One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
moiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and
the French lady, thinking—too conclusively from the breath
on the glass at the moment, as it is the Gallic habit—that if
her dear Nesta must espouse one of the uninteresting creatures
called men in her native land, it might as well be this as
another, agreed that the night was very beautiful.
‘He speaks grammatical French,’ Nesta commented on his
achievement. ‘He contrives in his walking not to wet his
boots,’ mademoiselle rejoined.
Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders,
despite an inferior pretension to accent. He burned to be
near these ladies, and he passed them but once. His enthusiasm
for Mademoiselle de Seilles was notorious. Gratefully
the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her demure
fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for
the man who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen,
or eminently she among them, must have their enthusiasm
set springing in the breast before they can be swayed by the
most violent of outer gales. And say, that she is uprooted;—
he does but roll a log. Mr. Peridon’s efforts to perfect himself
in the French tongue touched her.
A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate
wink of the eye of light. Mr. Barmby, an exile from the
ladies by reason of an addiction to tobacco, quitted the
forepart of the vessel at the first greying. Now was the cloak
of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for the heralding of
gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs. The gentle
waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places
oily grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness
for refuge on any far fisher-sail.
Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly
closed. The girl’s cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet
unawakened though born. They were in a nest shading amid
silks of pale blue, and there was a languid flutter beneath her
chin to the catch of the morn-breeze. Bacchanal threads astray
from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair were alive
over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
securest of slumbers.
Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly. Both the ladies were in
their oblivion; the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably
framed, elevating to behold; a reproach to the remi-
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