George Meredith
Rhoda Fleming. Volume 4
CHAPTER XXXVIII
This neighbourhood was unknown to Edward, and, after plunging about in one direction and another, he found that he had missed his way. Down innumerable dusky streets of dwarfed houses, showing soiled silent window-blinds, he hurried and chafed; at one moment in sharp joy that he had got a resolution, and the next dismayed by the singular petty impediments which were tripping him. "My dearest!" his heart cried to Dahlia, "did I wrong you so? I will make all well. It was the work of a fiend." Now he turned to right, now to left, and the minutes flew. They flew; and in the gathering heat of his brain he magnified things until the sacrifice of herself Dahlia was preparing for smote his imagination as with a blaze of the upper light, and stood sublime before him in the grandeur of old tragedy. "She has blinded her eyes, stifled her senses, eaten her heart. Oh! my beloved! my wife! my poor girl! and all to be free from shame in her father's sight!" Who could have believed that a girl of Dahlia's class would at once have felt the shame so keenly, and risen to such pure heights of heroism? The sacrifice flouted conception; it mocked the steady morning. He refused to believe in it, but the short throbs of his blood were wiser.
A whistling urchin became his guide. The little lad was carelessly giving note to a popular opera tune, with happy disregard of concord. It chanced that the tune was one which had taken Dahlia's ear, and, remembering it and her pretty humming of it in the old days, Edward's wrestling unbelief with the fatality of the hour sank, so entirely was he under the sovereignty of his sensations. He gave the boy a big fee, desiring superstitiously to feel that one human creature could bless the hour. The house was in view. He knocked, and there came a strange murmur of some denial. "She is here," he said, menacingly.
"She was taken away, sir, ten minutes gone, by a gentleman," the servant tied to assure him.
The landlady of the house, coming up the kitchen stairs, confirmed the statement. In pity for his torpid incredulity she begged him to examine her house from top to bottom, and herself conducted him to Dahlia's room.
"That bed has not been slept in," said the lawyer, pointing his finger to it.
"No, sir; poor thing! she didn't sleep last night. She's been wearying for weeks; and last night her sister came, and they hadn't met for very long. Two whole candles they burnt out, or near upon it."
"Where?—" Edward's articulation choked.
"Where they're gone to, sir? That I do not know. Of course she will come back."
The landlady begged him to wait; but to sit and see the minutes—the black emissaries of perdition—fly upon their business, was torture as big as to endure the tearing off of his flesh till the skeleton stood out. Up to this point he had blamed himself; now he accused the just heavens. Yea! is not a sinner their lawful quarry? and do they not slip the hounds with savage glee, and hunt him down from wrong to evil, from evil to infamy, from infamy to death, from death to woe everlasting? And is this their righteousness?—He caught at the rusty garden rails to steady his feet.
Algernon was employed in the comfortable degustation of his breakfast, meditating whether he should transfer a further slice of ham or of Yorkshire pie to his plate, or else have done with feeding and light a cigar, when Edward appeared before him.
"Do you know where that man lives?"
Algernon had a prompting to respond, "Now, really! what man?" But passion stops the breath of fools. He answered, "Yes."
"Have you the thousand in your pocket?"
Algernon nodded with a sickly grin.
"Jump up! Go to him. Give it up to him! Say, that if he leaves London on the instant, and lets you see him off—say, it shall be doubled. Stay, I'll write the promise, and put my signature. Tell him he shall, on my word of honour, have another—another thousand pounds—as soon as I can possibly obtain it, if he holds his tongue, and goes with you; and see that he goes. Don't talk to me on any other subject, or lose one minute."
Algernon got his limbs slackly together, trying to think of the particular pocket in which he had left his cigar-case. Edward wrote a line on a slip of note-paper, and signed his name beneath. With this and an unsatisfied longing for tobacco Algernon departed, agreeing to meet his cousin in the street where Dahlia dwelt.
"By Jove! two thousand! It's an expensive thing not to know your own mind," he thought.
"How am I to get out of this scrape? That girl Rhoda doesn't care a button for me. No colonies for me. I should feel like a convict if I went alone. What on earth am I to do?"
It seemed preposterous to him that he should take a cab, when he had not settled upon a scheme. The sight of a tobacconist's shop charmed one of his more immediate difficulties to sleep. He was soon enabled to puff consoling smoke.
"Ned's mad," he pursued his soliloquy. "He's a weather-cock. Do I ever act as he does? And I'm the dog that gets the bad name. The idea of giving this fellow two thousand—two thousand pounds! Why, he might live like a gentleman."
And that when your friend proves himself to be distraught, the proper friendly thing to do is to think for him, became eminently clear in Algernon's mind.
"Of course, it's Ned's money. I'd give it if I had it, but I haven't; and the fellow won't take a farthing less; I know him. However, it's my duty to try."
He summoned a vehicle. It was a boast of his proud youth that never in his life had he ridden in a close cab. Flinging his shoulders back, he surveyed the world on foot. "Odd faces one sees," he meditated. "I suppose they've got feelings, like the rest; but a fellow can't help asking—what's the use of them? If I inherit all right, as I ought to— why shouldn't I?—I'll squat down at old Wrexby, garden and farm, and drink my Port. I hate London. The squire's not so far wrong, I fancy."
It struck him that his chance of inheriting was not so very obscure, after all. Why had he ever considered it obscure? It was decidedly next to certain, he being an only son. And the squire's health was bad!
While speculating in this wise he saw advancing, arm-in-arm, Lord Suckling and Harry Latters. They looked at him, and evidently spoke together, but gave neither nod, nor smile, nor a word, in answer to his flying wave of the hand. Furious, and aghast at this signal of exclusion from the world, just at the moment when he was returning to it almost cheerfully in spirit, he stopped the cab, jumped out, and ran after the pair.
"I suppose I must say Mr. Latters," Algernon commenced.
Harry deliberated a quiet second or two. "Well, according to our laws of primogeniture, I don't come first, and therefore miss a better title," he said.
"How are you?" Algernon nodded to Lord Suckling, who replied, "Very well,
I thank you."
Their legs were swinging forward concordantly. Algernon plucked out his purse. "I have to beg you to excuse me," he said, hurriedly; "my cousin Ned's in a mess, and I've been helping him as well as I can—bothered— not an hour my own. Fifty, I think?" That amount he tendered to Harry Latters, who took it most coolly.
"A thousand?" he queried of Lord Suckling.
"Divided by two," replied the young nobleman, and the Blucher of bank-notes was proffered to him. He smiled queerly, hesitating to take it.
"I was looking for you at all the Clubs last night," said Algernon.
Lord Suckling and Latters had been at theirs, playing whist till past midnight; yet is money, even when paid over in this egregious public manner by a nervous hand, such testimony to the sincerity of a man, that they shouted a simultaneous invitation for him to breakfast with them, in an hour, at the Club, or dine with them there that evening. Algernon affected the nod of haste and acquiescence, and ran, lest they should hear him groan. He told the cabman to drive Northward, instead of to the South-west. The question of the thousand pounds had been decided for him—"by fate," he chose to affirm. The consideration that one is pursued by fate, will not fail to impart a sense of dignity even to the meanest. "After all, if I stop in England," said he, "I can't afford to lose my position in society; anything's better than that an unmitigated low scoundrel like Sedgett should bag the game." Besides, is it not somewhat sceptical to suppose that when Fate decides, she has not weighed the scales, and decided for the best? Meantime, the whole energy of his intellect was set reflecting on the sort of lie which Edward would, by nature and the occasion, be disposed to swallow. He quitted the cab, and walked in the Park, and au diable to him there! the fool has done his work.
It was now half-past ten. Robert, with a most heavy heart, had accomplished Rhoda's commands upon him. He had taken Dahlia to his lodgings, whither, when free from Edward, Rhoda proceeded in a mood of extreme sternness. She neither thanked Robert, nor smiled upon her sister. Dahlia sent one quivering look up at her, and cowered lower in her chair near the window.
"Father comes at twelve?" Rhoda said.
Robert replied: "He does."
After which a silence too irritating for masculine nerves filled the room.
"You will find, I hope, everything here that you may want," said Robert.
"My landlady will attend to the bell. She is very civil."
"Thank you; we shall not want anything," said Rhoda. "There is my sister's Bible at her lodgings."
Robert gladly offered to fetch it, and left them with a sense of relief that was almost joy. He waited a minute in the doorway, to hear whether Dahlia addressed him. He waited on the threshold of the house, that he might be sure Dahlia did not call for his assistance. Her cry of appeal would have fortified him to stand against Rhoda; but no cry was heard. He kept expecting it, pausing for it, hoping it would come to solve his intense perplexity. The prolonged stillness terrified him; for, away from the sisters, he had power to read the anguish of Dahlia's heart, her frozen incapacity, and the great and remorseless mastery which lay in Rhoda's inexorable will.
A few doors down the street he met Major blaring, on his way to him. "Here's five minutes' work going to be done, which we may all of us regret till the day of our deaths," Robert said, and related what had passed during the morning hours.
Percy approved Rhoda, saying, "She must rescue her sister at all hazards. The case is too serious for her to listen to feelings, and regrets, and objections. The world against one poor woman is unfair odds, Robert. I come to tell you I leave England in a day or two. Will you join me?"
"How do I know what I shall or can do?" said Robert, mournfully: and they parted.
Rhoda's unflickering determination to carry out, and to an end, this tragic struggle of duty against inclination; on her own sole responsibility forcing it on; acting like a Fate, in contempt of mere emotions,—seemed barely real to his mind: each moment that he conceived it vividly, he became more certain that she must break down. Was it in her power to drag Dahlia to the steps of the altar? And would not her heart melt when at last Dahlia did get her voice? "This marriage can never take place!" he said, and was convinced of its being impossible. He forgot that while he was wasting energy at Fairly, Rhoda had sat hiving bitter strength in the loneliness of the Farm; with one vile epithet clapping on her ears, and nothing but unavailing wounded love for her absent unhappy sister to make music of her pulses.
He found his way to Dahlia's room; he put her Bible under his arm, and looked about him sadly. Time stood at a few minutes past eleven. Flinging himself into a chair, he thought of waiting in that place; but a crowd of undefinable sensations immediately beset him. Seeing Edward Blancove in the street below, he threw up the window compassionately, and Edward, casting a glance to right and left, crossed the road. Robert went down to him.
"I am waiting for my cousin." Edward had his watch in his hand. "I think
I am fast. Can you tell me the time exactly?"
"Why, I'm rather slow," said Robert, comparing time with his own watch.
"I make it four minutes past the hour."
"I am at fourteen," said Edward. "I fancy I must be fast."
"About ten minutes past, is the time, I think."
"So much as that!"
"It may be a minute or so less."
"I should like," said Edward, "to ascertain positively."
"There's a clock down in the kitchen here, I suppose," said Robert.
"Safer, there's a clock at the church, just in sight from here."
"Thank you; I will go and look at that."
Robert bethought himself suddenly that Edward had better not. "I can tell you the time to a second," he said. "It's now twelve minutes past eleven."
Edward held his watch balancing. "Twelve," he repeated; and, behind this mask of common-place dialogue, they watched one another—warily, and still with pity, on Robert's side.
"You can't place any reliance on watches," said Edward.
"None, I believe," Robert remarked.
"If you could see the sun every day in this climate!" Edward looked up.
"Ah, the sun's the best timepiece, when visible," Robert acquiesced.
"Backwoodsmen in America don't need watches."
"Unless it is to astonish the Indians with them."
"Ah! yes!" hummed Robert.
"Twelve—fifteen—it must be a quarter past. Or, a three quarters to the next hour, as the Germans say."
"Odd!" Robert ejaculated. "Foreigners have the queerest ways in the world. They mean no harm, but they make you laugh."
"They think the same of us, and perhaps do the laughing more loudly."
"Ah! let them," said Robert, not without contemptuous indignation, though his mind was far from the talk.
The sweat was on Edward's forehead. "In a few minutes it will be half-past—half-past eleven! I expect a friend; that makes me impatient. Mr. Eccles"—Edward showed his singular, smallish, hard-cut and flashing features, clear as if he had blown off a mist—"you are too much of a man to bear malice. Where is Dahlia? Tell me at once. Some one seems to be cruelly driving her. Has she lost her senses? She has:—or else she is coerced in an inexplicable and shameful manner."
"Mr. Blancove," said Robert, "I bear you not a bit of malice—couldn't if I would. I'm not sure I could have said guilty to the same sort of things, in order to tell an enemy of mine I was sorry for what I had done, and I respect you for your courage. Dahlia was taken from here by me."
Edward nodded, as if briefly assenting, while his features sharpened.
"Why?" he asked.
"It was her sister's wish."
"Has she no will of her own?"
"Very little, I'm afraid, just now, sir."
"A remarkable sister! Are they of Puritan origin?"
"Not that I am aware of."
"And this father?"
"Mr. Blancove, he is one of those sort—he can't lift up his head if he so much as suspects a reproach to his children."
Edward brooded. "I desire—as I told you, as I told her sister, as I told my father last night—I desire to make her my wife. What can I do more? Are they mad with some absurd country pride? Half-past eleven!—it will be murder if they force her to it! Where is she? To such a man as that! Poor soul! I can hardly fear it, for I can't imagine it. Here— the time is going. You know the man yourself."
"I know the man?" said Robert. "I've never set eyes on him—I've never set eyes on him, and never liked to ask much about him. I had a sort of feeling. Her sister says he is a good, and kind, honourable young fellow, and he must be."
"Before it's too late," Edward muttered hurriedly—"you know him—his name is Sedgett."
Robert hung swaying over him with a big voiceless chest.
"That Sedgett?" he breathed huskily, and his look was hard to meet.
Edward frowned, unable to raise his head.
"Lord in heaven! some one has something to answer for!" cried Robert. "Come on; come to the church. That foul dog?—Or you, stay where you are. I'll go. He to be Dahlia's husband! They've seen him, and can't see what he is!—cunning with women as that? How did they meet? Do you know?—can't you guess?"
He flung a lightning at Edward and ran off. Bursting into the aisle, he saw the minister closing the Book at the altar, and three persons moving toward the vestry, of whom the last, and the one he discerned, was Rhoda.
