The sprite of Colney Durance had struck him smartly overnight. Victor’s internal crow was over Colney now. And when you have the optimist and pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of time. For a principle is involved, besides the knowledge of the other’s triumph or dismay. The couple are scales of a balance; and not before last night had Victor ever consented to think of Colney ascending while he dropped low to graze the pebbles.
He left his hotel for the station, singing the great aria of the fourth Act of the Favorita: neglected since that mighty German with his Rienzi, and Tannhauser, and Tristan and Isolda, had mastered him, to the displacement of his boyhood’s beloved sugary -inis and -antes and-zettis; had clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had wafted him up to a new realm, invigorating if severer. But now his youth would have its voice. He travelled up to town with Sir Abraham Quatley and talked, and took and gave hints upon City and Commercial affairs, while the honeyed Italian of the conventional, gloriously animal, stress and flutter had a revel in his veins, now and then mutedly ebullient at the mouth: honeyed, golden, rich in visions;—having surely much more of Nature’s encouragement to her children?
CHAPTER XXIV. NESTA’S ENGAGEMENT
A word in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man Blathenoy, set the wheels of Victor’s brain at work upon his defences, for a minute, on the walk Westward. Who knew?—who did not know! He had a torpid consciousness that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the great monster to hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had caught its miserable spies by the lurcher neck and was towering. He dwelt on his contempt of them, to curtain the power they could stir.
‘The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?’
Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a second statement, thought ‘there was the look of it.’
‘Well, we must watch over her. Dartrey!—but Dartrey’s an honest fellow with women. But men are men. Very few men spare a woman when the mad fit is on her. A little woman-pretty little woman!—wife to Jacob Blathenoy! She mustn’t at her age have any close choosing—under her hand. And Dartrey’s just the figure to strike a spark in a tinder-box head.’
‘With a husband who’d reduce Minerva’s to tinder, after a month of him!’
‘He spent his honeymoon at his place at Wrensham; told me so.’ Blathenoy had therefore then heard of the building of Lakelands by the Victor Radnor of the City; and had then, we guess—in the usual honeymoon boasting of a windbag with his bride—wheezed the foul gossip, to hide his emptiness and do duty for amusement of the pretty little caged bird. Probably so. But Victor knew that Blathenoy needed him and feared him. Probably the wife had been enjoined to keep silence; for the Blachingtons, Fannings and others were, it could be sworn, blank and unscratched folio sheets on the subject:—as yet; unless Mrs. Burman had dropped venom.
‘One pities the little woman, eh, Fenellan?’
‘Dartrey won’t be back for a week or so; and they’re off to Switzerland, after the dinner they give. I heard from him this morning; one of the Clanconans is ill.
‘Lucky. But wherever Blathenoy takes her, he must be the same “arid bore,” as old Colney says.’
‘A domestic simoom,’ said Fenellan, booming it: and Victor had a shudder.
‘Awful thing, marriage, to some women! We chain them to that domestic round; most of them haven’t the means of independence or a chance of winning it; and all that’s open to them, if they’ve made a bad cast for a mate—and good Lord! how are they to know before it’s too late!—they haven’t a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and “drape in blight,” as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!—if he means it. You never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt of savage irony. It’s donkey nonsense, eh?’
‘The very hee-haw of nonsense,’ Fenellan acquiesced.
‘Come, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have shown wisdom,’ Victor said, rather leaning to the theme of a fretfulness of women in the legal yoke. ‘They’re donkeys till we know them for prophets. Who can tell! Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.’
Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although the loneliness of his lodgeings was known, and also, that he played whist at his Club. Victor had grounds for turning to him at the door and squeezing his hand warmly, by way of dismissal. In ascribing them to a weariness at Fenellan’s perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on them, and he stamped it with a repudiation of the charge, that Colney’s views upon the great Marriage Question were the ‘very hee-haw of nonsense.’ They were not the hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they were for discussion; there was no bray about them. He could not feel them to be absurd while Mrs. Burman’s tenure of existence barred the ceremony. Anything for a phrase! he murmured of Fenellan’s talk; calling him, Dear old boy, to soften the slight.
Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey; so she continued to be uninformed of her hero’s release; and that was in the order of happy accidents. She had hardly to look her interrogation for the news; it radiated. But he stated such matter-of-course briefly. ‘The good ladies are ready to receive our girl.’
Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled pride, in the idea, that he who tamed everybody to submission, might well have command of her.
The note, signed D. and V., was shown.
There stood the words. And last night she had been partly of the opinion of Colney Durance. She sank down among the unreasoning abject;—not this time with her perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety under compression. For she had not quite comprehended why Nesta should go. This readiness of the Duvidney ladies to receive the girl, stopped her mental inquiries.
She begged for a week’s delay; ‘before the parting’; as her dear old silly mother’s pathos whimpered it, of the separation for a month! and he smiled and hummed pleasantly at any small petition, thinking her in error to expect Dartrey’s return to town before the close of a week; and then wondering at women, mildly denouncing in his heart the mothers who ran risk of disturbing their daughters’ bosoms with regard to particular heroes married or not. Dartrey attracted women: he was one of the men who do it without effort. Victor’s provident mind blamed the mother for the indiscreetness of her wish to have him among them. But Dudley had been making way bravely of late; he improved; he began to bloom, like a Spring flower of the garden protected from frosts under glass; and Fredi was the sheltering and nourishing bestower of the lessons. One could see, his questions and other little points revealed, that he had a certain lover’s dread of Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy: Victor understood the feeling. To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man elsewhere in another; though she may know she never can wed the man, and has not the hope of it; is torment to the lover quailing, as we do in this terrible season of the priceless deliciousness, stripped against all the winds that blow; skinless at times. One gets up a sympathy for the poor shy dependent shivering lover. Nevertheless, here was young Dudley waking, visibly becoming bolder. As in the flute-duets, he gained fire from concert. The distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge was two miles and a quarter.
Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted four days, which embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John Cormyn’s on the last of the days, when Nesta was engaged to sing with her mother a duet of her own composition, the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it pass: eulogy, coming from him. So Victor heard, and he doated am the surprise to come for him, in a boyish anticipation. The girl’s little French ballads under tutelage of Louise de Seilles promised, though they were imitative. If Strauscher let this pass… Victor saw Grand Opera somewhere to follow; England’s claim to be a creative musical nation vindicated; and the genius of the fair sex as well.