George Meredith - One of Our Conquerors. Complete

‘He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar.’

‘He was a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley sugar in her pockets;—and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar for 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. Carling, 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 the story?’

Carling replied: ‘A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two very distinct versions.’

‘Hear mine.—And, by Jove! a runaway cab. No, all 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 Radnor’s Romance Conti aged thirty-one: a wine, you’ll say at the second glass, High Priest for the celebration of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of man.’

‘You hit me rightly,’ said Carting, tickled and touched; sensually excited by the bouquet of Victor Radnor’s hospitality 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 diplomatists 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. Barman Radnor’s legal adviser: you are Mr. Victor Radnor’s friend. They are, as we see them, not on the best of terms. I would rather—at its lowest, 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. Miss Dreighton is one of the finest young women alive. She has a glorious contralto voice. Victor and she are encouraged by Mrs. Barman 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. Barman cares to practise charity, she has only to hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think ‘s the name.’

Carting shrugged.

‘Let her keep from striking, if she’s Christian,’ pursued Fenetlan, ‘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 wretched 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 Radnor is of a particularly inflammable nature. Imagine one of us in such a situation, Mr. Carting!’

‘Trying!’ said the lawyer.

‘The dear fellow 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 Hesperides 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 Leading Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you’re bending over the baskets. I seem to have got circularly 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 Radnor’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 intoxicant 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. Burman’s legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner’s pastor, the Reverend gentleman ministering to her spiritual needs, would presumptively exercise it, in this instance, in a superior degree.’

Carling murmured: ‘The Rev. Groseman Buttermore’; and did so for something of a cover, to continue a run of 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 consequently, that his exuberant flow could hardly 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 necessarily to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity.

‘Buttermore!’ ejaculated Fenellan: ‘Groseman Buttermore! 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 long after birth, the names would appear the active parts of them, and themselves mere marching supports, like the bearers of street placard-advertisements. Now, I know a Septimus Barmby, and you a Groseman Buttermore, and beyond the fact that Reverend starts up before their names without mention, I wager it’s about all we do know of them. They’re Society’s trusty rock-limpets, no doubt.’

‘My respect for the cloth is extreme.’ Carling’s short cough prepared the way for deductions. ‘Between ourselves, they are men of the world.’

Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose innermost imp burst out periodically, like a Dutch clocksentry, to trot on his own small grounds for thinking himself of the community of the man of the world. ‘You lawyers dress in another closet,’ he said. ‘The Rev. Groseman has the ear of the lady?’

‘He has:—one ear.’

‘Ah? She has the other open for a man of the world, perhaps.’