One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

‘It relieves me, if you will. Here is your horse.’
She gave her hand. He touched it and bent. He looked at
her. A surge of impossible questions rolled to his mouth and
rolled back, with the thought of an incredible thing, that her
manner, more than her words, held him from doubting.
‘I obey you,’ he said.
‘You are kind.’
He mounted horse, raised hat, paced on, and again bowing,
to one of the wayside trees, cantered. The man was gone;
but not from Nataly’s vision that face of wet chalk under one
of the shades of fire.
George Meredith
CHAPTER XXVI
IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL
GENTLEMAN ENDEAVOURING TO EX-
AMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
DUDLEY RODE BACK to Cronidge with his thunderstroke. It
filled him, as in those halls of political clamour, where explanatory
speech is not accepted, because of a drowning tide
of hot blood on both sides. He sought to win attention by
submitting a resolution, to the effect, that he would the next
morning enter into the presence of Mr. Victor Radnor, bearing
his family’s feelings, for a discussion upon them. But the
brutish tumult, in addition to surcharging, encased him: he
could not rightly conceive the nature of feelings: men were
driving shoals; he had lost hearing and touch of individual
men; had become a house of angrily opposing parties.
He was hurt, he knew; and therefore he supposed himself
injured, though there were contrary outcries, and he admitted
that he stood free; he had not been inextricably deceived.
The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a
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