the true luxury of travelling, the true secret for thoroughly enjoying
all the attractions of moving about from place to place. Wherever we
now go, we carry our elegant and comfortable home along with us. We
can stop where we like, see what we like, and always come back to our
favourite corner on the sofa, always carry on our favourite
occupations and amusements, and still be travelling, still be getting
forward to new scenes all the time. Here is no hurrying to accommodate
yourself to other people's hours for starting, no scrambling for
places, no wearisome watchfulness over baggage. Here are no anxieties
about strange beds,--for have we not each of us our own sweet little
cabin to nestle in at night?--no agitating dependence at the dinner
hour upon the vagaries of strange cooks--for have we not our own
sumptuous larder always to return to, our own accomplished and
faithful culinary artist always waiting to minister to our special
tastes? We can walk and sleep, stand up or lie down just as we please,
in our floating travelling-carriage. We can make our own road, and
trespass nowhere. The bores we dread, the letters we don't want to
answer, cannot follow and annoy us. We are the freest travellers under
Heaven; and we find something to interest and attract us through every
hour of the day. The ships we meet, the trimming of our sails, the
varying of the weather, the everlasting innumerable changes of the
ocean, afford constant occupation for eye and ear. Sick, indeed, must
that libellous traveller have been who first called the sea
monotonous--sick to death, and perhaps, born brother also to that
other traveller of evil renown, the first man who journeyed from Dan
to Beersheba, and found all barren.
Rest then awhile unemployed, my faithful Black Mirror! The last scene
you have shown me is sufficient to answer the purpose for which I took
you up. Towards what point of the compass I may turn after leaving
London is more than I can tell; but this I know, that my next
post-horses shall be the winds, my next stages coast-towns, my next
road over the open waves. I will be a sea-traveller once more, and
will put off resuming my land journeyings until the arrival of that
most obliging of all convenient periods of time--a future opportunity.
SKETCHES OF CHARACTER.--III.
MRS. BADGERY.
[Drawn from the Life. By a Gentleman with No Sensibilities.]
Is there any law in England which will protect me from Mrs. Badgery?
I am a bachelor, and Mrs. Badgery is a widow. Don't suppose she wants
to marry me! She wants nothing of the sort. She has not attempted to
marry me; she would not think of marrying me, even if I asked her.
Understand, if you please, at the outset, that my grievance in
relation to this widow lady is a grievance of an entirely new kind.
Let me begin again. I am a bachelor of a certain age. I have a large
circle of acquaintance; but I solemnly declare that the late Mr.
Badgery was never numbered on the list of my friends. I never heard of
him in my life; I never knew that he had left a relict; I never set
eyes on Mrs. Badgery until one fatal morning when I went to see if the
fixtures were all right in my new house.
My new house is in the suburbs of London. I looked at it, liked it,
took it. Three times I visited it before I sent my furniture in. Once
with a friend, once with a surveyor, once by myself, to throw a sharp
eye, as I have already intimated, over the fixtures. The third visit
marked the fatal occasion on which I first saw Mrs. Badgery. A deep
interest attaches to this event, and I shall go into details in
describing it.
I rang at the bell of the garden-door. The old woman appointed to keep
the house answered it. I directly saw something strange and confused
in her face and manner. Some men would have pondered a little and
questioned her. I am by nature impetuous and a rusher at conclusions.
"Drunk," I said to myself, and walked on into the house perfectly
satisfied.
I looked into the front parlour. Grate all right, curtain-pole all
right, gas chandelier all right. I looked into the back
parlour--ditto, ditto, ditto, as we men of business say. I mounted the
stairs. Blind on back window right? Yes; blind on back window right. I
opened the door of the front drawing-room--and there, sitting in the
middle of the bare floor, was a large woman on a little camp-stool!
She was dressed in the deepest mourning; her face was hidden by the
thickest crape veil I ever saw; and she was groaning softly to herself
in the desolate solitude of my new unfurnished house.
What did I do? Do! I bounced back into the landing as if I had been
shot, uttering the national exclamation of terror and astonishment:
"Hullo!" (And here I particularly beg, in parenthesis, that the
printer will follow my spelling of the word, and not put Hillo, or
Halloa, instead, both of which are senseless compromises which
represent no sound that ever yet issued from an Englishman's lips.) I
said, "Hullo!" and then I turned round fiercely upon the old woman who
kept the house, and said "Hullo!" again.
She understood the irresistible appeal that I had made to her
feelings, and curtseyed, and looked towards the drawing-room, and
humbly hoped that I was not startled or put out. I asked who the
crape-covered woman on the camp-stool was, and what she wanted there.
Before the old woman could answer, the soft groaning in the
drawing-room ceased, and a muffled voice, speaking from behind the
crape veil, addressed me reproachfully, and said:
"I am the widow of the late Mr. Badgery."
What do you think I said in answer? Exactly the words which, I flatter
myself, any other sensible man in my situation would have said. And
what words were they? These two:
"Oh, indeed?"
"Mr. Badgery and myself were the last tenants who inhabited this
house," continued the muffled voice. "Mr. Badgery died here." The
voice ceased, and the soft groans began again.
It was perhaps not necessary to answer this; but I did answer it. How?
In two words again:
"Did he?"
"Our house has been long empty," resumed the voice, choked by sobs.
"Our establishment has been broken up. Being left in reduced
circumstances, I now live in a cottage near; but it is not home to me.
This is home. However long I live, wherever I go, whatever changes may
happen to this beloved house, nothing can ever prevent me from looking
on it as _my_ home. I came here, sir, with Mr. Badgery after our
honeymoon. All the brief happiness of my life was once contained
within these four walls. Every dear remembrance that I fondly cherish
is shut up in these sacred rooms."
Again the voice ceased, and again the soft groans echoed round my
empty walls, and oozed out past me down my uncarpeted staircase.
I reflected. Mrs. Badgery's brief happiness and dear remembrances were
not included in the list of fixtures. Why could she not take them away
with her? Why should she leave them littered about in the way of my
furniture? I was just thinking how I could put this view of the case
strongly to Mrs. Badgery, when she suddenly left off groaning, and
addressed me once more.
"While this house has been empty," she said, "I have been in the habit
of looking in from time to time, and renewing my tender associations
with the place. I have lived, as it were, in the sacred memories of
Mr. Badgery and of the past, which these dear, these priceless rooms
call up, dismantled and dusty as they are at the present moment. It
has been my practice to give a remuneration to the attendant for any
slight trouble that I might occasion----"
"Only sixpence, sir," whispered the old woman, close at my ear.
"And to ask nothing in return," continued Mrs. Badgery, "but the
permission to bring my camp-stool with me, and to meditate on Mr.
Badgery in the empty rooms, with every one of which some happy
thought, or eloquent word, or tender action of his, is everlastingly
associated. I came here on my usual errand to-day. I am discovered, I
presume, by the new proprietor of the house--discovered, I am quite
ready to admit, as an intruder. I am willing to go, if you wish it
after hearing my explanation. My heart is full, sir; I am quite
incapable of contending with you. You would hardly think it, but I am
sitting on the spot once occupied by _our_ ottoman. I am looking
towards the window in which _my_ flower-stand once stood. In this very
place, Mr. Badgery first sat down and clasped me to his heart, when
we came back from our honeymoon trip. 'Matilda,' he said, 'your
drawing-room has been expensively papered, carpeted, and furnished for
a month; but it has only been adorned, love, since you entered it.' If
you have no sympathy, sir, for such remembrances as these; if you see
nothing pitiable in my position, taken in connection with my presence
here; if you cannot enter into my feelings, and thoroughly understand
that this is not a house, but a Shrine--you have only to say so, and I
am quite willing to go."
She spoke with the air of a martyr--a martyr to my insensibility. If
she had been the proprietor and I had been the intruder, she could not
have been more mournfully magnanimous. All this time, too, she never
raised her veil--she never has raised it, in my presence, from that
time to this. I have no idea whether she is young or old, dark or
fair, handsome or ugly: my impression is, that she is in every respect
a finished and perfect Gorgon; but I have no basis of fact on which I
can support that horrible idea. A moving mass of crape, and a muffled
voice--that, if you drive me to it, is all I know, in a personal point
of view, of Mrs. Badgery.
"Ever since my irreparable loss, this has been the shrine of my
pilgrimage, and the altar of my worship," proceeded the voice. "One
man may call himself a landlord, and say that he will let it; another
man may call himself a tenant, and say that he will take it. I don't
blame either of those two men; I don't wish to intrude on either of
those two men; I only tell them that this is my home; that my heart is
still in possession, and that no mortal laws, landlords, or tenants
can ever turn it out. If you don't understand this, sir; if the
holiest feelings that do honour to our common nature have no
particular sanctity in your estimation, pray do not scruple to say so;
pray tell me to go."
"I don't wish to do anything uncivil, ma'am," said I. "But I am a
single man, and I am not sentimental." (Mrs. Badgery groaned.) "Nobody
told me I was coming into a Shrine when I took this house; nobody
warned me, when I first went over it that there was a Heart in
possession. I regret to have disturbed your meditations, and I am
sorry to hear that Mr. Badgery is dead. That is all I have to say
about it; and now, with your kind permission, I will do myself the
honour of wishing you good morning, and will go up-stairs to look
after the fixtures on the second floor."
Could I have given a gentler hint than this? Could I have spoken more
compassionately to a woman whom I sincerely believe to be old and
ugly? Where is the man to be found who can lay his hand on his heart,
and honestly say that he ever really pitied the sorrows of a Gorgon?
Search through the whole surface of the globe, and you will discover
human phenomena of all sorts; but you will not find that man.
To resume. I made her a bow, and left her on the camp-stool, in the
middle of the drawing-room floor, exactly as I had found her. I
ascended to the second floor, walked into the back room first, and
inspected the grate. It appeared to be a little out of repair, so I
stooped down to look at it closer. While I was kneeling over the bars,
I was violently startled by the fall of one large drop of Warm Water,
from a great height, exactly in the middle of a bald place, which has
been widening a great deal of late years on the top of my head. I
turned on my knees, and looked round. Heaven and earth! the
crape-covered woman had followed me up-stairs--the source from which
the drop of warm water had fallen was Mrs. Badgery's eye!
"I wish you could contrive not to cry over the top of my head, ma'am,"
I remarked. My patience was becoming exhausted, and I spoke with
considerable asperity. The curly-headed youth of the present age may
not be able to sympathise with my feelings on this occasion; but my
bald brethren know, as well as I do, that the most unpardonable of all
liberties is a liberty taken with the unguarded top of the human head.
Mrs. Badgery did not seem to hear me. When she had dropped the tear,
she was standing exactly over me, looking down at the grate; and she
never stirred an inch after I had spoken. "Don't cry over my head,
ma'am," I repeated, more irritably than before.
"This was his dressing-room," said Mrs. Badgery, indulging in muffled
soliloquy. "He was singularly particular about his shaving-water. He
always liked to have it in a little tin pot, and he invariably desired
that it might be placed on this hob." She groaned again, and tapped
one side of the grate with the leg of her camp-stool.
If I had been a woman, or if Mrs. Badgery had been a man, I should now
have proceeded to extremities, and should have vindicated my right to
my own house by an appeal to physical force. Under existing
circumstances, all that I could do was to express my indignation by a
glance. The glance produced not the slightest result--and no wonder.
Who can look at a woman with any effect, through a crape veil?
I retreated into the second-floor front room, and instantly shut the
door after me. The next moment I heard the rustling of the crape
garments outside, and the muffled voice of Mrs. Badgery poured
lamentably through the keyhole.
"Do you mean to make that your bed-room?" asked the voice on the other
side of the door. "Oh, don't, don't make that your bed-room! I am
going away directly--but, oh pray, pray let that one room be sacred!
Don't sleep there! If you can possibly help it, don't sleep there!"
I opened the window, and looked up and down the road. If I had seen a
policeman within hail I should certainly have called him in. No such
person was visible. I shut the window again, and warned Mrs. Badgery,
through the door, in my sternest tones, not to interfere with my
domestic arrangements. "I mean to have my own iron bedstead put up
here," I said. "And what is more, I mean to sleep here. And what is
more, I mean to snore here!" Severe, I think, that last sentence? It
completely crushed Mrs. Badgery for the moment. I heard the crape
garments rustling away from the door; I heard the muffled groans going
slowly and solemnly down the stairs again.
In due course of time I also descended to the ground-floor. Had Mrs.
Badgery really left the premises? I looked into the front
parlour--empty. Back parlour--empty. Any other room on the
ground-floor? Yes; a long room at the end of the passage. The door was
closed. I opened it cautiously, and peeped in. A faint scream, and a
smack of two distractedly-clasped hands saluted my appearance. There
she was, again on the camp-stool, again sitting exactly in the middle
of the floor.
"Don't, don't look in, in that way!" cried Mrs. Badgery, wringing her
hands. "I could bear it in any other room, but I can't bear it in
this. Every Monday morning I looked out the things for the wash in
this room. He was difficult to please about his linen; the washerwoman
never put starch enough into his collars to satisfy him. Oh, how often
and often has he popped his head in here, as you popped yours just
now; and said, in his amusing way, 'More starch!' Oh, how droll he
always was--how very, very droll in this dear little back room!"
I said nothing. The situation had now got beyond words. I stood with
the door in my hand, looking down the passage towards the garden, and
waiting doggedly for Mrs. Badgery to go out. My plan succeeded. She
rose, sighed, shut up the camp-stool, stalked along the passage,
paused on the hall mat, said to herself, "Sweet, sweet spot!"
descended the steps, groaned along the gravel-walk, and disappeared
from view at last through the garden-door.
"Let her in again at your peril," said I to the woman who kept the
house. She curtseyed and trembled. I left the premises, satisfied with
my own conduct under very trying circumstances; delusively convinced
also that I had done with Mrs. Badgery.
The next day I sent in the furniture. The most unprotected object on
the face of this earth is a house when the furniture is going in. The
doors must be kept open; and employ as many servants as you may,
nobody can be depended on as a domestic sentry so long as the van is
at the gate. The confusion of "moving in" demoralises the steadiest
disposition, and there is no such thing as a properly-guarded post
from the top of the house to the bottom. How the invasion was managed,
how the surprise was effected, I know not; but it is certainly the
fact, that when my furniture went in, the inevitable Mrs. Badgery went
in along with it.
I have some very choice engravings, after the old masters; and I was
first awakened to a consciousness of Mrs. Badgery's presence in the
house, while I was hanging up my proof impression of Titian's Venus
over the front parlour fire-place. "Not there!" cried the muffled
voice imploringly. "_His_ portrait used to hang there. Oh, what a
print--what a dreadful, dreadful print to put where _his_ dear
portrait used to be!"
I turned round in a fury. There she was, still muffled up in crape,
still carrying her abominable camp-stool. Before I could say a word in
remonstrance, six men in green baize aprons staggered in with my
sideboard, and Mrs. Badgery suddenly disappeared. Had they trampled
her under foot, or crushed her in the doorway? Though not an inhuman
man by nature, I asked myself those questions quite composedly. No
very long time elapsed before they were practically answered in the
negative by the reappearance of Mrs. Badgery herself, in a perfectly
unruffled condition of chronic grief. In the course of the day I had
my toes trodden on, I was knocked about by my own furniture, the six
men in baize aprons dropped all sorts of small articles over me in
going up and down stairs; but Mrs. Badgery escaped unscathed. Every
time I thought she had been turned out of the house she proved, on the
contrary, to be groaning close behind me. She wept over Mr. Badgery's
memory in every room, perfectly undisturbed to the last, by the
chaotic confusion of moving in. I am not sure, but I think she brought
a tin box of sandwiches with her, and celebrated a tearful pic-nic of
her own in the groves of my front garden. I say I am not sure of this;
but I am positively certain that I never entirely got rid of her all
day; and I know to my cost that she insisted on making me as well
acquainted with Mr. Badgery's favourite notions and habits as I am
with my own. It may interest the reader if I report that my taste in
carpets is not equal to Mr. Badgery's; that my ideas on the subject of
servants' wages are not so generous as Mr. Badgery's; and that I
ignorantly persisted in placing a sofa in the position which Mr.
Badgery, in his time, considered to be particularly fitted for an
arm-chair. I could go nowhere, look nowhere, do nothing, say nothing,
all that day, without bringing the widowed incubus in the crape
garments down upon me immediately. I tried civil remonstrances, I
tried rude speeches, I tried sulky silence--nothing had the least
effect on her. The memory of Mr. Badgery was the shield of proof with
which she warded off my fiercest attacks. Not till the last article of
furniture had been moved in, did I lose sight of her; and even then
she had not really left the house. One of my six men in green baize
aprons routed her out of the back-garden area, where she was telling
my servants, with floods of tears, of Mr. Badgery's virtuous
strictness with his housemaid in the matter of followers. My admirable
man in green baize courageously saw her out, and shut the garden-door
after her. I gave him half-a-crown on the spot; and if anything
happens to him, I am ready to make the future prosperity of his
fatherless family my own peculiar care.
The next day was Sunday; and I attended morning service at my new
parish church.
A popular preacher had been announced, and the building was crowded. I
advanced a little way up the nave, and looked to my right, and saw no
room. Before I could look to my left, I felt a hand laid persuasively
on my arm. I turned round--and there was Mrs. Badgery, with her
pew-door open, solemnly beckoning me in. The crowd had closed up
behind me; the eyes of a dozen members of the congregation, at least,
were fixed on me. I had no choice but to save appearances, and accept
the dreadful invitation. There was a vacant place next to the door of
the pew. I tried to drop into it, but Mrs. Badgery stopped me. "_His_
seat," she whispered, and signed to me to place myself on the other
side of her. It is unnecessary to say that I had to climb over a
hassock, and that I knocked down all Mrs. Badgery's devotional books
before I succeeded in passing between her and the front of the pew.
She cried uninterruptedly through the service; composed herself when
it was over; and began to tell me what Mr. Badgery's opinions had been
on points of abstract theology. Fortunately there was great confusion
and crowding at the door of the church; and I escaped, at the hazard
of my life, by running round the back of the carriages. I passed the
interval between the services alone in the fields, being deterred from
going home by the fear that Mrs. Badgery might have got there before
me.
Monday came. I positively ordered my servants to let no lady in deep
mourning pass inside the garden-door, without first consulting me.
After that, feeling tolerably secure, I occupied myself in arranging
my books and prints.
I had not pursued this employment much more than an hour, when one of
the servants burst excitably into the room, and informed me that a
lady in deep mourning had been taken faint, just outside my door, and
had requested leave to come in and sit down for a few moments. I ran
down the garden-path to bolt the door, and arrived just in time to see
it violently pushed open by an officious and sympathising crowd. They
drew away on either side as they saw me. There she was, leaning on the
grocer's shoulder, with the butcher's boy in attendance, carrying her
camp-stool! Leaving my servants to do what they liked with her, I ran
back and locked myself up in my bedroom. When she evacuated the
premises, some hours afterwards, I received a message of apology,
informing me that this particular Monday was the sad anniversary of
her wedding-day, and that she had been taken faint, in consequence, at
the sight of her lost husband's house.
Tuesday forenoon passed away happily, without any new invasion. After
lunch, I thought I would go out and take a walk. My garden-door has a
sort of peep-hole in it, covered with a wire grating. As I got close
to this grating, I thought I saw something mysteriously dark on the
outer side of it. I bent my head down to look through, and instantly
found myself face to face with the crape veil. "Sweet, sweet spot!"
said the muffled voice, speaking straight into my eyes through the
grating. The usual groans followed, and the name of Mr. Badgery was
plaintively pronounced before I could recover myself sufficiently to
retreat to the house.