I’ll example you with thievery.—“Timon of Athens.”
The dear old lady was ninety, and it was always Christmas in the
sweet winter of her face. With the pink in her cheeks and the white of
her hair, she came straight from the eighteenth century in which she
was born. They were not more at odds with nature than are the hips and
the traveller’s joy in a withered hedge; and if at one time they paid
to art, why it was a charitable gift to a poor dependent—nothing
more, I’ll swear.
People are fond of testing links with the past. This sound old
chatelaine had played trick-track, and dined at four o’clock. She had
eaten battalia pie with “Lear” sauce, and had drunk orgeat in Bond
Street. She had seen Blücher, the tough old “Vorwärts,” brought to
bay in Hyde Park by a flying column of Amazons, and surrendering
himself to an onslaught of kisses. She had seen Mr. Consul Brummell
arrested by bailiffs in the streets of Caen, on a debt of so many
hundreds of francs for so many bottles of vernis de Guiton, which was
nothing less than an adorable boot-polish. She had heard the demon
horns of newspaper boys shrill out the Little Corporal’s escape from
Elba. She had sipped Roman punch, maybe;—I trust she had never taken
snuff. She had—but why multiply instances? Born in 1790, she had
taken just her little share in, and drawn her full interest of, the
history, social and political, of all those years, fourscore and ten,
which filled the interval between then and now.
Once upon a time she had entered a hackney-coach; and, lo! before her
journey was done, it was a railway coach, moving ever swifter and
swifter, and its passengers succeeding one another with an ever more
furious energy of hurry-scurry. Among the rest I got in, and straight
fell into talk, and in love, with this traveller who had come from so
far and from scenes so foreign to my knowledge. She was as sweet and
instructive as an old diary brought from a bureau, smelling of
rose-leaves and cedar-wood. She was merry, too, and wont to laugh at
my wholly illusory attachment to an age which was already as dead as
the moon when I was born. But she humoured me; though she complained
that her feminine reminiscences were sweetmeats to a man.
“You should talk with William keeper,” she said. “_He_ holds on to the
past by a very practical link indeed.”
It was snowy weather up at the Hall—the very moral of another winter
(so I was told) when His Majesty’s frigate “Caledonia” came into
Portsmouth to be paid off, and Commander Playfair sent express to his
young wife up in the Hampshire hills that she might expect him early
on the following morning. He did not come in the morning, nor in the
afternoon, nor, indeed, until late in the evening, when—as Fortune
was generous—he arrived just at the turn of the supper, when the snow
outside the kitchen windows below was thawing itself, in delirious
emulation of the melting processes going on within, into a rusty
gravy.
“You see,” said Madam, “it was not the etiquette, when a ship was paid
off, for any officer to quit the port until the pennant was struck,
which the cook, as the last officer, had to see done. And the cook had
gone ashore and got tipsy; and there the poor souls must bide till he
could be found. Poor Henry—and poor little me! But it came right.
_Tout vient à qui sait attendre_. We had woodcocks for supper. It was
just such a winter as this—the snow, the sky, the very day. Will you
take your gun, and get me a woodcock, sir? and we will keep the
anniversary, and you shall toast, in a bottle of _the_ Madeira, the
old French rhyme.”