One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
But he was admonished, that to speak high approval would
not be honourable advantage taken of the rival condemning;
and he said: ‘Blame? Some think it is not always the
right thing to do the right thing. I’ve made mistakes, with
no bad design. A good mother’s view is not often wrong.’
‘You pressed my hand,’ she murmured.
That certainly had said more.
‘Glad to again,’ he responded. It was uttered airily and was
meant to be as lightly done.
Nesta did not draw back her hand. ‘I feel strong when you
press it.’ Her voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing
thin at the filling, ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged.
How was he to relax the pressure!—he had to give her the
strength she craved: and he vowed it should be but for half a
minute, half a minute longer.
Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of
sunlight in shower.
‘Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,’ he
said; and her gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.
He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud
lighting it for a revealment, that allowed as little as it retained
of a shadow of obscurity.
The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood
with blood to quicken slumbering seeds of passion.
But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which
calls to honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to
guard the gunlock. He stopped the word at his mouth. It
was not in him to stop or moderate the force of his eyes. She
met them with the slender unbendingness that was her own;
a feminine of inspirited manhood. There was no soft expression,
only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying
as much as is borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun.
And when such an exchange has come between the two, they
are past plighting, they are the wedded one.
Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved. She
was his. She had not a thought of the word of love or the
being beloved. Showers of painful blissfulness went through
her, as the tremours of a shocked frame, while she sat quietly,
showing scarce a sign; and after he had let her hand go,
she had the pressure on it. The quivering intense of the moment
of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day
and of all days coming. That is how Love slays Death. Never
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