Although nervous in moments of crisis Joe was, however, always calm and competent; but he generally managed to relieve the situation with his own irrepressible spirits at the earliest possible moment, and many a comic tale hangs round the strange doings of an incapable old Gamp who tended me at the birth of my second child.
He would lure her with the seemingly innocent question: “Sweetened or unsweetened gin, Mrs. Peveril?” knowing well that the spirit was needed for friction and that “Peveril of the Peak” (otherwise hook-nosed) as he had named her, would “rise” every time and answer demurely: “I’m sure I don’t know, Sir. I never tasted neither.”
Luckily the old lady was neither sharp enough to see nor thin-skinned enough to mind; but who ever minded Joe’s wit? Though it was keen enough at times, the urbanity behind it shone through too well.
Even his wife was a willing target—and a good one. As Edward Burne-Jones used kindly to say when they had both tried me on their favourite theme and taken me in over a Dickens quotation: “There never was anybody who rose better than the dear lady.” Yet I maintain that it needs a profound student of the master to know that he has created an obscure character named “Pip,” other than the human boy in Great Expectations.
Well, many is the bon mot to which I helped my husband.
When I declared myself nervous over my part in private theatricals at my father’s house in Canterbury, I can hear him say: “You are surely not bothering your head about two half-pay officers and a rural dean?”
And one day at a picnic, commenting on a criticism of a sturdy Irish uncle as to “not wanting these slight figures at all, at all,” Joe gave me the sound advice not to sit upon a rock “lest diamond cut diamond.”
We were all young then and things that may seem truly foolish now made the company laugh; it is more remarkable that the radiant personality, the inexhaustible animal spirits and rare sense of humour should have survived years of hard work and still have shone forth after the prostration of illness.
When scarcely recovered from a serious attack, Joe told me one morning of a dream that he had had, which—as Mr. W. J. Locke has remarked—contained such a “lightning flash of characterization” that it is hard to believe it came to him in sleep.
“I dreamed,” he said, “that Squire Bancroft brought me some grapes,” and as he removed the paper from the basket he said, “White, Joe; when the case is serious I never bring black.”