One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
which is the guarantee of enjoyment: doing otherwise, we
lose ourselves in one or other of the furious matrix instincts;
we are blunt to all else.
Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with
Miss Radnor; he alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments.
He was waxing to fervidness. He said he must expect competitors;
adding, on a start, that he was to say, from his mother,
she, in the case of an intention to present Miss Radnor at
Court … .
Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head
had come out of hot water. He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities,
under a kind of sneer at its functions: ‘Court! my
girl? But the arduous duties are over for the season. We are a
democratic people retaining the seductions of monarchy, as
a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count among
the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court
presentations; no harm. Only there’s plenty of time … very
young girls have their heads turned—though I don’t say, don’t
imagine, my girl would. By and by perhaps.’
Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling’s room and introduced
to the figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate,
and Radnor: a respectable City merchant indeed, whom
Dudley could read-off in a glimpse of the downright contrast
to his partner. He had heard casual remarks on the respectable
City of London merchant from Colney Durance.
A short analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the
powers of the man who kept him up. Mr. Inchling was a
florid City-feaster, descendant of a line of City merchants,
having features for a wife to identify; as drovers, they tell us,
can single one from another of their round-bellied beasts.
Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits
of restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor’s obedient
cart-horse. He sighed in set terms for the old days of
the Firm, when, like trouts in the current, the Firm had only
to gape for shoals of good things to fatten it: a tale of English
prosperity in quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the
by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to make it our
national Poem.
Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden
oats were still somehow constantly allotted to him. His wife
believed in Victor, and deemed the loss of the balancing
Pennergate a gain. Since that lamentable loss, Mr. Inchling,
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