One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
other little points revealed, that he had a certain lover’s dread
of Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy: Victor understood
the feeling. To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man elsewhere
in another; though she may know she never can wed
the man, and has not the hope of it; is torment to the lover
quailing, as we do in this terrible season of the priceless deliciousness,
stripped against all the winds that blow; skinless
at times. One gets up a sympathy for the poor shy dependent
shivering lover. Nevertheless, here was young Dudley
waking, visibly becoming bolder. As in the flute-duets, he
gained fire from concert. The distance between Cronidge
and Moorsedge was two miles and a quarter.
Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted four
days, which embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John
Cormyn’s on the last of the days, when Nesta was engaged to
sing with her mother a duet of her own composition, the
first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from rigid
Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it
pass: eulogy, coming from him. So Victor heard, and he
doated am the surprise to come for him, in a boyish anticipation.
The girl’s little French ballads under tutelage of Louise
de Seilles promised, though they were imitative. If Strauscher
let this pass … Victor saw Grand Opera somewhere to follow;
England’s claim to be a creative musical nation vindicated;
and the genius of the fair sex as well.
He heard the duet at Mrs. Cormyn’s; and he imagined a
hearing of his Fredi’s Opera, and her godmother’s delight in
it; the once famed Sanfredini’s consent to be the diva at a
rehearsal, and then her compelling her hidalgo duque to consent
further: an event not inconceivable. For here was downright
genius; the flowering aloe of the many years in formation;
and Colney admitted the song to have a streak of genius;
though he would pettishly and stupidly say, that our
modern newspaper Press is able now to force genius for us
twenty or so to the month, excluding Sundays-our short
pauses for the incubation of it. Real rare genius was in that
song, nothing forced; and exquisite melody; one of those
melodies which fling gold chains about us and lead us off,
lead us back into Eden. Victor hummed at bars of it on the
drive homeward. His darlings had to sing it again in the halflighted
drawing-room. The bubble-happiness of the three
was vexed only by tidings heard from Colney during the
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