One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
it permitted by the Merciful Disposer! … Nataly’s intellect
and her reverence clashed. They clash to the end of time if
we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as a remote Externe,
who plays the human figures, to bring about this or that
issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we
will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal,
mount to the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of
body or mind. She was in her error, from judgeing of the
destiny of man by the fate of individuals. Chiefly her error
was, to try to be thinking at all amid the fevered tangle of
her sensations.
A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker
overhead when her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance
of the philosophy of existence, in a savour of gratification
at the prospect of her equal footing with the world while
yet she lived. She hated herself for taking pleasure in anything
to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard, ill-balanced, unjust;
she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not to be aware
that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome
the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person
had a greater than common need of the protection.
CHAPTER XVII
CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A
YOUNG MAID’S IMAGININGS
THAT MAUSOLEUM at Dreux may touch to lift us. History,
pleads for the pride of the great discrowned Family giving
her illumination there. The pride is reverently postured, the
princely mourning-cloak it wears becomingly braided at the
hem with fair designs of our mortal humility in the presence
of the vanquisher; against whom, acknowledgeing a visible
conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid contention in
coloured glass and marbles.
Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked
for having advised the curvature of the route homeward to
visit ‘the spot of so impressive a monument’: as it, was phrased
by the Rev. Septimus Barmby; whose exposition to Nesta of
the beautiful stained-glass pictures of incidents in the life of
the crusading St. Louis, was toned to be likewise impressive:—Colney
Durance not being at hand to bewail the pathos
of his exhaustless ‘whacking of the platitudes’; which
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