CHAPTER XLIX
Dutiful Friendship
A great annual occasion has come round in the establishment of Mr.
Matthew Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman and present bassoon-player. An occasion of feasting and festival. The celebration of a birthday in the family.
It is not Mr. Bagnet's birthday. Mr. Bagnet merely distinguishes that epoch in the musical instrument business by kissing the children with an extra smack before breakfast, smoking an additional pipe after dinner, and wondering towards evening what his poor old mother is thinking about it-a subject of infinite speculation, and rendered so by his mother having departed this life twenty years. Some men rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection into their mother's name. Mr.
Bagnet is one of like his trade the better for that. If I had kept clear of his old girl causes him usually to make the nounsubstantive 'goodness' of the feminine gender.
It is not the birthday of one of the three children. Those occasions are kept with some marks of distinction, but they rarely overleap the bounds of happy returns and a pudding. On young Woolwich's last birthday, Mr. Bagnet certainly did, after observing on his growth and general advancement, proceed, in a moment of profound reflection on the changes wrought by time, to examine him in the catechism, accomplishing with extreme accuracy the questions number one and two, 'What is your name?' and 'Who gave you that name?' but there failing in the exact precision of his memory and substituting for number three the question 'And how do you like that name?' which he propounded with a sense of its importance, in itself so edifying and improving as to give it quite an orthodox air. This, however, was a speciality on that particular birthday, and not a general solemnity.
It is the old girl's birthday, and that is the greatest holiday and reddest-letter day in Mr. Bagnet's calendar. The auspicious event is always commemorated according to certain forms settled and prescribed by Mr. Bagnet some years since. Mr. Bagnet, being deeply convinced that to have a pair of fowls for dinner is to attain the highest pitch of imperial luxury, invariably goes forth himself very early in the morning of this day to buy a pair; he is, as invariably, taken in by the vendor and installed in the possession of the oldest inhabitants of any coop in Europe.
Returning with these triumphs of toughness tied up in a clean blue and white cotton handkerchief (essential to the arrangements), he in a casual manner invites Mrs. Bagnet to declare at breakfast what she would like for dinner. Mrs. Bagnet, by a coincidence never known to fail, replying fowls, Mr. Bagnet instantly produces his bundle from a place of concealment amidst general amazement and rejoicing. He further requires that the old girl shall do nothing all day long but sit in her very best gown and be served by himself and the young people. As he is not illustrious for his cookery, this may be supposed to be a matter of state rather than enjoyment on the old girl's part, but she keeps her state with all imaginable cheerfulness.
On this present birthday, Mr. Bagnet has accomplished the usual preliminaries. He has bought two specimens of poultry, which, if there be any truth in adages, were certainly not caught with chaff, to be prepared for the spit; he has amazed and rejoiced the family by their unlooked-for production; he is himself directing the roasting of the poultry; and Mrs. Bagnet, with her wholesome brown fingers itching to prevent what she sees going wrong, sits in her gown of ceremony, an honoured guest.
Quebec and Malta lay the cloth for dinner, while Woolwich, serving, as beseems him, under his father, keeps the fowls revolving. To these young scullions Mrs. Bagnet occasionally imparts a wink, or a shake of the head, or a crooked face, as they made mistakes.
'At half after one.' Says Mr. Bagnet. 'To the minute. They'll be done.'
Mrs. Bagnet, with anguish, beholds one of them at a standstill before the fire and beginning to burn.
'You shall have a dinner, old girl,' says Mr. Bagnet. 'Fit for a queen.'
Mrs. Bagnet shows her white teeth cheerfully, but to the perception of her son, betrays so much uneasiness of spirit that he is impelled by the dictates of affection to ask her, with his eyes, what is the matter, thus standing, with his eyes wide open, more oblivious of the fowls than before, and not affording the least hope of a return to consciousness. Fortunately his elder sister perceives the cause of the agitation in Mrs. Bagnet's breast and with an admonitory poke recalls him. The stopped fowls going round again, Mrs. Bagnet closes her eyes in the intensity of her relief.
'George will look us up,' says Mr. Bagnet. 'At half after four.
To the moment. How many years, old girl. Has George looked us up.
This afternoon?'
'Ah, Lignum, Lignum, as many as make an old woman of a young one, I begin to think. Just about that, and no less,' returns Mrs.
Bagnet, laughing and shaking her head.
'Old girl,' says Mr. Bagnet, 'never mind. You'd be as young as ever you was. If you wasn't younger. Which you are. As everybody knows.'
Quebec and Malta here exclaim, with clapping of hands, that Bluffy is sure to bring mother something, and begin to speculate on what it will be.
'Do you know, Lignum,' says Mrs. Bagnet, casting a glance on the table-cloth, and winking 'salt!' at Malta with her right eye, and shaking the pepper away from Quebec with her head, 'I begin to think George is in the roving way again.'
'George,' returns Mr. Bagnet, 'will never desert. And leave his old comrade. In the lurch. Don't be afraid of it.'
'No, Lignum. No. I don't say he will. I don't think he will.
But if he could get over this money trouble of his, I believe he would be off.'
Mr. Bagnet asks why.
'Well,' returns his wife, considering, 'George seems to me to be getting not a little impatient and restless. I don't say but what he's as free as ever. Of course he must be free or he wouldn't be George, but he smarts and seems put out.'
'He's extra-drilled,' says Mr. Bagnet. 'By a lawyer. Who would put the devil out.'
'There's something in that,' his wife assents; 'but so it is, Lignum.'
Further conversation is prevented, for the time, by the necessity under which Mr. Bagnet finds himself of directing the whole force of his mind to the dinner, which is a little endangered by the dry humour of the fowls in not yielding any gravy, and also by the made gravy acquiring no flavour and turning out of a flaxen complexion.
With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the process of peeling, upheaving from their centres in every direction, as if they were subject to earthquakes. The legs of the fowls, too, are longer than could be desired, and extremely scaly.
Overcoming these disadvantages to the best of his ability, Mr.
Bagnet at last dishes and they sit down at table, Mrs. Bagnet occupying the guest's place at his right hand.
It is well for the old girl that she has but one birthday in a year, for two such indulgences in poultry might be injurious.
Every kind of finer tendon and ligament that is in the nature of poultry to possess is developed in these specimens in the singular form of guitar-strings. Their limbs appear to have struck roots into their breasts and bodies, as aged trees strike roots into the earth. Their legs are so hard as to encourage the idea that they must have devoted the greater part of their long and arduous lives to pedestrian exercises and the walking of matches. But Mr.
Bagnet, unconscious of these little defects, sets his heart on Mrs.
Bagnet eating a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and as that good old girl would not cause him a moment's disappointment on any day, least of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her digestion fearfully. How young Woolwich cleans the drum-sticks without being of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is at a loss to understand.
The old girl has another trial to undergo after the conclusion of the repast in sitting in state to see the room cleared, the hearth swept, and the dinner-service washed up and polished in the backyard. The great delight and energy with which the two young ladies apply themselves to these duties, turning up their skirts in imitation of their
