The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Read online

  Mrs Gashleigh has never liked him since he left off calling her mamma, and kissing her. But he said he could not stand it any longer – he was hanged if he would. So he went away to Chambers, leaving the field clear to Rosa, mamma, and the two dear girls.

  – Or to one of them, rather; for before leaving the house, he thought he would have a look at little Fitzroy up-stairs in the nursery, and he found the child in the hands of his maternal aunt Eliza, who was holding him and pinching him as if he had been her guitar, I suppose; so that the little fellow bawled pitifully – and his father finally quitted the premises.

  No sooner was he gone, and although the party was still a fortnight off, yet the women pounced upon his little Study, and began to put it in order. Some of his papers they pushed up over the bookcase, some they put behind the Encyclopædia, some they crammed into the drawers, where Mrs Gashleigh found three cigars, which she pocketed, and some letters, over which she cast her eye; and by Fitz’s return they had the room as neat as possible, and the best glass and dessert-service mustered on the study-table.

  It was a very neat and handsome service, as you may be sure Mrs Gashleigh thought, whose rich uncle had purchased it for the young couple, at Spode and Copeland’s: but it was only for twelve persons.

  It was agreed that it would be, in all respects, cheaper and better to purchase a dozen more dessert plates; and with ‘my silver basket in the centre,’ Mrs G. said (she is always bragging about that confounded bread-basket), ‘we need not have any extra china dishes, and the table will look very pretty.’

  On making a roll-call of the glass, it was calculated that at least a dozen or so tumblers, four or five dozen wines, eight water-bottles, and a proper quantity of ice-plates, were requisite; and that, as they would always be useful, it would be best to purchase the articles immediately. Fitz tumbled over the basket containing them, which stood in the hall, as he came in from Chambers, and over the boy who had brought them – and the little bill.

  The women had had a long debate, and something like a quarrel, it must be owned, over the bill of fare. Mrs Gashleigh, who had lived a great part of her life in Devonshire, and kept house in great state there, was famous for making some dishes, without which, she thought, no dinner could be perfect. When she proposed her mock-turtle, and stewed pigeons, and gooseberry-cream, Rosa turned up her nose – a pretty little nose it was, by the way, and with a natural turn in that direction.

  ‘Mock-turtle in June, mamma!’ said she.

  ‘It was good enough for your grandfather, Rosa,’ the mamma replied: ‘it was good enough for the Lord High Admiral, when he was at Plymouth; it was good enough for the first men in the county, and relished by Lord Fortyskewer and Lord Rolls; Sir Lawrence Porker ate twice of it after Exeter Races; and I think it might be good enough for—’

  ‘I will not have it, mamma!’ said Rosa, with a stamp of her foot – and Mrs Gashleigh knew what resolution there was in that; once, when she had tried to physic the baby, there had been a similar fight between them.

  So Mrs Gashleigh made out a carte, in which the soup was left with a dash – a melancholy vacuum; and in which the pigeons were certainly thrust in amongst the entrées; but Rosa determined they never should make an entrée at all into her dinner-party, but that she would have the dinner her own way.

  When Fitz returned, then, and after he had paid the little bill of £6 14s. 6d. for the glass, Rosa flew to him with her sweetest smiles, and the baby in her arms. And after she had made him remark how the child grew every day more and more like him, and after she had treated him to a number of compliments and caresses, which it were positively fulsome to exhibit in public, and after she had soothed him into good humour by her artless tenderness, she began to speak to him about some little points which she had at heart.

  She pointed out with a sigh how shabby the old curtains looked since the dear new glasses which her darling Fitz had given her had been put up in the drawing-room. Muslin curtains cost nothing, and she must and would have them.

  The muslin curtains were accorded. She and Fitz went and bought them at Shoolbred’s, when you may be sure she treated herself likewise to a neat, sweet, pretty half-mourning (for the Court, you know, is in mourning) – a neat sweet barège, or calimanco, or bombazine, or tiffany, or some such thing; but Madame Camille of Regent Street, made it up, and Rosa looked like an angel in it on the night of her little dinner.

  ‘And my sweet,’ she continued, after the curtains had been given in, ‘mamma and I have been talking about the dinner. She wants to make it very expensive, which I cannot allow. I have been thinking of a delightful and economical plan, and you, my sweetest Fitz, must put it into execution.’

  ‘I have cooked a mutton-chop when I was in chambers,’ Fitz said with a laugh. ‘Am I to put on a cap and an apron?’

  ‘No; but you are to go to the Megatherium Club (where, you wretch, you are always going without my leave), and you are to beg Monsieur Mirobolant, your famous cook, to send you one of his best aides-de-camp, as I know he will, and with his aid we can dress the dinner and the confectionery at home for almost nothing, and we can show those purse-proud Topham Sawyers and Rowdys that the humble cottage can furnish forth an elegant entertainment as well as the gilded halls of wealth.’

  Fitz agreed to speak to Monsieur Mirobolant. If Rosa had had a fancy for the cook of the prime minister, I believe the deluded creature of a husband would have asked Lord John for the loan of him.

  IV

  Fitzroy Timmins, whose taste for wine is remarkable for so young a man, is a member of the committee of the Megatherium Club, and the great Mirobolant, good-natured as all great men are, was only too happy to oblige him. A young friend and protégé of his, of considerable merit, M. Cavalcadour, happened to be disengaged through the lamented death of Lord Hauncher, with whom young Cavalcadour had made his débût as an artist. He had nothing to refuse to his master, Mirobolant, and would impress himself to be useful to a gourmé so distinguished as Monsieur Timmins. Fitz went away as pleased as Punch with this encomium of the great Mirobolant, and was one of those who voted against the decreasing of Mirobolant’s salary, when the measure was proposed by Mr Parings, Colonel Close, and the Screw party in the committee of the club.

  Faithful to the promise of his great master, the youthful Cavalcadour called in Lilliput Street the next day. A rich crimson velvet waistcoat, with buttons of blue glass and gold, a variegated blue satin stock, over which a graceful mosaic chain hung in glittering folds, a white hat worn on one side of his long curling ringlets, redolent with the most delightful hair oil – one of those white hats which looks as if it had been just skinned – and a pair of gloves not exactly of the colour of beurre frais, but of beurre that has been up the chimney, with a natty cane with a gilt knob, completed the upper part, at any rate, of the costume of the young fellow whom the page introduced to Mrs Timmins.

  Her mamma and she had been just having a dispute about the gooseberry-cream when Cavalcadour arrived. His presence silenced Mrs Gashleigh; and Rosa, in carrying on a conversation with him in the French language, which she had acquired perfectly in an elegant finishing establishment in Kensington Square, had a great advantage over her mother, who could only pursue the dialogue with very much difficulty, eyeing one or other interlocutor with an alarmed and suspicious look, and gasping out ‘We’ whenever she thought a proper opportunity arose for the use of that affirmative.

  ‘I have two leetl menus weez me,’ said Cavalcadour to Mrs Gashleigh.

  ‘Minews – yes, O indeed,’ answered the lady.

  ‘Two little cartes.’

  ‘O two carts! O we,’ she said – ‘coming, I suppose;’ and she looked out of the window to see if they were there.

  Cavalcadour smiled; he produced from a pocket-book a pink paper and a blue paper, on which he had written two bills of fare, the last two which he had composed for the lamented Hauncher, and he handed these over to Mrs Fitzroy.

  The poor little woman was drea
dfully puzzled with these documents, (she has them in her possession still,) and began to read from the pink one as follows: –

  DINER POUR 16 PERSONNES.

  Potage (clair) à la Rigodon.

  Do. à la Prince de Tombuctou.

  Deux Poissons.

  Saumon de Severne, Rougets Gratinés

  à la Boadicée. à la Cléopâtre.

  Deux Relevés.

  Le Chapeau-à-trois-cornes farci à la Robespierre.

  Le Tire-botte à l’Odalisque.

  Six Entrées.

  Sauté de Hannetons à l’Epinglière.

  Cotelettes à la Megatherium.

  Bourrasque de Veau à la Palsambleu.

  Laitances de Carpe en goguette à la Reine Pomaré.

  Turban de Volaille à l’Archévêque de Cantorbéry.

  And so on with the entremets, and hors d’œuvre, and the rotis, and the relevés.

  ‘Madame will see that the dinners are quite simple,’ said M. Cavalcadour.

  ‘O quite!’ said Rosa, dreadfully puzzled.

  ‘Which would madame like?’

  ‘Which would we like, mamma?’ Rosa asked; adding, as if after a little thought, ‘I think, sir, we should prefer the blue one.’ At which Mrs Gashleigh nodded as knowingly as she could; though pink or blue, I defy anybody to know what these cooks mean by their jargon.

  ‘If you please, madam, we will go down below and examine the scene of operations,’ Monsieur Cavalcadour said; and so he was marshalled down the stairs to the kitchen, which he didn’t like to name, and appeared before the cook in all his splendour.

  He cast a rapid glance round the premises, and a smile of something like contempt lighted up his features. ‘Will you bring pen and ink, if you please, and I will write down a few of the articles which will be necessary for us? We shall require, if you please, eight more stew-pans, a couple of braising pans, eight sauté pans, six bain-marie pans, a freezing-pot with accessories, and a few more articles of which I will inscribe the names’; and Mr Cavalcadour did so, dashing down, with the rapidity of genius, a tremendous list of ironmongery goods, which he handed over to Mrs Timmins. She and her mamma were quite frightened by the awful catalogue.

  ‘I will call three days hence and superintend the progress of matters; and we will make the stock for the soup the day before the dinner.’

  ‘Don’t you think, sir,’ here interposed Mrs Gashleigh, ‘that one soup – a fine rich mock-turtle, such as I have seen in the best houses in the West of England, and such as the late Lord Fortyskewer—’

  ‘You will get what is wanted for the soups, if you please,’ Mr Cavalcadour continued, not heeding this interruption, and as bold as a captain on his own quarter-deck; ‘for the stock of clear soup, you will get a leg of beef, a leg of veal, and a ham.’

  ‘We munseer,’ said the cook, dropping a terrified curtsey. ‘A leg of beef, a leg of veal, and a ham.’

  ‘You can’t serve a leg of veal at a party,’ said Mrs Gashleigh; ‘and a leg of beef is not a company dish.’

  ‘Madam, they are to make the stock of the clear soup,’ Mr Cavalcadour said.

  ‘What?’ cried Mrs Gashleigh; and the cook repeated his former expression.

  ‘Never, whilst I am in this house,’ cried out Mrs Gashleigh, indignantly; ‘never in a Christian English household; never shall such sinful waste be permitted by me. If you wish me to dine, Rosa, you must get a dinner less expensive. The Right Honourable Lord Fortyskewer could dine, sir, without these wicked luxuries, and I presume my daughter’s guests can.’

  ‘Madame is perfectly at liberty to decide,’ said M. Cavalcadour. ‘I came to oblige madame and my good friend Mirobolant, not myself.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, I think it will be too expensive,’ Rosa stammered in a great flutter; ‘but I am very much obliged to you.’

  ‘Il n’y a point d’obligation, madame,’ said Monsieur Alcide Camile Cavalcadour in his most superb manner; and, making a splendid bow to the lady of the house, was respectfully conducted to the upper regions by little Buttons, leaving Rosa frightened, the cook amazed and silent, and Mrs Gashleigh boiling with indignation against the dresser.

  Up to that moment, Mrs Blowser, the cook, who had come out of Devonshire with Mrs Gashleigh (of course that lady garrisoned her daughter’s house with servants, and expected them to give her information of everything which took place there); up to that moment, I say, the cook had been quite contented with that subterraneous station which she occupied in life, and had a pride in keeping her kitchen neat, bright, and clean. It was, in her opinion, the comfortablest room in the house (we all thought so when we came down of a night to smoke there); and the handsomest kitchen in Lilliput Street.

  But after the visit of Cavalcadour, the cook became quite discontented and uneasy in her mind. She talked in a melancholy manner over the area railings to the cooks at twenty-three and twenty-five. She stepped over the way, and conferred with the cook there. She made inquiries at the baker’s and at other places about the kitchens in the great houses in Brobdingnag Gardens, and how many spits, bangmarry pans, and stoo pans they had. She thought she could not do with an occasional help, but must have a kitchen-maid. And she was often discovered by a gentleman of the police force, who was, I believe, her cousin, and occasionally visited her when Mrs Gashleigh was not in the house or spying it: – she was discovered, seated with Mrs Rundell in her lap, its leaves bespattered with her tears. ‘My pease be gone, Pelisse,’ she said, ‘zins I zaw that ther Franchman’: and it was all the faithful fellow could do to console her.

  ‘—the dinner,’ said Timmins, in a rage at last: ‘having it cooked in the house is out of the question: the bother of it: and the row your mother makes are enough to drive one mad. It won’t happen again, I can promise you, Rosa – order it at Fubsby’s at one. You can have everything from Fubsby’s – from footmen to saltspoons. Let’s go and order it at Fubsby’s.’ ‘Darling, if you don’t mind the expense, and it will be any relief to you, let us do as you wish,’ Rosa said; and she put on her bonnet, and they went off to the grand cook and confectioner of the Brobdingnag quarter.

  V

  On the arm of her Fitzroy, Rosa went off to Fubsby’s, that magnificent shop at the corner of Parliament Place and Alycompayne Square, – a shop into which the rogue had often cast a glance of approbation as he passed; for there are not only the most wonderful and delicious cakes and confections in the window, but at the counter there are almost sure to be three or four of the prettiest women in the whole of this world, with little darling caps of the last French make, with beautiful wavy hair, and the neatest possible waists and aprons.

  Yes, there they sit; and, others, perhaps, besides Fitz have cast a sheep’s eye through those enormous plate-glass window panes. I suppose it is the fact of perpetually living amongst such a quantity of good things that makes those young ladies so beautiful. They come into the place, let us say, like ordinary people, and gradually grow handsomer and handsomer, until they grow out into the perfect angels you see. It can’t be otherwise: if you and I, my dear fellow, were to have a course of that place, we should become beautiful too. They live in an atmosphere of the most delicious pine-apples, blancmanges, creams, (some whipt, and some so good that of course they don’t want whipping,) jellies, tipsy-cakes, cherry-brandy – one hundred thousand sweet and lovely things. Look at the preserved fruits, look at the golden ginger, the outspreading ananas, the darling little rogues of China oranges, ranged in the gleaming crystal cylinders. Mon Dieu! Look at the strawberries in the leaves. Each of them is as large nearly as a lady’s reticule, and looks as if it had been brought up in a nursery to itself. One of those strawberries is a meal for those young ladies behind the counter; they nibble off a little from the side, and if they are very hungry, which can scarcely ever happen, they are allowed to go to the crystal canisters and take out a rout-cake or macaroon. In the evening they sit and tell each other little riddles out of the bon-bons; and when they wish to amuse themselves,
they read the most delightful remarks, in the French language, about Love, and Cupid, and Beauty, before they place them inside the crackers. They always are writing down good things into Mr Fubsby’s ledgers. It must be a perfect feast to read them. Talk of the Garden of Eden! I believe it was nothing to Mr Fubsby’s house; and I have no doubt that after those young ladies have been there a certain time, they get to such a pitch of loveliness at last, that they become complete angels, with wings sprouting out of their lovely shoulders, when (after giving just a preparatory balance or two) they fly up to the counter and perch there for a minute, hop down again, and affectionately kiss the other young ladies, and say ‘Good bye, dears, we shall meet again la haut,’ and then with a whirr of their deliciously scented wings, away they fly for good, whisking over the trees of Brobdingnag Square, and up into the sky, as the policeman touches his hat.

  It is up there that they invent the legends for the crackers, and the wonderful riddles and remarks on the bonbons. No mortal, I am sure, could write them.

  I never saw a man in such a state as Fitzroy Timmins in the presence of those ravishing houris. Mrs Fitz having explained that they required a dinner for twenty persons, the chief young lady asked what Mr and Mrs Fitz would like, and named a thousand things, each better than the other, to all of which Fitz instantly said yes. The wretch was in such a state of infatuation that I believe if that lady had proposed to him a fricaseed elephant, or a boa-constrictor in jelly, he would have said, ‘Oh yes, certainly; put it down.’

  That Peri wrote down in her album a list of things which it would make your mouth water to listen to. But she took it all quite calmly. Heaven bless you! They don’t care about things that are no delicacies to them! But whatever she chose to write down, Fitzroy let her.

  After the dinner and dessert were ordered (at Fubsby’s they furnish everything; dinner and dessert, plate and china, servants in your own livery, and if you please, guests of title too), the married couple retreated from that shop of wonders; Rosa delighted that the trouble of the dinner was all off their hands, but she was afraid it would be rather expensive.