"With that person?"
He could not but look the withering disgust of the modern world in a conservative gentleman who has been lured to go with it a little way, only to be bitten. "I decline to believe it," he said with forcible sound.
"She is married," was the rather shameless, exasperating answer.
"Married or not!" he cried, and murmured: "I have borne--. These may be Mr. Dartrey Fenellan"s ideas; they are not mine. I have--Something at least is due to me: Ask any lady:--there are clergymen, I know, clergymen who are for uplifting--quite right, but not a.s.sociating:--to call one of them a friend! Ask any lady, any! Your mother..."
"I beg you will not distress my mother," said Nesta.
"I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?" said Dudley.
"All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it."
"You are." He added hastily: "Counsels of prudence--there is not a lady living who would tell you otherwise. At all events, in public opinion, if it were known--and it would certainly be known,--a lady, wife or spinster, would suffer--would not escape the--at least shadow of defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with... hard words are wholesome in such a case: "touch pitch," yes! My sense is coherent."
"Quite," said Nesta.
"And you do not agree with me?"
"I do not."
"Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?"
"In this instance, better."
"Then I retire. I cannot retain my place here. You may depend upon it, the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance of women leading disorderly lives."
"Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?"
"Men, too, of course."
"You do not exclude the men from Society."
"Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books."
"Oh! the worthy books, then. I would read them, if I could find them."
"They are banned by self-respecting readers."
"It grieves me to think differently."
Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him, that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish, was in a state of liquefaction.
Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said: "I do hope you may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not erroneous."
"But do not distress her," Nesta implored him. "She is not well. When she has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady, so that she may not be deprived of the society of good women. I shall hope she will not disapprove of me. I cannot forsake a friend."
"I beg to say good-bye," said Dudley.
She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.
He "wished her prudent advisers."
She thanked him. "In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here."
A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.
Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell under a salutation regretful in frostiness.
A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made happy with a piece of Parisian riband.
Winter was rapidly in pa.s.sage: changes were visible everywhere; Earth and House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs.
Burman was the sole exception. To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner to make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an instrument for one of the darker purposes of Providence--and where are we standing if we ask such things?--she held on to her thread of life.
February went by. And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor from the Rev. Groseman b.u.t.termore, nor from Jarniman. That is to say, the two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment, one of our fixtures. On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared from her. Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed for the middle of April. Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman and nourished her on comfortable fiction. So the death of the member for the South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility lead to an exposure of the private history of the candidate for his vacant seat.
CHAPTER XL. AN EXPIATION
Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.
So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken impressions; she could distinguish her girl"s feeling, and her aim; she could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.
Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too p.r.o.nounced preference of the more unstable one:--or rather, the man adventurous out of the world"s highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness. Mademoiselle"s occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the young Frenchwoman"s novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly, very happily boasted. The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected: for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly"s generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of persons.
Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to see herself in her position altogether with the world"s relentless, unexamining hard eyes. Bitterness added, of Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett: She is made an honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded.
Otherwise her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion over some lost Idea he had often touched on latterly. And she was the one who sent him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: "You would found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury" when he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior weapon. That being, in fact, as Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-conquest used by them "before they fell away to flesh-pottery."
Was it his Idea? He fancied an aching at the back of his head when he speculated. But his Idea had been surpa.s.singly luminous, alive, a creation; and this came before him with the yellow skin of a Theory, bred, born of books. Though Nataly"s mention of the aristocracy of self-denying discipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.
Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said: she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her dealings with Dudley and with himself. She so quietly displaced the lady visiting him at the City offices. His girl"s disregard of hostile weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated, at her coming daily. She came: nor was there an instigation on the part of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought she met the dreadful Brighton woman. His Fredi drove constantly to walk back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable; and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera. The lady resisted; she was vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.
His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be a ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to reflections--a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the verge of a doubt. Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when we yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence? Is she, when translated into us, solely the imperious appet.i.te? Here was Fredi, his little Fredi--stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all her fun and her sail on wings--lifting him to pleasures not followed by clamorous, and perfectly satisfactory, yet discomposingly violent, appeals to Nature. They could be vindicated. Or could they, when they would not bear a statement of the case? He could not imagine himself stating it namelessly to his closest friend--not to Simeon Fenellan. As for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him with shivers:--Young Dudley would have seemed a more possible confidant:--and he represented the Puritan world.--And young Dudley was getting over Fredi"s infatuation for the woman she had rescued: he was beginning to fancy he saw a right enthusiasm in it;--in the abstract; if only the fair maid would drop an unseemly acquaintance. He had called at the office to say so. Victor stammered the plea for him.
"Never, dear father," came the smooth answer: a shocking answer in contrast with the tones. Her English was as lucid as her eyes when she continued up to the shock she dealt: "Do not encourage a good man to waste his thoughts upon me. I have chosen my mate, and I may never marry him. I do not know whether he would marry me. He has my soul. I have no shame in saying I love him. It is to love goodness, greatness of heart.
He is a respecter of women--of all women; not only the fortunate. He is the friend of the weaker everywhere. He has been proved in fire. He does not sentimentalize over poor women, as we know who scorns people for doing:--and that is better than hardness, meaning kindly. He is not one of the unwise advocates. He measures the forces against them. He reads their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He likes me. He is with me in my plans. He has not said, has not shown, he loves me. It is too high a thought for me until I hear it."
"Has your soul!" was all that Victor could reply, while the whole conception of Lakelands quaked under the crumbling structure.
Remonstrance, argument, a word for Dudley, swelled to his lips and sank in dumbness. Her seeming intuition--if it was not a perception--of the point where submission to the moods of his nature had weakened his character, and required her defence of him, struck Victor with a serious fear of his girl: and it was the more illuminatingly d.a.m.natory for being recognized as the sentiment which no father should feel. He tried to think she ought not to be so wise of the things of the world. An effort to imagine a reproof, showed him her spirit through her eyes: in her deeds too: she had already done work on the road:--Colney Durance, Dartrey Fenellan, anything but sentimentalists either of them, strongly backing her, upholding her. Victor could no longer so naturally name her Fredi.
He spoke it hastily, under plea of some humorous tenderness, when he ventured. When Dudley, calling on him in the City to discuss the candidature for the South London borough, named her Fredi, that he might regain a vantage of familiarity by imitating her father, it struck Victor as audacious. It jarred in his recollection, though the heir of the earldom spoke in the tone of a lover, was really at high pitch. He appeared to be appreciating her, to have suffered stings of pain; he offered himself; he made but one stipulation. Victor regretfully a.s.sured him, he feared he could do nothing. The thought of his entry into Lakelands, with Nesta Victoria refusing the foundation stone of the place, grew dim.
But he was now canva.s.sing for the Borough, hearty at the new business as the braced swimmer on seas, which instantly he became, with an end in view to be gained.
Late one April night, expecting Nataly to have gone to bed, and Nesta to be waiting for him, he reached home, and found Nataly in her sitting-room alone. "Nesta was tired," she said: "we have had a scene; she refuses Mr. Sowerby; I am sick of pressing it; he is very much in earnest, painfully; she blames him for disturbing me; she will not see the right course:--a mother reads her daughter! If my girl has not guidance!--she means rightly, she is rash."
Nataly could not utter all that her insaneness of feeling made her think with regard to Victor"s daughter--daughter also of the woman whom her hard conscience accused of inflammability. "Here is a note from Dr.