LIII
It was a calm, bright day, that third of December, with a mild, sweet westerly wind blowing between a blue, waveless sea and a blue, cloudless sky. So warm and genial the weather, that sandwich-board-men parading the streets of Folkestone behind blue-and-red double-crown bills announcing that Performances would be given at the Town Hall of that Thrilling Melodrama, “The Warlock of the Glen,” by Miss Arabella Smallsopp, of the Principal London Theaters, and a Full Company of Specially Engaged Artists, For Three Nights Only,—were fain to lean against the outer walls of public-houses—thus nefariously concealing from the public eye the colored pictorial representations of Miss Smallsopp in therôleof the persecuted Countess—Mr.Montague Barnstormer as the usurping Laird, and Master Pilkington as the infant Adalbert—and hide their streaming faces in pots of frothing beer.
And so, over the salty, creaking, tarry-smelling gangway to the deck of the Boulogne packetBritannia. A jovial Irish priest, a pair of prim English spinsters in green veils, their lapdogs and their maid, their manservant and their courier; with Dunoisse and a honeymooning couple, made up the list of theBritannia’safter-cabin passengers. The bride was my Aunt Julietta; Fate would have it so.
For the impression created three brief years before uponthe susceptible maiden fancy of my Aunt by the very ingratiating manners and handsome personality of a young foreign gentleman, by chance encountered in a railway-train, had faded; to be replaced by the highly-colored image of a large, loud, heavily-built, sturdily-limbed young man, holding the commission of a junior Captain in Her Majesty’s 444th Irish Regiment of Foot; a well-known fighting corps, distinguished in the annals of the British Army by the significant sobriquet of the “Rathkeale Ragamuffins.”
You saw in Captain Golightly M’Creedy the eldest of fourteen children, begotten of an ancient warrior of Peninsular fame, a certain Lieutenant-General M’Creedy of Creedystown, County Cork, who had served twenty years in the 444th, had left three fingers and half a sword-hilt upon the field of Talavera, and wore a silver plate at the top of his skull, to testify to his having been cut down by a sergeant of French Light Infantry during the Battle of Barrosa, when in the act of capturing an eagle from the foe.
Having thus performed his duty by his country, the veteran thought, and with some reason, that his country owed something to him; and commissions for his sons Golightly, Thaddeus, and Considine being obtained by the paternal interest, these three young gentlemen—as innocent of polite education and technical information as the hairy “lepping” colts they hunted, and the half-bred pointers they shot over—were pitched into the General’s old regiment, and left to sink or swim.
Goliath, Thady, and young Con, after some rasping experiences, mastered the small amount of professional knowledge that was held in those days to be indispensable to the status of an officer and a gentleman. Indeed, by the time the Rathkeale Ragamuffins, with flying colors, banging of drums, and blaring of brazen instruments, marched into the provincial garrison town of Dullingstoke, in the genteeler suburbs of which stood the family mansion of my grandparents, Captain Goliath M’Creedy had attained some degree of reputation in his regiment as a smart officer and a show man.
You saw him at this era as a strapping young Celt of thirty, with thick sandy whiskers and a thicker brogue, who could top the regulation three bottles of port with ajorum or so of whisky-punch; walk home to his quarters while men of weaker head were being conveyed to theirs in wheelbarrows; and consume vast quantities of bacon and eggs, washed down by bitter ale, at breakfast, when hardened seniors were calling for green apples and glasses of gin, and pallid juniors nibbled captain’s biscuits as they quenched their red-hot coppers with soda-water. But what did my Aunt Julietta see in him, I should like to know?
Why did not her gentle affections rather twine about the Captain’s younger brother, Lieutenant Thady, who sang Irish ballads with the sweetest of tenor voices, played juvenile leading parts in private theatricals, and won regimental steeplechases on his leggy Irish thoroughbred, to the admiration of the gentler sex and the envy of the males? Or Ensign Con, who had the biggest blue eyes and the smallest waist you can imagine; wrote poetry which was understood to be of home manufacture, in feminine albums—painted groups of impossible flowers and marvelous landscapes upon fans and fire-screens—waltzed like an angel, and was generally admitted to be a ladies’ man.
Why should my gentle Aunt adore Captain Goliath, who gambled, and swore horribly when he lost; who loved strong liquors, to the detriment of his figure and complexion; who had fought duels and perforated with pistol-bullets the bodies of two gentlemen who had impugned his honor; who kept fighting-cocks in his quarters, and the steel spurs wherewith he armed these feathered warriors for the combat in a neat leather pocket-case; who would consume raw beefsteaks, bend pokers, and lift ponies for wagers, and win them; and spend the money in carousing with his friends; and who had once—oh, hideous thought!—backed himself to kill three rats with his teeth against the Major’s bull-terrier bitch Fury, and accounted for the rodents with half-a-minute out of five to spare?...
In the lifetime of my grandfather, thrice Mayor of Dullingstoke, a peppery old sea-dog, who had settled down as far from his professional element as possible,—had amassed a considerable fortune in the tanning-trade, and had made it the business of his later years to keep his large family of daughters single—no young men were ever admitted within his doors. It is on record that no sooner had thesable border of woe upon the edge of my widowed grandmother’s notepaper narrowed to the quarter-inch significant of tempered sorrow than—each of my aunts having inherited a nice little landed property under the paternal will—in addition to a snug sum, comfortably invested in Three Per Cent. Consols—the bachelor officers of the “Rathkeale Ragamuffins” began to buzz like hungry wasps about the six fair honey-pots that adorned my grandmother’s tea-table.
Ordinarily of a frugal mind, she is said to have been lavish in her expenditure of plum-cake, home-made jams, preserved ginger, and best Souchong upon these festal occasions, accounting for her prodigality to a female friend in these words:
“I grudge nothing, Georgiana, that helps to get rid of the girls!”
Honest Captain Goliath, introduced at the ladies’ tea-table by Lieutenant Thady—who had a knack at making acquaintances which the clumsier Captain did not possess, was at first attracted by the showier charms of my Aunt Marietta, which, you will perhaps remember?—were of the lofty, aquiline, disdainful kind. He stared at the young lady a good deal, and tugged his sandy whiskers, and breathed hard, as he paid her clumsy compliments, punctuated with “Egad!” and “By Jove!” He was rather at a loss when his long legs were inserted under my grandmother’s polished mahogany. He liked the rich plum-cake, but tea was a beverage abhorred of his manly soul.
“Women’s slops,” the young officer mentally termed the infusion beloved of the sex, as he took three lumps of sugar, and stirred the boiling liquid so clumsily with a fiddle-headed silver teaspoon that—splash!—he overset the cup.... My Aunts Harrietta and Emmelina, who were timid, screamed aloud.... My Aunts Elisabetta and Claribella, who were sitting upon either side of Lieutenant Thady, tittered, being giddily inclined.
My Aunt Marietta, who was wearing a sweet new pinkbarége, suffered the complete ruin of a beflounced side-breadth, and, it must be owned, took the unlucky incident with a very bad grace; even permitting herself to utter the word “Clumsy,” and toss her head in contempt of the crimson Captain’s profuse if incoherently expressed regrets. While my Aunt Julietta, in whose lap the agitatedsweep of the young man’s elbow had deposited a plate of bread-and-butter, butter side down—bade him “Never mind!” in so soft a tone of kindness, accompanying the words with a glance so bright and gentle, that the utterance and the look bowled Goliath over as completely as the elder Philistine, his namesake, was, cycles of centuries ago, by the brook-stone hurled from the young David’s sling.
“Indeed and indeed, Miss Juley,” the Captain stuttered, “with all the good-will in the worruld a man can do no more than apologize, that has had the bad luck to do damage to a young lady’s dress. And though you’re so kind and amiable as to make no very great shakes of it, begad! I see your own elegant gown is spoilt entirely by the clumsy divvle—begging your pardon for the word!—that would walk from here to London—supposing you’d accept it!—to get you a purtier gown!”
The Captain dropped a glove in the hall when he went away. It had his initials marked inside in great big sprawling characters; but even without the inky “G. M’C.” my Aunt Julietta would have known to whom it belonged....
Ah! in what a pure, sweet hiding-place it was lying, that clumsy hand-cover of dogskin,—while the Captain was routing in the litter of bills, and writs, and dunning-letters that strewed the table in his quarters, and cursing at his soldier-servant for losing his things. And he came to tea yet again, and one of his extra-sized feet accidentally touched, beneath the shelter of the well-spread board, a little foot in a velvet sandal-slipper; and She blushed like an armful of roses, and He crimsoned to the parting of his sandy curls. And thenceforwards the Captain’s wooing proceeded smoothly enough, save for a few manifestations of jealousy on the part of Lieutenant Thady, who was inclined to resent the appropriation of my Aunt Julietta’s smiles.
“For I inthrojuiced you—and you’d heard me say the black-eyed wan was the natest pacer of the sthring—and you’ve cut me out with her—so you have!—and begad! the thing’s joocedly unfair!”
Upon which Captain Goliath extracted a shilling from his waistcoat-pocket, and suggested that the goddess of Chance be called in to decide the issue.
“I’m wit’ you!” said the Lieutenant, with alacrity.“And the best two out of three takes Black Eyes!”
“Done!” agreed his senior, rubbing the edge of his coin carelessly with a stout, muscular thumb. “And the loser will have his pick of the five girrls that’s left. He’ll not have a pin to choose between them in the way of fortune, for the old man left them share and share alike; but the fella that gets the high-nosed wan”—in these disrespectful terms the Captain alluded to my Aunt Marietta—“will have a vixen, take my word for it! Call, now! Heads or tails?—shame or honor?”
Lieutenant Thady called “Tails,” and Captain Goliath spun, and the Lieutenant lost the toss three times running, unaware that the astute Captain carried a double-headed shilling for contingencies of this kind.
A few days later, with the consent of my grandmother—now beginning to realize that the sacrifice of her best plum-cake and Souchong had not been all in vain—the Captain drove my Aunt Julietta out in the family chaise. That drive was, at the outset, a painful experience for Browney, the younger of the stout, elderly carriage pair, who was attached to the vehicle. Never had such pace been got out of him before. Never had such scientific handling of the reins, such artistic touches of the whip, been known to the experience of that respectable cob. But it is on record that he returned home at his own pace, with an engaged couple behind him; and that when my Aunt Julietta was assisted to descend by the hand of thebrave and gallant man, to whom, as she wrote to her confidential friend, the daughter of Sir Wackton Tackton, “I have plighted thefondest vowthat awoman’s lipsmaybreathe,” she went to the sedate animal’s head and thanked him for the happiest day in all her maiden life, and kissed him on the nose.
Thus Captain Goliath M’Creedy and my Aunt Julietta became definitely betrothed. And the Lieutenant, after some hesitation between blue eyes and brown, arch, coquettish ringlets and Grecian coils, “plumped,” as he afterwards said, for my Aunt Elisabetta.
And Ensign Con, being ordered by his seniors to choose a bride of three-hundred a year pin-money from amongst my grandmother’s remaining daughters, wrote her a note in his best round-hand, soliciting an interview upon a “mater of importanse very near my hart”; and upon thereceipt of an elegant billet naming a fitting hour, set out, attired in his best; curled, pomatumed, gloved, and booted beyond anything you can imagine, to conquer Fate.
Perhaps the brain behind those cerulean orbs of my Uncle Con’s was of rather soft consistency. Or it may be that the sight of my grandmother sitting in her best parlor, arrayed in her stiffest black silk gown—endued with her most imposing widow’s cap and weepers—waiting, with folded mittens, to hear that yet another of the pound-cakes cast upon the waters had not been sacrificed in vain—was calculated to make havoc of stronger wits and daunt a stouter courage. Suffice it to say that, having started out from barracks with the firm intention of returning as a man definitely engaged—preferably to my Aunt Emmelina rather than to my Aunt Claribella (young ladies between whose respective persons Con had hesitated, uncertain as the proverbial donkey between the bundles of hay)—the Ensign tottered back to quarters, a blighted being, engaged to my Aunt Marietta, whose Roman profile and haughty manners had from the first stricken terror to the young man’s soul.
He must have made wild work with his wooing, unlucky Con! for my grandmother subsequently confided to her bosom friend, Georgiana, that at one moment her firm conviction had been that the young man, with a maturity of taste and judgment rare in one so young, was proposing marriage to herself. In vain Con’s fraternal counselors advised him to go back, explain that he had got the wrong girl, and change her! Con could not muster the pluck! And so my Aunt Emmelina, who had loved the handsome young booby, never married; and Con was a henpecked husband to the ending of his days.
There was a triple wedding, so that one breakfast and one cake might do duty for three brides, a flying visit to London to do the lions; and now you saw my Aunt Julietta, a wife of two days, starting on her honeymoon-trip to Boulogne with the idol of her soul. Be sure that she recognized the deposed idol in their handsome fellow-traveler; that my aunt’s fresh English face had completely faded from Dunoisse’s memory may be guessed.
But the natural chagrin of my Aunt at this discovery was to give place to pangs of a less romantic kind. She had studied French fashions in the illuminating pages oftheLadies’ Mentor, had mastered the French language sufficiently to spell out a “Moral Tale” of Marmontel, or a page of Lamartine, or even a verse of Victor Hugo; and had compounded French dishes from English recipes. But she had never previously crossed the restless strip of Channel that divides her native isle of Britain from the shores of Gallia. And in those days nobody had ever heard of a real gentlewoman who was not very seriously incommoded, if not absolutely indisposed, at sea.
Conceive, then, my Aunt Julietta upon this smoothest of crossings, being dreadfully prostrated by the malady of the wave. Imagine her flattening her bridal bonnet—a sweet thing in drawn peach-blossom satin, with a wreath of orange-blooms inside the brim—into a cocked hat against the stalwart shoulder of her martial lord, as she reiterated agitated entreaties to be taken immediately on shore—picture her subsiding, in all the elegance of her flounced plaid poplin—a charming thing in large checks of pink, brown, and bottle-green—and her mantle of beaver-trimmedcasimir, into a mere wisp of seasick humanity, distinguishable afterwards as a moaning bundle of shawls—prone upon a red plush sofa in a saloon cabin—ministered to by a stewardess with brandy-and-water and smelling-salts.
While theBritannia’sother first-class passengers gathered for the one o’clock dinner about the long table in the adjoining saloon, whence the clashing of knives and forks and the robust savors of the leg of boiled mutton with caper sauce, turnips, and potatoes—the porter and ale that washed these down; the apple-pudding that followed, and the Dutch cheese that came in with the materials for gin-hot and whisky-toddy—penetrated to the sufferer, moaning on the other side of the dividing partition of painted planks.
You may imagine that the bridegroom—placed upon the right hand of theBritannia’scommander at the head of the board, made tremendous havoc among the eatables; disposed of pewter after pewter of foaming ale; hobnobbed with the more jovial of the male passengers in bumpers of whisky-toddy; cracked broad jokes, and roared at them loudest of all; and capped the skipper’s thrilling recital of how, in 1830, when First Officer, and on his way to join his steamer at Southampton, he had nearly been pressed forservice in the Royal Navy, and had, armed solely with a carpet-bag, containing a log-book and some heavy nautical instruments, done battle with and escaped from the clutches of a gang of crimps and man-catchers;—by relating, with much circumstantial detail, and to the breathless interest of his auditors, the story of how he, Captain Goliath M’Creedy, had backed himself to kill “tree rass” with his “teet” in emulation of the Adjutant’s “ould turrabred bull-bitch Fury,” and had “shuk the squale” out of the last remaining victim thirty seconds under the five minutes. “To the chune of ten guineas and six dozen of the foinust clarrut that ever a gentleman put down his troat!”