Perhaps, there was after all nothing better in the delivery of the whole of this Reading, than the utterance of the two words italicised below in the first dialogue, reported by Boots as having taken place between himself and Master Harry Walmers, junior, when “that mite,” as Boots calls him, stops one day, along with the fine young woman of seven already mentioned, where Boots (then under-gardener, remember) was hoeing weeds in the gravel:—
“'Cobbs,' he says, 'I like you.' 'Do you, sir? I'm proud to hear it.' 'Yes, I do, Cobbs. Why do I like you, do you think, Cobbs?' 'Don't know, Master Harry, I'm sure.' 'Because Norah likes you, Cobbs.' 'Indeed, sir? That's very gratifying.' 'Gratifying, Cobbs? It is better than millions of the brightest diamonds, to be liked by Norah?' 'Certainly, sir.'”
Confirmed naturally enough in his good opinion of Cobbs by this thorough community of sentiment, Master Harry, who has been given to understand from the latter that he is going to leave, and, further than that, on inquiring, that he wouldn't object to another situation “if it was a good 'un,” observes, while tucking that other mite in her little sky-blue mantle under his arm, “Then, Cobbs, you shall be our head gardener when we are married.” Boots, thereupon, in the person of the Reader, went on to describe how “the babies with their long bright curling hair, their sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, rambled about the garden deep in love,” sometimes here, sometimes there, always under his own sympathetic and admiring observation, until one day, down by the pond, he heard Master Harry say, “Adorable Norah, kiss me and say you love me to distraction.” Altogether Cobbs seemed exactly, and with delicious humour, to define the entire situation when he declared, that “on the whole the contemplation of them two babies had a tendency to make him feel as if he was in love himself—only he didn't know who with!”
The delightful gravity of countenance (with a covert sparkle in the eye where the daintiest indications of fun were given by the Reader) lent a charm of its own to the merest nothing, comparatively, in the whimsical dialogues he was reporting. Master Harry, for example, having confided to Cobbs one evening, when the latter was watering the flowers, that he was going on a visit to his grandmama at York—“'Are you indeed, sir? I hope you'll have a pleasant time. I'm going into Yorkshire myself, when I leave here.' 'Are you going to your grandmama's, Cobbs?' 'No, sir. I haven't got such a thing.' 'Not as a grandmama, Cobbs?' 'No, sir.'” Immediately after which, on the boy observing to his humble confidant, that he shall be so glad to go because “Norah's going,” Cobbs, naturally enough, as it seemed, took occasion to remark, “You'll be all right then, sir, with your beautiful sweetheart by your side.” Whereupon we realised more clearly than ever the delicate whimsicality of the whole delineation, when we saw, as well as heard, the boy return a-flushing, “Cobbs, I never let anybody joke about that when I can prevent them,” Cobbs immediately explaining in all humility, “It wasn't a joke, sir—wasn't so meant.” No wonder, Boots had exclaimed previously: “And the courage of that boy! Bless you, he'd have throwed off his little hat and tucked up his little sleeves and gone in at a lion, he would—if they'd happened to meet one, and she [Norah] had been frightened.” At the close of Boots's record of this last-quoted conversation with Master Harry, came one of the drollest touches in the Reading—“'Cobbs,' says that boy, 'I'll tell you a secret. At Norah's house, they have been joking her about me, and [with a wondering look] pretending to laugh at our being engaged! Pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!' 'Such, sir,' I says, 'is the depravity of human natur.'” A glance during the utterance of which words, either at the Reader himself or at his audience, was something enjoyable.
Hardly less inspiriting in its way was the incidental mention, directly after this by Cobbs, of the manner in which he gave Mr. Walmers notice, not that he'd anything to complain of—“'Thanking you, sir, I find myself as well sitiwated here as I could hope to be anywheres. The truth is, sir, that I'm a going to seek my fortun.' 'O, indeed, Cobbs?' he says, 'I hope you may find it.'” Boots hereupon giving his audience the assurance, with the characteristic touch of the bootjack to his forehead, that “he hadn't found it yet!”
Then came the delectable account of the elopement—full, true, and particular—from the veracious lips of Cobbs himself, at that time, and again some years afterwards, when he came to call up his recollections, Boots at the Holly Tree Inn. Passages here and there in his description of the incident were irrisistibly laughable. Master Harry's going down to the old lady's in York, for example, “which old lady were so wrapt up in that child as she would have give that child the teeth in her head (if she had had any).” The arrival of “them two children,” again at the Holly Tree Inn, he, as bold as brass, tucking her in her little sky-blue mantle under his arm, with the memorable dinner order, “Chops and cherry pudding for two!” Their luggage, even, when gravely enumerated—the lady having “a parasol, a smelling bottle, a round and a half of cold buttered toast, eight peppermint drops, and a doll's hair-brush;” the gentleman having “about half a dozen yards of string, a knife, three or four sheets of writing paper folded up surprisingly small, a orange, and a chaney mug with his name on it.” Several of the little chance phrases, the merest atoms of exclamation here and there, will still be borne in mind as having had an intense flavour of fun about them, as syllabled in the Reading. Boots's “Sir, to you,” when his governor, the hotel-keeper, proposes to run over to York to quiet their friends' minds, while Cobbs keeps his eye upon the innocents! Master Harry's replying to Boots' suggestion, that they should wile away the time by a walk down Love-lane—“'Get out with you, Cobbs!'—that was that there boy's expression.” The glee of the children was prettily told too on their finding “Good Cobbs! Dear Cobbs!” among the strangers around them at their temporary halting-place. They themselves appearing smaller than ever in his eyes, by reason of his finding them “with their little legs entirely off the ground, of course—and it really is not possible to express how small them children looked!—on a e-normous sofa;” immense at any time, but looking like a Great Bed of Ware then by comparison.
How, during the governor's absence in search of their friends, Cobbs, feeling himself all the while to be “the meanest rascal for deceiving 'em, that ever was born,” gets up a cock and a bull story about a pony he's acquainted with, who'll take them on nicely to Gretna Green—but who was not at liberty the first day, and the next was only “half clipped, you see, and couldn't be took out in that state for fear it should strike to his inside”—was related with the zest of one who had naturally the keenest relish possible for every humorous particular. Finding the lady in tears one time when Boots goes to see how the runaway couple are getting on, “Mrs. Harry Walmers, junior, fatigued, sir?” asks Cobbs. “Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to be away from home, and she has been in low spirits again. Cobbs, do you think you could bring a biffin, please?”—“I ask your pardon, sir, What was it you ———?” “I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her, Cobbs.” Restoratives of that kind, Boots would seem to have regarded as too essential to Mrs. Harry Walmers junior's happiness. Hence, when he comes upon the pair over their dinner of “biled fowl and bread-and-butter pudding,” Boots privately owns that “he could have wished to have seen her more sensible to the woice of love, and less abandoning of herself to the currants in the pudding.” According to Cobbs's own account of the gentleman, however, it should be added that he too could play his part very effectively at table, for—having mentioned another while, how the two of them had ordered overnight sweet milk-and-water and toast and currant jelly for breakfast—when Cobbs comes upon them the next morning at their meal, he describes Master Harry as sitting behind his breakfast cup “a tearing away at the jelly as if he had been his own father!”
Remorseful in the thought of betraying them, Boots at one moment declared, that rather than combine any longer against them, he would by preference “have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the governor!” And at another time, when the said governor had returned from York, “with Mr. Walmers and a elderly lady,” Boots, while conducting Mr. Walmers upstairs, could not for the life of him help pausing at the room door, with, “I beg your pardon, sir, I hope you are not angry with Master Harry. For Master Harry's a fine boy, sir, and will do you credit and honour.” Boots signifying while he related the circumstance, that “if the fine boy's father had contradicted him in the state of mind in which he then was, he should have 'fetched him a crack' and took the consequences.” As for the appreciation of Master Harry by the female dependents at the Holly Tree, there were two allusions to that—one general, as may be said, the other particular—that were always the most telling hits, the two chief successes of the Reading. Who that once heard it, for example, has forgotten the Author's inimitable manner of saying, as the Boots—“The way in which the women of that house—without exception—every one of 'em—married and single—took to that boy when they heard the story, is surprising. It was as much as could be done to keep 'em from dashing into the room and kissing him. They climbed up all sorts of places, at the risk of their lives, to look at him through a pane of glass. They was seven deep at the key-hole!” The climax of fun came naturally at the close, however, when, having described how Mr. Walmers lifted his boy up to kiss the sleeping “little warm face of little Mrs. Harry Walmers, junior,” at the moment of their separation, Boots, that is the Reader, cried out in the shrill voice of one of the chambermaids, “It's a shame to part 'em!”
Two reflections indulged in by Boots during the course of his narrative, being among the pleasantest in connection with this most graceful of all the purely comic Readings, may here, while closing these allusions to it, be recalled to mind not inappropriately. One—where Cobbs “wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where them two babies could have made an impossible marriage, and have lived impossibly happy ever afterwards.” The other—where, with genial sarcasm, Boots propounds this brace of opinions by way of general summing up—“Firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to be married who are half as innocent as them two children. Secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing for a great many couples on their way to be married, if they could only be stopped in time, and brought back separate.” With which cynical scattering of sugar-plums in the teeth, of married and single, the blithe Reading was laughingly brought to its conclusion.