Nesta’s ears were fatigued. ‘My mother writes of you,’ she said, to vary the subject.
Mrs. Marsett looked. She sighed downright: ‘I have had my dream of a friend!—It was that gentleman with you on the pier! Your mother objects?’
‘She has inquired, nothing more.’
‘I am not twenty-three: not as old as I should be, for a guide to you. I know I would never do you harm. That I know. I would walk into that water first, and take Mrs. Worrell’s plunge:—the last bath; a thorough cleanser for a woman! Only, she was a good woman and didn’t want it, as we—as lots of us do:—to wash off all recollection of having met a man! Your mother would not like me to call you Nesta! I have never begged you to call me Judith. Damnable name!’ Mrs. Marsett revelled in the heat of the curse on it, as a relief to torture of the breast, until a sense of the girl’s alarmed hearing sent the word reverberating along her nerves and shocked her with such an exposure of our Shaggy wild one on a lady’s lips. She murmured: ‘Forgive me,’ and had the passion to repeat the epithet in shrieks, and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller; but the twitch of Nesta’s brows made her say: ‘Do pardon me. I did something in Scripture. Judith could again. Since that brute Worrell crossed me riding with you, I loathe my name; I want to do things. I have offended you.’
‘We have been taught differently. I do not use those words. Nothing else.’
‘They frighten you.’
‘They make me shut; that is all.’
‘Supposing you were some day to discover… ta-tata, all the things there are in the world.’ Mrs. Marsett let fly an artificial chirrup. ‘You must have some ideas of me.’
‘I think you have had unhappy experiences.’
‘Nesta… just now and then! the first time we rode out together, coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking—I was enraged—of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were not afraid to talk of it. I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she’s bold! I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know: until—you did—you set my heart going. You spoke of the poor women like an angel of compassion. You said, we were all mixed up with their fate—I forget the words. But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so. I worshipped you. You said, you thought of them often, and longed to find out what you could do to help. And I thought, if they could hear you, and only come near you, as I was—ah, my heaven! Unhappy experiences? Yes. But when men get women on the slope to their perdition, they have no mercy, none. They deceive, and they lie; they are false in acts and words; they do as much as murder. They’re never hanged for it. They make the Laws! And then they become fathers of families, and point the finger at the “wretched creatures.” They have a dozen names against women, for one at themselves.’
‘It maddens me at times to think…!’ said Nesta, burning with the sting of vile names.
Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men: but men have the power and the lead, and they take advantage of it; and then they turn round and execrate us for not having what they have robbed us of!’
‘I blame women—if I may dare, at my age,’ said Nesta, and her bosom heaved. ‘Women should feel for their sex; they should not allow the names; they should go among their unhappier sisters. At the worst, they are sisters! I am sure, that fallen cannot mean—Christ shows it does not. He changes the tone of Scripture. The women who are made outcasts, must be hopeless and go to utter ruin. We should, if we pretend to be better, step between them and that. There cannot be any goodness unless it is a practiced goodness. Otherwise it is nothing more than paint on canvas. You speak to me of my innocence. What is it worth, if it is only a picture and does no work to help to rescue? I fear I think most of the dreadful names that redden and sicken us.—The Old Testament!—I have a French friend, a Mademoiselle Louise de Seines—you should hear her: she is intensely French, and a Roman Catholic, everything which we are not: but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her sex! I love her. It is love. She will never marry until she meets a man who has the respect for women, for all women. We both think we cannot separate ourselves from our sisters. She seems to me to wither men, when she speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and their cruelty when they have succeeded. She is right, it is the—brute: there is no other word.’
‘And French and good!’ Mrs. Marsett ejaculated. ‘My Ned reads French novels, and he says, their women.... But your mademoiselle is a real one. If she says all that, I could kneel to her, French or not. Does she talk much about men and women?’
‘Not often: we lose our tempers. She wants women to have professions; at present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless. Poverty, and the sight of luxury! It seems as if we produced the situation, to create an envious thirst, and cause the misery. Things are improving for them; but we groan at the slowness of it.’
Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were nearly quite as bad as men. ‘I don’t think I could take up with a profession. Unless to be a singer. Ah! Do you sing?’
Nesta smiled: ‘Yes, I sing.’
‘How I should like to hear you! My Ned’s a thorough Englishman—gentleman, you know: he cares only for sport; Shooting, Fishing, Hunting; and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches. He’s immensely proud of England in those things. And such muscle he has! though he begins to fancy his heart’s rather weak. It’s digestion, I tell him. But he takes me to the Opera sometimes—Italian Opera; he can’t stand German. Down at his place in Leicestershire, he tells me, when there ‘s company, he has—I’m sure you sing beautifully. When I hear beautiful singing, even from a woman they tell tales of, upon my word, it’s true, I feel my sins all melting out of me and I’m new-made: I can’t bear Ned to speak. Would you one day, one afternoon, before the end of next week?—it would do me such real good, you can’t guess how much; if I could persuade you! I know I’m asking something out of rules. For just half an hour: I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do me good-good-good to hear you sing. There is a tuned piano—a cottage; I don’t think it sounds badly. You would not see any great harm in calling on me? once!’
‘No,’ said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they were; or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her vision of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the stamp of the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to inexperienced pure young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust those lips, those eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel, the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune’s issue, if we but see the one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the Fates. Nesta did not err in her divination of the good and the bad incarnate beside her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain; the latter sparing her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the simply feminine claim on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of the flames of the forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that the good predominated. She had the heart which is at our primal fires when nature speaks.