“LET BY-GONES BE BY-GONES.”
Ten months wore away, and the Farmer’s birthday arrived in its turn. The Dame, who had passed an uncomfortable night, having dreamt, in truth, that she did not much like herself in mourning, saluted him as soon as the day dawned, and with a sigh wished him many years to come. The Farmer repaid her in kind, the sigh included; his own visions having been of the painful sort for he had dreamt of having a headache from wearing a black hatband, and the malady still clung to him when awake. The whole morning was spent in silent meditation and melancholy on both sides, and when dinner came, although the most favourite dishes were upon the table, they could not eat. The Farmer, resting his elbows upon the board, with his face between his hands, gazed wistfully on his wife,—scooping her eyes, as it were, out of their sockets, stripping the flesh off her cheeks, and in fancy converting her whole head into a mere Caput Mortuum. The Dame, leaning back in her high arm-chair, regarded the Yeoman quite as ruefully,—by the same process of imagination picking his sturdy bones, and bleaching his ruddy visage to the complexion of a plaster cast. Their minds travelling in the same direction, and at an equal rate, arrived together at the same reflection; but the Farmer was the first to give it utterance:
“Thee’d be missed, Dame, if thee were to die!”
The Dame started. Although she had nothing but Death at that moment before her eyes, she was far from dreaming of her own exit, and at this rebound of her thoughts against herself, she felt as if an extra cold coffin-plate had been suddenly nailed on her chest; recovering, however, from the first shock, her thoughts flowed into their old channel, and she retorted in the same spirit.—“I wish, Master, thee may live so long as I!”
The Farmer, in his own mind, wished to live rather longer; for, at the utmost, he considered that his wife’s bill of mortality had but two months to run. The calculation made him sorrowful; during the last few months she had consulted his appetite, bent to his humour, and dove-tailed her own inclinations into his, in a manner that could never be supplied; and he thought of her, if not in the language, at least in the spirit of the Lady in Lalla Rookh—
“I never taught a bright Gazelle
To watch me with its dark black eye,
But when it came to know me well,
And love me, it was sure to die!”
His wife, from being at first useful to him, had become agreeable, and at last dear; and as he contemplated her approaching fate, he could not help thinking out audibly, “that he should be a lonesome man when she was gone.” The Dame, this time, heard the survivorship foreboded without starting; but she marveled much at what she thought the infatuation of a doomed man. So perfect was her faith in the infallibility of St. Mark, that she had even seen the symptoms of mortal disease, as palpable as plague spots, on the devoted Yeoman. Giving his body up, therefore, for lost, a strong sense of duty persuaded her, that it was imperative on her, as a Christian, to warn the unsuspecting Farmer of his dissolution. Accordingly, with a solemnity adapted to the subject, a tenderness of recent growth, and a Memento Mori face, she broached the matter in the following question—“Master, how bee’st?”