Part 3

“When I go to business to-morrow, I will just have a look at Mr. Fitz's account,” Mr. Rowdy thought; “and if it is overdrawn, as it usually is, why . . .” The announcement of Mrs. Rowdy's brougham here put an end to this agreeable train of thought; and the banker and his lady stepped into it to join a snug little family-party of two-and-twenty, given by Mr. and Mrs. Secondchop at their great house on the other side of the Park.

“Rowdys 2, Bungays 3, ourselves and mamma 3, 2 Sawyers,” calculated little Rosa.

“General Gulpin,” Rosa continued, “eats a great deal, and is very stupid, but he looks well at table with his star and ribbon. Let us put HIM down!” and she noted down “Sir Thomas and Lady Gulpin, 2. Lord Castlemouldy, 1.”

“You will make your party abominably genteel and stupid,” groaned Timmins. “Why don't you ask some of our old friends? Old Mrs. Portman has asked us twenty times, I am sure, within the last two years.”

“And the last time we went there, there was pea-soup for dinner!” Mrs. Timmins said, with a look of ineffable scorn.

“Nobody can have been kinder than the Hodges have always been to us; and some sort of return we might make, I think.”

“Return, indeed! A pretty sound it is on the staircase to hear 'Mr. and Mrs. 'Odge and Miss 'Odges' pronounced by Billiter, who always leaves his h's out. No, no: see attorneys at your chambers, my dear--but what could the poor creatures do in OUR society?” And so, one by one, Timmins's old friends were tried and eliminated by Mrs. Timmins, just as if she had been an Irish Attorney-General, and they so many Catholics on Mr. Mitchel's jury.

Mrs. Fitzroy insisted that the party should be of her very best company. Funnyman, the great wit, was asked, because of his jokes; and Mrs. Butt, on whom he practises; and Potter, who is asked because everybody else asks him; and Mr. Ranville Ranville of the Foreign Office, who might give some news of the Spanish squabble; and Botherby, who has suddenly sprung up into note because he is intimate with the French Revolution, and visits Ledru-Rollin and Lamartine. And these, with a couple more who are amis de la maison, made up the twenty, whom Mrs. Timmins thought she might safely invite to her little dinner.

But the deuce of it was, that when the answers to the invitations came back, everybody accepted! Here was a pretty quandary. How they were to get twenty into their dining-room was a calculation which poor Timmins could not solve at all; and he paced up and down the little room in dismay.

“Pooh!” said Rosa with a laugh. “Your sister Blanche looked very well in one of my dresses last year; and you know how stout she is. We will find some means to accommodate them all, depend upon it.”

Mrs. John Rowdy's note to dear Rosa, accepting the latter's invitation, was a very gracious and kind one; and Mrs. Fitz showed it to her husband when he came back from chambers. But there was another note which had arrived for him by this time from Mr. Rowdy--or rather from the firm; and to the effect that Mr. F. Timmins had overdrawn his account 28L. 18s. 6d., and was requested to pay that sum to his obedient servants, Stumpy, Rowdy and Co.

*****

And Timmins did not like to tell his wife that the contending parties in the Lough Foyle and Lough Corrib Railroad had come to a settlement, and that the fifteen guineas a day had consequently determined. “I have had seven days of it, though,” he thought; “and that will be enough to pay for the desk, the dinner, and the glasses, and make all right with Stumpy and Rowdy.”

III.

The cards for dinner having been issued, it became the duty of Mrs. Timmins to make further arrangements respecting the invitations to the tea-party which was to follow the more substantial meal.

These arrangements are difficult, as any lady knows who is in the habit of entertaining her friends. There are--

People who are offended if you ask them to tea whilst others have been asked to dinner;

People who are offended if you ask them to tea at all; and cry out furiously, “Good heavens! Jane my love, why do these Timminses suppose that I am to leave my dinner-table to attend their ----- soiree?” (the dear reader may fill up the ----- to any strength, according to his liking)--or, “Upon my word, William my dear, it is too much to ask us to pay twelve shillings for a brougham, and to spend I don't know how much in gloves, just to make our curtsies in Mrs. Timmins's little drawing-room.” Mrs. Moser made the latter remark about the Timmins affair, while the former was uttered by Mr. Grumpley, barrister-at-law, to his lady, in Gloucester Place.

That there are people who are offended if you don't ask them at all, is a point which I suppose nobody will question. Timmins's earliest friend in life was Simmins, whose wife and family have taken a cottage at Mortlake for the season.

“We can't ask them to come out of the country,” Rosa said to her Fitzroy--(between ourselves, she was delighted that Mrs. Simmins was out of the way, and was as jealous of her as every well-regulated woman should be of her husband's female friends)--“we can't ask them to come so far for the evening.”

“Why, no, certainly.” said Fitzroy, who has himself no very great opinion of a tea-party; and so the Simminses were cut out of the list.

And what was the consequence? The consequence was, that Simmins and Timmins cut when they met at Westminster; that Mrs. Simmins sent back all the books which she had borrowed from Rosa, with a withering note of thanks; that Rosa goes about saying that Mrs. Simmins squints; that Mrs. S., on her side, declares that Rosa is crooked, and behaved shamefully to Captain Hicks in marrying Fitzroy over him, though she was forced to do it by her mother, and prefers the Captain to her husband to this day. If, in a word, these two men could be made to fight, I believe their wives would not be displeased; and the reason of all this misery, rage, and dissension, lies in a poor little twopenny dinner-party in Lilliput Street.

Well, the guests, both for before and after meat, having been asked, old Mrs. Gashleigh, Rosa's mother--(and, by consequence, Fitzroy's DEAR mother-in-law, though I promise you that “dear” is particularly sarcastic)--Mrs. Gashleigh of course was sent for, and came with Miss Eliza Gashleigh, who plays on the guitar, and Emily, who limps a little, but plays sweetly on the concertina. They live close by--trust them for that. Your mother-in-law is always within hearing, thank our stars for the attention of the dear women. The Gashleighs, I say, live close by, and came early on the morning after Rosa's notes had been issued for the dinner.

When Fitzroy, who was in his little study, which opens into his little dining-room--one of those absurd little rooms which ought to be called a gentleman's pantry, and is scarcely bigger than a shower-bath, or a state cabin in a ship--when Fitzroy heard his mother-in-law's knock, and her well-known scuffling and chattering in the passage--in which she squeezed up young Buttons, the page, while she put questions to him regarding baby, and the cook's health, and whether she had taken what Mrs. Gashleigh had sent overnight, and the housemaid's health, and whether Mr. Timmins had gone to chambers or not--and when, after this preliminary chatter, Buttons flung open the door, announcing--“Mrs. Gashleigh and the young ladies,” Fitzroy laid down his Times newspaper with an expression that had best not be printed here, and took his hat and walked away.

Mrs. Gashleigh has never liked him since he left off calling her mamma, and kissing her. But he said he could not stand it any longer--he was hanged if he would. So he went away to chambers, leaving the field clear to Rosa, mamma, and the two dear girls.

Or to one of them, rather: for before leaving the house, he thought he would have a look at little Fitzroy up stairs in the nursery, and he found the child in the hands of his maternal aunt Eliza, who was holding him and pinching him as if he had been her guitar, I suppose; so that the little fellow bawled pitifully--and his father finally quitted the premises.

No sooner was he gone, although the party was still a fortnight off, than the women pounced upon his little study, and began to put it in order. Some of his papers they pushed up over the bookcase, some they put behind the Encyclopaedia. Some they crammed into the drawers--where Mrs. Gashleigh found three cigars, which she pocketed, and some letters, over which she cast her eye; and by Fitz's return they had the room as neat as possible, and the best glass and dessert-service mustered on the study table.

It was a very neat and handsome service, as you may be sure Mrs. Gashleigh thought, whose rich uncle had purchased it for the young couple, at Spode and Copeland's; but it was only for twelve persons.