“How strikingly beautiful!” he ejaculated. “Pray introduce me,” he added.
“You will soon have the opportunity of knowing each other better.”
“In truth, Mr. Gomer,” exclaimed Mr. Grahame, in his grandest manner, “I shall look forward with impatience for that honour, I need not add, and high gratification.”
Flora could only look timidly from one to the other, and feel extremely relieved by the absence of both.
Nathan Gomer having, ere they parted, reiterated his promise of supplying Mr. Grahame with all the funds his present need required, that gentleman walked into his mansion with the cold loftiness of a Sultan, and with high elation of spirits. Not that the latter emotion rendered him cheerful; on the contrary, it expanded and inflated his pride--it made him look over to the verge of the horizon, and believe the lands and domains between were his own. It made him regard his servants as serfs, his tradespeople as vassals, his acquaintances as persons who lived only to bask in the sunshine of his smiles, himself an imperial personage, to whom it was the duty of the world in general to bow down and worship.
During the last ten days, he had felt rather disposed to sneak out of sight than to exhibit his greatness to wondering eyes. Now, removed from the danger of imminent disgrace, his own grand staircase appeared too circumscribed for the majesty of his presence.
Whelks, who had--by hot lotions and cold lotions, and fomentations, and blistering garlic, new flannel, a couple of calomel pills, and a half-a-pint of black draught--subdued the ear-ache, lost a sovereign--how, he was mystified in imagining--and taken the form of a ghostly shadow--noticed the change in his master, but with infinitely less surprise than that alteration which made him almost familiar with Chewkle.
With the instinctive perception of individuals of his class, he presumed, by the ascendancy of the commission agent, that “something was up.” He was extremely anxious to find out what: hence, his civility to Chewkle, and his desire to form an acquaintance with him. Whatever that something was, it was plain, by his master’s resumption of stern pomposity that it was “down again.”
Mr. Grahame, preceded by Whelks, entered the room in which he expected to find Mrs. Grahame and one at least of her daughters, but the whole family as well as the two guests, who had been prevailed to extend their visit beyond the term originally intended, were assembled together, engaged in conversation, which did not pause for an instant at the appearance of Mr. Grahame.