One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
He went to Nataly’s room.
She was considerately treated, and was aware of being
dandled, that she might have sleep.
She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.—Those
women invade us —we cannot keep them out! was her inward
cry: with a reverberation of the unfailing accompaniment:
The world holds you for one of them!
Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness
to doat upon his girl for whatever she did, set him exalting
Nesta’s conduct. She thought: Was Nesta so sympathetic with
her mother of late by reason of a moral insensibility to the
offence?
This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart,
that travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:—
the apprehended sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby’s knock
at the street door. Or sometimes a footman handed her his
letter, courteously phrased to withdraw from the alliance.
Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and her mother was
dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about
her. The girl was visioned as deadly. She might be indifferent
to the protection of Dudley’s name. Robust, sanguine, Victor’s
child, she might—her mother listened to a devil’s whisper—
but no; Nesta’s aim was at the heights; she was pure in mind
as in body. No, but the world would bring the accusation;
and the world would trace the cause: Heredity, it would say.
Would it say falsely? Nataly harped on the interrogation until
she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth,
and she found herself wondering at the breath she drew,
doubting that another would follow, speculating on the cruel
force which keeps us to the act of breathing.—Though I could
draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping across the moors!
her worn heart said to her youth: and out of ken of the world,
I could regain a portion of my self-esteem. Nature thereat renewed
her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were
supported by Dr. Themison’s account of the virtuous married
lady who chafed at the yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed
the independent union the ideal. Nataly’s brain had a short
gallop over moorland. It brought her face to face with Victor’s
girl, and she dropped once more to her remorse in herself and
her reproaches of Nesta. The girl had inherited from her father
something of the cataract’s force which won its way by
catching or by mastering, uprooting, ruining!
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