“Go on, as if you hadn’t heard a score of times all I’ve got to tell about the General—though you know I hate him to be called that. He’ll always be the Captain to me.”
Soon afterward, notwithstanding her first refusal, Mrs. Gainsborough embarked upon tales of gay days in the ’sixties and ’seventies. It was astonishing to think that this room in which they were sitting could scarcely have changed since then.
“The dear Captain! He bought this house for me in eighteen-sixty-nine before I was twenty, and I’ve lived in it ever since. Ah, dear! many’s the summer daybreak we’ve walked back here after dancing all night at Cremorne. Such lovely lights and fireworks. Earl’s Court is nothing to Cremorne. Fancy their pulling it down as they did. But perhaps it’s as well it went, as all the old faces have gone. It would have given me the dismals to be going there now without my Captain.”
She went on with old tales of London, tales that had in them the very smoke and grime of the city.
“Who knows what’s going to happen when the clock strikes twelve?” she said, shaking her head. “So enjoy yourselves while you can. That’s my motto. And if there’s a hereafter, which good God forbid, I should be very aggravated to find myself waltzing around as fat and funny as I am now.”
The old pagan, who had mellowed slowly with her house for company, seemed to sit here hugging the old friend; and as she told her tales it was difficult not to think she was playing hostess to the spirits of her youths to ghostly Dundrearies and spectral belles with oval faces. Michael could have listened all night to her reminiscences of dead singers and dead dancers, of gay women become dust and of rakes reformed, of beauties that were now hags, and of handsome young subalterns grown parched and liverish. Sylvia egged her on from story to story, and Lily lay languidly back in her chair. It must be after two o’clock, and Michael rose to go.
“We’ll have one song,” cried Sylvia, and she pulled Mrs. Gainsborough to the piano. The top of the instrument was hidden by stacked-up albums, and the front of it was of fretted walnut-wood across a pleating of claret-colored silk.
Mrs. Gainsborough, pounding with her fat fingers the keys that seemed in comparison so frail and old, sang in a wheezy pipe of a voice: The Captain with his Whiskers took a Sly Glance at Me.
“But you only get me to do it, so as you can have a good laugh at me behind my back,” she declared, swinging round upon the stool to face Sylvia when she had finished.
“Nothing of the sort, you fat old darling. We do it because we like it.”