HER MOTHER
I have spoken of that first cousinhood of seventy, the grandchildren of
the Chief Justice, of whom my mother and Martin’s were not the least
notable members. I want to say something more of these two, and if such
tales as Martin and I have remembered may seem sometimes to impinge upon
the Fifth Commandment, I would, in apology, recall the old story of the
masquerade at which Love cloaked himself in laughter, and was only
discovered when he laughed till he cried, and they saw that the laughter
was assumed, but the tears were real.
I have come upon a letter of my cousin Nannie’s, undated, unfortunately,
but its internal evidence, indicating for her an age not far exceeding
seven years, would place it in or about the year 1830.
“_To Mrs. Charles Fox_:
“MY DEAR MAMA,
“I am very sorry for touching that stinking little cat. I’ll try
to-morrow and Teusday if I can do as happy and as well without
touching Dawny. I had once before my birthday a little holiness in
my heart and for two days I was trying to keep it in and I exceeded
a little in it but alas one day Satan tempted me and one day I kept
it out of my heart and then I did not care what I did and I ware
very bold. One day the week after that I tried without touching
Dawny and I thought myself every bit as much happy but I was
tempted tempted tempted another day: but I hope to-morrow morning I
may be good Mama and that there will be one day that I may please
Mama
“Your affectionate daughter
“NANNIE FOX.”
The crime of which this is an expression of repentance is obscure. That
the repentance was not untinged by indignation with the temptation is
obvious; but why should she _not_ have “touched Dawny”? I am reminded of
a companion incident. A small boy, of whom I have the honour to be
godmother, was privileged to come upon a _cache_ of carpenter’s tools,
unhampered by the carpenter. He cut his fingers and was sent to bed. In
the devotions which he subsequently offered up, the following clause was
overheard,
“And please God, be more careful another time, and don’t let me touch
Willy Driscoll’s tools.”
A very just apportioning of the blame. My cousin Nannie put it all upon
Satan, who was the more fashionable deity of her period.
I remember that my aunt Florence Coghill sat up for the whole of one
night, verifying from her Bible the existence of the devil; a fact that
had been called in question by a reprobate nephew. She came down to
breakfast wan, but triumphant, and flung texts upon the nephew, even as
the shields were cast upon Tarpeia.
Martin had many stories of her mother, which, alas! she has not written
down. Many of them related to the time when they were living in Dublin,
and with all humility, and with apologies for possible error, I will try
to remember some of them. Mrs. Martin was then a large and handsome lady
of imposing presence, slow-moving, stately, and, in spite of a very
genial manner, distinctly of a presence to inspire respect. It was
alleged by her graceless family that only by aligning her with some
fixed and distant object, and by close observation of the one in
relation to the other, was it possible to see her move. (One of the
stories turned on the mistake of one of her children, short-sighted like
herself. “Oh, there’s Mamma coming at last!” A pause. Then, in tones of
disappointment, “No, it’s only the tramcar!”)
Martin once wrote that “the essence of good housekeeping is to make
people eat things that they naturally dislike. Ingredients that must,
for the sacred sake of economy, be utilised, are rarely attractive, but
the good housekeeper can send the most nauseous of them to heaven, in a
curry, as in a chariot of fire.”
It must be admitted that neither artistic housekeeping, nor even the
lower branches of the art, were my cousin Nannie’s strong suit. It is
related of her that one day, returning from a tea-party, she remembered
that her household lacked some minor need. Undeterred by her tea-party
splendour of attire, she sailed serenely into a small and unknown
grocer’s shop in quest of what she needed. The grocer, stout and
middle-aged, lolled on his fat bare arms on the counter, reading a
newspaper. He negligently produced the requirement, received the payment
for it, and then, remarking affably, “Ta ta, me child!” returned to his
paper.
My cousin Nannie, whose sense of the ridiculous could afflict her like
an illness, tottered home in tearful ecstasies, and was only less
shattered by the condescension of the grocer than by another tribute,
somewhat similar in kind. She had a singularly small and well-shaped
foot; a fact to which her son Robert was wont to attribute the
peculiarity that her shoe-strings were rarely securely fastened,
involving her in an appeal to the nearest man to tie them. She returned
to her family one day and related with joy how, as she passed a
cabstand, her shoe lace had become unfastened, and how she had then
asked a cabman to tie it for her. She thanked him with her usual and
special skill in such matters, and, as she slowly moved away, she was
pleased to hear her cabman remark to a fellow:
“That’s a dam pleshant owld heifer!”
And the response of the fellow:
“Ah, Shakespeare says ye’ll always know a rale lady when ye see her.”
Her love for society was only matched by her intolerance of being bored.
There was a recess in her bedroom, possessed of a small window and a
heavy curtain. To this one day, on hearing a ring at the door, she
hurriedly repaired, and took with her a chair and a book. She heard the
travelling foot of the maid, searching for her. Then the curtain was
pushed aside and the maid’s face appeared.
“Oh, is it _there_ you are!” said the maid, with the satisfaction of the
finder in a game of hide and seek. That her mistress did not dash her
book in her face speaks well for her self-control.
It may be urged that Mrs. Martin might have spared herself this
discomfiture by the simpler expedient of leaving directions that she was
“Not at Home.” But this shows how little the present generation can
appreciate the consciences of the last. I have known my mother to rush
into the garden on a wet day, in order that the servant might truthfully
say she was “out.”
“Ah, Ma’am, ’twas too much trouble you put on yourself,” said the
devoted retainer for whom the sacrifice was made. “God knows I’d tell a
bigger lie than that for you! And be glad to do it!” (which was probably
true, if only from the artist’s point of view).
Mrs. Martin’s contempt for danger was one of the many points wherein she
differed from the average woman of her time. Indeed, it cannot be said
that she despised it, as, quite obviously, she enjoyed it. Martin has
told of how she and her mother were caught in a storm, in a small boat,
on Lough Corrib. Things became serious; one boatman dropped his oar and
prayed, the other wept but continued to row; Martin, who had not been
bred to boats on Ross Lake for nothing, tugged at the abandoned oar of
the supplicant. Meanwhile her mother sat erect in the stern, looking on
the tempest in as unshaken a mood as Shakespeare could have desired, and
enjoying every moment of it. Neither where horses were concerned did she
know fear. I have been with her in a landau, with one horse trying to
bolt, while the other had kicked till it got a leg over the trace. Help
was at hand, and during the readjustment Mrs. Martin firmly retained her
seat. Her only anxiety was lest the drive might have to be given up, her
only regret that both horses had not bolted. She said she liked driving
at a good round pace. An outside-car might do anything short of lying
down and rolling, without being able to shake her off; her son Robert
used to say of her that on an outside-car his mother’s grasp of the
situation was analogous to that of a poached egg on toast--both being
practically undetachable.
How different was she from her first cousin, my mother, who, frankly
mid-Victorian, proclaimed herself a coward, without a blush, even with
ostentation. When the much-used label, “Mid-Victorian,” is applied, it
calls up, in my mind at least, a type of which the three primary causes
are, John Leech’s pictures, “The Newcomes,” and Anthony Trollope’s
massive output. Pondering over these signs of that time, I withdraw the
label from my mother and her compeers. Either must that be done, or the
letter “i” substituted for the “a” in label. Let us think for a moment
of Mrs. Proudie, of “The Campaigner”; of Eleanor, “The Warden’s”
daughter, who bursts into floods of tears as a solution to all
situations; of the insufferable Amelia Osborne. Consider John Leech’s
females, the young ones, turbaned and crinolined, wholly idiotic, flying
with an equal terror from bulls and mice, ogling Lord Dundreary and his
whiskers, being scored off by rude little boys. And the elderly women,
whose age, if nothing else, marked them, in mid-Victorian times, as fit
subjects for ridicule, invariably hideous, jealous, spiteful, nagging,
and even more grossly imbecile than their juniors. Thackeray and
Trollope between them poisoned the wells in the ’fifties, and the water
has hardly cleared yet. Nevertheless, with however mutinous a mind their
books are approached, their supreme skill, their great authority, cannot
be withstood; their odious women must needs be authentic. I am therefore
forced to the conclusion that Martin’s mother, and mine, and their
sisters, and their cousins and their aunts were exceptions to the rule
that all mid-Victorian women were cats, and I can only deposit the
matter upon that crowded ash-heap, that vast parcel-office, adored of
the bromidic, “the knees of the Gods,” there to be left till called for.
* * * * *
There is a song that my mother used to sing to us when we were
children, of which I can now remember only fragments, but what I can
recall of it is so beautifully typical of the early Victorian young
lady, and of what may be called the Bonnet and Shawl attitude towards
the Lover, that a verse or two shall be transcribed. I believe it used
to be sung at the house of my grandmother (Anna Maria Coghill, _née_
Bushe), in Cheltenham, by one of the many literary and artistic dandies
who hung about her and her handsome daughters. Lord Lytton, then Sir
Edward Bulwer Lytton, was one of these, and he and my grandmother were
among the first amateur experimenters in mesmerism, thought-reading, and
clairvoyance, as might have been expected from the future author of
“Zanoni,” and from the mother of my mother (who was wont, with her usual
entire frankness, to declare herself “the most curious person in the
world,” _i.e._ the most inquisitive).
I do not know the name of the song or of its composer. It has a most
suitable, whining, peevish little tune; my mother used to sing it to us
with intense dramatic expression, and it was considered to be a failure
if the last verse did not leave my brother and me dissolved in tears.
The song is in the form of a dialogue between the Lady and the Lover,
and the Lady begins:
“So so so, Sir, you’ve come at last!
I thought you’d come no more,
I’ve waited with my bonnet on
From one till half-past four!
You know I hate to sit at home
Uncertain where to go,
You’ll break my heart, I know you will,
If you continue so!”
(The tune demands the repetition of the last two lines, but it, I regret
to say, cannot be given here.)
One sees her drooping on a high chair by the window (which of course is
closed), her ringlets losing their curl, her cheeks their colour. The
Lover takes a high hand.
“Pooh! pooh! my dear! Dry up your tears,” he begins, arrogantly, and
goes on to ask for trouble by explaining that the delay was caused by
his having come “down Grosvenor Gate Miss Fanny’s eye to catch,” and he
ends with defiance--
“I won’t, I swear, I _won’t_ be made
To keep time like a watch!”
The Lady replies:
“What! Fanny Grey! Ah, now indeed
I understand it all!
I saw you making love to her
At Lady Gossip’s ball!”
“My life, my soul! My dearest Jane!
I love but you alone!
I never _thought_ of Fanny Grey!
(How tiresome she’s grown!)
I _never_ thought of Fanny Grey!
(How _tiresome_ she’s grown!)”
The last phrase an aside to the moved audience. “She” was his so-called
“dearest Jane”! We thrilled at the perfidy, which lost nothing from my
mother’s delivery.
And then poor Jane’s reproaches, and his impudent defence.
“Oh Charles, I wonder that the earth
Don’t open where you stand!
By the Heaven that’s above us both,
I saw you kiss her hand!”
“You didn’t dear, and if you did,
Supposing it is true,
When a pretty woman shows her rings
What _can_ a poor man do!”
But it was always the last lines of the last verse that touched the
fount of tears. Charles, with specious excuses, has made his farewells;
she watches him from the window (still closed, no doubt).
“Goodbye, goodbye, we’ll meet again
On one of these fine days!”
he has warbled and departed. And then her cry (to the audience):
“He’s _turned_ the street, I knew he would!
He’s gone to Fanny Grey’s!
He’s turned the street, I _knew_ he would,
He’s gone--to Fanny Grey’s!”
I shall never forget that absurd tune, and its final feeble wail of
despair; and inextricably blended with it is the memory of how
lusciously my brother and I used to weep, even while we clamoured for an
encore.