Apply immediate remedies, if you please, Mr. Bossolton, interrupted Mr. Mordaunt, in that sweet and honeyed tone which somehow or other always silenced even the garrulous practitioner.
Driven into taciturnity, Mr. Bossolton again inspected the arm, and proceeded to urge the application of liniments and bandages, which he promised to prepare with the most solicitudinous despatch and the most despatchful solicitude.
CHAPTER V
Your name, Sir!
Ha! my name, you saymy name?
T is wellmy nameisnay, I must consider.
This accident occasioned a delay of some days in the plans of the young gentleman, for whom we trust very soon, both for our own convenience and that of our reader, to find a fitting appellation.
Mr. Mordaunt, after seeing every attention paid to him both surgical and hospitable, took his departure with a promise to call the next day; leaving behind him a strong impression of curiosity and interest to serve our hero as some mental occupation until his return. The bonny landlady came up in a new cap, with blue ribbons, in the course of the evening, to pay a visit of inquiry to the handsome patient, who was removed from the Griffin, No. 4, to the Dragon, No. 8,a room whose merits were exactly in proportion to its number, namely, twice as great as those of No. 4.
Well, sir, said Mrs. Taptape, with a courtesy, I trust you find yourself better.
At this moment I do, said the gallant youth, with a significant air.
Hem, quoth the landlady.
A pause ensued. In spite of the compliment, a certain suspicion suddenly darted across the mind of the hostess. Strong as are the prepossessions of the sex, those of the profession are much stronger.
Honest folk, thought the landlady, dont travel with their initials only; the last Whitehall Evening was full of shocking accounts of swindlers and cheats; and I gave nine pounds odd shillings for the silver teapot John has brought him up,as if the delft one was not good enough for a foot traveller!
Pursuing these ideas, Mrs. Taptape, looking bashfully down, said,
By the by, sir; Mr. Bossolton asked me what name he should put down in his book for the medicines; what would you please me to say, sir?
Mr. who? said the youth, elevating his eyebrows.
Mr. Bossolton, sir, the apothecary.
Oh! Bossolton! very odd name that,not near so pretty asdear me, what a beautiful cap that is of yours! said the young gentleman.
Lord, sir, do you think so? The ribbon is pretty enough; butbut, as I was saying, what name shall I tell Mr. Bossolton to put in his book? This, thought Mrs. Taptape, is coming to the point.
Well! said the youth, slowly, and as if in a profound reverie, well, Bossolton is certainly the most singular name I ever heard; he does right to put it in a book: it is quite a curiosity! is he clever?
Very, sir, said the landlady, somewhat sharply; but it is your name, not his, that he wishes to put into his book.
Mine? said the youth, who appeared to have been seeking to gain time in order to answer a query which most men find requires very little deliberation, mine, you say; my name is LindenClarence Lindenyou understand?
What a pretty name! thought the landladys daughter, who was listening at the keyhole; but how could he admire that odious cap of Mas!
And, now, landlady, I wish you would send up my boxes; and get me a newspaper, if you please.
Yes, sir, said the landlady, and she rose to retire.
I do not think, said the youth to himself, that I could have hit on a prettier name, and so novel a one too!Clarence Linden,why, if I were that pretty girl at the bar I could fall in love with the very words. Shakspeare was quite wrong when he said,
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
A rose by any name would not smell as sweet; if a roses name was Jeremiah Bossolton, for instance, it would not, to my nerves at least, smell of anything but an apothecarys shop!
When Mordaunt called the next morning, he found Clarence much better, and carelessly turning over various books, part of the contents of the luggage superscribed C. L. A book of whatever description was among the few companions for whom Mordaunt had neither fastidiousness nor reserve; and the sympathy of taste between him and the sufferer gave rise to a conversation less cold and commonplace than it might otherwise have been. And when Mordaunt, after a stay of some length, rose to depart, he pressed Linden to return his visit before he left that part of the country; his place, he added, was only about five miles distant from W. Linden, greatly interested in his visitor, was not slow in accepting the invitation, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, Mordaunt was shaking hands with a stranger he had only known two days.
CHAPTER VI
While yet a child, and long before his time,
He had perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness.
.....
But eagerly he read, and read again.
.....
Yet still uppermost
Nature was at his heart, as if he felt,
Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power
In all things that from her sweet influence
Might seek to wean him. Therefore with her hues,
Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,
He clothed the nakedness of austere truth.
Algernon Mordaunt was the last son of an old and honourable race, which had centuries back numbered princes in its line. His parents had had many children, but all (save Algernon, the youngest) died in their infancy. His mother perished in giving him birth. Constitutional infirmity and the care of mercenary nurses contributed to render Algernon a weakly and delicate child: hence came a taste for loneliness and a passion for study; and from these sprung, on the one hand, the fastidiousness and reserve which render us apparently unamiable, and, on the other, the loftiness of spirit and the kindness of heart which are the best and earliest gifts of literature, and more than counterbalance our deficiencies in the minor morals due to society by their tendency to increase our attention to the greater ones belonging to mankind. Mr. Mordaunt was a man of luxurious habits and gambling propensities: wedded to London, he left the house of his ancestors to moulder into desertion and decay; but to this home Algernon was constantly consigned during his vacations from school; and its solitude and cheerlessness gave to a disposition naturally melancholy and thoughtful those colours which subsequent events were calculated to deepen, not efface.
Truth obliges us to state, despite our partiality to Mordaunt, that, when he left his school after a residence of six years, it was with the bitter distinction of having been the most unpopular boy in it. Why, nobody could exactly explain, for his severest enemies could not accuse him of ill-nature, cowardice, or avarice, and these make the three capital offences of a school-boy; but Algernon Mordaunt had already acquired the knowledge of himself, and could explain the cause, though with a bitter and swelling heart. His ill health, his long residence at home, his unfriended and almost orphan situation, his early habits of solitude and reserve, all these, so calculated to make the spirit shrink within itself, made him, on his entrance at school, if not unsocial, appear so: this was the primary reason of his unpopularity; the second was that he perceived, for he was sensitive (and consequently acute) to the extreme, the misfortune of his manner, and in his wish to rectify it, it became doubly unprepossessing; to reserve, it now added embarrassment, to coldness, gloom; and the pain he felt in addressing or being addressed by another was naturally and necessarily reciprocal, for the effects of sympathy are nowhere so wonderful, yet so invisible, as in the manners.