CHAPTER XL

AN EXPIATION

Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.  So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken impressions; she could distinguish her girl’s feeling, and her aim; she could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.  Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.  Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced preference of the more unstable one:—­or rather, the man adventurous out of the world’s highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness.  Mademoiselle’s occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the young Frenchwoman’s novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly, very happily boasted.  The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected:  for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly’s generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of persons.

Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to see herself in her position altogether with the world’s relentless, unexamining hard eyes.  Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett:  She is made an honest woman!—­And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded.  Otherwise her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion over some lost Idea he had often touched on latterly.  And she was the one who sent him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying:  ’You would found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury’ when he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior weapon.  That being, in fact, as Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-conquest used by them ‘before they fell away to flesh-pottery.’  Was it his Idea?  He fancied an aching at the back of his head when he speculated.  But his Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a creation; and this came before him with the yellow skin of a Theory, bred, born of books.  Though Nataly’s mention of the aristocracy of self-denying discipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.