One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
boyhood’s beloved sugary -inis and -antes and -zettis; had
clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had wafted him up to a
new realm, invigorating if severer. But now his youth would
have its voice. He travelled up to town with Sir Abraham
Quatley and talked, and took and gave hints upon City and
Commercial affairs, while the honeyed Italian of the conventional,
gloriously animal, stress and flutter had a revel in
his veins, now and then mutedly ebullient at the mouth:
honeyed, golden, rich in visions;—having surely much more
of Nature’s encouragement to her children?
CHAPTER XXIV
NESTA’S ENGAGEMENT
A WORD in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man
Blathenoy, set the wheels of Victor’s brain at work upon his
defences, for a minute, on the walk Westward. Who knew?—
who did not know! He had a torpid consciousness that he
cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the great monster
to hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had caught
its miserable spies by the lurcher neck and was towering. He
dwelt on his contempt of them, to curtain the power they
could stir.
‘The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?’
Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a second
statement, thought ‘there was the look of it.’
‘Well, we must watch over her. Dartrey!—but Dartrey’s an
honest fellow with women. But men are men. Very few men
spare a woman when the mad fit is on her. A little womanpretty
little woman!—wife to Jacob Blathenoy! She mustn’t
at her age have any close choosing—under her hand. And
226