain

Dartrey, for having recourse to violence in her defence: it is against

her principles. "Then you die," she says; and our principles are to gain

more by death. She says, we are alive in them; but worse if we abandon

them for the sake of living.--I am a little confused; she is very

abstruse.--Because, that is the corruptible life, she says. I have found

it quite impossible to argue with her; she has always a complete answer;

wonderful. In case of Invasion, we are to lift our voices to the Lord;

and the Lord's will shall be manifested. If we are robbed, we ask, How

came we by the goods? It is unreasonable; it strikes at rights of

property. But I have to go on thinking. When in danger, she sings without

excitement. When the blow struck her, she stopped singing only an

instant. She says, no one fears, who has real faith. She will not let me

call her brave. She cannot admire Captain Dartrey. Her principles are

opposed. She said to him, "Sir, you did what seemed to you right." She

thinks every blow struck sends us back to the state of the beasts. Her

principles . . .'

'How was it Captain Dartrey happened to be present, Skepsey?'

'She is very firm. You cannot move her.--Captain Dartrey was on his way

to the station, to meet a gentleman from London, Miss Nesta. He carried a

stick--a remarkable stick--he had shown to me in the morning, and he has

given it me now. He says, he has done his last with it. He seems to have

some of Matilda Pridden's ideas about fighting, when it's over. He was

glad to be rid of the stick, he said.'

'But who attacked you? What were the people?'

'Captain Dartrey says, England may hold up her head while she breeds

young women like Matilda Pridden: right or wrong, he says: it is the

substance.'

Hereupon Manton, sick of Miss Pridden, shook the little man with a

snappish word, to bring him to attention. She got him together

sufficiently for him to give a lame version of the story; flat until he

came to his heroine's behaviour, when he brightened a moment, and he sank

back absorbed in her principles and theories of life. It was understood

by Nesta, that the processionists, going at a smart pace, found their way

blocked and were assaulted in one of the sidestreets; and that Skepsey

rushed to the defence of Matilda Pridden; and that, while they were

engaged, Captain Dartrey was passing at the end of the street, and

recognized one he knew in the thick of it and getting the worst of it,

owing to numbers. 'I will show you the stick he did it with, Miss Nests';

said Skepsey, regardless of narrative; and darted out of the room to

bring in the Demerara supple-jack; holding which, he became inspired to

relate something of Captain Dartrey's deeds.

They gave no pleasure to his young lady, as he sadly perceived:--thus it

is with the fair sex ever, so fond of heroes! She shut her eyes from the

sight of the Demerara supple-jack descending right and left upon the

skulls of a couple of bully lads. 'That will do--you were rescued. And

now go to bed, Skepsey; and be up at seven to breakfast with me,' Nesta

said, for his battle-damaged face would be more endurable to behold after

an interval, she hoped; and she might in the morning dissociate its evil

look from the deeds of Captain Dartrey.

The thought of her hero taking active part in a streetfray, was repulsive

to her; it swamped his brilliancy. And this distressed her, by

withdrawing the support which the thought of him had been to her since

mid-day. She lay for sleepless hours, while nursing a deeper pain, under

oppression of repugnance to battle-dealing, bloodshedding men. It was

long before she grew mindful of the absurdity of the moan recurring

whenever reflection wearied. Translated into speech, it would have run:

'In a street of the town! with a stick!'--The vulgar picture pursued her

to humiliation; it robbed her or dimmed her possession of the one bright

thing she had remaining to her. So she deemed it during the heavy sighs

of night; partly conscious, that in some strange way it was as much as

tossing her to the man who never could have condescended to the

pugnacious using of a stick in a street. He, on the contrary, was a cover

to the shamefaced.

Her heart was weak that night. She hovered above it, but not so detached

as to scorn it for fawning to one--any one--who would offer her and her

mother a cover from scorn. And now she exalted Dudley's generosity, now

clung to a low idea of a haven in her father's wealth; and she was

unaware, that the second mood was deduced from the first. She did know

herself cowardly: she had, too, a critic in her clear head, to spurn at

the creature who could think of purchasing the world's respect. Dudley's

generosity sprang up to silence the voice. She could praise him, on a

review of it, for delicacy, moreover; and the delicacy laid her under a

more positive obligation. Her sense of it was not without a toneless

quaint faint savour of the romantic, that her humour little humorously

caught at, to paint her a picture of former heroes of fiction, who win

their trying lady by their perfection of good conduct on a background of

high birth; and who are not seen to be wooden before the volume closes.

Her fatigue of sleeplessness plunged her into the period of poke-bonnets

and peaky hats to admire him; giving her the kind of sweetness we may

imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired horse munching hay. If she

had gone to her bed with a noble or simply estimable plain image of one

of her friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been thus

abject. Skepsey's discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey's behaviour behind

it, threw her upon Dudley's generosity, as being the shield for an

outcast. Girls, who see at a time of need their ideal extinguished in its

appearing tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing

suitor. Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning the best she could

think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.

According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom of Dorothea

and Virginia, to assure them of her having slept well, and say the

good-bye to them and their Tasso. The little dog was the growl of a

silken ball in a basket. His mistresses excused him, because of his being

unused to the appearance of any person save Manton in their bedroom.

Dorothea, kissing her, said: 'Adieu, dear child; and there is home with

us always, remember. And, after breakfast, however it may be,

you will, for our greater feeling of security, have--she has our

orders--Manton--your own maid we consider too young for a guardian--to

accompany you. We will not have it on our consciences, that by any

possibility harm came to you while you were under our charge. The good

innocent girl we received from the hands of your father, we return to

him; we are sure of that.'

Nesta said: 'Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.'

'However it may be,' Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.

Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso's temper he enjoyed

ordinarily a slumber of half an hour's longer duration. He was, Dorothea

feelingly added, regularity itself. Virginia murmured: 'Except once!' and

both were appalled by the recollection of that night. It had,

nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem's published

beautiful sermon ON DIRT; the words of which were an antidote to the

night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea could reply

to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart Rem at

his loftiest: '"Let us not bring into the sacred precincts Dirt from the

roads, but have a care to spread it where it is a fructification."'

Virginia produced the sequent sentence, likewise weighty. Nesta stood

between the thin division of their beds, her right hand given to one, her

left to the other. They had the semblance of a haven out of storms.

She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that the residing

with them had been a means of casting her--it was an effort to remember

how--upon the world where the tree of knowledge grows. She had eaten; and

she might be the worse for it; but she was raised to a height that would

not let her look with envy upon peace and comfort. Luxurious quiet people

were as ripening glass-house fruits. Her bitter gathering of the

knowledge of life had sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even in

the young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than fallow soil.

But for the fountain of human warmth at her breast, she might have been

snared by the conceit of intellect, to despise the simple and

conventional, or shed the pity which is charity's contempt. She had only

to think of the kindness of the dear good ladies; her heart jumped to

them at once. And when she fancied hearing those innocent souls of women

embracing her and reproaching her for the knowledge of life she now bore,

her words down deep in her bosom were: It has helped me to bear the shock

of other knowledge! How would she have borne it before she knew of the

infinitely evil? Saving for the tender compassion weeping over her

mother, she had not much acute personal grief.

For this world condemning her birth, was the world tolerant of that

infinitely evil! Her intellect fortified her to be combative by day,

after the night of imagination; which splendid power is not so

serviceable as the logical mind in painful seasons: for night revealed

the world snorting Dragon's breath at a girl guilty of knowing its

vilest. More than she liked to recall, it had driven her scorched, half

withered, to the shelter of Dudley. The daylight, spreading thin at the

windows, restored her from that weakness. 'We will quit England,' she

said, thinking of her mother and herself, and then of her father's surely

following them. She sighed thankfully, half way through the breakfast

with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by the clock; she was hurriedly

sentient of the puzzle of her feelings, when she guessed at a chance that

Dudley would be delayed. She supposed herself as possibly feeling not so

well able to keep every thought of her head brooding on her mother in

Dudley's company.

Skepsey's face was just sufferable by light of day, if one pitied

reflecting on his honest intentions; it ceased to discolour another. He

dropped a few particulars of his hero in action; but the heroine

eclipsed. He was heavier than ever with his Matilda Pridden. At the hour

for departure, Perrin had a conveyance at the door. Nesta sent off

Skepsey with a complimentary message to Captain Dartrey. Her maid Mary

begged her to finish her breakfast; Manton suggested the waiting a

further two or three minutes. 'We must not be late,' Nesta said; and when

the minute-hand of the clock marked ample time for the drive to the

station, she took her seat and started, keeping her face resolutely set

seaward, having at her ears the ring of a cry that was to come from

Manton. But Manton was dumb; she spied no one on the pavement who

signalled to stop them. And no one was at the station to greet them. They

stepped into a carriage where they were alone. Dudley with his dreaded

generosity melted out of Nesta's thoughts, like the vanishing

steam-wreath on the dip between the line and the downs.

She passed into music, as she always did under motion of carriages and

trains, whether in happiness or sadness: and the day being one that had a

sky, the scenic of music swung her up to soar. None of her heavy burdens

enchained, though she knew the weight of them, with those of other

painful souls. The pipeing at her breast gave wings to large and small of

the visible; and along the downs went stateliest of flowing dances; a

copse lengthened to forest; a pool of cattle-water caught grey for

flights through enchantment. Cottage-children, wherever seen in groups,

she wreathed above with angels to watch them. Her mind all the while was

busy upon earth, embracing her mother, eyeing her father. Imagination and

our earthly met midway, and still she flew, until she was brought to the

ground by a shot. She struggled to rise, uplifting Judith Marsett: a

woman not so very much older than her own teens, in the count of years,

and ages older; and the world pulling at her heels to keep her low. That

unhappiest had no one but a sisterly girl to help her: and how she clung

to the slender help! Who else was there?

The good and the bad in the woman struck separate blows upon the girl's

resonant nature. She perceived the good, and took it into her

reflections. The bad she divined: it approached like some threat of

inflammation. Natures resonant as that which animated this girl, are

quick at the wells of understanding: and she had her intimations of the

world's wisdom in withholding contagious presences from the very mangy of

the young, who may not have an, aim, or ideal or strong human compassion,

for a preservative. She was assured of her possessing it. She asked

herself in her mother's voice, and answered mutely. She had the

certainty: for she rebuked the slavish feverishness of the passion, as

betrayed by Mrs. Marsett; and the woman's tone, as of strung wires

ringing on a rage of the wind. Then followed her cry for the man who

could speak to Captain Marsett of his duty in honour. An image of one,

accompanying the faster beats of her heart, beguiled her to think away

from the cause. He, the one man known to her, would act the brother's

part on behalf of the hapless creature.

Nesta just imagined her having supplicated him, and at once imagination

came to dust. She had to thank him she knelt to him. For the first time

of her life she found herself seized with her sex's shudder in the blood.