Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/307

 294 “Am I in your way, sir?” asked the other, hardening his under lip.

“Well, I did find it difficult, when I was a boy, to cross the Ass’s Bridge!” retorted Jack—and there was laughter.

The chairman’s neighbour, Drummond, whispered him: “Laxley will get up a row with that fellow.”

“It’s young Jocelyn egging him on,” said the chairman.

“Um!” added Drummond: “it’s the friend of that talkative rascal that’s dangerous, if it comes to anything.”

Mr. Raikes perceived that his host desired him to conclude. So, lifting his voice and swinging his arm, he ended: “Allow me to propose to you the Fly in Amber. In other words, our excellent host embalmed in brilliant ale! Drink him! and so let him live in our memories for ever!”

Mr. Raikes sat down very well contented with himself, very little comprehended, and applauded loudly.

“The Flyin’ Number!” echoed farmer Broadmead, confidently and with clamour; adding to a friend, when both had drunk the toast to the dregs, “But what number that be, or how many ’tis of ’em, dishes me! But that’s ne'ther here nor there.”

The chairman and host of the evening stood up to reply, welcomed by thunders, and “There ye be, Mr. Tom! glad I lives to see ye!” and “No names!” and “Long life to him!”

This having subsided, the chairman spoke, first nodding.

“You don’t want many words, and if you do, you won’t get ’em from me.”

Cries of “Got something better!” took up the blunt address.

“You’ve been true to it, most of you. I like men not to forget a custom.”

“Good reason so to be,” and “A jolly good custom,” replied to both sentences.

“As to the beef, I hope you didn’t find it tough: as to the ale—I know all about that!”

“Aha! good!” rang the verdict.

“All I can say is, that this day next year it will be on the table, and I hope that every one of you will meet Tom—will meet me here punctually. I’m not a Parliament man, so that’ll do—”

The chairman’s breach of his own rules drowned the termination of his speech in an uproar.

Re-seating himself, he lifted his glass, and proposed: “The Antediluvians!”

Farmer Broadmead echoed: “The Antediloovians!” appending, as a private sentiment, “And dam rum chaps they were!”

The Antediluvians, undoubtedly the toast of the evening, were enthusiastically drunk, and in an ale of treble brew.

When they had quite gone down, Mr. Raikes ventured to ask for the reason of their receiving such honour from a posterity they had so little to do with. He put the question mildly, but was impetuously snapped at by the chairman.

“You respect men for their luck, sir, don’t you? Don’t be a hypocrite, and say you don’t—you do. Very well: so do I. That’s why I drink ‘The Antediluvians! ”

“Our worthy host here” (Drummond, gravely smiling, undertook to elucidate the case) “has a theory that the constitutions of the Postdiluvians have been deranged, and their lives shortened, by the miasmas of the Deluge. I believe he carries it so far as to say that Noah, in the light of a progenitor, is inferior to Adam, owing to the shaking he had to endure in the ark, and which he conceives to have damaged the patriarch and the nervous systems of his sons. It’s a theory, you know.”

“They lived close on a thousand years, hale, hearty—and no water!” said the chairman.

“Well!” exclaimed one, some way down the table, a young farmer, red as a cock’s comb: “no fools they, eh, master? Where there’s ale, would you drink water, my hearty?” and back he leaned to enjoy the tribute to his wit; a wit not remarkable, but nevertheless sufficient in the noise it created to excite the envy of Mr. John Raikes, who, inveterately silly when not engaged in a contest, now began to play on the names of the sons of Noah.

The chairman lanced a keen light at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

“Ought to have excused this humble stuff to you, sir,” he remarked. “It’s the custom. We drink ale to-night: any other night happy to offer you your choice, sir—Johannisberg, Rudesheim, Steenberg, Libefreemilk, Asmannshauser, Lafitte, La Rose, Margaux, Bordeaux: Clarets, Rhine wines, Burgundies—drinks that men of your station are more used to.”

Mr. Raikes stammered: “Thank you, thank you; ale will do, sir—an excellent ale!”

But before long the chairman had again to call two parties to order. Mr. Raikes was engaged in a direct controversy with his enemy. In that young gentleman he had recognised one of a station above his own—even what it was in the palmy days of bank-notes and naughty suppers; and he did not intend to allow it. On the other hand, Laxley had begun to look at him very distantly over the lordly bridge of his nose. To Mr. Raikes, Laxley was a puppy: to Laxley, Mr. Raikes was a snob. The antagonism, therefore, was natural: ale did but put the match to the magazine. But previous to an explosion, Laxley, who had observed Evan’s disgust at Jack’s exhibition of himself, and had been led to think, by his conduct and clothes in conjunction, that Evan was his own equal; a gentleman condescending to the society of a low-born acquaintance; had sought with sundry propitiations—calm, intelligent glances, light shrugs, and such like—to divide Evan from Jack. He did this, doubtless, because he partly sympathised with Evan, and to assure him that he took a separate view of him. Probably Evan was already offended, or he held to Jack, as a comrade should, or else it was that Tailordom bellowed in his ears, every fresh minute: “Nothing assume!” I incline to think that the more ale he drank the fiercer rebel he grew against conventional ideas of rank, and those class-barriers which we scorn so vehemently when we find ourselves kicking at them. Whatsoever the reason that prompted him, he did not respond to Laxley’s advances;