“Nothing half so sweet in life
As love’s young dream;”
or prate of the delights of ambition; the charms of fame; the pleasures of hope and of memory; the satisfaction of a good conscience; or the inestimable blessings of domestic felicity—which, in a general way, means buying cradles, paying taxes, and settling bills:—you may have heard all this, and believed much or little of it, as your bump of veneration happens to be largely developed or otherwise. But what I am going to tell you is a “great fact;” and do you remember it, and act upon it accordingly. The happiest time of your life ought to be, and probably therefore will be, the glorious night on which you, a light-hearted, merry child, witness your first pantomime!—and you may go with my compliments to Papa and inform him that I say so.
At all events, Hugh Colville felt strongly that until he had seen a clown he had been ignorant of the real dignity of human nature, or the sublime heights to which, properly cultivated, it was capable of soaring. Columbine also (as enacted by that houri, Rosetta Matilda Slammock) impressed him with a deep sense of the sylph-like grace and ethereal purity of woman,—all but the very pink calves of her seraphic legs, in regard to which, beautiful and praiseworthy as they were, viewing them in the abstract as mere bounding, pirouetting, sliding, and gliding machines, he could not help indulging some scruples of conscience, mentally classing them with unpaid-for toffy, clandestine nine-pins on Sunday, and the few other examples of the “pleasant, but wrong” principle, which had come within the limits of his juvenile experience; and he was just considering that, if Heaven had vouchsafed to place him in the proud and enviable position of her elder brother, he should have mildly remonstrated against her making such a very prominent feature of her legs; when to his surprise and regret, Virtue suddenly triumphed amidst ablaze of fireworks, and Vice being punished in the person of the Lurid Wizard of the Forty-locked Murderer’s Cavern, who was dragged by three supernumerary fiends-to a naughty place under the stage, the curtain fell, and all was over.
The next phase of the evening was to Hugh one strange and uncomfortable scene of inexplicable confusion. Biggington, Norman, and his companions, went behind the scenes, under the auspices of Jack Sprattly, who did not look nearly so brave and glorious out of his scarlet coat; and Hugh followed them for fear of being lost, receiving at their hands much the same kind and degree of attention that a little dog would have met with.
Of all miserable, desolate, chaotic-looking places, the stage of a theatre in dishabille is one of the most forlorn. The incomprehensible machinery for scene-shifting, the frightful backs of all the brilliant effects, the dirt, the smell of the lamps, the ropes, the rubbish, the dangerous trap-doors, the tired, sleepy carpenters, the haggard, snobbish actors, and, worse than all, the pale, hollow-eyed actresses, with their forced, heartless laughter—a very mockery of mirth—of all places for destroying illusion, commend me to the region behind the-scenes as the most dismally effectual.
Biggington, Norman, and Stradwick, having disappeared somewhere within the mysterious precincts of the green-room where they remained long enough for Terry to jump over everything, and tumble down everywhere, and set wrong bells ringing in all kinds of unexpected places, and have a terrific combat with nobody in virtue of a “property” sword and buckler wherewith he had illegally armed himself—the party re-assembled, and without further delay proceeded to “The Bull.”
This remarkable quadruped must have been, in his interesting lifetime, a most rare and wonderful creature, at least, if he at all resembled his portrait, which hung creaking on a species of jovial gibbet in front of the hostelrie bearing his name. The picture certainly may have been a likeness, but as it represented the bovine original got up, regardless of expense, in richly-gilt hoofs and horns, with his tail twisted over his back in the shape of a horizontal figure of eight, ending in a bright golden flame, while such a cluster of Hyperion curls waved over his massive-brow, as involuntarily to suggest the idea of his wearing one of those false fronts, paraded by self-deluding old ladies in the forlorn hope of deceiving society on the score of their undesirable longevity, we can scarcely conceive the artist to have adhered to nature with a proper degree of pre-Raphaelite severity. Be this as it may, the present proprietor of the Bull had exerted all his energies to provide a supper commensurate with the dignity and gullibility of the givers of the feast; and Hugh Colville’s eyes sparkled with delight, when the goodly array of nice things first met his gaze; for, though by no means greedy, he was still almost a child, and was a hungry school-boy into the bargain—need we say more?
Then arrived Courtenay Trevanion (alias Jack Sprattly) and the young ladies, who from a strict sense of propriety, which was one of their marked characteristics, had refused to come unless they might be allowed to bring with them Mrs. Belvidera Fitz-Siddons as chaperone. This great lady, for such she was in every sense of the word, had done the heavy tragic business for many years with immense éclat, until latterly she had grown too heavy even for that, which fact had been painfully impressed upon her by reason of her constantly, at harrowing moments of heart-rending despair, disappearing suddenly from before the streaming eyes of the astonished audience down traps calculated to support mortals of moderate (but not immoderate) weight. Finding that these unexpected disappearances tended to impart a burlesque character to her acting, rather than to increase the pathos thereof, Mrs. B. Fitz-Siddons had wisely restricted herself to such parts as suited her advanced years; and now having, by the trifling addition of sixpence weekly to his salary, bribed the call-boy to chalk B. T. (beware traps!) upon all dangerous footing, she still shone in the elderly comic line, and played Mrs. Malaprop and Mrs. Backbite to delighted audiences. For the rest, this illustrious woman rejoiced in a pair of large, bold, uncomfortable black eyes; a man’s voice, slightly the worse for wear, and——and a little failing she had in regard to liquor; stiff horse-hair-like curls, which might have been her own only that she had a harmless scruple against wasting money on paying her bills; and a generally hooked outline, so essentially Israelitish, that her green-room cognomen of “Mother Moses” appeared by no means inappropriate. Of the young ladies we will only say that, like all young ladies, they were irresistible.
Just at first starting, matters appeared a little dull and unpromising; the fact being that the two elder Tickletonians, not finding, when put to the test, that they were quite such thorough men of the world as they imagined themselves, suffered under an uncomfortable inability to make small talk; while Jack Sprattly, possessing a most inconvenient appetite, was so engrossed with the good cheer before him, that conversation, under the circumstances, became a physical impossibility.