By great exertions I wrested myself free from my "backers," and, bounding over the table with a formidable old tongs in my hand, I reached the door just as it gave way to the assaulting party, and came flat down off the hinges, discovering the forlorn hope of the enemy led on by—oh, shame and disgrace ineffable!—no other than my father himself! There he was, Bob, without his coat, with a large saucepan in one hand for a shield, and a kitchen cleaver in the other. He vociferously cheered on his followers to the breach. I own to you that, what with his patched and poor attire, his long beard, and his moustaches, I scarcely knew him. His voice, however, there was no mistaking; and, at the first word he uttered, I grounded my arms in surrender.
It turned out that some infernal device in pastry had communicated to him the intelligence that it was Mrs. D. was the entertainer of the gorgeous company, the crumbs from whose sumptuous table he and his friends were then consuming. Maddened with the indignity of his position, and outraged at her extravagance, he tossed off two tumblers of sherry to give him courage, and cried out to his partisans "to charge!" I have often heard that no description can convey even the faintest notion of the horrors of a town taken by assault. I now believed it. For the same good reason, you will not expect of me to portray what I own to be beyond my pictorial powers. I can, it is true, give you the ingredients, as Lord Macartney did those of a plum-pudding to the Chinese cook, but you must yourself know how to mingle and combine them. Take thirty ladies of various ages, from sixteen to sixty, and of all nations of Europe, with gents to match; throw them into strong convulsions of fright, horror, fun, or laughter, amidst smashed crockery, broken glass, upset viands, and drinkables; beat them up with some ten or twelve travellers of unwashed appearance, neither civil of speech nor ceremonious in conduct; dash the mixture with Dodd père in a state of frenzied passion, to which he gave short and per saltum utterance in such phrases as "Spitzbuben!" "Coquins!" "Canaille!" "Scoundrels!" "Gueux!" "Blackguards!" &c,—a vocabulary that, even without a labored context, seemed sufficiently intelligible. The company took Lady Macbeth's hint; they did n't stand upon the order of their going, "they went at once." I do not believe that a party ever separated with greater despatch and less useless ceremony. A few of the "greatly overcome" were, indeed, led out between friends, "unconscious;" but the mass fled with a laudable precipitancy, leaving the field to my father and the rest of the Dodd family,—a group, I beg to say, that nothing but a painter could properly render. That it may one day be thought worthy of a fresco, let me record it.
Foreground, and principal figure, Dodd père, seated Marius-like amidst the ruins, cravat in one hand, turban of a spoiled countess inadvertently grasped in the other; countenance strongly marked with intense perplexity, a kind of universal doubt of everything; prevailing impression of the figure, power, but power weakened by incredulity.
Middle distance, Mary Anne Dodd, dishevelled and weeping, gracefully draped, and the attitude well chosen.
Extreme distance, Dodd mère, seated on the floor, with a student's cap stuck on over her own toque, evidently horror-struck and unconscious, as seen by the wild stare of her eyes, and the half-open lips. Dodd fils, dimly detected in the shadow of left foreground, mixing brandy-and-water.
There's the tableau; the smaller details are, a universal smashery, with occasional vestiges of that part of the creation consigned to hairdressers, tailors, and milliners, of which the ground displays various curious specimens, in scalps, fronts, ringlets, and tufts, scraps of lace, tuckers, and trinkets, with skirts of coats, cravats, and a false calf! Had these been all that the company left behind them, Bob, it might have been bearable; but, alas! they had bequeathed to us other relics,—their contempt, their very lowest contempt. Even my father's French was intelligible enough to show what he claimed, and what we could not deny him, to be. You can fancy, therefore, the impression they must have conceived of us!
One of the worst features of this unlucky occurrence was that it happened at Baden. Baden is, so to say, one of those great banking-houses at which a note is sure to be presented at some period or other of its circulation, and here we were now,—declared a "forgery," pronounced "not negotiable."
These were the bitter thoughts which each of us had now to revolve in secret, tormenting our several ingenuities to find a remedy for the evil. The governor was apparently the first of us to rally, for he turned round at last to the table, cleared a small spot for his operations at a corner, helped himself to some of a game pie, and began to eat like one who had not relished such delicacies for some time back.