One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
the antidote. She said to him: ‘Luciani’s voice wears better
than her figure.’
The colonel replied: ‘I remember,’ and corrected himself,
‘at Eton, in jackets: she was not so particularly slim; never
knew how to dress. You beat Italians there! She moved one
as a youngster.’
‘Eton boys are so susceptible!’
‘Why, hulloa, don’t I remember her coming out!—and do
you mean to tell me,’ Mr. Beaves Urmsing brutally addressed
the colonel, ‘that you were at Eton when … why, what age
do you give the poor woman, then!’ He bellowed, ‘Eh?’ as it
were a bull crowing.
The colonel retreated to one of his defensive corners. ‘I am
not aware that I meant to tell you anything.’
Mr. Beaves Urmsing turned square-breasted on Fenellan:
‘Fellow’s a born donkey!’
‘And the mother lived?’ said Fenellan.
Mr. Beaves Urmsing puffed with wrath at the fellow.
Five minutes later, in the midst of the group surrounding
and felicitating Victor, he had sight of Fenellan conversing
with fair ones, and it struck a light in him; he went three
steps backward, with shouts. ‘Dam funny fellow! eh? who is
he? I must have that man at my table. Worth fifty Colonel
Jackasses! And I ‘ve got a son in the Guards: and as much
laugh in him, he ‘s got, as a bladder. But we’ll make a party,
eh, Radnor? with that friend o’ yours. Dam funny fellow!
and precious little of it going on now among the young lot.
They’re for seeing ghosts and gaping their jaws; all for the
quavers instead of the capers.’
He sounded and thrummed his roguish fling-off for the
capers. A second glimpse of Fenellan agitated the anecdote,
as he called it, seizing Victor’s arm, to have him out of earshot
of the ladies. Delivery, not without its throes, was accomplished,
but imperfectly, owing to sympathetic convulsions,
under which Mr. Beaves Urmsing’s countenance was
crinkled of many colours, as we see the Spring rhubarb-leaf.
Unable to repeat the brevity of Fenellan’s rejoinder, he expatiated
on it to convey it, swearing that it was the kind of
thing done in the old days, when men were witty dogs:—
’pat! and pat back! as in the pantomime.’
‘Repartee !’ said Victor. ‘He has it. You shall know him.
You’re the man for him.’
201