Moreover, his relatives are present to assure him that he did not jump
out of Jupiter's head or come of the doctor. They hang on him like an
ill-conditioned prickly garment; and if he complains of the irritation
they cause him, they one and all denounce his irritable skin.
Fretted by his relatives he cannot be much of a giant.
Beauchamp looked from Dr. Shrapnel in his invalid's chair to his uncle
Everard breathing robustly, and mixed his uncle's errors with those of
the world which honoured and upheld him. His remainder of equability
departed; his impatience increased. His appetite for work at Dr.
Shrapnel's writing-desk was voracious. He was ready for any labour, the
transcribing of papers, writing from dictation, whatsoever was of service
to Lord Avonley's victim: and he was not like the Spartan boy with the
wolf at his vitals; he betrayed it in the hue his uncle Everard detested,
in a visible nervousness, and indulgence in fits of scorn. Sharp
epigrams and notes of irony provoked his laughter more than fun. He
seemed to acquiesce in some of the current contemporary despair of our
immoveable England, though he winced at a satire on his country, and
attempted to show that the dull dominant class of moneymakers was the
ruin of her. Wherever he stood to represent Dr. Shrapnel, as against Mr.
Grancey Lespel on account of the Itchincope encroachments, he left a
sting that spread the rumour of his having become not only a black torch
of Radicalism--our modern provincial estateholders and their wives bestow
that reputation lightly--but a gentleman with the polish scratched off
him in parts. And he, though individually he did not understand how
there was to be game in the land if game-preserving was abolished, signed
his name R. C. S. NEVIL BEAUCHAMP for Dr. SHRAPNEL, in the
communications directed to solicitors of the persecutors of poachers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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