One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
CHAPTER XXXVIII
NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY
FENELLAN
PLEASANT THINGS, that come to us too late for our savour of
the sweetness in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk
to its end. Yesterday, before Dudley Sowerby’s visit, Nataly
would have been stirred where the tears we shed for happiness
or repress at a flattery dwell when seeing her friend Mrs.
John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing her speak repentantly,
most tenderly. Mrs. John said: ‘You will believe I
have suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think’: and she
did not set the smile of responsive humour moving; although
these two ladies had a key of laughter between them. Nataly
took her kiss; held her hand, and at the parting kissed her.
She would rather have seen her friend than not: so far she
differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to the
dead in the insensibility to any change of light shining on
one who best loved darkness and silence. She cried to herself
wilfully, that her pride was broken: as women do when they
spurn at the wounding of a dignity they cannot protect and
die to see bleeding; for in it they live.
The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and
after a certain space for recovery combative. She said:
Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not
refuse; I would humble myself and bless heaven for being
able to pay my debt—what I can of it. All I contend against
is, injustice. And she sank into sensational protests of her
anxious care of her daughter, too proud to phrase them.
Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter
loneliness;—an outcast from her family; daily, and she
knew not how, more shut away from the man she loved;
now shut away from her girl;—seemed under the hand of
the angel of God. The abandonment of her by friends, was
merely the light to show it.
Midday’s post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves,
entreating to be allowed to call on her next day.—We are
not so easily cast off! Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the
lady whose offending had not been so great. She wrote:
‘Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.’
Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with
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