“It’s a true bill that you’ll have to pay for as fine a couple of chickens as ever was trussed, which is now cast away before swine, for as to ’em keeping till the day after to-morrow, it’s a model impossibilitude.”
“I should rather have thought a physical one,” suggested Frere sotto voce.
“Then there’s a tongue,” continued Jemima, unheeding the interruption, “as beautiful a one as ever I set my two eyes on.”
“I wonder if it’s as long as her own,” observed Frere, speculatively pursuing the under-current of his private annotations.
“A tongue that with care and good carving would have lasted you for breakfast for a fortnight.”
“Then it would not have gone by any means as fast as a certain unruly member with which I am acquainted,” continued the commentator.
“Together with a lovely turbot, which I almost had to go down on my bended knees to get out of the fishmonger—turbots being like pearls of price at this time of year, with three dozen of natives, which was astonished not to be able to procure, so was forced to put up with lobster sauce instead, and a beauty it is now, though it will be non compo scenlis by the day after to-morrow, and fit only to make people sick in the dusthole, where it’s a sin to let it go, with so many poor starving creatures a-wanting it, which was not the case when your blessed mother was upon the face of the earth, in a violent satin gownd, a setting you moral copies ‘A woeful waist makes wilful want,’ and ‘My name is Norval, on the Grumpy Hills,’ which ought to have taught you better than to have asked five gents to come here, looking like fools, and yourself the sixth, gone out of town, leaving me to tell ’em so, with the house full of good things all turning bad, and nobody but me to eat ’em, which is a hard trial for an aged woman, that, taking you from the month, ought to be respected, if grey hairs is honourable, which they don’t seem to be nowadays, when we have got a bad lot of wigs over our heads, with half of ’em nothing in ’em but crimped horsehair, I do believe.”
Here the worthy woman’s breath failing her, Frere was at length able to get in a word or two.
“My good Jemima,” he began blandly, “listen to me. When I invited my friends and ordered a dinner, I was of course not aware that I should be suddenly called upon to leave town; such being the case, however, we must make the best of it. I will, therefore, despatch notes to the gentlemen who were to have been my guests, putting them off; and in regard to the comestibles, such as from their animal fabric require cooking must be cooked, and we must endeavour to consume them in detail at—at our earliest convenience. Now have I slain your Hydra, my good Jemima?”
“I don’t understand your gibberish, Master Richard, nor don’t want to. My poor dear mistress, which piously departed this moral life in a mahogany coffin and silver nails, didn’t used to talk so, though she’d been brought up at boarding-school with the best of pastors and masters to honour and obey; but this I know, that the blessed dinner will go to rack and ruin in spite of all your cooking retail combustibles, and that puts me in mind, what have you been doing with your breakfast? why, goodness gracious! he’s never touched a bit of it, and” (here she caught sight of the butter-knife), “Oh lor, oh lor! if he ain’t gone clean demented. What’s the matter?” she continued, as Frere, astonished at her unusual vehemence, sought to learn the cause of her disquietude; “what’s the matter, indeed? Look in the glass, and if you’re fit for any place but Bedlam you’ll soon see what’s the matter.”