One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
endowment. He rushed to it. ‘My girl will have ten thousand
a year settled on her the day of her marriage.’ Choice of
living at Lakelands was offered.
It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview.
At the same time, it moved him to a curious contempt of the
youth. He had to conjure-up an image of the young man in
person, to correct the sentiment:—and it remained as a kind
of bruise only half cured.
Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose presence
would rectify such an abstract estimate of the genus
pursuer. He now came frequently of an evening, to practise a
duet for flutes with Victor;—a Mercadante, honeyed and
flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as Fenellan characterized
it to Nataly, went through the music somewhat like
an inquisitive tourist in a foreign town, conscientious to get
to the end of the work of pleasure; until the notes had become
familiar, when it rather resembled a constable’s walk
along the midnight streets into collision with a garlanded
roysterer; and the man of order and the man of passion, true
to the measure though they were, seeming to dissent, almost
to wrangle, in their different ways of winding out the melody,
on to the last movement; which was plainly a question between
home to the strayed reveller’s quarters or off to the
lockup. Victor was altogether the younger of the two. But
his vehement accompaniment was a tutorship; Mr. Sowerby
improved; it was admitted by Nesta and mademoiselle that
he gained a show of feeling; he had learnt that feeling was
wanted. Passion, he had not a notion of: otherwise he would
not be delaying; the interview, dramatized by the father of
the young bud of womanhood, would be taking place, and
the entry into Lakelands calculable, for Nataly’s comfort, as
under the aegis of the Cantor earldom. Gossip flies to a wider
circle round the members of a great titled family, is inaudible;
or no longer the diptherian whisper the commonalty
hear of the commonalty: and so we see the social uses of our
aristocracy survive. We do not want the shield of any family;
it is the situation that wants it; Nataly ought to be awake to
the fact. One blow and we have silenced our enemy: Nesta’s
wedding-day has relieved her parents.
Victor’s thoughts upon the instrument for striking that, blow,
led him to suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditating on the
extent of the young lady’s fortune. He talked randomly of
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