One of Our Conquerors | Page 7

sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel,
and they smiled.
They do not smile on the condemnable.
She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him. And
who, calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the
blissful!
Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he
flew to it, he breathed, dispensed it. How conceive the clear-sighted
celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate? Not they. He
knew, for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield
him subservient responses. The world, or Puritanic members of it, had
pushed him to the trial once or twice--or had put on an air of doing so;
creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his
daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet
lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the
good example to shine in the sun.
He had a secret for them.
Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his baritone
--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate notes--should be
rising in spirited union with the curtain of that secret: there was matter
for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in it. And during the
whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast thought on a secret so
palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition and a long year's
prospect of the present day! It seemed to have been knocked clean out
of it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say. Nor had any combinations
upon the theme of business displaced it. Just before the fall, the whole
drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to his eyes as a scene
on a stage.
He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more

than the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would
define as feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a
homoeopathic globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything.
Only, Sanity does not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.
Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely little
while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white
waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful
in its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the
seas of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he stood
contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic
countenance, from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a
novelty to him; unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often
traversed, equally careful that his hesitation should not be seen. A trifle
more impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and
magnum of pursiness barring the City against him. He could have
laughed aloud at the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial
wonderment at London's sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as
well by the singular fit of timidity enchaining him. Cart, omnibus, cab,
van, barrow, donkey-tray, went by in strings, broken here and there,
and he could not induce his legs to take advantage of the gaps; he
listened to a warning that he would be down again if he tried it, among
those wheels; and his nerves clutched him, like a troop of household
women, to keep him from the hazard of an exposure to the horrid
crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth; and we may say truly, that once down,
or once out of the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal--the
forces of the world will have you in their mandibles.
An idea was there too; but it would not accept pursuit.
'A pretty scud overheard?' said a voice at his ear.
'For fine!--to-day at least,' Mr. Radnor affably replied to a stranger; and
gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and laughed:
'You?' He straightened his back immediately to cross the road,
dismissing nervousness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van:
'Anything doing in the City?' For Mr. Fenellan's proper station faced

Westward.
The reply was deferred until they had reached the pavement, when Mr.
Fenellan said: 'I'll tell you,' and looked a dubious preface, to his friend's
thinking.
But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots
on the coat.
'We'll lunch; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then,' said Mr. Radnor,
adding within himself: 'Emptiness! want of food!' to account for recent
ejaculations and qualms. He had not eaten for a good four hours.
Fenellan's tone signified to