Darco did, in the main, his own marketing. He had sent home sausages for breakfast, seven in number. Six came to table.
‘Vere is my other zausage,’ cries Darco. ‘There vere zeven. Now there are six. Vere is my other zausage?’
‘Really you know, sir,’ says Mrs. Brace. ‘Sausages do shrink so in the cooking.’
Paul was under the table with a helpless yelp of pleasure, and Darco stormed like a beaten gong.
Come back again, in the brown sultry air, and the solitude, over that bridge of years departed, Mrs. Fuller. It was Mrs. Fuller’s plan to convey a portion of the guests’ clean linen from the chest of drawers into the hall, and to lay it on the table there pinned up in a neat newspaper parcel, and to say, ‘If you please, gentlemen, the rest of your linning have come home, and, if you please, it’s two and elevenpence halfpenny.’ Oh, the days—the days when a jest like this could shake the ribs with mirth!
And Mistress MacAlister, painfully intoxicated at the dinner hour of 2 p.m., and the uncooked leg of young pork in the larder.
‘D’ye thenk ah’m goin’ to cuik till ye on the Sabba’ Day? Ye’ll no be findin’ th’ irreligious sort o’ betches that’ll do that for ye in Dundee, ah’m thenkin’.’
And the little soft-spoken lady from New Orleans, whose husband had been a General—in Del Oro—and an old friend of Darco’s in his campaigning days. And the execution in the house. And Darco signing a cheque for twice the amount claimed, and blubbering like a great fat baby, and swearing to burn the cheque if she thanked him by another word. Old Darco, the nerve-tearer, the inordinate pyramid of vanity, the tender, the generous, the loyal. Sweetest fruit in sourest rind! Sleep on, old Darco. God makes none gentler in heart, though He makes many more beloved.
And how men do, on all hands, unconsciously lay themselves out to delight the budding genial satirist! Here is Darco, wealthy and prosperous as he has never been before, launching out fearlessly, and bearing with him the splendour of the stage—the great Montgomery Bassett. Darco, in consultation with the glorious creature, the question being in which of his unrivalled and majestic assumptions he shall first appear:
‘It doesn’t matter, dear boy,’ says Mr. Montgomery Bassett, in that noble voice, a voice rich as the king of all the wines of Burgundy—‘it doesn’t matter the toss up of a blind beggar’s farthing. The people don’t come to see the play, my boy; they come to see me. They’d come to see me if I played in Punch and Judy.’