One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
haven of heavenliness, to delight in:—these conjoined with
a woman’s unspoken pleading ideas of her own, on her own
behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication of Nature.
Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them,
Nataly could argue her case in her conscience—deep down
and out of hearing, where women under scourge of the laws
they have not helped decree may and do deliver their minds.
She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature against the
Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of
revel; but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come;
she who was designed by nature to be an ornament of those
Institutions opposed them and when thinking of the rights
and the conduct of the decrepit Legitimate—virulent in a
heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy—she had Nature’s
logic, Nature’s voice, for self-defence. It was eloquent with
her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to the
convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires
within to feel elementally. The other voices within her issued
of the acknowledged dues to her family and to the
world—the civilization protecting women: sentences thereanent
in modern books and Journals. But the remembrance
of moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by
name of Love raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing,
was, in a perpetual struggle with a whirlpool, a constant
support while she and Victor were one at heart. The sense of
her standing alone made her sway; and a thought of differences
with him caused frightful apprehensions of the abyss.
Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that
he had governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and
he might therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public
men, expect a woman blindfold to follow his lead. But
no; we may be rebels against our time and its Laws: if we are
really for Nature, we are not lawless. Nataly’s untutored
scruples, which came side by side with her ability to plead
for her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring
of a young man of social rank to espouse the daughter of a
couple socially insurgent-stained, to common thinking,
should denunciation come. The Nature upholding her fled
at a vision of a stranger entangled. Pitiable to reflect, that he
was not one of the adventurer-lords of prey who hunt and
run down shadowed heiresses and are congratulated on their
luck in a tolerating country! How was the young man to be
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