“No, I don’t think it’s the breed, my dear,” returned Pa. “I rather think it is because they are not done.”
“They ought to be,” said Bella.
“Yes, I am aware they ought to be, my dear,” rejoined her father, “but they—ain’t.”
So, the gridiron was put in requisition, and the good-tempered cherub, who was often as un-cherubically employed in his own family as if he had been in the employment of some of the Old Masters, undertook to grill the fowls. Indeed, except in respect of staring about him (a branch of the public service to which the pictorial cherub is much addicted), this domestic cherub discharged as many odd functions as his prototype; with the difference, say, that he performed with a blacking-brush on the family’s boots, instead of performing on enormous wind instruments and double-basses, and that he conducted himself with cheerful alacrity to much useful purpose, instead of foreshortening himself in the air with the vaguest intentions.
Bella helped him with his supplemental cookery, and made him very happy, but put him in mortal terror too by asking him when they sat down at table again, how he supposed they cooked fowls at the Greenwich dinners, and whether he believed they really were such pleasant dinners as people said? His secret winks and nods of remonstrance, in reply, made the mischievous Bella laugh until she choked, and then Lavinia was obliged to slap her on the back, and then she laughed the more.
But her mother was a fine corrective at the other end of the table; to whom her father, in the innocence of his good-fellowship, at intervals appealed with: “My dear, I am afraid you are not enjoying yourself?”
“Why so, R. W.?” she would sonorously reply.
“Because, my dear, you seem a little out of sorts.”
“Not at all,” would be the rejoinder, in exactly the same tone.
“Would you take a merry-thought, my dear?”
“Thank you. I will take whatever you please, R. W.”
“Well, but my dear, do you like it?”
“I like it as well as I like anything, R. W.” The stately woman would then, with a meritorious appearance of devoting herself to the general good, pursue her dinner as if she were feeding somebody else on high public grounds.
Bella had brought dessert and two bottles of wine, thus shedding unprecedented splendour on the occasion. Mrs. Wilfer did the honours of the first glass by proclaiming: “R. W. I drink to you.
“Thank you, my dear. And I to you.”
“Pa and Ma!” said Bella.
“Permit me,” Mrs. Wilfer interposed, with outstretched glove. “No. I think not. I drank to your papa. If, however, you insist on including me, I can in gratitude offer no objection.”
“Why, Lor, Ma,” interposed Lavvy the bold, “isn’t it the day that made you and Pa one and the same? I have no patience!”
“By whatever other circumstance the day may be marked, it is not the day, Lavinia, on which I will allow a child of mine to pounce upon me. I beg—nay, command!—that you will not pounce. R. W., it is appropriate to recall that it is for you to command and for me to obey. It is your house, and you are master at your own table. Both our healths!” Drinking the toast with tremendous stiffness.
“I really am a little afraid, my dear,” hinted the cherub meekly, “that you are not enjoying yourself?”
“On the contrary,” returned Mrs. Wilfer, “quite so. Why should I not?”
“I thought, my dear, that perhaps your face might—”
“My face might be a martyrdom, but what would that import, or who should know it, if I smiled?”
And she did smile; manifestly freezing the blood of Mr. George Sampson by so doing. For that young gentleman, catching her smiling eye, was so very much appalled by its expression as to cast about in his thoughts concerning what he had done to bring it down upon himself.
“The mind naturally falls,” said Mrs. Wilfer, “shall I say into a reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on a day like this.”
Lavvy, sitting with defiantly folded arms, replied (but not audibly), “For goodness’ sake say whichever of the two you like best, Ma, and get it over.”
“The mind,” pursued Mrs. Wilfer in an oratorical manner, “naturally reverts to Papa and Mamma—I here allude to my parents—at a period before the earliest dawn of this day. I was considered tall; perhaps I was. Papa and Mamma were unquestionably tall. I have rarely seen a finer woman than my mother; never than my father.”
The irrepressible Lavvy remarked aloud, “Whatever grandpapa was, he wasn’t a female.”
“Your grandpapa,” retorted Mrs. Wilfer, with an awful look, and in an awful tone, “was what I describe him to have been, and would have struck any of his grandchildren to the earth who presumed to question it. It was one of mamma’s cherished hopes that I should become united to a tall member of society. It may have been a weakness, but if so, it was equally the weakness, I believe, of King Frederick of Prussia.” These remarks being offered to Mr. George Sampson, who had not the courage to come out for single combat, but lurked with his chest under the table and his eyes cast down, Mrs. Wilfer proceeded, in a voice of increasing sternness and impressiveness, until she should force that skulker to give himself up. “Mamma would appear to have had an indefinable foreboding of what afterwards happened, for she would frequently urge upon me, ‘Not a little man. Promise me, my child, not a little man. Never, never, never, marry a little man!’ Papa also would remark to me (he possessed extraordinary humour), ‘that a family of whales must not ally themselves with sprats.’ His company was eagerly sought, as may be supposed, by the wits of the day, and our house was their continual resort. I have known as many as three copperplate engravers exchanging the most exquisite sallies and retorts there, at one time.”
