No, Mr. Marchbanks did not offer his venerable mistress many happy returns of her birthday. And to those of our readers who aspire to serve old ladies who live in Hill Street—and let us not be judged immodest if we express the belief that many who are inspired with this excellent ambition will be found among them—a word of warning may not be out of place. Let us urge these neophytes not to take the practice of Mr. Marchbanks for their guide. His eminence was the fruit of years. Remember he had been tipped by the Duke of Wellington. He had pulled down the coat collar of Lord Palmerston on more than one occasion; while as for Lord Granville, he knew him as well as he knew his own father.
“How is Ponto this morning?” inquired the occupant of the four-poster.
“In excellent spirits, my lady.”
“And his appetite?”
“He has eaten a chicken, my lady, with excellent relish.”
“Humph,” said the occupant of the four-poster, “that dog eats as much as a Christian.”
In the opinion of Mr. Marchbanks Ponto ate more, but he did not say so. He was content merely to bow and withdraw with simple yet ample dignity. The old lady read her letters and glanced at the Court Circular, the Parliamentary Report, and the Money Market. She then announced her intention of getting up. Over the divers things incident to this complex process it is doubtless well to draw the veil. Let it suffice that an hour and a half later she reached her morning-room, a veritable dragon in black silk and a brown wig, leaning on an ebony walking-stick.
The normal condition of her temper was severe, “Acidulated to the verge of the morose,” said those who had particular cause to respect it. A considerable, not to say representative body they were. On this wet morning of the early spring, this seventy-third annual commemoration of the most pregnant fact of her experience, her temper was so positively formidable that it smote the officers of her household with a feeling akin to dismay.
Various causes had contributed to the state of the barometer. For one thing that impertinent fellow Cheriton had issued his annual persiflage upon the subject of her birthday. It fell, it appeared, upon the first of April; a stroke of irony, in Cheriton’s opinion, for which she had never quite been able to forgive her Creator. Then, again, if you came to think of it, what had existence to offer an old woman who had so long outlived her youth; who had neither kith nor kin of her own; who bored her friends; who rendered her dependents miserable; who was unable to take exercise; who distrusted doctors and despised the clergy: a praiser of past times who considered the present age all that it ought not to be?
Why should this old lady be in a good humor on her seventy-third birthday? She was a nuisance to everybody, including herself. She was a vain and selfish old woman, as all the world knew. Yet even she had her points. Everybody has to have points of some kind, else they would never be allowed to persist—particularly to their seventy-fourth year.