Mr. and Mrs. Wilfer had seen a full quarter of a hundred more
anniversaries of their wedding-day than Mr. and Mrs. Lammle had seen
of theirs, but they still celebrated the occasion in the bosom of
their family. Not that these celebrations ever resulted in anything
particularly agreeable, or that the family was ever disappointed by
that circumstance on account of having looked forward to the return of
the auspicious day with sanguine anticipations of enjoyment. It was
kept morally, rather as a Fast than a Feast, enabling Mrs. Wilfer to
hold a somber darkling state, which exhibited that impressive woman in
her choicest colors.
[Footnote 30: From Book III, Chapter IV, of "Our Mutual Friend."]
The noble lady's condition on these delightful occasions was one
compounded of heroic endurance and heroic forgiveness. Lurid
indications of the better marriages she might have made, shone athwart
the awful gloom of her composure, and fitfully revealed the cherub as
a little monster unaccountably favored by Heaven, who had possest
himself of a blessing, for which many of his superiors had sued and
contended in vain. So firmly had this his position toward his treasure
become established, that when the anniversary arrived, it always found
him in an apologetic state. It is not impossible that his modest
penitence may have even gone the length of sometimes severely
reproving him for that he ever took the liberty of making so exalted a
character his wife.
As for the children of the union, their experience of these festivals
had been sufficiently uncomfortable to lead them annually to wish,
when out of their tenderest years, either that Ma had married somebody
else instead of much-teased Pa, or that Pa had married somebody else
instead of Ma.
When there came to be but two sisters left at home, the daring mind of
Bella on the next of these occasions scaled the height of wondering
with droll vexation, "what on earth Pa ever could have seen in Ma, to
induce him to make such a little fool of himself as to ask her to have
him."
The revolving year now bringing the day round in its orderly sequence,
Bella arrived in the Boffin chariot to assist at the celebration. It
was the family custom when the day recurred to sacrifice a pair of
fowls on the altar of Hymen; and Bella had sent a note beforehand, to
intimate that she would bring the votive offering with her. So, Bella
and the fowls, by the united energies of two horses, two men, four
wheels, and a plum-pudding carriage dog with as uncomfortable a collar
on as if he had been George the Fourth, were deposited at the door of
the parental dwelling. They were there received by Mrs. Wilfer in
person, whose dignity on this, as on most special occasions, was
heightened by a mysterious toothache.
"I shall not require the carriage at night," said Bella. "I shall walk
back."
The male domestic of Mrs. Boffin touched his hat, and in the act of
departure had an awful glare bestowed upon him by Mrs. Wilfer,
intended to carry deep into his audacious soul the assurance that,
whatever his private suspicions might be, male domestics in livery
were no rarity there.
"Well, dear Ma," said Bella, "and how do you do?"
"I am as well, Bella," replied Mrs. Wilfer, "as can be expected."
"Dear me, Ma," said Bella, "you talk as if one was just born!"
"That's exactly what Ma has been doing," interposed Lavvy, over the
maternal shoulder, "ever since we got up this morning. It's all very
well to laugh, Bella, but anything more exasperating it is impossible
to conceive."
Mrs. Wilfer, with a look too full of majesty to be accompanied by any
words, attended both her daughters to the kitchen, where the sacrifice
was to be prepared.
"Mr. Rokesmith," said she, resignedly, "has been so polite as to place
his sitting-room at our disposal to-day. You will therefore, Bella, be
entertained in the humble abode of your parents, so far in accordance
with your present style of living, that there will be a drawing-room
for your reception as well as a dining-room. Your papa invited Mr.
Rokesmith to partake of our lowly fare. In excusing himself on account
of a particular engagement, he offered the use of his apartment."
Bella happened to know that he had no engagement out of his own room
at Mr. Boffin's, but she approved of his staying away. "We should only
have put one another out of countenance," she thought, "and we do
that quite often enough as it is."
Yet she had sufficient curiosity about his room to run up to it with
the least possible delay, and make a close inspection of its contents.
It was tastefully tho economically furnished, and very neatly
arranged. There were shelves and stands of books, English, French, and
Italian; and in a portfolio on the writing-table there were sheets
upon sheets of memoranda and calculations in figures, evidently
referring to the Boffin property. On that table also, carefully backed
with canvas, varnished, mounted, and rolled like a map, was the
placard descriptive of the murdered man who had come from afar to be
her husband. She shrank from this ghostly surprize, and felt quite
frightened as she rolled and tied it up again. Peeping about here and
there, she came upon a print, a graceful head of a pretty woman,
elegantly framed, hanging in the corner by the easy chair. "Oh,
indeed, Sir!" said Bella, after stopping to ruminate before it. "Oh,
indeed, Sir! I fancy I can guess whom you think that's like. But I'll
tell you what it's much more like--your impudence!" Having said which
she decamped: not solely because she was offended, but because there
was nothing else to look at.
"Now, Ma," said Bella, reappearing in the kitchen with some remains of
a blush, "you and Lavvy think magnificent me fit for nothing, but I
intend to prove the contrary. I mean to be cook to-day."
"Hold!" rejoined her majestic mother. "I can not permit it. Cook in
that dress!"
"As for my dress, Ma," returned Bella, merrily searching in a
dresser-drawer, "I mean to apron it and towel it all over the front;
and as to permission, I mean to do without."
"You cook?" said Mrs. Wilfer. "You who never cooked when you were at
home?"
"Yes, Ma," returned Bella; "that is precisely the state of the case."
She girded herself with a white apron, and busily with knots and pins
contrived a bib to it, coming close and tight under her chin, as if it
had caught her round the neck to kiss her. Over this bib her dimples
looked delightful, and under it her pretty figure not less so. "Now,
Ma," said Bella, pushing back her hair from her temples with both
hands, "what's first?"
"First," returned Mrs. Wilfer solemnly, "if you persist in what I can
not but regard as conduct utterly incompatible with the equipage in
which you arrived--"
("Which I do, Ma.")
"First, then, you put the fowls down to the fire."
"To--be--sure!" cried Bella; "and flour them, and twirl them around,
and there they go!" sending them spinning at a great rate. "What's
next, Ma?"
"Next," said Mrs. Wilfer with a wave of her gloves, expressive of
abdication under protest from the culinary throne, "I would recommend
examination of the bacon in the saucepan on the fire, and also of the
potatoes by the application of a fork. Preparation of the greens will
further become necessary if you persist in this unseemly demeanor."
"As of course I do, Ma."
Persisting, Bella gave her attention to one thing and forgot the
other, and gave her attention to the other and forgot the third, and
remembering the third was distracted by the fourth, and made amends
whenever she went wrong by giving the unfortunate fowls an extra spin,
which made their chance of ever getting cooked exceedingly doubtful.
But it was pleasant cookery too. Meanwhile Miss Lavinia, oscillating
between the kitchen and the opposite room, prepared the dining-table
in the latter chamber. This office she (always doing her household
spiriting with unwillingness) performed in a startling series of
whisks and bumps; laying the table-cloth as if she were raising the
wind, putting down the glasses and salt-cellars as if she were
knocking at the door, and clashing the knives and forks in a
skirmishing manner suggestive of hand-to-hand conflict.
"Look at Ma," whispered Lavinia to Bella when this was done, and they
stood over the roasting fowls. "If one was the most dutiful child in
existence (of course, on the whole, one hopes one is), isn't she
enough to make one want to poke her with something wooden, sitting
there bolt upright in the corner?"
"Only suppose," returned Bella, "that poor Pa was to sit bolt upright
in another corner."
"My dear, he couldn't do it," said Lavvy. "Pa would loll directly. But
indeed I do not believe there ever was any human creature who could
keep so bolt upright as Ma, or put such an amount of aggravation into
one back! What's the matter, Ma? Ain't you well, Ma?"
"Doubtless I am very well," returned Mrs. Wilfer, turning her eyes
upon her youngest born, with scornful fortitude. "What should be the
matter with me?"
"You don't seem very brisk, Ma," retorted Lavvy the bold.
"Brisk?" repeated her parent. "Brisk? Whence the low expression,
Lavinia? If I am uncomplaining, if I am silently contented with my
lot, let that suffice for my family."
"Well, Ma," returned Lavvy, "since you will force it out of me, I must
respectfully take leave to say that your family are no doubt under the
greatest obligations to you for having an annual toothache on your
wedding-day, and that it's very disinterested in you, and an immense
blessing to them. Still, on the whole, it is impossible to be too
boastful even of that boon."
"You incarnation of sauciness," said Mrs. Wilfer, "do you speak like
that to me? On this day of all days in the year? Pray do you know what
would have become of you, if I had not bestowed my hand upon R. W.,
your father, on this day?"
"No, Ma," replied Lavvy, "I really do not; and, with the greatest
respect for your abilities and information, I very much doubt if you
do either."
Whether or no the sharp vigor of this sally on a weak point of Mrs.
Wilfer's entrenchments might have routed that heroine for the time, is
rendered uncertain by the arrival of a flag of truce in the person of
Mr. George Sampson: bidden to the feast as a friend of the family,
whose affections were now understood to be in course of transference
from Bella to Lavinia, and whom Lavinia kept--possibly in remembrance
of his bad taste in having overlooked her in the first instance--under
a course of stinging discipline.
"I congratulate you, Mrs. Wilfer," said Mr. George Sampson, who had
meditated this neat address while coming along, "on the day." Mrs.
Wilfer thanked him with a magnanimous sigh, and again became an
unresisting prey to that inscrutable toothache.
"I am surprized," said Mr. Sampson feebly, "that Miss Bella
condescends to cook."
Here Miss Lavinia descended on the ill-starred young gentleman with a
crushing supposition that at all events it was no business of his.
This disposed of Mr. Sampson in a melancholy retirement of spirit,
until the cherub arrived, whose amazement at the lovely woman's
occupation was great.
However, she persisted in dishing the dinner as well as cooking it,
and then sat down, bibless and apronless, to partake of it as an
illustrious guest: Mrs. Wilfer first responding to her husband's
cheerful "For what we are about to receive--" with a sepulchral Amen,
calculated to cast a damp upon the stoutest appetite.
"But what," said Bella, as she watched the carving of the fowls,
"makes them pink inside, I wonder, Pa! Is it the breed?"
"No; I don't think it's the breed, my dear," returned Pa. "I rather
think it is because they are not done."
"They ought to be," said Bella.
"Yes, I'm aware they ought to be, my dear," rejoined her father, "but
they--ain't."
So, the gridiron was put in requisition, and the good-tempered cherub,
who was often as uncherubically employed in his own family as if he
had been in the employment of some of the Old Masters, undertook to
grill the fowls. Indeed, except in respect of staring about him (a
branch of the public service to which the pictorial cherub is much
addicted), this domestic cherub discharged as many odd functions as
his prototype; with the difference, say, that he performed with a
blacking-brush on the family's boots, instead of performing on
enormous wind instruments and double-basses, and that he conducted
himself with cheerful alacrity to much useful purpose, instead of
foreshortening himself in the air with the vaguest intentions.
Bella helped him with his supplemental cookery, and made him very
happy, but put him in mortal terror too by asking him when they sat
down at table again, how he supposed they cooked fowls at the
Greenwich dinner, and whether he believed they really were such
pleasant dinners as people said? His secret winks and nods of
remonstrance, in reply, made the mischievous Bella laugh until she
choked, and then Lavinia was obliged to slap her on the back, and then
she laughed the more.
But her mother was a fine corrective at the other end of the table; to
whom her father, in the innocence of his good fellowship, at intervals
appealed with: "My dear, I am afraid you are not enjoying yourself?"
"Why so, R. W.?" she would sonorously reply.
"Because, my dear, you seem a little out of sorts."
"Not at all," would be the rejoinder, in exactly the same tone.
"Would you take a merry-thought, my dear?"
"Thank you. I will take whatever you please, R. W."
"Well, but my dear, do you like it?"
"I like it as well as I like anything, R. W." The stately woman would
then, with a meritorious appearance of devoting herself to the general
good, pursue her dinner as if she were feeding somebody else on high
public grounds.
Bella had brought dessert and two bottles of wine, thus shedding
unprecedented splendor on the occasion. Mrs. Wilfer did the honors of
the first glass by proclaiming: "R. W., I drink to you."
"Thank you, my dear. And I to you."
"Pa and Ma!" said Bella.
"Permit me," Mrs. Wilfer interposed, with outstretched glove. "No. I
think not. I drank to your Pa. If, however, you insist on including
me, I can in gratitude offer no objection."
"Why, Lor, Ma," interposed Lavvy the bold, "isn't it the day that made
you and Pa one and the same? I have no patience."
"By whatever other circumstances the day may be marked, it is not the
day, Lavinia, on which I will allow a child of mine to pounce upon me.
I beg--nay, command!--that you will not pounce. R. W., it is
appropriate to recall that it is for you to command and for me to
obey."
"It is your house, and you are master at your own table. Both our
healths!" Drinking the toast with tremendous stiffness.
"I really am a little afraid, my dear," hinted the cherub meekly,
"that you are not enjoying yourself?"
"On the contrary," returned Mrs. Wilfer, "quite so. Why should I not?"
"I thought, my dear, that perhaps your face might--"
"My face might be a martyrdom, but what would that import, or who
should know it if I smiled?"
And she did smile; manifestly freezing the blood of Mr. George Sampson
by so doing. For that young gentleman, catching her smiling eye, was
so very much appalled by its expression as to cast in his thoughts
concerning what he had done to bring it down upon himself.
"The mind naturally falls," said Mrs. Wilfer, "shall I say into a
reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on a day like this."
Lavvy, sitting with defiantly folded arms, replied (but not audibly),
"For goodness' sake say whichever of the two you like best, Ma, and
get it over."
"The mind," pursued Mrs. Wilfer in an oratorical manner, "naturally
reverts to Papa and Mama--I here allude to my parents--at a period
before the earliest dawn of this day. I was considered tall; perhaps I
was. Papa and Mama were unquestionably tall. I have rarely seen a
finer woman than my mother; never than my father."
The irrepressible Lavvy remarked aloud, "Whatever grandpapa was, he
wasn't a female."
"Your grandpapa," retorted Mrs. Wilfer, with an awful look, and in an
awful tone, "was what I describe him to have been, and would have
struck any of his grandchildren to the earth who presumed to question
it. It was one of Mama's cherished hopes that I should become united
to a tall member of society. It may have been a weakness, but if so,
it was equally the weakness, I believe, of King Frederick of Prussia."
These remarks being offered to Mr. George Sampson, who had not the
courage to come out for single combat, but lurked with his chest under
the table and his eyes cast down, Mrs. Wilfer proceeded, in a voice of
increasing sternness and impressiveness, until she should force that
skulker to give himself up. "Mama would appear to have had an
indefinable foreboding of what afterward happened, for she would
frequently urge upon me, 'Not a little man. Promise me, my child, not
a little man. Never, never, never marry a little man!' Papa also would
remark to me (he possest extraordinary humor), 'That a family of
whales must not ally themselves with sprats.'
"His company was eagerly sought, as may be supposed, by the wits of
the day, and our house was their continual resort. I have known as
many as three copper-plate engravers exchanging the most exquisite
sallies and retorts there, at one time." (Here Mr. Sampson delivered
himself captive, and said, with an uneasy movement on his chair, that
three was a large number, and it must have been highly entertaining).
"Among the most prominent members of that distinguished circle, was a
gentleman measuring six feet four in height. He was not an engraver."
(Here Mr. Sampson said, with no reason whatever, of course not.) "This
gentleman was so obliging as to honor me with attentions which I
could not fail to understand." (Here Mr. Sampson murmured that when it
came to that, you could always tell.) "I immediately announced to both
parents that those attentions were misplaced, and that I could not
favor his suit. They inquired was he too tall? I replied it was not
the stature, but the intellect was too lofty. At our house, I said,
the tone was too brilliant, the pressure was too high, to be
maintained by me, a mere woman, in every-day domestic life. I well
remember Mama's clasping her hands, and exclaiming, 'This will end in
a little man!'" (Here Mr. Sampson glanced at his host and shook his
head with despondency.) "She afterward went so far as to predict that
it would end in a little man whose mind would be below the average,
but that was in what I may denominate a paroxysm of maternal
disappointment. Within a month," said Mrs. Wilfer, deepening her
voice, as if she were relating a terrible ghost story, "within a
month, I first saw R. W., my husband. Within a year I married him. It
is natural for the mind to recall these dark coincidences on the
present day."
Mr. Sampson, at length released from the custody of Mrs. Wilfer's eye,
now drew a long breath, and made the original and striking remark,
that there was no accounting for these sort of presentiments. R. W.
scratched his head and looked apologetically all round the table until
he came to his wife, when observing her as it were shrouded in a more
somber veil than before, he once more hinted, "My dear, I am really
afraid you are not altogether enjoying yourself?" To which she once
more replied, "On the contrary, R. W. Quite so."
The wretched Mr. Sampson's position at this agreeable entertainment
was truly pitiable. For, not only was he exposed defenseless to the
harangues of Mrs. Wilfer, but he received the utmost contumely at the
hands of Lavinia, who, partly to show Bella that she (Lavinia) could
do what she liked with him, and partly to pay him off for still
obviously admiring Bella's beauty, led him the life of a dog.
Illuminated on the one hand by the stately graces of Mrs. Wilfer's
oratory, and shadowed on the other by the cheeks and frowns of the
young lady to whom he had devoted himself in his destitution, the
sufferings of this young gentleman were distressing to witness. If his
mind for the moment reeled under them, it may be urged, in extenuation
of its weakness, that it was constitutionally a knock-knee'd mind, and
never very strong upon its legs.