Suddenly saying: ‘There, beside our friend in clerical garb: here she comes; judge if that is the girl for the foulest of curs to worry, no matter where she’s found.’ Dartrey directed the colonel’s attention to Nesta and Mr. Barmby turning off the pier and advancing.
He saluted. She bowed. There was no contraction of her eyelids; and her face was white. The mortal life appeared to be deadened in her cold wide look; as when the storm-wind banks a leaden remoteness, leaving blown space of sky.
The colonel said: ‘No, that’s not the girl a gentleman would offend.’
‘What man!’ cried Dartrey. ‘If we had a Society for the trial of your gentleman!—but he has only to call himself gentleman to get grant of licence: and your Society protects him. It won’t punish, and it won’t let you. But you saw her: ask yourself—what man could offend that girl!’
‘Still, my friend, she ought to keep clear of the Marsetts.’
‘When I meet him, I shall treat him as one out of the law.’
‘You lead on to an ultimate argument with the hangman.’
We ‘ll dare it, to waken the old country. Old England will count none but Worrells in time. As for discreet, if you like!—the young lady might have been more discreet. She’s a girl with a big heart. If we were all everlastingly discreet!’
Dartrey may have meant, that the consequence of a prolonged conformity would be the generation of stenches to shock to purgeing tempests the tolerant heavens over such smooth stagnancy. He had his ideas about movement; about the good of women, and the health of his England. The feeling of the hopelessness of pleading Nesta’s conduct, for the perfect justification of it to son or daughter of our impressing conventional world—even to a friend, that friend a true man, a really chivalrous man—drove him back in a silence upon his natural brotherhood with souls that dare do. It was a wonder, to think of his finding this kinship in a woman. In a girl?—and the world holding that virgin spirit to be unclean or shadowed because its rays were shed on foul places? He clasped the girl. Her smitten clear face, the face of the second sigh after torture, bent him in devotion to her image.
The clasping and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours: quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little ‘blue butterfly’ of the days at Craye. Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of Dudley Sowerby’s pretensions to; her hand. Nesta’s youthfulness cast double age on him from the child’s past. He pictured the child; pictured the girl, with her look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate wide world, where her noble compassion for a woman had unexpectedly, painfully, almost by transubstantiation, rack-screwed her to woman’s mind. And above sorrowful, holy were those eyes.