One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
CHAPTER XL
AN EXPIATION
NATALY had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship
save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather
than try at healing. So rational a mind as she had was not
long in outliving mistaken impressions; she could distinguish
her girl’s feeling, and her aim; she could speak on the subject
with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on. Louise de Seilles
comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta. Mademoiselle,
however, by means of a change of tone and look
when Dudley Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes,
showed a too pronounced preference of the more unstable
one:—or rather, the man adventurous out of the world’s highways,
whose image, as husband of such a daughter as hers,
smote the wounded mother with a chillness. Mademoiselle’s
occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might
have tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions,
accounting for the young Frenchwoman’s novel tenderness
to England, of which Nesta proudly, very happily boasted.
The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected: for not even
the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly’s generous
character, to let her moods divert and command her
thoughts of persons.
Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything
about her; with the one exception of the reason
why she had come to favour Dudley, and how it was she had
been smitten by that woman at Brighton to see herself in her
position altogether with the world’s relentless, unexamining
hard eyes. Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made an
honest woman!—And there was a strain of the lower in
Nataly, to reproach the girl for causing the reflection to be
cast on the unwedded. Otherwise her mind was open; she
was of aid to Victor in his confusion over some lost Idea he
had often touched on latterly. And she was the one who sent
him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: ‘You would
found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of
luxury’ when he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior
weapon. That being, in fact, as Colney Durance had
pointed out to him, the weapon of self-conquest used by
them ‘before they fell away to flesh-pottery.’ Was it his Idea?
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