One of Our Conquerors | Page 3

petting the mob, for tossing it sops,
never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to
exhibit the grinders: and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his
dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word
punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered
him susceptible. Headache threatened--and to him of all men! But was
there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium? Puzzles are
presented to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller

they are the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in
rattle-boxes, they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but
not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they
break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in
hollowness. Or does this happen to us only after a fall?
He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the
clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations,
in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by
any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London
Bridge, of all places in the world!--he, so popular, renowned for his
affability, his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs,
entirely the reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and
accustomed to receive their applause. And in what way had he offered a
hint to bring on him the charge of punctilio?
'But I am treating it seriously!' he said, and jerked a dead laugh while
fixing a button of his coat.
That he should have treated it seriously, furnished next the subject of
cogitation; and here it was plainly suggested, that a degradation of his
physical system, owing to the shock of the fall, must be seen and
acknowledged; for it had become a perverted engine, to pull him down
among the puerilities, and very soon he was worrying at punctilio anew,
attempting to read the riddle of the application of it to himself, angry
that he had allowed it to be the final word, and admitting it a famous
word for the closing of a controversy:--it banged the door and rolled
drum-notes; it deafened reason. And was it a London cockney
crow-word of the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head
from the perusal of his pothouse newspaper columns?
Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall,
required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to
him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of
collapses. This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee--using a
friend's term for the ready gift--was an old and a rueful one with Victor
Radnor. His godmother Fortune denied him that. She bestowed it on his
friend Fenellan, and little else. Simeon Fenellan could clap the halter

on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and stilled it,
by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him; and the effect
of the scene upon Victor Radnor disposed him to rank the gift of
repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was permitted to
tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught. Let it only be
explosive repartee: the well-fused bomb, the bubble to the stone, echo
round the horn. Fenellan, would have discharged an extinguisher on
punctilio in emission. Victor Radnor was unable to cope with it
reflectively.
No, but one doesn't like being beaten by anything! he replied to an
admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more
significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head, and
checked or stemmed the current of a fear. For he was utterly unlike
himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the
smallest, an incident of the streets; and although he refused to feel a
bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of
his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been
shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking.
Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word
engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another
friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him
Colney; and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between
them upon man's present achievements and his probable destinies:
especially upon England's grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent
appreciation of her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic
dignity of London City. Colney had to be overcome