sees. What business is superior to that of seeing her? Does a little
Hellespontine matter keep Leander from his Hero? He would die rather than not
see her. Had he swum out of that difficulty on that stormy night, and carried on
a few months later, it might have been, "Beloved! my cold and rheumatism are so
severe that the doctor says I must not think of cold bathing at-night;" or,
"Dearest! we have a party at tea, and you mustn't expect your ever fond Lambda
to-night," and so forth, and so forth. But in the heat of his passion water
could not stay him; tempests could not frighten him; and in one of them he went
down, while poor Hero's lamp was twinkling and spending its best flame in vain.
So Philip came from Sestos to Abydos daily��across one of the bridges, and
paying a halfpenny toll very likely��and, late or early, poor little Charlotte's
virgin lamps were lighted in her eyes, and watching for him.
Philip made many sacrifices, mind you: sacrifices which all men are not in the
habit of making. When Lord Ringwood was in Paris, twice, thrice he refused to
dine with his lordship, until that nobleman smelt a rat, as the saying is��and
said, "Well, youngster, I suppose you are going where there is metal more
attractive. When you come to twelve lustres, my boy, you'll find vanity and
vexation in that sort of thing, and a good dinner better, and cheaper, too, than
the best of them." And when some of Philip's rich college friends met him in his
exile, and asked him to the Rocher or the Trois Freres, he would break away from
those banquets; and as for meeting at those feasts doubtful companions, whom
young men will sometimes invite to their entertainments, Philip turned from such
with scorn and anger. His virtue was loud, and he proclaimed it loudly. He
expected little Charlotte to give him credit for it, and told her of his
self-denial. And she believed anything he said; and delighted in everything he
wrote; and copied out his articles for the Pall Mall Gazette; and treasured his
poems in her desk of desks: and there never was in all Sestos, in all Abydos, in
all Europe, in all Asia Minor or Asia Major, such a noble creature as Leander,
Hero thought; never, never! I hope, young ladies, you may all have a Leander on
his way to the tower where the light of your love is burning steadfastly. I
hope, young gentlemen, you have each of you a beacon in sight, and may meet with
no mishap in swimming to it.
From my previous remarks regarding Mrs. Baynes, the reader has been made aware
that the general's wife was no more faultless than the rest of her
fellowcreatures; and having already candidly informed the public that the writer
and his family were no favourites of this lady, I have now the pleasing duty of
recording my own opinions regarding her Mrs. General B. was an early riser. She
was a frugal woman; fond of her young, or, let us say, anxious to provide for
their maintenance; and here, with my best compliments, I think the catalogue of
her good qualities is ended. She had a bad, violent temper; a disagreeable
person, attired in very bad taste; a shrieking voice; and two manners, the
respectful and the patronizing, which were both alike odious. When she ordered
Baynes to marry her, gracious powers! why did he not run away? Who dared first
to say that marriages are made in heaven? We know that there are not only
blunders, but roguery in the marriage office. Do not mistakes occur every day,
and are not the wrong people coupled? Had heaven anything to do with the bargain
by which young Miss Blushrose was sold to old Mr. Hoarfrost? Did heaven order
young Miss Tripper to throw over poor Tom Spooner, and marry the wealthy Mr.
Bung? You may as well say that horses are sold in heaven, which, as you know,
are groomed, are doctored, are chanted on to the market, and warranted by
dexterous horse-vendors, as possessing every quality of blood, pace, temper,
age. Against these Mr. Greenhorn has his remedy sometimes; but against a mother
who sells you a warranted daughter, what remedy is there? You have been jockeyed
by false representation into bidding for the Cecilia, and the animal is yours
for life. She shies, kicks, stumbles, has an infernal temper, is a crib-biter
��and she was warranted to you by her mother as the most perfect, good-tempered
creature, whom the most timid might manage! You have bought her. She is yours.
Heaven bless you! Take her home, and be miserable for the rest of your days. You
have no redress. You have done the deed. Marriages were made in heaven, you
know; and in yours you were as much sold as Moses Primrose was when he bought
the gross of green spectacles.
I don't think poor General Baynes ever had a proper sense of his situation, or
knew how miserable he ought by rights to have been. He was not uncheerful at
times: a silent man, liking his rubber and his glass of wine; a very weak person
in the common affairs of life, as his best friends must own; but, as I have
heard, a very tiger in action. "I know your opinion of the general," Philip used
to say to me, in his grandiloquent way. "You despise men who don't bully their
wives; you do, sir! You think the general weak, I know, I know. Other brave men
were so about women, as I daresay you have heard. This man, so weak at home, was
mighty on the war-path; and in his wigwam are the scalps of countless warriors."
"In his wig what?" say I. The truth is, on his meek head the general wore a
little curling chestnut top-knot, which looked very queer and out of place over
that wrinkled and war-worn face.
"If you choose to laugh at your joke, pray do," says Phil, majestically. "I make
a noble image of a warrior: You prefer a barber's pole. Bon! Pass me the wine.
The veteran whom I hope to salute as father ere long�� the soldier of twenty
battles;��who saw my own brave grandfather die at his side��die at Busaco, by
George; you laugh at an account of his wig. It's a capital joke." And here Phil
scowled and slapped the table, and passed his hand across his eyes, as though
the death of his grandfather, which occurred long before Philip was born, caused
him a very serious pang of grief. Philip's newspaper business brought him to
London on occasions. I think it was on one of these visits, that we had our talk
about General Baynes. And it was at the same time Philip described the
boarding-house to us, and its inmates, and the landlady, and the doings there.
For that struggling landlady, as for all women in distress, our friend had a
great sympathy and liking; and she returned Philip's kindness by being very good
to Mademoiselle Charlotte, and very forbearing with the general's wife and his
other children. The appetites of those little ones were frightful, the temper of
Madame la G�n�rale was almost intolerable, but Charlotte was an angel, and the
general was a mutton��a true mutton. Her own father had been so. The brave are
often muttons at home. I suspect that, though madame could have made but little
profit by the general's family, his monthly payments were very welcome to her
meagre little exchequer. "Ah! if all my locataires were like him!" sighed the
poor lady. "T
hat Madame Boldero, whom the generaless treats always as
Honourable, I wish I was as sure of her! And others again!"
I never kept a boarding-house, but I am sure there must be many painful duties
attendant on that profession. What can you do if a lady or gentleman doesn't pay
his bill? Turn him or her out? Perhaps the very thing that lady or gentleman
would desire. They go. Those trunks which you have insanely detained, and about
which you have made a fight and a scandal, do not contain a hundred francs'
worth of goods, and your creditors never come back again. You do not like to
have a row in a boarding-house any more than you would like to have a party with
scarlet-fever in your best bedroom. The scarlet-fever party stays, and the other
boarders go away. What, you ask, do I mean by this mystery? I am sorry to have
to give up names, and titled names. I am sorry to say the Honourable Mrs.
Boldero did not pay her bills. She was waiting for remittances, which the
Honourable Boldero was dreadfully remiss in sending. A dreadful man! He was
still at his lordship's at Gaberlunzie Castle, shooting the wild deer and
hunting the roe. And though the Honourable Mrs. B.'s heart was in the Highlands,
of course, how could she join her Highland chief without the money to pay
madame? The Highlands, indeed! One dull day it came out that the Honourable
Boldero was amusing himself in the Highlands of Hesse Homburg; and engaged in
the dangerous sport which is to be had in the green plains about Loch
Badenbadenoch!
"Did you ever hear of such depravity? The woman is a desperate and unprincipled
adventuress! I wonder madame dares to put me and my children and my general down
at table with such people as those, Philip!" cries madame la g�n�rale. "I mean
those opposite�� that woman and her two daughters who haven't paid madame a
shilling for three months��who owes me five hundred francs, which she borrowed
until next Tuesday, expecting a remittance��a pretty remittance indeed�� from
intimate at the embassy; and that she would introduce us there, and at the
Tuileries: and she told me Lady Estridge had the small-pox in the house; and
when I said all ours had been vaccinated, and I didn't mind, she fobbed me off
with some other excuse; and it's my belief the woman's a humbug. Overhear me! I
don't care if she does overhear me. No. You may look as much as you like, my
Honourable Mrs. Boldero; and I don't care if you do overhear me. Ogoost!
Pomdytare pour le g�n�ral! How tough madame's boof is, and it's boof, boof, boof
every day, till I'm sick of boof. Ogoost! why don't you attend to my children?"
And so forth.
By this report of the worthy woman's conversation, you will see that the
friendship which had sprung up between the two ladies had come to an end, in
consequence of painful pecuniary disputes between them; that to keep a
boarding-house can't be a very pleasant occupation; and that even to dine in a
boarding-house must be very bad fun when the company is frightened and dull, and
when there are two old women at table ready to fling the dishes at each other's
fronts. At the period of which I now write, I promise you, there was very little
of the piano-duet business going on after dinner. In the first place, everybody
knew the girls' pieces; and when they began, Mrs. General Baynes would lift up a
voice louder than the jingling old instrument, thumped Minna and Brenda ever so
loudly. "Perfect strangers to me, Mr. Clancy, I assure you. Had I known her, you
don't suppose I would have lent her the money. Honourable Mrs. Boldero, indeed!
Five weeks she has owed me five hundred frongs. Bong swor, Monsieur Bidois! Sang
song frong pas payy encor! Prommy, pas payy!" Fancy, I say, what a dreary life
that must have been at the select boarding-house, where these two parties were
doing battle daily after dinner! Fancy, at the select soir�es, the general's
lady seizing upon one guest after another, and calling out her wrongs, and
pointing to the wrong-doer; and poor Madame Smolensk, smirking, and smiling, and
flying from one end of the salon to the other, and thanking M. Pivoine for his
charming romance, and M. Brumm for his admirable performance on the violoncello,
and even asking those poor Miss Bolderos to perform their duet��for her heart
melted towards them. Not ignorant of evil, she had learned to succour the
miserable. She knew what poverty was, and had to coax scowling duns, and wheedle
vulgar creditors. "Tenez, Monsieur Philippe," she said, "the g�n�rale is too
cruel. There are others here who might complain, and are silent." Philip felt
all this; the conduct of his future mother-in-law filled him with dismay and
horror. And some time after these remarkable circumstances, he told me, blushing
as he spoke, a humiliating secret. "Do you know, sir," says he, "that autumn I
made a pretty good thing of it with one thing or another. I did my work for the
Pall Mall Gazette: and Smith of the Daily Intelligencer, wanting a month's
holiday, gave me his letter and ten francs a day. And at that very time I met
Redman, who had owed me twenty pounds ever since we were at college, and who was
just coming back flush from Homburg, and paid me. Well, now. Swear you won't
tell. Swear on your faith as a Christian man! With this money I went, sir,
privily to Mrs. Boldero. I said if she would pay the dragon ��I mean Mrs.
Baynes��I would lend her the money. And I did lend her the money, and the
Boldero never paid back Mrs. Baynes. Don't mention it. Promise me you won't tell
Mrs. Baynes. I never expected to get Redman's money you know, and am no worse
off than before. One day of the Grandes Eaux we went to Versailles I think, and
the Honourable Mrs. Boldero gave us the slip. She left the poor girls behind her
in pledge, who, to do them justice, cried and were in a dreadful way; and when
Mrs. Baynes, on our return, began shrieking about her 'sang song frong,' Madame
Smolensk fairly lost patience for once, and said, 'Mais, madame, vous nous
fatiguez avec vos cinq cents francs;' on which the other muttered something
about 'Ansolong,' but was briskly taken up by her husband, who said, 'By George,
Eliza, madame is quite right. And I wish the five hundred francs were in the
sea.'"
Thus you understand, if Mrs. General Baynes thought some people were "stuck-up
people," some people can��and hereby do by these presents��pay off Mrs. Baynes,
by furnishing the public with a candid opinion of that lady's morals, manners,
and titles? There used to dine at Madame Smolensk's boarding-house a certain
German baron, with a large finger-ring, upon a dingy finger, towards whom the
lady was pleased to cast the eye of favour, and who chose to fall in love with
her pretty daughter; young Mr. Clancy, the Irish poet, was also smitten with the
charms of the fair young lady; and this intrepid mother encouraged both suitors,
to the unspeakable agonies of Philip Firmin, who felt often that whilst he was
away at his
work these inmates of Madame Smolensk's house were near his
charmer��at her side at lunch, ever handing her the cup at breakfast, on the
watch for her when she walked forth in the garden; and I take the pangs of
jealousy to have formed a part of those unspeakable sufferings which Philip said
he endured in the house whither he came courting.
Little Charlotte, in one or two of her letters to her friends in Queen Square,
London, meekly complained of Philip's tendency to jealousy. "Does he think,
after knowing him, I can think of these horrid men?" she asked. "I don't
understand what Mr. Clancy is talking about, when he comes to me with his 'pomes
and potry;' and who can read poetry like Philip himself? Then the German
baron��who does not even call himself a baron: it is mamma who will insist upon
calling him so��has such very dirty things, and smells so of cigars, that I
don't like to come near him. Philip smokes too, but his cigars are quite
pleasant. Ah, dear friend, how could he ever think such men as these were to be
put in comparison with him! And he scolds so; and scowls at the poor men in the
evening when he comes! and his temper is so high! Do say a word to him��quite
cautiously and gently, you know��in behalf of your fondly attached and most
happy��only he will make me unhappy sometimes; but you'll prevent him, won't
you?��Charlotte B."
I could fancy Philip hectoring through the part of Othello, and his poor young
Desdemona not a little frightened at his black humours. Such sentiments as Mr.
Philip felt strongly, he expressed with an uproar. Charlotte's correspondent, as
usual, made light of these little domestic confidences and grievances. "Women
don't dislike a jealous scolding," she said. "It may be rather tiresome, but it
is always a compliment. Some husbands think so well of themselves, that they
can't condescend to be jealous." Yes, I say, women prefer to have tyrants over
them. A scolding you think is a mark of attention. Hadn't you better adopt the
Russian system at once, and go out and buy me a whip, and present it to me with
a curtsey, and your compliments; and a meek prayer that I should use it.
"Present you a whip! present you a goose!" says the lady, who encourages
scolding in other husbands, it seems, but won't suffer a word from her own.
Both disputants had set their sentimental hearts on the marriage of this young
man and this young woman. Little Charlotte's heart was so bent on the match,
that it would break, we fancied, if she were disappointed; and in her mother's
behaviour we felt, from the knowledge we had of the woman's disposition, there
was a serious cause for alarm. Should a better offer present itself, Mrs.
Baynes, we feared, would fling over poor Philip: or, it was in reason and
nature, that he would come to a quarrel with her, and in the course of the
pitched battle which must ensue between them, he would fire off expressions
mortally injurious. Are there not many people, in every one's acquaintance, who,
as soon as they have made a bargain, repent of it? Philip, as "preserver" of
General Baynes, in the first fervour of family gratitude for that act of
self-sacrifice on the young man's part, was very well. But gratitude wears out;
or suppose a woman says, "It is my duty to my child to recal my word; and not
allow her to fling herself away on a beggar." Suppose that you and I, strongly
inclined to do a mean action, get a good, available, and moral motive for it? I
trembled for poor Philip's course of true love, and little Charlotte's chances,
when these surmises crossed my mind. There was a hope still in the honour and
gratitude of General Baynes. He would not desert his young friend and
benefactor. Now General Baynes was a brave man of war, and so was John of
Marlborough a brave man of war; but it is certain that both were afraid of their