One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
at a stroke the glittering armies of her enthusiasm. He had
proved it; he proved it daily in conflicts and in victories that
dwarfed emotional troubles like hers: yet they were something
to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable.
But those were times of weakness. Let anything be doubted
rather than the good guidance of the man who was her breath
of life! Whither he led, let her go, not only submissively,
exultingly.
Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that
unless rushing into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had
to do it, and should therefore think it.
This was the prudent woman’s clear deduction from the
state wherein she found herself, created by the one first great
step of the mad woman. Her surrender then might be likened
to the detachment of a flower on the river’s bank by
swell of flood: she had no longer root of her own; away she
sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing
fall, a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more
the sunny whirling surface. Strange to think, she had not
since then power to grasp in her abstract mind a notion of
stedfastness without or within.
But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman. Love is
a madness, having heaven’s wisdom in it—a spark. But even
when it is driving us on the breakers, call it love: and be not
unworthy of it, hold to it. She and Victor had drunk of a
cup. The philtre was in her veins, whatever the directions of
the rational mind.
Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car
with a racing charioteer. Or up beside a more than Titanically
audacious balloonist. For the charioteer is bent on a
goal; and Victor’s course was an ascension from heights to
heights. He had ideas, he mastered Fortune. He conquered
Nataly and held her subject, in being above his ambition;
which was now but an occupation for his powers, while the
aim of his life was at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment.
In spite of his fits of unreasonableness in the means—
and the woman loving him could trace them to a breath of
nature—his gentle good friendly innocent aim in life was of
this very simplest; so wonderful, by contrast with his powers,
that she, assured of it as she was by experience of him,
was touched, in a transfusion of her feelings through lucent
globes of admiration and of tenderness, to reverence. There
43