CHAPTER VIII

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS

Nesta read her mother’s face when Mrs. Victor entered the drawing-room to receive the guests.  She saw a smooth fair surface, of the kind as much required by her father’s eyes as innocuous air by his nostrils:  and it was honest skin, not the deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear man happy over his volcano.  Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with whom her feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts gave her station:  they liked her for herself; they helped her to feel at home with herself and be herself:  a rarer condition with us all than is generally supposed.  So she could determine to be cheerful in the anticipation of an evening that would at least be restful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling to the great organ; often colouring the shows and seems of adverse things for an apeing of reality with too cruel a resemblance.  One of the scraps of practical wisdom gained by hardened sufferers is, to keep from spying at horizons when they drop into a pleasant dingle.  Such is the comfort of it, that we can dream, and lull our fears, and half think what we wish:  and it is a heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided from our wishes.

Nesta wondered at her mother’s complacent questions concerning this Lakelands:  the house, the county, the kind of people about, the features of the country.  Physically unable herself to be regretful under a burden three parts enrapturing her, the girl expected her mother to display a shadowy vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon her thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part:  namely, the aristocratic iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them off; as they had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt:  she remembered it, of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding people—­or no, not all, but some of them.  And what had roused their pride?

Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England, supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation, had hit on her father’s profession of merchant.  It accounted to her for the behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families.  But certain of the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the families were avowedly commercial.  ‘They follow suit,’ her father said at Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided instantly to quit and fly once more.  But if they followed suit in such a way, then Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English the most sheepy of sheep:—­and Nesta could not consent to the cruel verdict, she adored her compatriots.  Incongruities were pacified for her by the suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a merchant, was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is not liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like his being both.