But the letter from the Flammas was the great event—from London, all that way, asking for some Coombe Oaks lavender! Then there was billing and cooing, and fraternising, and sunshine in the garden over the hedge of lavender. If only it could have lasted! Somehow, as people grow older there seems so much grating of the wheels.
In time, long time, people’s original feelings get strangely confused and overlaid. The churchwardens of the eighteenth century plastered the fresco paintings of the fourteenth in their churches—covered them over with yellowish mortar. The mould grows up, and hides the capital of the fallen column; the acanthus is hidden in earth. At the foot of the oak, where it is oldest, the bark becomes dense and thick, impenetrable, and without sensitiveness; you may cut off an inch thick without reaching the sap. A sort of scale or caking in long, long time grows over original feelings.
There was no one in the world so affectionate and loving as Mrs. Iden—no one who loved a father so dearly; just as Amaryllis loved her father.
But after they had lived at Coombe Oaks thirty years or so, and the thick dull bark had grown, after the scales or caking had come upon the heart, after the capital of the column had fallen, after the painting had been blurred, it came about that old Flamma, Mrs. Iden’s father, died in London.
After thirty years of absolute quiet at Coombe Oaks, husband and wife went up to London to the funeral, which took place at one of those fearful London cemeteries that strike a chill at one’s very soul. Of all the horrible things in the world there is nothing so calmly ghastly as a London cemetery.
In the evening, after the funeral, Mr. and Mrs. Iden went to the theatre.
“How frivolous! How unfeeling!” No, nothing of the sort; how truly sad and human, for to be human is to be sad. That men and women should be so warped and twisted by the pressure of the years out of semblance to themselves; that circumstances should so wall in their lives with insurmountable cliffs of granite facts, compelling them to tread the sunless gorge; that the coldness of death alone could open the door to pleasure.
They sat at the theatre with grey hearts. With the music and the song, the dancing, the colours and gay dresses, it was sadder there than in the silent rooms at the house where the dead had been. Old Flamma alone had been dead there; they were dead here. Dead in life—at the theatre.
They had used to go joyously to the theatre thirty years before, when Iden came courting to town; from the edge of the grave they came back to look on their own buried lives.
If you will only think, you will see it was a most dreadful and miserable incident, that visit to the theatre after the funeral.
X
When Mrs. Iden threw his lardy-cake descent in Iden’s face she alluded to Grandfather Iden’s being a baker and miller, and noted for the manufacture of these articles. A lardy, or larded, cake is a thing, I suppose, unknown to most of this generation; they were the principal confectionery familiar to country folk when Grandfather Iden was at the top of his business activity, seventy years since, in the Waterloo era.
A lardy-cake is an oblong, flat cake, crossed with lines, and rounded at the corners, made of dough, lard, sugar, and spice. Our ancestors liked something to gnaw at, and did not go in for lightness in their pastry; they liked something to stick to their teeth, and after that to their ribs. The lardy-cake eminently fulfilled these conditions; they put a trifle of sugar and spice in it, to set it going as it were, and the rest depended on the strength of the digestion. But if a ploughboy could get a new, warm lardy-cake, fresh from the oven, he thought himself blessed.
Grandfather Iden had long since ceased any serious business, but he still made a few of these renowned cakes for his amusement, and sold a good few at times to the carters’ lads who came in to market.
Amaryllis knew the path perfectly, but if she had not, the tom-tomming of drums and blowing of brass, audible two miles away, would have guided her safely to the fair. The noise became prodigious as she approached—the ceaseless tom-tom, the beating of drums and gongs outside the show vans, the shouting of the showmen, the roar of a great crowd, the booing of cattle, the baaing of sheep, the neighing of horses—altogether the “rucket” was tremendous.
She looked back from the hill close to the town and saw the people hurrying in from every quarter—there was a string of them following the path she had come, and others getting over distant stiles. A shower had fallen in the night, but the ceaseless wheels had ground up the dust again, and the lines of the various roads were distinctly marked by the clouds hanging above them. For one on business, fifty hastened on to join the uproar.
Suppose the Venus de Medici had been fetched from Florence and had been set up in the town of Woolhorton, or the Laocoön from Rome, or the Milo from Paris, do you think all these people would have scurried in such haste to admire these beautiful works? Nothing of the sort; if you want a crowd you must make a row. It is really wonderful how people do thoroughly and unaffectedly enjoy a fearful disturbance; if the cannon could be shot off quietly, and guns made
