THE FIVE INSIDES
I’ll example you with thievery.—“Timon of Athens.”
The dear old lady was ninety, and it was always Christmas in the sweet winter of her face. With the pink in her cheeks and the white of her hair, she came straight from the eighteenth century in which she was born. They were not more at odds with nature than are the hips and the traveller’s joy in a withered hedge; and if at one time they paid to art, why it was a charitable gift to a poor dependent—nothing more, I’ll swear.
People are fond of testing links with the past. This sound old chatelaine had played trick-track, and dined at four o’clock. She had eaten battalia pie with “Lear” sauce, and had drunk orgeat in Bond Street. She had seen Blücher, the tough old “Vorwärts,” brought to bay in Hyde Park by a flying column of Amazons, and surrendering himself to an onslaught of kisses. She had seen Mr. Consul Brummell arrested by bailiffs in the streets of Caen, on a debt of so many hundreds of francs for so many bottles of vernis de Guiton, which was nothing less than an adorable boot-polish. She had heard the demon horns of newspaper boys shrill out the Little Corporal’s escape from Elba. She had sipped Roman punch, maybe;—I trust she had never taken snuff. She had—but why multiply instances? Born in 1790, she had taken just her little share in, and drawn her full interest of, the history, social and political, of all those years, fourscore and ten, which filled the interval between then and now.
Once upon a time she had entered a hackney-coach; and, lo! before her journey was done, it was a railway coach, moving ever swifter and swifter, and its passengers succeeding one another with an ever more furious energy of hurry-scurry. Among the rest I got in, and straight fell into talk, and in love, with this traveller who had come from so far and from scenes so foreign to my knowledge. She was as sweet and instructive as an old diary brought from a bureau, smelling of rose-leaves and cedar-wood. She was merry, too, and wont to laugh at my wholly illusory attachment to an age which was already as dead as the moon when I was born. But she humoured me; though she complained that her feminine reminiscences were sweetmeats to a man.
“You should talk with William keeper,” she said. “He holds on to the past by a very practical link indeed.”
It was snowy weather up at the Hall—the very moral of another winter (so I was told) when His Majesty’s frigate “Caledonia” came into Portsmouth to be paid off, and Commander Playfair sent express to his young wife up in the Hampshire hills that she might expect him early on the following morning. He did not come in the morning, nor in the afternoon, nor, indeed, until late in the evening, when—as Fortune was generous—he arrived just at the turn of the supper, when the snow outside the kitchen windows below was thawing itself, in delirious emulation of the melting processes going on within, into a rusty gravy.
“You see,” said Madam, “it was not the etiquette, when a ship was paid off, for any officer to quit the port until the pennant was struck, which the cook, as the last officer, had to see done. And the cook had gone ashore and got tipsy; and there the poor souls must bide till he could be found. Poor Henry—and poor little me! But it came right. Tout vient à qui sait attendre. We had woodcocks for supper. It was just such a winter as this—the snow, the sky, the very day. Will you take your gun, and get me a woodcock, sir? and we will keep the anniversary, and you shall toast, in a bottle of the Madeira, the old French rhyme.”
I had this rhyme in my ears as I went off for my woodcock—
Le bécasseau est de fort bon manger,
Duquel la chair resueille l’appetit.
Il est oyseau passager et petit:
Est par son goust fait des vins bien juger.