Mrs. Bridget had pawn’d all the little stock of honour a poor chambermaid was worth in the world, that she would get to the bottom of the affair in ten days; and it was built upon one of the most concessible postulata in nature: namely, that whilst my uncle Toby was making love to her mistress, the corporal could find nothing better to do, than make love to her——“And I’ll let him as much as he will, said Bridget, to get it out of him.”
Friendship has two garments; an outer and an under one. Bridget was serving her mistress’s interests in the one—and doing the thing which most pleased herself in the other; so had as many stakes depending upon my uncle Toby’s wound, as the Devil himself——Mrs. Wadman had but one—and as it possibly might be her last (without discouraging Mrs. Bridget, or discrediting her talents) was determined to play her cards herself.
She wanted not encouragement: a child might have look’d into his hand——there was such a plainness and simplicity in his playing out what trumps he had——with such an unmistrusting ignorance of the ten-ace——and so naked and defenceless did he sit upon the same sopha with widow Wadman, that a generous heart would have wept to have won the game of him.
Let us drop the metaphor.
[ CHAPTER XXIV]
——And the story too—if you please: for though I have all along been hastening towards this part of it, with so much earnest desire, as well knowing it to be the choicest morsel of what I had to offer to the world, yet now that I am got to it, any one is welcome to take my pen, and go on with the story for me that will—I see the difficulties of the descriptions I’m going to give—and feel my want of powers.
It is one comfort at least to me, that I lost some fourscore ounces of blood this week in a most uncritical fever which attacked me at the beginning of this chapter; so that I have still some hopes remaining, it may be more in the serous or globular parts of the blood, than in the subtile aura of the brain——be it which it will—an Invocation can do no hurt——and I leave the affair entirely to the invoked, to inspire or to inject me according as he sees good.
[THE INVOCATION]
Gentle Spirit of sweetest humour, who erst did sit upon the easy pen of my beloved Cervantes; Thou who glided’st daily through his lattice, and turned’st the twilight of his prison into noonday brightness by thy presence——tinged’st his little urn of water with heaven-sent nectar, and all the time he wrote of Sancho and his master, didst cast thy mystic mantle o’er his wither’d stump,[1] and wide extended it to all the evils of his life———
——Turn in hither, I beseech thee!——behold these breeches!——they are all I have in the world——that piteous rent was given them at Lyons———