Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/304

 31, 1860.] “Thank you,” said Evan, smiling, and holding out his plate.

“Yes, yes; I understand you,” continued Mr. Raikes. “We eat, and eke we swear. We’ll be avenged for this. In the interim let sweet fancy beguile us!”

Before helping himself, a thought appeared to strike him. He got up hastily, and summoned Mark afresh.

“R-r-r-r—a—what are the wines here, waiter?” he demanded to know.

It was a final effort at dignity and rejection of the status to which, as he presumed, the sight of a gentleman, or the son of one, pasturing on plain cheese, degraded him. It was also Jack’s way of repelling the tone of insolent superiority in the bearing of the three young cricketers.

“What are the wines in this establishment?” he repeated peremptorily, for Mark stood smoothing his mouth, as if he would have enjoyed the liberty of a grin.

“Port, sir,—sherry.”

“Ah—the old story,” returned Mr. Raikes. “Dear! dear! dear!”

“Perhaps, sir,” insinuated Mark, “you mean foreign wines?”

“None of your infamous home-concoctions, waiter. Port! I believe there’s no Port in the country, except in half-a-dozen private cellars—of which I know three. I do mean foreign wines.”

Now Mark had served in a good family, and in a London hotel. He cleared his throat, and mutely begging the attention of the chairman, thus volubly started: “Foreign wines, sir, yes! Rhine wines! we have Rudesham; we have Maregbrun; we have Steenbug—Joehannisbug—Libefromil—Asmyhaus, and several others. Claret!—we have Lafitte; we have Margaw; we have Rose;—’Fitte—Margaw—Rose—Julia—Bodo. At your disposal, sir.”

Jack, with a fiery face, blinked wildly under the torrent of vintages.

Evan answered his plaintive look: “I shall drink ale.”

“Then I suppose I must do the same,” said Jack, with a miserable sense of defeat and provoked humiliation. “Thank you, waiter, it goes better with cheese. A pint of ale.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mark, scorning to stop and enjoy his victory.

Heaving a sad “Heigho!” and not daring to glance at the buzzing company, Mr. Raikes cut a huge bit of crust off the loaf, and was preparing to encounter it. The melancholy voracity in his aspect was changed in a minute to surprise, for the chairman had started out of a fit of compressed merriment to arrest his hand.

“Let me offer you vengeance on the spot, sir.”

“How?” cried Jack, angrily; “enigmas?”

The chairman entreated Evan to desist from the cheese; and, pulling out his watch, thundered: “Time!”

The company generally jumped on their legs; and, in the midst of a hum of talk and laughter, the chairman informed Evan and Jack, that he invited them cordially to a supper upstairs, and would be pleased if they would partake of it, and in a great rage if they would not.

“Sir,” said Jack, by this time quite recovered, “the alternative decides me. The alternative is one I should so deeply grieve to witness, that, in short, I—a—give in my personal adhesion, with thanks.”

“You are not accustomed to this poor fare, sir,” remarked the chairman.”

“You have aptly divined the fact, sir,sir,” [sic] said Jack; “nor I, nor this, my friend. The truth is, that where cometh cheese, and nothing precedeth it, there is, the—the cultivated intelligence, the sense of a hiatus—a sort of vocative ‘caret,’ as we used to say at school—which may promote digestion, but totally at the expense of satisfaction. Man, by such means, is sunk below the level of the ruminating animal. He cheweth—”

The stentorian announcement of supper interrupted Mr. Raikes; and the latter gentleman, to whom glibness stood for greatness of manner, very well content with the effect he conceived he had produced on the company, set about persuading Evan to join the feast. For several reasons, Evan would have preferred to avoid it. He was wretched, inclined to enjoy a fit of youthful misanthropy; Jack’s dramatic impersonation of the lord had disgusted him; and bread and cheese symbolled his condition. The chairman, catching indications of reluctance, stooped forward, and said: “Sir! must I put it as a positive favour?”

“Pray, do not,” replied Evan, and relinquished the table with a bow.

The door was open, and the company of jolly yeomen, tradesmen, farmers, and the like, had become intent on observing all the ceremonies of precedence: not one would broaden his back on the other: and there was bowing, and scraping, and grimacing, till Farmer Broadmead was hailed aloud, and the old boy stepped forth, and was summarily pushed through: the chairman calling from the rear, “Hulloa! no names to-night!” to which was answered lustily: “All right, Mr. Tom!” and the speaker was reproved with, “There you go! at it again!” and out and up they hustled.

The chairman said quietly to Evan, as they were ascending the stairs: “We don’t have names to-night: may as well drop titles.” Which presented no peculiar meaning to Evan’s mind, and he smiled the usual smile.

To Jack, at the door of the supper-room, the chairman repeated the same; and Jack, with extreme affability and alacrity of abnegation, rejoined, “Oh, certainly!”

No wonder that he rubbed his hands with more delight than aristocrats and people with gentlemanly connections are in the habit of betraying at the prospect of refection, for the release from bread and cheese was rendered overpoweringly glorious, in his eyes, by the bountiful contrast exhibited on the board before him.

proclaim that yon ribs of beef, and yonder ruddy Britons have met, is to furnish matter for an hour’s comfortable meditation.