One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
‘It’s a large estate, mama, and a big new house.’
Nataly’s bosom sank. ‘Ah me! here’s misery! I ought to have
known. And too late now it has gone so far! But I never
imagined he would be building.’
She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if
her beauty were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily. To be
looking in that manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish.
But Nesta’s divinations were target-arrows; they flew to
the mark. Could it have been expected that Victor would
ever do anything on a small scale? O the dear little lost lost
cottage! She thought of it with a strain of the arms of
womanhood’s longing in the unblessed wife for a babe. For
the secluded modest cottage would not rack her with the old
anxieties, beset her with suspicions… .
‘My child, you won’t possibly have time before the dinnerhour,’
she said to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss
of comfort with a short and straining look out of the depths.
Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are
an incipient dislike, when one’s own feelings to the neighbours
are kind, could be affectionate. We are distracted, perverted,
made strangers to ourselves by a false position.
She heard his voice on a carol. Men do not feel this doubtful
position as women must. They have not the same to endure;
the world gives them land to tread, where women are
on breaking seas. Her Nesta knew no more than the pain of
being torn from a home she loved. But now the girl was
older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her
fearful directness would touch the spot, question, bring on
the scene to-come, necessarily to come, dreaded much more
than death by her mother. But if it might be postponed till
the girl was nearer to an age of grave understanding, with
some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a
case that could be pleaded!
He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it;
and in her present wrestle with the scheme of a large country
estate involving new intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of
rival magnates, followed by the wretched old cloud, and the
imposition upon them to bear it in silence though they knew
they could plead a case, at least before charitable and discerning
creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could
have asked whether he was perfectly sane.
Who half so brilliantly!—Depreciation of him, fetched up
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