Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor
would not have been so encouraging, half boyishly
caressing, with Dudley Sowerby! It was the very
manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted
as she was to her father. Nataly sighed, foreseeing
evil, owning it a superstition, feeling it a certainty.
We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material
ends appears most delicately perfect. History,
the tales of households, the tombstone, are with us
to inspire. In Nataly’s bosom, the reproof
of her inefficiency for offering counsel where Victor
for his soul’s sake needed it, was beginning
to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness
in his mate, worse than a public denunciation of the
sin against Society.
It might be decreed that she and Society were to come
to reconcilement. A pain previously thought of,
never previously so realized, seized her at her next
sight of Nesta. She had not taken in her front
mind the contrast of the innocent one condemned to
endure the shadow from which the guilty was by a transient
ceremony released. Nature could at a push be
eloquent to defend the guilty. Not a word of
vindicating eloquence rose up to clear the innocent.
Nothing that she could do; no devotedness, not any
sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy
to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child.
She dreamed of the succour in eloquence, to charm
the ears of chosen juries while a fact spoke over
the population, with a relentless rolling out of its
one hard word. But eloquence, powerful on her
behalf, was dumb when referred to Nesta. It
seemed a cruel mystery. How was it permitted
by the Merciful Disposer! . . . Nataly’s
intellect and her reverence clashed. They clash
to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit
of Life as a remote Externe, who plays the human figures,
to bring about this or that issue, instead of being
beside us, within us, our breath, if we will; marking
on us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount
to the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of
body or mind. She was in her error, from judgeing
of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals.
Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all
amid the fevered tangle of her sensations.
A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker
overhead when her warm blood had drawn her to some
acceptance of the philosophy of existence, in a savour
of gratification at the prospect of her equal footing
with the world while yet she lived. She hated
herself for taking pleasure in anything to be bestowed
by a world so hap-hazard, ill-balanced, unjust; she
took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not to
be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving
her to welcome the restorative ceremony because her
largeness of person had a greater than common need
of the protection.
CHAPTER XVII
Copyrights
One of Our Conquerors — Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
