One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
in these Islands, in Europe, America, all over our habitable
sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way to bliss, was no
longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show himself
to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the enjoyments,
this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing
himself upon the world as a factory of ideas. Colney’s
insolent charge, that the English have no imagination—a
doomed race, if it be true!—would be confuted. For our
English require but the lighted leadership to come into cohesion,
and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song
of their benevolent aim. And that astral head giving, as a
commencement, example of the right use of riches, the nation
is one, part of the riddle of the future solved.
Surely he had here the Idea? He had it so warmly, that his
bath-water heated. Only the vision was wanted.
On London Bridge he had seen it—a great thing done to
the flash of brilliant results. That was after a fall.
There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.
Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications
and significations in the fall!—But there had certainly been
a moral fall, fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining
of that scheme of Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible
Nesta—who had saved him from falling
further. His bath-water chilled. He jumped out and rubbed
furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea
for simple warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel
just that sustainment; with the cry: But no one can say I do
not love my Nataly! And he tested it to prove it by his readiness
to die for her: which is heroically easier than the devotedly
living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts
for surpassing the latter tedious performance.
His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces. Except for
the making of money, the whole year of an erected Lakelands,
notwithstanding uninterrupted successes, was a blank. Or
rather we have to wish it were a blank. The scheme departs:
payment for the enlisted servants of it is in prospect. A black
agent, not willingly enlisted, yet pointing to proofs of service,
refuses payment in ordinary coin; and we tell him we
owe him nothing, that he is not a man of the world, has no
understanding of Nature: and still the fellow thumps and
alarums at a midnight door we are astonished to find we
have in our daylight house. How is it? Would other men be
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