One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
named her train for London in the early morning. He said it
was not too early. He would have desired to be warmed; yet
he liked her the better for the moral sentiment controlling
the physical. He had appointments with relatives or connections
in the town, and on that pretext he departed, hoping
for the speedy dawn of the morrow as soon as he had turned
his back on the house.
No, not he the man to have pity of women underfoot!
That was the thought, unrevolved, unphrased, all but unconscious,
in Nesta: and while her heart was exalting him
for his generosity. Under her present sense of the chilling
shadow, she felt the comfort there was in being grateful to
him for the golden beams which his generosity cast about
her. But she had an intelligence sharp to pierce, virgin though
she was; and with the mark in sight, however distant, she
struck it, unerring as an Artemis for blood of beasts: those
shrewd young wits, on the lookout to find a champion, athirst
for help upon a desolate road, were hard as any judicial to
pronounce the sentence upon Dudley in that respect. She
raised him high; she placed herself low; she had a glimpse of
the struggle he had gone through; love of her had helped
him, she believed. And she was melted; and not the less did
the girl’s implacable intuition read with the keenness of eye
of a man of the world the blunt division in him, where warm
humanity stopped short at the wall of social concrete forming
a part of this rightly esteemed young citizen. She, too,
was divided: she was at his feet; and she rebuked herself for
daring to judge—or rather, it was, for having a reserve in her
mind upon a man proving so generous with her. She was
pulled this way and that by sensibilities both inspiring to
blind gratitude and quickening her penetrative view. The
certainty of an unerring perception remained.
Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below, waiting
for their carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the Hon.
Dudley’s departure; soon after, Nesta entered to them. She swam
up to Dorothea’s lap, and dropped her head on it, kneeling.
The ladies feared she might be weeping. Dorothea patted
her thick brown twisted locks of hair. Unhappiness following
such an interview, struck them as an ill sign.
Virginia bent to the girl’s ear, and murmured: ‘All well?’
She replied: ‘He has been very generous.’
Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that
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