One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
like Fenellan’s laundress, the tearful woman whose professional
apparatus was her soft heart and a cake of soap. Skepsey
has made his peace with you?’
Victor answered: ‘Yes, yes; I see what he has been about.
We’re a mixed lot, all of us-the best! You’ve noticed, Skepsey
has no laugh: however absurd the thing he tells you, not a
smile!’
‘But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them. Captain
Dartrey thinks him one of the men most in earnest of
any of his country.’
‘So Nataly of course thinks the same. And he’s a worthy
little velocipede, as Fenellan calls him. One wishes Colney
had been with us. Only Colney!—pity one can’t cut his talons
for the space before they grow again.’
Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would
not have been so encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with
Dudley Sowerby! It was the very manner to sow seed of imitativeness
in the girl, devoted as she was to her father. Nataly
sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition, feeling it a
certainty. We are easily prophets, sure of being justified, when
the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears
most delicately perfect. History, the tales of households, the
tombstone, are with us to inspire. In Nataly’s bosom, the
reproof of her inefficiency for offering counsel where Victor
for his soul’s sake needed it, was beginning to thunder at
whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his mate, worse than
a public denunciation of the sin against Society.
It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to
reconcilement. A pain previously thought of, never previously
so realized, seized her at her next sight of Nesta. She
had not taken in her front mind the contrast of the innocent
one condemned to endure the shadow from which the guilty
was by a transient ceremony released. Nature could at a push
be eloquent to defend the guilty. Not a word of vindicating
eloquence rose up to clear the innocent. Nothing that she
could do; no devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of
peace, no possible joy to come, nothing could remove the
shadow from her child. She dreamed of the succour in eloquence,
to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact spoke
over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one
hard word. But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb
when referred to Nesta. It seemed a cruel mystery. How was
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