Rhoda Fleming | Page 5

the name of 'Rhoda;' but it did not endure for so long a space,
as it was known that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective
reading of her Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal. Country
people are not inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for anything.

They find it as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the midst of larger
congregations, what we call genius. For some years, Mrs. Fleming's
proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity was
openly pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance which her
labour lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced confession
of there being poverty in the household. The ragged elbow was then
projected in the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a sober
appreciation of the fairness of the face.
Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her
garden was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and
she had been heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be
fully fed. The encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden
was indicative of a moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply
her table with plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how
provided, sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated
to have fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right in the
abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said, `Good
bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and my
children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced by
foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby, in
cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers
economies consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative
woman. Practically it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying
her. Though payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as
lost ones by Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one
main secret for mastering the custodians of credit. She had a
considerate remembrance and regard for the most distant of her debts,
so that she seemed to be only always a little late, and exceptionally
wrongheaded in theory. Wrexby, therefore, acquiesced in helping to
build up her children to stoutness, and but for the blindness of all
people, save artists, poets, novelists, to the grandeur of their own
creations, the inhabitants of this Kentish village might have had an
enjoyable pride in the beauty and robust grace of the young
girls,--fair-haired, black-haired girls, a kindred contrast, like fire and
smoke, to look upon. In stature, in bearing, and in expression, they
were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern manner of eulogy, strikingly

above their class. They carried erect shoulders, like creatures not
ashamed of showing a merely animal pride, which is never quite apart
from the pride of developed beauty. They were as upright as Oriental
girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to the
well. Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her
Rachel. They tossed one another their mutual compliments, drawn from
the chief book of their reading. Queen of Sheba was Dahlia's title. No
master of callisthenics could have set them up better than their mother's
receipt for making good blood, combined with a certain harmony of
their systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress have taught them
correcter speaking. The characteristic of girls having a disposition to
rise, is to be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned
over, till by degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of
highly grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of
people in story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books,
wherein the princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their
silken calves; nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to
ordinary men.
The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;
and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her
secret Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities;
on the contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were
only to be seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of
London. Naturally, the girls dreamed of London. To educate
themselves, they copied out whole pages of a book called the `Field of
Mars,' which was next to the family Bible in size among the volumes of
the farmer's small library. The deeds of the heroes of this book, and the
talk of the fairy princes, were assimilated in their minds; and as they
looked around them upon millers', farmers', maltsters', and tradesmen's
sons, the thought of what manner of youth would propose to marry