“I say, Coverdale, old Broomfield is going to ask you to stay and dine—I know he is, he looks so pleased with himself. For mercy’s sake don’t refuse, or else I shall have to endure a tête-à-tête with the old boy, and that will use me up all together—horse, foot, and artillery; for, besides being bored to extinction, he will do me out of every advantage you have obtained for me to-day. He’s an awful screw, and I’m good for nothing at a bargain after the first bottle; so if you leave me to his tender mercies, I’m safe to be butchered like a lamb, and served up in my own mint sauce before we quit the mahogany.”
“I’m afraid I must decline,” was the reply, “for my wife has been at home by herself all day, and it is not fair to expect her to spend the evening in solitude also. But you need not be victimised on that account; come home and dine with us. You’ve never met my wife; she was in the school-room and a pinafore when you went abroad with your regiment. Say yes, and then you can tell old Broomfield that you are engaged to me.”
“So be it then,” was the rejoinder, and thus was Mr. Broomfield cheated of his guests, and Harry enabled to avoid a tête-à-tête dinner, and possibly a scene, with his outraged spouse. In the meantime, Alice had been enduring all the mental torments consequent upon having been angry with the person one loves best in the world. First, the idea that she had been most cruelly used, and extensively sinned against, and put upon, was the only one which presented itself to her mind in anything like a clear and definite shape; and she bewailed her evil fortune in a very thunderstorm of weeping. Having by this means condensed, and disposed of, a vast amount of superfluous steam, she grew calmer and more reasonable, when the uncomfortable possibility gradually dawned upon her, that she also might have been to blame—that she had first irritated, and then defied Harry, and utterly and completely failed in her duty as a wife; and so penitent did she become on the strength of this conviction, that if her husband had returned at that moment, she would have thrown herself at his feet and humbly implored his pardon, which act of unqualified submission must have disarmed Harry so entirely and totally, that he would instantly have forgiven her, and frankly confessed himself to blame, and Alice would never again have experienced the effects of his “quiet manner.” But, unfortunately, Harry was at that moment differently occupied, in impressing upon Tom Rattleworth the important fact, that Lucifer would be all the better for having a red-hot iron passed lightly over his off fetlock at the first convenient opportunity, and thus Alice’s extreme penitence evaporated as her anger had done. The final conclusion at which she arrived was, that she would confess her fault to Harry on his return, and then try calmly and quietly to convince him of his injustice. If she should succeed in this, of which she did not feel by any means certain, they would exchange forgiveness; and, warned by that which had occurred, take heed to their ways, and live in harmony and affection ever after. All these sentiments Alice proposed to deliver when she and her husband should be tête-à-tête after dinner, at which time she had observed Harry to be usually in an amiable and convincible frame of mind. It may easily be imagined, therefore, that when she heard Tom Rattleworth declare with much enthusiasm, and in a voice raised to the pitch in which its possessor had been wont to direct the gallant fraction of the British army lately under his command to “Should—der ar-r-ums,” that he was open to “be blessed,” on the spot, if “the jolly old place did not look stunning,” she was by no means inclined to afford him the benediction he had invoked, and heartily wished him at the bottom of the Red Sea, which we take to be the lowest geographical limit to which a lady’s anathema can be permitted to descend. She had not time to do more than condemn her unknown visitor to the oceanic penal settlement aforesaid, ere a sound as of a jibbing man impelled forward by some powerful agency in the rear, together with the following expostulation, met her ear:—“My dear fellow, I’m not fit to be introduced; I’m all over mud, I am upon my life!”
In another moment the drawing-room door flew open, and her husband and a tall, large, bushy-whiskered, bluff, young man, who looked as if he could only have been brought in doors by way of a trick, like a pony, or a wheelbarrow, stood before her.
“Alice, this is Tom Rattleworth, an old schoolfellow of mine, who is very anxious to form your acquaintance, and has kindly consented to dine with us,” observed Harry.
“Hey!—haw!” began Tom Rattleworth, uttering sounds like a bashful ogre in his intense consciousness of his muddy disqualification for female society; “haw!—hey! the kindnesses all—haw!—the other way. I hope—Mrs. Coverdale—my dear fellow—will excuse—I told you I wasn’t fit to be seen; but you seem to be—the roads are—impetuous as ever—so very muddy.” Having delivered himself of this slightly incoherent address, the embryo M.F.H. “made his reverence” to Alice, and then performing the military evolution expressed in the mysterious terms, “To the right about! wheel!” he laid violent hands upon his host, and forced him out of the room as energetically as he had been himself propelled into it.
The dinner soon made its appearance, and was a “real blessing” to all parties, for it provided them something wherewith to occupy their mouths, and thus obviated the painful necessity of manufacturing small-talk—a toil compared with which the labours of Hercules appear child’s play, and the up-hill work of Sisyphus a mere game at ball.
The first sharp edge of his appetite taken off, Tom Rattleworth began to converse fluently upon the only topic which never failed him, and which invariably formed the staple ingredient in his discourse, and, indeed, in his thoughts generally—viz., himself and his own sayings and doings.
Alice, bored and unhappy, uttered monosyllabic replies, when she perceived that she was expected to do so; and remained silent and distraite when such exertions were not required of her.
Harry, partly grieved at perceiving the accustomed sunshine in his wife’s pretty face overcast, partly irritated at what he imagined to be the sulkiness of her manner; annoyed at his friend’s egotistic chatter, which he felt was disgusting Alice, and which he could not contrive to check (seeing that the obtuseness of Tom Rattleworth’s faculties rendered him totally impervious to a hint); and generally provoked by the change from his usual state of careless, light-hearted happiness to his present uncomfortable frame of mind—a change which he rightly enough attributed in a great measure to his own hastiness and mismanagement, almost lost his temper. This he displayed by rating the lad who assisted Wilkins, until he reduced that unhappy juvenile to such a pitch of nervousness and general mental debility, that, having inveigled his mistress into sugaring instead of peppering a broiled turkey’s leg, and replenished the Champagne glasses from a bottle of bitter ale, he was sent out of the room in disgrace. But in this mortal life (which would be quite unendurable if such were not the case) all things sooner or later come to an end—and dull dinners are no exceptions to the rule—thus, after the dessert had been placed on the table, Alice, having finished her half-glass of sherry and nibbled a fragment of some little vegetable absurdity preserved in candied sugar, and looking like a geological specimen rather than a sweetmeat, reckoned she had sufficiently fulfilled her duty as hostess, and was watching for an opportunity to escape and go and be wretched comfortably by herself, when Tom Rattleworth, addressing her especially, began:—