Читать книгу Dr. Wainwright's Patient. A Novel онлайн

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After that little episode, Paul Derinzy took small heed of his brother's proceedings, or, indeed, of anything save his business, in which he seemed to be entirely absorbed. He was there early and late, taking his dinner at a tavern, and retiring to chambers in Chancery Lane, where he read philosophical treatises and abstruse foreign philosophical works until bedtime. He had no intimate friends, and never went into society. Even after his mother's death, when he spent most of his leisure time, such as it was, at Muswell Hill, with his father, then become very old and feeble, he shrank from meeting the neighbours, and was looked upon as an oddity and a recluse. In the fulness of time old Peter Derinzy died, leaving, it was said, upwards of a hundred thousand pounds. By his will he bequeathed twenty thousand pounds to his second son, Captain Alexis Derinzy, while the whole of the rest of his fortune went to his son Paul, who was left sole executor.

Captain Alexis Derinzy made use of very strong language when he learned the exact amount of the legacy bequeathed to him by his father's will. He had been always given to understand, he said, that the governor was a hundred-thousand-pound man, and he thought it deuced hard that he shouldn't have had at least a third of what was left, specially considering that he was a married man with a family, whereas that money-grubbing old tradesman, his elder brother, had nobody but himself to look after. The statement of Captain Derinzy's marriage was so far correct. About two years previous to his father's death, the Captain being at the time, like another captain famed in song, "in country quarters," had made the acquaintance of a young lady, the daughter of a clever, ne'er-do-weel, pot-walloping artist, who, when sober, did odd bits of portrait-painting, and, among other jobs, had painted correct likenesses of Captain Derinzy's two chargers. Captain Derinzy's courtship of the artist's daughter, unlike that of his prototype in verse, was carried on with the strictest decorum, not, one is bound to say, from any fault of the Captain's, who wished and intended to assimilate it to scores of other such affairs which he had had under what he considered similar circumstances. But the truth was that he had never met anyone like Miss Gertrude Skrymshire before. A pretty woman, delicate-looking, and thoroughly feminine, she was far more of an old soldier than the Captain, with all his barrack training and his country-garrison experience. Years before, when she was a mere child of fourteen, she had made up her mind, after experience of her father's career and prospects, that Bohemianism, for a woman at least, was a most undesirable state, and she had determined that she would marry either for wealth or position; the latter preferable, she thought, as the former might be afterwards attainable by her own ready wit and cleverness; while if she married a bon bourgeois, she must be content to remain in Bloomsbury, Bedfordshire, or wherever she might be placed, and must abandon all hope of rising. When Captain Derinzy first came fluttering round her, she saw the means to her end, and determined to profit thereby. She was a very pretty young woman of her style, red and white, with black eyes and flattened black hair, altogether very like those Dutch dolls fashionable at that period, who were made of shiny composition down to their busts, but then diverged abruptly into calico and sawdust. She had a trim waist and a neat ankle, and what is called nowadays a very "fetching" style, and she made desperate havoc with Captain Derinzy's heart; so much so, that when she declined with scorn to listen to any of the eccentric--to say the least of them--propositions which he made to her, and forbade him her presence for daring to make them, he, after staying away one day, during which he was intensely wretched, and would have taken to drinking but that he had tried it before without effect, and would have drowned himself but that he did not want to die, came down and made an open declaration of his love to Gertrude, and a formal proposal for her hand to Skrymshire père.