Читать книгу The Letters of Her Mother to Elizabeth - W. R. H. Trowbridge - Страница 10

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Monk's Folly, 10th August

Darling Elizabeth:

The Graftons

I felt particularly virtuous this morning, and drove over to Romford to see old Admiral and Mrs. Grafton. Such a dear Darby and Joan pair, so different from the foot-in-the-grave old couples one meets now-a-days. The Admiral was pruning roses in the dearest little garden when I drove up; he hobbled up with a wheeze and muddy fingers and opened the carriage door before Alfred had time to dismount from the box. He welcomed me to Romford with an old-school bow, and gave me an elbow to shake because his hands were full of lumps of Somersetshire clay. He asked me to sit down in the dining-room (they always shut up the drawing-room in the summer, and it is as damp as a church), while he called his wife. Mrs. Grafton, who is a dear, kissed me on both cheeks, and asked after my neuralgia and you. Although it was awfully hot, she was wearing the Queen's Indian shawl; they keep the rooms so dark that I nearly sat down on the Angora cat, which was sleeping in the most comfortable chair in the room. While the Admiral was washing his hands and choking with asthma in the next room, Mrs. Grafton told me about the rheumatism in her left shoulder, and that she had thought at first that I was the chiropodist they were expecting from Taunton.

They insisted on my seeing the kitchen garden, and were very proud that their Brussels sprouts took the first prize at the Bath Vegetable Show in the Spring. I saw the pigs being fed, and the Admiral told me that one of his sows had been given him by the Dowager Marchioness of Ealing, who had brought it to him in her arms wrapped in cotton-wool when it was a week old. The Admiral amuses himself with carpentering, and has had one of the conservatories fitted up as a tool-house, but since he mistook one of his thumbs for a shaving and nearly planed it off, he hasn't been able to finish the table for the butler's pantry. Mrs. Grafton made him show me his artificial ice-machine, and he frappéed a Veuve Clicquot for me, but the vacuum or something didn't work and the neck of the bottle broke. Then we went back to the dining-room, where the Angora cat was sharpening its claws in the lace curtains. The Admiral said, "Damn that beast, Maria!" but Mrs. Grafton gave him such a look, and said, "Oh, Arthur! how can you when he has been so ill lately. Puss, puss, purr-r, purr-r."

A servant brought in some port wine and biscuits, and the Admiral asked me if I cared to see his views of places on the Pacific station. We came to a photograph of a woman in a mantilla, whom the Admiral said was the belle of Lima, and he sighed and chuckled. "Those were days to remember; we were the fastest ship in the Navy, and when we went out of commission there wasn't a pair of black eyes from Valparaiso to Vancouver that didn't shed tears." Then Mrs. Grafton told me of the voyage she made out to the station, when she was the only woman on the steamer, and how two men quarrelled over her in Colon harbour, and another threatened to throw himself in among the man-eaters at Barbados, because she hadn't spoken to him for a whole day. The Admiral looked very savage, and wheezed terribly and called her Mrs. Grafton. They were too delightfully Jo Anderson, my jo, John. I could have spent the whole morning with them, for it is so refreshing to find people natural and sincerely attached to each other. They never spoke a word of scandal during the whole visit; and when I left, Mrs. Grafton gave me a beautiful bouquet of Maréchal Niels and said if she were a man she knew she would break her heart over me, and the dear old Admiral insisted on helping me into the carriage and gave me such a charming Early Victorian salute.

I know they only said nice things of me when I was out of sight, and I wish there were more people like them in the county.