One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
to wreck, irritated the best of his nature. He had a resolve to
pass an hour with the couple, and speak and insist on hearing
plain words before the night had ended. But Fenellan
took it out of him. Victor’s show of a perfect contentment
emulating Pempton’s, incited Colney to some of his cunning
rapier-thrusts with his dancing adversary; and the heat
which is planted in us for the composition: of those cool
epigrams, will not allow plain words to follow. Or, handing
him over to the police of the Philistines, you may put it, that
a habit of assorting spices will render an earnest simplicity
distasteful. He was invited by Nataly to come home with
them; her wish for his presence, besides personal, was moved
by an intuition, that his counsel might specially benefit them.
He shrugged; he said he had work at his chambers.
‘Work!’ Victor ejaculated: he never could reach to a right
comprehension of labour, in regard to the very unremunerative
occupation of literature. Colney he did not want, and
he let him go, as Nataly noticed, without a sign of the reluctance
he showed when the others, including Fenellan, excused
themselves.
‘So! we’re alone?’ he said, when the door of the hall had
closed on them. He kept Nesta talking of the success of the
day until she, observing her mother’s look, simulated the
setting-in of a frenzied yawn. She was kissed, and she tripped
to her bed.
‘Now we are alone,’ Nataly said.
‘Well, dear, and the day was, you must own … ‘ he sought
to trifle with her heavy voice; but she recalled him: ‘Victor!’
and the naked anguish in her cry of his name was like a
foreign world threatening the one he filled.
‘Ah, yes; that man, that Jarniman. You saw him, I remember.
You recollected him?—stouter than he was. In her service
ever since. Well, a little drop of bitter, perhaps: no harm, tonic.’
‘Victor, is she very ill?’
‘My love, don’t feel at your side: she is ill, ill, not the extreme
case: not yet: old and ill. I told Skepsey to give the
man refreshment: he had to do his errand.’
‘What? why did he come?’
‘Curious; he made acquaintance with Skepsey, and appears
to have outwitted poor Skepsey, as far as I see it. But if that
woman thinks of intimidating me now—!’ His eyes brightened;
he had sprung from evasions. ‘Living in flagrant sin,
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