“Serves you right, sir, for your impertinence!” protested Nelly Walpole, bridling up and applying a fresh hot poultice to her brother’s cheek, which she bade him hold; but Stephen, in his manly inability to bear the toothache with composure, dropped the soft mess under a sudden sting that jerked it out of his hand.
“What an unmanageable baby it is!” cried Nelly, catching the poultice in time to save her pretty violet cashmere dress. “I told you to hold your cheek while I fastened the bandage; make haste now before it cools.”
“O my unfortunate brother! Ill-fated man! Is this how I find you, bound and poulticed in the hands of the Philistines?”
This was from Marmaduke, Nelly’s younger brother, who entered while the operation was going on, and stood surveying the victim in serene compassion.
“Yes,” cried Stephen, “and all the pity a poor devil gets is being bullied for not holding his jaw.”
“Oh! come, you’re not so bad, since there’s vice enough in you for a pun!” said Marmaduke. “How did you catch the thing?”
“What thing—the pun?”
“The toothache.”
“It caught me,” said Stephen resentfully.
“Then it caught you in some of those villanous cut-throat places where you go pottering after beggars and blackguards and the Lord knows what!” said Marmaduke with airy contempt, drawing his slim, beringed fingers gracefully through a mass of remarkably fine curls that clustered over his high, white forehead, and gave a boyish look to his handsome young face, and added to its attractions. He was extremely prepossessing, this perfumed, patent-leather-booted young gentleman of two-and-twenty. You could not look at him without liking him. His eye was as clear as a child’s, his smile as frank, his laughter as joyous and catching. Yet, as it sometimes happens with the graces of childhood, these things were a deceptive promise. The frankness and the joy were genuine; but there was a cold gleam of contempt, a cold ring of selfishness, in the bright eyes and the merry voice that were very disappointing when you found them out. But people were slow to find them out. Even those who lived with Marmaduke, and thus had ample opportunities of judging, remained under the spell of his attractive manners and personal charms until some accident revealed their worthlessness. A false coin will go on passing current through many hands, until one day some one drops it to the ground, and the glittering sham is betrayed. He had not a bad heart; he was kind even, when he could be brought to forget himself for a moment and think of others. But it required a shock to do this; and shocks are, happily, rare in every-day life. So Marmaduke slept on undisturbed in his egotism, hardening unconsciously in self-absorbed enjoyment. He had never taken trouble about anything, made a genuine effort of any sort except for his amusement. He had just the kind of brains to enable him to get through college with a decent amount of success easily—tact, ready repartee, a quick, retentive memory that gave the maximum of result for the minimum of work. He would pass for clever and well informed where an awkward, ugly youth, who had ten times his intellect and studied ten times harder, would pass for knowing nothing. Stephen was eight years older than he, and had not yet discovered his brother’s real value. Perhaps this arose partly from Stephen’s not being of a particularly observant or analytical turn of mind. He took people pretty much at their own valuation, as the world is rather apt to do. Marmaduke set a very high price on his handsome face and limited attainments, and his brother had never dreamed of disputing it. He would sometimes naïvely express his surprise that people were so fond of Duke when he did so little to please them; and wonder how popular he was, considering that he never gave himself the smallest trouble to oblige or humor people.