One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
kind of sweetness we may imagine ourselves to get in the
state of tired horse munching hay. If she had gone to her bed
with a noble or simply estimable plain image of one of her
friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been
thus abject. Skepsey’s discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey’s
behaviour behind it, threw her upon Dudley’s generosity, as
being the shield for an outcast. Girls, who see at a time of
need their ideal extinguished in its appearing tarnished, are
very much at the disposal of the pressing suitor. Nesta rose
in the black winter morn, summoning the best she could
think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.
According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom
of Dorothea and Virginia, to assure them of her having
slept well, and say the good-bye to them and their Tasso.
The little dog was the growl of a silken ball in a basket. His
mistresses excused him, because of his being unused to the
appearance of any person save Manton in their bedroom.
Dorothea, kissing her, said: ‘Adieu, dear child; and there is
home with us always, remember. And, after breakfast, however
it may be, you will, for our greater feeling of security,
have—she has our orders—Manton—your own maid we
consider too young for a guardian—to accompany you. We
will not have it on our consciences, that by any possibility
harm came to you while you were under our charge. The
good innocent girl we received from the hands of your father,
we return to him; we are sure of that.’
Nesta said: ‘Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.’
‘However it may be,’ Dorothea repeated her curtaining
phrase.
Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso’s temper he
enjoyed ordinarily a slumber of half an hour’s longer duration.
He was, Dorothea feelingly added, regularity itself. Virginia
murmured: ‘Except once!’ and both were appalled by
the recollection of that night. It had, nevertheless, caused
them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem’s published beautiful
sermon On Dirt; the words of which were an antidote to the
night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea
could reply to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting
Mr. Stuart Rem at his loftiest: ‘“Let us not bring into the
sacred precincts Dirt from the roads, but have a care to spread
it where it is a fructification.”’ Virginia produced the sequent
sentence, likewise weighty. Nesta stood between the thin di-
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