One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
numbering the labourers they paralyze at home and stultify
abroad.’ Colney thumped away. The country’s annuitants
had for type ‘the figure with the helmet of the Owl-Goddess
and the trident of the Earth-shaker, seated on a wheel, at the
back of penny-pieces; in whom you see neither the beauty of
nakedness nor the charm of drapery; not the helmet’s dignity
or the trident’s power; but she has patently that which
stops the wheel; and poseing for representative of an imperial
nation, she helps to pass a penny.’ So he passed his epigram,
heedless of the understanding or attention of his hearer;
who temporarily misjudged him for a man impelled by the
vanity of literary point and finish, when indeed it was hot
satiric spite, justified of its aim, which crushed a class to extract
a drop of scathing acid, in the interests of the country,
mankind as well. Nataly wanted a picture painted, colours
and details, that she might get a vision of the scene at
Moorsedge. She did her best to feel an omen and sound it,
in his question ‘whether the yearly increasing army of the
orderly annuitants and their parasites does not demonstrate
the proud old country as a sheath for pith rather than of the
vital run of sap.’
Perhaps it was patriotic to inquire; and doubtless she was
the weakest of women; she could follow no thought; her
heart was beating blindly beside Victor, hopeing for the refusal
painful to her through his disappointment.
‘You think me foolish,’ she made answer to one of Colney’s
shrugs; ‘and it has come to that pitch with me, that I cannot
be sensible of a merit except in being one with him—obeying,
is the word. And I have never yet known him fail. That
terrible Lakelands wears a different look to me, when I think
of what he can do; though I would give half my days to
escape it.’
She harped on the chord of feverish extravagance; the more
hateful to Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated
a blind devotedness to stupefy her natural pride; and he
was divided between stamping on her for an imbecile and
dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation rendered her
pitiable. ‘You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,’ he
said, and thought how the simple words carried the bitterness.
That was uttered within a few minutes of midnight, when
the ladies of Moorsedge themselves, after an exhausting resistance
to their dearest relative, were at the hall-door of the
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