“Nay, madam!” whimpered the page, who was a good-hearted girl; “'twas your great complaisance for us, not vanity. Oh! oh! oh!” and she began to blubber, to make matters better.
“No, my children,” said the old lady, “'twas vanity. I wanted to show you what an old 'oman could do; and I have humiliated myself, trying to outshine younger folk. I am justly humiliated, as you see;” and she began to cry a little.
“This is very painful,” said Cibber.
Mrs. Bracegirdle now raised her eyes (they had set her in a chair), and looking sweetly, tenderly and earnestly on her old companion, she said to him, slowly, gently, but impressively “Colley, at threescore years and ten this was ill done of us! You and I are here now—for what? to cheer the young up the hill we mounted years ago. And, old friend, if we detract from them we discourage them. A great sin in the old!”
“Every dog his day.”
“We have had ours.” Here she smiled, then, laying her hand tenderly in the old man's, she added, with calm solemnity: “And now we must go quietly toward our rest, and strut and fret no more the few last minutes of life's fleeting hour.”
How tame my cacotype of these words compared with what they were. I am ashamed of them and myself, and the human craft of writing, which, though commoner far, is so miserably behind the godlike art of speech: “Si ipsam audivisses!”
These ink scratches, which, in the imperfection of language, we have called words, till the unthinking actually dream they are words, but which are the shadows of the corpses of words; these word-shadows then were living powers on her lips, and subdued, as eloquence always does, every heart within reach of the imperial tongue.
The young loved her, and the old man, softened and vanquished, and mindful of his failing life, was silent, and pressed his handkerchief to his eyes a moment; then he said:
“No, Bracy, no. Be composed, I pray you. She is right. Young people, forgive me that I love the dead too well, and the days when I was what you are now. Drat the woman,” continued he, half ashamed of his emotion; “she makes us laugh, and makes us cry, just as she used.”