One of Our Conquerors Part 40

'She is different, if you are alone with her.'

'It is not unusual,' said Colney.

At eleven o'clock he was in London, and Nesta rode beside Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett amid the troop.

A South-easterly wind blew the waters to shifty goldleaf prints of brilliance under the sun.

'I took a liberty this morning, I called you "Dear" this morning,'

the lady said. 'It's what I feel, only I have no right to blurt out everything I feel, and I was ashamed. I am sure I must have appeared ridiculous. I got quite nervous.'

'You would not be ridiculous to me.'

'I remember I spoke of Ned!

'You have spoken of him before.'

'Oh! I know: to you alone. I should like to pluck out my heart and pitch it on the waves, to see whether it would sink or swim. That's a funny idea, isn't it! I tell you everything that comes up. What shall I do when I lose you! You always make me feel you've a lot of poetry ready-made in you.'

'We will write. And you will have your husband then.'

'When I had finished my letter to Ned, I dropped my head on it and behaved like a fool for several minutes. I can't bear the thought of losing you!'

'But you don't lose me,' said Nesta; 'there is no ground for your supposing that you will. And your wish not to lose me, binds me to you more closely.'

'If you knew!' Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett caught at her slippery tongue, and she carolled: 'If we all knew everything, we should be wiser, and what a naked lot of people we should be!'

They were crossing the pa.s.sage of a cavalcade of gentlemen, at the end of the East Cliff. One among them, large and dominant, with a playful voice of bra.s.s, cried out:

'And how do you do, Mrs. Judith Ma.r.s.ett--ha? Beautiful morning?'

Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett's figure tightened; she rode stonily erect, looked level ahead. Her woman's red mouth was shut fast on a fighting underlip.

'He did not salute you,' Nesta remarked, to justify her for not having responded.

The lady breathed a low thunder: 'Coward!'

'He cannot have intended to insult you,' said Nesta.

'That man knows I will not notice him. He is a beast. He will learn that I carry a horsewhip.'

'Are you not taking a little incident too much to heart?'

The sigh of the heavily laden came from Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett.

'Am I pale? I dare say. I shall go on my knees tonight hating myself that I was born "one of the frail s.e.x." We are, or we should ride at the coward and strike him to the ground. Pray, pray do not look distressed!

Now you know my Christian name. That dog of a man barks it out on the roads. It doesn't matter.'

'He has offended you before?'

'You are near me. They can't hurt me, can't touch me, when I think that I 'm talking with you. How I envy those who call you by your Christian name!'

'Nesta,' said smiling Nesta. The smile was forced, that she might show kindness, for the lady was jarring on her.

Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett opened her lips: 'Oh, my G.o.d, I shall be crying!--let's gallop. No, wait, I'll tell you. I wish I could! I will tell you of that man. That man is Major Worrell. One of the majors who manage to get to their grade. A retired warrior. He married a handsome woman, above him in rank, with money; a good woman. She was a good woman, or she would have had her vengeance, and there was never a word against her. She must have loved that--Ned calls him, full-blooded ox. He spent her money and he deceived her.--You innocent! Oh, you dear! I'd give the world to have your eyes. I've heard tell of "crystal clear," but eyes like yours have to tell me how deep and clear. Such a world for them to be in! I did pray, and used your name last night on my knees, that you--I said Nesta--might never have to go through other women's miseries. Ah me! I have to tell you he deceived her. You don't quite understand.'

'I do understand,' said Nesta.

'G.o.d help you!--I am excited to-day. That man is poison to me. His wife forgave him three times. On three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave him. He is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them. She walked out one November afternoon and met him riding along with a notorious creature. You know there are bad women. They pa.s.sed her, laughing. And look there, Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.' Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett pointed her whip hard out. 'The poor lady went down from the height here; she walked into that rough water look!--steadying herself along it, and she plunged; she never came out alive. A week after her burial, Major Worrell--I 've told you enough.'

'We 'll gallop now,' said Nesta.

Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett's talk, her presence hardly less, affected the girl with those intimations of tumult shown upon smooth waters when the great elements are conspiring. She felt that there was a cause why she had to pity, did pity her. It might be, that Captain Ma.r.s.ett wedded one who was of inferior station,' and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.

The supposition seemed probable. The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence. What?

She did not reflect. Her quick physical sensibility curled to some breath of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance: not pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of our life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants.

But she was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.

Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness. Her friend Louise was absent: she had so few friends--owing to that unsolved reason: she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady seemed to need her: and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for swallowing and digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.

At one time, she liked Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett best absent: in musing on her, wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was wearisome to hear praises of 'innocence'; and women can do so little to cure that 'wickedness of men,' among the lady's conversational themes; and 'love'

too: it may be a 'plague,' and it may be 'heaven': it is better left unspoken of. But there were times when Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett's looks and tones touched compa.s.sion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing signification in the girl's bosom: and when, by the simple avoidance of ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett's quieted good looks had a shadow of a tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.

These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her English was guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce and drainage instead of the upper wells. But there are many uneducated ladies in the land. Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature betray now and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta's maid Mary's. Mrs.

Ma.r.s.ett liked love, blood, and adventure. She had, moreover, a favourite n.o.ble poet, and she begged Nesta's pardon for naming him, and she would not name him, and told her she must not read him until she was a married woman, because he did mischief to girls. Thereupon she fell into one of her silences, emerging with a cry of hate of herself for having ever read him. She did not blame the bard. And, ah, poor bard! he fought his battle: he shall not be named for the brand on the name. He has lit a sulphur match for the lover of nature through many a generation; and to be forgiven by sad frail souls who could accuse him of pipeing devil's agent to them at the perilous instant--poor girls too!--is chastis.e.m.e.nt enough. This it is to be the author of unholy sweets: a Posterity sitting in judgement will grant, that they were part of his honest battle with the hypocrite English Philistine, without being dupe of the plea or at all the thirsty swallower of his sugary brandy. Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett expressed aloud her gladness of escape in never having met a man like him; followed by her regret that 'Ned' was so utterly unlike; except 'perhaps'--and she hummed; she was off on the fraternity in wickedness.

Nesta's ears were fatigued. 'My mother writes of you,' she said, to vary the subject.

Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett looked. She sighed downright: 'I have had my dream of a friend!--It was that gentleman with you on the pier! Your mother objects?'

'She has inquired, nothing more.'

'I am not twenty-three: not as old as I should be, for a guide to you.

I know I would never do you harm. That I know. I would walk into that water first, and take Mrs. Worrell's plunge:--the last bath; a thorough cleanser for a woman! Only, she was a good woman and didn't want it, as we--as lots of us do:--to wash off all recollection of having met a man!

Your mother would not like me to call you Nesta! I have never begged you to call me Judith. d.a.m.nable name!' Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett revelled in the heat of the curse on it, as a relief to torture of the breast, until a sense of the girl's alarmed hearing sent the word reverberating along her nerves and shocked her with such an exposure of our s.h.a.ggy wild one on a lady's lips. She murmured: 'Forgive me,' and had the pa.s.sion to repeat the epithet in shrieks, and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller; but the twitch of Nesta's brows made her say: 'Do pardon me. I did something in Scripture. Judith could again. Since that brute Worrell crossed me riding with you, I loathe my name; I want to do things. I have offended you.'

'We have been taught differently. I do not use those words. Nothing else.'

'They frighten you.'

'They make me shut; that is all.'

'Supposing you were some day to discover... ta-tata, all the things there are in the world.' Mrs. Ma.r.s.ett let fly an artificial chirrup.

'You must have some ideas of me.'

'I think you have had unhappy experiences.'

'Nesta... just now and then! the first time we rode out together, coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking--I was enraged--of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were not afraid to talk of it. I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she's bold! I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know: until--you did--you set my heart going. You spoke of the poor women like an angel of compa.s.sion. You said, we were all mixed up with their fate--I forget the words. But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so.

I worshipped you. You said, you thought of them often, and longed to find out what you could do to help. And I thought, if they could hear you, and only come near you, as I was--ah, my heaven! Unhappy experiences? Yes. But when men get women on the slope to their perdition, they have no mercy, none. They deceive, and they lie; they are false in acts and words; they do as much as murder. They're never hanged for it. They make the Laws! And then they become fathers of families, and point the finger at the "wretched creatures." They have a dozen names against women, for one at themselves.'