My cousin Nannie, whose sense of the ridiculous could afflict her like an illness, tottered home in tearful ecstasies, and was only less shattered by the condescension of the grocer than by another tribute, somewhat similar in kind. She had a singularly small and well-shaped foot; a fact to which her son Robert was wont to attribute the peculiarity that her shoe-strings were rarely securely fastened, involving her in an appeal to the nearest man to tie them. She returned to her family one day and related with joy how, as she passed a cabstand, her shoe lace had become unfastened, and how she had then asked a cabman to tie it for her. She thanked him with her usual and special skill in such matters, and, as she slowly moved away, she was pleased to hear her cabman remark to a fellow:
“That’s a dam pleshant owld heifer!”
And the response of the fellow:
“Ah, Shakespeare says ye’ll always know a rale lady when ye see her.”
Her love for society was only matched by her intolerance of being bored. There was a recess in her bedroom, possessed of a small window and a heavy curtain. To this one day, on hearing a ring at the door, she hurriedly repaired, and took with her a chair and a book. She heard the travelling foot of the maid, searching for her. Then the curtain was pushed aside and the maid’s face appeared.
“Oh, is it there you are!” said the maid, with the satisfaction of the finder in a game of hide and seek. That her mistress did not dash her book in her face speaks well for her self-control.
It may be urged that Mrs. Martin might have spared herself this discomfiture by the simpler expedient of leaving directions that she was “Not at Home.” But this shows how little the present generation can appreciate the consciences of the last. I have known my mother to rush into the garden on a wet day, in order that the servant might truthfully say she was “out.”
“Ah, Ma’am, ’twas too much trouble you put on yourself,” said the devoted retainer for whom the sacrifice was made. “God knows I’d tell a bigger lie than that for you! And be glad to do it!” (which was probably true, if only from the artist’s point of view).
Mrs. Martin’s contempt for danger was one of the many points wherein she differed from the average woman of her time. Indeed, it cannot be said that she despised it, as, quite obviously, she enjoyed it. Martin has told of how she and her mother were caught in a storm, in a small boat, on Lough Corrib. Things became serious; one boatman dropped his oar and prayed, the other wept but continued to row; Martin, who had not been bred to boats on Ross Lake for nothing, tugged at the abandoned oar of the supplicant. Meanwhile her mother sat erect in the stern, looking on the tempest in as unshaken a mood as Shakespeare could have desired, and enjoying every moment of it. Neither where horses were concerned did she know fear. I have been with her in a landau, with one horse trying to bolt, while the other had kicked till it got a leg over the trace. Help was at hand, and during the readjustment Mrs. Martin firmly retained her seat. Her only anxiety was lest the drive might have to be given up, her only regret that both horses had not bolted. She said she liked driving at a good round pace. An outside-car might do anything short of lying down and rolling, without being able to shake her off; her son Robert used to say of her that on an outside-car his mother’s grasp of the situation was analogous to that of a poached egg on toast—both being practically undetachable.
How different was she from her first cousin, my mother, who, frankly mid-Victorian, proclaimed herself a coward, without a blush, even with ostentation. When the much-used label, “Mid-Victorian,” is applied, it calls up, in my mind at least, a type of which the three primary causes are, John Leech’s pictures, “The Newcomes,” and Anthony Trollope’s massive output. Pondering over these signs of that time, I withdraw the label from my mother and her compeers. Either must that be done, or the letter “i” substituted for the “a” in label. Let us think for a moment of Mrs. Proudie, of “The Campaigner”; of Eleanor, “The Warden’s” daughter, who bursts into floods of tears as a solution to all situations; of the insufferable Amelia Osborne. Consider John Leech’s females, the young ones, turbaned and crinolined, wholly idiotic, flying with an equal terror from bulls and mice, ogling Lord Dundreary and his whiskers, being scored off by rude little boys. And the elderly women, whose age, if nothing else, marked them, in mid-Victorian times, as fit subjects for ridicule, invariably hideous, jealous, spiteful, nagging, and even more grossly imbecile than their juniors. Thackeray and Trollope between them poisoned the wells in the ’fifties, and the water has hardly cleared yet. Nevertheless, with however mutinous a mind their books are approached, their supreme skill, their great authority, cannot be withstood; their odious women must needs be authentic. I am therefore forced to the conclusion that Martin’s mother, and mine, and their sisters, and their cousins and their aunts were exceptions to the rule that all mid-Victorian women were cats, and I can only deposit the matter upon that crowded ash-heap, that vast parcel-office, adored of the bromidic, “the knees of the Gods,” there to be left till called for.