One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

CHAPTER XXXIX
A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW
OF MRS. MARSETT
HE READ her more closely when Arlington brought in the
brown paper envelope of the wires—to which the mate of
Victor ought to have become accustomed. She took it; her
eyelids closed, and her features were driven to whiteness.
‘Only these telegrams,’ she said, in apology.
‘Lakelands on fire?’ Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she
answered: ‘I should not be sorry.’
Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.
Dartrey interposed: ‘I’m sure she thinks Lakelands worries
her mother.’
‘That ranks low among the worries,’ Nataly sighed, opening
the envelope.
Nesta touched her arm: ‘Mother! even before Captain
Dartrey, if you will let me!’—she turned to him: ‘before …’
at the end of her breath she said: ‘Dartrey Fenellan. You shall
see my whole heart, mother.’
George Meredith
Her mother looked from her at him.
‘Victor returns by the last train. He telegraphs, that he
dines with—’ She handed the paper to Dartrey.
‘Marsett,’ he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry
with him for not knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium
flung at her.
‘It’s to tell you he has done what he thought good,’ said
Dartrey. ‘In other words, as I interpret, he has completed his
daughter’s work. So we won’t talk about it till he comes. You
have no company this evening?’
‘Oh! there is a pause to-night! It’s nearly as unceasing as
your brother Simeon’s old French lady in the ronde with her
young bridegroom, till they danced her to pieces. I do get
now and then an hour’s repose,’ Nataly added, with a vision
springing up of the person to whom the story had applied.
‘My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,’ the owner
of the name said to Nesta.
Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar
to both, for the directest of the bare statements. She could
have protested, that her love of truth was on an equality with
theirs; and certainly, that her regard for decency was livelier.
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