Tracks of a Rolling Stone Part 6

CHAPTER X

BEFORE dropping the curtain on my college days I must relate a little adventure which is amusing as an ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.siduous 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 circ.u.mvent 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 d.i.c.kens 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 _fiancee_, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sign 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 c.o.xcomb-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 a.s.s. 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 a.s.siduously, 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 compa.s.sion 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.

CHAPTER XI.

DURING my blindness I was hospitably housed in Eaten Place by Mr.

Whitbread, the head of the renowned firm. After my recovery I had the good fortune to meet there Lady Morgan, the once famous auth.o.r.ess of the 'Wild Irish Girl.' She still bore traces of her former comeliness, and had probably lost little of her sparkling vivacity. She was known to like the company of young people, as she said they made her feel young; so, being the youngest of the party, I had the honour of sitting next her at dinner. When I recall her conversation and her pleasing manners, I can well understand the homage paid both abroad and at home to the bright genius of the Irish actor's daughter.

We talked a good deal about Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb. This arose out of my saying I had been reading 'Glenarvon,' in which Lady Caroline gives Byron's letters to herself as Glenarvon's letters to the heroine. Lady Morgan had been the confidante of Lady Caroline, had seen many of Byron's letters, and possessed many of her friend's-full of details of the extraordinary intercourse which had existed between the two.

Lady Morgan evidently did not believe (in spite of Lady Caroline's mad pa.s.sion for the poet) that the liaison ever reached the ultimate stage contemplated by her lover. This opinion was strengthened by Lady Caroline's undoubted attachment to her husband-William Lamb, afterwards Lord Melbourne-who seems to have submitted to his wife's vagaries with his habitual stoicism and good humour.