Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 06

								

se-se-secret--not in the market yet--not at all--soon snapped up."
"Humph!  Has Colonel Maltravers been extravagant?"
"No; but he does not--I hear--or rather Lady--Julia--so I'm told, yes,
indeed--does not li-like--going so far, and so they spend the winter in
Italy instead.  Yes--very odd--very fine place."
Lumley was slightly acquainted with the elder brother of his old
friend,--a man who possessed some of Ernest's faults,--very proud, and
very exacting, and very fastidious; but all these faults were developed
in the ordinary commonplace world, and were not the refined abstractions
of his younger brother.
Colonel Maltravers had continued, since he entered the Guards, to be
thoroughly the man of fashion, and nothing more.  But rich and well-born,
and highly connected, and thoroughly a la mode as he was, his pride
made him uncomfortable in London, while his fastidiousness made him
uncomfortable in the country.  He was rather a great person, but he
wanted to be a very great person.  This he was at Lisle Court; but that
did not satisfy him.  He wanted not only to be a very great person, but a
very great person among very great persons--and squires and parsons bored
him.  Lady Julia, his wife, was a fine lady, inane and pretty, who saw
everything through her husband's eyes.  He was quite master chez lui,
was Colonel Maltravers!  He lived a great deal abroad; for on the
Continent his large income seemed princely, while his high character,
thorough breeding, and personal advantages, which were remarkable,
secured him a greater position in foreign courts than at his own.  Two
things had greatly disgusted him with Lisle Court,--trifles they might be
with others, but they were not trifles to Cuthbert Maltravers; in the
first place, a man who had been his father's attorney, and who was the
very incarnation of coarse unrepellable familiarity, had bought an estate
close by the said Lisle Court, and had, horresco referens, been made a
baronet!  Sir Gregory Gubbins took precedence of Colonel Maltravers!  He
could not ride out but he met Sir Gregory; he could not dine out but he
had the pleasure of walking behind Sir Gregory's bright blue coat with
its bright brass buttons.  In his last visit to Lisle Court, which he had
then crowded with all manner of fine people, he had seen--the very first
morning after his arrival--seen from the large window of his state
saloon, a great staring white, red, blue, and gilt thing, at the end of
the stately avenue planted by Sir Guy Maltravers in honour of the victory
over the Spanish armada.  He looked in mute surprise, and everybody else
looked; and a polite German count, gazing through his eye-glass, said,
"Ah! dat is vat you call a vim in your pays,--the vim of Colonel
Maltravers!"
This "vim" was the pagoda summer-house of Sir Gregory Gubbins, erected in
imitation of the Pavilion at Brighton.  Colonel Maltravers was miserable:
the vim haunted him; it seemed ubiquitous; he could not escape it,--it