UC-NRLF Hill lllllllllll B 3 35A 1fl2 REESE LIBRARY UNIVER&FTY OF CALIFORNI im .Accessions No. b^6'^ & ■■ Q$& jtie-. * ftjgjf :-,%;: ; : ..;..,; msm E&blptt* .p^ "^ ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. Mr. George Meredith is the greatest English novelist living; he is probably the greatest novelist of our time. He is a man of genius, a literary artist, and truly a great writer. — The Beacon. GEORGE MEREDITH'S NOVELS. TITLES. THE ORDEAL OF R'CHARD RHODA FLEMING. FEVEREL. BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. EVAN HARRINGTON. THE EGOIST. HARRY RICHMOND. DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. SANDRA BELLONI. THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT, VITTORIA. AND FARINA. ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS. SOME PRESS NOTICES. Mr. Meredith's novels are an intellectual tonic. They are the great, and in- deed, we may say, they are the only novels of any living author which deserve to be called great. They will take the same high and permanent rank that is as- signed to the novels of George Eliot and George Sand. They are deeper in intellectual power than Dickens, while they have less of his dramatizations. They are an intellectual mine, and will repay careful study. — Boston Traveller. The London "Athenaeum'' says of "Diana of the Crossways": "It is a study of character, and it is also a study of emotion ; it is a picture of fact and of the world, and it is touched with generous romance ; it is rich in kindly comedy, and it abounds in natural passion ; it sets forth a selection of many human ele- ments, and it is joyful and sorrowful, wholesome with laughter and fruitful of tears as life itself." Mr. Meredith's novels certainly have the qualities which we marked as essen- tial to permanent literature. They can set before you pictures of happy love, or of youth and nature that can never be forgotten ; scenes that flash before your eyes when your thoughts are elsewhere. . . . Whoever reads Mr. Meredith does not waste his time. He is in good company, among gentlemen and ladies ; above all, in the company of a Genius. — Daily News. Genius of a truly original and spontaneous kind shines in every one of these books; of fancy there is only too much, perhaps; with healthy benevolent sym- pathy they abound; and if there exists any greater master of his native tongue than Mr. Meredith, we have yet to hear of the gentleman's name. — St. James's Gazette. It was not until 1859, when he had reached the age of thirty-two, that he pro- duced " The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," his first mature novel, charged to the brim with earnestness, wit, strength of conception. Meredith's stories generally end happily ; but this one is profoundly tragic. I have read many of his chapters without being moved, even when the situation in itself must theoretically be ac- knowledged an affecting one. But it seems to me that the heart which is not touched, and the eyes that do not become moist, in the reading of the last portions of " Richard Feverel " must be indurated with a glaze of indifference which is not to be envied. — G. P. Lathrop, in Atlantic Monthly. 12 Volumes, English Edition, uncut, nrao. Price, $2.00. 12 Volumes, English Edition, half calf. Extra, $30.00 the set. 12 Volumes, Popular American Edition, i6mo, cloth. Price, $1.50. ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, BOSTON, MASS. ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. BY GEORGE MEREDITH, ^utijor's lEtutton. ROBERTS BROTHERS, 3, SOMERSET STREET, BOSTON. 1891. 6 i+ '* Presswork by John Wilson and Son, University Press. CONTENTS. CHAPTEB I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI. XXII. *AGE Across London Brtdgb . . . . •• • • 1 Through the Vague to the Infinitely Little . . 9 Old Veuve .. .. •• •• ..14 The Second Bottle .. . • •• . . 21 The London Walk Westward • • * . 30 Nataly .. .. .. .. .. 39 Between a General Man of the World and a Pro- fessional . . . . • . . . 47 Some Familiar Guests •• . * .. 58 An Inspection of Lakelands .. . . ..66 Skepsey in Motion .. .. .. .. 77 Wherein we behold the Couple Justified of Love having Sight of their Scourge . . . . 89 Treats of the Dumbness possible with Members of a Household having One Heart .. .. ..99 The Latest of Mrs. Burman Discloses a Stage on the Drive to Paris .. A Patriot Abroad Accounts for Skepsey's Misconduct, showing how it affected Nataly Chiefly upon the Theme of a Young Matd's Imaginings Suitors for the Hand of Nesta Victoria Treats of Nature and Circumstance and the Dissen- sion between them and of a Satirist's Malignity in the Direction of his Country .. .. 164 The Great Assembly at Lakelands ., .. 180 Dartrey Fenellan .. .. .. .. 192 Concerns the Intrusion of Jarniman •• .. 208 105 115 127 135 143 153 IV CONTENTS. CHAPTER *A1 XXXIX. A Chapter in the Shadow of Mrs. Marsett .. 372 XL. An Expiation .. .. .. .. 385 XLI. The Night of the Great Undelivered Speech .. 395 XLIL ThsLast 407 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, CHAPTER L ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE. A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to match it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was almost magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly strip of slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which had more or less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passen- gers, and now laid this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful for the moment as the uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides. He was unhurt, quite sound, merely astonished, he remarked, in reply. to the inquiries of the first kind helper at his elbow ; and it appeared an accept- able statement of his condition. He laughed, shook his coat- tails, smoothed the back of his head raiher thoughtfully, thankfully received his runaway hat, nodded bright beams to right and left, and making light of the muddy stigmas imprinted by the pavement, he scattered another shower of his nods and smiles around, to signify that, as his good friends would wish, he thoroughly felt his legs and could walk unaided. And he was in the act of doing it, question- ing his familiar behind the waistcoat amazedly, to tell him how such a misadventure could have occurred to him of all men, when a glance below his chin discomposed his outward face. "Oh, confound the fellow!" he said, with simple frankness, and was humorously ruffled, having seen absurd blots of smutty knuckles distributed over the maiden waist- coat. His outcry was no more than the confidential communica* E 2 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. tion of a genial spirit with that distinctive article of his attire. At the same time, for these friendly people about him to share the fun of the annoyance, he looked hastily brightly back, seeming with the contraction of his brows to frown, on the little land of observant Samaritans; in the centre of whom a man who knew himself honourably unclean, perhaps consequently a bit of a political jewel, hearing one of their number confounded for his pains, and by the wearer of a superfine dashing-white waistcoat, was moved to take notice of the total deficiency of gratitude in this kind of gentleman's look and pocket. If we ask for nothing for helping gentlemen to stand upright on their legs, and get it, we expect civility into the bargain. Moreover, there are reasons in nature why we choose to give sign of a particular surliness when our wealthy superiors would have us think their condescending grins are cordials. The gentleman's eyes were lollowed on a second hurried downward grimace, the necessitated wrinkles of which could be stretched by malevolence to a semblance of haughty dis- gust ; reminding us, through our readings in journals, of the wicked overblown Prince Regent and his Court, together with the view taken of honest labour in the mind of super- cilious luxury, even if indebted to it lreshly for a trifle ; and the hoar-headed nineteenth-century billow of democratic ire craved the word to> be set swelling. " Am I the fellow you mean, sir?" the man said. He was answered, not ungraciously : " All right, my man." But the balance of our public equanimity is prone to violent antic bobbin gs on occasions when, for example, an ostentatious garment shall appear disdainful of our class and ourself, and coin of the realm has not usurped command of one of the scales: thus a fairly pleasant answer, cast in persuasive features, provoked the retort — M There you're wrong; nor wouldn't be." 44 What's that?" was the gentleman's musical inquiry. •* That's flat, as you was half a minute ago," the man rejoined. 44 Ah, well, don't be impudent," the gentleman said, by way of amiable remonstrance before a parting. 44 And none of your dam punctilio," said the man. Their exchange rattled smartly, without a direct hostility, and the gentleman stepped forward. ACKOSS LONDON BRIDGE. 8 It was observed in the crowd, that after a few paces he put two fingers on the back of his head. They might suppose him to be condoling with his recent mishap. But, in fact, a thing had occurred to vex him more than a descent upon the pavement or damage to his waist- coat's whiteness : he abominated the thought of an altercation with a member of the mob; he found that enormous beast comprehensible only when it applauded him ; and besides he wished it warmly well ; all that was good for it ; plentiful dinners, country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed : he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never for irritating it to sh»w an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to exhibit the grinders : and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered him susceptible. Headache threatened— and to him of all men ! But was there ever such a word tor drumming on a cranium ? Puzzles are presented to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they are the better for the purpose, it would seem ; and they come in rattle-boxes, they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollo wness. Or does this happen to us only after a fall? He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations, in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London Bridge, of all places in the world! — he, so popular, renowned for his affability, his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs, entirely the reverse, liking them and doing his best for them ; and accustomed to receive their applause. And in what way had he offered a hint to bring on him i te charge of punctilio? But I am treating it seriously ! he said, and jerked a dead laugh while fixing a button of his coat. That he should have treated it seriously, furnished next the subject of cogitation ; and here it was plainly suggested, that a degradation of his -physical system, owing to the V- OF THK r UNIVERSITY ^LcaliforH^ 4 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. shock of the fall, must be seen and acknowledged ; for it had become a perverted engine, to pull him down among the puerilities, and very soon he was worrying at punctilio anew, attempting to read the riddle of the application of it to himself, angry that he had allowed it to be the final word, and admitting it a famous word for the closing of a con- troversy : — it banged the door and rolled drum-notes ; it deafened reason. And was it a London cockney crow-word of the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head from the perusal of his pothouse newspaper columns? Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall, required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of collapses. This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee — using a friend's term for the ready gift — was an old and a rueiul one with Victor Kadnor. His godmother Fortune denied him that. She bestowed it on his friend Fenelbm, and little else. Simeon Fenel'an could clap the halter on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and stilled it, by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him ; and the effect of the scene upem. Victor Kadnor disposed him to rank the gift of repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was permitted to tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught. Let it only be explosive repartee : the well-fused bomb, the bubble to the stone, echo round the horn. Fenellan would have discharged an extin- guisher on punctilio in emission. Victor Kadnor was unable to cope witn it reflectively. No, but one doesn't like being beaten by anything ! he replied to an admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head, and checked or stemmed the current of a fear. For he was utterly unlike himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the smallest, an incident of the streets ; and although he refused to feel a bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking. Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of lite, and uu odd word engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE. 5 he addressed another friend, from whom he stood constitu- tionally in dissent, naming him Colney ; and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between them upon man's present achievements and his probable destinies: especially 'jpon England's grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent appreciation of her place in the universe ; not to speak of the historic dignity of London City. Colney had to be overcome afresh, and he fled, but managed, with two or three of his bitter phrases, to make a cuttle-fish, fight of it, that oppressively shadowed his vanquisher : — The Daniel Lambert of Cities : the Female Annuitant of Nations:— and such like, wretched stuff, proper to Colney Durance, easily dispersed and out-laughed when we have our vigour. We have as much as we need of it in summon- ing a contemptuous Pooh to our lips, with a shrug at venomous dyspepsia. Nevertheless, a malignant sketch of Colney's, in the which Hengist and Horsa, our fishy Saxon originals, in modern garb of liveryman and gaitered squire, flat-headed, paunchy, assiduously servile, are shown blacking Ben-Israel's boots and grooming the princely stud of the Jew, had come so near to Yictor Kadnor's apprehensions of a possible, if not an impending, consummation, that the ghastly vision of the Jew Dominant in London City, over England, over Europe, America, the world (a picture drawn in literary sepia by Colney : with our poor hang-neck population uncertain about making a bell-rope of the forelock to the Satyr-snouty master; and the Norman Lord de Warenne handing him for a lump sum son and daughter, both to be Hebraized in their different ways), fastened on the most mercurial of patriotic men, and gave him a whole-length plunge into despondency. It lasted nearly a minute. His recovery was not in this instance due to the calling on himself for the rescue of an ancient and glorious country ; nor altogether to the spectacle of the shipping, over the parapet, to his right : the hundreds of masts rising out of the merchant river ; London's unrivalled mezzotint and the City rhetorician's inexhaustible argu- ment : he gained it rather from the imperious demand of an animated and thirsty frame for novel impressions. Commonly he was too hot with his business, and airy fancies above it, when crossing the bridge, to reflect in freshness on its 6 ONE OF OUR CONG.UERORS. wonders ; though a phrase could spring him alive to them ; a suggestion of the Foreigner, jealous, condemned to admire in despair of outstripping, like Satan worsted; or when a Premier's fine inflation magnified the scene at City banquets — exciting while audible, if a waggery in memory ; or when England's cherished Bard, the Leading Article, blew bellows, and wind primed the lieges. That a phrase on any other subject was of much the same effect, in relation to it, may be owned ; he was lightly kindled. The scene, however, had a sharp sparkle of attractiveness at the instant. Down went the twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the bridge, bieaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern che^k of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and the Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood. against descending tug and long tail of stein-ajerk empty harges ; with a steamer slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw ; and half-bottom- upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a wintry Woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume ; and here the spouts and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously undulated, curved to vanish ; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead. Surely a scene pretending to sublimity? Gazing along that grand highway of the voyaging forest, your London citizen of good estate has reproached his country's poets for not pouring out, succinctly and melo- diously, his multitudinous larvae of notions begotten by the scene. For there are times when he would pay to have them sung: and he feels them big; he thinks them human in their bulk ; they are Londinensian ; they want but form and fire to get them scored on the tablets of the quotable at festive boards. This he can promise to his poets. As for otherwhere than at the festive. Commerce invoked is a Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her nostrils, and poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime, she leads them, after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive into the turtle-tureen. Heels up they go, poet first* — a plummet he ! And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE. 7 in the mood of meditation, to direct his gaze off the "bridge along the waterway North-eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait's bow- window by the river- side, to the front of the summer sunset, a league 01 so down stream ; where he sees, in memory savours, the Elysian end of Commerce : frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the out- wearied spectre of old Apicius ; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel his purse into the market for the purchase of a cost- lier mullet ! But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot- king of Commerce ? In that case, we do not ask our country's poets to compose a single stanza of eulogy's rhymes — far from it. Far to the contrary, we bid ourselves remember the sons of whom we are ; instead of revelling in the fruits of Commerce, we shoot scornfully past those blazing bellied windows of the aromatic dinners, and beyond Thames, away to the fisher- men's deeps. Old England's native element, where the strenuous ancestry of a race yet and ever manful at the stress of trial are heard around and aloft whistling us back to the splendid strain of muscle, and spray fringes cloud, and strong heart rides the briny scoops and hillocks, and Death and Man are at grip for the haul. There we find our nationality, our poetry, no Hebrew competing. We do : or there at least we left it. Whether to recover it when wanted, is not so certain. Humpy Hengist and dumpy Horsa, quitting ledger and coronet, might recur to their sea bow-legs and red-stubble chins, might take to their tarpaulins again ; they might renew their manhood on the capture of cod ; headed by Harald and Hardiknut, they might roll surges to whelm a Dominant Jew clean gone to the fleshpots and effeminacy. Aldermen of our ancient con- ception, they may teach him that he has been backsliding once more, and must repent in ashes, as those who are for jewels, titles, essences, banquets, for wallowing in slimy spawn of lucre, have ever to do. They dispossess him of his greedy gettings. And how of the Law ? But the Law is always, and must ever be, the Law of the stronger. — Ay, but brain beats muscle, and what if the Jew should 8 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. prove to have superior power of brain ? A dreaded hypo- thesis ! Why, then you see the insurgent Saxon seamen (of the names in two syllables with accent on the first), and their Danish captains, and it may be but a remnant of high- nosed old Norman Lord de Warenne beside them, in the criminal box: and presently the Jew smoking a giant regalia cigar on a balcony giving view of a gallows-tree. But we will try that: on our side, to back a native pug- nacity, is morality, humanity, fraternity — nature's rights, aha ! and who withstands them ? on his, a troop of merce- naries ! — And that lands me in Eed Eepublicanism, a hop and a skip from Socialism ! said Mr. Eadnor, and chuckled ironi- cally at the natural declivity he had come to. Still, there was an idea in it. . . . A short run or attempt at running after the idea, ended in pain to his head near the spot where the haunting word punctilio caught at any excuse for clamouring. Yet we cannot relinquish an idea that was ours ; we are vowed to the pursuit of it. Mr. Eadnor lighted on the tracks, by dint of a thought flung at his partner Mr. Inch- ling's dread of the Jews. Inchling dreaded Scotchmen as well, and Americans, and Armenians, and Greeks : latterly Germans hardly less ; but his dread of absorption in Jewry, signifying subjection, had often precipitated a deplorable shrug, in which Victor Eadnor now perceived the skirts of his idea, even to a fancy that something of the idea must have struck Inchling when he shrugged : the idea being . . . he had lost it again. Definition seemed to be an extirpating enemy of this idea, or she was by. nature shy. She was very feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted. Not until nigh upon the close of his history did she return, iull-siatured and einoraoeable, to Victor Eadnor, ( 9 ) CHAPTER II. THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE. The fair dealing with readers demands of us, that a narra- tive shall not proceed at slower pace than legs of a man in motion; and we are still but little more than midway across London Bridge. But if a man's mind is to be taken as a part of him, the likening of it, at an introduction, to an army on the opening march of a great campaign, should plead excuses for tardy forward movements, in consideration of the large amount of matter you have to review before you can at all imagine yourselves to have made his acquaint- ance. This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man's mind at home while he performs the deeds befitting him : he can indeed be rapid Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the governing element in the composition of man, and of his present business here. The Tale inspirits one's earlier ardours, when we sped with- out baggage, when the Impossible was wings to imagination, and heroic sculpture the simplest act of the chisel. It does not advance, 'tis true; it drives the whirligig circle round and round the single existing central point; but it is enriched with applause of the boys and girls of both ages in this land ; and all the English critics heap their honours on its brave old Simplicity : — our national literary flag, which signalizes us while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows. One may sigh for it. An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with distinctness, that man is not as much comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the fuller portraiture. Alter his ineffectual catching at the volatile idea, Mr. Kadnor found repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother. They had begged him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken kerchief for the throat. Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal month, the white of the daisied meadow, and although 10 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. he owned a light overcoat to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to wear it for protection. His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever the tender request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to the control of garments. Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over the couple beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced waistcoat, exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on Norwegian peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh — horrid women of the whistling clouts, in the pay of our doctors. He braved them ; he starved the profession. He was that man in fifty thousand who despises hostile elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a sneezing and tumbled host, as a light- house overhead of breezy fleets. The coursing of his blood was by comparison electrical ; he had not the sensation of cold, other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse him ; and so quick was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act, that the three successive tributaries of con- duct appeared as an irreflective flash and a gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him and his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding. Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so, with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are reckoned for a favourite candi- date : excepting on the part of a small band of black dissen- tients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish in their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord, with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, ihe sole bad step rhargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall we not have them turned out? He gives the sign for it ; and he leaves his buoying constituents to outrour them : and he tells a friend that it was not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step : but let us explain to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in ; a step deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed : it was a step necessitated (emphati- cally) by a false preceding step; and having youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance ; and secondly, and how deeply truly ! Love. Deep true love, proved by years, is the advocate. He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE. 11 advocate's exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them only can he expose the whole skele- ton-cupboard of the case), judged by those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated. To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved. As to that, there is no doubt : whom they, all-seeing, dis- cerning as they do, acquit they justify. Whom they justify, they compliment. They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinc- tions, as the world is. What, to them, is the spot of the error ? — admitting it as an error. They know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature. We stand forth to plead it in proof of an adherence to Nature's laws : we affirm that, far from a defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility. On the beloved who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility. Our world has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot brand an angel. This was another favourite sentence of Love's grand oration for the defence. So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the case, that they all, when the sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel, and they smiled. They do not smile on the condemnable. She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him. And who, calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful ! Mr. Eadnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he flew to it, he breathed, dispensed it. How conceive the clear-sighted celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate ? Not they. He knew, for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield him sub- servient responses. The world, or Puritanic members of it, had pushed him to the trial once or twice — or had put on an air of doing so ; creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his daughter Nesta Victoria : a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good example to shine in the sun. He had a secret for them. Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his baritone — a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate notes — should be rising in spirited union with 12 ONE OP OUR CONQUERORS. the cur fain of that secret : there was matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in it. And during the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast thought on a secret so palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition and a long year's prospect of the present day ! It seemed to have been knocked clean out of it — punctilioed out, Fenellan might say. Nor had any combinations upon the theme of business displaced it. Just before the fall, the whole drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to his eyes as a scene on a stage. He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission that he perhaps might think he felt one : which was virtually no more than the feeling of a thought ; — what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeo- pathic globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything. Only, Sanity does not allow the infinitely little to disturb us... Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Eoyalty, worshipful in its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he stood contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly Gruelphic countenance, from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a novelty to him ; unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often traversed, equally careful that his hesitation should not be seen. A trifle more impressttde, he might have imagined the smoky figure and magnunrof pur- siness barring the City against him. He could have laughed aloud at the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment at London's sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as well by the singular fit of timidity enchaining him. Cart, omnibus, cab, van, barrow, donkey-tray, went by in strings, broken here and there, and he could not induce his legs to take advantage of the gaps ; he listened to a warning that he would be down again if he tried it, among those wheels ; and his nerves clutched him, like a troop of household women, to keep him from the hazard of an expo- sure to the horrid crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth ; and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of the rutted THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE. 13 line, you are food for lion and jackal — the forces of the world will have you in their mandibles. An idea was there too ; but it would not accept pursuit. " A pretty scud overhead ? " said a voice at his ear. " For tine ! — to-day at least," Mr. Eadnor affably replied to a stranger; and gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and laughed : "You?" He straightened his back immediately to cross the road, dismissing nervous- ness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van : " Any- thing doing in the City ? " For Mr. Fenellan's proper station faced Westward. The reply was deferred until they had reached the pave- ment, when Mr. Fenellan said : " I'll tell you," and looked a dubious preface, to his friend's thinking. But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots on the coat. " We'll lunch ; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then," said Mr. Eadnor, adding within himself: " Emptiness ! want of food ! " to account for receut ejaculations and qualms. He had not eaten for a good four hours. Fenellan's tone signified to his feverish sensibility of the moment, that the matter was personal ; and the intimation of a touch on domestic affairs caused sinkings in his vacuity, much as though liis heart were having a fall. He mentioned the slip on the bridge, to explain his need to visit a haberdasher's shop, and pointed at the waistcoat. Mr. Fenellan was compassionate over the " Poor virgin of the smoky city ! " " They have their ready-made at these shops — last year's perhaps, never mind, do for the day," said Mr. Eadnor, impatient for eating, now that he had spoken of it. " A basin of turtle ; I can't wait. A brush of the coat ; mud must be dry by this time. Clear turtle, I think, with a bottle of the Old Veuve. Not bad news to tell ? You like that Old Veuve?" " Too well to tell bad news of her," said Mr. Fenellan in a manner to reassure his friend, as he intended. " You wouldn't credit it for the Spring of the year, without the spotless waistcoat?" "Something of that, I suppose." And so saying, Mr. Eadnor entered the shop of his quest, to be complimented by the shopkeeper, while the attendants climbed the ladder 14 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. to upper stages for white-waistcoat boxes, on his being the first bird of the season ; which it pleased him to hear ; for the smallest of bur gratifications in life could give a happy tone to this brightly -constituted gentleman. CHAPTER III. OLD VEUVE. They were known at the house of the turtle and the attrac- tive Old Veuve : a champagne of a sobered sweetness, of a great year, a great age, counting up to the extremer maturity attained by wines of stilly depths ; and their worthy comrade, despite the wanton sparkles, for the promoting of the state of reverential wonderment in rapture, which an ancient wine will lead to, well you wot. The silly girly sugary crudity has given way to womanly suavity, matronly composure, with yet the sparkles ; they ascend ; but hue and flavour tell of a soul that has come to a lodgement there. It conducts the youthful man to temples of dusky thought : philosophers partaking of it are drawn by the arms of garlanded nymphs about their necks into the fathomless of inquiries. It presents us with a sphere, for the pursuit of the thing we covet most. It bubbles over mellowness ; it has, in the marriage with Time, extracted a spice of individuality from the saccharine : by miracle, one would say, were it not for our knowledge of the right noble issue of Time when he and good things unite. There should be somewhere legends of him and the wine-flask. There must be meanings to that effect in the Mythology, awaiting unravelment. For the subject opens to deeper than cellars, and is a tree with vast ramifications of the roots and the spreading growth, whereon half if not all the mythic Gods, Inferior and Superior, Infernal and Celestial, might be shown sitting in concord, performing in concert, harmoniously receiving sacrificial offerings of the black or the white ; and the black not extinguishing the fairer fellow. Tell us of a certainty that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be asserted (assuming the great year for the wine, i.e. combinations above) OLD VEUVE. 15 that a speck of the white within us who drink will conquer, to rise in main ascension over volumes of the black. It may, at a greater venture, but confidently, be said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of auspicious birth induces ever to the worship of the loftier Deities. Think as you will ; forbear to come hauling up examples of malarious men, in whom these pourings of the golden rays of life breed fogs ; and be moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning, in tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of the reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a most magnetic polarity. Take it for not worse than accompanying choric flourishes, in accord with Mr. Victor Eadnor and Mr. Simeon Ifenellan at their sipping of the venerable wine. Seated in a cosy corner, near the grey City window edged with a sooty maze, they praised the wine, in the neuter and in the feminine ; that for the glass, this for the widow-branded bottle : not as poets hymning ; it was done in the City manner, briefly, part pensively, like men travelling to the utmost bourne of flying flavour (a dell in infinite aether), and still masters of themselves and at home. Such a wine, in its capturing permeation of us, insists on being for a time a theme. •• I wonder ! " said Mr. Eadnor, completely restored, eyeing his half-emptied second glass and his boon-fellow. " Low ! " Mr. Fenellan shook head. " Half a dozen dozen left ? " " Nearer the half of that. And who's the culprit ? " " Old days ! They won't let me have another dozen out of the house now." " They'll never hit on such another discovery in their cellar, unless they unearth a fifth corner." **I don't blame them for making the price prohibitive. And sound as ever ! " Mr. Eadnor watched the deliberate constant ascent of bubbles through their rose-topaz transparency. He drank. That notion of the dish of turtle was an inspiration of the right : he ought always to know it for the want of replenish- ment when such a man as he went quaking. His latest experiences of himself were incredible ; but they passed, as the dimples of the stream. He finished his third glass. 16 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. The bottle, like the cellar-wine, was at ebb : unlike the cellar-wine, it conld be set flowing again. He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion : " Fenellan, remember, I had a sort of right to the wine — to the best I could get ; and this Old Veuve, more than any- other, is a bridal wine! We heard of Giulia Sanfredini's marriage to come off with the Spanish Duke, and drank it to the toast of our little Nesta's godmother. I've told you. We took the girl to the Opera, when quite a little one — that high : — and I declare to you, it was marvellous ! Next morn- ing after breakfast, she plants herself in the middle of the room, and strikes her attitude for song, and positively, almost with the Sanfredini's voice— illusion of it, you know, — trills us out more than I could have believed credible to be recollected — by a child. But I've told you the story. We called her Fredi from that day. I sent the diva, with excuses and compliments, a nuptial present — necklace, Roman goldwork, locket-pendant, containing sunny curl, and below a fine pearl ; really pretty ; telling her our grounds for the liberty. She replied, accepting the responsible office; touch- ing letter — w« found it so; framed in Fredi's room, under her godmother's photograph. Fredi has another heroine now, though she worships her old one still ; she never abandons her old ones. You've heard the story over and over ! " Mr. Fenellan nodded ; he had a tenderness for the garrulity of Old Veuve, and for the damsel. Chatter on that subject ran pleasantly with their entertainment. Mr. Radnor meanwhile scribbled, and despatched a strip of his Note-book, bearing a scrawl of orders, to his office. He was now fully himself, benevolent, combative, gay, alert for amusement or the probing of schemes to the quick, weighing the good and the bad in them with his fine touch on proportion. " City dead fiat? A monotonous key; but it's about the same as fetching a breath after a run; only, true, it lasts too long— not healthy ! Skepsey will bring me my letters. I wrs down in the country early this morning, looking over the house, with Taplow, my arc hitect ; and he speaks fairly well of the contractors. Yes, down at Lakelands, and saw my first lemon butterfly in a dell of sunshine, out of the wind, and had half a mind to catch it for Fredi, — and should have caught it myself, if I had ! The truth is, we three are OLD VEUVE. 17 country born and bred; we pine in London. Good for a season; you know my old feeling. They are to learn the secret of Lakelands to-morrow. It's great fun ; they think I don't see they've had their suspicion for some time. You said — somebody said— 'the eye of a needle for what they let slip of their secrets, and the point of it for penetrating yours : » — women. But no ; my dear souls didn't prick and bother. And they dealt with a man in armour. I carry them down to Lakelands to morrow, if the City's flat." '•Keeping a secret's the lid on a boiling pot with you," Mr. Fenellan said ; and he mused on the profoundness of the flavour at his lips. "I do it." " You do : up to bursting at the breast." " I keep it from Colney ! " " As Vesuvius keeps it from Palmieri when shaking him." " Has old Colney an idea of it ? " 44 He has been foretelling an eruption of an edifice." The laugh between them subsided to pensiveness. Mr. Fenellan's delay in the delivery of his news was eloquent to reveal the one hateful topic ; and this being seen, it waxed to such increase of size with the passing seconds, that prudence called for it. " Come ! " said Mr. Kadnor. The appeal was understood. * 4 Nothing very particular. I came into the City to look at a warehouse they want to mount double guard on. Your idea of the fireman's night-patrol and wires has done wonders for the office." " I guarantee the City if all my directions are followed." Mr. Fenellan's remark, that he had nothing very particular to tell, reduced it to the mere touch upon a vexatious matter, which one has to endure in the ears at times ; but it may be postponed. So Mr. Eadnor encouraged him to talk of an Insurance Office Investment. Where it is all bog and mist, as in the City to-day, the maxim is, not to take a step, they agreed. Whether it was attributable to an unconsumed glut of the markets, or apprehensions of a panic, had to be con- sidered. Both gentlemen were angry with the Birds on the flags of foreign nations, which would not imitate a sawdust Lion to couch reposei'ully. Incessantly they scream and sharpen talons. 18 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. " They crack the City bubbles and bladders, at all events," M.r. Fenellan said. " But if we let our journals go on making use of them, in the shape of sham hawks overhead, we shall pay for their one good day of the game with our loss of the covey. An unstable London's no world's market-place." " No, no ; it's a niggardly national purse, not the journals," Mr. Radnor said. "The journals are trading engines. Panics are grist to them ; so are wars ; but they do their duty in warning the taxpayer and rousing Parliament. Dr. Schlesien's right : we go on believing that our God Neptune '/vill do everything for us, and won't see that Steam has paralyzed his Trident : — good ! You and Colney are hard on Schlesien — or at him, I should say. He's right : if we won't learn that we have become Continentals, we shall be marched over. Laziness, cowardice, he says." "Oh, be hanged!" interrupted Fenellan. "As much of the former as you like. He's right about our ' individual- ismus ' being another name for selfishness, and showing the usual deficiency in external features; it's an individualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky, each fellow his own way. Well, then, conscript them, and they'll be all of a better pattern. The only thing to do, and the cheapest. By heaven ! it's the only honourable thing to do." Mr. Eadnor disapproved. " No conscription here." " Not till you've got the drop of poison in your blood, in the form of an army landed. That will teach you to catch at the drug." " No, Fenellan ! Besides they've got to land. I guarantee a trusty army and navy under a contract, at two-thirds of the present cost. We'll start a National Defence Insurance Company after the next panic." "During," said Mr. Fenellan, and there was a flutter of laughter at the unobtrusive hint for seizing Dame England in the mood. Both dropped a sigh. "But you must try and run down with us to Lakelands to-morrow," Mr. Radnor resumed on a cheerluller theme. " You have not yet seen all I've done there. And it's a castle with a drawbridge : no exchangeing of visits, as we did at Craye Farm and at Creckholt ; we are there for country air ; we don't court neighbours at all — perhaps the elect ; it will depend on Nataly's wishes. We can accommodate our OLD VEUVE, 19 Concert-set, and about thirty or forty more, for as long as they like. You see, that was my intention — to be inde- pendent of neighbouring society. Madame Callet guarantees dinners or hot suppers for eighty — and Armandine is the last person to be recklessly boasting. — When was it I was thinking last of Armandine ? " He asked himself that, as he rubbed at the back of his head. Mr. Fenellan was reading his friend's character by the light of his remarks and in opposition to them, after the critical fashion of intimates who know as well as hear : but it was amiably and trippingly, on the dance of the wine in his veins. His look, however, was one that reminded ; and Mr. Radnor cried : " Now ! whatever it is ! " " I had an interview : — I assure you," Mr. Fenellan inter- posed to pacify : " the smallest of trifles, and to be expected : I thought you ought to know it : — an interview with her lawyer ; office business, increase of Insurance on one of her City warehouses." " Speak her name, speak the woman's name ; we're talking like a pair of conspirators," exclaimed Mr. Radnor. *' He informed me that Mrs. Burman has heard of the new mansion." " My place at Lakelands ? " Mr. Radnor's clear-water eyes hardened to stony as their vision ran along the consequences of her having heard it. " Earlier this time ! " he added, thrummed on the table, and thumped with knuckles. " I make ray stand at Lake- lands for good ! Nothing mortal moves me ! " " That butler of hers " " Jarniman, you mean : he's her butler, yes, the scoundrel — h'm — pah ! Heaven forgive me ! she's an honest woman at least ; I wouldn't rob her of her little : fifty-nine or sixty next September, fifteenth of the month ! with the constitution of a broken drug-bottle, poor soul ! She hears everything from Jarniman : he catches wind of everything. All fore- seen, Fenellan, foreseen. I have made my stand at Lake- lands, and there's my flag till it's hauled down over Victor Radnor. London kills Nataly as well as Fredi — and me: that is — I can use the words to you — I get back to primal innocence in the country. We all three have the feeling. You're a man to understand. My beasts, and the wild 20 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. flowers, hedge-banks, and stars. Fredi's poetess will tell yon. Quiet waters reflecting;. I should feel it in Paris as well, though they have nightingales in their Bois. It's the rustic I want to bathe me ; and I had the feeling at school, biting at Horace. Well, this is my Sabine Farm, rather on a larger scale, for the sake of friends. Come, and pure air, water from the springs, walks and rides in lanes, high sand- , lanes ; Nataly loves them ; Fredi worships the old roots of trees: she calls them the faces of those weedy sandy lanes. And the two dear souls on their own estate, Fenellan ! And their poultry, cows, cream. And a certain influence one has in the country socially. I make my siand on a home — not empty punctilio." Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, " Punctilio," and not emphatically. "Don't bawl the word," said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it rang and sang. "Here in the City the soman's harmless ; and here," he struck his breast. " But Bhe can shoot and hit another through me. Ah, the witch ! — poor wretch ! poor soul ! Only, she's malignant. I could swear ! But Colney's right for once in something he says about oaths — 'dropping empty buckets.' or something." " ' Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as heavily as the ready devil himself,' " Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase. " Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he's what the critics call sententious. We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us." " Come, Fenellan, I don't think . . . " " Oh yes, but it's true of me too." " You reserve it for your enemies." " I'd like to distract it a bit from the biggest of 'em." He pointed finger at the region of the heart. " Here we have Skepsey," said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach of a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed javelin's cast, shot from the doorway to the table. , ( 21 ) CHAPTER IV. THE SECOND BOTTLE. This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism. His lean slip of face was an illumi- nation of vivacious grey from the quickest of prominent large eyes. He placed his master's letters legibly on tho table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another. Skepsey waited for Mr. Ffenellan to notice him. "Huw about the Schools for Boxing?" that gentleman said. Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: "I have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously : — a person of no station : — it does not appear of national importance. Ladies are against. They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because of the blood ; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not ; and it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex. They seem to be unaware of their own interests — ladies. The contention all around us is with ignorance. My plan is written ; I have shown it, and sig- natures of gentlemen, to many of our City notables— favour- able in most cases : gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly. The clergy and the medical profession are quite with me." " The surgical, perhaps you mean ? " "Also, sir. The clergy strongly." *' On the grounds of — what, Skepsey?" *' Morality. I have fully explained to them : — after his work at the desk all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment. He needs it, must have it. I propose to catch him. on his way to his music-halls and other places, and take him to one of our establishments. A short term of instruc- tion, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves ; it would delight him more than excesses — beer and tobacco. The female in her right place, certainly." Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his hearer, and pursued : " It would 22 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his sense of personal dignity." " Would you teach females as well — to divert them from their frivolities ? " " That would have to be thought over, sir. It would be better for them than using their nails." " I don't know, Skepsey : I'm rather a Conservative there." " Yes ; with regard to the female, sir : I confess, my scheme does not include them. They dance ; that is a healthy exercise. One has only to say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency. I look to that. And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent of — I have to say — sex. Not that there is harm in sex. But we are for training. I hope my meaning is clear? " " Quite. You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic recreation." " Ke creation is the word, sir ; I have often admired it," said Skepsey, blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic. "I was a bit of a boxer once," Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height alnd breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him. *' Something might be done with you still, sir." Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful sum- mary of his gifts in a glimpse. Mr. Fenellan bowed to him. Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters perused. 44 Skepsey's craze : regeneration of the English race by boxing — nucleus of a national army ? " 44 To face an enemy at close quarters — it teaches that, sir. I have always been of opinion, that courage may be taught. I do not say heroism. And setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable citizens. Protection to the weak in streets and by-places : — shocking examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd/' " One strong man is an overmatch for your mob," said Mr. Fenellan. Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion of the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn. "Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant THE SECOND BOTTLE. 23 mob: — strong, yon say, sir? I venture my word that a decent lad, with science, would beat him. It is a question of the study and practice of first principles." "If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman ? " Skopsey conjured the scene by bending his head and peer- ing abstractedly, as if over spectacles. " I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake." Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting. " My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first principles, I think? " " Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir : exceedingly quick and clever; a hard boxer to beat." " You will not call him captain when you see him ; he has dismissed the army." " I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him. Captain Dartrey Fenellan was a beautiful fencer. He gave me some instruction; unhappily, I have to acknowledge, too late. It is a beautiful art. Captain Dartrey says, the French excel at it. But it asks for a weapon, which nature has not given : 'whereas the fists . . ." " So," Mr. Eadnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey : "No sign of life?" " It is not yet seen in the City, sir." •* The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth's maziest penetralia, where no tides are ! — is it not so, Skepsey ? " said Mr. Fenellan, whose initiative and exu- berance in loquency had been restrained by a slight oppres- sion, known to guests ; especially to the guest in the earlier process of his magnification and illumination by virtue of a grand old wine ; and also when the news he has to com- municate may be a stir to unpleasant heaps. The shining lips and eyes of his florid, face now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy jack-o'-lanterning over it. " Business hangs to swing at every City door, like a rag-shop Doll, on the gallows of overproduction. Stocks and Shares aru hollow nuts not a squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight of the milky kernel mouldered to beard. Percentage, like a cabman without a fare, has gone to sleep inside his vehicle. Dividend may just be seen by tiptoe stock- holders, twinkling heels over the far horizon. Too true ! — »nd our merchants, brokers, bankers, projectors of Com- 24 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. panies, parade our City to remind us of the poor steamed fellows trooping out of the burst- boiler-room of the big ship Leviathan, in old years ; a shade or two paler than the crowd o' the passengers, apparently alive and conversible, but corpses, all of them to lie their length in fifteen minutes." " And yon, Fenellan ? " cried his host, inspired for a second bottle by the lovely nonsense of a voluble friend wound up to the mark. "Doctor of the ship! with this prescription ! " Mr. Fenellan held up his glass. " Empty ? " Mr. Fenellan made it completely so. " Confident ! " he affirmed. An order was tossed to the waiter, and both gentlemen screwed their lips in relish of his heavy consent to score off another bottle from the narrow list. " At the office in forty minutes," Skepsey's master nodded to him and shot him forth, calling him back : " By the way, in case a man named J ami man should ask to see me, you turn him to the rightabout." Skepsey repeated : " Jarniman ! " and flew. 44 A good servant," Mr. Radnor said. "Few of us think of our country so much, whatever may be said of the specific he offers. Colney has impressed him somehow immensely : he studies to write too ; pushes to improve himself; altogether a worthy creature." The second bottle appeared. The waiter, in sincerity a reluctant executioner, heightened his part for the edification of the admiring couple. " Take heart, Benjamin," said Mr. Fenellan ; " it's only the bottle dies ; and we are the angels above to receive the spirit." " I'm thinking of the house," Benjamin replied. He told them that again. " It's the loss of the fame of having the' wine, that he mourns. But, Benjamin," said Mr. Fenellan, "the fame enters into the partakers of it, and we spread it, and per- petuate it for you." " That don't keep a house upright," returned Benjamin. Mr. Fenellan murmured to himself : " True enough, it's elegy, though we perform it through a trumpet; and there's not a doubt of our being down or having knocked the world down, if we're loudly praised." THE SECOND BOTTLE. 25 Benjamin waited to hear approval sounded on the lips: uncertain as a woman is a wine of ticklish age. The gentle- men nodded, and he retired. A second bottle, just as good as 1he first, should, one thoughtlessly supposes, procure us a similar reposeful and excursive enjoyment, as of men lying on their backs and flying imagination like a kite. The effect was quite other, Mr. Eadnor drank hastily and spoke with heat : " You told me all ? tell me that ! " Mr. Fenellan gathered himself together; he sipped, and relaxed his bracing. But there really was a bit more to tell: not much, was it? Not likely to puff a gale on the voluptuous indolence of a man drawn along by Nereids over sunny sea- waves to behold the birth of the Foam-Goddess? " According to Carling, her lawyer ; that is, he hints she meditates a blow." " Mrs. Burman means to strike a blow ? " " The lady." " Does he think I fear any — does he mean a blow with a weapon ? Is it a legal . . . ? At last ? Fenellan I " " So I fancied I understood." "But can the good woman dream of that as a blow to strike and hurt, for a punishment ? — that's her one aim." " She may have her hallucinations." " But a blow — what a word for it ! But it's life to us f life ! It's the blow we've prayed for. Why, you know it ! Let her strike, we bless her. We've never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary — pity, pity, pity ! Let her do that, we're at her feet, my Nataly and I. If you knew what my poor girl suffers ! She's a saint at the stake. Chiefly on behalf of her family. Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my fortune : I'll own to luck ; I put in a claim to courage and calculation . . ." " You've been a bulwark to your friends." "All, Fenellan, all — stocks, shares, mines, companies, in- dustries at home and abroad — all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow ! Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again — singing ! Ha ! the woman has threatened it before. It's probably feline play with us." His chin took support, he frowned. *' You may have touched her." " She won't be touched, and she won't be driven. What's 26 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. the secret of her? I can't guess, I never could. She's a riddle." " Eiddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the ardently sought secret to reveal itself," said Mr. Fenellan. His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor's eyes, they turned over. " Oh ! — her charms ! She had a desperate belief in her beauty. The woman's undoubtedly charitable ; she's not without a mind — sort of mind : well, it shows no crack till it's put to use. Heart ! yes, against me she has plenty of it. They say she used to be courted; she talked of it: 'my courtiers, Mr. Victor!' There, heaven forgive me, I wouldn't mock at her to another." "It looks as if she were only inexorably human," said Mr. Fenellan, crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to flavour. "We read of the tester of a bandit-bed ; and it flattened unwary recum bents to pancakes. An escape from the like of that seems plead- able, should be: none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the insane." Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case. " For the sake of my sanity, it was ! to preserve my . . . but any word makes nonsense of it. Could — I must ask you — could any sane man — you were abroad in those days, horrible days ! and never met her : I say, could you consent to be tied — I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth — tied to — 1 was barely twenty-one : I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an engagement — which is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good faith ; that is, with capacity on both sides to keep the engagement : between the man you know I was in youth and a more than middle-aged woman crazy up to the edge of the cliff" — as Colney says half the world is, and she positively is when her spite is roused. No, Fenellan, I have nothing on my conscience with regard to the woman. She had wealth : I left her not one penny the worse for — but she was not one to reckon it, I own. She could be generous, was, with her money. If she had struck this blow — I know- she thought of it : or if she would strike it now, I could not only forgive her, I could beg forgiveness." A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead. " You've borne your part bravely, my friend." " I ! " Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal THE SECOND BOTTLE. 27 burdens. •* Praise my Nataly if yon like ! Made for one another, if ever two in this world ! You know us both, and do you doubt it ? The sin would have been for us two to meet and — but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death and beyond it : that's my firm faith. Nataly teaches me the religion of life, and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman. Eighteen — nineteen — twenty years ! " Tears fell from him, two drops. He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed his watch, and smiled : " The finishing glass! We should have had to put Colney to bed. Few men stand their wine. You and I are not lamed by it ; we can drink and do business : my first experience in the City was, that the power to drink — keeping a sound head — con- duces to the doing of business." " It's a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror." "If it doubles the energies, mind." "Not if it fiddles inside. I confess to that effect upon me. I've a waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and it won't allow of a thought upon Investments." "Consult me to-morrow," said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided. " You've looked at the warehouse ? " " That's performed." " Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early morning as you well can." Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity : lie was indulgent, the giant spoke in good fellowship. It would have been to have strained his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness. He stopped, and laughed : " Now I'm pumping my pulpit — eh ? You come with us to Lakelands. I drive the ladies down to my office, ten a.m. : if it's fine ; train half-past. We take a basket. By the way, I had no letter from Dartrey last mail." " He has buried his wife. It Happens to some men." Mr. Radnor stood gazing. He asked for the name of the place of the burial. He heard without seizing it. A simula- crum spectre-spark of hopefulness shot up in his imagination, 28 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. glowed and quivered, darkening at the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy. Dartrey Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and dishonoured him: and it was in Africa! One would have to go to Africa to be free of the galling. But Dartrey had gone, and he was free! — The strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the brain ; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring, always in ambush. We do not speak of them : we have not words to stamp the indefinite things ; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had the words; we know them as out of reason : they haunt us, pluck at us, fret us, nevertheless. Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the mind of shackled men. It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that Dartrey should be free, suddenly free ; and free while still a youngish man. He was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country for vigour, gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness ; his heavenly good fortune decked him as a prodigy. "No harm to the head from that fall of yours?" Mr. Fenellan said. " None." Mr. Eadnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and cried cheerily : " Now to business ; " as men may, who have confidence in their ability to con- centrate an instant attention upon the substantial. " You dine with us. The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Col- noy, Yatt, or Catkin : Priscilla Graves and Nataly : the Eev. Septimus; Cormyn and his wife: Young Dudley Sowerby and I — flutes : he has precision, as naughty Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression. In the course of the evening, Lady Grace, perhaps : you like her." " Human nature in the upper circle is particularly like- able." " Fenellan," said Mr. Eadnor, emboldened to judge hope- fully of his fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey 's, " I put it to you : would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend Calling's report ? " Although it had not been phrased as a report, Mr. Fenel- lan's answering look and gesture, and a run of indiscriminate THE SECOND BOTTLE. 29 words, enrolled it in that form, greatly to the inspiriting of Mr. Eadnor. Old Veuve in one, to the soul of Old Veuve in the other, they recalled a past day or two, touched the skies ; and merriment or happiness in the times behind them held a mirror to the present : or the hour of the reverse of happi- ness worked the same effect by contrast : so that notions of the singular election of us by Dame Fortune, sprang like vinous bubbles. For it is written that, however powerful 3-ou be, you shall not take the Winegod on board to enter- tain him as a simple passenger ; an$ you may captain your vessel, you may pilot it, and keep to your reckonings, and steer for all the ports you have a mind to, even to doing profitable exchange with Armenian and Jew, and still you shall do the something more, which proves that the Winegod is on board : he is the pilot of your blood if not the captain of your thoughts. Mr. Fenellan was unused to the copious outpouring of Victor Radnor's confidences upon his domestic affairs ; and the unwonted excitement of Victor's manner of speech would have perplexed him, had there not been such a fiddling of the waltz inside him. Payment for the turtle and the bottles of Old Veuve was performed apart with Benjamin, while rfimeon Fenellan strolled out of the house, questioning a tumbled mind as to what description of suitable entertainment, which would oe dancing and flirting and fal-lallery in the season of youth, London City could provide near meridian hours for a man of middle age carrying his bottle of champagne, like a guest of an old-fashioned wedding-breakfast. For although he could stand his wine as well as his friend, his friend's potent capacity martially after the fe 1st to buckle to business at a sign of the clock, was beyond him. It pointed to one of the embodied elements, hot from Nature's workshop. It told of the endurance of powers, that partly explained the successful, astonishing career of his friend among a people making urgent, if unequal, demands perpetually upon stomach and head. 30 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. CHAPTER V. THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD. In that nationally interesting Poem, or Dramatic Satire, once famous, The Rajah in London (London, Limbo and -Sons, 1889), now obliterated under the long wash of Prt-ss- matter, the reflection — not unknown to philosophical ob- servers, and natural perhaps in the mind of an Oriental Prince — produced by his observation of the march of London citizens Eastward at morn, Westward at eve, attributes their practice to a survival of the Zoruastrian form of worship. His Minister, favourable to the people or for the sake of fostering an idea in his Master's head, remarks, that they show more than the fidelity of the sunflower to her God. The Rajah, it would appear, frowns interrogatively, in the princely fashion, accusing him of obscureness of speech : — princes and the louder members of the grey -public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip of that which they do not immediately comprehend. It is explained by the Minister : not even the flower, he says, would hold constant, as they, to the constantly unseen — a trebly cataphractic Invisible. The Rajah proiesses curiosity to know how it is that the singular people nourish their loyalty, since they cannot attest to the continued being of the object in which they put their faith. He is informed by his prostrate servant of a settled habit they have of diligently seeking their Divinity, hidden above, below; and of copiously taking inside them doses of what is denied to their external vision : thus they fortify credence chemically on an abundance of meats and liquors ; fire they eat, and they drink fire ; they become consequently instinct with fire. Necessarily there- fore they believe in fire. Believing, they worship. Wor- ship] »ing, they march Eastward at morn, Westward at eve. For that way lies the key, this way the cupboard, of the supplies, their fuel. According to Stage directions, The Rajah and his Minister Enter a Gin-Palace. It is to witness a service that they have learnt to appreciate as Anglicanly religious. On the step of the return to their Indiaa clime, they THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD. 81 speak of the hatted sect, which is most, or most commercially, succoured and fattened by our rule there : they wave adieu to the conquering Islanders, as to " Parsees beneath a cloud." The two are seen last on the deck of the vessel, in perusal of a medical pamphlet composed of statistics and sketches, traceries, horrid blots, diagrams with numbers referring to notes, of the various maladies caused by the prolonged pro- secution of that form of worship. "But can they suffer so and live?" exclaims the Eajah, vexed by the physical sympathetic twinges which set him wincing. ** Science," his Minister answers, " took them up where Nature, in pity of their martyrdom, dropped them. They do not live ; they are engines, insensible things of repairs and patches ; insteamed to pursue their infuriate course, to the one end of exhausting supplies for the renewing of them, on peril of an instant suspension if they deviate a step or stop : nor do they." The Eajah is of opinion, that he sails home with the key of the riddle of their power to vanquish. In some apparent allusion to an Indian story of a married couple who success- fully made their way, he accounts for their solid and resistless advance, resembling that of — The doubly-wedded man and wife, Pledged to each other and against the world* With mutual onion. One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian citizens iac.ng South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to our nourishing luminary : at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king, after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of blueish smack- o'-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and pedimental monsters, and omnibus-umbrella. One would fain believe that they advance admiring; they are assuredly made hand- some by the beams. No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from coal-dust to sparks, rushing, as it 82 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. were, on respiratory blasts of an enormous engine's centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to meet the rosy Dinner, which, is ever at see-saw with the God of Light in his fall ; the mask of the noble human visage upon thern is not roughened, as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler's hand seen from forehead down to jaw ; when indeed they have all the appearance of sour scientific productions. And unhappily for the national portrait, in the Poem quoted, the Rajah's Minister chose an hour between morning and meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure inside their persons, for drawing his Master's attention to the quaint similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they had travelled so far to visit and to study : These Britons wear I The driven and perplexed look of men I Begotten hastily 'ticixt business hours. It could not have been late afternoon. These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them, fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset. In April, the month of piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous ; and London, smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swing- ing motion, collision, dusky richness of colouring, to" the sight; and to the mind idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not inquiring scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the ripe kitchen hour), here is a noble harmony of heaven and the earth of the works of man, speaking a grander tongue than barren sea or wood or wilderness. Just a moment ; it goes ; as, when a well-attuned barrel-organ in a street has drawn us to recollection's of the Opera or Italy, another harshly crashes, and the postman knocks at doors, and perchance a coster- monger cries his mash of fruit, a beggarwoman wails her hymn. For the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths, the forces repressing them. That grand tongue of the giant, City inspires none human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be. An embittered Muse of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of the THE LONDON WALK WESTWAED. 83 adulatory Essay and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an angry irony upon those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff. Song of praise she does not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a striking picture is accorded, and no more. For this London, this England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody ; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras ; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies ; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might — as may, we will suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of Keason; ultimately, with her consent, to the Spirit of Song. But first there must be the cleansing. When Night has fallen upon London, the Rajah remarks : Monogamic Societies present A decent visage and a hideous rear. His Minister (satirically, or in sympathetic Conservatism) would have thern not to move on, that they may preserve among beholders the impression of their handsome frontage. Night, however, will come; and they, adoring the decent face, are moved on, made to expose what the Eajah sees. Behind his courteousness, he is an antagonistic observer of his conquerors; he pushes his questions farther than the need for them; his Minister the same; apparently to retain the discountenanced people in their state of exposure. Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate — whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with the cat of ehe tiles at night. 34 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. Granting all that, it being a transient novelist's business to please the light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only chance of half of it, let him identify him- self with them, in keeping to the quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable. Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess to lift the angry heroic head over human. They gloriously transfigure. A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun's hand so speaks to us. And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of street-organs has quickened little children's legs to rhythmic footing, they strike on thoughts braver than pastoral. Victor Kadnor, lover of the country though he was, would have been the first to say it. He would indeed have said it too emphatically. Open London as a theme, to a citizen of London aident for the clear air out of it, you have roused an orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages. The figures of the hurtled fair ones in sky were wreathing Nelson's cocked hat when Victor, distinguishably bright- faced amid a crowd of the irradiated, emerged from the tide- way to cross the square, having thoughts upon Art, which were due rather to the suggestive proximity of the National Gallery than to the Flemish mouldings of cloud-forms under Venetian brushes. His purchases of pictures had been his unhappiest ventures. He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics; who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are fatal. He was led to the conclusion that our modern-lauded pictures do not ripen. They have a chance of it, if abused. But who thinks of buying the abused? Exalted by the critics they have, during the days of Exhibition, a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them where examination is close and con- stant, and the critic's trumpet-note dispersed to the thinness of the fee for his blowing. As to foreign pictures, classic pictures. Victor had known his purse to leap for a Raphael with a history in stages of descent from the Master, and critics to swarm : a Kaphael of the dealers, exposed to be condemned by the critics, universally derided. A rea) Kaphael in your house is aristocracy to the roof-tree. Bu* THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD. 85 the wealthy trader will reach to title "before he may hope to get the real Eaphael or a Titian. Yet he is the one who would, it may be, after enjoyment of his prize, bequeath it to the nation : — Presented to the Nation by Victor Mont- gomery Eadnor. There stood the letters in gilt; and he had a thrill of his generosity ; for few were the generous acts he could not perform ; and if an object haunted the deed, iv came of his trader's habit of mind. He revelled in benevolent projects of gifts to the nation, which would coat a sensitive name. Say, an ornamental City Square, flowers, fountains, afternoon bands of music : comfortable seats in it, and a shelter, and a ready supply of good cheap coffee or tea. Tobacco ? why not rolls of honest tobacco ! nothing so much soothes the labourer. A volume of plans for the benefit of London smoked out of each ascend- ing pile in his brain. London is at night a moaning outcast round the policeman's legs. What of an all-night-long, cosy, brightly-lighted, odoriferous coffee-saloon for rich or poor, on the model of the hospitable Paduan? Owner of a penny, no soul among us shall be rightly an outcast. . . . Dreams of this kind are taken at times by wealthy people as a cordial at the bar of benevolent intentions. But Victor was not the man to steal his refreshments in that known style. He meant to make deeds of them, as far as he could, considering their immense extension ; and except for the sensitive social name, he was of single-minded purpose. Turning to the steps of a chemist's shop to get a prescrip- tion made up for his Nataly's doctoring of her lomestics, he was arrested by a rap on his elbow; and no one was near; and there could not be a doubt of the blow — a sharp hard stroke, sparing the funny-bone, but ringing. His head, at the punctilio bump, throbbed responsively : owing to which or indifference to the prescription, as of no instant require- ment, he pursued his course, resembling mentally the wanderer along a misty beach, who hears cannon across the waters. He certainly had felt it. He remembered the shock : he could not remember much of pain. How about intimations? His asking caused a smile. Very soon the riddle answered itself. He had come into view of the diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a couplet from the pen of the dis- 36 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. respectful Satirist Peter, he thought of a fall : his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought. All was explained save his consequent rightabout from the chemist's shop : and that belongs to the minor involutions of circumstances and the will. It passed like a river's wrinkle. He read the placards of the Opera, reminding himself of the day when it was the single Opera-house; and now we have two — or three. We have also a distracting couple ol Clowns and Pantaloons in our Pantomimes : though Colney says that the multiplication of the pantaloon is a distinct advance to representative truth — and bother Colney ! Two Columbines also. We forbear to speak of men, but where is the boy who can set his young heart upon two Columbines at once ! Victor felt the boy within him cold to both : and in his youth he had doated on the solitary twirling spangled lovely Fairy. The tale of a delicate lady dancer leaping as the kernel ont of a nut from the arms of Harlequin to the legalized embrace of a wealthy brewer, and thenceforth living, by repute, with unagitated legs, as holy a matron, despite her starry past, as any to be shown in a country breeding the like abundantly, had always delighted him. It seemed a reconcilement of opposing stations, a defeat of Puritanism. Ay, and poor women ! — women in the worser plight under the Puritan's eye. They may be erring and good : yes, finding the man to lift them the one step up ! Eead the history of the error. But presently we shall teach the Puritan to act by the standards of his religion. All is coming right — must come right. Colney shall be confounded. Hereupon Victor hopped on to Fenellan's hint regarding the designs of " Mrs. Burman." His Nataly might have to go through a short sharp term of scorching — Godiva to the gossips. She would come out of it glorified. She would be recon- ciled with her family. With her story of her devotion to the man loving her, the world would know her for the heroine she was : a born lady, in appearance and manner an empress among women. It was a story to be pleaded in any court, before the sternest public. Mrs. Burman had thrown her into temptation's way. It was a story to touch the heart, as none other ever written. Not over all the earth was there a woman equalling his Nataly I THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD. 87 And their Nesta would have a dowry to make princesses envious: — she would inherit ... he ran up an arithmetical column, down to a line of figures in addition, during three paces of his feet. Dartrey Fenellan had said of little Nesta once, that she had a nature pure and sparkling as mid-sea foam. Happy he who wins her ! But she was one of the young women who are easily pleased and hardly enthralled. Her father strained his mind for the shape of the man 10 accomplish the feat. Whether she had an ideal of a youth in her feminine head, was beyond his guessing. She was not the damsel to weave a fairy waistcoat for the identical prince, and try it upon all comers to discover him : as is done by some ; excusably, if we would be just. Nesta was of the elect, for whom excuses have not to be made. She would probablv like a flute-player best; because her father played the flute, and she loved him — laughably a little maiden's reason ! Her father laughed at her. Along the street of Clubs, where a bruised fancy may see black balls raining, the narrow way between ducal mansions offers prospect of the sweep of greensward, all but touching up to the sunset to draw it to the dance. •Formerly, in his very early youth, he clasped a dre^m of gaining way to an alliance with one of these great surround- ing houses ; and he had a passion for the acquisition of money as a means. And it has to be confessed, he had sacrificed in youth, a slice of his youth, to gain it without labour — usually a costly purchase. It had ended disastrously : or say, a running of the engine off the rails, and a speedy re-establish- ment of traffic. Could it be a loss, that had led to the winning of his Nataly ? Can we really loathe the first of the steps when the one in due sequence, cousin to it, is a blessed- ness ? If we have been righted to health by a medical draught, we are bound to be respectful to our drug. And so we are, in spite of Nature's wry face and shiver at a mention of what we went through during those days, those horrible days : — hide them ! The smothering of them from sight set them sounding: he had to listen. Coiney Durance accused him of entering into bonds with Somebody's grandmother for the simple sake of browsing on her thousands : a picture of himself too abhorrent to Victor to permit of any sort of acceptance. Consequently he struck a vay t< the other extreme of those 88 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. who have a choice in mixed motives : he protested that compassion had been the cause of it. Looking at the circum- stance now, he could see, allowing for human frailty— perhaps a wish to join the ranks of the wealthy — compassion for the woman as the principal motive. How often had she not in those old days praised his generosity for allying his golden youth to her withered age — Mrs. Burman's very words! And she was a generous woman — or had been: she was generous in saying that. Well, and she was generous in having a well-born well-bred beautiful young creature like Nataly for her companion, when it was a case of need for the dear girl; and compassionately insisting, against remonstrances : — they were spoken by him, though they were but partial. How, then, had she become — at least, how was it that she could continue to behave as the vindictive Fury who persecuted remorseless^, would give no peace, poisoned the wells round every place where he and his dear one pitched their tent ! But at last she had come to charity, as he could well believe. Not too late ! Victor's feeling of gratitude to Mrs. Burman assured him it was genuine because of his genuine conviction, that she had determined to end her incom- prehensibly lengthened days in reconcilement with him : and he had always been ready to ' forget and forgive.' A truly beautiful old phrase ! It thrilled one of the most susceptible of men. His well-kept secret of the spacious country-house danced him behind a sober demeanour from one park to another; and along beside the drive to view of his town-house — unbe- loved of the inhabitants, although by acknowledgment it had, as Fredi funnily drawled, to express her sense of justice in depreciation, * good accommoda'ion.' Nataly was at homo, he was sure. Time to be dressing : sun sets at six-forty, he said, and glanced at the stained West, with an accompanying vision of outspread primroses flooding banks of shadowy fields near Lakelands. He crossed the road and rang. Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs. His darling Fredi stood out cf it, a dramatic Undine. ( 39 ) CHAPTER VL NATALY. " II segreto ! " the girl cried commandingly, with a forefinger at his breast. He crossed arms, toning in similar recitative, with anguish, ** Dove vol are ! " They joined in half a dozen bars of operatic duet. She flew to him, embraced and kissed. "I must have it, my papa ! unlock. I've been spying the bird o i its hedgerow nest so long ! And this morning, my own d^ar cunning papa, weren't you as bare as winter twigs? * To-morrow perhaps we will have a day in the country.' To go and see the npst ? Only, please, not a big one. A real nest -where mama and I can wear dairymaid's hat and apron all day — the style you like ; and strike roots. We've been torn away two or three times : twice, I know." " Fixed, this time ; nothing shall tear us 1 p " said her father, moving on to the stairs, with an arm about her. " So, it is? . . ." " She's amazed at her cleverness ! " "A nest for three?" " We must have a friend or two." " And pretty country ? " " Trust her papa for that." " Nice for walking and running over fields ? No rich people ? " . " How escape that rabble in England ! as Colney says. It's a place for being quite independent of neighbours, free as air." "Oh! bravo!" " And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony- carriage; and Fredi can have a swim every Summer morning." " A swim ? " Her note was dubious. " A river ? " "A good long stretch — fairish, fairish. Bit of a lake; bathing-shed ; the Naiad\s bower : pretty water to see." " Ah. And has the house a name ? " " Lakelands. I like the name." " Papa gave it the name ! " 40 ONE OP OUR CONQUERORS. " There's nothing he can conceal from his girl. Only now and then a little surprise." •' And his girl is off her head with astonishment. But tell me, who has been sharing the secret with you ? " " Fredi strikes home ! And it is true, you dear; 1 must have a confidant : Simeon Fenellan." "Not Mr. Durance ?" He shook out a positive negative. " I leave Colney to his guesses. He'd have been prophesying fire to the works before the completion." " Then it is not a dear old house, like Crave and Creek- holt?" " Wait and see to-morrow." He spoke of the customary guests for Concert practice; the mu;«ic, instrumental and vocal; quartet, duet, solo; and advising the girl to be quick, as she had but twenty-five minutes, he went humming and trilling into his dressing- room. Nesta signalled at her mother's door for permission to enter. She slipped in, saw that the maid was absent, and said : " Yes, mama ; and prepa.i e, I feared it ; I was sure." Her mother breathed a little moan : •* Not a cottage ?" " He has not mentioned it to Mr. Durance." "Why not?" " Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant." " My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speak- ing. You don't know for certain yet?" " It's a large estate, mama, and a big new house." Nataly's bosom sank. " Ah me ! here's misery ! I ought to have known. And too late -now it has gone so far ! But I never imagined he would be building." She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as if her beauty were at stake ; and shut her eyelids angrily. To be looking in that manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish. But Nesta's divinations were target-arrows ; they flew to the mark. Could it have been expected that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale? the dear little lost lost cottage ! She thought of it with a strain of the arms of womanhood's longing in the unblessed wife for a babe. For the secluded modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with suspicions. . . . 44 My child, you won't possibly have time before the NATALY. 41 dinner-hour," she said to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and straining look out of the depths. Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient dislike, when one's own feelings to the neigh- bours are kind, could be affectionate. We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves by a false position. She heard his voice on a carol. Men do not feel this doubtful position as women must. They have not the same to endure; the world gives them land to tread, where women are on breaking seas. Her Nesta knew no more than the pain of being torn from a home she loved. But now the girl was older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful directness would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come, necessarily to-come, dreaded much more than death by her mother. But if it might be post- poned till the girl was nean r to an age of grave understand- ing, with some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a case that could be pleaded ! — He sang : he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it ; and in her present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new intimacies, anxieties, the court- ship of rival magnates, followed by the wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have asked whether he was perfectly sane. Who half so brilliantly ! — Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the glittering armies of her enthusiasm. — He had proved it ; he proved it daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like hers : yet they were some- thing to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable. But those were times of weakness. Let anything be doubted rather than the good guidance of the man who was her breath of life! Wi.ither he led, let her go, not only submi-sively, exultingly. Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge that, unless rushing into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should therefore think it. This was the prudent woman's clear deduction from the state wherein she found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman. Her surrender then might bo 42 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. likened to the detachment of a flower on the river's hank hy swell of flood : she had no longer root of her own ; away she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crash- ing fall, a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny whirling surface. Strange to think, she had not since then power to grasp in her abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within. But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman. Love is a madness, having heaven's wisdom in it — a spark. But even when it is driving us on the breakers, call it love : and be not unworthy of it, hold to it. She and Victor had drunk of a cup. The philtre was in her veins, whatever the direc- tions of the rational mind. Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car with a racing charioteer. Or up beside a more than Titani- cally audacious balloonist. Fur the charioteer is bent on a goal ; and Victor's course was an ascension from heights to heights. He had ideas, he mastered Fortune. He con- quered Nataly and held her subject, in being above his ambition ; which was now but an occupation for his powers, while the aim of his life was at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment. In spite of his fits of unreasonableness in the means — and the woman loving him could trace them to a breadth of nature — his gentle good friendly innocent aim in life was of this very simplest ; so wonderful, by con- trast with his powers, that she, assured of it as she was by experience of him, was touched, in a transfusion of her feel- ings through lucent globes of admiration and of tenderness, to reverence. There had been occasions when her wish for the whole world to have proof and exhibition of his great- ness, goodness, and simplicity amid his gifts, prompted her incitement of him to stand forth eminently (' lead a king- dom,' was the phrase behind the curtain within her shy bosom) ; and it revealed her to herself, upon reflection, as being still the Nataly who drank the cup with him, to join her fate with his. And why not? Was that regretted? Far from it. In her maturity, the woman was unable to send forth any dwelling thought or more than a flight of twilight fancy, that cancelled the deed of her youth, and therewith seemed to expunge near upon the half of her term of years. If it came to consideration of her family and the family's opinion NATALY. 45 of Tier conduct, her judgement did not side with them or with herself, it whirled, swam to a giddiness and subsided. Of course,- if she and Victor were to inhabit a large country-house, they might as well have remained at Craye Farm or at Creckholt ; both places dear to them in turn. Such was the plain sense of the surface question. And how etrange it was to her, that he, of the most quivering sensi- tiveness on her behalf, could not see, that he threw her into situations where hard words of men and women threatened about her head; where one or two might on a day, some day, be heard ; and where, in the recollection of two years back, the word ' Impostor ' had smacked her on both cheeks from her own mouth. Now once more they were to run the same round of alarms, undergo the love of the place, with perpetual appre- hensions of having to leave it : alarms, throbbing suspicions, like those of old travellers through the haunted forest, where whispers have intensity of meaning, and unseeing we are seen, and unaware awaited. Nataly shook the rolls of her thick brown hair from her forehead ; she took strength from a handsome look of reso- lution in the glass. She could always honestly say, that her courage would not fail him. "Victor tapped at the door; he stepped into the room, wearing his evening white flower over a more open white waistcoat ; and she was composed and uninquiring. Their Nesta was heard on the descent of the stairs, with a rattle of Donizetti's II segreto to the skylights. He performed his never-omitted lover's homage. Nataly enfolded him in a homely smile. "A country- house ? We go and see it to-morrow ? " " And you've been pining for a country home, my dear soul. ,, " After the summer six weeks, the house in London does not seem a home to return to." " And next day, Nataly draws five thousand pounds for the first sketch of the furniture." " There is the Creckholt . . ." she had a difficulty in saying;:. " Part of it may do. Lakelands requires — but you will see to-morrow." After a close shutting of her eyes, she rejoined : " It is net a cottage ? " 44 ONE OP OUR CONQUERORS. " Well, dear, no : when the Slave of the Lamp takes to building, he does not run up cottages. And we did it without magic, all in a year; which is quite as good as a magical trick in a night." He drew her close to him. ** When was it my dear girl guessed me at work ? M '* It was the other dear girl. Nesta is the guessei." " You were two best of souls to keep from bothering me ; and I might have had to fib ; and we neither of us like that." He noticed a sidling of her look. " More than the circum- stances oblige : — to be frank. But now we can speak of them. Wait — and the change comes; and opportunely, I have found. It's true we have waited long ; my darling has had her worries. However, it's here at last. Prepare your- self. I speak positively. You have to brace up for one sharp twitch — the woman s portion! as Natata says — and it's over." He looked into her eyes for comprehension ; and not finding inquiry, resumed : " Just in time for the entry into Lakelands. With the pronouncement of the decree, we pre- sent the licence . ,\ . at an altar we've stood before, in spirit . . . one of the ladies of your family to support you : — why not? Not even then?" " No, Victor ; they have cast me off." "Count on my cousins, the Duvidney ladies. Then we can say, that those two good old spinsters are less narrow than the Dreightons. I have to confess I rather think I was to blame for leaving Creckholt. Only, if I see my girl wounded, I hate the place that did the mischief. You and Fredi will clap hands for the country about Lakelands." "Have you heard from her ... of her ... is it any- thing, Victor?" Nataly asked him shyly ; with not much of hope, but some readiness to be inflated. The prospect of an entry into the big new house, among a new society, "begirt by the old nightmares and fretting devils, drew her into staring daylight or furnace-light. He answered: "Mrs. Burman has definitively decided. In pity of us ? — to be free herself? — who can say ! She's a woman with a conscience — of a kind : slow, but it brings her to the point at last. You know her, know her well. Fenellan has it from her lawyer— her lawyer ! a Mr. Car- ling ; a thoroughly trustworthy man." " Fenellan, as a reporter ? " " Thoroughly to be trusted on serious matters. I under- NATALY. 4(5 stand tliat Mrs. Biirman : — her health is awful : yes, yes ; jioor woman! poor woman ! we feel for her: — she has come to perceive her duty to those she leaves behind. Consider: she has used the rod. She must be tired out — if human. And she is. One remembers traits." Victor sketched one or two of the traits allusively to the hearer acquainted with them. They received strong colour- ing frcm midday's Old Veuve in his blood. His voice and words had a swing of conviction : they imparted vinousness to a heart athirst. The histrionic self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another, who is again, though not ignorant of his cha- racter, tempted to swallow the nostrums which have made so gallant a man of him : his imperceptible sensible playing of the part, on a substratum of sincereness, induces fasci- natingly to the like performance on our side, that we may be armed as he is for enjoying the coveted reality through the partial simulation of possessing it. And this is not a task to us when we have looked our actor in the lace, and seen him bear the look, knowing that he is not intentionally •T«ntruthful ; and when we incline to be captivated by his rare theatrical air of confidence; when it seems as an out- side thought striking us, that he may not be altogether deceived in the pr< sent instance; when suddenly an expec- tation of the thing desired is born and swims in a credible featureless vagueness on a misty scene : and when we are being kissed and the blood is warmed. In fine, here as everywhere along our history, when the sensations are spirited up to drown the mind, we become drift- matter of tides, metal to magnets. And if we are women, who com- monly allow the lead to men, getting it for themselves only by snaky cunning or desperate adventure, credulity — the continued trust in the man — is the alternative of despair. " But, Victor, I must ask," Nataly said : " you have ifc through Simeon Fenellan ; you have not yourself received the letter from her lawyer ? " "My knowledge of what she would do near the grave : — poor soul, yes ! I shall soon be hearing." " You do not propose to enter this place until — until it is over ? " " We enter this place, my love, without any sort of cere- mony. We live there independently, and we can : we have 46 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. quarters there for our friends. Our one neighbour is Lon- don — there ! And at Lakelands we are able to entertain London and wife ; — our friends, in short; with some, what we have to call, satellites. You inspect the house and grounds to-morrow— sure to be fair. Put aside all but the pleasant recollections of Craye and Creckholt. We start on a different footing. Really nothing can be simpler. Keeping your town-house, you are now and then .in residence at Lakelands, where you entertain your set, teach them to feel the charm of country life: we have everything about us; could have had our own milk and cream up to London the last two months. Was it very naughty ? — I should have exploded my surprise! You will bee, you will see to- morrow." Nataly nodded, as required. "Good news from the mines ? " she said. He answered : " Dartrey is — yes, poor fellow ! — Dartrey is confident, from the yield of stones, that the value of our claim counts in a number of millions. The same with the gold. But gold-mines are lodgeings, not homes." "Oh, Victor! if money! . . . But why did you say 'poor fellow ' of Dartrey Fenellan ? " " You know how he's . . ." " Yes, yes," she said hastily. " But has that woman been causing fresh anxiety?" u And Natata's chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow," said he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them liked to touch. Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow ; and he would have mentioned the circum- stance confided to him by Simeon, but for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy. He had also another, more dis ant, very faint idea, that it had better not be mentioned just yet, foi- a reason entirely undefined. He consulted his watch. The maid had come in for the robeing of her mistress. Nataly 's mind had turned to the little country cottage which would have given her such great happiness, i^he raised her eyes to him; she could not check their filling ; they were like a river carrying moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall. He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them. With an impatient, " There, there I " and a smart affectionate look, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 47 he retired, thinking in our old satirical vein tf the hope- less endeavour to satisfy a woman's mind without the intru- sion of hard material statements, facts. Even the best of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts. You mu«t not expect to appease them unless you administer solids. It would almost appear that man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his mate, the fair, the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and purest of natures, cannot help being something of a groveller. Nataly had likewise her thoughts. CHAPTEE Ylt. BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL. Rather earlier in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking of the many things which are nothing, and sO melancholy for lack of amusements properly to follow Old Yeuve, that he could ask himself whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his fellow-men like an owl all mad for the reveller's hoots and flights and mice and moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure, chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln's Inn pumps lawyers into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane. He was in the state of the wine when a shake will rouse the sluggish sparkles to foam. Sight of Mrs. Burman's legal adviser had instantly this effect upon him: his bubbling friendliness for Yictor Radnor, and the desire of the voice in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the rush of two waves together, upon which he may be figured as the b<>at: he caught at Mr. Carling's hand more heartily than their acquaintanceship quite sanc- tioned ; but his grasp and his look of overflowing were immediately privileged ; Mr. Calling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman's conversation as he did, liked the warmth, ai,d was flattered during the squeeze with a prospect of his wife- and friends partaking of the fun from time to time. *' I was telling my wife yecterday your story of the lady- 48 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. contrabandist : I don't think she has done laughing since," Mr. Carling said. Fenellan fluted: "Ah?" He had scent, in the eulogy of a story grown fl;it as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way of men, a step or two behind the man of the world.' He expressed profound regret at not having heard the silvery ring of the lady's laughter. Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his wife. " Perhaps you will some day honour us?" " You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir." " Now, if I might name the day ? " " You lump the gold and make it current coin ; — says the blushing bride, who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel, her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, he named the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the compli- mentary tyrant he was." " To-morrow, then ! " said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm, through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of friends at short notice. He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow. " With happiness," Fenellan responded. Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it. " To-morrow, half-past seven : as for company to meet you, we will do what we can. You go Westward?" " To bed with the sun," said the reveller. "Perhaps by Covent Garden? I must give orders there." " Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter ! Ah, dear me ! Is there anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life? " " I was married at four and twenty," said Carling, as one taking up the expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, hut weighty and necessary : " my wife was in her twentieth year: we have five children; two sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby. So we are grandfather and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may say for both of us." ••Think of it! Good luck and sagacity joined hands THE MAN OP THE WORLD. 49 overhead on the day you proposed to the lady : and I'd say, that all the credit is with her, but that it would seein to be at the expense of her sex." " She would be the last to wish it. I assure you." " True of all good women ! You encourage me, touching a matter of deep interest, not unknown to you. The lady's warm heart will be with us. Probably she sees Mrs. Burman ? " " Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one." A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferen- tially accepted by Fenellan. " Pardon. She flies her flag, with her captain wanting ; and she has, queerly, the right. So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one, might be treated, it struck us, con- versationally, as a respectable harbour-hulk, with more history than top-honours. But she has the indubitable legal right to fly them— to proclaim it ; for it means little else." " You would have her, if I follow you, divest herself of the name ? " " Pin me to no significations, if you please, shrewdest of the legal sort ! I have wit enough to escape you there. She is no doubt an estimable person." " Well, she is ; she is m her way a very good woman." "Ah. You see, Mr. Carling, I cannot bring myself to rank her beside another lady, who has already claimed the title of me ; and you will forgive me if I say, that your word ' good ' has a look of being stuck upon the features we know of her, like a coquette's naughty patch ; or it's a jewel of an eye in an ebony idol: though I've heard tell she performs her charities." " I believe she gives away three parts of her income : and that is large." "Leaving the good lady a fine fat fourth." " Compare her with other wealthy people." "And does she outshine the majority still with her personal attractions ? " Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on his wife to separate himself from a female pretender so ludicrous ; he sought Fenellan's nearest ear, emitting the sound of 'hum.' " in other respects, unimpeachable J " "Oh! quite!" 50 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. "There was a fishfag of classic Billingsgate, who had broken her husband's nose with a sledgehammer fist, and swore before the magistrate, tiiat the man hadn't a crease to complain of in her character. We are condemned, Mr. Carling, sometimes to suffer in the flesh for the assurance we receive of the inviolability of those moral fortifications." " Character, yes, valuable — I do wish you had named to-night for doing me the honour of dining with me ! " said the lawyer impulsively, in a rapture of the appetite for anecdotes- " I have a ripe Pichon Longueville, '65." "A fine wine. Seductive to hear of. I dine with my friendVictor Radnor. And he knows wine. — There are good women in the world, Mr. Carling, whose characters . . ." "Of course, of course there are; and I could name you some. We law> ers ! . . ." , " You encounter all sorts." " Between ourselves," Carling sank his tones to the in- discriminate, where it mingled with the roar of London. "You do?" Fenellan hazarded a guess at having heard enlightened liberal opinions regarding the sex. " Eight 1 " " Many ! " " I back you, Mr. Carling." The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communica- tion, up to the verge of the clearly audible: he spoke of examples, experiences. Fenellan backed him further. "Acting on behalf of clients, you understand, Mr. Fenellan." " Professional, but charitable ; I am with you." " Poor things ! we — if we have to condemn — we owe them something." " A kind word for poor Polly Yenus, with all the world against her! She doesn't hear it often." " A real service," Calling's voice deepened to the legal ' without prejudice,' — " 1 am bound to say it — a service to Society." " Ah, poor wench I And the kind of reward g,he gets ? " "We can hardly examine . . . mysterious dispensations . . . here we are to make the best we can of it." " For the creature Society's indebted to ? True. And am I to think there's a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in founding an Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the country, and win com- THE MAN OP THE WORLD. 51 passion for her, as one of the principal persons of her time, that Society's indebted to for whatever it's indebted for ? " " Scarcely that," said Carling, contracting. " But you're for great Reforms ? " " Gradual." " Then it's for Reformatories, mayhap." " They would hardly be a cure." " You're in search of a cure ? " " It would be a blessed discovery." " But what's to become of Society ? " " It's a puzzle to the cleverest." "All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that Establishments must have their sacrifices. Beware of inter fering : eh ? " " By degrees,*we may hope . . ." "Society prudently shuns the topic; and so*ll we. For we might tell of one another, in a tit of distraction, that t'other one talked of it, and we should be banished for an offence against propriety. You should read my friend Durance's Essay on Society. Lawyers are a buttress of Society. But, come : I wager they don't know what they support until they read that Essay." Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being per- sonally asked to read the Es^ay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to him. He said : '* Mr. Radnor is a very old friend ? " " Our fathers were friends ; they served in the same regiment for years. I was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal ! " "Followed by a second, not less . . . ?" " In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to make it so ! " " Tne Law must be vindicated." *' The law is a clumsy bludgeon." "We think it the highest effort of human reason — the practical instrument." "You may compare it to a rustic's finger on a fiddle- string, for the murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument." "I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not." "You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, 52 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. when, by chance, down it conies on the foot an inch off the line. — Here's a peep of Old London ; if the habit of old was not to wash windows. 1 like these old streets." "Hum," Carling hesitated. "I can remember when the dirt at the windows was appalling." "Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster's green-scum eye : it was. And there your Law- did good work. — You're for Bordeaux. What is your word on Burgundy?" " Our Falernian ! " *' Victor Radnor has the oldest in the kingdom. But he will have the best of everything. A Romance ! A Musigny ! Sip, my friend, yon embrace the Goddess of your choice above. You are up beside her at, a sniff of that wine. — And lo, venerable Drury ! we duck through the court, reminded a bit by our feelings of our first love, who hadn't the cleanest* of faces or nicest of manners, but she takes her station in memory because we were boys then, and the golden halo of youth is upon her." Carling, as a man of the world, acquiesced in souvenirs he did not share. He said urgently : " Understand me ; you speak of Mr. Radnor; pray, believe I have the greatest respect for Mr. Radnor's abilities. He is one of our foremost men . . . proud of him. Mr. Radnor has genius; I have watched him ; it is genius ; he shows it in all he does ; one of the memorable men of our time. I can admire him, independent of — well, misfortunes of that kind ... a mis- taken early step. Misfortune, it is to be named. Between ourselves — we are men of the world — if one could see the way ! She occasionally . . . as I have told you. I have ventured suggestions. As I have mentioned, I have received an impression . . ." *' But still, Mr. Carling, if the lady doesn't release him and will keep his name, she might stop her cowardly perse- cutions." " Can you trace them ? " •* Undisguised ! " "Mrs. Burmau Radnor is devout. I should not exactly say revengeful. We have to discriminate. I gather, that her animus is, in all honesty, directed at tlje — 1 quote — state of sin. We are mixed you know." The Winegod in the blood of Fenellan gave a leap. " But, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 53 fifty thousand times more mixed, she might any moment stop the slate of sin, as she calls it, if it pleased her." "She might try. Our Judges look suspiciously on long- delayed actions. And there are, too, w ( omen who regard the marriage-tie as indissoluble. She has had to combat that scruple." " Believer in the renewing of the engagement overhead ! — well. But put a by- word to Mother Nature about the state of sin. Where, do you imagine, she would lay it? You'll say, that Nature and Law never agreed. They ought." •• The latter deferring to the former? " " Moulding itself on her swelling proportions. My dear dear sir, the state of sin was the continuing to live in defiance of, in contempt of, in violation of, in the total degradation of, Nature." "He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar." "Ho was a small hoy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley-sugar in her pocket; — and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar fur awful combinations in druggery ! Gilt widows are equal to decrees of Fate to us young ones. Upon my word, the cleric who unites, and the Law that sanctions, they're the criminals. Victor Radnor is the noblest of fellows, the very best friend a man can have. I will tell you : he saved me, after I left the army, from living on the produce of my pen — which means, if there is to be any produce, the prostrating of yourself to .the level of the round middle of the public: saved me from that! Yes, Mr Carl in g, I have trotted our thoroughfares a poor Polly of the pen ; and it is owing to Victor Radnor that I can order my thoughts as an individual man again before I blacken paper. Owing to him, I have a tenderness for mercenaries; having been one of them and knowing how little we can help it. He is an Olympian — who thinks of them below. The lady also is an admirable woman at all points. The pair are a" mated couple, such as you won't find in ten households over Christendom. Are you aware of tne stury?" Carling replied : " A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two very distinct versions." "He;tr mine. — And, by Jove! a runaway cab. No, all 54 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. right. But a crazy cab it is, and fit to do mischief in narrow Drury. Except that it's sheer riff-raff here to knock over." " Hulloa? — come ! " quoth the wary lawyer. " There's the heart I wanted to rouse to hear me '( One may be sure that the man for old Burgundy has it big and sound, in spite of his legal practices ; a dear good spherical fellow ! Some day, we'll hope, you will be sitting with us over a magnum of Victor Badnor's Bomanee Conti aged thirty-one : a wine, you'll say at the second glass, High Briest for the celebiation of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of man." " You hit me rightly," said Carling, tickled and touched ; sensually excited by the bouquet of Victor Badnor's hospi- tality and companionship, which added flavour to Fenellan's compliments. These came home to him through his desire to be the • good spherical fellow ' ; for he, like modern diplo- matists in the track of their eminent Berlinese New Type of the time, put on frankness as an armour over wariness, holding craft in reserve : his aim was at the refreshment of honest fellowship: by no means to discover that the coupling of his native bias with his professional duty was unprofitable nowadays. "Wariness, however, was not somnolent, even when he said : " You know, I am never the lawyer out of my office. Man of the world to men of the world ; and I have not lost by it. I am Mrs. Burman Badnor's legal adviser : you are Mr. Victor Badnor's friend. They are, as we see them, not on the best of terms. 1 would lather — at its low- est, as a matter of business — be known for having helped them to some kind of footing than send in a round bill to my client — or another. I gain more in the end. Frankly, I mean to prove, that it's a lawyer's interest to be human." " Because, now, see ! " said Fenellan, " here's the case. Miss Natalia Dreighton, of a good Yorkshire family— a large one, reads an advertisement for the post of companion to a lady, and answers it, and engages herself, previous to the appearance of the young husband. Mi^s Dreighton is one of the finest young women alive. She has a glorious contralto voice. Victor and she are encouraged by Mrs. Burman to sing duets together. Well? Why, Euclid would have theorem'd it out for you at a glance at the trio. You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a Drama without a stop. If Mrs. Burman cares to piactise THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 55 charity, she has only to hold in her Fury- forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think's the name ..." Carl in g shrugged. " Let her keep from striking, if she's Christian," pursued Fenellan, "and if kind let her resume the name of her first lord, who did a better thing for himself than for her, when he shook off his bars of bullion, to rise the lighter, and left a wi etched female soul below, with the devil's own testimony to her attractions — thousands in the Funds, houses in the City. She threw the young couple together. And my friend Victor Kadnor is of a particularly inflammable nature. Imagine one of us in such a situation, Mr. Carling! " ** Trying I " said the lawyer. " The dear felL»w was as nigh death as a man can be and know the sweetness of a woman's call to him to live. — And here's London's garden of pines, bananas, oranges; all the droppings of the He^perides here ! We don't reflect on it, Mr. Carling." "Not enough, not enough." *' I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out with a a Leading Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you're bending over the baskets. I seem to have got cir- cularly round again to Eden when I enter a garden. Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck. Well, and just the same there ; and no end to the payment either. We're always paying ! By the way, Mrs. Victor Kadnor's dinner- table's a spectacle. * Her taste in flowers equals her lord's in wine. But age improves the wine and spoils the flowers, you'll say. Maybe you're for arguing that lovely women show us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to the course of time. I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxi- cant she is. We reconcile it, Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape's her spirit, the flower her body. Or is it the reverse? Perhaps an intertwining. But look upon bouquets and clusters, and the idea of woman springs up at once, proving she's composed of them. I was about to remark, that with deference to the influence of Mrs. Hurman's legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner's pastor, the Eeverend gentleman ministering to her spiritual needs, would presumptively exercise it, in this instance, in a superior degree." Carling murmured : " The Rev. Groseman Buttermore ; w 56 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. and did so for something of a cover, to continue a run cf internal reflections : as, that he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day ; which impression placed him on a decorous platform above the amusing gentleman; to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing conse- quently, that his exuberant flow could haidly be a mask; and that an indication here and there of a trap in his talk, must have been due rather to excess of wariness, habitual in the .mind of a long-headed man, whose incorrigibly impulsive fits had necessarilv to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity. "Buttermore!" ejaculated Fenellan: " Groseman Butter- more! Mrs. Victor's Father Confessor is the Rev. Septimus Barmby. Groseman Buttermore — Septimus Barmby. Is there anything in names? Truly, unless these clerical gentlemen take them up at the crossing of the roads l'