Upon the very steps of Rothschild’s, a brother-officer of the Regiment of Line to which our young sprig of the Staff was attached in the capacity of Assistant-Adjutant, met and repaid Dunoisse an ancient, moss-grown, long-forgotten debt of three thousand francs.
“You come fort à propos—for you, that is! Here, catch hold! Sorry I met you! You’re not, I’ll bet you this whacking lump!” Monsieur the Captain joyfully flourished the stout roll of billets de banque, from which he had stripped the notes he now thrust under Dunoisse’s nose. “Wonder where I got ’em? Inside there”—a thumb clothed in lemon-colored kid jerked over the shoulder—“from one of those powdered old cocks behind the gilt balusters. My old girl has stumped with a vengeance this time. I told her my tailor was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and had sent me a cartel because I hadn’t paid his bill.” One is sorry to record that Monsieur the Captain’s “old girl” was no less stately a person than Madame la Comtesse de Kerouatte, of the Château de Pigandel, Ploubanou, La Bretagne. “She swallowed the story, and see the result. Don’t shy at taking the plasters. You can lend me again when I’m broke! Pouch! and va te promener!”
So Dunoisse gratefully took the tendered banknotes and with one of them an outside place on the blue Havre diligence, rattling out of Paris, next morning, behind its four bony bays, ere the milkwomen, and postmen, and newspaper-carts began their rounds.
The salt fresh wind stinging his red-brown skin, the salter spray upon his lips, the veiled and shawled and muffled ladies, and cloaked and greatcoated gentlemen, already extended on the deck-seats and deck-chairs of the steam-packet Britannia of Southampton—patiently waiting to be dreadfully indisposed in little basins that were dealt out by the brisk, hurrying, gilt-buttoned stewards as cards are dealt at whist; the glasses of brandy-and-water being called for by robust Britons, champing ham sandwiches with mustard on their upper lips, and good-fellowship beaming out of their large pink, whiskered faces; the tumblers of eau sucrée being ordered by French travelers, who invariably got toast-and-water instead; the swaying crates of luggage, the man-traps made by coils of rope on wet and slippery decks, the crash of waves hitting bows or paddle-wheels, the shrieks of scared females, convinced their last hour had come,—recalled to Dunoisse his boyish visit to what poor Smithwick had invariably termed “the shores of Albion.”
He remembered with gratitude the self-denying hospitality of the poor sisters: the little home at Hampstead, the golden-blossomed furze of the Heath, came back to him with extraordinary vividness. Down to the piping bullfinch, whose cage hung in the little front parlor-window, and whose répertoire, consisting of the first bar of “Home, Sweet Home,” the boy had endeavored to enlarge with the melodies of “Partant Pour La Syrie” and “Jeanette et Jeannot,” every detail stood clear.
And here was England, upon a pale gray February morning, under skies that wept cold heavy tears of partly-melted snow. Black fungus-growths of umbrellas were clustered on the quay; the thick air smelled of oilskins and wet mackintoshes. And so across a dripping gangway to a splashy paved incline that ended in a Railway Station, for instead of coaching through Hants and Surrey to Middlesex by the scarlet “Defiance” or the yellow “Tally-Ho!” you traveled by the Iron Road all the way to London.
You are to picture the splay-wheeled, giraffe-necked locomotive of the time, with the top of the funnel nicked like the cut paper round a cutlet-bone; the high-bodied carriages, with little windows and hard hair-cloth cushions; the gentlemen passengers in shaggy hats with curly brims, high-waisted coats, with immense roll-collars, and full-hipped trousers strapped down over shiny boots; assisting ladies in coal-scuttle bonnets, and pelerines trimmed with fur, worn over gored skirts, swelled out by a multiplicity of starched, embroidered petticoats, affording peeps of pantalettes and sandals, to alight or to ascend....
Pray understand that there was no jumping. Violent movement was not considered genteel. Supposing you to be of the softer sex—it was softer in those days than it is now!—you were swanlike or sprightly, according to your height, figure, and the shape of your nose, and your name almost invariably ended in “anna” or “ina” or “etta.”
My Aunt Julietta was sprightly. She had a nose ever so slightly turned up at the end, and a dimple in her left cheek. Her elder sister, one of her elder sisters—Aunt Julietta was the youngest of six—her elder, Marietta, was swanlike, with a long neck and champagne-bottle shoulders, and the most elegant Early Victorian figure you can conceive; a fiddle of the old pattern has such a waist and hips.
Both my aunts traveled by this very train, in the same first-class compartment as the Assistant-Adjutant of the 999th Regiment of the Line. The young ladies were, in fact, returning from a visit to the elegant and hospitable family mansion of Sir Tackton Wackton, Baronet, of Wops Hall, Hants; whose elder daughter had been their schoolfellow and bosom-friend at the Misses Squeezers’ Select Boarding-School for young ladies at Backboard House, Selina Parade, Brighton. It was the first occasion upon which they had braved the dangers of the Iron Road unprotected by a member of the sterner sex. Consequently, when, in the act of picking up and handing to my Aunt Julietta a sweet green velvet reticule she had accidentally dropped upon the platform, the black-eyed, dark-complexioned, military-looking young foreign gentleman, in a gray traveling cloak and cap, who performed this act of gallantry, peeped up the tunnel of her coal-scuttle bonnet, with evident appreciation of the wholesome apple-cheeked, bright-eyed English girl-face looking out from amongst the ringlets and frills and flowers at the end, both the young ladies were extremely fluttered. And as they passed on, Aunt Marietta whispered haughtily, “How presumptuous!” and Aunt Julietta responded: “Oh, I don’t think he meant to be that, my dear! And how handsome and distinguished-looking!” To which my Aunt Marietta only responded, with the disdainful curl of the lip that went with her Roman nose: “For a foreigner, passably so!”