CHAPTER XXII

A LOQUACIOUS VISITOR

There is an amusing sketch in the first volume of _Our Village_ entitled “The Talking Lady,” from which we should like to quote a few passages. Its scene is evidently laid in the Mitfords’ common sitting-room, whose two windows look both front and back, and in which we have sat many a time.

After alluding to a play written by Ben Jonson called _The Silent Woman_ Miss Mitford remarks:—

“If the learned dramatist had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have given us a pendant to his picture in the _Talking Lady_. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now. I am too much stunned; too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days’ hard listening—four snowy, sleety, rainy days, all of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out; four days chained by ‘sad civility’ to that fireside once so quiet, and again—cheering thought!—again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visitor’s incessant tongue shall have died away.

“The visitor in question is a very excellent and respectable elderly lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her dancing master, and a face exceedingly well preserved.... She took us in the way from London to the West of England, and being, as she wrote, ‘not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself’ (_Ours!_ as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!) ‘and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house, her countryman.’ Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago ... and ever since has she detailed with a minuteness ... which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing.... It should seem to listen to her as if at some time of her life she must have listened herself; and yet her countryman declares ... no such event has occurred.

“... Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption.... Walking exhausts the breath that might be better employed.... Allude to some anecdote of the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel passages as are to be found in an air with variations.... The very weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of hard frosts and long droughts and high winds and terrible storms, with all the evils that followed in their train and all the personal events connected with them.... By this time it rains, and she sits down to a pathetic see-saw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith’s having set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady Green’s new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the coach.

[Illustration: WHERE THE CURATE LODGED]

“With all this intolerable prosing she is actually reckoned a pleasant woman! Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town where she usually resides is very large.... Doubtless her associates deserve the old French compliment, ‘_Ils ont tous un grand talent pour le silence._‘... It is the _tête-à-tête_ that kills, or the small fireside circle of three or four where only one can speak and all the rest must seem to listen—_seem!_ did I say?—must listen in good earnest.... She has the eye of a hawk, and detects a wandering glance, an incipient yawn, the slightest movement of impatience. The very needle must be quiet.... I wonder if she had married how many husbands she would have talked to death.... Since the decease of her last nephew she attempted to form an establishment with a widow lady for the sake, as they both said, of the comfort of society. But—strange miscalculation! she was a talker too! They parted in a week.

“... And we have also parted. I am just returned from escorting her to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward; and I have still the murmur of her adieux resounding in my ears like the indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see how almost simultaneously these mournful adieux shaded into cheerful salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Poor souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her or the fat lady, his mamma, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner who, after some dispute, was at length won to admit her dressing-box—little do they suspect what is to befall them. Two hundred miles! And she never sleeps in a carriage! Well, patience be with them ... and to her all happiness.”

In one of her stories entitled “Whitsun Eve,” Mary Mitford describes her own garden and its picturesque surroundings.

“The pride of my heart,” she writes, “and the delight of my eyes is my garden. Our house, which is in dimensions very much like a bird-cage, and might with almost equal convenience be laid on a shelf, or hung up in a tree, would be utterly unbearable in warm weather were it not that we have a retreat out of doors—and a very pleasant retreat it is....

“Fancy a small plot of ground with a pretty, low, irregular cottage at one end; a large granary, divided from the dwelling by a little court running along one side, and a long thatched shed, open towards the garden, and supported by wooden pillars on the other. The bottom is bounded, half by an old wall and half by an old paling, over which we see a pretty distance of woody hills. The house, granary, wall and palings are covered with vines, cherry trees, roses, honeysuckles and jessamines, with great clusters of tall hollyhocks running up between them.... This is my garden; and the long pillared shed, the sort of rustic arcade, which runs along one side, parted from the flower-beds by a row of rich geraniums, is our out-of-door drawing-room.

[Illustration: IN THE CURATE’S PARLOUR]

“I know nothing so pleasant as to sit there on a summer afternoon, with the western sun flickering through a great elder tree, and lighting up one gay parterre, where flowers and flowering shrubs are set as thick as grass in a field ... where we may guess that there is such a thing as mould but never see it. I know nothing so pleasant as to sit in the shade of that dark bower ... now catching a glimpse of the little birds as they fly rapidly in and out of their nests ... now tracing the gay gambles of the common butterflies as they sport around the dahlias; now watching that rarer moth which the country people, fertile in pretty names, call the bee-bird....

“What a contrast from the quiet garden to the lively street! Saturday night is always a time of stir and bustle in our village, and this is Whitsun Eve, the pleasantest Saturday of all the year, when London journeymen and servant lads and lasses snatch a short holiday to visit their families.... This village of ours is swarming to-night like a hive of bees.... I must try to give some notion of the various figures.

“First there is a group suited to Teniers, a cluster of out-of-door customers of the ‘Rose,’ old benchers of the inn, who sit round a table smoking and drinking in high solemnity to the sound of Timothy’s fiddle. Next a mass of eager boys, the combatants of Monday, who are surrounding the shoemaker’s shop where an invisible hole in their [cricket] ball is mending by Master Kemp himself.... Farther down the street is the pretty black-eyed girl, Sally Wheeler, come home for a day’s holiday from B——, escorted by a tall footman in a dashing livery, whom she is trying to curtsy off before her deaf grandmother sees him. I wonder whether she will succeed?”

In another early sketch of _Our Village_ called “Dr. Tubb,” Mary Mitford writes:—

“On taking possession of our present abode about four years ago we found our garden and all the gardens of the straggling village street in which it is situated filled, peopled, infested by a beautiful flower which grew in such profusion and was so difficult to keep under that (poor pretty thing!) instead of being admired and cherished ... it was cut down, pulled up and hoed out like a weed. I do not know the name of this elegant plant, nor have I met with anyone who does; we call it the Spicer, after an old naval officer who once inhabited the white house just above, and, according to tradition, first brought the seed from foreign parts....

I never saw anything prettier than a whole bed of these spicers which had clothed the top of a large heap of earth belonging to our little mason by the roadside; [they] grew as thick and close as grass in a meadow, covered with delicate red and white blossoms like a fairy orchard.”

It seems to us that this flower may have been the American Balsam, which grows as rapidly as any weed, and which we happened actually to see, waving its pretty red and white blossoms in Miss Mitford’s garden some years ago. This was long after her death, and when the cottage and garden had fallen into humbler hands.

“I never passed the spicers,” remarks Mary, “without stopping to look at them, and I was one day half shocked to see a man, his pockets stuffed with the plants, two large bundles under each arm, and still tugging away root and branch.... This devastation did not, however, proceed from disrespect, the spicer gatherer being engaged in sniffing with visible satisfaction the leaves and stalks. ‘It has a fine venomous smell,’ quoth he in soliloquy, ‘and will certainly when stilled be good for something or other.’ This was my first sight of Dr. Tubb ... a quack of the highest and most extended reputation, inventor and compounder of medicines, bleeder, shaver and physicker of man and beast....

“We have frequently met since, and are now well acquainted, although the worthy experimentalist considers me as a rival practitioner, an interloper, and hates me accordingly. He has very little cause, [for] my quackery, being mostly of the cautious, preventive, safeguard, commonsense order, stands no chance against the boldness and decision of his all-promising ignorance. He says, Do! I say, Do not! He deals in _stimuli_, I in sedatives; I give medicine, he gives cordial waters. Alack! alack! when could a dose of rhubarb, even although reinforced by a dole of good broth, compete with a draught of peppermint and a licensed dram? No! no! Dr. Tubb has no cause to fear my practice.”