One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
CHAPTER IX
pect for the covering solitariness of her chamber. A multitude
of clashing sensations, and a throat-thickening hateful
AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS to her, compelled her to summon so as to force herself to feel
a groundless anger, directed against none, against nothing,
ONE MAY NOT have an intention to flourish, and may be pardoned
for a semblance of it, in exclaiming, somewhat roy-
great wave surgent at her eyes.
perfectly crazy, but her only resource for keeping down the
ally, as creator and owner of the place: ‘There you see Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations
encircling him. He led through the straight passage
Lakelands.’
The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a of the galleried hall, offering two fair landscapes at front door
rise of road fronting an undulation, where our modern English
architect’s fantasia in crimson brick swept from central water, notable in a district not abounding in the commod-
and at back, down to the lake, Fredi’s lake; a good oblong of
gables to flying wings, over pents, crooks, curves, peaks, ity. He would have it a feature of the district; and it had been
cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections, away to a deepened and extended; up rose the springs, many ran the
red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious in ducts. Fredi’s pretty little bathshed or bower had a space of
irregularity; and coloured homely with the greensward about marble on the three-feet shallow it overhung with a shade of
it, the pines beside it, the clouds above it. Not many palaces carved woodwork; it had a diving-board for an eight-feet
would be reckoned as larger. The folds and swells and stream plunge; a punt and small row-boat of elegant build hard by.
of the building along the roll of ground, had an appearance Green ran the banks about, and a beechwood fringed with
of an enormous banner on the wind. Nataly looked. Her birches curtained the Northward length: morning sun and
next look was at Colney Durance. She sent the expected nods evening had a fair face of water to paint. Saw man ever the
to Victor’s carriage. She would have given the whole pros-
like for pleasing a poetical damsel? So was Miss Fredi, the
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