CHAPTER VI
Then Lieutenant Burney sauntered into the room and greeted Esther; but when Fanny inquired with some eagerness what had been the result of Mr. Garrick’s fooling of poor Mr. Kendal, James was by no means so glib or amusing as Fanny expected him to be.
“Psha!” he cried; “that Mr. Kendal is not worth powder and shot—at least not the weight of metal that Mr. Garrick can discharge—not in a broadside—Mr. Garrick is not given to broadsides—they are too clumsy for him—he is like Luke Boscawen, our chief gunner; he had a contempt for what he was used to term a blustering broadside, having a liking only for the working of his little brass swivel. He could do anything that he pleased with his little swivel. ‘Ping!’ it would go, when he had squinted along the sights, and the object he aimed at half a mile away—sometimes so small that we could scarce see it from our foretop—down it went. Boscawen could do what he pleased with it—the blunt nose of a whale rising to spout a mile away—the stem of a cocoa-nut palm on one of the islands when we were not sure of the natives and there was no time to climb the tree—that is the marksmanship of Mr. Garrick, and your Mr. Kendal was not worthy of an exercise of so much skill.”
“Nobody seems too insignificant to be made a fool of by Mr. Garrick,” said Mrs. Burney. “He is as happy when he has made a gruesome face and frightened a maid with a mop at the doorstep, as when he has stricken us with awe when the ghost enters in Hamlet, or when Macbeth declaims of the horror of the curse of sleeplessness that has been cast on him. That is why I said before he arrived that I was not sure that his influence upon you all is for good. He makes one lose one’s sense of the right proportions and realities of life. Now is not that so, Hetty? I make no appeal to Fanny, for I know that she has ever been devoted to Mr. Garrick. Is it not true that she was used to frighten poor Lottie before she was ten by showing how Mr. Garrick frowned as the Duke of Gloster?”
“I know that Fanny murdered us all in turn in our beds, assuring us that we were the Princes in the Tower, or some less real characters invented by herself,” said Esther. “But indeed if James tells us that Mr. Garrick’s gun practice smashed the cocoa-nut that serves Mr. Kendal as a head, I should not grieve. Tell us what happened, James.”
“Oh, ’twas naught worth words to describe,” said James. “The man came to take counsel of Daddy in regard to a jest that Mr. Garrick had, unknown to his victim, played off upon him, and Mr. Garrick so worked upon him that Daddy had no chance to speak. But Mr. Garrick made fools of us as well, for I give you my word, though we were in with him in his jest, he had us blubbering like boobies when he laid his hand on the fellow’s shoulder and spoke nonsense in a voice quivering and quavering as though he were at the point of breaking down.”
Mrs. Burney the elder shook her head.
“That is what I do not like—that trifling with sacred things,” she said. “’Tis not decent in a private house—I would not tolerate it even in a playhouse, and I see that you are of my opinion, James, though you may have been dragged into the abetting of Mr. Garrick in whatever mad scheme he had set himself upon perfecting.”
“Oh, for that matter we are all sorry when we have been merry at the expense of another, even though he be an elderly coxcomb such as that Mr. Kendal,” said James. “But enough—more than enough—of coxcomb Kendal! Tell us of the Duchess’s concert, Hetty. Were the matrimonial duets as successful as usual?”