Then Lieutenant Burney sauntered into the room and greeted Esther; but
when Fanny inquired with some eagerness what had been the result of Mr.
Garrick’s fooling of poor Mr. Kendal, James was by no means so glib or
amusing as Fanny expected him to be.
“Psha!” he cried; “that Mr. Kendal is not worth powder and shot—at
least not the weight of metal that Mr. Garrick can discharge—not in a
broadside—Mr. Garrick is not given to broadsides—they are too clumsy
for him—he is like Luke Boscawen, our chief gunner; he had a contempt
for what he was used to term a blustering broadside, having a liking
only for the working of his little brass swivel. He could do anything
that he pleased with his little swivel. ‘Ping!’ it would go, when he
had squinted along the sights, and the object he aimed at half a mile
away—sometimes so small that we could scarce see it from our foretop—down
it went. Boscawen could do what he pleased with it—the blunt nose of a
whale rising to spout a mile away—the stem of a cocoa-nut palm on one of
the islands when we were not sure of the natives and there was no time
to climb the tree—that is the marksmanship of Mr. Garrick, and your Mr.
Kendal was not worthy of an exercise of so much skill.”
“Nobody seems too insignificant to be made a fool of by Mr. Garrick,”
said Mrs. Burney. “He is as happy when he has made a gruesome face and
frightened a maid with a mop at the doorstep, as when he has stricken us
with awe when the ghost enters in _Hamlet_, or when Macbeth declaims of
the horror of the curse of sleeplessness that has been cast on him. That
is why I said before he arrived that I was not sure that his influence
upon you all is for good. He makes one lose one’s sense of the right
proportions and realities of life. Now is not that so, Hetty? I make
no appeal to Fanny, for I know that she has ever been devoted to Mr.
Garrick. Is it not true that she was used to frighten poor Lottie before
she was ten by showing how Mr. Garrick frowned as the Duke of Gloster?”
“I know that Fanny murdered us all in turn in our beds, assuring us
that we were the Princes in the Tower, or some less real characters
invented by herself,” said Esther. “But indeed if James tells us that Mr.
Garrick’s gun practice smashed the cocoa-nut that serves Mr. Kendal as a
head, I should not grieve. Tell us what happened, James.”
“Oh, ’twas naught worth words to describe,” said James. “The man came to
take counsel of Daddy in regard to a jest that Mr. Garrick had, unknown
to his victim, played off upon him, and Mr. Garrick so worked upon him
that Daddy had no chance to speak. But Mr. Garrick made fools of us as
well, for I give you my word, though we were in with him in his jest,
he had us blubbering like boobies when he laid his hand on the fellow’s
shoulder and spoke nonsense in a voice quivering and quavering as though
he were at the point of breaking down.”
Mrs. Burney the elder shook her head.
“That is what I do not like—that trifling with sacred things,” she said.
“’Tis not decent in a private house—I would not tolerate it even in a
playhouse, and I see that you are of my opinion, James, though you may
have been dragged into the abetting of Mr. Garrick in whatever mad
scheme he had set himself upon perfecting.”
“Oh, for that matter we are all sorry when we have been merry at the
expense of another, even though he be an elderly coxcomb such as that
Mr. Kendal,” said James. “But enough—more than enough—of coxcomb Kendal!
Tell us of the Duchess’s concert, Hetty. Were the matrimonial duets as
successful as usual?”
Esther, who had been disappointed that her stepmother had not yet said a
word about the concert of the previous night given by the Dowager Duchess
of Portland, at which she and her husband had performed, brightened up at
her brother’s question.
“The concert was well enough,” she replied with an affectation of
carelessness. “’Twas no better than many that have taken place under
this roof. Her Grace and her grandees were very kind to us—we had enough
plaudits to turn the head of Gabrielli herself.”
“Oh, the Gabrielli’s head has been turned so frequently that one can
never tell when it sits straight on her shoulders,” said James.
“She was very civil to us last evening,” said Esther. “Indeed, she was
civil to everyone until the enchanter Rauzzini sang the solo from _Piramo
e Tisbe_ and swept the company off their feet. The poor Gabrielli had no
chance against Rauzzini.”
“Especially in a company that numbered many ladies,” said James, with a
laugh. “You remember what Sir Joshua told us that Dr. Goldsmith had once
said of Johnson?—that in his argument he was like the highwayman: when
his pistol missed fire he knocked one down with the butt.”
“I heard that upon one occasion Dr. Johnson knocked a man down with a
heavy book, but I cannot imagine his ever firing a pistol,” remarked
Mrs. Burney, who had been used, when the wife of a straightforward
merchant of Lynn, to take every statement literally, and had not yet
become accustomed to the involved mode of speaking of the brilliant young
Burneys.
“You mean that Rauzzini—I don’t quite perceive what you do mean by your
reference to Dr. Goldsmith’s apt humour,” said Esther.
“I only mean that among such a company as assembled at the Duchess’s, if
he missed fire with his singing, he glanced around with those dark eyes
of his and the ladies went down before him by the score,” replied James.
“Do not I speak the truth, Fanny?” he added, turning quickly to where
Fanny was searching with her short-sighted eyes close to her work-basket
for some material that seemed to be missing.
But she had clearly heard her brother’s question, for she did not need to
raise her head or to ask him to repeat it.
“Oh, we are all the slaves of the nobil’ signor,” she said, and continued
her search in the basket.
“From the way he talked to us last night it might be fancied that it was
he who was the captive,” said Esther.
“And I do not doubt that he is living in a state of constant captivity,”
laughed James. “Ay, or I should rather term it inconstant captivity, for
I dare swear that those black eyes of his do a deal of roving in the
course of a year—nay, in the course of a day. These singer fellows feel
that ’tis due to their art, this moving the hearts of their hearers,
by moving their own affections from heart to heart. The Rauzzini is, I
fancy, like one of the splendid butterflies we came upon in the Straits,
fluttering from flower to flower.”
“I have heard no stories of his inconstancy, even from the Gabrielli
when she was most envious of his plaudits,” said Esther, and she glanced
at her sister, who was earnestly threading a needle.
“You goose!” cried James to Esther. “Do you suppose that Gabrielli would
tell you anything so greatly complimentary to him? In these days you
cannot pay a man a greater compliment than to compare him to the fickle
butterfly. You see that suggests a welcome from every flower.”
“I protest that it is to sailors I have heard most compliments of that
sort paid,” laughed Esther, and then, putting herself in a singing
attitude before him, she lilted most delightfully:
“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more!
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot on sea——
“ha, ha, brother James!
and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
“Now be advised by me, dear James, and do not attribute even in a cynical
way, the vice of inconstancy to a singer, until you have left the Navy.”
“I did not allude to it as a vice—rather as a virtue,” said James. “Just
think of the hard fate of any girl to have such a person as a singer ever
by her side!”
He easily evaded the rush down upon him made by Hetty, and used his
nautical skill to sail to the windward of her, as it were, until he had
reached the door, whence he sent a parting shot at her.
“You surely don’t think that I hinted that your spouse was a singer,” he
cried. “A singer! Oh, lud! I should be swaying away on all top ropes if I
were to call the matrimonial duets singing.”
He gave a shout of laughter as he caught the ball of wool which Esther
threw at him, having picked it up from her stepmother’s work-table. He
returned it with a better aim, and before his sister could get a hand on
it, he had shut the door, only opening it a little space a few seconds
later to put in his head with a mocking word, withdrawing it at once, and
then his foot was heard upon the stair, while he gave a sailor’s version
of Mr. Garrick’s patriotic naval song:
Come, cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer.
“He has gone before I had a chance of asking him to take a message to the
cheesemonger,” said Mrs. Burney, calling out to him while she hurried
after him out of the room.