Fish
When the performances were concluded, our friends took coach for Mr.
Warrington's lodging, where the Virginians had provided an elegant
supper. Mr. Warrington was eager to treat them in the handsomest
manner, and the General and his wife accepted the invitation of the two
bachelors, pleased to think that they could give their young friends
pleasure. General and Mrs. Lambert, their son from college, their two
blooming daughters, and Mr. Spencer of the Temple, a new friend whom
George had met at the coffee-house, formed the party, and partook with
cheerfulness of the landlady's fare. The order of their sitting I have
not been able exactly to ascertain; but, somehow, Miss Theo had a place
next to the chickens and Mr. George Warrington, whilst Miss Hetty and a
ham divided the attentions of Mr. Harry. Mrs. Lambert must have been on
George's right hand, so that we have but to settle the three places of
the General, his son, and the Templar.
Mr. Spencer had been at the other theatre, where, on a former day, he
had actually introduced George to the greenroom. The conversation about
the play was resumed, and some of the party persisted in being delighted
with it.
“As for what our gentlemen say, sir,” cries Mrs. Lambert to Mr. Spencer,
“you must not believe a word of it. 'Tis a delightful piece, and my
husband and Mr. George behaved as ill as possible.”
“We laughed in the wrong place, and when we ought to have cried,” the
General owned, “that's the truth.”
“You caused all the people in the boxes about us to look round and cry
'Hush!' You made the pit folks say, 'Silence in the boxes, yonder!' Such
behaviour I never knew, and quite blushed for you, Mr. Lambert!”
“Mamma thought it was a tragedy, and we thought it was a piece of fun,”
says the General. “George and I behaved perfectly well, didn't we,
Theo?”
“Not when I was looking your way, papa!” Theo replies. At which the
General asks, “Was there ever such a saucy baggage seen?”
“You know, sir, I didn't speak till I was bid,” Theo continues,
modestly. “I own I was very much moved by the play, and the beauty and
acting of Mrs. Woffington. I was sorry that the poor mother should find
her child, and lose him. I am sorry, too, papa, if I oughtn't to have
been sorry!” adds the young lady, with a smile.
“Women are not so clever as men, you know, Theo,” cries Hetty from her
end of the table, with a sly look at Harry. “The next time we go to the
play, please, brother Jack, pinch us when we ought to cry, or give us a
nudge when it is right to laugh.”
“I wish we could have had the fight,” said General Lambert, “the fight
between little Norval and the gigantic Norwegian--that would have been
rare sport: and you should write, Jack, and suggest it to Mr. Rich, the
manager.”
“I have not seen that: but I saw Slack and Broughton at Marybone
Gardens!” says Harry, gravely; and wondered if he had said something
witty, as all the company laughed so? “It would require no giant,” he
added, “to knock over yonder little fellow in the red boots. I, for one,
could throw him over my shoulder.”
“Mr. Garrick is a little man. But there are times when he looks a
giant,” says Mr. Spencer. “How grand he was in Macbeth, Mr. Warrington!
How awful that dagger-scene was! You should have seen our host, ladies!
I presented Mr. Warrington, in the greenroom, to Mr. Garrick and Mrs.
Pritchard, and Lady Macbeth did him the honour to take a pinch out of
his box.”
“Did the wife of the Thane of Cawdor sneeze?” asked the General, in an
awful voice.
“She thanked Mr. Warrington, in tones so hollow and tragic, that he
started back, and must have upset some of his rappee, for Macbeth
sneezed thrice.”
“Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth!” cries the General.
“And the great philosopher who was standing by Mr. Johnson, says, 'You
must mind, Davy, lest thy sneeze should awaken Duncan!' who, by the way,
was talking with the three witches as they sat against the wall.”
“What! Have you been behind the scenes at the play? Oh, I would give
worlds to go behind the scenes!” cries Theo.
“And see the ropes pulled, and smell the tallow-candles, and look at the
pasteboard gold, and the tinsel jewels, and the painted old women, Theo?
No. Do not look too close,” says the sceptical young host, demurely
drinking a glass of hock. “You were angry with your papa and me.”
“Nay, George!” cries the girl.
“Nay? I say, yes! You were angry with us because we laughed when you
were disposed to be crying. If I may speak for you, sir, as well as
myself,” says George (with a bow to his guest, General Lambert), “I
think we were not inclined to weep, like the ladies, because we stood
behind the author's scenes of the play, as it were. Looking close up to
the young hero, we saw how much of him was rant and tinsel; and as for
the pale, tragical mother, that her pallor was white chalk, and her
grief her pocket-handkerchief. Own now, Theo, you thought me very
unfeeling?”
“If you find it out, sir, without my owning it,--what is the good of my
confessing?” says Theo.
“Suppose I were to die?” goes on George, “and you saw Harry in grief,
you would be seeing a genuine affliction, a real tragedy; you would
grieve too. But you wouldn't be affected if you saw the undertaker in
weepers and a black cloak!”
“Indeed, but I should, sir!” says Mrs. Lambert; “and so, I promise you,
would any daughter of mine.”
“Perhaps we might find weepers of our own, Mr. Warrington,” says Theo,
“in such a case.”
“Would you?” cries George, and his cheeks and Theo's simultaneously
flushed up with red; I suppose because they both saw Hetty's bright
young eyes watching them.
“The elder writers understood but little of the pathetic,” remarked Mr.
Spencer, the Temple wit.
“What do you think of Sophocles and Antigone?” calls out Mr. John
Lambert.
“Faith, our wits trouble themselves little about him, unless an Oxford
gentleman comes to remind us of him! I did not mean to go back farther
than Mr. Shakspeare, who, as you will all agree, does not understand
the elegant and pathetic as well as the moderns. Has he ever approached
Belvidera, or Monimia, or Jane Shore; or can you find in his comic
female characters the elegance of Congreve?” and the Templar offered
snuff to the right and left.
“I think Mr. Spencer himself must have tried his hand?” asks some one.
“Many gentlemen of leisure have. Mr. Garrick, I own, has had a piece of
mine and returned it.”
“And I confess that I have four acts of a play in one of my boxes,” says
George.
“I'll be bound to say it's as good as any of 'em,” whispers Harry to his
neighbour.
“Is it a tragedy or a comedy?” asks Mrs. Lambert.
“Oh, a tragedy, and two or three dreadful murders at least!” George
replies.
“Let us play it, and let the audience look to their eyes! Yet my chief
humour is for a tyrant,” says the General.
“The tragedy, the tragedy! Go and fetch the tragedy this moment,
Gumbo!” calls Mrs. Lambert to the black. Gumbo makes a low bow and says,
“Tragedy? yes, madam.”
“In the great cowskin trunk, Gumbo,” George says, gravely.
Gumbo bows and says, “Yes, sir,” with still superior gravity.
“But my tragedy is at the bottom of I don't know how much linen,
packages, books, and boots, Hetty.”
“Never mind, let us have it, and fling the linen out of window!” cries
Miss Hetty.
“And the great cowskin trunk is at our agent's at Bristol: so Gumbo must
get post-horses, and we can keep it up till he returns the day after
to-morrow,” says George.
The ladies groaned a comical “Oh!” and papa, perhaps more seriously,
said, “Let us be thankful for the escape. Let us be thinking of going
home too. Our young gentlemen have treated us nobly, and we will all
drink a parting bumper to Madam Esmond Warrington of Castlewood, in
Virginia. Suppose, boys, you were to find a tall, handsome stepfather
when you got home? Ladies as old as she have been known to marry before
now.”
“To Madam Esmond Warrington, my old schoolfellow!” cries Mrs. Lambert.
“I shall write and tell her what a pretty supper her sons have given us:
and, Mr. George, I won't say how ill you behaved at the play!” And,
with this last toast, the company took leave; the General's coach and
servant, with a flambeau, being in waiting to carry his family home.
After such an entertainment as that which Mr. Warrington had given, what
could be more natural or proper than a visit from him to his guests,
to inquire how they had reached home and rested? Why, their coach might
have taken the open country behind Montague House, in the direction
of Oxford Road, and been waylaid by footpads in the fields. The ladies
might have caught cold or slept ill after the excitement of the tragedy.
In a word, there was no reason why he should make any excuse at all to
himself or them for visiting his kind friends; and he shut his books
early at the Sloane Museum, and perhaps thought, as he walked away
thence, that he remembered very little about what he had been reading.
Pray what is the meaning of this eagerness, this hesitation, this
pshaing and shilly-shallying, these doubts, this tremor as he knocks
at the door of Mr. Lambert's lodgings in Dean Street, and survey the
footman who comes to his summons? Does any young man read? does any
old one remember? does any wearied, worn, disappointed pulseless heart
recall the time of its full beat and early throbbing? It is ever so many
hundred years since some of us were young; and we forget, but do not all
forget. No, madam, we remember with advantages, as Shakspeare's Harry
promised his soldiers they should do if they survived Agincourt and
that day of St. Crispin. Worn old chargers turned out to grass, if the
trumpet sounds over the hedge, may we not kick up our old heels, and
gallop a minute or so about the paddock, till we are brought up roaring?
I do not care for clown and pantaloon now, and think the fairy ugly, and
her verses insufferable: but I like to see children at a pantomime. I
do not dance, or eat supper any more; but I like to watch Eugenio and
Flirtilla twirling round in a pretty waltz, or Lucinda and Ardentio
pulling a cracker. Burn your little fingers, children! Blaze out little
kindly flames from each other's eyes! And then draw close together and
read the motto (that old namby-pamby motto, so stale and so new!)--I
say, let her lips read it, and his construe it; and so divide the
sweetmeat, young people, and crunch it between you. I have no teeth.
Bitter almonds and sugar disagree with me, I tell you; but, for all
that, shall not bonbons melt in the mouth?
We follow John upstairs to the General's apartments, and enter with Mr.
George Esmond Warrington, who makes a prodigious fine bow. There is
only one lady in the room, seated near a window: there is not often much
sunshine in Dean Street: the young lady in the window is no especial
beauty: but it is spring-time, and she is blooming vernally. A bunch
of fresh roses is flushing in her honest cheek. I suppose her eyes are
violets. If we lived a hundred years ago, and wrote in the Gentleman's
or the London Magazine, we should tell Mr. Sylvanus Urban that her neck
was the lily, and her shape the nymph's: we should write an acrostic
about her, and celebrate our Lambertella in an elegant poem, still to be
read between a neat new engraved plan of the city of Prague and the King
of Prussia's camp, and a map of Maryland and the Delaware counties.
Here is Miss Theo blushing like a rose. What could mamma have meant an
hour since by insisting that she was very pale and tired, and had best
not come out to-day with the rest of the party? They were gone to pay
their compliments to my Lord Wrotham's ladies, and thank them for the
house in their absence; and papa was at the Horse Guards. He is in great
spirits. I believe he expects some command, though mamma is in a sad
tremor lest he should again be ordered abroad.
“Your brother and mine are gone to see our little brother at his school
at the Chartreux. My brothers are both to be clergymen, I think,” Miss
Theo continues. She is assiduously hemming at some article of boyish
wearing apparel as she talks. A hundred years ago, young ladies were not
afraid either to make shirts, or to name them. Mind, I don't say they
were the worse or the better for that plain stitching or plain speaking:
and have not the least desire, my dear young lady, that you should make
puddings or I should black boots.
So Harry has been with them? “He often comes, almost every day,” Theo
says, looking up in George's face. “Poor fellow! He likes us better than
the fine folks, who don't care for him now--now he is no longer a fine
folk himself,” adds the girl, smiling. “Why have you not set up for the
fashion, and frequented the chocolate-houses and the racecourses, Mr.
Warrington?”
“Has my brother got so much good out of his gay haunts or his grand
friends, that I should imitate him?”
“You might at least go to Sir Miles Warrington; sure his arms are open
to receive you. Her ladyship was here this morning in her chair, and
to hear her praises of you! She declares you are in a certain way to
preferment. She says his Royal Highness the Duke made much of you at
court. When you are a great man will you forget us, Mr. Warrington?”
“Yes, when I am a great man I will, Miss Lambert.”
“Well! Mr. George, then----”
“--Mr. George!”
“When papa and mamma are here, I suppose there need be no mistering,”
says Theo, looking out of the window, ever so little frightened. “And
what have you been doing, sir? Reading books, or writing more of your
tragedy? Is it going to be a tragedy to make us cry, as we like them, or
only to frighten us, as you like them?”
“There is plenty of killing, but, I fear, not much crying. I have not
met many women. I have not been very intimate with those. I daresay what
I have written is only taken out of books or parodied from poems which
I have read and imitated like other young men. Women do not speak to me,
generally; I am said to have a sarcastic way which displeases them.”
“Perhaps you never cared to please them?” inquires Miss Theo, with a
blush.
“I displeased you last night; you know I did?”
“Yes; only it can't be called displeasure, and afterwards thought I was
wrong.”
“Did you think about me at all when I was away, Theo?”
“Yes, George--that is, Mr.--well, George! I thought you and papa were
right about the play; and, as you said, that it was no real sorrow, only
affectation, which was moving us. I wonder whether it is good or ill
fortune to see so clearly? Hetty and I agreed that we would be very
careful, for the future, how we allowed ourselves to enjoy a tragedy.
So, be careful when yours comes! What is the name of it?”
“He is not christened. Will you be the godmother? The name of the chief
character is----” But at this very moment mamma and Miss Hetty arrived
from their walk; and mamma straightway began protesting that she never
expected to see Mr. Warrington at all that day--that is, she thought he
might come--that is, it was very good of him to come, and the play and
the supper of yesterday were all charming, except that Theo had a little
headache this morning.
“I dare say it is better now, mamma,” says Miss Hetty.
“Indeed, my dear, it never was of any consequence; and I told mamma so,”
says Miss Theo, with a toss of her head.
Then they fell to talking about Harry. He was very low. He must have
something to do. He was always going to the Military Coffee-House, and
perpetually poring over the King of Prussia's campaigns. It was not fair
upon him, to bid him remain in London, after his deposition, as it were.
He said nothing, but you could see how he regretted his previous useless
life, and felt his present dependence, by the manner in which he avoided
his former haunts and associates. Passing by the guard at St. James's,
with John Lambert, he had said to brother Jack, “Why mayn't I be
a soldier too? I am as tall as yonder fellow, and can kill with a
fowling-piece as well as any man I know. But I can't earn so much as
sixpence a day. I have squandered my own bread, and now I am eating half
my brother's. He is the best of brothers, but so much the more shame
that I should live upon him. Don't tell my brother, Jack Lambert.” “And
my boy promised he wouldn't tell,” says Mrs. Lambert. No doubt. The
girls were both out of the room when their mother made this speech to
George Warrington. He, for his part, said he had written home to his
mother--that half his little patrimony, the other half likewise, if
wanted, were at Harry's disposal, for purchasing a commission, or for
any other project which might bring him occupation or advancement.
“He has got a good brother, that is sure. Let us hope for good times for
him,” sighs the lady.
“The Danes always come pour qui scait attendre,” George said, in a low
voice.
“What, you heard that? Ah, George! my Theo is an----Ah! never mind what
she is, George Warrington,” cried the pleased mother, with brimful eyes.
“Bah! I am going to make a gaby of myself, as I did at the tragedy.”
Now Mr. George had been revolving a fine private scheme, which
he thought might turn to his brother's advantage. After George's
presentation to his Royal Highness at Kensington, more persons than
one, his friend General Lambert included, had told him that the Duke had
inquired regarding him, and had asked why the young man did not come to
his levee. Importunity so august could not but be satisfied. A day was
appointed between Mr. Lambert and his young friend, and they went to pay
their duty to his Royal Highness at his house in Pall Mall.
When it came to George's turn to make a bow, the Prince was especially
gracious; he spoke to Mr. Warrington at some length about Braddock and
the war, and was apparently pleased with the modesty and intelligence
of the young gentleman's answers. George ascribed the failure of the
expedition to the panic and surprise certainly, but more especially to
the delays occasioned by the rapacity, selfishness, and unfair dealing
of the people of the colonies towards the King's troops who were come
to defend them. “Could we have moved, sir, a month sooner, the fort
was certainly ours, and the little army had never been defeated,”
Mr. Warrington said; in which observation his Royal Highness entirely
concurred.
“I am told you saved yourself, sir, mainly by your knowledge of the
French language,” the Royal Duke then affably observed. Mr. Warrington
modestly mentioned how he had been in the French colonies in his youth,
and had opportunities of acquiring that tongue.
The Prince (who had a great urbanity when well pleased, and the finest
sense of humour) condescended to ask who had taught Mr. Warrington the
language; and to express his opinion, that, for the pronunciation, the
French ladies were by far the best teachers.
The young Virginian gentleman made a low bow, and said it was not for
him to gainsay his Royal Highness; upon which the Duke was good enough
to say (in a jocose manner) that Mr. Warrington was a sly dog.
Mr. W. remaining respectfully silent, the Prince continued, most kindly:
“I take the field immediately against the French, who, as you know, are
threatening his Majesty's Electoral dominions, If you have a mind to
make the campaign with me, your skill in the language may be useful,
and I hope we shall be more fortunate than poor Braddock!” Every eye
was fixed on a young man to whom so great a Prince offered so signal a
favour.
And now it was that Mr. George thought he would make his very cleverest
speech. “Sir,” he said, “your Royal Highness's most kind proposal does
me infinite honour, but----”
“But what, sir?” says the Prince, staring at him.
“But I have entered myself of the Temple, to study our laws, and to fit
myself for my duties at home. If my having been wounded in the service
of my country be any claim on your kindness, I would humbly ask that my
brother, who knows the French language as well as myself, and has far
more strength, courage, and military genius, might be allowed to serve
your Royal Highness; in the place of----”
“Enough, enough, sir!” cried out the justly irritated son of the
monarch. “What? I offer you a favour, and you hand it over to your
brother? Wait, sir, till I offer you another!” And with this the Prince
turned his back upon Mr. Warrington, just as abruptly as he turned it on
the French a few months afterwards.
“Oh, George! oh, George! Here's a pretty kettle of fish!” groaned
General Lambert, as he and his young friend walked home together.