One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
coldest of the party hitherto, and dreaming a preference of
‘old places’ like Creckholt and Craye Farm, ‘captured to be
enraptured,’ quite according to man’s ideal of his beneficence
to the sex. She pressed the hand of her young French governess,
Louise de Seilles. As in everything he did for his girl,
Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience
and her tastes: the pine-panels of the interior, the
shelves for her books, pegs to hang her favourite drawings,
and the couch-bunk under a window to conceal the summerly
recliner while throwing full light on her book; and the hearthsquare
for logs, when she wanted fire: because Fredi bathed
in any weather: the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings
of doves, tits, fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings
she was to choose, and have shy odalisque peeps of sunny
water from her couch.
‘Fredi’s Naiad retreat, when she wishes to escape Herr
Strauscher or Signor Ruderi,’ said Victor, having his grateful
girl warm in an arm; ‘and if they head after her into the
water, I back her to leave them puffing; she’s a dolphin. That
water has three springs and gets all the drainage of the upland
round us. I chose the place chiefly on account of it and
the pines. I do love pines!’
‘But, excellent man! what do you not love?’ said Lady Grace,
with the timely hit upon the obvious, which rings.
‘It saves him from accumulation of tissue,’ said Colney.
‘What does?’ was eagerly asked by the wife of the
homoeopathic Dr. John Cormyn, a sentimental lady beset
with fears of stoutness.
Victor cried: ‘Tush; don’t listen to Colney, pray.’
But she heard Colney speak of a positive remedy; more
immediately effective than an abjuration of potatoes and
sugar. She was obliged by her malady to listen, although detesting
the irreverent ruthless man, who could direct expanding
frames, in a serious tone, to love; love everybody, everything;
violently and universally love; and so without intermission
pay out the fat created by a rapid assimilation of
nutriment. Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments:
probably as being aware, that its legitimate appeal to pathos
is ever smothered in its pudding-bed of the grotesque. She
was pained, and showed it, and was ashamed of herself for
showing it; and that very nearly fetched the tear.
‘Our host is an instance in proof,’ Colney said. He waved
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