One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in the dark,
getting to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched
the door of a mystery that denied her its key, but showed the
lock; and her life was beginning to know of hours that fretted
her to recklessness. Her friend Louise was absent: she had so
few friends—owing to that unsolved reason: she wanted one,
of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady seemed to need her:
and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for swallowing and
digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.
At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in musing
on her, wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was
wearisome to hear praises of ‘innocence’; and women can do
so little to cure that ‘wickedness of men,’ among the lady’s
conversational themes; and ‘love’ too: it may be a ‘plague,’
and it may be ‘heaven’: it is better left unspoken of. But there
were times when Mrs. Marsett’s looks and tones touched
compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing
signification in the girl’s bosom: and when, by the simple
avoidance of ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett’s quieted good
looks had a shadow of a tender charm, more pathetic than
her outcries were.
These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her
English was guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English
of commerce and drainage instead of the upper wells.
But there are many uneducated ladies in the land. Many,
too, whose tastes in romantic literature betray now and then
by peeps a similarity to Nesta’s maid Mary’s. Mrs. Marsett
liked love, blood, and adventure. She had, moreover, a
favourite noble poet, and she begged Nesta’s pardon for naming
him, and she would not name him, and told her she
must not read him until she was a married woman, because
he did mischief to girls. Thereupon she fell into one of her
silences, emerging with a cry of hate of herself for having
ever read him. She did not blame the bard. And, ah, poor
bard! he fought his battle: he shall not be named for the
brand on the name. He has lit a sulphur match for the lover
of nature through many a generation; and to be forgiven by
sad frail souls who could accuse him of pipeing devil’s agent
to them at the perilous instant—poor girls too!—is chastisement
enough. This it is to be the author of unholy sweets: a
Posterity sitting in judgement will grant, that they were part
of his honest battle with the hypocrite English Philistine,
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