A roar invariably greeted the remark, “They were but two, but they were red enough for ten.” Similarly pronounced was the reception of the casual announcement of the “stone pitcher of terrific size,” in which the good wife brought her contribution of “a little flip” to the final merry-making. “Mrs. Chicken-stalker's notion of a little flip did honour to her character,” elicited a burst of laughter that was instantly renewed when the Reader added, that “the pitcher reeked like a volcano,” and that “the man who carried it was faint.” The Drum, by the way—braced tight enough, as any one might admit in the original narrative—seemed rather slackened, and was certainly less effective, in the Reading. One listened in vain for the well-remembered parenthesis indicative of its being the man himself, and not the instrument. “The Drum (who was a private friend of Trotty's) then stepped forward, and” offered—evidently with a hiccough or two—his greeting of good fellowship, “which,” as we learn from the book, “was received with a general shout.” The Humorist added thereupon, in his character as Storyteller, not in his capacity as Reader, “The Drum was rather drunk, by-the-bye; but never mind.” A band of music, with marrow-bones and cleavers and a set of hand-bells—clearly all of them under the direction of the Drum—then struck up the dance at Meg's wedding. But, after due mention had been made of how Trotty danced with Mrs. Chickenstalker “in a step unknown before or since, founded on his own peculiar trot,” the story closed in the book, and closed also in the Reading, with words that, in their gentle and harmonious flow, seemed to come from the neighbouring church-tower as final echoes from “The Chimes” themselves.
THE STORY OF LITTLE DOMBEY.
The hushed silence with which the concluding passages of this Reading were always listened to, spoke more eloquently than any applause could possibly have done, of the sincerity of the emotions it awakened. A cursory glance at the audience confirmed the impression produced by that earlier evidence of their rapt and breathless attention. It is the simplest truth to say that at those times many a face illustrated involuntarily the loveliest line in the noblest ode in the language, where Dryden has sung even of a warrior—
“And now and then a sigh he heaved,
And tears began to flow.”
The subdued voice of the Reader, moreover, accorded tenderly with one's remembrance of his own acknowledgment ten years after his completion of the book from which this story was extracted, that with a heavy heart he had walked the streets of Paris alone during the whole of one winter's night, while he and his little friend parted company for ever! Charles Young's son, the vicar of Ilminster, has, recently, in his own Diary appended to his memoir of his father, the tragedian, related a curious anecdote, illustrative, in a very striking way, of the grief—the profound and overwhelming grief—excited in a mind and heart like those of Lord Jeffrey, by the imaginary death of another of these dream-children of Charles Dickens. The editor of the Edinburgh Review, we there read, was surprised by Mrs. Henry Siddons, seated in his library, with his head on the table, crying. “Delicately retiring,” we are then told, “in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed,” Mrs. Siddons observed that Jeffrey raised his head and was kindly beckoning her back. The Diary goes on: “Perceiving that his cheek was flushed and his eyes suffused with tears, she apologised for her intrusion, and begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was seriously intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands, and led her to a seat.” Then came the acknowledgment prefaced by Lord Jeffrey's remark that he was “a great goose to have given way so.” Little Nell was dead! The newly published number of “Master Humphrey's Clock” (No. 44) was lying before him, in which he had just been reading of the general bereavement!
Referring to another of these little creatures' deaths, that of Tiny Tim, Thackeray wrote in the July number of Fraser, for 1844, that there was one passage regarding it about which a man would hardly venture to speak in print or in public “any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart.”
It has been related, even of the burly demagogue, O'Connell, that on first reading of Nell's death in the Old Curiosity Shop, he exclaimed—his eyes running over with tears while he flung the leaves indignantly out of the window—“he should not have killed her—he should not have killed her: she was too good!”