A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him:—Is it a truth, that if we are great owners of money, we are so swollen with a force not native to us, as to be precipitated into acts the downright contrary of our tastes?
He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit of unmeasured phrasing when they are displeased, and so they yield no rational answer. Still he gave heed to violent extraneous harpings against money. Epigrams of Colney’s; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist orators reported in some newspaper corner; had him by the ears.
They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who entered his office to tell him she was leaving town for Whinfold, her husband’s family-seat, where the dear man lay in evil case. She signified her resignation to the decrees from above, saying generously:
‘You look troubled, my friend. Any bad City news?’
‘I look troubled?’ Victor said laughing, and bethought him of what the trouble might be. ‘City news would not cause the look. Ah, yes;—I was talking in the street to a friend of mine on horseback the other day, and he kept noticing his horse’s queer starts. We spied half a dozen children in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one of them plucking at a hair. “Please, sir, may I have a hair out of your horse’s tail?” said the mite. We patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to pluck at. Men come to the fathers about their girls. It’s my belief that mothers more easily say no. If they learn the word as maids, you’ll say! However, there’s no fear about my girl. Fredi’s hard to snare. And what brings you Cityward?’
‘I want to know whether I shall do right in selling out of the Tiddler mine.’
‘You have multiplied your investment by ten.’
‘If it had been thousands!’
‘Clearly, you sell; always jump out of a mounted mine, unless you’re at the bottom of it.’
‘There are City-articles against the mine this morning—or I should have been on my way to Whinfold at this moment. The shares are lower.’
‘The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to the ground, that you may quit it for them to ascend. Tiddler has enemies, like the best of mines: or they may be named lovers, if you like. And mines that have gone up, go down for a while before they rise again; it’s an affair of undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy. The stories are false, for the time. I had the latest from Dartrey Fenellan yesterday. He’s here next month; some time in August.’
‘He is married, is he not?’
‘Was.’
Victor’s brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.
‘Is he not a soldier?’ she said.
‘Soldiers and parsons!’ Victor interjected.
Now she saw. She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby’s hovering offer of the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling Bethesda.
But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have to lower her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming: ‘It’s only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream of the past!’
‘The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to you,’ said Victor.
She put out her hand to be taken. ‘Not if you back me here. It really is not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow. And if I’m to be a widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you. I love adventure, danger;—well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain in a storm. And if the worst happens, we go down together. It ‘s the detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of fighting.’
‘Say, brandy.’
‘Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel?’
‘Colney may call it what he pleases. If I read fiction, let it be fiction; airier than hard fact. If I see a ballet, my troop of short skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen. I can’t read dull analytical stuff or “stylists” when I want action—if I’m to give my mind to a story. I can supply the reflections. I’m English—if Colney ‘s right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of supernaturalism.
I don’t ask for bloodshed: that’s what his “brandy” means.’
‘But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it where there’s love; it’s part of the balance, and justifies one’s excitement. How otherwise do you get any real crisis? I must read and live something unlike this flat life around us.’
‘There’s the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says. Pass it in books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our thoughts. No brandy there! And no fine name for personal predilections or things done in domino!’ Victor said, with his very pleasant face, pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage despite—or with that poor kind of—trust in her captain. But the thought was not guilty of drawing comparisons. ‘This is one that I could trust, as captain or mate,’ he pressed the hand again before dropping it.
‘You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person at the trial,’ said Lady Grace.
Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and she was reminded of trains and husbands.
She left Victor uncomfortably rufed: and how? for she had none of the physical charms appealing peculiarly to the man who was taken with grandeur of shape. She belonged rather to the description physically distasteful to him.
It is a critical comment on a civilization carelessly distilled from the jealous East, when visits of fair women to City offices can have this effect. If the sexes are separated for an hour, the place where one is excluded or not common to see, becomes inflammable to that appearing spark. He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the monasticism of the Court of Law: and he and she awaken unhallowed emotions. Supposing, however, that western men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions of her, and dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman’s voluble tongue to sisterly occupation there in the midst of the pleading Court, as in the domestic circle: very soon would her eyes be harmless: unless directed upon us with intent.
That is the burning core of the great Question, our Armageddon in Morality: Is she moral? Does she mean to be harmless? Is she not untamable Old Nature? And when once on an equal footing with her lordly half, would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be that wanton old thing—the empress of disorderliness? You have to recollect, as the Conservative acutely suggests, that her timidities, at present urging her to support Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence. The party views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we should remember, on an intimate acquaintance with her in the situations where she is almost unrestrictedly free and her laughter rings to confirm the sentences of classical authors and Eastern sages. Conservatives know what they are about when they refuse to fling the last lattice of an ancient harem open to air and sun-the brutal dispersers of mystery, which would despoil an ankle of its flying wink.
Victor’s opinions were those of the entrenched majority; objecting to the occult power of women, as we have the women now, while legislating to maintain them so; and forbidding a step to a desperately wicked female world lest the step should be to wickeder. His opinions were in the background, rarely stirred; but the lady had brought them forward; and he fretted at his restlessness, vexed that it should be due to the intrusion of the sex instead of to the charms of the individual. No sting of the sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board the Channel boat-nothing to speak of. ‘Why does she come here! Why didn’t she go to her husband! She gets into the City scramble blindfold, and catches at the nearest hand to help her out! Nice woman enough.’ Yes, but he was annoyed with her for springing sensations that ran altogether heartless to the object, at the same time that they were disloyal to the dear woman their natural divinity. And between him and that dear woman, since the communication made by Skepsey in the town of Dreux, nightly the dividing spirit of Mrs. Burman lay cold as a corpse. They both felt her there. They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.