One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
house with Victor, saying the good-night, to which he responded
hurriedly, cordially, dumbly, a baffled man. They
clasped hands. Miss Dorothea said:
‘You, Victor, always.’ Miss Virginia said: ‘You will be sure
of welcome.’ He walked out upon the moonless night; and
for lack of any rounded object in the smothering darkness to
look at, he could nowhere take moorings to gather himself
together and define the man who had undergone so portentous
a defeat. He was glad of quarters at an hotel, a solitary
bed, absence from his Nataly.
For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered. They had no
triumph in their victory: the weight of it bore them down. They
closed, locked, shot the bolts and fastened the chain of the door.
They had to be reminded by the shaking of their darling dog
Tasso’s curly silky coat, that he had not taken his evening’s trot
to notify malefactors of his watchfulness and official wrath at
sound of footfall or a fancied one. Without consultation, they
unbolted the door, and Tasso went forth, to ‘compose his vesper
hymn,’ as Mr. Posterley once remarked amusingly.
Though not pretending to the Muse’s crown so far, the
little dog had qualities to entrance the spinster sex. His mistresses
talked of him; of his readiness to go forth; of the audible
first line of his hymn or sonnet; of his instinct telling
him that something was wrong in the establishment. For
most of the servants at Moorsedge were prostrated by a fashionable
epidemic; a slight attack, the doctor said; but
Montague, the butler, had withdrawn for the nursing of his
wife; Perrin, the footman, was confined to his chamber;
Manton, the favourite maid, had appeared in the morning
with a face that caused her banishment to bed; and the cook,
Mrs. Bannister, then sighingly agreed to send up cold meat
for the ladies’ dinner. Hence their melancholy inhospitality
to their cousin Victor, who had, in spite of his errors, the
right to claim his place at their table, was ‘of the blood,’ they
said. He was recognized as the living prince of it. His every
gesture, every word, recalled the General. The trying scene
with him had withered them, they did not speak of it; each
had to the other the look of a vessel that has come out of a
gale. Would they sleep? They scarcely dared ask it of themselves.
They had done rightly; silence upon that reflection
seemed best. It was the silence of an inward agitation; still
they knew the power of good consciences to summon sleep.
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