One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
she says: you and I! She will not have it; warns me. Heard
this day at noon of company at Lakelands. Jarniman off at
once. Are to live in obscurity;—you and I! if together! Dictates
from her death-bed-I suppose her death-bed.’
‘Dearest,’ Nataly pressed hand on her left breast, ‘may we
not think that she may be right?’
‘An outrageous tyranny of a decrepit woman naming herself
wife when she is only a limpet of vitality, with drugs for blood,
hanging-on to blast the healthy and vigorous! I remember old
Colney’s once, in old days, calling that kind of marriage a
sarcophagus. It was to me. There I lay —see myself lying! wasting!
Think what you can good of her, by all means! From her
bed! despatches that Jarniman to me from her bedside, with
the word, that she cannot in her conscience allow—what imposition
was it I practised? … flagrant sin?—it would have
been an infinitely viler … . She is the cause of suffering enough:
I bear no more from her; I’ve come to the limit. She has heard
of Lakelands: she has taken one of her hatreds to the place.
She might have written, might have sent me a gentleman, privately.
No: it must be done in dramatic style-for effect: her
confidential—lawyer?—doctor?—butler! Perhaps to frighten
me:—the boy she knew, and—poor soul! I don’t mean to abuse
her: but such conduct as this is downright brutal. I laugh at it,
I snap my fingers. I can afford to despise it. Only I do say it
deserves to be called abominable.’
‘Victor, has she used a threat?’
‘Am I brought to listen to any of her threats!—Funny thing,
I ‘m certain that woman never can think of me except as the
boy she knew. I saw her first when she was first a widow. She
would keep talking to me of the seductions of the metropolis—kept
informing me I was a young man … shaking her
head. I ‘ve told you. She—well, I know we are mixtures,
women as well as men. I can, I hope, grant the same—I
believe I can—allowances to women as to men; we are poor
creatures, all of using one sense: though I won’t give Colney
his footing; there’s a better way of reading us. I hold fast to
Nature. No violation of Nature, my good Colney! We can
live the lives of noble creatures; and I say that happiness was
meant for us:—just as, when you sit down to your dinner,
you must do it cheerfully, and you make good blood: otherwise
all’s wrong. There’s the right answer to Colney! But when
a woman like that … . and marries a boy: well, twenty-one—
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