One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
was mistaken if he supposed the homoeopathic doctor who
smoked was exercising a destructive influence on the efficacy
of the infinitesimal doses he prescribed; Dr. Yatt chuckled
a laugh at globules; Dr. Cormyn at patients treated as
horses; while Mr. Catkin was brought to praise the smoke of
tobacco as our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr. Peridon quietly
denied, that the taking of it into his nostrils from the
puffs of his friend caused him sad silences: Nesta flew to
protect the admirer of her beloved Louise. Her subsiding
young excitement of the day set her Boating on that moony
melancholy in Mr. Peridon.
No one could understand the grounds for Colney’s more
than usual waspishness. He trotted out the fulgent and tonal
Church of the Rev. Septimus; the skeleton of worship, so
truly showing the spirit, in that of Dudley Sowerby’s family;
maliciously admiring both; and he had a spar with Fenellan,
ending in a snarl and a shout. Victor said to him: ‘Yes, here,
as much as you like, old Colney, but I tell you, you’ve staggered
that poor woman Lady Blachington to-day, and her
husband too; and I don’t know how many besides. What the
pleasure of it can be, I can’t guess.’
‘Nor I,’ said Fenellan, ‘but I’ll own I feel envious; like the
girl among a family of boys I knew, who were all of them
starved in their infancy by a miserly father, that gave them
barely a bit of Graves to eat and not a drop of Pempton to
drink; and on the afternoon of his funeral, I found them in
the drawing-room, four lank fellows, heels up, walking on
their hands, from long practice; and the girl informed me,
that her brothers were able so to send the little blood they
had in their bodies to their brains, and always felt quite cheerful
for it, happy, and empowered to deal with the problems
of the universe; as they couldn’t on their legs; but she, poor
thing, was forbidden to do the same! And I’m like her. I care
for decorum too much to get the brain to act on Colney’s
behaviour; but I see it enraptures him and may be comprehensible
to the topsy-turvy.’
Victor rubbed hands. It was he who filled Colney’s bag of
satiric spite. In addition to the downright lunacy of the courting
of country society, by means of the cajolements witnessed
this day, a suspicion that Victor was wearing a false face over
the signification—of Jarniman’s visit and meant to deceive
the trustful and too-devoted loving woman he seemed bound
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