The Book of Snobs Part 9

Besides Stripes, they keep a boy called Thomas or Tummus. Tummus works in the garden or about the pigsty and stable; Thomas wears a page's costume of eruptive b.u.t.tons.

When anybody calls, and Stripes is out of the way, Tummus flings himself like mad into Thomas's clothes, and comes out metamorphosed like Harlequin in the pantomime. To-day, as Mrs. P. was cutting the grapevine, as the young ladies were at the roller, down comes Tummus like a roaring whirlwind, with 'Missus, Missus, there's company coomin'!' Away skurry the young ladies from the roller, down comes Mrs.

P. from the old chair, off flies Tummus to change his clothes, and in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time Sir John Hawbuck, my Lady Hawbuck, and Master Hugh Hawbuck are introduced into the garden with brazen effrontery by Thomas, who says, 'Please Sir Jan and my Lady to walk this year way: I KNOW Missus is in the rose-garden.'

And there, sure enough, she was!

In a pretty little garden bonnet, with beautiful curling ringlets, with the smartest of ap.r.o.ns and the freshest of pearl-coloured gloves, this amazing woman was in the arms of her dearest Lady Hawbuck. 'Dearest Lady Hawbuck, how good of you! Always among my flowers! can't live away from them!'

'Sweets to the sweet! hum--a-ha--haw!' says Sir John Hawbuck, who piques himself on his gallantry, and says nothing without 'a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!'

'Whereth yaw pinnafaw?' cries Master Hugh. 'WE thaw you in it, over the wall, didn't we, Pa?'

'Hum--a-ha--a-haw!' burst out Sir John, dreadfully alarmed. 'Where's Ponto? Why wasn't he at Quarter Sessions? How are his birds this year, Mrs. Ponto--have those Carabas pheasants done any harm to your wheat?

a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!' and all this while he was making the most ferocious and desperate signals to his youthful heir.

'Well, she WATH in her pinnafaw, wathn't she, Ma?' says Hugh, quite unabashed; which question Lady Hawbuck turned away with a sudden query regarding her dear darling daughters, and the ENFANT TERRIBLE was removed by his father.

'I hope you weren't disturbed by the music?' Ponto says. 'My girls, you know, practise four hours a day, you know--must do it, you know--absolutely necessary. As for me, you know I'm an early man, and in my farm every morning at five--no, no laziness for ME.'

The facts are these. Ponto goes to sleep directly after dinner on entering the drawing-room, and wakes up when the ladies leave off practice at ten. From seven till ten, from ten till five, is a very fair allowance of slumber for a man who says he's NOT a lazy man. It is my private opinion that when Ponto retires to what is called his 'Study,'

he sleeps too. He locks himself up there daily two hours with the newspaper.

I saw the HAWBUCK scene out of the Study, which commands the garden.

It's a curious object, that Study. Ponto's library mostly consists of boots. He and Stripes have important interviews here of mornings, when the potatoes are discussed, or the fate of the calf ordained, or sentence pa.s.sed on the pig, &c.. All the Major's bills are docketed on the Study table and displayed like a lawyer's briefs. Here, too, lie displayed his hooks, knives, and other gardening irons, his whistles, and strings of spare b.u.t.tons. He has a drawer of endless brown paper for parcels, and another containing a prodigious and never-failing supply of string. What a man can want with so many gig-whips I can never conceive.

These, and fis.h.i.+ng-rods, and landing-nets, and spurs, and boot-trees, and b.a.l.l.s for horses, and surgical implements for the same, and favourite pots of s.h.i.+ny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes in the most elegant manner, and buckskin gloves stretched out on their trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; and the family medicine-chest, and in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the 'Study' but for that awful purpose)--all these, with 'Mogg's Road Book,' the GARDENERS'

CHRONICLE, and a backgammon-board, form the Major's library. Under the trophy there's a picture of Mrs. Ponto, in a light blue dress and train, and no waist, when she was first married; a fox's brush lies over the frame, and serves to keep the dust off that work of art.

'My library's small, says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, 'but well selected, my boy--well selected. I have been reading the "History of England" all the morning.'

CHAPTER XXVII--A VISIT TO SOME COUNTRY Sn.o.bS

We had the fish, which, as the kind reader may remember, I had brought down in a delicate attention to Mrs. Ponto, to variegate the repast of next day; and cod and oyster-sauce, twice laid, salt cod and scolloped oysters, formed parts of the bill of fare until I began to fancy that the Ponto family, like our late revered monarch George II., had a fancy for stale fish. And about this time, the pig being consumed, we began upon a sheep.

But how shall I forget the solemn splendour of a second course, which was served up in great state by Stripes in a silver dish and cove; a napkin round his dirty thumbs; and consisted of a landrail, not much bigger than a corpulent sparrow.

'My love, will you take any game?' says Ponto, with prodigious gravity; and stuck his fork into that little mouthful of an island in the silver sea. Stripes, too, at intervals, dribbled out the Marsala with a solemnity which would have done honour to a Duke's butler. The Bamnecide's dinner to Shacabac was only one degree removed from these solemn banquets.

As there were plenty of pretty country places close by; a comfortable country town, with good houses of gentlefolks; a beautiful old parsonage, close to the church whither we went (and where the Carabas family have their ancestral carved and monumented Gothic pew), and every appearance of good society in the neighbourhood, I rather wondered we were not enlivened by the appearance of some of the neighbours at the Evergreens, and asked about them.

'We can't in our position of life--we can't well a.s.sociate with the attorney's family, as I leave you to suppose,' says Mrs. Ponto, confidentially. 'Of course not,' I answered, though I didn't know why.

'And the Doctor?' said I.

'A most excellent worthy creature,' says Mrs. P. saved Maria's life--really a learned man; but what can one do in one's position? One may ask one's medical man to one's table certainly: but his family, my dear Mr. Sn.o.b!'

'Half-a-dozen little gallipots,' interposed Miss Wirt, the governess: 'he, he, he!' and the young ladies laughed in chorus.

'We only live with the county families,' Miss Wirt (1) continued, tossing up her head. 'The Duke is abroad: we are at feud with the Carabases; the Ringwoods don't come down till Christmas: in fact, n.o.body's here till the hunting season--positively n.o.body.'

'Whose is the large red house just outside of the town?'

'What! the CHATEAU-CALICOT? he, he, he! That purse-proud ex-linendraper, Mr. Yardley, with the yellow liveries, and the wife in red velvet? How CAN you, my dear Mr. Sn.o.b, be so satirical? The impertinence of those people is really something quite overwhelming.'

'Well, then, there is the parson, Doctor Chrysostom. He's a gentleman, at any rate.' At this Mrs. Ponto looked at Miss Wirt. After their eyes had met and they had wagged their heads at each other. They looked up to the ceiling. So did the young ladies. They thrilled. It was evident I had said something terrible. Another black sheep in the Church? thought I with a little sorrow; for I don't care to own that I have a respect for the cloth. 'I--hope there's nothing wrong?

'Wrong?' says Mrs. P., clasping her hands with a tragic air.

'Oh!' says Miss Wirt, and the two girls, gasping in chorus.

'Well,' says I, 'I'm very sorry for it. I never saw a nicer-looking old gentleman, or a better school, or heard a better sermon.'

'He used to preach those sermons in a surplice,' hissed out Mrs. Ponto.

'He's a Puseyite, Mr. Sn.o.b.'

'Heavenly powers!' says I, admiring the pure ardour of these female theologians; and Stripes came in with the tea. It's so weak that no wonder Ponto's sleep isn't disturbed by it.

Of mornings we used to go out shooting. We had Ponto's own fields to sport over (where we got the landrail), and the non-preserved part of the Hawbuck property: and one evening in a stubble of Ponto's skirting the Carabas woods, we got among some pheasants, and had some real sport.

I shot a hen, I know, greatly to my delight. 'Bag it,' says Ponto, in rather a hurried manner: 'here's somebody coming.' So I pocketed the bird.

'You infernal poaching thieves!' roars out a man from the hedge in the garb of a gamekeeper. 'I wish I could catch you on this side of the hedge. I'd put a brace of barrels into you, that I would.'

'Curse that Snapper,' says Ponto, moving off; 'he's always watching me like a spy.'

'Carry off the birds, you sneaks, and sell 'em in London,' roars the individual, who it appears was a keeper of Lord Carabas. 'You'll get six s.h.i.+llings a brace for 'em.'

'YOU know the price of 'em well enough, and so does your master too, you scoundrel,' says Ponto, still retreating.

'We kill 'em on our ground,' cries Mr. Snapper. 'WE don't set traps for other people's birds. We're no decoy ducks. We're no sneaking poachers.

We don't shoot 'ens, like that 'ere c.o.c.kney, who's got the tail of one a-sticking out of his pocket. Only just come across the hedge, that's all.'

'I tell you what,' says Stripes, who was out with us as keeper this day, (in fact he's keeper, coachman, gardener, valet, and bailiff, with Tummus under him,) 'if YOU'LL come across, John Snapper, and take your coat off, I'll give you such a whopping as you've never had since the last time I did it at Guttlebury Fair.'

'Whop one of your own weight,' Mr. Snapper said, whistling his dogs and disappearing into the wood. And so we came out of this controversy rather victoriously; but I began to alter my preconceived ideas of rural felicity.

Notes.

(1) I have since heard that this aristocratic lady's father was a livery-b.u.t.ton maker in St. Martin's Lane: where he met with misfortunes, and his daughter acquired her taste for heraldry. But it may be told to her credit, that out of her earnings she has kept the bed-ridden old bankrupt in great comfort and secrecy at Pentonville; and furnished her brother's outfit for the Cadets.h.i.+p which her patron, Lord Swigglebiggle, gave her when he was at the Board of Control. I have this information from a friend. To hear Miss Wirt herself, you would fancy that her Papa was a Rothschild, and that the markets of Europe were convulsed when he went into the GAZETTE.

CHAPTER XXVIII--ON SOME COUNTRY Sn.o.bS

'Be hanged to your aristocrats!' Ponto said, in some conversation we had regarding the family at Carabas, between whom and the Evergreens there was a feud. 'When I first came into the county--it was the year before Sir John Buff contested in the Blue interest--the Marquis, then Lord St.

Michaels, who, of course, was Orange to the core, paid me and Mrs. Ponto such attentions, that I fairly confess I was taken in by the old humbug, and thought that I'd met with a rare neighbour. 'Gad, Sir, we used to get pines from Carabas, and pheasants from Carabas, and it was--"Ponto, when will you come over and shoot?"--and--"Ponto, our pheasants want thinning,"--and my Lady would insist upon her dear Mrs. Ponto coming over to Carabas to sleep, and put me I don't know to what expense for turbans and velvet gowns for my wife's toilette. Well, Sir, the election takes place, and though I was always a Liberal, personal friends.h.i.+p of course induces me to plump for St. Michaels, who comes in at the head of the poll. Next year, Mrs. P. insists upon going to town--with lodgings in Clarges Street at ten pounds a week, with a hired brougham, and new dresses for herself and the girls, and the deuce and all to pay. Our first cards were to Carabas House; my Lady's are returned by a great big flunkey; and I leave you to fancy my poor Betsy's discomfiture as the lodging-house maid took in the cards, and Lady St. Michaels drives away, though she actually saw us at the drawing-room window. Would you believe it, Sir, that though we called four times afterwards, those infernal aristocrats never returned our visit; that though Lady St. Michaels gave nine dinner-parties and four DEJEUNERS that season, she never asked us to one; and that she cut us dead at the Opera, though Betsy was nodding to her the whole night? We wrote to her for tickets for Almack's; she writes to say that all hers were promised; and said, in the presence of Wiggins, her lady's-maid, who told it to Diggs, my wife's woman, that she couldn't conceive how people in our station of life could so far forget themselves as to wish to appear in any such place! Go to Castle Carabas! I'd sooner die than set my foot in the house of that impertinent, insolvent, insolent jackanapes--and I hold him in scorn!'

After this, Ponto gave me some private information regarding Lord Carabas's pecuniary affairs; how he owed money all over the county; how Jukes the carpenter was utterly ruined and couldn't get a s.h.i.+lling of his bill; how Biggs the butcher hanged himself for the same reason; how the six big footmen never received a guinea of wages, and Snaffle, the state coachman, actually took off his blown-gla.s.s wig of ceremony and flung it at Lady Carabas's feet on the terrace before the Castle; all which stories, as they are private, I do not think proper to divulge.

But these details did not stifle my desire to see the famous mansion of Castle Carabas, nay, possibly excited my interest to know more about that lordly house and its owners.

At the entrance of the park, there are a pair of great gaunt mildewed lodges--mouldy Doric temples with black chimney-pots, in the finest cla.s.sic taste, and the gates of course are surmounted by the CHATS BOTTES, the well-known supporters of the Carabas family. 'Give the lodge-keeper a s.h.i.+lling,' says Ponto, (who drove me near to it in his four-wheeled cruelty-chaise). 'I warrant it's the first piece of ready money he has received for some time. I don't know whether there was any foundation for this sneer, but the gratuity was received with a curtsey, and the gate opened for me to enter. 'Poor old porteress!' says I, inwardly. 'You little know that it is the Historian of Sn.o.bs whom you let in!' The gates were pa.s.sed. A damp green stretch of park spread right and left immeasurably, confined by a chilly grey wall, and a damp long straight road between two huge rows of moist, dismal lime-trees, leads up to the Castle. In the midst of the park is a great black tank or lake, bristling over with rushes, and here and there covered over with patches of pea-soup. A shabby temple rises on an island in this delectable lake, which is approached by a rotten barge that lies at roost in a dilapidated boat house. Clumps of elms and oaks dot over the huge green flat. Every one of them would have been down long since, but that the Marquis is not allowed to cut the timber.