One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
had darkened her on the descent of stairs. For sensibilities
sharp as Nesta’s, are not to be had without their penalties:
and she who had gone nigh to summing in a flash the nature
of Dudley, sank suddenly under that affliction often besetting
the young adventurous mind, crushing to young
women:—the fascination exercised upon them by a positive
adverse masculine attitude and opinion. Young men know
well what it is: and if young women have by chance overcome
their timidity, to the taking of any step out of the trim
pathway, they shrink, with a sense of forlornest isolation. It
becomes a subjugation; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight
to cast off. Soon it assumed its material form for the contention
between her and Dudley, in the figure of Mrs. Marsett.
The Nesta who had been instructed to know herself to be
under a shadow, heard, she almost justified Dudley’s reproaches
to her, for having made the acquaintance of the
unhappy woman, for having visited her, for having been,
though but for a minute, at the mercy of a coarse gentleman’s
pursuit. The recollection was a smart buffet.
Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjuring
of Dudley’s words, should news of her relations with Mrs.
Marsett reach him:—and she would have to tell him. Would
he not say: ‘I have borne with the things concerning your
family. All the greater reason why I must insist’—he would
assuredly say he insisted (her humour caught at the word, as
being the very word one could foresee and clearly see him
uttering in a fit of vehemence) on her immediate abandonment
of ‘that woman.’
And with Nesta’s present enlightenment by dusky beams,
upon her parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the
opinion of the majority. Would he not say or think, that her
clinging to Mrs. Marsett put them under a kind of common
stamp, or gave the world its option to class them together?
These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined to
be a battle-field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of them,
while the girl’s face was hidden on Dorothea’s lap, and her
breast heaved and heaved.
She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must
instantly see her mother.
They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and Dorothea
said: ‘Yes, dear; any day you like.’
‘To-morrow—I must go to her to-morrow!’
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