Martin Chuzzlewit
And with that, she skipped away, among the trees.
‘Ecod, my lady!’ said Jonas, looking after her, and biting a piece
of straw, almost to powder; ‘you’ll catch it for this, when you ARE
married. It’s all very well now--it keeps one on, somehow, and you know
it--but I’ll pay you off scot and lot by-and-bye. This is a plaguey dull
sort of a place for a man to be sitting by himself in. I never could
abide a mouldy old churchyard.’
As he turned into the avenue himself, Miss Merry, who was far ahead,
happened to look back.
‘Ah!’ said Jonas, with a sullen smile, and a nod that was not addressed
to her. ‘Make the most of it while it lasts. Get in your hay while the
sun shines. Take your own way as long as it’s in your power, my lady!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
IS IN PART PROFESSIONAL, AND FURNISHES THE READER WITH SOME VALUABLE
HINTS IN RELATION TO THE MANAGEMENT OF A SICK CHAMBER
Mr Mould was surrounded by his household gods. He was enjoying the
sweets of domestic repose, and gazing on them with a calm delight. The
day being sultry, and the window open, the legs of Mr Mould were on the
window-seat, and his back reclined against the shutter. Over his shining
head a handkerchief was drawn, to guard his baldness from the flies. The
room was fragrant with the smell of punch, a tumbler of which grateful
compound stood upon a small round table, convenient to the hand of
Mr Mould; so deftly mixed that as his eye looked down into the cool
transparent drink, another eye, peering brightly from behind the crisp
lemon-peel, looked up at him, and twinkled like a star.
Deep in the City, and within the ward of Cheap, stood Mr Mould’s
establishment. His Harem, or, in other words, the common sitting room
of Mrs Mould and family, was at the back, over the little counting-house
behind the shop; abutting on a churchyard small and shady. In this
domestic chamber Mr Mould now sat; gazing, a placid man, upon his punch
and home. If, for a moment at a time, he sought a wider prospect, whence
he might return with freshened zest to these enjoyments, his moist
glance wandered like a sunbeam through a rural screen of scarlet
runners, trained on strings before the window, and he looked down, with
an artist’s eye, upon the graves.
The partner of his life, and daughters twain, were Mr Mould’s
companions. Plump as any partridge was each Miss Mould, and Mrs M.
was plumper than the two together. So round and chubby were their fair
proportions, that they might have been the bodies once belonging to the
angels’ faces in the shop below, grown up, with other heads attached
to make them mortal. Even their peachy cheeks were puffed out and
distended, as though they ought of right to be performing on celestial
trumpets. The bodiless cherubs in the shop, who were depicted as
constantly blowing those instruments for ever and ever without any
lungs, played, it is to be presumed, entirely by ear.
Mr Mould looked lovingly at Mrs Mould, who sat hard by, and was a
helpmate to him in his punch as in all other things. Each seraph
daughter, too, enjoyed her share of his regards, and smiled upon him in
return. So bountiful were Mr Mould’s possessions, and so large his
stock in trade, that even there, within his household sanctuary, stood
a cumbrous press, whose mahogany maw was filled with shrouds, and
winding-sheets, and other furniture of funerals. But, though the Misses
Mould had been brought up, as one may say, beneath his eye, it had cast
no shadow on their timid infancy or blooming youth. Sporting behind
the scenes of death and burial from cradlehood, the Misses Mould knew
better. Hat-bands, to them, were but so many yards of silk or crape; the
final robe but such a quantity of linen. The Misses Mould could idealise
a player’s habit, or a court-lady’s petticoat, or even an act of
parliament. But they were not to be taken in by palls. They made them
sometimes.
The premises of Mr Mould were hard of hearing to the boisterous noises
in the great main streets, and nestled in a quiet corner, where the City
strife became a drowsy hum, that sometimes rose and sometimes fell and
sometimes altogether ceased; suggesting to a thoughtful mind a stoppage
in Cheapside. The light came sparkling in among the scarlet runners,
as if the churchyard winked at Mr Mould, and said, ‘We understand
each other;’ and from the distant shop a pleasant sound arose of
coffin-making with a low melodious hammer, rat, tat, tat, tat, alike
promoting slumber and digestion.
‘Quite the buzz of insects,’ said Mr Mould, closing his eyes in a
perfect luxury. ‘It puts one in mind of the sound of animated nature in
the agricultural districts. It’s exactly like the woodpecker tapping.’
‘The woodpecker tapping the hollow ELM tree,’ observed Mrs Mould,
adapting the words of the popular melody to the description of wood
commonly used in the trade.
‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Mr Mould. ‘Not at all bad, my dear. We shall be glad
to hear from you again, Mrs M. Hollow elm tree, eh! Ha, ha! Very good
indeed. I’ve seen worse than that in the Sunday papers, my love.’
Mrs Mould, thus encouraged, took a little more of the punch, and handed
it to her daughters, who dutifully followed the example of their mother.
‘Hollow ELM tree, eh?’ said Mr Mould, making a slight motion with his
legs in his enjoyment of the joke. ‘It’s beech in the song. Elm, eh?
Yes, to be sure. Ha, ha, ha! Upon my soul, that’s one of the best things
I know?’ He was so excessively tickled by the jest that he couldn’t
forget it, but repeated twenty times, ‘Elm, eh? Yes, to be sure. Elm,
of course. Ha, ha, ha! Upon my life, you know, that ought to be sent to
somebody who could make use of it. It’s one of the smartest things that
ever was said. Hollow ELM tree, eh? of course. Very hollow. Ha, ha, ha!’
Here a knock was heard at the room door.
‘That’s Tacker, I know,’ said Mrs Mould, ‘by the wheezing he makes. Who
that hears him now, would suppose he’d ever had wind enough to carry the
feathers on his head! Come in, Tacker.’
‘Beg your pardon, ma’am,’ said Tacker, looking in a little way. ‘I
thought our Governor was here.’
‘Well! so he is,’ cried Mould.
‘Oh! I didn’t see you, I’m sure,’ said Tacker, looking in a little
farther. ‘You wouldn’t be inclined to take a walking one of two, with
the plain wood and a tin plate, I suppose?’
‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr Mould, ‘much too common. Nothing to say to
it.’
‘I told ‘em it was precious low,’ observed Mr Tacker.
‘Tell ‘em to go somewhere else. We don’t do that style of business
here,’ said Mr Mould. ‘Like their impudence to propose it. Who is it?’
‘Why,’ returned Tacker, pausing, ‘that’s where it is, you see. It’s the
beadle’s son-in-law.’
‘The beadle’s son-in-law, eh?’ said Mould. ‘Well! I’ll do it if the
beadle follows in his cocked hat; not else. We carry it off that way, by
looking official, but it’ll be low enough, then. His cocked hat, mind!’
‘I’ll take care, sir,’ rejoined Tacker. ‘Oh! Mrs Gamp’s below, and wants
to speak to you.’
‘Tell Mrs Gamp to come upstairs,’ said Mould. ‘Now Mrs Gamp, what’s YOUR
news?’
The lady in question was by this time in the doorway, curtseying to
Mrs Mould. At the same moment a peculiar fragrance was borne upon the
breeze, as if a passing fairy had hiccoughed, and had previously been to
a wine-vaults.
Mrs Gamp made no response to Mr Mould, but curtseyed to Mrs Mould again,
and held up her hands and eyes, as in a devout thanksgiving that she
looked so well. She was neatly, but not gaudily attired, in the
weeds she had worn when Mr Pecksniff had the pleasure of making her
acquaintance; and was perhaps the turning of a scale more snuffy.
‘There are some happy creeturs,’ Mrs Gamp observed, ‘as time runs
back’ards with, and you are one, Mrs Mould; not that he need do nothing
except use you in his most owldacious way for years to come, I’m
sure; for young you are and will be. I says to Mrs Harris,’ Mrs Gamp
continued, ‘only t’other day; the last Monday evening fortnight as
ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs
Harris when she says to me, “Years and our trials, Mrs Gamp, sets marks
upon us all.”--“Say not the words, Mrs Harris, if you and me is to be
continual friends, for sech is not the case. Mrs Mould,” I says, making
so free, I will confess, as use the name,’ (she curtseyed here), ‘“is
one of them that goes agen the obserwation straight; and never, Mrs
Harris, whilst I’ve a drop of breath to draw, will I set by, and not
stand up, don’t think it.”--“I ast your pardon, ma’am,” says Mrs Harris,
“and I humbly grant your grace; for if ever a woman lived as would see
her feller creeturs into fits to serve her friends, well do I know that
woman’s name is Sairey Gamp.”’
At this point she was fain to stop for breath; and advantage may be
taken of the circumstance, to state that a fearful mystery surrounded
this lady of the name of Harris, whom no one in the circle of Mrs Gamp’s
acquaintance had ever seen; neither did any human being know her place
of residence, though Mrs Gamp appeared on her own showing to be in
constant communication with her. There were conflicting rumours on the
subject; but the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs
Gamp’s brain--as Messrs. Doe and Roe are fictions of the law--created
for the express purpose of holding visionary dialogues with her on all
manner of subjects, and invariably winding up with a compliment to the
excellence of her nature.
‘And likeways what a pleasure,’ said Mrs Gamp, turning with a tearful
smile towards the daughters, ‘to see them two young ladies as I know’d
afore a tooth in their pretty heads was cut, and have many a day
seen--ah, the sweet creeturs!--playing at berryins down in the shop, and
follerin’ the order-book to its long home in the iron safe! But that’s
all past and over, Mr Mould;’ as she thus got in a carefully regulated
routine to that gentleman, she shook her head waggishly; ‘That’s all
past and over now, sir, an’t it?’
‘Changes, Mrs Gamp, changes!’ returned the undertaker.
‘More changes too, to come, afore we’ve done with changes, sir,’ said
Mrs Gamp, nodding yet more waggishly than before. ‘Young ladies with
such faces thinks of something else besides berryins, don’t they, sir?’
‘I am sure I don’t know, Mrs Gamp,’ said Mould, with a chuckle--‘Not bad
in Mrs Gamp, my dear?’
‘Oh yes, you do know, sir!’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘and so does Mrs Mould,
your ‘ansome pardner too, sir; and so do I, although the blessing of a
daughter was deniged me; which, if we had had one, Gamp would certainly
have drunk its little shoes right off its feet, as with our precious boy
he did, and arterward send the child a errand to sell his wooden leg for
any money it would fetch as matches in the rough, and bring it home
in liquor; which was truly done beyond his years, for ev’ry individgle
penny that child lost at toss or buy for kidney ones; and come home
arterwards quite bold, to break the news, and offering to drown himself
if sech would be a satisfaction to his parents.--Oh yes, you do know,
sir,’ said Mrs Gamp, wiping her eye with her shawl, and resuming the
thread of her discourse. ‘There’s something besides births and berryins
in the newspapers, an’t there, Mr Mould?’
Mr Mould winked at Mrs Mould, whom he had by this time taken on his
knee, and said: ‘No doubt. A good deal more, Mrs Gamp. Upon my life, Mrs
Gamp is very far from bad, my dear!’
‘There’s marryings, an’t there, sir?’ said Mrs Gamp, while both the
daughters blushed and tittered. ‘Bless their precious hearts, and well
they knows it! Well you know’d it too, and well did Mrs Mould, when you
was at their time of life! But my opinion is, you’re all of one age now.
For as to you and Mrs Mould, sir, ever having grandchildren--’