There was at least no seeing of the public blot on her birth when looking on her face. Nor when thinking of the beauty of her character, in absence or in presence, was there any. He had mastered distaste to such a degree, that he forgot the a.s.sistance he had received from the heiress for enabling him to appreciate the fair young girl. Money is the imperious requirement of superior station; and more money and more: in these our modern days of the merchant"s wealth, and the miner"s, and the gigantic American and Australian millionaires, high rank is of necessity vowed, in peril of utter eclipse; to the possession of money. Still it is, when a.s.sured, a consideration far to the rear with a gentleman in whose bosom love and the buzzing world have fought their battle out. He could believe it thoroughly fought out, by the prolonged endurance of a contest lasting many days and nights; in the midst of which, at one time, the task of writing to tell her of his withdrawal from the engagement, was the cause of his omission to write.
As to her character, he dwelt on the charm of her recovered features, to repress an indicative dread of some intrepid force behind it, that might be unfeminine, however gentle the external lineaments. Her features, her present aristocratic deficiency of colour, greatly pleased him; her character would submit to moulding. Of all young ladies in the world, she should be the one to shrink from a mental independence and hold to the guidance of the man enn.o.bling her. Did she? Her eyes were reading him. She had her father"s limpid eyes, and when they concentrated rays, they shot.
"Have you seen my parents, Mr. Sowerby?"
He answered smilingly, for rea.s.suringly: "I have seen them."
"My mother?"
"From your mother first. But am I not to be Dudley?"
"She spoke to you? She told you?"
"And yesterday your father--a second time."
Some remainder of suspicion in the dealing with members of this family, urged Dudley to say: "I understood from them, you were not?... that you were quite...?"
"I have heard: I have guessed: it was recently--this morning, as it happened. I wish to go to my mother to-day. I shall go to her to-morrow."
"I might offer to conduct you-now!"
"You are kind; I have Skepsey." She relieved the situation of its cold-toned strain in adding: "He is a host."
"But I may come?--now! Have I not the right? You do not deny it me?"
"You are very generous."
"I claim the right, then. Always. And subsequently, soon after, my mother hopes to welcome you at Cronidge. She will be glad to hear of your naming of a day. My father bids me... he and all our family."
"They are very generous."
"I may send them word this evening of a day you name?"
"No, Mr. Sowerby.
"Dudley?"
"I cannot say it. I have to see my parents."
"Between us, surely?"
"My whole heart thanks you for your goodness to me. I am unable to say more."
He had again observed and he slightly crisped under the speculative look she directed on him: a simple unstrained look, that had an air of reading right in, and was worse to bear with than when the spark leaped upon some thought from her eyes: though he had no imagination of anything he concealed--or exposed, and he would have set it down to her temporary incredulousness of his perfect generosity or power to overcome the world"s opinion of certain circ.u.mstances. That had been a struggle!
The peculiar look was not renewed. She spoke warmly of her grat.i.tude.
She stated, that she must of necessity see her parents at once. She submitted to his entreaty to conduct her to them on the morrow. It was in the manner of one who yielded step by step, from inability to contend.
Her att.i.tude continuing unchanged, he became sensible of a monotony in the speech with which he a.s.sailed it, and he rose to leave, not dissatisfied. She, at his urgent request, named her train for London in the early morning. He said it was not too early. He would have desired to be warmed; yet he liked her the better for the moral sentiment controlling the physical. He had appointments with relatives or connections in the town, and on that pretext he departed, hoping for the speedy dawn of the morrow as soon as he had turned his back on the house.
No, not he the man to have pity of women underfoot! That was the thought, unrevolved, unphrased, all but unconscious, in Nesta: and while her heart was exalting him for his generosity. Under her present sense of the chilling shadow, she felt the comfort there was in being grateful to him for the golden beams which his generosity cast about her. But she had an intelligence sharp to pierce, virgin though she was; and with the mark in sight, however distant, she struck it, unerring as an Artemis for blood of beasts: those shrewd young wits, on the lookout to find a champion, athirst for help upon a desolate road, were hard as any judicial to p.r.o.nounce the sentence upon Dudley in that respect. She raised him high; she placed herself low; she had a glimpse of the struggle he had gone through; love of her had helped him, she believed.
And she was melted; and not the less did the girl"s implacable intuition read with the keenness of eye of a man of the world the blunt division in him, where warm humanity stopped short at the wall of social concrete forming a part of this rightly esteemed young citizen. She, too, was divided: she was at his feet; and she rebuked herself for daring to judge--or rather, it was, for having a reserve in her mind upon a man proving so generous with her. She was pulled this way and that by sensibilities both inspiring to blind grat.i.tude and quickening her penetrative view. The certainty of an unerring perception remained.
Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below, waiting for their carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the Hon. Dudley"s departure; soon after, Nesta entered to them. She swam up to Dorothea"s lap, and dropped her head on it, kneeling.
The ladies feared she might be weeping. Dorothea patted her thick brown twisted locks of hair. Unhappiness following such an interview, struck them as an ill sign.
Virginia bent to the girl"s ear, and murmured: "All well?"
She replied: "He has been very generous."
Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that had darkened her on the descent of stairs. For sensibilities sharp as Nesta"s, are not to be had without their penalties: and she who had gone nigh to summing in a flash the nature of Dudley, sank suddenly under that affliction often besetting the young adventurous mind, crushing to young women:--the fascination exercised upon them by a positive adverse masculine att.i.tude and opinion. Young men know well what it is: and if young women have by chance overcome their timidity, to the taking of any step out of the trim pathway, they shrink, with a sense of forlornest isolation. It becomes a subjugation; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight to cast off. Soon it a.s.sumed its material form for the contention between her and Dudley, in the figure of Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett. The Nesta who had been instructed to know herself to be under a shadow, heard, she almost justified Dudley"s reproaches to her, for having made the acquaintance of the unhappy woman, for having visited her, for having been, though but for a minute, at the mercy of a coa.r.s.e gentleman"s pursuit. The recollection was a smart buffet.
Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjuring of Dudley"s words, should news of her relations with Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett reach him:--and she would have to tell him. Would he not say: "I have borne with the things concerning your family. All the greater reason why I must insist"--he would a.s.suredly say he insisted (her humour caught at the word, as being the very word one could foresee and clearly see him uttering in a fit of vehemence) on her immediate abandonment of "that woman."
And with Nesta"s present enlightenment by dusky beams, upon her parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the opinion of the majority. Would he not say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett put them under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its option to cla.s.s them together?
These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined to be a battle-field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of them, while the girl"s face was hidden on Dorothea"s lap, and her breast heaved and heaved.
She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must instantly see her mother.
They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and Dorothea said: "Yes, dear; any day you like."
"To-morrow--I must go to her to-morrow!"
A suggestion of her mother"s coming down, was faintly spoken by one lady, echoed in a quaver by the other.
Nesta shook her head. To quiet the kind souls, she entreated them to give their promise that they would invite her again.
Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both ladies embraced her: not entirely yielding-up their hearts to her, by reason of the pernicious new ideas now in the world to sap our foundations of morality; which warned them of their duty to uphold mentally his quite justifiable behaviour, even when compa.s.sionating the sufferings of the guiltless creature loved by them.
CHAPTER x.x.xIV. 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 gla.s.s 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 grat.i.tude 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 m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sion 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.