One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
of the taint; and not only did they no longer fear the moment
when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr. Posterley might call for
evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting the married
one of those gentlemen, to ‘divert dear Nesta.’ Every night
she slept well. In all she did, she proved she was ‘of the blood.’
She had Victor’s animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded
to think, his eloquence. They put it down to his eloquence
entirely, that their resistance to his petition had been overcome,
for similarly with the treatment of the private acts of
royal personages by lacquey History, there is, in the minds
of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that any event having a
consequence in matters personal to them, be at all hazards
recorded with the utmost nicety in decency. By such means,
they preserve the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity
of their existence; and so they maintain the regal elevation
over the awe-struck subjects of their interiors; who might
otherwise revolt, pull down, scatter, dishonour, expose for a
shallow fiction the holiest, the most vital to them. A democratic
evil spirit is abroad, generated among congregations,
often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the
desperate wickedness they know (not solely through the
monition of Mr. Stuart Rem) to lurk within. It has to be
excluded: on certain points they must not think. The night
of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds of the pure ladies:
a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense of smell,
to revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of
their intelligences.
Victor’s eloquence, Victor’s influence, Victor’s child he carried
them as a floodstream, insomuch, that their reception
of this young creature of the blot on her birth, was regarded
by them in the unmentioned abstract, and the child’s presence
upon earth seen with the indulgence (without the
naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English for the numerous
offspring of the peccadillos of their monarchs. These
things pass muster from being ‘Britannically cocooned in
the purple,’ says our irreverent satirist; and the maiden ladies’
passion of devotion to ‘the blood’ helped to blind them;
but still more so did the imperious urgency to curtain closely
the night of Tasso, throwing all its consequences upon Victor’s
masterful tongue. Whence it ensued (and here is the danger
for illogical individuals as well as vast communities, who
continue to batten upon fiction when the convenience of it
234