One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
old order and the new, cessation to political turmoil: Radicalism,
Socialism, all the monster names of things with heads
agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable, obliterate
the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and
garden were, would be appeased, transfigured. She hoped,
she prayed for that glorious leader’s advent.
On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not
intelligibly, not communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one
which struck at her through her sex and must, she thought,
ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature saw it as a very
thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams of a body
rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her
hopes and prayers were dumb in her bosom. It signified
shame. She knew not the how, for she had no power to contemplate
it: there was a torment of earth and a writhing of
lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse. But if the new crusading
Hero were to come attacking that—if some born
prince nobly man would head the world to take away the
withering scarlet from the face of women, she felt she could
kiss the print of his feet upon the ground. Meanwhile she
had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of
mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good
aspiration through their obscurities find much akin to them.
She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these
French Princes had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another
encounter with them and the old result—poor dear
gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly! What
amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow
parade, and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification
of a holiday on arrested legs. Dudley Sowerby’s attention
to him, in elucidating the scenes with historical scraps,
greatly pleased her. The Rev. Septimus of course occupied
her chiefly.
Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions
of gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without
personal objections to a well-meaning orderly man, whose
pardonable error it was to be aiming too considerably higher
than his head, she did but show him the voluble muteness of
a Frenchwoman’s closed lips; not a smile at all, and certainly
no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
in the sentence of French. Mr. Barmby had noticed
(and a strong sentiment rendered him observant, unwont-
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