Page:A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc. George du Maurier, 1898.djvu/145

 faithful consort, who can only roar at home; and if said lion, such as he is, accepts said invitation, and allows his lioness to be passed over and ignored, even by the greatest lady in the land, it suits Mr. Punch's humour to get himself introduced to that lion, and after the usual compliments to hiss into his ear,

And he must be uncommon smart at repartee for an amateur tenor if he can parry such a home-thrust as that.

Mais, revenons à nos By the bye, what is the French for Spratts? Perhaps there are no such fish or people in that democratic country, so we will return instead to the trusty friends, who, thank Heaven! are to be found in all countries. In this country, alas! which is not democratic, trusty friends who are not asked to dine and dance with the Aristocracy, very seldom tolerate those who are. They say spiteful things calculated to take one down; and Mrs. Spratt did not like to be taken down. It was especially distasteful to her when she happened quite by accident to mention the dear Marchioness, and poor Lady Anna Maria with her rheumatics, or to bewail Lord George's unhappy mésalliance with an attorney's daughter, that these tried and trusty friends should yawn, or hum, or whistle out of tune, as they would invariably do on such occasions; moreover, their innocent prattle about the grand Old Masters (peace to whose ashes!) had begun very much to pall on Mrs. Spratt; and she had grown to dislike the cut of the trusty friends' clothes, and the way they wore their hair, and other mediæval ways they had, so that a coolness gradually made itself felt between them. At last they fell out altogether, sad to say, and parted. It happened thus:—

Jack Spratt and his wife had been driven on a drag to Hurlingham by a noble lord of their acquaintance. Mrs. Spratt had sat on the box-seat, and with the exception of the two grooms (and of her husband, who had been put inside), there had sat nobody behind her back of humbler rank than the younger son of an Earl. After a delightful afternoon, they were set down at their own door. There was to have been a dress evening with the trusty friends at Jack's house that night; and one of them, Peter Leonardo Pye, was to have read a series of original poems, entitled Dank Kisses from Mildewed Lips. Mrs. Spratt bade a regretful farewell to all the smart young men, and on entering her dwelling with a sigh, she found the trusty friends assembled in the hall. They were austerely pulling off their trousers, and revealing themselves in brand-new mediæval tights of purple silk, and short green doublets of a stuff they called "samite." At this sudden sight, Mrs. Spratts' dormant sense of humour was at last aroused, and she poured forth such peals upon peals of laughter, that these unhappy men were offended beyond all hopes of reconciliation, and dragging on their every-day reach-me-downs in great haste, they shook the dust off their feet on the door-step, and left that hospitable house, never to return there again!

This incident led to the first misunderstanding that had ever occurred between Jack Spratt and his wife. He upbraided her with the loss of his old friends; whereupon she told him that it was no loss at all, and that they were a "duffing lot"—an expression she must have heard at Hurlingham, or on the baronial box-seat.

And Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt, who had been so closely united in thought, feeling, and sympathy, or, rather, who had always been as perfect complements to each other, each completing the other's being through harmonious dissimilarity of taste as thoroughly as did their thrice happy namesakes in the undying nursery rhyme, and like them reaching a common goal by apparently divergent ways, were no longer one and indivisible evermore.

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