One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
them.’—Not like one near death.—They were met in the
hall by the Rev. Groseman Buttermore. ‘You will find a welcome,’
was his reassurance to them: gently delivered, on the
stoop of a large person. His whispered tones were more agreeably
deadening than his words.
Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.
‘Can she bear it?’ Victor said, and heard: ‘Her wish ten
minutes.’
‘Soon over,’ he murmured to Nataly, with a compassionate
exclamation for the invalid.
They rounded the open door. They were in the drawingroom.
It was furnished as in the old time, gold and white,
looking new; all the same as of old, save for a division of
silken hangings; and these were pale blue: the colour preferred
by Victor for a bedroom. He glanced at the ceiling, to
bathe in a blank space out of memory. Here she lived,—here
she slept, behind the hangings. There was refreshingly that
little difference in the arrangement of the room. The corner
Northward was occupied by the grand piano; and Victor
had an inquiry in him:—tuned? He sighed, expecting a sight
to come through the hangings. Sensible that Nataly trembled,
he perceived the Rev. Groseman Buttermore half across a
heap of shawl-swathe on the sofa.
Mrs. Burman was present; seated. People may die seated;
she had always disliked the extended posture; except for the
night’s rest, she used to say; imagining herself to be not inviting
the bolt of sudden death, in her attitude when seated
by day:—and often at night the poor woman had to sit up
for the qualms of her dyspepsia!—But I ‘m bound to think
humanely, be Christian, be kind, benignant, he thought, and
he fetched the spirit required, to behold her face emerge from
a pale blue silk veiling; as it were, the inanimate wasted led
up from the mould by morning.
Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.
Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for sunken
eyes was distinguishable as the one once known. If the world
could see it and hear, that it called itself a man’s wife! She
looked burnt out.
Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa. Execution there!
Victor thought, and he garrotted the unruly mind of a man
really feeling devoutness in the presence of the shadow thrown
by the dread Shade.
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