One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
despondency—that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would
smooth a troubled prospect: and a present resentment at her
weakness rendered her shrewd to detect Victor’s cunning to
cover his own: a thing imaginable of him previously in sentimental
matters, yet never accurately and so legibly printed
on her mind. It did not draw her to read him with a novel
familiarity; it drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations
of the man he was —irresistible in attack, not impregnably
defensive. Nor did he seem in this instance humanely
considerate: if mademoiselle’s estimate of the mind
of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby’s position would
be both a ridiculous and a cruel one. She had some silly final
idea that the poor man might now serve permanently to check
the more dreaded applicant: a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness
was blunted.
Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to
have his weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation,
of a loss of her natural cheerfulness, and promised
amendment, with a steely smile, that his lips mimicked
fondly; and her smile softened. To strengthen the dear soul’s
hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the
tragic depths he struck or of the burden he gave her heart to
bear. Her look alarmed him. She seemed to be hugging herself
up to the tingling scalp, and was in a moment marble to
sight and touch. She looked like the old engravings of martyrs
taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.
He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the
awful grip of fingers from the outside of life.
The seizure was over before it could be called ominous.
When it was once over, and she had smiled again and rebuked
him for excessive anxiety, his apprehensions no longer
troubled him, but subsided sensationally in wrath at the
crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her ailments
instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.
Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental
penance for it. In consequence, the wrath, and the wish,
and the penitence, haunted him, each swelling to possession
of him in turn; until they united to head a plunge into retrospects;
which led to his reviewing the army of charges against
Mrs. Burman.
And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid
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