One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
are the angels who cause us to think of changeing. I don’t
care for sermons, but when I meet charity: I won’t bore you!’
‘You don’t.’
‘My … Captain Marsett can’t bear—he calls it Psalmody.
He thinks things ought always to be as they are, with women
and men; and women preachers he does detest. She is not
one to preach. You are waiting to hear what I have to tell.
That man Major Worrell has tried to rob me of everything I
ever had to set a value on:—love, I ‘d say;—he laughs at a
woman like me loving.’
Dartrey nodded, to signify a known sort of fellow.
‘She came here.’ Mrs. Marsett’s tears had risen. ‘I ought
not to have let her come. I invited her—for once: I am lonely.
None of my sex—none I could respect! I meant it for only
once. She promised to sing to me. And, Oh! how she sings!
You have heard her. My whole heart came out. I declare I
believe girls exist who can hear our way of life—and I’m not
so bad except compared with that angel, who heard me, and
was and is, I could take oath, no worse for it. Some girls can;
she is one. I am all for bringing them up in complete innocence.
If I was a great lady, my daughters should never know
anything of the world until they were married. But Miss
Radnor is a young lady who cannot be hurt. She is above us.
Oh! what a treasure for a man!—and my God! for any man
born of woman to insult a saint, as she is!—He is a beast!’
‘Major Worrell met her here?’
‘Blame me as much as you like: I do myself. Half my rage
with him is at myself for putting her in the way of such a
beast to annoy. Each time she came, I said it was to be the
last. I let her see what a mercy from heaven she was to me.
She would come. It has not been many times. She wishes me
either to … Captain Marsett has promised. And nothing
seems hard—to me when my own God’s angel is by. She is!
I’m not such a bad woman, but I never before I knew her
knew the meaning of the word virtue. There is the young
lady that man worried with his insulting remarks! though he
must have known she was a lady:—because he found her in
my rooms.’
‘You were present when, as you say, he insulted her?’
‘I was. Here it commenced; and he would see her downstairs.’
‘You heard?’
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