POOR PRETTY BOBBY.
POOR PRETTY BOBBY.
“Yes, my dear, you may not believe me, but I can assure you that you cannot dislike old women more, nor think them more contemptible supernumeraries, than I did when I was your age.”
This is what old Mrs. Wentworth says—the old lady so incredibly tenacious of life (incredibly as it seems to me at eighteen) as to have buried a husband and five strong sons, and yet still to eat her dinner with hearty relish, and laugh at any such jokes as are spoken loudly enough to reach her dulled ears. This is what she says, shaking the while her head, which—poorold soul—is already shaking a good deal involuntarily. I am sitting close beside her arm-chair, and have been reading aloud to her; but as I cannot succeed in pitching my voice so as to make her hear satisfactorily, by mutual consent the book has been dropped in my lap, and we have betaken ourselves to conversation.
“I never said I disliked old women, did I?” reply I evasively, being too truthful altogether to deny the soft impeachment. “What makes you think I do? They are infinitely preferable to old men; I do distinctly dislikethem.”
“A fat, bald, deaf old woman,” continues she, not heeding me, and speaking with slow emphasis, while she raises one trembling hand to mark each unpleasant adjective; “if in the year ’2 any one had told me that I should have lived to be that, I think I should have killed them or myself! and yet now I am all three.”
“You are notverydeaf,” say I politely—(the fatness and baldness admit of no civilities consistent with veracity)—but I raise my voice to pay the compliment.
“In the year ’2 I was seventeen,” she says, wandering off into memory. “Yes, my dear, I am just fifteen years older than the century anditis getting into its dotage, is not it? The year ’2—ah! I that was just about the time that I first saw my poor Bobby! Poor pretty Bobby.”
“And whowasBobby?” ask I, pricking up my ears, and scenting, with the keen nose of youth, a dead-love idyll; an idyll of which this poor old hill of unsteady flesh was the heroine.
“I must have told you the tale a hundred times, have not I?” she asks, turning her old dim eyes towards me. “A curious tale, say what you will, and explain it how you will. I think Imusthave told you; butindeed I forgot to whom I tell my old stories and to whom I do not. Well, my love, you must promise to stop me if you have heard it before, but to me, you know, these old things are so much clearer than the things of yesterday.”
“You never told me, Mrs. Hamilton,” I say, and say truthfully; for being a new acquaintance I really have not been made acquainted with Bobby’s history. “Would you mind telling it me now, if you are sure that it would not bore you?”
“Bobby,” she repeats softly to herself, “Bobby. I daresay you do not think it a very pretty name?”
“N—not particularly,” reply I honestly. “To tell you the truth, it rather reminds me of a policeman.”
“I daresay,” she answers quietly; “and yet in the year ’2 I grew to think it the handsomest, dearest name on earth. Well,if you like, I will begin at the beginning and tell you how that came about.”
“Do,” say I, drawing a stocking out of my pocket, and thriftily beginning to knit to assist me in the process of listening.
“In the year ’2 we were at war with France—you know that, of course. It seemed then as if war were our normal state; I could hardly remember a time when Europe had been at peace. In these days of stagnant quiet it appears as if people’s kith and kin always lived out their full time and died in their beds.Thenthere was hardly a house where there was not one dead, either in battle, or of his wounds after battle, or of some dysentery or ugly parching fever. As for us, we had always been a soldier family—always; there was not one of us that had ever worn a black gown or sat upon a high stool with a pen behind his ear. I had lost uncles and cousins by the half-dozen and dozen, but,for my part, I did not much mind, as I knew very little about them, and black was more becoming wear to a person with my bright colour than anything else.”
At the mention of her bright colour I unintentionally lift my eyes from my knitting, and contemplate the yellow bagginess of the poor old cheek nearest me. Oh, Time! Time! what absurd and dirty turns you play us! What do you do with all our fair and goodly things when you have stolen them from us? In what far and hidden treasure-house do you store them?
“But I did care very much—very exceedingly—for my dear old father—not so old either—younger than my eldest boy was when he went; he would have been forty-two if he had lived three days longer. Well, well, child, you must not let me wander; you must keep me to it. He was not a soldier, was not my father; he was a sailor, a post-captain inhis Majesty’s navy and commanded the shipThundererin the Channel fleet.
“I had struck seventeen in the year ’2, as I said before, and had just come home from being finished at a boarding-school of repute in those days, where I had learnt to talk the prettiestancien régimeFrench and to hate Bonaparte with unchristian violence from a little ruinedémigre maréchale; had also, with infinite expenditure of time, labour, and Berlin wool, wrought out ‘Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac’ and ‘Jacob’s First Kiss to Rachel,’ in finest cross-stitch. Now I had bidden adieu to learning; had inly resolved never to disinter ‘Télémaque’ and Thompson’s ‘Seasons’ from the bottom of my trunk; had taken a holiday from all my accomplishments with the exception of cross-stitch, to which I still faithfully adhered—and indeed, on the day I am going to mention, I recollect that I was hard at work on Judas Iscariot’s face inLeonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’—hard at work at it, sitting in the morning sunshine, on a straight-backed chair. We had flatter backs in those days; our shoulders were not made round by lolling in easy-chairs; indeed, nothenupholsterer made a chair that it was possible to loll in. My father rented a house near Plymouth at that time, an in-and-outnookykind of old house—no doubt it has fallen to pieces long years ago—a house all set round with unnumbered flowers, and about which the rooks clamoured all together from the windy elm tops. I was labouring in flesh-coloured wool on Judas’s left cheek, when the door opened and my mother entered. She looked as if something had freshly pleased her, and her eyes were smiling. In her hand she held an open and evidently just-read letter.
“‘A messenger has come from Plymouth,’ she says, advancing quickly and joyfully towardsme. ‘Your father will be here this afternoon.’
“‘This afternoon!’ cry I, at the top of my voice, pushing away my heavy work-frame. ‘How delightful! But how?—how can that happen?’
“‘They have had a brush with a French privateer,’ she answers, sitting down on another straight-backed chair, and looking again over the large square letter, destitute of envelope, for such things were not in those days, ‘and then they succeeded in taking her. Yet they were a good deal knocked about in the process, and have had to put into Plymouth to refit, so he will be here this afternoon for a few hours.’
“‘Hurrah!’ cry I, rising, holding out my scanty skirts, and beginning to dance.
“‘Bobby Gerard is coming with him,’ continues my mother, again glancing at her despatch. ‘Poor boy, he has had a shot throughhis right arm, which has broken the bone, so your father is bringing him here for us to nurse him well again.’
“I stop in my dancing.
“‘Hurrah again!’ I say brutally. ‘I do not mean about his arm; of course I am very sorry for that; but at all events, I shall see him at last. I shall see whether he is like his picture, and whether it is not as egregiously flattered as I have always suspected.’
“There were no photographs you know in those days—not even hazy daguerreotypes—it was fifty good years too soon for them. The picture to which I allude is a miniature, at which I had stolen many a deeply longingly admiring glance in its velvet case. It is almost impossible for a miniature not to flatter. To the most coarse-skinned and mealy-potato-faced people it cannot help giving cheeks of the texture of a rose-leaf and brows of the grain of finest marble.
“‘Yes,’ replies my mother, absently, ‘so you will. Well, I must be going to give orders about his room. He would like one looking on the garden best, do not you think, Phœbe?—one where he could smell the flowers and hear the birds?’
“Mother goes, and I fall into a meditation. Bobby Gerard is an orphan. A few years ago his mother, who was an old friend of my father’s—who knows! perhaps an old love—feeling her end drawing nigh, had sent for father, and had asked him, with eager dying tears, to take as much care of her pretty forlorn boy as he could, and to shield him a little in his tender years from the evils of this wicked world, and to be to him a wise and kindly guardian, in the place of those natural ones that God had taken. And father had promised, and when he promised there was small fear of his not keeping his word.
“This was some years ago, and yet I hadnever seen him nor he me; he had been almost always at sea and I at school. I had heard plenty about him—about his sayings, his waggeries, his mischievousness, his soft-heartedness, and his great and unusual comeliness; but his outward man, save as represented in that stealthily peeped-at miniature, had I never seen. They were to arrive in the afternoon; but long before the hour at which they were due I was waiting with expectant impatience to receive them. I had changed my dress, and had (though rather ashamed of myself) put on everything of most becoming that my wardrobe afforded. If you were to see me as I stood before the glass on that summer afternoon you would not be able to contain your laughter; the little boys in the street would run after me throwing stones and hooting; butthen—according to thethenfashion and standard of gentility—I was all that was most elegant andcomme il faut. Lately it has beenthe mode to puff oneself out with unnatural and improbable protuberances;thenone’s great life-object was to make oneself appear as scrimping as possible—to make oneself look as flat as if one had been ironed. Many peopledampedtheir clothes to make them stick more closely to them, and to make them define more distinctly the outline of form and limbs. One’s waist was under one’s arm’s; the sole object of which seemed to be to outrage nature by pushing one’s bust up into one’s chin, and one’s legs were revealed through one’s scanty drapery with startling candour as one walked or sat. I remember once standing with my back to a bright fire in our long drawing-room, and seeing myself reflected in a big mirror at the other end. I was so thinly clad that I was transparent, and could see through myself. Well, in the afternoon in question I was dressed quite an hour and a half too soon. I had a narrow little whitegown, which clung successfully tight and close to my figure, and which was of so moderate a length as to leave visible my ankles and my neatly-shod and cross-sandled feet. I had long mittens on my arms, black, and embroidered on the backs in coloured silks; and above my hair, which at the back was scratched up to the top of my crown, towered a tremendous tortoise-shell comb; while on each side of my face modestly drooped a bunch of curls, nearly meeting over my nose.
“My figure was full—ah! my dear, I have always had a tendency to fat, and you see what it has come to—and my pink cheeks were more deeply brightly rosy than usual. I had looked out at every upper window, so as to have the furthest possible view of the road.
“I had walked in my thin shoes half way down the drive, so as to command a turn, which, from the house, impeded my vision, when, at last, after many tantalising falsealarms, and just five minutes later than the time mentioned in the letter, the high-swung, yellow-bodied, post-chaise hove in sight, dragged—briskly jingling—along by a pair of galloping horses. Then, suddenly, shyness overcame me—much as I loved my father, it was more as my personification of all knightly and noble qualities than from much personal acquaintance with him—and I fled.
“I remained in my room until I thought I had given them ample time to get through the first greetings and settle down into quiet talk. Then, having for one last time run my fingers through each ringlet of my two curl bunches, I stole diffidently downstairs.
“There was a noise of loud and gay voices issuing from the parlour, but, as I entered, they all stopped talking and turned to look at me.
“‘And so this is Phœbe!’ cries my father’s jovial voice, as he comes towards me, andheartily kisses me. ‘Good Lord, how time flies! It does not seem more than three months since I saw the child, and yet then she was a bit of a brat in trousers, and long bare legs!’
“At this allusion to my late mode of attire, I laugh, but I also feel myself growing scarlet.
“‘Here, Bobby!’ continues my father, taking me by the hand, and leading me towards a sofa on which a young man is sitting beside my mother; ‘this is my little lass that you have so often heard of. Not such a very little one, after all, is she? Do not be shy, my boy; you will not see such a pretty girl every day of your life—give her a kiss.’
“My eyes are on the ground, but I am aware that the young man rises, advances (not unwillingly, as it seems to me), and bestows a kiss, somewhere or other on my face. I am not quite clearwhere, as I think the curls impede him a good deal.
“Thus, before ever I saw Bobby, before ever I knew what manner of man he was, I was kissed by him. That was a good beginning, was not it?
“After these salutations are over, we subside again into conversation—I sitting beside my father, with his arm round my waist, sitting modestly silent, and peeping every now and then under my eyes, as often as I think I may do so safely unobserved, at the young fellow opposite me. I am instituting an inward comparison between Nature and Art: between the real live man and the miniature that undertakes to represent him. The first result of this inspection is disappointment, for where are the lovely smooth roses and lilies that I have been wont to connect with Bobby Gerard’s name? There are no roses in his cheek, certainly; they are paleish—from his wound, as I conjecture; but even before that accident, if there were roses at all, they must have beenmahogany-coloured ones, for the salt sea winds and the high summer sun have tanned his fair face to a rich reddish, brownish, copperish hue. But in some things the picture lied not. There is the brow more broad than high; the straight fine nose; the brave and joyful blue eyes, and the mouth with its pretty curling smile. On the whole, perhaps, I am not disappointed.
“By-and-by father rises, and steps out into the verandah, where the canary birds hung out in their cages are noisily praising God after their manner. Mother follows him. I should like to do the same; but a sense of good manners, and a conjecture that possibly my parents may have some subjects to discuss, on which they would prefer to be without the help of my advice, restrain me. I therefore remain, and so does the invalid.