Luik i’ my feace, and you may fairly see.”
The Costard’s Complaint, by Ewan Clark.
It was a profound remark of Mrs. Coddle—and women, however humble, read characters very quickly, especially when their own interests are concerned—that there was no telling what ever had come to her Major since them Sandboys had got back to the place. She only knew he hadn’t been “all there” for the last ten days.
And certainly a peculiar change had taken place in Major Oldschool’s deportment in general, and to his housekeeper in particular. Do what she might, there was no pleasing him. For a long time, Mrs. Coddle speculated as to the cause of the alteration of the gentleman’s conduct towards her. At first, with a true nurse’s discrimination, she had been inclined to refer his ill-temper to what she termed the bad state of his “digester,” being convinced that his stomach rather than his head was deranged, and felt satisfied it was all owing to his having left off his nightly brace of “Cockles.” Accordingly, she provided him with a miniature bandbox of the best antibilious, and endeavoured to persuade him to swallow a double allowance of the tiny medicinal dumplings—but all to no avail. Then she felt certain it must be the nasty rheumatiz flying about him, for he’d been and got his blood chilled the evening he went to the station-’us, she knew, cause, on taking his shoe off that night, she had found his sock was quite damp, and the cold must have struck in’ards; so she made him tureensful of white wine whey and treacle-posset, and hot milk and suet, but he would not touch a thimbleful, as she said, of any of them, vowing he never was better in all his life.
At length, however, Mrs. Coddle communicated in confidence to Mrs. Fokesell that she had that morning discovered the cause of all her Major’s tantrums of late, for, on examining the bottom of her teacup at breakfast that day, she had seen a wedding among the grouts as plain as she had ever seed any think in all her life; and what was more, so as to satisfy herself that she couldn’t be mistaken, she had took the trouble to burn a letter, and watch the sparks among the ashes, and there was the parson and the clerk a-going one after the other, for all the world as if they had been right afore her; and so, she said, putting this and that, and a many other things together, Mrs. Fokesell might take her word for it that there would be a wedding in that very house afore the twelvemonth was over.
Mrs. Fokesell shook her head, and remarked that there was no going agin such things, and that she too remembered of dreaming three times running of tumbling into a bed of nettles, and that meant marriage all the world over—adding, that her Fokesell was going to sea again directly, and there was no telling what might happen afore the year was out. But Mrs. Coddle had, as she observed, her eye on a very different party, and all she would then say was, “that there was no fools like old fools,” and she laid a most significant emphasis on that part of the proverb which refers to the age of the simpletons.
Every day Mrs. Coddle discovered some fresh evidence to confirm her in the opinion she had formed as to the cause of the Major’s odd ways of late. Now she would catch him seated at his desk, and scribbling on his blotting-pad, in a fit of abstraction, the name of “Elcy.” Then he had taken to paying daily visits to Covent Garden Market in quest of bouquets and bunches of violets, or baskets of choice fruit, which he always sent up stairs with his compliments to the ladies. Then again he had grown all of a sudden “so dreadful purticlar” about his dress, that there was no bearing him. To-day the plaiting of his frill wouldn’t suit him—to-morrow his shoe wasn’t polished to his liking—and he had actually been and ordered a light poplin palletott, just because he had seed some of the “young bloods” about in them.
And, to tell the truth, Mrs. Coddle was not very wrong in her surmises as to the reason of the Major’s altered behaviour towards her. Ever since he had first seen Elcy Sandboys weeping in the passage, and had discovered the tenderness of her care and regard for her father, he had had thoughts that he had never known before. Major Oldschool had left England as a mere boy of a cadet, and before he had been a year up at his station in India, he had discontinued corresponding with his mother’s lady’s-maid, to whom he had sworn eternal attachment on quitting the country. While out in India, the want of female society had, in a measure, inured him to celibacy, till at last he had gradually sunk into what the ladies termed “a hardened old bachelor.”
On his return to England, however, Major Oldschool soon began to find that the Indian life, food, and climate, had made such inroads upon his constitution, and accustomed him to such habits of indolence, or rather dependence upon others for the execution of even his most trifling wants, that now that his retinue of black domestics was no longer at his command, he found it was utterly impossible to remain without some one to look after him, so he provided himself with that most miserable of all matrimonial make-shifts, an old crone of a housekeeper. Mrs. Coddle was not long in discovering how necessary she was to the comfort of the Major, nor in taking every advantage of him that his dependence upon her permitted. Major Oldschool, however, had not been altogether blind to the exactions of his housekeeper—but being naturally deficient in energy, and not exactly seeing any way of immediately extricating himself from the web that she had spun round him, he had tolerated her tyranny in as patient a manner as possible.
On becoming acquainted with Elcy, the Major began to feel the thraldom of Mrs. Coddle unusually irksome to him. He was continually contrasting the truthfulness of the young girl with the artifice and deceit of the old woman, and comparing the gentleness and loving care of the one with the exactions and hollow sympathy of the other; and as he grew to like the younger one, he got almost to hate the older in an equal degree. Still he would hardly allow himself to imagine that he could be in love at his time of life; and whenever he caught himself thinking how wretched he was with old Mrs. Coddle, and how happy he could be with Elcy Sandboys to attend upon him, he drove the thought from his mind, calling himself an old fool, and mentally inquiring what the world would think of him marrying a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.