When the two professors met it was with the most delighted cordiality on the part of both. “Mein lieber Herr,” Thrum would say (with some malice), “your sonata in x flat is divine.” “Chevalier,” Baroski would reply, “dat andante movement in w is worthy of Beethoven. I gif you my sacred honour,” and so forth. In fact, they loved each other as gentlemen in their profession always do.
The two famous professors conduct their academies on very opposite principles. Baroski writes ballet music; Thrum, on the contrary, says “he cannot but deplore the dangerous fascinations of the dance,” and writes more for Exeter Hall and Birmingham. While Baroski drives a cab in the Park with a very suspicious Mademoiselle Leocadie, or Amenaide, by his side, you may see Thrum walking to evening church with his lady, and hymns are sung there of his own composition. He belongs to the “Athenaeum Club,” he goes to the Levee once a year, he does everything that a respectable man should; and if, by the means of this respectability, he manages to make his little trade far more profitable than it otherwise would be, are we to quarrel with him for it?
Sir George, in fact, had every reason to be respectable. He had been a choir-boy at Windsor, had played to the old King's violoncello, had been intimate with him, and had received knighthood at the hand of his revered sovereign. He had a snuff-box which His Majesty gave him, and portraits of him and the young princes all over the house. He had also a foreign order (no other, indeed, than the Elephant and Castle of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel), conferred upon him by the Grand Duke when here with the allied sovereigns in 1814. With this ribbon round his neck, on gala days, and in a white waistcoat, the old gentleman looked splendid as he moved along in a blue coat with the Windsor button, and neat black small-clothes, and silk stockings. He lived in an old tall dingy house, furnished in the reign of George III., his beloved master, and not much more cheerful now than a family vault. They are awfully funereal, those ornaments of the close of the last century—tall gloomy horse-hair chairs, mouldy Turkey carpets with wretched druggets to guard them, little cracked sticking-plaster miniatures of people in tours and pigtails over high-shouldered mantelpieces, two dismal urns on each side of a lanky sideboard, and in the midst a queer twisted receptacle for worn-out knives with green handles. Under the sideboard stands a cellaret that looks as if it held half a bottle of currant wine, and a shivering plate-warmer that never could get any comfort out of the wretched old cramped grate yonder. Don't you know in such houses the grey gloom that hangs over the stairs, the dull-coloured old carpet that winds its way up the same, growing thinner, duller, and more threadbare as it mounts to the bedroom floors? There is something awful in the bedroom of a respectable old couple of sixty-five. Think of the old feathers, turbans, bugles, petticoats, pomatum-pots, spencers, white satin shoes, false fronts, the old flaccid boneless stays tied up in faded riband, the dusky fans, the old forty-years-old baby linen, the letters of Sir George when he was young, the doll of poor Maria who died in 1803, Frederick's first corduroy breeches, and the newspaper which contains the account of his distinguishing himself at the siege of Seringapatam. All these lie somewhere, damp and squeezed down into glum old presses and wardrobes. At that glass the wife has sat many times these fifty years; in that old morocco bed her children were born. Where are they now? Fred the brave captain, and Charles the saucy colleger: there hangs a drawing of him done by Mr. Beechey, and that sketch by Cosway was the very likeness of Louisa before—
“Mr. Fitz-Boodle! for Heaven's sake come down. What are you doing in a lady's bedroom?”
“The fact is, madam, I had no business there in life; but, having had quite enough wine with Sir George, my thoughts had wandered upstairs into the sanctuary of female excellence, where your Ladyship nightly reposes. You do not sleep so well now as in old days, though there is no patter of little steps to wake you overhead.”
They call that room the nursery still, and the little wicket still hangs at the upper stairs: it has been there for forty years—bon Dieu! Can't you see the ghosts of little faces peering over it? I wonder whether they get up in the night as the moonlight shines into the blank vacant old room, and play there solemnly with little ghostly horses, and the spirits of dolls, and tops that turn and turn but don't hum.
Once more, sir, come down to the lower storey—that is to the Morgiana story—with which the above sentences have no more to do than this morning's leading article in The Times; only it was at this house of Sir George Thrum's that I met Morgiana. Sir George, in old days, had instructed some of the female members of our family, and I recollect cutting my fingers as a child with one of those attenuated green-handled knives in the queer box yonder.
In those days Sir George Thrum was the first great musical teacher of London, and the royal patronage brought him a great number of fashionable pupils, of whom Lady Fitz-Boodle was one. It was a long long time ago: in fact, Sir George Thrum was old enough to remember persons who had been present at Mr. Braham's first appearance, and the old gentleman's days of triumph had been those of Billington and Incledon, Catalani and Madame Storace.
He was the author of several operas (“The Camel Driver,” “Britons Alarmed; or, the Siege of Bergen-op-Zoom,” etc. etc.), and, of course, of songs which had considerable success in their day, but are forgotten now, and are as much faded and out of fashion as those old carpets which we have described in the professor's house, and which were, doubtless, very brilliant once. But such is the fate of carpets, of flowers, of music, of men, and of the most admirable novels—even this story will not be alive for many centuries. Well, well, why struggle against Fate?
But, though his heyday of fashion was gone, Sir George still held his place among the musicians of the old school, conducted occasionally at the Ancient Concerts and the Philharmonic, and his glees are still favourites after public dinners, and are sung by those old bacchanalians, in chestnut wigs, who attend for the purpose of amusing the guests on such occasions of festivity. The great old people at the gloomy old concerts before mentioned always pay Sir George marked respect; and, indeed, from the old gentleman's peculiar behaviour to his superiors, it is impossible they should not be delighted with him, so he leads at almost every one of the concerts in the old-fashioned houses in town.