One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
some taste of the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony
because of her eating at all, and a vile confession, that she was
enabled to eat, owing to the receipt of Priscilla’s empty letter:
for her soul’s desire was to be doing a deed of expiation, and
the macerated flesh seemed her assurance to herself of the courage
to make amends.—I must have some strength, she said
wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.
Nesta’s being in the house with her, became an excessive
irritation. Doubts of the girl’s possible honesty to speak a reptile
truth under question; amazement at her boldness to speak
it; hatred of, the mouth that could: and loathing of the words,
the theme; and abomination of herself for conjuring fictitious
images to rouse real emotions; all ran counterthreads, that produced
a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting to reason: and
then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational leap, and
ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to the
divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal
spot for chastisement. She clasped her breast, and said: It is
mortal. And that calmed her.
She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came!
Therefore the blow was proved divine. Ought it not to be
welcomed?—and she appearing no better than one of those,
the leprous of the sex! And brought to acknowledgement of
the likeness by her daughter!
Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations
and was ice. She had denied herself to Nesta’s redoubled petition.
Nesta knocking at the door a third time and calling,
tore the mother two ways: to have her girl on her breast or
snap their union in a word with an edge. She heard the voice
of Dartrey Fenellan.
He was admitted. ‘No, dear,’ she said to Nesta; and Nesta’s,
‘My own mother,’ consentingly said, in tender resignation,
as she retired, sprang a stinging tear to the mother’s eyelids.
Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.
‘Is it a very low woman?’ Nataly asked him in a Church
whisper, with a face abashed.
‘It is not,’ said he, quick to meet any abruptness.
‘She must be cunning.’
‘In the ordinary way. We say it of Puss before the hounds.’
‘To deceive a girl like Nesta!’
‘She has done no harm.’
‘Dartrey, you speak to a mother. You have seen the woman?
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