One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
be denuded, for her girl to learn the felicity of having relatives.
For some reason, over which Nataly mused in the succeeding
hours, the girl had not spoken of any visit her mother
was to pay to the Duvidney ladies or they to her. Latterly she
had not alluded to her mother’s family. It might mean, that
the beloved and dreaded was laying finger on a dark thing in
the dark; reading syllables by touch; keeping silence over the
communications to a mind not yet actively speculative, as it
is a way with young women. ‘With young women educated
for the market, to be timorous, consequently secretive, rather
snaky,’ Colney Durance had said. Her Nesta was not one of
the ‘framed and glazed’ description, cited by him, for an example
of the triumph of the product; ‘exactly harmonious
with the ninny male’s ideal of female innocence.’ No; but
what if the mother had opened her heart to her girl? It had
been of late her wish or a dream, shaping hourly to a design,
now positively to go through that furnace. Her knowledge
of Victor’s objection, restrained an impulse that had not won
spring enough to act against his counsel or vivify an intelligence
grown dull in slavery under him, with regard to the
one seeming right course. The adoption of it would have
wounded him—therefore her. She had thought of him first;
she had also thought of herself, and she blamed herself now.
She went so far as to think, that Victor was guilty of the
schemer’s error of counting human creatures arithmetically,
in the sum, without the estimate of distinctive qualities and
value here and there. His return to a shivering sensitiveness
on the subject of his girl’s enlightenment ‘just yet,’ for which
Nataly pitied and loved him, sharing it, with humiliation for
doing so, became finally her excuse. We must have some
excuse, if we would keep to life.
Skepsey’s case appeared in the evening papers. He confessed,
‘frankly,’ he said, to the magistrate, that, ‘acting under
temporary exasperation, he had lost for a moment a man’s
proper self-command.’ He was as frank in stating, that he
‘occupied the prisoner’s place before his Worship a second
time, and was a second time indebted to the gentleman, Mr.
Colney Durance, who so kindly stood by him.’ There was
hilarity in the Court at his quaint sententious envelopment
of the idiom of the streets, which he delivered with solemnity:
‘He could only plead, not in absolute justification—an
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