CHAPTER XXXIII. A FRIGHTFUL DEBATE
Pushing through a swarm into the cot, Fleetwood saw Carinthia on a knee beside a girl’s lap, where the stripped child lay. Its mother held a basin for the dabbing at raw red spots.
A sting of pain touched the memory of its fright, and brought further screams, then the sobs. Carinthia hummed a Styrian cradle-song as the wailing lulled.
She glanced up; she said to the earl: ‘The bite was deep; it was in the blood. We may have time. Get me an interpreter. I must ask the mother. I know not many words.’
‘What now?’ said he, at the looming of new vexations.
‘We have no choice. Has a man gone? Dr. Griffiths would hurry fast. An hour may be too late. The poison travels: Father advised it:—Fifty years for one brave minute! This child should be helped to live.’
‘We ‘ll do our best. Why an interpreter?’
‘A poker in the fire. The interpreter—whether the mother will bear to have it done.’
‘Burn, do you mean?’
‘It should be burnt.’
‘Not by you?’
‘Quick! Quick!’
‘But will you—could you? No, I say!’
‘If there is no one else.’
‘You forget your own child.’
‘He is near the end of his mother.’
‘The doctor will soon arrive.’
‘The poison travels. It cannot be overtaken unless we start nearly equal, father said.’
‘Work like that wants an experienced hand.’
‘A steady one. I would not quake—not tremble.’
‘I cannot permit it.’
‘Mr. Wythan would know!—he would know!
‘Do you hear, Lady Fleetwood—the dog may not be mad!’
‘Signs! He ran heavy, he foamed.’
‘Foam ‘s no sign.’
‘Go; order to me a speaker of English and Welsh.’
The earl spun round, sensible of the novelty of his being commanded, and submitting; but no sooner had he turned than he fell into her view of the urgency, and he went, much like the boy we see at school, with a strong hand on his collar running him in.
Madge entered, and said: ‘Mr. Woodseer has seen baby and Martha and the donkey all safe.’
‘He is kind,’ said Carinthia. ‘Do we right to bathe the wound? It seems right to wash it. Little things that seem right may be exactly wrong after all, when we are ignorant. I know burning the wound is right.’
Madge asked: ‘But, my lady, who is to do it?’
‘You would do it, dear, if I shrank,’ her mistress replied.
‘Oh, my lady, I don’t know, I can’t say. Burning a child! And there’s our baby.’
‘He has had me nearly his time.’
‘Oh, my dear lady! Would the mother consent?’
‘My Madge! I have so few of their words yet. You would hold the child to save it from a dreadful end.’
‘God help me, my lady—I would, as long as I live I will.... Oh! poor infant, we do need our courage now.’
Seeing that her mistress had not a tear or a tremor, the girl blinked and schooled her quailing heart, still under the wicked hope that the mother would not consent; in a wonderment at this lady, who was womanly, and who could hold the red iron at living flesh, to save the poor infant from a dreadful end. Her flow of love to this dear lady felt the slicing of a cut; was half revulsion, half worship; uttermost worship in estrangement, with the further throbbing of her pulses.
The cottage door was pushed open for Lord Fleetwood and Howell Edwards, whom his master had prepared to stand against immediate operations. A mounted messenger had been despatched. But it was true, the doctor might not be at home. Assuming it to be a bite of rabies, minutes lost meant the terrible: Edwards bowed his head to that. On the other hand, he foresaw the closest of personal reasons for hesitating to be in agreement with the lady wholly. The countess was not so much a persuasive lady as she was, in her breath and gaze, a sweeping and a wafting power. After a short argument, he had the sense of hanging like a bank detached to fatality of motion by the crack of a landslip, and that he would speedily be on his manhood to volunteer for the terrible work.
He addressed the mother. Her eyes whitened from their red at his first word of laying hot iron on the child: she ran out with the wild woman’s howl to her neighbours.
‘Poor mother!’ Carinthia sighed. ‘It may last a year in the child’s body, and one day he shudders at water. Father saw a bitten man die. I could fear death with the thought of that poison in me. I pray Dr. Griffiths may come.’
Fleetwood shuffled a step. ‘He will come, he will come.’
The mother and some women now packed the room.
A gabble arose between them and Edwards. They fired sharp snatches of speech, and they darted looks at the lady and her lord.
‘They do not know!’ said Carinthia.
Gower brought her news that the dog had been killed; Martha and her precious burden were outside, a mob of men, too. He was not alarmed; but she went to the door and took her babe in her arms, and when the women observed the lady holding her own little one, their looks were softened. At a hint of explanation from Edwards, the guttural gabble rattled up to the shrill vowels.
Fleetwood’s endurance broke short. The packed small room, the caged-monkey lingo, the wailful child, and the past and apprehended debate upon the burning of flesh, composed an intolerable torture. He said to Edwards: ‘Go to the men; settle it with them. We have to follow that man Wythan; no peace otherwise. Tell the men the body of the dog must be secured for analysis. Mad or not, it’s the same. These Welsh mothers and grandmothers won’t allow cautery at any price. Hark at them!’
He turned to Carinthia: ‘Your ladyship will let Mr. Edwards or Mr. Woodseer conduct you to the house where you are residing. You don’t know these excitable people. I wish you to leave.’
She replied softly: ‘I stay for the doctor’s coming.’
‘Impossible for me to wait, and I can’t permit you to be here.’
‘It is life and death, and I must not be commanded.’
‘You may be proposing gratuitous agony.’
‘I would do it to my own child.’
The earl attacked Gower: ‘Add your voice to persuade Lady Fleetwood.’
Gower said: ‘What if I think with Lady Fleetwood?’
‘You would see her do it?’
‘Do it myself, if there was no one else’
‘This dog-all of you have gone mad,’ the earl cried.
‘Griffiths may keep his head; it’s the only chance. Take my word, these Welshwomen just listen to them won’t have it. You ‘ll find yourself in a nest of Furies. It may be right to do, it’s folly to propose it, madness to attempt it. And I shall be bitten if I stop here a minute longer; I’m gone; I can neither command nor influence. I should have thought Gower Woodseer would have kept his wits.’
Fleetwood’s look fell on Madge amid the group. Gower’s perception of her mistress through the girl’s devotion to her moved him. He took Madge by the hand, and the sensation came that it was the next thing to pressing his wife’s. ‘You’re a loyal girl. You have a mistress it ‘s an honour to serve. You bind me. By the way, Ines shall run down for a minute before I go.’
‘Let him stay where he is,’ Madge said, having bobbed her curtsey.
‘Oh, if he’s not to get a welcome!’ said the earl; and he could now fix a steadier look on his countess, who would have animated him with either a hostile face or a tender. She had no expression of a feeling. He bent to her formally.
Carinthia’s words were: ‘Adieu, my lord.’
‘I have only to say, that Esslemont is ready to receive you,’ he remarked, bowed more curtly, and walked out…
Gower followed him. They might as well have been silent, for any effect from what was uttered between them. They spoke opinions held by each of them—adverse mainly; speaking for no other purpose than to hold their positions.
‘Oh, she has courage, no doubt; no one doubted it,’ Fleetwood said, out of all relation to the foregoing.
Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting in him.
Had that been done, even to the hint of it, instead of the lordly indifference shown, Gower might have ventured on a suggestion, that the priceless woman he could call wife was fast slipping away from him and withering in her allegiance. He did allude to his personal sentiment. ‘One takes aim at Philosophy; Lady Fleetwood pulls us up to pay tribute to our debts.’ But this was vague, and his hearer needed a present thunder and lightning to shake and pierce him.
‘I pledged myself to that yacht,’ said Fleetwood, by way of reply, ‘or you and I would tramp it, as we did once-jolly old days! I shall have you in mind. Now turn back. Do the best you can.’
They parted midway up the street, Gower bearing away a sharp contrast of the earl and his countess; for, until their senses are dulled, impressionable young men, however precociously philosophical, are mastered by appearances; and they have to reflect under new lights before vision of the linked eye and mind is given them.
Fleetwood jumped into his carriage and ordered the coachman to drive smartly. He could not have admitted the feeling small; he felt the having been diminished, and his requiring a rapid transportation from these parts for him to regain his proper stature. Had he misconducted himself at the moment of danger? It is a ghastly thought, that the craven impulse may overcome us. But no, he could reassure his repute for manliness. He had done as much as a man could do in such a situation.
At the same time, he had done less than the woman.
Needed she to have gone so far? Why precipitate herself into the jaws of the beast?
Now she, proposes to burn the child’s wound. And she will do it if they let her. One, sees her at the work,—pale, flinty; no faces; trebly the terrific woman in her mild way of doing the work. All because her old father recommended it. Because she thinks it a duty, we will say; that is juster. This young woman is a very sword in the hand of her idea of duty. She can be feminine, too,—there is one who knows. She can be particularly distant, too. If in timidity, she has a modest view of herself—or an enormous conception of the magi that married her. Will she take the world’s polish a little?
Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes…
But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort and pass it. As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of them, if it was not for their union. She wrestled with him where the darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of the netherworld. She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital heat, to bear unwithering beside her the test of light. They flew, they chased, battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the count of their deeds, compared them,—and name the one crushed! It was the one weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own disgust, by his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the woman’s frame would ‘take polish a little.’
Why should it be a contention between them? For this reason: he was reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire without respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he reverenced, he worshipped. Therefore she had him at her feet. At the feet of any woman, except for the trifling object! But at the feet of ‘It is my husband!’ That would be a reversal of things.
Are not things reversed when the name Carinthia sounds in the thought of him who laughed at the name not less angelically martial than Feltre’s adored silver trumpets of his Papal procession; sweeter of the new morning for the husband of the woman; if he will but consent to the worshipper’s posture? Yes, and when Gower Woodseer’s ‘Malady of the Wealthy,’ as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling world upon the favoured of Fortune’s habits and tastes, promises to quit its fell clutch on him?
Another voice in the young nobleman cried: Pooh, dolt and dupe! and surrounded her for half a league with reek of burnt flesh and shrieks of a tortured child; giving her the aspect of a sister of the Parcw. But it was not the ascendant’ voice. It growled underneath, much like the deadly beast at Carinthia’s gown while she stood:—an image of her to dominate the princeliest of men.
The princeliest must have won his title to the place before he can yield other than complimentary station to a woman without violation of his dignity; and vast wealth is not the title; worldly honours are not; deeds only are the title. Fleetwood consented to tell himself that he had not yet performed the deeds.
Therefore, for him to be dominated was to be obscured, eclipsed. A man may outrun us; it is the fortune of war. Eclipsed behind the skirts of a woman waving her upraised hands, with, ‘Back, pray!’—no, that ignominy is too horribly abominable! Be sure, the situation will certainly recur in some form; will constantly recur. She will usurp the lead; she will play the man.
Let matters go on as they are. We know our personal worth.
Arrived at this point in the perpetual round of the conflict Carinthia had implanted, Fleetwood entered anew the ranks of the ordinary men of wealth and a coronet, and he hugged himself. He enjoyed repose; knowing it might be but a truce. Matters might go on as they were. Still, he wished her away from those Wythans, residing at Esslemont. There she might come eventually to a better knowledge of his personal worth:—‘the gold mine we carry in our bosoms till it is threshed out of us in sweat,’ that fellow Gower Woodseex says; adding, that we are the richer for not exploring it. Philosophical cynicism is inconclusive. Fleetwood knew his large capacities; he had proved them and could again. In case a certain half foreseen calamity should happen:—imagine it a fact, imagine him seized, besides admiring her character, with a taste for her person! Why, then, he would have to impress his own mysteriously deep character on her portion of understanding. The battle for domination would then begin.
Anticipation of the possibility of it hewed division between the young man’s pride of being and his warmer feelings. Had he been free of the dread of subjection, he would have sunk to kiss the feet of the statuesque young woman, arms in air, firm-fronted over the hideous death that tore at her skirts.
CHAPTER XXXIV. A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE COUNTESS OF FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT
A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive her, autocratically concealed her lord’s impatience to have her there; and by the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were marked, as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady would find preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered mother’s mind on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the father’s hatred, second to his hatred of the mother. But the mother could defend herself, the child was prey the child of a detested wife was heir to his title and estates. His look at the child, his hasty one look down at her innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick at a stone in his path. His indifference to the child’s Christian names pointed darkly over its future.
The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her thoughts. She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her till breath was gone. Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty of maltreating this woman of women. ‘But when you do leave Wales,’ he said, ‘you shall be guarded up to your haven.’
Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then. She sent a short letter of reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she was unable to leave Wales because of her friend’s illness and her part as nurse. Regrets were unmentioned.
Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death. Not cheerlessly, more and more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for Carinthia’s ears in commending ‘the most real of husbands of an unreal wife’ to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow he had wedded. She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-no husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said; and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man’s remaining one chance of happiness. On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was verily to hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the rich interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can find. Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions when other people came under its light; she sketched them and their views in her brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she read startlingly, if correctly.
Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a drinking at the springs of life.
Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady Fleetwood’s consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months old,—and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.
In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of ‘the four and twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the Kentish gates of Esslemont,’ has a foundation, though the story is not the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets, printed when London’s wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings. of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on whispers.
Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds of Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality, to give the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard. London had intimations of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them in the interests of the national humour: which is the English way of exalting to criticize, criticizing to depreciate, and depreciating to restore, ultimately to cherish, in reward for the amusement furnished by an eccentric person, not devoid of merit.
These little tales of her, pricking cool blood to some activity, were furze-fires among the Welsh. But where the latter heard Bardic strings inviting a chorus, the former as unanimously obeyed the stroke of their humorous conductor’s baton for an outburst from the ribs or below. And it was really funny to hear of Whitechapel’s titled heroine roaming Taffyland at her old pranks.
Catching a maddened bull by the horns in the marketplace, and hanging to the infuriate beast, a wild whirl of clouts, till he is reduced to be a subject for steaks, that is no common feat.
Her performances down mines were things of the underworld. England clapped hands, merely objecting to her not having changed her garb for the picador’s or matador’s, before she seized the bull. Wales adopted and was proud of her in any costume. Welshmen North and South, united for the nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards at the next Eisteddfod. She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak leaves and mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash to clothe her, and the vanquished beast’s horns on a gilded pole behind the dais; hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by Colonel Fluellen Wythan at one ear, and Captain Agincourt Gower at the other. A splendid scene; she might well insist to be present.
There, however, we are at the pitch of burlesque beyond her illustrious lord’s capacity to stand. Peremptory orders from England arrive, commanding her return. She temporizes, postpones, and supplicates to have the period extended up to the close of the Eisteddfod. My lord’s orders are imperatively repeated, and very blunt. He will not have her ‘continue playing the fool down there.’ She holds her ground from August into February, and then sets forth, to undergo the further process of her taming at Esslemont in England; with Llewellyn and Vaughan and Cadwallader, and Watkyn and Shenkyn and the remains of the race of Owen Tudor, attending her; vowed to extract a receipt from the earl her lord’s responsible servitors for the safe delivery of their heroine’s person at the gates of Esslemont; ich dien their trumpeted motto.
Counting the number at four and twenty, it wears the look of an invasion. But the said number is a ballad number, and has been since the antique time. There was, at a lesser number, enough of a challenge about it for squires of England, never in those days backward to pick up a glove or give the ringing rejoinder for a thumb-bite, to ride out and tilt compliments with the Whitechapel Countess’s green cavaliers, rally their sprites and entertain them exactly according to their degrees of dignity, as exhibited by their ‘haviour under something of a trial; and satisfy also such temporary appetites as might be excited in them by (among other matters left to the luck of events) a metropolitan play upon the Saxon tongue, hard of understanding to the leeky cocks until their ready store of native pepper seasons it; which may require a corresponding English condiment to rectify the flavour of the stew.
Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen is declared to have not exceeded nine. So much pretends to be historic, in opposition to the poetic version. They would, we may be sure, have made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it. Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive, countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame’s ballad authorities. She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may create in others an enjoyment of what has been called ‘the Mackrell fry.’
Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle of feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly antecedent steps. The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in more than one of the ballads. Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase; next we have the countess for a disputed Helen.
The lady’s lord is not a shining figure. How can an undecided one be a dispenser of light? Poetry could never allow him to say with her:
‘Where’er I go I make a name,
And leave a song to follow.’
Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material power was his. Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact) denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the position between the driven and the driver. Poetry, however erratic, is less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History. The Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor the devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.
Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl of Fleetwood’s intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose them to have gone at his bidding. That they met the procession of the Welsh, and claimed to take charge of the countess’s carriage, near the Kentish border-line, is an assertion supported by testimony fairly acceptable.
Intelligence of the advancing party had reached the earl by courier, from the date of the first gathering on the bridge of Pont-y-pridd; and from Gloucester, along to the Thames at Reading; thence away to the Mole, from Mickleham, where the Surrey chalk runs its final turfy spine North-eastward to the slope upon Kentish soil.
Greatly to the astonishment of the Welsh cavaliers, a mounted footman, clad in the green and scarlet facings of Lord Fleetwood’s livery, rode up to them a mile outside the principal towns and named the inn where the earl had ordered preparations for the reception of them. England’s hospitality was offered on a princely scale. Cleverer fencing could not be.
The meeting, in no sense an encounter, occurred close by a thirty-acre meadow, famous over the county; and was remarkable for the punctilious exchange of ceremonial speech, danger being present; as we see powder-magazines protected by their walls and fosses and covered alleys. Notwithstanding which, there was a scintillation of sparks.
Lord Brailstone, spokesman of the welcoming party, expressed comic regrets that they had not an interpreter with them.
Mr. Owain Wythan, in the name of the Cambrian chivalry, assured him of their comprehension and appreciation of English slang.
Both gentlemen kept their heads uncovered in a suspense; they might for a word or two more of that savour have turned into the conveniently spacious meadow. They were induced, on the contrary, to enter the channel of English humour, by hearing Chumley Potts exclaim: ‘His nob!’ and all of them laughed at the condensed description of a good hit back, at the English party’s cost.
Laughter, let it be but genuine, is of a common nationality, indeed a common fireside; and profound disagreement is not easy after it. The Dame professes to believe that ‘Carinthia Jane’ had to intervene as peacemaker, before the united races took the table in Esslemont’s dining-hall for a memorable night of it, and a contest nearer the mark of veracity than that shown in another of the ballads she would have us follow. Whatever happened, they sat down at table together, and the point of honour for them each and every was, not to be first to rise from it. Once more the pure Briton and the mixed if not fused English engaged, Bacchus for instrument this time, Bacchus for arbiter of the fray.
You may imagine! says the Dame. She cites the old butler at Esslemont, ‘as having been much questioned on the subject by her family relative, Dr. Glossop, and others interested to know the smallest items of the facts,’—and he is her authority for the declaration that the Welsh gentlemen and the English gentlemen, ‘whatever their united number,’ consumed the number of nine dozen and a half of old Esslemont wine before they rose, or as possibly sank, at the festive board at the hour of five of the morning.
Years later, this butler, Joshua Queeney, ‘a much enfeebled old man,’ retold and enlarged the tale of the enormous consumption of his best wine; with a sacred oath to confirm it, and a tear expressive of elegiacal feelings.
‘They bled me twelve dozen, not a bottle less,’ she quotes him, after a minute description of his countenance and scrupulously brushed black suit, pensioner though he had become. He had grown, during the interval, to be more communicative as to particulars. The wines were four. Sherry led off the parade pace, Hock the trot into the merry canter, Champagne the racing gallop, Burgundy the grand trial of constitutional endurance for the enforced finish. All these wines, except the sparkling, had their date of birth in the precedent century. ‘They went like water.’
Questioned anxiously by Dr. Glossop, Queeney maintained an impartial attitude, and said there was no victor, no vanquished. They did not sit in blocks. The tactics for preserving peace intermingled them. Each English gentleman had a Welsh gentleman beside him; they both sat firm; both fell together. The bottles or decanters were not stationary for the guest to fill his glass, they circulated, returning to an empty glass. All drank equally. Often the voices were high, the talk was loud. The gentlemen were too serious to sing.
At one moment of the evening Queeney confidently anticipated a ‘fracassy,’ he said. One of the foreign party—and they all spoke English, after five dozen bottles had gone the round, as correct as the English themselves—remarked on the seventy-years Old Brown Sherry, that ‘it had a Madeira flavour.’ He spoke it approvingly. Thereupon Lord Simon Pitscrew calls to Queeney, asking him ‘why Madeira had been supplied instead of Esslemont’s renowned old Sherry?’ A second Welsh gentleman gave his assurances that his friend had not said it was Madeira. But Lord Brailstone accused them of the worse unkindness to a venerable Old Brown Sherry, in attributing a Madeira flavour to it. Then another Welsh gentleman briskly and emphatically stated his opinion, that the attribution of Madeira flavour to it was a compliment. At this, which smelt strongly, he said, of insult, Captain Abrane called on the name of their absent host to warrant the demand of an apology to the Old Brown Sherry, for the imputation denying it an individual distinction. Chumley Potts offered generally to bet that he would distinguish blindfold at a single sip any Madeira from any first-class Sherry, Old Brown or Pale. ‘Single sip or smell!’ Ambrose Mallard cried, either for himself or his comrade, Queeney could not say which.
Of all Lord Fleetwood’s following, Mr. Potts and Mr. Mallard were, the Dame informs us, Queeney’s favourites, because they were so genial; and he remembered most of what they said and did, being moved to it by ‘poor young Mr. Mallard’s melancholy end and Mr. Potts’s grief!’