‘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!’
‘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 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, industries 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 the secret of her? I can’t guess, I never could. She’s a riddle.’
‘Riddles 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 recumbents to pancakes. An escape from the like of that seems pleadable, 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—I 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 burdens. ‘Praise my Nataly if you 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—conduces 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 he 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 simulacrum spectre-spark of hopefulness shot up in his imagination, 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. Radnor 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 concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial. ‘You dine with us. The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or Catkin: Priscilla Graves and Nataly—the Rev. 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 likeable.’
‘Fenellan,’ said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey’s, ‘I put