One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
noble inducement as often as by base: Nature at flood being
the cause in either instance. This young Nature of the good
and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as
well as to thirsts of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves,
to discover how much of Nature their abstract
honourable conception or representative eidolon of young
women will bear without going to pieces; and it will not be
much, unless they shall have taken instruction from the poet’s
pen: for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the slough,
when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If
they have learnt of Nature’s priest to respect her, they will
less distrust those rare daughters of hers who are moved by
her warmth to lift her out of slime. It is by her own live
warmth that it has to be done: cold worship at a niche in the
wall will not do it.—Well, there is an index, for the enlargement
of your charity.
But facts were Dudley’s teachers. Physically, morally, mentally,
he read the world through facts; that is to say, through
the facts he encountered: and he was in consequence
foredoomed to a succession of bumps; all the heavier from
his being, unlike the horned kind, not unimpressible by the
hazy things outside his experience. Even at his darkest over
Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her parents,
which denied to a certain still small advocate within
him the right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the
attitude for pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct;
at best a stammering speaker in the Court of the wigged
Facts. Instinct of this Nesta Radnor’s character would have
said a brave word, but for her deeds bearing witness to her
inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous temperament.
What to do? He was no nearer to an answer when the
wintry dusk had fallen on the promenading crowds. To do
nothing, is the wisdom of those who have seen fools perish.
Facts had not taught him, that the doing nothing, for a length
of days after the first shock he sustained, was the reason of
how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance with
the ‘agreeable lady’ she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge.
Those excellent counsellors of a mercantile community gave
him no warnings, that the ‘masterly inactive’ part, so greatly
esteemed by him for the conduct of public affairs, might be
perilous in dealings with a vivid girl: nor a hint, that when
facts continue undigested, it is because the sensations are as
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