BEFORE dropping the curtain on my college days I must relate a little
adventure which is amusing as an illustration of my reverend friend
Napier’s enthusiastic spontaneity. My own share in the farce is a
subordinate matter.
During the Christmas party at Holkham I had ‘fallen in love,’ as the
phrase goes, with a young lady whose uncle (she had neither father nor
mother) had rented a place in the neighbourhood. At the end of his visit
he invited me to shoot there the following week. For what else had I
paid him assiduous attention, and listened like an angel to the
interminable history of his gout? I went; and before I left, proposed
to, and was accepted by, the young lady. I was still at Cambridge, not
of age, and had but moderate means. As for the maiden, ‘my face is my
fortune’ she might have said. The aunt, therefore, very properly
pooh-poohed the whole affair, and declined to entertain the possibility
of an engagement; the elderly gentleman got a bad attack of gout; and
every wire of communication being cut, not an obstacle was wanting to
render persistence the sweetest of miseries.
Napier was my confessor, and became as keen to circumvent the ‘old
she-dragon,’ so he called her, as I was. Frequent and long were our
consultations, but they generally ended in suggestions and schemes so
preposterous, that the only result was an immoderate fit of laughter on
both sides. At length it came to this (the proposition was not mine): we
were to hire a post chaise and drive to the inn at G—. I was to write a
note to the young lady requesting her to meet me at some trysting place.
The note was to state that a clergyman would accompany me, who was ready
and willing to unite us there and then in holy matrimony; that I would
bring the licence in my pocket; that after the marriage we could confer
as to ways and means; and that—she could leave the _rest_ to me.
No enterprise was ever more merrily conceived, or more seriously
undertaken. (Please to remember that my friend was not so very much
older than I; and, in other respects, was quite as juvenile.)
Whatever was to come of it, the drive was worth the venture. The number
of possible and impossible contingencies provided for kept us occupied by
the hour. Furnished with a well-filled luncheon basket, we regaled
ourselves and fortified our courage; while our hilarity increased as we
neared, or imagined that we neared, the climax. Unanimously we repeated
Dr. Johnson’s exclamation in a post chaise: ‘Life has not many things
better than this.’
But where were we? Our watches told us that we had been two hours
covering a distance of eleven miles.
‘Hi! Hullo! Stop!’ shouted Napier. In those days post horses were
ridden, not driven; and about all we could see of the post boy was what
Mistress Tabitha Bramble saw of Humphrey Clinker. ‘Where the dickens
have we got to now?’
‘Don’t know, I’m sure, sir,’ says the boy; ‘never was in these ’ere parts
afore.’
‘Why,’ shouts the vicar, after a survey of the landscape, ‘if I can see a
church by daylight, that’s Blakeney steeple; and we are only three miles
from where we started.’
Sure enough it was so. There was nothing for it but to stop at the
nearest house, give the horses a rest and a feed, and make a fresh
start,—better informed as to our topography.
It was past four on that summer afternoon when we reached our
destination. The plan of campaign was cut and dried. I called for
writing materials, and indicted my epistle as agreed upon.
‘To whom are you telling her to address the answer?’ asked my accomplice.
‘We’re _incog._ you know. It won’t do for either of us to be known.’
‘Certainly not,’ said I. ‘What shall it be? White? Black? Brown? or
Green?’
‘Try Browne with an E,’ said he. ‘The E gives an aristocratic flavour.
We can’t afford to risk our respectability.’
The note sealed, I rang the bell for the landlord, desired him to send it
up to the hall and tell the messenger to wait for an answer.
As our host was leaving the room he turned round, with his hand on the
door, and said:
‘Beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Cook, would you and Mr. Napeer please to take
dinner here? I’ve soom beatiful lamb chops, and you could have a
ducklin’ and some nice young peas to your second course. The post-boy
says the ’osses is pretty nigh done up; but by the time—’
‘How did you know our names?’ asked my companion.
‘Law sir! The post-boy, he told me. But, beggin’ your pardon, Mr.
Napeer, my daughter, she lives in Holkham willage; and I’ve heard you
preach afore now.’
‘Let’s have the dinner by all means,’ said I.
‘If the Bishop sequesters my living,’ cried Napier, with solemnity, ‘I’ll
summon the landlord for defamation of character. But time’s up. You
must make for the boat-house, which is on the other side of the park.
I’ll go with you to the head of the lake.’
We had not gone far, when we heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.
What did we see but an open carriage, with two ladies in it, not a
hundred yards behind us.
‘The aunt! by all that’s—!’
What— I never heard; for, before the sentence was completed, the
speaker’s long legs were scampering out of sight in the direction of a
clump of trees, I following as hard as I could go.
As the carriage drove past, my Friar Lawrence was lying in a ditch, while
I was behind an oak. We were near enough to discern the niece, and
consequently we feared to be recognised. The situation was neither
dignified nor romantic. My friend was sanguine, though big ardour was
slightly damped by the ditch water. I doubted the expediency of trying
the boat-house, but he urged the risk of her disappointment, which made
the attempt imperative.
The padre returned to the inn to dry himself, and, in due course, I
rejoined him. He met me with the answer to my note. ‘The boat-house,’
it declared, ‘was out of the question. But so, of course, was the
_possibility_ of _change_. We must put our trust in _Providence_. Time
could make _no_ difference in _our_ case, whatever it might do with
_others_. _She_, at any rate, could wait for YEARS.’ Upon the whole the
result was comforting—especially as the ‘years’ dispensed with the
necessity of any immediate step more desperate than dinner. This we
enjoyed like men who had earned it; and long before I deposited my dear
friar in his cell both of us were snoring in our respective corners of
the chaise.
A word or two will complete this romantic episode. The next long
vacation I spent in London, bent, needless to say, on a happy issue to my
engagement. How simple, in the retrospect, is the frustration of our
hopes! I had not been a week in town, had only danced once with my
_fiancée_, when, one day, taking a tennis lesson from the great Barre, a
forced ball grazed the frame of my racket, and broke a blood vessel in my
eye.
For five weeks I was shut up in a dark room. It was two more before I
again met my charmer. She did not tell me, but her man did, that their
wedding day was fixed for the 10th of the following month; and he ‘hoped
they would have the pleasure of seeing me at the breakfast!’ [I made the
following note of the fact: N.B.—A woman’s tears may cost her nothing;
but her smiles may be expensive.]
I must, however, do the young lady the justice to state that, though her
future husband was no great things as a ‘man,’ as she afterwards
discovered, he was the heir to a peerage and great wealth. Both he and
she, like most of my collaborators in this world, have long since passed
into the other.
The fashions of bygone days have always an interest for the living: the
greater perhaps the less remote. We like to think of our ancestors of
two or three generations off—the heroes and heroines of Jane Austen, in
their pantaloons and high-waisted, short-skirted frocks, their pigtails
and powdered hair, their sandalled shoes, and Hessian boots. Our near
connection with them entrances our self-esteem. Their prim manners,
their affected bows and courtesies, the ‘dear Mr. So-and-So’ of the wife
to her husband, the ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ of the children to their parents,
make us wonder whether their flesh and blood were ever as warm as ours;
or whether they were a race of prigs and puppets?
My memory carries me back to the remnants of these lost externals—that
which is lost was nothing more; the men and women were every whit as
human as ourselves. My half-sisters wore turbans with birds-of-paradise
in them. My mother wore gigot sleeves; but objected to my father’s
pigtail, so cut it off. But my father powdered his head, and kept to his
knee-breeches to the last; so did all elderly gentlemen, when I was a
boy. For the matter of that, I saw an old fellow with a pigtail walking
in the Park as late as 1845. He, no doubt, was an ultra-conservative.
Fashions change so imperceptibly that it is difficult for the historian
to assign their initiatory date. Does the young dandy of to-day want to
know when white ties came into vogue?—he knows that his great-grandfather
wore a white neckcloth, and takes it for granted, may be, that his
grandfather did so too. Not a bit of it. The young Englander of the
Coningsby type—the Count d’Orsays of my youth, scorned the white tie
alike of their fathers and their sons. At dinner-parties or at balls,
they adorned themselves in satin scarfs, with a jewelled pin or chained
pair of pins stuck in them. I well remember the rebellion—the protest
against effeminacy—which the white tie called forth amongst some of us
upon its first invasion on evening dress. The women were in favour of
it, and, of course, carried the day; but not without a struggle. One
night at Holkham—we were a large party, I daresay at least fifty at
dinner—the men came down in black scarfs, the women in white ‘chokers.’
To make the contest complete, these all sat on one side of the table, and
we men on the other. The battle was not renewed; both factions
surrendered. But the women, as usual, got their way, and—their men.
For my part I could never endure the original white neckcloth. It was
stiffly starched, and wound twice round the neck; so I abjured it for the
rest of my days; now and then I got the credit of being a coxcomb—not for
my pains, but for my comfort. Once, when dining at the Viceregal Lodge
at Dublin, I was ‘pulled up’ by an aide-de-camp for my unbecoming attire;
but I stuck to my colours, and was none the worse. Another time my
offence called forth a touch of good nature on the part of a great man,
which I hardly know how to speak of without writing me down an ass. It
was at a crowded party at Cambridge House. (Let me plead my youth; I was
but two-and-twenty.) Stars and garters were scarcely a distinction.
White ties were then as imperative as shoes and stockings; I was there in
a black one. My candid friends suggested withdrawal, my relations cut me
assiduously, strangers by my side whispered at me aloud, women turned
their shoulders to me; and my only prayer was that my accursed tie would
strangle me on the spot. One pair of sharp eyes, however, noticed my
ignominy, and their owner was moved by compassion for my sufferings. As
I was slinking away, Lord Palmerston, with a _bonhomie_ peculiarly his
own, came up to me; and with a shake of the hand and hearty manner, asked
after my brother Leicester, and when he was going to bring me into
Parliament?—ending with a smile: ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’
That is the sort of tact that makes a party leader. I went to bed a
proud, instead of a humiliated, man; ready, if ever I had the chance, to
vote that black was white, should he but state it was so.
Beards and moustache came into fashion after the Crimean war. It would
have been an outrage to wear them before that time. When I came home
from my travels across the Rocky Mountains in 1851, I was still unshaven.
Meeting my younger brother—a fashionable guardsman—in St. James’s Street,
he exclaimed, with horror and disgust at my barbarity, ‘I suppose you
mean to cut off that thing!’
Smoking, as indulged in now, was quite out of the question half a century
ago. A man would as soon have thought of making a call in his
dressing-gown as of strolling about the West End with a cigar in his
mouth. The first whom I ever saw smoke a cigarette at a dining-table
after dinner was the King; some forty years ago, or more perhaps. One of
the many social benefits we owe to his present Majesty.