Rhoda Fleming. Complete

“How did he lose it?”

The poor victim of this pertinacious interrogatory now beat about within herself for succour. “I must not say,” she replied.

“You’re going to try to keep a secret, are ye?” said Anthony; and she, in her relief at the pause to her torment, said: “I am,” with a little infantile, withering half-smile.

“Well, you’ve been and kept yourself pretty secret,” the old man pursued. “I suppose your husband’s proud? He’s proud, ain’t he? He’s of a family, I’ll be bound. Is he of a family? How did he like your dressing up like a mill’ner gal to come down in the City and see me?”

Dahlia’s guile was not ready. “He didn’t mind,” she said.

“He didn’t mind, didn’t he? He don’t mind your cutting of your hair so?—didn’t mind that?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Anthony was down upon her like a hawk.

“Why, he’s abroad!”

“Yes; I mean, he did not see me.”

With which, in a minute, she was out of his grasp; but her heart beat thick, her lips were dry, and her thoughts were in disorder.

“Then, he don’t know you’ve been and got shaved, and a poll like a turnip-head of a thief? That’s something for him to learn, is it?”

The picture of her beauty gone, seared her eyes like heated brass. She caught Anthony’s arm with one firm hand to hold him silent, and with the other hand covered her sight and let the fit of weeping pass.

When the tears had spent themselves, she relinquished her hold of the astonished old man, who leaned over the table to her, and dominated by the spirit of her touch, whispered, like one who had accepted a bond of secresy: “Th’ old farmer’s well. So’s Rhoda—my darkie lass. They’ve taken on a bit. And then they took to religion for comfort. Th’ old farmer attends Methody meetin’s, and quotes Scriptur’ as if he was fixed like a pump to the Book, and couldn’t fetch a breath without quotin’. Rhoda’s oftenest along with your rector’s wife down there, and does works o’ charity, sicknussin’, readin’—old farmer does the preachin’. Old mother Sumfit’s fat as ever, and says her money’s for you. Old Gammon goes on eatin’ of the dumplins. Hey! what a queer old ancient he is. He seems to me to belong to a time afore ever money was. That Mr. Robert’s off…never been down there since he left, ‘cause my darkie lass thought herself too good for him. So she is!—too good for anybody. They’re going to leave the farm; sell, and come to London.”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Dahlia; “not going to leave the dear old farm, and our lane, and the old oaks, leading up to the heath. Are they? Father will miss it. Rhoda will mourn so. No place will ever be like that to them. I love it better than any place on earth.”

“That’s queer,” said Anthony. “Why do you refuse to go, or won’t let your husband take you down there; if you like the place that raving-like? But ‘queer’’s your motto. The truth is this—you just listen. Hear me—hush! I won’t speak in a bawl. You’re a reasonable being, and you don’t—that’s to say, you do understand, the old farmer feels it uncomfortable—”

“But I never helped him when I was there,” said Dahlia, suddenly shrinking in a perceptible tremble of acute divination. “I was no use. I never helped him—not at all. I was no—no use!”

Anthony blinked his eyes, not knowing how it was that he had thus been thrown out of his direct road. He began again, in his circumlocutory delicacy: “Never mind; help or no help, what th’ old farmer feels is—and quite nat’ral. There’s sensations as a father, and sensations as a man; and what th’ old farmer feels is—”

“But Rhoda has always been more to father than I have,” Dahlia cried, now stretching forward with desperate courage to confront her uncle, distract his speech, and avert the saying of the horrible thing she dreaded. “Rhoda was everything to him. Mother perhaps took to me—my mother!”

The line of her long underlie drawn sharp to check her tears, stopped her speaking.

“All very well about Rhoda,” said Anthony. “She’s everything to me, too.”

“Every—everybody loves her!” Dahlia took him up.

“Let ‘em, so long as they don’t do no harm to her,” was Anthony’s remark. There was an idea in this that he had said, and the light of it led off his fancy. It was some time before he returned to the attack.

“Neighbours gossip a good deal. O’ course you know that.”

“I never listen to them,” said Dahlia, who now felt bare at any instant for the stab she saw coming.

“No, not in London; but country’s different, and a man hearing of his child ‘it’s very odd!’ and ‘keepin’ away like that!’ and ‘what’s become of her?’ and that sort of thing, he gets upset.”

Dahlia swallowed in her throat, as in perfect quietude of spirit, and pretended to see no meaning for herself in Anthony’s words.

But she said, inadvertently, “Dear father!” and it gave Anthony his opening.

“There it is. No doubt you’re fond of him. You’re fond o’ th’ old farmer, who’s your father. Then, why not make a entry into the village, and show ‘em? I loves my father, says you. I can or I can’t bring my husband, you seems to say; but I’m come to see my old father. Will you go down to-morrow wi’ me?”

“Oh!” Dahlia recoiled and abandoned all defence in a moan: “I can’t—I can’t!”

“There,” said Anthony, “you can’t. You confess you can’t; and there’s reason for what’s in your father’s mind. And he hearin’ neighbours’ gossip, and it comes to him by a sort of extractin’—‘Where’s her husband?’ bein’ the question; and ‘She ain’t got one,’ the answer—it’s nat’ral for him to leave the place. I never can tell him how you went off, or who’s the man, lucky or not. You went off sudden, on a morning, after kissin’ me at breakfast; and no more Dahly visible. And he suspects—he more’n suspects. Farm’s up for sale. Th’ old farmer thinks it’s unbrotherly of me not to go and buy, and I can’t make him see I don’t understand land: it’s about like changeing sovereigns for lumps o’ clay, in my notions; and that ain’t my taste. Long and the short is—people down there at Wrexby and all round say you ain’t married. He ain’t got a answer for ‘em; it’s cruel to hear, and crueller to think: he’s got no answer, poor old farmer! and he’s obliged to go inter exile. Farm’s up for sale.”

Anthony thumped with his foot conclusively.

“Say I’m not married!” said Dahlia, and a bad colour flushed her countenance. “They say—I’m not married. I am—I am. It’s false. It’s cruel of father to listen to them—wicked people! base—base people! I am married, uncle. Tell father so, and don’t let him sell the farm. Tell him, I said I was married. I am. I’m respected. I have only a little trouble, and I’m sure others have too. We all have. Tell father not to leave. It breaks my heart. Oh! uncle, tell him that from me.”

Dahlia gathered her shawl close, and set an irresolute hand upon her bonnet strings, that moved as if it had forgotten its purpose. She could say no more. She could only watch her uncle’s face, to mark the effect of what she had said.

Anthony nodded at vacancy. His eyebrows were up, and did not descend from their elevation. “You see, your father wants assurances; he wants facts. They’re easy to give, if give ‘em you can. Ah, there’s a weddin’ ring on your finger, sure enough. Plain gold—and, Lord! how bony your fingers ha’ got, Dahly. If you are a sinner, you’re a bony one now, and that don’t seem so bad to me. I don’t accuse you, my dear. Perhaps I’d like to see your husband’s banker’s book. But what your father hears, is—You’ve gone wrong.”

Dahlia smiled in a consummate simulation of scorn.

“And your father thinks that’s true.”

She smiled with an equal simulation of saddest pity.

“And he says this: ‘Proof,’ he says, ‘proof’s what I want, that she’s an honest woman.’ He asks for you to clear yourself. He says, ‘It’s hard for an old man’—these are his words ‘it’s hard for an old man to hear his daughter called…’”

Anthony smacked his hand tight on his open mouth.

He was guiltless of any intended cruelty, and Dahlia’s first impulse when she had got her breath, was to soothe him. She took his hand. “Dear father! poor father! Dear, dear father!” she kept saying.

“Rhoda don’t think it,” Anthony assured her.

“No?” and Dahlia’s bosom exulted up to higher pain.

“Rhoda declares you are married. To hear that gal fight for you—there’s ne’er a one in Wrexby dares so much as hint a word within a mile of her.”

“My Rhoda! my sister!” Dahlia gasped, and the tears came pouring down her face.

In vain Anthony lifted her tea-cup and the muffin-plate to her for consolation. His hushings and soothings were louder than her weeping. Incapable of resisting such a protest of innocence, he said, “And I don’t think it, neither.”

She pressed his fingers, and begged him to pay the people of the shop: at which sign of her being probably moneyless, Anthony could not help mumbling, “Though I can’t make out about your husband, and why he lets ye be cropped—that he can’t help, may be—but lets ye go about dressed like a mill’ner gal, and not afford cabs. Is he very poor?”

She bowed her head.

“Poor?”

“He is very poor.”

“Is he, or ain’t he, a gentleman?”

Dahlia seemed torn by a new anguish.

“I see,” said Anthony. “He goes and persuades you he is, and you’ve been and found out he’s nothin’ o’ the sort—eh? That’d be a way of accounting for your queerness, more or less. Was it that fellow that Wicklow gal saw ye with?”

Dahlia signified vehemently, “No.”

“Then, I’ve guessed right; he turns out not to be a gentleman—eh, Dahly? Go on noddin’, if ye like. Never mind the shop people; we’re well-conducted, and that’s all they care for. I say, Dahly, he ain’t a gentleman? You speak out or nod your head. You thought you’d caught a gentleman and ‘taint the case. Gentlemen ain’t caught so easy. They all of ‘em goes to school, and that makes ‘em knowin’. Come; he ain’t a gentleman?”

Dahlia’s voice issued, from a terrible inward conflict, like a voice of the tombs. “No,” she said.

“Then, will you show him to me? Let me have a look at him.”

Pushed from misery to misery, she struggled within herself again, and again in the same hollow manner said, “Yes.”

“You will?”

“Yes.”

“Seein’s believin’. If you’ll show him to me, or me to him…”

“Oh! don’t talk of it.” Dahlia struck her fingers in a tight lock.

“I only want to set eye on him, my gal. Whereabouts does he live?”

“Down—down a great—very great way in the West.”

Anthony stared.

She replied to the look: “In the West of London—a long way down.”

“That’s where he is?”

“Yes.”

“I thought—hum!” went the old man suspiciously. “When am I to see him? Some day?”

“Yes; some day.”

“Didn’t I say, Sunday?”

“Next Sunday?”—Dahlia gave a muffled cry.

“Yes, next Sunday. Day after to-morrow. And I’ll write off to-morrow, and ease th’ old farmer’s heart, and Rhoda ‘ll be proud for you. She don’t care about gentleman—or no gentleman. More do th’ old farmer. It’s let us, live and die respectable, and not disgrace father nor mother. Old-fashioned’s best-fashioned about them things, I think. Come, you bring him—your husband—to me on Sunday, if you object to my callin’ on you. Make up your mind to.”

“Not next Sunday—the Sunday after,” Dahlia pleaded. “He is not here now.”

“Where is he?” Anthony asked.

“He’s in the country.”

Anthony pounced on her, as he had done previously.

“You said to me he was abroad.”

“In the country—abroad. Not—not in the great cities. I could not make known your wishes to him.”

She gave this cool explanation with her eyelids fluttering timorously, and rose as she uttered it, but with faint and ill-supporting limbs, for during the past hour she had gone through the sharpest trial of her life, and had decided for the course of her life. Anthony was witless thereof, and was mystified by his incapability of perceiving where and how he had been deluded; but he had eaten all the muffin on the plate, and her rising proclaimed that she had no intention of making him call for another; which was satisfactory. He drank off her cup of tea at a gulp.

The waitress named the sum he was to pay, and receiving a meditative look in return for her air of expectancy after the amount had been laid on the table, at once accelerated their passage from the shop by opening the door.

“If ever I did give pennies, I’d give ‘em to you,” said Anthony, when he was out of her hearing. “Women beat men in guessing at a man by his face. Says she—you’re honourable—you’re legal—but prodigal ain’t your portion. That’s what she says, without the words, unless she’s a reader. Now, then, Dahly, my lass, you take my arm. Buckle to. We’ll to the West. Don’t th’ old farmer pronounce like ‘toe’ the West? We’ll ‘toe’ the West. I can afford to laugh at them big houses up there.

“Where’s the foundation, if one of them’s sound? Why, in the City.

“I’ll take you by our governor’s house. You know—you know—don’t ye, Dahly, know we been suspecting his nephew? ‘cause we saw him with you at the theatre.

“I didn’t suspect. I knew he found you there by chance, somehow. And I noticed your dress there. No wonder your husband’s poor. He wanted to make you cut a figure as one of the handsomes, and that’s as ruinous as cabs—ha! ha!”

Anthony laughed, but did not reveal what had struck him.

“Sir William Blancove’s house is a first-rater. I’ve been in it. He lives in the library. All the other rooms—enter ‘em, and if ‘taint like a sort of, a social sepulchre! Dashed if he can get his son to live with him; though they’re friends, and his son’ll get all the money, and go into Parliament, and cut a shine, never fear.

“By the way, I’ve seen Robert, too. He called on me at the Bank. Asked after you.

“‘Seen her?’ says he.

“‘No,’ I says.

“‘Ever see Mr. Edward Blancove here?’ he says.

“I told him, I’d heard say, Mr. Edward was Continentalling. And then Robert goes off. His opinion is you ain’t in England; ‘cause a policeman he spoke to can’t find you nowhere.

“‘Come,” says I, ‘let’s keep our detectives to catch thieves, and not go distracting of ‘em about a parcel o’ women.’

“He’s awfully down about Rhoda. She might do worse than take him. I don’t think he’s got a ounce of a chance now Religion’s set in, though he’s the mildest big ‘un I ever come across. I forgot to haul him over about what he ‘d got to say about Mr. Edward. I did remark, I thought—ain’t I right?—Mr. Algernon’s not the man?—eh? How come you in the theatre with him?”

Dahlia spoke huskily. “He saw me. He had seen me at home. It was an accident.”

“Exactly how I put it to Robert. And he agreed with me. There’s sense in that young man. Your husband wouldn’t let you come to us there—eh? because he…why was that?”

Dahlia had it on her lips to say it “Because he was poorer than I thought;” but in the intensity of her torment, the wretchedness of this lie, revolted her. “Oh! for God’s sake, uncle, give me peace about that.”

The old man murmured: “Ay, ay;” and thought it natural that she should shun an allusion to the circumstance.

They crossed one of the bridges, and Dahlia stopped and said: “Kiss me, uncle.”

“I ain’t ashamed,” said Anthony.

This being over, she insisted on his not accompanying her farther.

Anthony made her pledge her word of honour as a married woman, to bring her husband to the identical spot where they stood at three o’clock in the afternoon of Sunday week. She promised it.

“I’ll write home to th’ old farmer—a penny,” said Anthony, showing that he had considered the outlay and was prepared for it.

“And uncle,” she stipulated in turn, “they are not to see me yet. Very soon; but not yet. Be true to me, and come alone, or it will be your fault—I shall not appear. Now, mind. And beg them not to leave the farm. It will kill father. Can you not,” she said, in the faded sweetness of her speech, “could you not buy it, and let father be your tenant, uncle? He would pay you regularly.”

Anthony turned a rough shoulder on her.

“Good-bye, Dahly. You be a good girl, and all ‘ll go right. Old farmer talks about praying. If he didn’t make it look so dark to a chap, I’d be ready to fancy something in that. You try it. You try, Dahly. Say a bit of a prayer to-night.”

“I pray every night,” Dahlia answered.

Her look of meek despair was hauntingly sad with Anthony on his way home.

He tracked her sorrowfulness to the want of money; and another of his terrific vague struggles with the money-demon set in.