Anno Domini 1669.
‘Poor dear!’ whispered Maude.
‘It was hard that she should die just as her husband was becoming famous
and successful,’ said Frank. ‘She who had washed his shirts, and made up
the coal fires, when they lived in a garret together. What a pity that
she could not have a good time!’
‘Ah well, if she loved him, dear, she had a good time in the garret.’
Maude was leaning forward with her face raised to look at the bust of the
dead woman, which also leaned forward as if to look down upon her. A
pair of marble skulls flanked the lady’s grave. A red glow from the
evening sun struck through a side-window and bathed the whole group in
its ruddy light. As Frank, standing back in the shadow, ran his eyes
from the face of the dead young wife to that of his own sweet, girlish
bride, with those sinister skulls between, there came over him like a
wave, a realisation of the horror which lies in things, the grim close of
the passing pageant, the black gloom, which swallows up the never-ending
stream of life. Will the spirit wear better than the body; and if not,
what infernal practical joke is this to which we are subjected!
‘It will. It must,’ he said.
‘_Why_, Frank—Frank dear, what is the matter? You are quite pale.’
‘Come out into the air, Maude. I have had enough of this stuffy old
church.’
‘Stuffy!’ said the clerk. ‘Well, we’ve ’ad the Lord Mayor ’ere at least
once a year, an’ ’e never found it stuffy. A cleaner, fresher church you
won’t find in the city of London. It’s ’ad its day, I’ll allow. There
was a time—and I can remember it—when folk used to spend their money
where they made it, and the plate would be full of paper and gold, where
now we find it ’ard enough to get coppers. That was fifty year ago, when
I was a young clerk. You might not think it, but I’ve seen a Lord Mayor,
a past Lord Mayor, and a Lord Mayor elect of the city of London, all
sitting on one bench in this very church. And _you_ call it stuffy!’
Frank soothed the wounded feelings of the old clerk, and explained that
by stuffy he meant interesting. He also shook hands with him in a
peculiar way as he held his palm upturned in the small of his back. Then
Maude and he retraced their steps up the narrow street which is called
Seething Lane.
‘Poor old boy! What was it, then?’ asked Maude, looking up with her
sympathetic eyes. It is at such moments that a man realises what the
companionship of women means. The clouds melted before the sun.
‘What an ass I was! I began to think of all sorts of horrible things.
Never mind, Maude! We are out for a holiday. Hang the future! Let us
live in the present.’
‘I always do,’ said Maude, and she spoke for her sex.
‘Well, what now? Buttered toast or suède gloves?’
‘Business first!’ said Maude primly, and so proceeded to save her
sixpence on the gloves. As she was tempted, however (‘such a civil
obliging shopman, Frank!’), to buy four yards of so-called Astrakhan
trimming, a frill of torchon lace, six dear little festooned
handkerchiefs, and four pairs of open-work stockings—none of which were
contemplated when she entered the shop—her sixpenny saving was not as
brilliant a piece of finance as she imagined.
And then they finished their excursion in the dark, wainscotted,
low-ceilinged coffee-room of an old-fashioned inn, once the mother of
many coaches, and now barren and deserted, but with a strange cunning in
the matter of buttered toast which had come down from more prosperous
days. It was a new waiter who served them, and he imagined them to be
lovers and scented an intrigue; but when they called for a second plate
of toast and a jug of boiling water, he recognised the healthy appetite
of the married. And then, instead of going home like a good little
couple, Maude suddenly got it into her head that it would cheer away the
last traces of Frank’s gloom if they went to see ‘Charley’s Aunt’ at the
Globe. So they loitered and shopped for a couple of hours, and then
squeezed into the back of the pit; and wedged in among honest, hearty
folk who were not ashamed to show their emotions, they laughed until they
were tired. And so home, as their friend Pepys would have said, after
such a day as comes into the memory, shining golden among the drab, when
old folk look back, and think of the dear dead past. May you and I,
reader, if ever we also come to sit in our final armchairs in the chimney
corners, have many such to which our minds may turn, sweet and innocent
and fragrant, to cheer us in those darksome hours to come.