Our Mutual Friend
of the murdered man who had come from afar to be her husband. She shrank
from this ghostly surprise, and felt quite frightened as she rolled and
tied it up again. Peeping about here and there, she came upon a print, a
graceful head of a pretty woman, elegantly framed, hanging in the corner
by the easy chair. ‘Oh, indeed, sir!’ said Bella, after stopping to
ruminate before it. ‘Oh, indeed, sir! I fancy I can guess whom you
think THAT’S like. But I’ll tell you what it’s much more like—your
impudence!’ Having said which she decamped: not solely because she was
offended, but because there was nothing else to look at.
‘Now, Ma,’ said Bella, reappearing in the kitchen with some remains of a
blush, ‘you and Lavvy think magnificent me fit for nothing, but I intend
to prove the contrary. I mean to be Cook today.’
‘Hold!’ rejoined her majestic mother. ‘I cannot permit it. Cook, in that
dress!’
‘As for my dress, Ma,’ returned Bella, merrily searching in a
dresser-drawer, ‘I mean to apron it and towel it all over the front; and
as to permission, I mean to do without.’
‘YOU cook?’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘YOU, who never cooked when you were at
home?’
‘Yes, Ma,’ returned Bella; ‘that is precisely the state of the case.’
She girded herself with a white apron, and busily with knots and pins
contrived a bib to it, coming close and tight under her chin, as if it
had caught her round the neck to kiss her. Over this bib her dimples
looked delightful, and under it her pretty figure not less so. ‘Now,
Ma,’ said Bella, pushing back her hair from her temples with both hands,
‘what’s first?’
‘First,’ returned Mrs Wilfer solemnly, ‘if you persist in what I cannot
but regard as conduct utterly incompatible with the equipage in which
you arrived—’
(‘Which I do, Ma.’)
‘First, then, you put the fowls down to the fire.’
‘To—be—sure!’ cried Bella; ‘and flour them, and twirl them round, and
there they go!’ sending them spinning at a great rate. ‘What’s next,
Ma?’
‘Next,’ said Mrs Wilfer with a wave of her gloves, expressive of
abdication under protest from the culinary throne, ‘I would recommend
examination of the bacon in the saucepan on the fire, and also of the
potatoes by the application of a fork. Preparation of the greens will
further become necessary if you persist in this unseemly demeanour.’
‘As of course I do, Ma.’
Persisting, Bella gave her attention to one thing and forgot the
other, and gave her attention to the other and forgot the third, and
remembering the third was distracted by the fourth, and made amends
whenever she went wrong by giving the unfortunate fowls an extra spin,
which made their chance of ever getting cooked exceedingly doubtful. But
it was pleasant cookery too. Meantime Miss Lavinia, oscillating between
the kitchen and the opposite room, prepared the dining-table in the
latter chamber. This office she (always doing her household spiriting
with unwillingness) performed in a startling series of whisks and bumps;
laying the table-cloth as if she were raising the wind, putting down
the glasses and salt-cellars as if she were knocking at the door, and
clashing the knives and forks in a skirmishing manner suggestive of
hand-to-hand conflict.
‘Look at Ma,’ whispered Lavinia to Bella when this was done, and they
stood over the roasting fowls. ‘If one was the most dutiful child in
existence (of course on the whole one hopes one is), isn’t she enough
to make one want to poke her with something wooden, sitting there bolt
upright in a corner?’
‘Only suppose,’ returned Bella, ‘that poor Pa was to sit bolt upright in
another corner.’
‘My dear, he couldn’t do it,’ said Lavvy. ‘Pa would loll directly. But
indeed I do not believe there ever was any human creature who could keep
so bolt upright as Ma, ‘or put such an amount of aggravation into one
back! What’s the matter, Ma? Ain’t you well, Ma?’
‘Doubtless I am very well,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, turning her eyes upon
her youngest born, with scornful fortitude. ‘What should be the matter
with Me?’
‘You don’t seem very brisk, Ma,’ retorted Lavvy the bold.
‘Brisk?’ repeated her parent, ‘Brisk? Whence the low expression,
Lavinia? If I am uncomplaining, if I am silently contented with my lot,
let that suffice for my family.’
‘Well, Ma,’ returned Lavvy, ‘since you will force it out of me, I must
respectfully take leave to say that your family are no doubt under
the greatest obligations to you for having an annual toothache on your
wedding day, and that it’s very disinterested in you, and an immense
blessing to them. Still, on the whole, it is possible to be too boastful
even of that boon.’
‘You incarnation of sauciness,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘do you speak like that
to me? On this day, of all days in the year? Pray do you know what
would have become of you, if I had not bestowed my hand upon R. W., your
father, on this day?’
‘No, Ma,’ replied Lavvy, ‘I really do not; and, with the greatest
respect for your abilities and information, I very much doubt if you do
either.’
Whether or no the sharp vigour of this sally on a weak point of Mrs
Wilfer’s entrenchments might have routed that heroine for the time, is
rendered uncertain by the arrival of a flag of truce in the person of
Mr George Sampson: bidden to the feast as a friend of the family, whose
affections were now understood to be in course of transference from
Bella to Lavinia, and whom Lavinia kept—possibly in remembrance of his
bad taste in having overlooked her in the first instance—under a course
of stinging discipline.
‘I congratulate you, Mrs Wilfer,’ said Mr George Sampson, who had
meditated this neat address while coming along, ‘on the day.’ Mrs Wilfer
thanked him with a magnanimous sigh, and again became an unresisting
prey to that inscrutable toothache.
‘I am surprised,’ said Mr Sampson feebly, ‘that Miss Bella condescends
to cook.’
Here Miss Lavinia descended on the ill-starred young gentleman with a
crushing supposition that at all events it was no business of his. This
disposed of Mr Sampson in a melancholy retirement of spirit, until the
cherub arrived, whose amazement at the lovely woman’s occupation was
great.
However, she persisted in dishing the dinner as well as cooking it, and
then sat down, bibless and apronless, to partake of it as an illustrious
guest: Mrs Wilfer first responding to her husband’s cheerful ‘For what
we are about to receive—’ with a sepulchral Amen, calculated to cast a
damp upon the stoutest appetite.
‘But what,’ said Bella, as she watched the carving of the fowls, ‘makes
them pink inside, I wonder, Pa! Is it the breed?’
‘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