CHAPTER XXXVII

THE MOTHER-THE DAUGHTER

Taking Nesta’s hand, on her entry into his chambers with her father, Colney Durance bowed over it and kissed it.  The unusual performance had a meaning; she felt she was praised.  It might be because she made herself her father’s companion.  ’I can’t persuade him to put on a great-coat,’ she said.  ’You would defeat his aim at the particular waistcoat of his ambition,’ said Colney, goaded to speak, not anxious to be heard.

He kept her beside him, leading her about for introductions to multiform celebrities of both sexes; among them the gentleman editing the Magazine which gave out serially the rival tongues:  and there was talk of a dragon-throated public’s queer appetite in Letters.  The pained Editor deferentially smiled at her cheerful mention of Delphica.  ’In, book form, perhaps!’ he remarked, with plaintive’ resignation; adding:  ’You read it?’ And a lady exclaimed:  ‘We all read it!’

But we are the elect, who see signification and catch flavour; and we are reminded of an insatiable monster how sometimes capricious is his gorge.  ‘He may happen to be in the humour for a shaking!’ Colney’s poor consolation it was to say of the prospects of his published book:  for the funny monster has been known to like a shaking.

‘He takes it kinder tickled,’ said Fenellan, joining the group and grasping Nesta’s hand with a warmth that thrilled her and set her guessing.  ’A taste of his favourite Cayenne lollypop, Colney; it fetches the tear he loves to shed, or it gives him digestive heat in the bag of his literary receptacle-fearfully relaxed and enormous!  And no wonder; his is to lie him down on notion of the attitude for reading, his back; and he has in a jiffy the funnel of the Libraries inserted into his mouth, and he feels the publishers pouring their gallons through it unlimitedly; never crying out, which he can’t; only swelling, which he’s obliged to do, with a non-nutritious inflation; and that’s his intellectual enjoyment; bearing a likeness to the horrible old torture of the baillir d’eau; and he’s doomed to perish in the worst book-form of dropsy.  You, my dear Colney, have offended his police or excise, who stand by the funnel, in touch with his palate, to make sure that nothing above proof is poured in; and there’s your misfortune.  He’s not half a bad fellow, you find when you haven’t got to serve him.’

‘Superior to his official parasites, one supposes!’ Colney murmured.

The celebrities were unaffectedly interested in a literary failure having certain merits; they discussed it, to compliment the crownless author; and the fervider they, the more was he endowed to read the meanness prompting the generosity.  Publication of a book, is the philosopher’s lantern upon one’s fellows.

Colney was caught away from his private manufactory of acids by hearing Simeon Fenellan relate to Victor some of the recent occurrences at Brighton.  Simeon’s tone was unsatisfying; Colney would have the word; he was like steel on the grindstone for such a theme of our national grotesque-sublime.