CHAPTER XX.—THE MORNING OF THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER.
THE first of September! No wonder if we were a covey of partridges what we should think about the first of September, and how, generalizing from that idea, we should feel towards the race of men,—sons of guns, as in partridge parlance we should, doubtless, metaphorically term them! We wonder from what point we should regard pointers (disappointers, as a witty friend of ours called a couple of “wild young dogs” who ran in upon their game, and cheated him of a promising shot), or how we should look upon a setter making a “dead set” at us! Reasoning by analogy, and not supposing partridges to be better Christians than Christians themselves, we fear we should consider sportsmen (the very name is an addition of insult to injury) greater brutes than their four-footed allies; and that the idea of standing fire (either kitchen or gun), the notion of the roasting we must undergo after we have been plucked,—of the way in which we should be cut up by a set of blades, who are, after all, ready enough to pick our brains, and avail themselves of our merry-thoughts, would put us in such a flutter that it would be a mercy if we were not to show the white feather, and refuse to die game after all.
Such, however, were by no means the sentiments with which Harry Coverdale looked forward to the first of September. On the contrary, although he endeavoured to disguise the fact from his wife, and indeed from himself, as far as in him lay, the truth was that he was as much delighted at the prospect of a good day’s partridge shooting, as the veriest school-boy released from the drudgery of dictionary and grammar. Markum, that trustworthy custodian of game, and original specimen of a polite letter-writer, who had been safely re-instated in his office, and received such handsome presents of baby-linen and other infantry accoutrements that the illustrious “little stranger,” who had wisely postponed his arrival till the evil day had departed, bid fair to be clothed in a style befitting the heir-apparent to a dukedom rather than to a double-barrelled gun—Markum reported that although the hares and pheasants (which he persisted in calling peasants) had suffered some diminution from the practice of the dishonest steward, yet that he’d never “in all his born days seen such a blessed sight o’ partridges.” Stimulated by this information, and by the recollection that on the preceding first of September he had been kicking his heels and cursing his evil fortune, as he performed quarantine in a red-hot port of the Mediterranean, Harry—having greatly amused Alice by the earnest zeal with which, on the 31st of August, he examined and re-examined his “Joe Manton,” and the exact and stringent orders he gave in regard to the feeding of his dogs, than which the most fastidious invalid could not have been more delicately and precisely dieted—awoke at four o’clock on the eventful morning, and, without disturbing Alice, who was sleeping as calmly as a child, rose and dressed himself in a thoroughly workmanlike shooting costume. Having accomplished this feat without waking Alice, he wrote on a bit of paper, “Good morning and good-bye, dearest. As I intend to have a glorious day of it, do not expect me till near dinner-time, when I hope to return with a full bag and an awful appetite. Yours, ever, H. C.,” and placing it on his wife’s dressing-table, stole on tiptoe to the door, closed it noiselessly after him; and when, three hours afterwards, Alice opened her eyes, he was striding through stubble on the farther side of the estate, having bagged four brace of birds and a well-conditioned and respectable Jack hare.
Mrs. Coverdale was some few minutes before she was, literally, awake to a sense of her situation; and the lady’s-maid entering while she was still between sleeping and waking, she half unconsciously asked the not unnatural question—“What has become of your master?”
“If you please, Mem, Master’s been out shooting partringers ever since five o’clock, Wilkins says. If you please, Mem, there’s a note for you, Mem, lying on your dressing-table, in Master’s handwriting.”
Rousing herself, Alice read it eagerly. The contents did not seem particularly to please her, for, as she refolded the paper, she looked grave, and gave vent to a mild sigh. “Do not undraw the curtain,” she said: “come again in an hour, Ellis; I feel sleepy, and there is nothing to get up for,” she added, in a slightly pettish tone. Falling asleep the moment she laid her head upon the pillow, Alice dreamed that when she came down to breakfast she found Harry had returned, saying that he could not bear to leave her alone all day, and so had come back and wished to drive her to call upon that agreeable woman, Mrs. Felicia Tabinette (a name with which she was inspired for the occasion, as no such neighbour existed), to which proposition she gladly assenting, they had gone out in a pony-chaise made of coral and mother-of-pearl, and drawn by two lovely little sea-green ponies with lilac manes and tails, and harness made of the best point lace. And she was just advancing the unanswerable proposition that, as lace was the fittest material of which to make a lady’s collar, it must also be the most proper fabric for that of a horse, when the inexorable Ellis appeared for the second time, and dispelled all her bright visions by awakening her to the dull reality. Alice, however, took her revenge upon that “dis-illusioning”—as a Frenchman would have called it—lady’s-maid, for she was more fastidious and difficult to please, and almost snappish, than Ellis had ever known her before, insomuch that the excellent Abigail afterwards propounded her opinion in the servants’ hall, that “Missus was tuter fay outer sorts,” which disheartening fact she accounted for by the hypothesis that she—Mrs. Coverdale—must have got out of bed with the wrong foot foremost.
While the tea for her solitary breakfast was drawing, Alice, having no one else to look at, amused herself by regarding her own natural—no term could be more appropriate—face in a large pier-glass, and was quite startled to behold the unmistakeably cross expression which characterized it. Taking herself to task for this, she, sipping her tea, which did not taste nearly so good as when Harry was at home, mentally decided that she was very unreasonable, and childish, and ridiculous—that when Harry had been devoting himself for the last month to her pleasure and amusement, going to balls and all sorts of places which he did not care a pin about, solely to please her, it was horribly selfish in her to grudge him a few hours to devote to a favourite pursuit—though how men could find delight in killing those poor birds, she could not tell. She did not so much wonder about other people; she believed men were generally cruel; but Harry was so unusually kind-hearted. She supposed it must be the excitement, and the beautiful scenery, and the interest in watching those dear, clever dogs stick out their long tails to point at the partridges with—which, looking at it in a Chesterfieldian point of view, was decidedly impolite, if not positively rude, of them; and yet she had heard gentlemen talk about their sporting dogs being so well-bred.
Having thus reasoned herself into a wiser frame of mind, she resolved to make the best of it; and suddenly recollecting she had at least a thousand things to do, which she was continually putting aside till some time or other when Harry should be out, she decided that this was the time, and that now or never must they all be done. Accordingly, she set vigorously to work, and wrote three letters one after another, to three former schoolfellows, wherein she described her husband as a species of modern demi-god, compounded of equal parts of Solomon and Adonis, with a dash of Achilles thrown in to do justice to his heroic qualities; and depicted matrimonial felicity in such glowing colours, that the richest and prettiest of her correspondents eloped the next week with her music-master; and one of the others, who was neither rich nor pretty, turned pious out of spite, and went into a sort of High Church Protestant nunnery-and-water, to punish the men, who, it must be confessed, appeared to submit to the trial with the most cheerful resignation. Then Alice brought out a large roll of bills, and a thick house-keeping book, ruled with blue lines, and having a business-like smell of new leather about the binding, which Alice flattered herself would impress even the stately housekeeper (who was old enough to be her mother, and stiff enough for anything; and of whom Alice, in her secret soul, stood very much in dread) with a deep sense of her being a very dragon of housewifery, prepared to be down upon the slightest attempt at peculation like an avenging fury. But the bills were so complicated, and never would add up twice alike, and the butcher was so inconsistent and slippery about his prices, sometimes charging 7d. and sometimes 7½d. as “if once a pound of mutton, always a pound of mutton,” were not an incontrovertible axiom; and the baker was as bad, besides choosing to spell dough, d.o.e., which at first made her think that he was the butcher and sold venison; and the hams seemed always to come from the tallow-chandler’s with the candles, which wasn’t by any means an agreeable association of ideas; and the footman was evidently of Esquimaux descent, and lived sumptuously upon lamp-oil at 8s. the gallon; and the coachman appeared to feed the carriage-horses with sponges, wash-leather, and rotten-stone, which she was sure could not be good for them; and she thought the under-housemaid had ordered herself a “Turk’s-head” dessert-cake, for her own private eating, but it turned out to be a particular species of broom; while the amount of hearth-stones and house-flannels that girl consumed would have served to build an “Albert pattern” model cottage once a quarter, and furnish the pauper inhabitants thereof with winter clothing: so that by the time luncheon arrived poor Alice, tired and confused, with inky fingers and an aching head, had come to the conclusion that she had nothing in common with Joseph Hume, M.P., and that for the future she should resign the glory of managing the housekeeper’s book to Mrs. Gripples, and restrict her department to the equally dignified, but less onerous, duty of making Harry sign the cheques, and handing them over to that august domestic to pay the bills with.