One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
“Jacob”: my husband’s Christian name:—so like my husband,
where there’s no concealment! There—he says:
“Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow.” Can it
signify, affairs are bad with my husband in the city?’
It had that signification to Nataly’s understanding. At the
same time, the pretty little woman’s absurd lisping repetition
of ‘my husband’ did not seem without design to inflict
the wound it caused.
In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment
of a silly tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be
controlled: and after contrasting her fortunes with Nataly’s,
on her way downstairs, she had comforted herself by saying,
that at least she had a husband. She was not aware that she
dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation in the
indulgence: for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding
figure of a woman, who could not legally say that
which the woman he admired less, if at all, legally could say.
‘I must leave you to interpret,’ Nataly remarked.
Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style. For
this reason, she abstained from an intended leading up to
mention of the ‘singular-looking lady’ seen riding with Miss
Radnor more than once; and as to whom, Miss Radnor (for
one gives her the name) had not just now, when questioned,
spoken very clearly. So the mother’s alarms were not raised.
And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey
subsequently; finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor’s
visit; it was a pity, because a young woman in Miss Radnor’s
position should not by any possibility be seen in association
with a person of commonly doubtful appearance.
She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the
championship bitter to her. Dartrey would not deliver an
opinion on Miss Radnor’s conduct. He declined, moreover,
to assist in elucidating the telegram by ‘looking here,’ and
poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek. He was petulantly
whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted at.
And it was then—and then only or chiefly through Nataly’s
recent allusion—that the man of honour had his quakings
in view of the quagmire, where he was planted on an exceedingly
narrow causeway, not of the firmest. For she was a pretty
little woman, one of the prize gifts of the present education
of women to the men who are for having them quiescent
domestic patterns; and her artificial ingenuousness or can-
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