I have never been entirely certain that Margharetta was not descended from the Bourbons. Her husband was in jail for theft, and was a poet. "I will show you some of his poetry," she promised me in the first five minutes of my acquaintance with her. "Some of my friends say he is as great a poet as Shakespeare."
Like Marie Antoinette, she had three children. Her husband's misfortune had made it necessary to put these under the care of others. She talked of them incessantly, and assured me that no heart could bleed like a mother's.
As we drove up from the station, she looked all about her, with the air of a Siddons.
"Wouldn't Ethel enjoy this scenery!" she remarked, still very grand, but almost awed, it seemed. "She's such a poetic child!" (Ethel was the oldest, a little girl of ten.) "And these trees!" she said solemnly, as we entered the grave lordly shadows of the hemlocks. "Wouldn't Richard enjoy them, now!" (Richard was the Dauphin, aged six.)
When we at last got to the house, and she entered the kitchen in her grand manner, it seemed to grow large—as the lintels and chambers of the Greeks are said to have done when the gods visited them. The walls seemed to widen out, and the pans and kettles took on a shining stateliness. I have difficulty when writing of her to keep myself to fact, so gracious, so spacious, was her manner. I know, for instance, that her dresses all dipped a little at the back, yet I have the greatest temptation to say she wore a court train, so much was that the enlarging impression that she at all times conveyed. She was the most dominating personality, I believe, that I have ever known. Like a French verb, she seemed to cover and account for all possibilities. She reminded you of the infinitive, the subjunctive, the future, the indicative, the plus-que-parfait. Entering the dining-room, her handsome hands bearing—always a little aloft—the corned beef or pot roast that should have been a peacock at the very least, she conveyed, silently, time and tense and person, passive and active: "I am"; "let us love"; "let us have"; "thou hast"; "I have not"; "if I had!"
Early in her career, I asked her what desserts she could make.
She turned her full Bourbon eyes on me. She had no need to lift her head: it was constitutionally, structurally high.
"I can't make any," she said, with firmness and finality. "We bought all our desserts at the delicatessen."
So, without anger, only with dignity, she managed to put me in my place.
Added to the many unconscious appeals that Margharetta was forever making to me, she finally made a direct one. Informing me once more that no heart could bleed like a mother's, she begged to be allowed to have, if it were only one of her children with her, the little girl aged ten. I consented, and went myself to fetch her.