One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
measured him by the favourite fiction’s heroes of their youth,
and found him to gaze, talk, comport himself, according to
the prescription; correct grammar, finished sentences, all that
is expected of a gentleman enamoured; and ever with the
watchful intentness for his lady’s faintest first dawn of an
inclining to a wish. Mr. Dudley Sowerby’s eye upon Nesta
was really an apprentice. There is in Love’s young season a
magnanimity in the male kind. Their superior strength and
knowledge are made subservient to the distaff of the weaker
and shallower: they crown her queen; her look is their mandate.
So was it when Sir Charles and Sir Rupert and the
estimable Villiers Davenant touched maidenly hearts to throb:
so is it now, with the Hon. Dudley Sowerby.
Very haltingly, the ladies were guilty of a suggestion to Victor.
‘Oh! Fredi?’ said he; ‘admires her, no doubt; and so do I,
so we all do; she’s one of the nice girls; but as to Cupid’s
darts, she belongs to the cucumber family, and he shoots
without fireing. We shall do the mischief if we put an interdict.
Don’t you remember the green days when obstacles were
the friction to light that match?’ Their pretty nod of assent
displayed the virgin pride of the remembrance: they dreamed
of having once been exceedingly wilful; it refreshed their
nipped natures; and dwelling on it, they forgot to press their
suggestion. Incidentally, he named the sum his Fredi would
convey to her husband; with, as was calculable, the further
amount his only child would inherit. A curious effect was
produced on them. Though they were not imaginatively
mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth commonly
are, they talked of the sum over and over in the solitude of
their chamber. ‘Dukes have married for less.’ Such an heiress,
they said, might buy up a Principality. Victor had supplied
them with something of an apology to the gentleman
proposing to Nesta in their house.
The chronicle of it is, that Dudley Sowerby did this on the
fifteenth day of September; and that it was not known to the
damsel’s parents before the twenty-third; as they were away
on an excursion in South Tyrol:—away, flown, with just a
word of the hurried departure to their envious, exiled girl;
though they did not tell her of new constructions at the London
house partly causing them to fly. Subject to their consent,
she wrote, she had given hers. The letter was telegramic
on the essential point. She wrote of Mr. Barmby’s having
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