One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
territorial and titled families. But certain of the minor titles
headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the families
were avowedly commercial. ‘They follow suit,’ her father said
at Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and
decided instantly to quit and fly once more. But if they followed
suit in such a way, then Mr. Durance must be right
when he called the social English the most sheepy of sheep:—
and Nesta could not consent to the cruel verdict, she adored
her compatriots. Incongruities were pacified for her by the
suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a
merchant, was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator
is not liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him;
or they did not like his being both.
She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion
that a quaint old high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical
rectitude (her thoughts rose in pictures) possibly condemned
the speculator as a description of gambler. An erratic severity
in ethics is easily overlooked by the enthusiast for things old
English. She was consciously ahead of them in the knowledge
that her father had been, without the taint of gambling, a
beneficent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South Africa,
and his dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways
in South America, his establishment of Insurance Offices,
which were Savings Banks, and the Stores for the dispensing
of sound goods to the poor, attested it. O and he was
hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the
very brightest of parents: he was his girl’s playmate. She could
be critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more
justly: yet if he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of
people, as these keen young optics perceived in him, he strove
to deserve it; and no one could accuse him of laying stress on
the benefits he conferred. Designedly, frigidly to wound a man
so benevolent, appeared to her as an incomprehensible baseness.
The dropping of acquaintanceship with him, after the
taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any better
elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit. It drove her,
despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism
that could find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance,
even when they passed her understanding; or when he was
not too distinctly seen by her to be shooting at all the parties
of her beloved England, beneath the wicked semblance of
shielding each by turns.
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