THE first of September! No wonder if we were a covey of partridges what
we should think about the first of September, and how, generalizing from
that idea, we should feel towards the race of men,--sons of guns, as in
partridge parlance we should, doubtless, metaphorically term them! We
wonder from what point we should regard pointers (disappointers, as a
witty friend of ours called a couple of “wild young dogs” who ran in
upon their game, and cheated him of a promising shot), or how we should
look upon a setter making a “dead set” at us! Reasoning by analogy,
and not supposing partridges to be better Christians than Christians
themselves, we fear we should consider sportsmen (the very name is an
addition of insult to injury) greater brutes than their four-footed
allies; and that the idea of standing fire (either kitchen or gun), the
notion of the roasting we must undergo after we have been plucked,--of
the way in which we should be cut up by a set of blades, who are,
after all, ready enough to pick our brains, and avail themselves of our
merry-thoughts, would put us in such a flutter that it would be a mercy
if we were not to show the white feather, and refuse to die game after
all.
Such, however, were by no means the sentiments with which Harry
Coverdale looked forward to the first of September. On the contrary,
although he endeavoured to disguise the fact from his wife, and indeed
from himself, as far as in him lay, the truth was that he was as much
delighted at the prospect of a good day’s partridge shooting, as the
veriest school-boy released from the drudgery of dictionary and grammar.
Markum, that trustworthy custodian of game, and original specimen of a
polite letter-writer, who had been safely re-instated in his office,
and received such handsome presents of baby-linen and other infantry
accoutrements that the illustrious “little stranger,” who had wisely
postponed his arrival till the evil day had departed, bid fair to be
clothed in a style befitting the heir-apparent to a dukedom rather than
to a double-barrelled gun--Markum reported that although the hares and
pheasants (which he persisted in calling peasants) had suffered some
diminution from the practice of the dishonest steward, yet that he’d
never “in all his born days seen such a blessed sight o’ partridges.”
Stimulated by this information, and by the recollection that on the
preceding first of September he had been kicking his heels and cursing
his evil fortune, as he performed quarantine in a red-hot port of the
Mediterranean, Harry--having greatly amused Alice by the earnest zeal
with which, on the 31st of August, he examined and re-examined his “Joe
Manton,” and the exact and stringent orders he gave in regard to the
feeding of his dogs, than which the most fastidious invalid could not
have been more delicately and precisely dieted--awoke at four o’clock on
the eventful morning, and, without disturbing Alice, who was sleeping as
calmly as a child, rose and dressed himself in a thoroughly workmanlike
shooting costume. Having accomplished this feat without waking Alice,
he wrote on a bit of paper, “Good morning and good-bye, dearest. As
I intend to have a glorious day of it, do not expect me till near
dinner-time, when I hope to return with a full bag and an awful
appetite. Yours, ever, H. C.,” and placing it on his wife’s
dressing-table, stole on tiptoe to the door, closed it noiselessly after
him; and when, three hours afterwards, Alice opened her eyes, he was
striding through stubble on the farther side of the estate, having
bagged four brace of birds and a well-conditioned and respectable Jack
hare.
Mrs. Coverdale was some few minutes before she was, literally, awake
to a sense of her situation; and the lady’s-maid entering while she was
still between sleeping and waking, she half unconsciously asked the not
unnatural question--“What has become of your master?”
“If you please, Mem, Master’s been out shooting partringers ever since
five o’clock, Wilkins says. If you please, Mem, there’s a note for you,
Mem, lying on your dressing-table, in Master’s handwriting.”
Rousing herself, Alice read it eagerly. The contents did not seem
particularly to please her, for, as she refolded the paper, she looked
grave, and gave vent to a mild sigh. “Do not undraw the curtain,” she
said: “come again in an hour, Ellis; I feel sleepy, and there is nothing
to get up for,” she added, in a slightly pettish tone. Falling asleep
the moment she laid her head upon the pillow, Alice dreamed that when
she came down to breakfast she found Harry had returned, saying that
he could not bear to leave her alone all day, and so had come back and
wished to drive her to call upon that agreeable woman, Mrs. Felicia
Tabinette (a name with which she was inspired for the occasion, as no
such neighbour existed), to which proposition she gladly assenting, they
had gone out in a pony-chaise made of coral and mother-of-pearl, and
drawn by two lovely little sea-green ponies with lilac manes and tails,
and harness made of the best point lace. And she was just advancing the
unanswerable proposition that, as lace was the fittest material of which
to make a lady’s collar, it must also be the most proper fabric for that
of a horse, when the inexorable Ellis appeared for the second time, and
dispelled all her bright visions by awakening her to the dull reality.
Alice, however, took her revenge upon that “dis-illusioning”--as a
Frenchman would have called it--lady’s-maid, for she was more fastidious
and difficult to please, and almost snappish, than Ellis had ever known
her before, insomuch that the excellent Abigail afterwards propounded
her opinion in the servants’ hall, that “Missus was _tuter fay_ outer
sorts,” which disheartening fact she accounted for by the hypothesis
that she--Mrs. Coverdale--must have got out of bed with the wrong foot
foremost.
While the tea for her solitary breakfast was drawing, Alice, having no
one else to look at, amused herself by regarding her own natural--no
term could be more appropriate--face in a large pier-glass, and was
quite startled to behold the unmistakeably cross expression which
characterized it. Taking herself to task for this, she, sipping her tea,
which did not taste nearly so good as when Harry was at home,
mentally decided that she was very unreasonable, and childish, and
ridiculous--that when Harry had been devoting himself for the last month
to her pleasure and amusement, going to balls and all sorts of places
which he did not care a pin about, solely to please her, it was horribly
selfish in her to grudge him a few hours to devote to a favourite
pursuit--though how men could find delight in killing those poor birds,
she could not tell. She did not so much wonder about other people;
she believed men were generally cruel; but Harry was so unusually
kind-hearted. She supposed it must be the excitement, and the beautiful
scenery, and the interest in watching those dear, clever dogs stick out
their long tails to point at the partridges with--which, looking at
it in a Chesterfieldian point of view, was decidedly impolite, if not
positively rude, of them; and yet she had heard gentlemen talk about
their sporting dogs being so well-bred.
Having thus reasoned herself into a wiser frame of mind, she resolved
to make the best of it; and suddenly recollecting she had at least a
thousand things to do, which she was continually putting aside till
some time or other when Harry should be out, she decided that _this_ was
_the_ time, and that now or never must they all be done. Accordingly,
she set vigorously to work, and wrote three letters one after another,
to three former schoolfellows, wherein she described her husband as a
species of modern demi-god, compounded of equal parts of Solomon and
Adonis, with a dash of Achilles thrown in to do justice to his heroic
qualities; and depicted matrimonial felicity in such glowing colours,
that the richest and prettiest of her correspondents eloped the next
week with her music-master; and one of the others, who was neither rich
nor pretty, turned pious out of spite, and went into a sort of High
Church Protestant nunnery-and-water, to punish the men, who, it must
be confessed, appeared to submit to the trial with the most cheerful
resignation. Then Alice brought out a large roll of bills, and a thick
house-keeping book, ruled with blue lines, and having a business-like
smell of new leather about the binding, which Alice flattered herself
would impress even the stately housekeeper (who was old enough to be her
mother, and stiff enough for anything; and of whom Alice, in her secret
soul, stood very much in dread) with a deep sense of her being a very
dragon of housewifery, prepared to be down upon the slightest attempt at
peculation like an avenging fury. But the bills were so complicated, and
never would add up twice alike, and the butcher was so inconsistent and
slippery about his prices, sometimes charging 7d. and sometimes 7-1/2d. as
“if once a pound of mutton, always a pound of mutton,” were not an
incontrovertible axiom; and the baker was as bad, besides choosing
to spell dough, d.o.e., which at first made her think that he was the
butcher and sold venison; and the hams seemed always to come from
the tallow-chandler’s with the candles, which wasn’t by any means
an agreeable association of ideas; and the footman was evidently of
Esquimaux descent, and lived sumptuously upon lamp-oil at 8s. the
gallon; and the coachman appeared to feed the carriage-horses with
sponges, wash-leather, and rotten-stone, which she was sure could not be
good for them; and she thought the under-housemaid had ordered herself
a “Turk’s-head” dessert-cake, for her own private eating, but it
turned out to be a particular species of broom; while the amount of
hearth-stones and house-flannels that girl consumed would have served to
build an “Albert pattern” model cottage once a quarter, and furnish the
pauper inhabitants thereof with winter clothing: so that by the time
luncheon arrived poor Alice, tired and confused, with inky fingers
and an aching head, had come to the conclusion that she had nothing in
common with Joseph Hume, M.P., and that for the future she should resign
the glory of managing the housekeeper’s book to Mrs. Gripples, and
restrict her department to the equally dignified, but less onerous, duty
of making Harry sign the cheques, and handing them over to that august
domestic to pay the bills with.