Kitabı oku: «Arminell, Vol. 1», sayfa 9

“As for the aristocracy,” said Mrs. Saltren, “I ought to know them. I combed their hair, and hooked their dresses, and unpacked their portmanteaus; and them as do that are best qualified to know them, I should think.”

“I don’t mind telling you,” said the captain, addressing his brother-in-law, “that their doom is sealed in heaven. I’ve had it revealed to me.”

“You have, have you?” asked Welsh in a tone of irony, which, however, Saltren did not perceive.

“Yes, I have – you shall hear. I would not tell every one, but I tell you. I was in the spirit this very morning, and I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Saltren, Saltren! Then I looked, and behold there came flying down to me, a book from heaven, written within and without. I held up my hands to receive it; but it fell past me into the water, and I stooped and looked thereon, and saw written ‘The Gilded Clique,’ and again the voice cried, ‘It is fallen, it is fallen!’”

“You don’t expect me to gulp that – ” Welsh checked himself, and added, shaking his head – “I can’t, I’m afraid, make copy of that.”

“It is true,” said Saltren earnestly. His vehemence, his kindled eyes, his deepened colour, showed his sincerity. “Would I dare in such matters to utter lies? I am but a poor mean instrument, but what of that? Prophets have been found among shepherds, and apostles taken from their fishing nets. I was engaged in heartfelt prayer when this took place.”

“You didn’t happen to fall asleep, whilst occupied in devotion, of course?” said Welsh, with a contemptuous jerk of the chin. “Such a weakness is not likely to befall you.”

“I was not asleep,” answered Saltren sternly. “How could I be asleep, when my eyes were open, and I saw the book; and my ears, and they heard the voice?”

“You didn’t happen to get hold of the book, and see the name of the publisher?”

“No – I was unable. It was unnecessary. I read the title plainly. I saw what was on the cover of the book.”

“I can do nothing with this,” said Welsh, leaning back in his chair, stretching, and closing his hands behind the back of his head.

“This belongs to another department altogether. You had better relate your experiences at the next revival-meeting among the horse-marines, there is no knowing what effect it may have upon that intelligent and excitable body of men.”

“It is true,” urged Saltren again, frowning.

He was incapable of seeing that his brother-in-law was bantering him. The man was absolutely without sense of humour; but he saw that Welsh did not believe in his story, and this irritated and offended him. That his tale, as he told it, grew in its proportions and became more and more unreal, was also what he did not know. His mind worked on the small materials it had, and spun out of them a fable in which he himself implicitly believed.

“I don’t dispute what you have narrated,” said Welsh composedly. “I know you are a total abstainer, so it is not to be accounted for in the way which comes naturally uppermost. Still, I’ve heard of wonderful elevation of spirits and general head-over-heeledness after an over-dose of non-alcoholic effervescing liquors.”

“I had touched nothing,” said Saltren, with his temper chafed. “If you doubt me – ”

“But I do not doubt you,” interrupted Welsh. “I tell you that this does not interest me, because it is outside my department, like Bulgaria, and the Opera Comique, and Inoculations for Hydrophobia, and Primitive Marriage. I don’t meddle with the Eastern Question, or review historical works, or sermons, or novels. I leave all that to other fellows; you must pass this on to the chap who does religion, not that I think he would make copy out of it for a magazine article, except under the head of Hallucinations.”

CHAPTER XV
REVELATIONS

“Now look straight for’ard,” said Mr. Welsh, “and distinguish. You call this affair of yours and the book – a revelation. There are revelations, my friend, that may be written with a capital R, and others that have to begin with a small cap.”

Mr. Welsh was not particular about the English he spoke, but he wrote it well, at least passably.

“The sort of revelation that suits me, one with a capital R, is that at which a shorthand reporter assists. That’s the sort of revelation we get in the courts – that is, as the French say, controlé. But on the other hand comes your hole-and-corner revelation, which has more given it than is its due when written with a little r. No reporter, no public present, totally uncontrolled; that sort of revelation is no use to me. I don’t mean to say but that sort of thing may go down at revivals, but for the press it is no good at all.”

“Am I likely to have imagined it? What should have put the thought of ‘The Gilded Clique’ into my head?” asked Saltren angrily. “I tell you I believe in this revelation as I believe that I see you before me.”

“Gilded Clique!” repeated Welsh, “I can’t say, but Gaboriau’s criminal novel may have fallen under your eyes.”

“What is that?”

“A French novel with that title. It has been translated.”

“Now see!” exclaimed Captain Saltren, kindling, springing up, and waving his arms, “I never have set eyes on such a book, never heard of it before. But nothing that you could have said would have confirmed me in my conviction more than this. It shows that the devil is active, and that to draw away attention from, and to weaken the force of my revelation, he has caused a book to be circulated under the same name. I should not be surprised if you told me it had a blood-red cover.”

“It has one.”

“There!” cried Saltren, “now nothing will ever shake my faith. When the devil strives to defeat the purposes of Heaven, it is because he fears those purposes. My solemn and sincere conviction is – ” He lowered his voice, but though low it shook with emotion. “My belief is that the book I saw was the Everlasting Gospel. John saw an angel flying in heaven having that book in his right hand, but it was not then communicated to man. The time was not ripe. Now, at last, towards the end of the ages, that book has been cast down, and its purport disclosed.”

“You didn’t happen to see the angel?” asked Welsh sneeringly.

“I – I am not sure, I saw something. Indeed, there no doubt was an angel flying, but my eyes were blinded with the extraordinary light, and my mind has not yet sufficiently recovered for me to recollect all the particulars of the vision. But this I can tell you, for I know it. Although I did not get hold of the book, its contents are written in fire in my brain. That book of the Everlasting Gospel declares that the age of privilege is at an end, the distinctions between rich and poor; noble and common, are at an end. This has been hidden from the world, because the world was not ready to receive it. Now the time is come, and I am the humble instrument chosen for announcing these good tidings to men. I care not if, like Samson, I be crushed as I take hold of the pillars, and bow myself, and bring the House of Lords down.”

“Well,” said Welsh, “if you can work that line in the chapel, well and good. I keep to my province, and that is the manganese. Why, Condy’s fluid, I fancy, is permanganate of potash – I can lug that in somehow.”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Saltren, who was becoming impatient at having been left out of the conversation, “at the park they thought a deal about Condy’s fluid.”

“I can manage it in this way,” said her brother, rubbing his hands. “That disinfectant has manganese as a constituent. His lordship, by stopping the manganese mine, cuts off a source of health, a deodorising and disinfecting stream from entering the homes of sickness, and the haunts of fever. Who can say how many lives may be sacrificed by the stopping of Wheal Julia? I’ll bring in Condy’s fluid with effect. What else is manganese used for?”

“Bleaching, I believe,” said Mrs. Saltren.

“Ah!” said Mr. Welsh, “that can be worked in also, and I’ll pull old Isabelle of Castile in by the ears as well. She vowed she would not change her smock till a certain city she was besieging had capitulated, and as that city held out three months, judge the colour of her linen. We are all, I presume, to wear Isabelle shirts – or rather cuffs and collars – and use Isabelle sheets and towels, and eat off Isabelle tablecloths, and the ministers of the Established Church to preach in Isabelle surplices, because, forsooth, the supply of manganese is withheld wherewith to whiten them.”

“Well, it does seem wrong,” said Mrs. Saltren.

“And then,” continued her brother, kindling with professional enthusiasm, “after that divorce case, too, when the noble lords and ladies washed their dirty linen in public. You can figure how it will all work out. Here is my Lord Lamerton knows that the titled aristocracy have so much dirty linen at home, that he is determined to prevent the British public from wearing bleached linen at all, lest they should perceive the difference. There is nothing,” continued Welsh with a chuckle, “nothing so convenient for one’s purpose as well mixing one’s hyperboles and analogies, and drawing just any conclusions you like out of premises well muddled up with similitudes. We know very well, my dear Marianne, that the bread we buy of the bakers is composed of some flour, and some alum, and some plaster-of-paris, and some china-clay, but we don’t stop to analyse it at our breakfast; we cut ourselves a slice, butter it, and pop it into our mouths, and like it a thousand times better than home-made bread made of pure unadulterated flour. It is just the same with political articles and political speeches. There’s a lot of stuff of all sorts goes into them besides the flour of pure reason. And the British public don’t analyse, they swallow. What they consume they expect to be light and to taste agreeably – they don’t care a farthing what it is made up of.”

Mr. Welsh took out his pocket-book, and jotted down his ideas. “Of course,” said he, talking and laughing to himself, “we must touch this off with a light hand in a semi-jocose, and semi-serious manner. There are some folks who never see a joke, or rather they always see it as something grave. They are like earth-worms – all swallow.”

Mr. Welsh put up his knee, interlaced his fingers round it, and began to swing his knee on a level with his chest.

“If you want to rouse the British public,” he said, “you must tickle them. You can’t do much with their heads, but their feelings are easily roused. Heads! – why there was no getting wisdom out of the head of Jupiter, till it was clove with an axe, and you would not have the skull of the British public more yielding than that of the king of the gods.” He put down his leg that he had been hugging. “My dear sister,” he went on, “I know the British public, it is my business to study it and treat it. I know its moods, and it is one of the most docile of creatures to drive. There is one thing it loves above anything, and that is a sore. Do you remember how Aunt Susan had a bad leg, and how she went on about that leg, the pride she took in it, the medicines she swallowed for it, and how she hated Betsy Tucker because she also had a bad leg, and how she contended that hers was the worst, the most inflamed, and caused her most pain? It is so with the public. It must have its sore; and show it, and discuss it, and apply to it quack plasters, and drink for it quack draughts. What would the doctors do but for the Aunt Susans and Betsy Tuckers – their fortunes stand on these old women’s legs. So is it with us – we live by the bad legs of the nation. The public, in its heart of hearts, don’t want those precious legs to be healed – certainly not to be taken off. What we have to do is to keep the sores angry with caustic, and poked with needles. And that is just why I want this manganese now, to rub it into the legs of the public and wake the sores up into irritation once more.”

Then Welsh began to whistle between his front teeth and swing his foot again.

“The public,” he continued, “are like Job on a dunghill, rubbing its sores. The public has no desire to have the dunghill removed; it rather likes the warmth. When it nods off into a nap then we stick the prongs of the fork into it, and up it starts excited and angry, and we turn the heap over under its nose, and then it settles down into it again deeper than before.”

“I confess I do not know much about the public,” said Mrs. Saltren, resolved to have a word; “but when you come to the aristocracy, why then you are on my ground.”

“On your ground,” laughed Welsh, “because you were lady’s maid at the Park; that is like the land surveyor claiming a property because he has walked over it with a chain.”

“At all events the surveyor knows it,” said Mrs. Saltren, with some spirit, “perhaps better than does the owner.”

“I admit that you have me there,” laughed her brother.

“And,” said Mrs. Saltren, “it is pounds on pounds I might have earned by sending information about high life to the society papers; but I was above doing that sort of thing; besides, the society papers were not published at that time. Sometimes there were as many as a dozen or fourteen lady’s-maids and as many valets staying in the house with their masters and mistresses, and they were full of the most interesting information and bursting to reveal it, like moist sugar in a paper-bag.”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Welsh, “servantdom is becoming a power in the country, just as the press has become. There is no knowing nowadays where to look for the seat of power, it is at the other extremity from the head. In old times the serfs and slaves were not of account at all, and now their direct representatives hold the characters and happiness of the best in the land in their hands. The country may have at one time been directed by its head; it is not so now, like a fish, it is directed and propelled by its tail. The servant class at one time was despised, now it is feared; it mounts on its two wings, the divorce court and the society press. What opportunities it now has of paying off old grudges, of pushing itself into notoriety, of earning a little money. This is the age of the utilisation of refuse. We find an employment for what our forefathers, nay, our fathers cast aside. The rummage of copper mines is now burnt for arsenic, the scum of coal-tar makes aniline dyes, and I hear they are talking of the conversion of dirty rags by means of vitriol into lump sugar. It is so in social and political life – we are using up our refuse, we invest it with preponderating political influence, we chuck it into the House of Commons, and right it should be so; give everything a chance, and in an age of transformation we must turn up our social deposits. If it were not so, life would be a donkey-race with the prize for the last.”

“When I was companion to her ladyship,” began Mrs Saltren, but was cut short by her brother —

“I beg your pardon, Marianne, when was that? I only knew you as lady’s-maid.”

“I was more than that,” said Mrs. Saltren flushing.

“Oh, of course, lady without the maid.”

“I might, I daresay, have been my lady, and have kept my maid,” said Mrs. Saltren, tossing her head, “so there is no point in your sneers, James. You may be a gentleman, but I am a captain’s wife, and might have been more.”

“Oh, indeed, and how came you not to be more?”

“Because I did not choose.”

“In fact,” said Welsh, “you thought you were in for a donkey-race. By George, you have got the prize!”

“You are really too bad,” exclaimed Mrs. Saltren, vexed and angry, “I could tell you things that would surprise you. You think nothing of me because I am not rich or grand, and have to do the house work in my home; but I have been much considered in my day, and admired, and sought. And I have had my wrongs, which I thought to have carried with me to my grave, but as you choose to insult me, your sister, with saying I came in last at a donkey-race, I will tell you that properly I ought to have come in first.”

“And I,” said Saltren, standing up, “I insist on your speaking out.” He had remained silent for some time, offended at his brother-in-law’s incredulity, and not particularly interested in what he was saying, which seemed to him trifling.

“Let us hear,” said Welsh, with a curl of his lips. He had no great respect for his sister. “You must let me observe in passing that just now you did not come in first because you wouldn’t, and now, apparently, it is because you weren’t allowed.”

“I have no wish,” said Marianne Welsh, not noticing the sneer, “to make mischief, but truth is truth.”

“Truth,” interposed Welsh, who had the family infirmity of loving to hear his own voice, “truth when naked is unpresentable. The public are squeamish, and turn aside from it as improper; here we step in and frizzle, paint and clothe her, and so introduce her to the public.”

“If you interrupt me, how am I to go on?” asked Mrs. Saltren, testily. “I was going to say, when you interrupted with your coarse remarks, that at one time I was a great beauty, and I don’t suppose I’ve quite lost my good looks yet; and I was then very much sought.”

“And what is more,” said Welsh, “to the best of my remembrance you were not like a slug in a flower-bed, that when sought digs under ground.”

“I tell you,” continued Mrs. Saltren, with heightened colour, “that I have been sought by some of the noblest in the land.”

Welsh looked out of the corners of his eyes at his sister, and said nothing.

“I was cruelly deceived. A great nobleman whom I will not name – ”

“Whose title is in abeyance,” threw in Welsh.

“Whom I will not name, but might do so if I chose, obtained a licence for a private marriage, and a minister to perform the ceremony, and there were witnesses – the nuptials took place. Not till several days after did I discover that I had been basely deceived. The licence was forged, the minister was a friend of the bridegroom disguised as a parson, and not in holy orders, and the witnesses were sworn to secrecy.”

“That is your revelation, is it?” asked James Welsh. “I write it with a small cap., and in pica print.”

“It is truth.”

“The truth, dressed, of course, and not in tailor-made clothes. I dress the truth myself, but – let me see, never allow of so much margin for improvers.”

Then Welsh stood up.

“I must be off, Marianne, if I am to catch the train. Saltren, keep the manganese in agitation, I will be with you and set your meeting going. Marianne, I can make no more of your revelation than I can of that disclosed by your husband. Facts, my dear sister, in my business are like the wax figures in Mrs. Jarley’s show. They are to be dressed in the livery of our political colours, and it is wonderful what service they will do thus; but, Marianne, you can’t make the livery stand by itself, there must be facts underneath, it matters not of what a wooden and skeleton nature, they hold up the garments. I can’t say that I see in what you have told me any supporting facts at all, only a bundle of tumbled, theatrical, romantic rubbish.”

CHAPTER XVI
HOW SALTREN TOOK IT

Mrs. Saltren, as already said, as Marianne Welsh, had been good-looking and vain, when lady’s-maid to the dowager Lady Lamerton, the mother of the present lord. She had never been in the park with Arminell’s mother, as she had pretended. She had been lady’s-maid only to the dowager, and had left her service precipitately and married Saltren a year before the marriage of my lord. She had been vain, and thought much of; her good looks were gone, her vanity had not departed with them. Her vanity had been wounded by the loss of her husband’s esteem. She had harboured anger against him for many years because of his fantastic ideas, and straight-laced morality. No one is perfect, she argued, and Saltren, who pinned his religion on the Bible, ought to have been the first to admit this. The just man falleth seven times a day, and she had tripped only once in forty-two years – over fifteen thousand days. If she could but raise the veil and look into her husband’s past life, argued she, no doubt she would see comical things there. What if she had tripped? Were not the ways of the world slippery? Did she make them slippery? Had she created the world and set it all over with slides? And if a person did slip, was it becoming of such a person to lie whimpering where she had fallen? Did not that show lack of spirit? For her part, after that slight lapse, she had hopped on her feet, shaken her skirts, and warbled a tune.

It is a fact patent to every one, that the further we recede from an object, the smaller it appears. For instance, the dome of St. Paul’s when we stand in St. Paul’s Churchyard, looks immense. But as we stand on Paul’s Wharf, waiting for a steamer, we already discover that the small intervening distance has diminished the dome to the size of a dish-cover. As we descend the river, the cupola decreases in proportion as we widen our distance from it, till it is reduced to an inconsiderable speck, and finally sinks beyond the range of our vision. It is precisely the same with our faults. At the moment of their commission, from under their shadow, they look portentous and actually oppress us; but they become sensibly reduced in bulk the farther we drift down life’s stream from them. What immeasurably weighed on us yesterday, measurably burden us to-day, and to-morrow are perceptible; but the day after cease to discomfort us. Not so only, but as we draw further from our past fault, we look back on it with a sort of fond admiration, tinged with sadness; we lounge over the bulwarks of our boat, opera-glass in hand, and consider it as we consider the dome of St. Paul’s, as an adjunct not altogether regretable in the retrospect; for, consider how uniform, how insufferable would be the landscape, without breaks in the sky line.

Now Mrs. Saltren was embarked on the same voyage with Stephen, her husband, and naturally expected that the same object which at one moment had obscured their sun, but which rapidly diminished in size and importance and signification to her eyes, should equally tend to disappear from his. When, however, she found that it did not, she was offended, and harboured the conviction that she was herself the injured party. Why were not Stephen’s eyes constituted as the eyes of other men? She had good occasion to take umbrage at the perversity of his vision. She had admitted at one time, faintly, and with a graceful curtsey, a pretty apology, and with that reluctance which a woman has to confess a fault, that her husband had been an injured man; but now, after the lapse of over twenty years, their relative positions were reversed. The cases are known of girls who have swallowed packets of needles. These needles inside have caused at first uneasiness and alarm for the consequences; but when they gradually, and in succession, work out, some at the elbows, some at the finger ends, some at the nose, and in the end come all away, they cease to trouble, and become a joke. It is so with our moral transgressions. When committed, they plunge us in an agony of remorse and fear; but gradually they work out of us, point or head foremost, and finally we get rid of them altogether. Now Marianne Welsh and Stephen Saltren had swallowed a packet of needles between them, and they were all her needles which had entered him. She did not retain hers long, but as they worked out of her, they worked into him and transfixed his heart, which bristled with them, like a christening pin-cushion. This, of course, was particularly annoying to her. To forgive and to forget is a Christian virtue, and Saltren, she argued, was no better than a heathen, for all his profession, because he neither forgot nor forgave.

When Mrs. Saltren made the announcement to her brother and husband, that a cruel fraud had been committed on her, she had acted without premeditation, stung to the confession by her galled vanity at her brother’s disrespectful tone, and with an indefined, immatured desire of setting herself to rights with her husband.

The story had been contemptuously cast back in her face by James Welsh; and it was with some surprise and much satisfaction, that she saw her husband ready to accept it without question. Captain Saltren had not offered to accompany his brother-in-law to the station, which was four miles distant; he could hardly wait with patience his departure. No sooner was Welsh gone, than Saltren grasped his wife’s arm, and said in his deepest tones, “Tell me all, Marianne, tell me all!”

“I ought,” said Mrs. Saltren, recovering herself from the confusion which she felt, when her brother ridiculed her story, “I ought at this day to wear a coronet of diamonds. I was loved by a distinguished nobleman, with ardour. I cannot say that I loved him equally; but I was dazzled. His family naturally were strenuously opposed to our union; but, indeed, they knew nothing at all about it. He entreated me to consent to have our union celebrated in private. He undertook to obtain a special licence from the Archbishop. How was I to know that my simplicity was being imposed upon? I was an innocent, confiding girl, ignorant of the world’s deceit; and extraordinarily good-looking.”

“And you did not reckon on the wickedness of the aristocracy. Go on.”

But Marianne paused. She was not ready to fill up the details, and to complete her narrative without consideration.

“Do not keep me in torture!” protested Saltren, his face was twitching convulsively.

“How could I help myself?” asked Marianne. “It was not my fault that I had such an exquisite complexion, such abundant beautiful hair, and such lovely eyes; though, heaven knows, little did I know it then, or have I thought of, or valued it since. My beauty is, to some extent, gone now, but not altogether. As for my teeth, Stephen, which were pearls – I had not a decayed one in my jaws then; but after I married you they began to go with worry, and because you did not trust me, and were unkind to me!”

“Marianne,” said Saltren, “you deceived me – you deceived me cruelly. You told me nothing of this when I married you.”

“I was always a woman of delicacy, and it was not for me to speak. I had been deceived and was deserted. Only when too late did I find how wickedly I had been betrayed, and then, when you came by and found me in my sorrow and desolation, I clung to your hand; I hoped you would be my consolation, my stay, my solace, and I – I – ” She burst into tears. “I have been bitterly disappointed. I have found you without love, churlish, sullen, holding me from you as if I were infected with the plague, not ready to clasp me as an unhappy, suffering woman, that needed all the love and pity you could give.”

“Not one word did you tell me of all this. You let me marry you in unsuspicion that before you had loved another.”

“Not at all, Stephen,” she said, “I have already assured you that I did not love the man whom I so foolishly and unfortunately trusted.”

“Why have you not told me this story long ago? Why have you left me in the dark so long?”

“Your own fault, Stephen, none but yours. If you had shown me that consideration which becomes a professing Christian, I might have been encouraged to open my poor, tired, fluttering heart to you; but I was always a woman of extreme delicacy, and very reserved. You, however, were distant, and cold, and jealous. Then my pride bade me keep my tragic story to myself.”

Saltren stood before her with folded arms, his hands were working. He could not keep them still but by clasping them to his side. “I was just, Marianne!” he said. “Just, and not severe to judge. I judged but as I knew the facts. If I was told nothing, I knew nothing to extenuate your fault. You were young and beautiful, and I thought that perhaps you had not strong principles to guide you. Now that you have told me all, I allow that you were more sinned against than sinning; but I cannot acquit you of not entrusting me before this with the whole truth.”

“You never asked me for it.”

“No,” he answered sternly. “I could not do that. It was for you to have spoken.”

Then, all at once, Saltren began to tremble; he took hold of the window-jamb, and he shook so that the diamond panes in the casement rattled. He stood there quivering in all his limbs. Great drops formed and rolled off his tall forehead, hung a moment suspended on his shaggy brow and then fell to the ground. They were not tears, they were the anguish drops expressed from his brain.

Mrs. Saltren looked at him with astonishment and some trepidation. She never had comprehended him. She could not understand what was going on in him now.

“What is it, Stephen?”

He waved his hand. He could not speak.

“But, Stephen, what is it? Are you ill?”

Then he threw himself before her, and clasped her to him furiously, with a cry and a sob, and broke into a convulsion of loud weeping. He kissed her forehead, hair, and lips. He seized her hands, and covered them at once with tears and kisses.

“Marianne!” he said at last, with a voice interrupted and choked. “For all these years we have been divided, you and I, I and you, under one roof, and yet with the whole world between us. I never loved any but you – never, never any; and all these long years there has been my old love deep in my heart, not dead, but sleeping; and now and then putting up its hands and uttering a cry, and I have bid it go to sleep again and lie still, and never hoped that the trumpet would sound, and it would spring up to life once more. But why did you not tell me this before? Why did you hide from me that you were the sufferer, you the wronged? If you would have told me this, I would have forgiven you long ago. My heart has been hungering and crying out for love. I have seen you every day, and felt that I have loved you, felt it in every vein. To me you have not grown old, but have remained the same, only there was this shadow of a great darkness between us. I constrained myself, because I considered you had sinned against God and me, and were unworthy of being loved!”

Again he drew her head to his shoulder, laid it there, and kissed her, and sobbed, and clasped her passionately.