One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
servative, were not wanting. All of them were pointedly opposed,
extraordinarily for so small an assembly: absurdly, it
might be thought: but these provoked a kind warm smile,
with the exclamation: ‘They are dears!’ They were the dearer
for their fads and foibles.
Music harmonized them. Music, strangely, put the spell
on Colney Durance, the sayer of bitter things, manufacturer
of prickly balls, in the form of Discord’s apples of whom
Fenellan remarked, that he took to his music like an angry
little boy to his barley-sugar, with a growl and a grunt. All
these diverse friends could meet and mix in Victor’s Concert-room
with an easy homely recognition of one another’s
musical qualities, at times enthusiastic; and their natural divergencies
and occasional clashes added a salient tastiness to
the group of whom Nesta could say: ‘Mama, was there ever
such a collection of dear good souls with such contrary
minds?’ Her mother had the deepest of reasons for loving
them, so as not to wish to see the slightest change in their
minds, that the accustomed features making her nest of homeliness
and real peace might be retained, with the humour of
their funny silly antagonisms and the subsequent march in
concord; excepting solely as regarded the perverseness of
Priscilla Graves in her open contempt of Mr. Pempton’s innocent
two or three wine-glasses. The vegetarian gentleman’s
politeness forbore to direct attention to the gobbets of meat
Priscilla consumed, though he could express disapproval in
general terms; but he entertained sentiments as warlike to
the lady’s habit of ‘drinking the blood of animals.’ The mockery
of it was, that Priscilla liked Mr. Pempton and admired
his violoncello-playing, and he was unreserved in eulogy of
her person and her pure soprano tones. Nataly was a poetic
match-maker. Mr. Peridon was intended for Mademoiselle
de Seilles, Nesta’s young French governess; a lady of a courtly
bearing, with placid speculation in the eyes she cast on a
foreign people, and a voluble muteness shadowing at intervals
along the line of her closed lips.
The one person among them a little out of tune with most,
was Lady Grace Halley. Nataly’s provincial gentlewoman’s
traditions of the manners indicating conduct, reproved unwonted
licences assumed by Lady Grace; who, in allusion to
Hymen’s weaving of a cousinship between the earldom of
Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang,
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