Part 9 (1/2)

Besides Stripes, they keep a boy called Thomas or Tummus. Tummus works in the garden or about the pigsty and stable; Thomas wears a page's costume of eruptive b.u.t.tons.

When anybody calls, and Stripes is out of the way, Tummus flings himself like mad into Thomas's clothes, and comes out metamorphosed like Harlequin in the pantomime. To-day, as Mrs. P. was cutting the grapevine, as the young ladies were at the roller, down comes Tummus like a roaring whirlwind, with 'Missus, Missus, there's company coomin'!' Away skurry the young ladies from the roller, down comes Mrs.

P. from the old chair, off flies Tummus to change his clothes, and in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time Sir John Hawbuck, my Lady Hawbuck, and Master Hugh Hawbuck are introduced into the garden with brazen effrontery by Thomas, who says, 'Please Sir Jan and my Lady to walk this year way: I KNOW Missus is in the rose-garden.'

And there, sure enough, she was!

In a pretty little garden bonnet, with beautiful curling ringlets, with the smartest of ap.r.o.ns and the freshest of pearl-coloured gloves, this amazing woman was in the arms of her dearest Lady Hawbuck. 'Dearest Lady Hawbuck, how good of you! Always among my flowers! can't live away from them!'

'Sweets to the sweet! hum--a-ha--haw!' says Sir John Hawbuck, who piques himself on his gallantry, and says nothing without 'a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!'

'Whereth yaw pinnafaw?' cries Master Hugh. 'WE thaw you in it, over the wall, didn't we, Pa?'

'Hum--a-ha--a-haw!' burst out Sir John, dreadfully alarmed. 'Where's Ponto? Why wasn't he at Quarter Sessions? How are his birds this year, Mrs. Ponto--have those Carabas pheasants done any harm to your wheat?

a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!' and all this while he was making the most ferocious and desperate signals to his youthful heir.

'Well, she WATH in her pinnafaw, wathn't she, Ma?' says Hugh, quite unabashed; which question Lady Hawbuck turned away with a sudden query regarding her dear darling daughters, and the ENFANT TERRIBLE was removed by his father.

'I hope you weren't disturbed by the music?' Ponto says. 'My girls, you know, practise four hours a day, you know--must do it, you know--absolutely necessary. As for me, you know I'm an early man, and in my farm every morning at five--no, no laziness for ME.'

The facts are these. Ponto goes to sleep directly after dinner on entering the drawing-room, and wakes up when the ladies leave off practice at ten. From seven till ten, from ten till five, is a very fair allowance of slumber for a man who says he's NOT a lazy man. It is my private opinion that when Ponto retires to what is called his 'Study,'

he sleeps too. He locks himself up there daily two hours with the newspaper.

I saw the HAWBUCK scene out of the Study, which commands the garden.

It's a curious object, that Study. Ponto's library mostly consists of boots. He and Stripes have important interviews here of mornings, when the potatoes are discussed, or the fate of the calf ordained, or sentence pa.s.sed on the pig, &c.. All the Major's bills are docketed on the Study table and displayed like a lawyer's briefs. Here, too, lie displayed his hooks, knives, and other gardening irons, his whistles, and strings of spare b.u.t.tons. He has a drawer of endless brown paper for parcels, and another containing a prodigious and never-failing supply of string. What a man can want with so many gig-whips I can never conceive.

These, and fis.h.i.+ng-rods, and landing-nets, and spurs, and boot-trees, and b.a.l.l.s for horses, and surgical implements for the same, and favourite pots of s.h.i.+ny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes in the most elegant manner, and buckskin gloves stretched out on their trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; and the family medicine-chest, and in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the 'Study' but for that awful purpose)--all these, with 'Mogg's Road Book,' the GARDENERS'

CHRONICLE, and a backgammon-board, form the Major's library. Under the trophy there's a picture of Mrs. Ponto, in a light blue dress and train, and no waist, when she was first married; a fox's brush lies over the frame, and serves to keep the dust off that work of art.

'My library's small, says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, 'but well selected, my boy--well selected. I have been reading the ”History of England” all the morning.'

CHAPTER XXVII--A VISIT TO SOME COUNTRY Sn.o.bS

We had the fish, which, as the kind reader may remember, I had brought down in a delicate attention to Mrs. Ponto, to variegate the repast of next day; and cod and oyster-sauce, twice laid, salt cod and scolloped oysters, formed parts of the bill of fare until I began to fancy that the Ponto family, like our late revered monarch George II., had a fancy for stale fish. And about this time, the pig being consumed, we began upon a sheep.

But how shall I forget the solemn splendour of a second course, which was served up in great state by Stripes in a silver dish and cove; a napkin round his dirty thumbs; and consisted of a landrail, not much bigger than a corpulent sparrow.

'My love, will you take any game?' says Ponto, with prodigious gravity; and stuck his fork into that little mouthful of an island in the silver sea. Stripes, too, at intervals, dribbled out the Marsala with a solemnity which would have done honour to a Duke's butler. The Bamnecide's dinner to Shacabac was only one degree removed from these solemn banquets.

As there were plenty of pretty country places close by; a comfortable country town, with good houses of gentlefolks; a beautiful old parsonage, close to the church whither we went (and where the Carabas family have their ancestral carved and monumented Gothic pew), and every appearance of good society in the neighbourhood, I rather wondered we were not enlivened by the appearance of some of the neighbours at the Evergreens, and asked about them.

'We can't in our position of life--we can't well a.s.sociate with the attorney's family, as I leave you to suppose,' says Mrs. Ponto, confidentially. 'Of course not,' I answered, though I didn't know why.

'And the Doctor?' said I.

'A most excellent worthy creature,' says Mrs. P. saved Maria's life--really a learned man; but what can one do in one's position? One may ask one's medical man to one's table certainly: but his family, my dear Mr. Sn.o.b!'

'Half-a-dozen little gallipots,' interposed Miss Wirt, the governess: 'he, he, he!' and the young ladies laughed in chorus.

'We only live with the county families,' Miss Wirt (1) continued, tossing up her head. 'The Duke is abroad: we are at feud with the Carabases; the Ringwoods don't come down till Christmas: in fact, n.o.body's here till the hunting season--positively n.o.body.'