One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
Tasso was usually timed for five minutes. They were astonished
to discover by the clock, that they had given him ten.
He was very quiet: if so, and for whatever he did, he had his
reason, they said: he was a dog endowed with reason: endowed—and
how they wished that Mr. Stuart Rem would
admit it!—with, their love of the little dog believed (and Mr.
Posterley acquiesced), a soul. Do but think it of dear animals,
and any form of cruelty to them becomes an impossibility,
Mr. Stuart Rem! But he would not be convinced:
ungenerously indeed he named Mr. Posterley a courtier. The
ladies could have retorted, that Mr. Posterley had not a
brother who was the celebrated surgeon Sir Nicholas Rem.
Usually Tasso came running in when the hall-door was
opened to him. Not a sound of him could be heard. The
ladies blew his familiar whistle. He trotted back to a third
appeal, and was, unfortunately for them, not caressed; he
received reproaches from two forefingers directed straight at
his reason. He saw it and felt it. The hug of him was deferred
to the tender good-night to him in his basket at the foot of
the ladies’ beds.
On entering their spacious bed-chamber, they were so fatigued
that sleep appeared to their minds the compensating
logical deduction. Miss Dorothea suppressed a yawn, and
inflicted it upon Miss Virginia, who returned it, with an apology,
and immediately had her sister’s hand on her shoulder,
for, an attempted control of one of the irresistibles; a specacle
imparting bitter shudders and shots to the sympathetic jawbones
of an observer. Hand at mouth, for not in privacy
would they have been guilty of exposing a grimace, they signified,
under an interim smile, their maidenly submission to
the ridiculous force of nature: after which, Miss Virginia retired
to the dressing-room, absorbed in woeful recollection
of the resolute No they had been compelled to reiterate, in
response to the most eloquent and, saving for a single instance,
admirable man, their cousin, the representative of
‘the blood,’ supplicating them. A recreant thankfulness coiled
within her bosom at the thought, that Dorothea, true to her
office of speaker, had tasked herself with the cruel utterance
and repetition of the word. Victor’s wonderful eyes, his voice,
yet more than his urgent pleas; and also, in the midst of his
fiery flood of speech, his gentleness, his patience, pathos,
and a man’s tone through it all; were present to her.
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