One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
‘The time begins to run. We have to look forward now:—
I declare, it’s I who seem the provident mother for Fredi!’
‘Let our girl wait; don’t hurry her mind to … She is happy
with her father and mother. She is in the happiest time of
her life, before those feelings distract.’
‘If we see good fortune for her, we can’t let it pass her.’
A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor,
which would be of necessity to do the avoided thing and
roll up the forbidden curtain opening on their whole history
past and prospective, was met in Nataly’s bosom by the more
bitter immediate confession that she was not his match. To
speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the effort;
and hopelessly after being overborne by him. There was not
the anticipation of a set contest to animate the woman’s naturally
valiant heart; he was too strong: and his vividness in
urgency overcame her in advance, fascinated her sensibility
through recollection; he fanned an inclination, lighted it to
make it a passion, a frenzied resolve—she remembered how
and when. She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married
sister, containing no word of endearment or proposal
for a meeting. An unregretted day, if Victor would think of
the dues to others; that is, would take station with the world
to see his reflected position, instead of seeing it through their
self-justifying knowledge of the honourable truth of their
love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the world
bestows on its orderly subjects.
They had done evil to no one as yet. Nataly thought that;
not-withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered
woman who bore Victor Radnor’s name: for whom, in consequence
of the rod the woman had used, this tenderest of
hearts could summon no emotion. If she had it, the thing
was not to be hauled up to consciousness. Her feeling was,
that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition
dissolving in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness.
She was frigid because she knew rightly of herself, that she in
the place of power would never have struck so meanly. But
the mainspring of the feeling in an almost remorseless bosom
drew from certain chance expressions of retrospective
physical distaste on Victor’s part;—hard to keep from a short
utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed
exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a
96