A LOQUACIOUS VISITOR
There is an amusing sketch in the first volume of _Our Village_
entitled “The Talking Lady,” from which we should like to quote a
few passages. Its scene is evidently laid in the Mitfords’ common
sitting-room, whose two windows look both front and back, and in which
we have sat many a time.
After alluding to a play written by Ben Jonson called _The Silent
Woman_ Miss Mitford remarks:—
“If the learned dramatist had happened to fall in with such a specimen
of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have
given us a pendant to his picture in the _Talking Lady_. Pity but he
had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time,
least of all now. I am too much stunned; too much like one escaped
from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue
of four days’ hard listening—four snowy, sleety, rainy days, all of
them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing,
were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out; four days chained
by ‘sad civility’ to that fireside once so quiet, and again—cheering
thought!—again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visitor’s
incessant tongue shall have died away.
“The visitor in question is a very excellent and respectable elderly
lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her
dancing master, and a face exceedingly well preserved.... She took
us in the way from London to the West of England, and being, as she
wrote, ‘not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no
other guest might be admitted so that she might have the pleasure of
our conversation all to herself’ (_Ours!_ as if it were possible for
any of us to slide in a word edgewise!) ‘and especially enjoy the
gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house,
her countryman.’ Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter
it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty
years ago ... and ever since has she detailed with a minuteness ...
which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or
even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing.... It should seem
to listen to her as if at some time of her life she must have listened
herself; and yet her countryman declares ... no such event has occurred.
“... Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She
likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption.... Walking exhausts
the breath that might be better employed.... Allude to some anecdote of
the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel
passages as are to be found in an air with variations.... The very
weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of
hard frosts and long droughts and high winds and terrible storms, with
all the evils that followed in their train and all the personal events
connected with them.... By this time it rains, and she sits down to a
pathetic see-saw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith’s having
set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have
ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady
Green’s new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the
coach.
[Illustration: WHERE THE CURATE LODGED]
“With all this intolerable prosing she is actually reckoned a pleasant
woman! Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town where she
usually resides is very large.... Doubtless her associates deserve
the old French compliment, ‘_Ils ont tous un grand talent pour le
silence._‘... It is the _tête-à-tête_ that kills, or the small
fireside circle of three or four where only one can speak and all
the rest must seem to listen—_seem!_ did I say?—must listen in good
earnest.... She has the eye of a hawk, and detects a wandering glance,
an incipient yawn, the slightest movement of impatience. The very
needle must be quiet.... I wonder if she had married how many husbands
she would have talked to death.... Since the decease of her last
nephew she attempted to form an establishment with a widow lady for
the sake, as they both said, of the comfort of society. But—strange
miscalculation! she was a talker too! They parted in a week.
“... And we have also parted. I am just returned from escorting her
to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward; and
I have still the murmur of her adieux resounding in my ears like the
indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see
how almost simultaneously these mournful adieux shaded into cheerful
salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Poor
souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her or the fat
lady, his mamma, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or
the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner who, after some dispute,
was at length won to admit her dressing-box—little do they suspect
what is to befall them. Two hundred miles! And she never sleeps in a
carriage! Well, patience be with them ... and to her all happiness.”
In one of her stories entitled “Whitsun Eve,” Mary Mitford describes
her own garden and its picturesque surroundings.
“The pride of my heart,” she writes, “and the delight of my eyes is my
garden. Our house, which is in dimensions very much like a bird-cage,
and might with almost equal convenience be laid on a shelf, or hung up
in a tree, would be utterly unbearable in warm weather were it not that
we have a retreat out of doors—and a very pleasant retreat it is....
“Fancy a small plot of ground with a pretty, low, irregular cottage
at one end; a large granary, divided from the dwelling by a little
court running along one side, and a long thatched shed, open towards
the garden, and supported by wooden pillars on the other. The bottom
is bounded, half by an old wall and half by an old paling, over which
we see a pretty distance of woody hills. The house, granary, wall and
palings are covered with vines, cherry trees, roses, honeysuckles
and jessamines, with great clusters of tall hollyhocks running up
between them.... This is my garden; and the long pillared shed, the
sort of rustic arcade, which runs along one side, parted from the
flower-beds by a row of rich geraniums, is our out-of-door drawing-room.
[Illustration: IN THE CURATE’S PARLOUR]
“I know nothing so pleasant as to sit there on a summer afternoon, with
the western sun flickering through a great elder tree, and lighting up
one gay parterre, where flowers and flowering shrubs are set as thick
as grass in a field ... where we may guess that there is such a thing
as mould but never see it. I know nothing so pleasant as to sit in the
shade of that dark bower ... now catching a glimpse of the little birds
as they fly rapidly in and out of their nests ... now tracing the gay
gambles of the common butterflies as they sport around the dahlias; now
watching that rarer moth which the country people, fertile in pretty
names, call the bee-bird....
“What a contrast from the quiet garden to the lively street! Saturday
night is always a time of stir and bustle in our village, and this is
Whitsun Eve, the pleasantest Saturday of all the year, when London
journeymen and servant lads and lasses snatch a short holiday to visit
their families.... This village of ours is swarming to-night like a
hive of bees.... I must try to give some notion of the various figures.
“First there is a group suited to Teniers, a cluster of out-of-door
customers of the ‘Rose,’ old benchers of the inn, who sit round a
table smoking and drinking in high solemnity to the sound of Timothy’s
fiddle. Next a mass of eager boys, the combatants of Monday, who are
surrounding the shoemaker’s shop where an invisible hole in their
[cricket] ball is mending by Master Kemp himself.... Farther down the
street is the pretty black-eyed girl, Sally Wheeler, come home for a
day’s holiday from B——, escorted by a tall footman in a dashing livery,
whom she is trying to curtsy off before her deaf grandmother sees him.
I wonder whether she will succeed?”
In another early sketch of _Our Village_ called “Dr. Tubb,” Mary
Mitford writes:—
“On taking possession of our present abode about four years ago we
found our garden and all the gardens of the straggling village street
in which it is situated filled, peopled, infested by a beautiful flower
which grew in such profusion and was so difficult to keep under that
(poor pretty thing!) instead of being admired and cherished ... it was
cut down, pulled up and hoed out like a weed. I do not know the name of
this elegant plant, nor have I met with anyone who does; we call it the
Spicer, after an old naval officer who once inhabited the white house
just above, and, according to tradition, first brought the seed from
foreign parts....
I never saw anything prettier than a whole bed of these spicers which
had clothed the top of a large heap of earth belonging to our little
mason by the roadside; [they] grew as thick and close as grass in a
meadow, covered with delicate red and white blossoms like a fairy
orchard.”
It seems to us that this flower may have been the American Balsam,
which grows as rapidly as any weed, and which we happened actually to
see, waving its pretty red and white blossoms in Miss Mitford’s garden
some years ago. This was long after her death, and when the cottage and
garden had fallen into humbler hands.
“I never passed the spicers,” remarks Mary, “without stopping to look
at them, and I was one day half shocked to see a man, his pockets
stuffed with the plants, two large bundles under each arm, and still
tugging away root and branch.... This devastation did not, however,
proceed from disrespect, the spicer gatherer being engaged in sniffing
with visible satisfaction the leaves and stalks. ‘It has a fine
venomous smell,’ quoth he in soliloquy, ‘and will certainly when
stilled be good for something or other.’ This was my first sight of Dr.
Tubb ... a quack of the highest and most extended reputation, inventor
and compounder of medicines, bleeder, shaver and physicker of man and
beast....
“We have frequently met since, and are now well acquainted, although
the worthy experimentalist considers me as a rival practitioner, an
interloper, and hates me accordingly. He has very little cause, [for]
my quackery, being mostly of the cautious, preventive, safeguard,
commonsense order, stands no chance against the boldness and decision
of his all-promising ignorance. He says, Do! I say, Do not! He deals in
_stimuli_, I in sedatives; I give medicine, he gives cordial waters.
Alack! alack! when could a dose of rhubarb, even although reinforced
by a dole of good broth, compete with a draught of peppermint and a
licensed dram? No! no! Dr. Tubb has no cause to fear my practice.”