Harry Coverdale's Courtship, and All That Came of It

by Frank E. Smedley

CHAPTER XVI.—TREATS OF THINGS IN GENERAL.

It must be confessed that Harry Coverdale was of a somewhat impetuous disposition. No sooner had he obtained Mr. Hazlehurst’s consent to the match, than he commenced a system of alternate petting and persecution, whereby he contrived to render the lives of Alice and her mother scarcely endurable, until he had induced them to fix an early day for his “execution,” as Tom irreverently paraphrased the solemnisation of the marriage ceremony. This object happily accomplished, a journey to London was proposed, whereat Mr. Hazlehurst looked very black; but when Alice seated herself on his knee, and, stroking his bald head, called him a dear, good, kind, papa (on speculation, probably, for at that moment he did not in the slightest degree look the character), his heart softened, and he consented to the plan. Then somebody told Arthur of a wonderful doctor, who had found out a new system of curing everything, and especially complaints analogous to that under which Mrs. Hazlehurst laboured; accordingly, he determined his mother should form one of the London party, and consult this fashionable fee-taker; and when Arthur had determined on a thing, it generally came to pass. Therefore, after considerable pro-ing-and con-ing, and macadamizing of difficulties, the matter was finally arranged by Mrs. Hazlehurst, her son, and her two daughters, taking up their abode at Cherry’s Hotel, in Jermyn Street, while Coverdale established himself in his old quarters at the Tavistock, in Covent-garden.

Then they began to be overwhelmed with business. First, the infallible doctor was to be consulted; so poor Mrs. Hazlehurst was dragged out of bed some three hours sooner than usual, breakfasted in a nervous tremor, which rendered the ceremony a most unreal mockery, was transported from her carriage to a stately dining-room, where some twenty fellow-victims were already incarcerated, whence (having waited two hours, because, in her ignorance of London rascalities, she had omitted to fee the noble creature in plush and powder who had admitted her) she was at length (his nobleness not being able longer to exclude her) ushered into the presence of the potentate of pills himself. This erudite individual was a short, stiff man, with a short, stiff appearance,—the result of the most severe application of starch and hair-brushes,—and a short, stiff manner, assumed, as are the stare and swagger of Van Amburg and other tiger-tamers, for the purpose of browbeating and mentally subduing refractory or sceptical patients. Seeing at a glance, however, that poor Mrs. Hazlehurst was already subdued, he obligingly let off a little superfluous starch, slightly disarranged his hair, smiled, to show a fine set of false teeth, put in at trade-price by a friendly dentist, and having thus brought himself somewhat nearer the limpness of average humanity, added (as he would have probably expressed it) a couple of drachms syrupi saccarinis to his manner, ere he proceeded to catechise his patient as to her symptoms, and the remedies that had been applied to remove them. To each fact thus elicited, he replied by frowning portentously, screwing round his mouth, and muttering, “I knew it,” in a gloomy and mysterious manner, as though he had acquired the knowledge by some awful and supernatural course of study; and, indeed, as Mrs. Hazlehurst’s confessions involved her having had a dangerous fall from her horse at a period when he, the doctor, must have been about five years old, and that she had been laid up with a bilious fever exactly two calendar months and four days before he was born, he can scarcely be supposed to have come by his information honestly and lawfully. In fact, to a logical mind, the question resolved itself into the following hypothesis—that he must either be a true prophet, or a lying doctor.

Having elicited all the facts he cared to learn (which, if he knew them before, he might as well have saved himself the trouble of doing), he drew himself up to his extreme altitude,—which was nothing very tremendous after all,—got his starch up to high-pressure pitch, judiciously tempering its stiffness with soothing syrup, and delivered himself of the following opinion:—“Madam, you have told me nothing that, the moment I beheld you, I was not prepared to hear. I do not in the slightest degree impugn the judgment and skill of Mr. Smithers” (the Hazlehurst general practitioner), “but the instant I glanced at his first prescription I saw he had taken a wrong view of our case. Superacetate of Euroclydon and bi-carbonate of Hydrocephalus would never remove the pain and palpitation on our right side—”

“The left is the side on which I usually feel the pain,” began Mrs. Hazlehurst, mildly.

“Eh! left—yes, of course; I said left, didn’t I? I believe I observed to you before, madam, that the moment I set eyes on you I became aware of—in fact, I felt (if I may so express myself) that pain and palpitation on our left side; and I said to myself, if that very talented practitioner, Mr. Smithers, has administered Superacetate of Euroclydon, and bi-carbonate of Hydrocephalus to that pain of ours—with the highest respect for Smithers (he was walking St. Bartholomew’s when I was dresser to the late celebrated and lamented Flayflesh), I must say he has mistaken our case. Now, I shall just—I make no secret of my practice—I shall just throw in three grains of extr. Borealis Aurorae, with equal proportions of Astri caninis, Geminorum siamesiæ, and sesqui-carbonate (mind that) sesqui-carbonate of Pantapolion, and our pain will lapse (as Byron so beautifully expresses it) into ‘a happy memory of the past.’ You will take the mixture six times in the twenty-four hours, and the pills immediately before dinner. With regard to diet, everything you have been accustomed to eat is wrong; your appetite is weak, and you like delicacies, as they are called, better than substantial joints, I dare say?”

Mrs. Hazlehurst acknowledged that his penetration had not failed him; and he resumed sharply—

“Madam, we musn’t touch them! they are poison in such a case as ours. No; we must restrict ourselves to plain beef and mutton, very much underdone; stale bread, no vegetables, no fruit, no nice things, very bitter beer, with plenty of the camomile in it (that’s the brewer’s secret, strychnine’s all a delusion), and stick to the sesqui-carbonate of Pantapolion, and we shall be a different woman in a short time. Let me see you again on Friday. Good morning.” And so, pocketing his guinea with less respect than many men pay to a fourpenny-piece, the fashionable quack allowed his victim to escape.

Then there was shopping. There are a good many shops in Regent Street, and those that are not there are in Bond Street, at least a fair sprinkling of them; but Harry solemnly declared (after his marriage) that during the fortnight the party were in London, they went into them all, and every man knows what that involves. Give a woman her head, so far as to allow her to put it into a shop, and he must indeed be a clever fellow who can coax or coerce her out of it under half-an-hour. But Harry was in love, and love is blind (though it has an awkward trick of recovering its eyesight after marriage and making up for lost time, by spying out all kinds of things to which it had far better had remained blind); besides, Alice was not more exigeante than a lover generally desires his mistress should be: too much independence of character in a young girl being by no means an attractive quality.

Then there was a good deal of sight-seeing to be got through. Emily had never been in London before, and Alice only once for a week. So they “did” Westminster Abbey, which they really enjoyed; and St. Paul’s, which they pretended to admire, and didn’t; and the Tower, where Emily called the figures in the horse-armoury a set of quizzical old things; and the Polytechnic, where they saw a man go down in a diving-bell, to pick up nothing at the bottom of a large wash-hand-basin, and come up again half suffocated, which they considered curious and highly satisfactory, as no doubt it was to everybody but that unfortunate martyr to popular science himself, who (taking the most cheerful view of his amphibious occupation) can scarcely be regarded in the light of a jolly young waterman. Then they went to the National Gallery to see the pictures, which, as it was not an unusually bright and clear day, of course they were unable to do; but they had the pleasure of seeing the building itself, and the fountains in Trafalgar Square, which they all agreed they had never beheld anything like before; and Harry added, that in his travels he had not met with anything to equal the whole affair in its peculiar style, and that he thought foreigners must be very strongly impressed by it, and that it must at once give them a clear idea of English taste; which remarks it was a pity the architect was not there to hear, as they might possibly have been of use to him. Emily had never beheld a play, so they went to the I-see-um Theatre, where they witnessed the performance of a very long melodrama, adapted from the French (that is, all that was national and peculiar—without which the plot became a mere silly tissue of improbable events and impossible situations—omitted, and the place supplied by worn-out and conventional clap-traps). This pièce de résistance, which was to last the play-going public for some four or six months, according to the degree in which it suited their appetites, was so well put on the stage, and so well acted, that the false sentiment and worse morality which pervaded it were for the time forgotten, and it was not till Arthur called his attention to the fact, that Harry recollected this un-English jumble of crimes and follies, was played night after night to crowded houses, while the masterpieces of Shakspere, the greatest dramatist who ever lived, were banished to an obscure theatre in the outskirts of London, or were forced to be translated into a foreign language, and acted by a foreign company, ere the “ears polite” of London fashionables could be persuaded to listen to them. The two young men argued the question in all its bearings, and arrived at this conclusion, viz. either that if Shakspere were better acted it would be better attended, or that if Shakspere were better attended, better actors would soon be found to perform the characters; though which of these statements might be regarded as the cause, and which as the effect, they could by no means agree. And by that time, the play being concluded, Emily declared that it was quite perfect, really charming; and that, as to Shakspere, he was an obsolete old slow-coach, and very wicked too—or else, why did they want a family edition of him? Whereas, if there had ever been any harm in this play, which she did not believe could have been the case, dear Mr. Kingsby Florence had translated it so beautifully that it might have been acted anywhere—in a church almost. Then she turned and appealed to her sister, to support her in her girlish and unorthodox enthusiasm.