One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
A remark or two passed among the company upon her
pretty face.
Nataly murmured to Colney: ‘Is there anything of Dartrey’s
wife?’
‘Dead,’ he answered.
‘When?’
‘Months back. I had it from Simeon. You didn’t hear?’
She shook her head. Her ears buzzed. If he had it from
Simeon Fenellan, Victor must have known it.
Her duties of hostess were conducted with the official smile.
As soon as she stood alone, she dropped on a chair, like
one who has taken a shot in the heart, and that hideous tumult
of wild cries at her ears blankly ceased. Dartrey, Victor,
Nesta, were shifting figures of the might-have-been for whom
a wretched erring woman, washed clean of her guilt by death,
in a far land, had gone to her end: vainly gone: and now
another was here, a figure of wood, in man’s shape, conjured
up by one of the three, to divide the two others; likely to be
fatal to her or to them: to her, she hoped, if the choice was to
be: and beneath the leaden hope, her heart set to a rapid
beating, a fainter, a chill at the core.
She snatched for breath. She shut her eyes, and with open
lips, lay waiting; prepared to thank the kindness about to
hurry her hence, out of the seas of pain, without pain.
Then came sighs. The sad old servant in her bosom was
resuming his labours.
But she had been near it—very near it? A gush of pity for
Victor, overwhelmed her hardness of mind.
Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and tottered
to the door, touched along to the stairs, and descended
them, thinking strangely upon such a sudden weakness of
body, when she would no longer have thought herself the
weak woman. Her aim was to reach the library. She sat on
the stairs midway, pondering over the length of her journey:
and now her head was clearer; for she was travelling to get
Railway-guides, and might have had them from the hands
of a footman, and imagined that she had considered it prudent
to hide her investigation of those books: proofs of an
understanding fallen backward to the state of infant and
having to begin our drear ascent again.
A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her. She betrayed
no infirmity of footing as she walked past Arlington in the
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