“Admit them; and, with all imaginable speed, show them to the painted closet. I will see them there.”
When the man-at-arms had left to perform his errand, the baron turned to his companion, and said,—
“It is they.”[B]
It is they!—is it they indeed? There’s soul-stirring interest for you, all about your grand Baron Mavaracordo’s, who can’t speak even good grammar, and Italian gentlemen of astrological skill, who declare, that “if by the occult sciences that are familiar to them they can only find the knave who threw this here, he should suffer such pangs he dreams not of.”[C]
And, bless your heart, she hadn’t been in the house a week or so before, I declare to goodness, I don’t think there was a saucepan in the place that hadn’t its bottom burnt out; for there she would let, no matter what it was, boil and boil away till there wasn’t a drop of water left; for what did she care about the fish or the potatoes so long as she could have a quiet half-hour’s cry over the “Black Pirate,” or else be finding out what became of “Mary, the Primrose Girl,” instead of looking after my greens. It’s a perfect miracle to me, too, that we were not all of us burnt in our beds; for when she found that I was one too many for her, and kept throwing her “Heiresses of Sackville” and her “Children of two Fathers” behind the fire as fast as she got them, then she must needs go reading in her room half the night through, and smuggling either “The Gipsy Boy,” or else “The Maniac Father, or the Victim of Seduction,” up to-bed with her of a night, robbing herself of her proper rest and me of my candles; and even when I took care to see that she had only an end just long enough to light her into bed, why then, drat her impudence, if the nasty toad didn’t burn all the kitchen stuff she could lay her hands upon in the butter-boat, with an old lamp wick stuck up in the middle.
How on earth the horrid silly could ever have managed to pay for all the works she took in out of the wages I allowed her, and what in the name of goodness she could ever have thought was to become of her in her old age, it would, I’m sure, take a much wiser head than mine to say; for independently of being a constant subscriber from the commencement to most of the penny novels, I declare nothing would please her stuck-up literary ladyship but she must needs take in a newspaper of her own every week, and be a constant reader of the “Penny Sunday Times,” though what to gracious she could have seen in the thing, I can’t make out. Positively, it used to make me shudder all over, and the blood run quite cold down my back, to see the large, staring, frightful engraving that there was always in the middle of its front page. For as true as each Saturday came round, there was sure to be some great brute of a man, in a Spanish hat and a large black cloak all flying about, striking some very grand theatrical attitude, and flourishing over his head a big carving-knife, to which three or four heavy notes of admiration were hanging, while a poor defenceless woman lay at his feet, with her throat cut as wide open as a cheese, and weltering in a pool of ink; and the beauty of it was, the thing always had some grand title, like “The Earl in his Jealous Rage slaying the Lady Isoline.”
Any one would naturally have fancied that the Penny Sunday Times and the novels at the same price would have been quite enough to have satisfied my lady’s love of the horrible; but, Lord bless you, no! I declare, there wasn’t a single murder or last dying speech and confession cried out in the streets, but she must rush up, all haste, to the door just to have another pen’orth of horrors; and then she would sit herself down, and never let the bit of paper go out of her hand until she had got the whole of the affecting copy of verses at the end of it by heart, and there I should have her marching about the house for weeks afterwards chanting some such nonsense as the following:—
“Biddle and Sheriff is our sad names,
And do confess we were much to blame,
On the 28th of September last,
We well remember, alas! alas!
The very thoughts causes us to rue,
In Eighteen hundred and forty-two.”
I declare to goodness, there was no keeping the woman away from the door as soon as she heard those husky vagabonds in the street, shouting away at the top of their cracked post-horn voices, all at once, “The full, true, and particular account” of some cock-and-a-bull-story or other; and whether it was the “as-sas-si-nation of Lew-is Philip, the King of the French,” (I’m sure those screaming scoundrels used to assassinate that poor, dear old man at least two or three times a month in our neighbourhood all the winter through,) or whether it was the “full disclosures of an elopement of a certain pretty milliner, not a hundred miles from these parts, with a well-known sporting nobleman, together with authentic copies of all the love-letters found in a silver cigar-case, which was picked up this morning by a respectable butcher in High-street,” or indeed no matter what it was, my Miss Betsy was sure to invest a penny in the rubbish, although directly I told her to let me see the nonsense that she had been stupid enough to go wasting her money about, of course, I used to find that it had nothing at all to do with what the fellows had been crying, and was merely some trumped-up rigmarole story, that would have done just as well for York as it did for Camden Town—a pack of wicked scoundrels coming up, three at a time, at the dusk of evening, alarming a quiet neighbourhood, and frightening one out of one’s wits by bawling their wicked stories out all of a sudden right under one’s window, and robbing the poor maids, who are sure to buy their rubbish, and imposing upon the mistresses, who are certain to read it.
As for the “new and popular songs,” too, it’s impossible to say how many miles of ballads that Betsy must have bought in her time, at three yards for a halfpenny. Positively, if the drawers in the dresser were not crammed with her “Cherry Ripes,” and her “Mistletoe Boughs,” and her “Old Arm Chairs,” and her “Cork Legs,” and a pack of other stuff, as full as they could hold, with the stupid engravings at the top of some of them, that had nothing at all to do with the song, for I declare if there wasn’t a ship in full sail put as an illustration to “Away, Away, to the Mountain’s Brow!” and a trumpery shepherdess, playing on a pipe to two grubby little lambs, as the picture of “Wanted! a Governess!”