He scarcely gives any but men's parties, and invites the whole club home to dinner. What is the compliment of being asked, when the whole club is asked too, I should like to know? Men's parties are only good for boys. I hate a dinner where there are no women.
Bragg sits at the head of his table, and bullies the solitary Mrs.
Bragg.
He entertains us with stories of storms which he, Bragg, encountered--of dinners which he, Bragg, has received from the Governor-General of India--of jokes which he, Bragg, has heard;and however stale or odious they may be, poor Mrs. B. is always expected to laugh.
Woe be to her if she doesn't, or if she laughs at anybody else's jokes. I have seen Bragg go up to her and squeeze her arm with a savage grind of his teeth, and say, with an oath, "Hang it, madam, how dare you laugh when any man but your husband speaks to you? Iforbid you to grin in that way. I forbid you to look sulky. Iforbid you to look happy, or to look up, or to keep your eyes down to the ground. I desire you will not be trapesing through the rooms. I order you not to sit as still as a stone." He curses her if the wine is corked, or if the dinner is spoiled, or if she comes a minute too soon to the club for him, or arrives a minute too late. He forbids her to walk, except upon his arm. And the consequence of his ill treatment is, that Mrs. Cammysole and Mrs.
Bragg respect him beyond measure, and think him the first of human beings.
"I never knew a woman who was constantly bullied by her husband who did not like him the better for it," Miss Clapperclaw says. And though this speech has some of Clapp's usual sardonic humor in it, I can't but think there is some truth in the remark.
LEVANT HOUSE CHAMBERS.
MR. RUMBOLD, A.R.A., AND MISS RUMBOLD.
When Lord Levant quitted the country and this neighborhood, in which the tradesmen still deplore him, No. 56, known as Levantine House, was let to the "Pococurante Club," which was speedily bankrupt (for we are too far from the centre of town to support a club of our own); it was subsequently hired by the West Diddle*** Railroad; and is now divided into sets of chambers, superintended by an acrimonious housekeeper, and by a porter in a sham livery:
whom, if you don't find him at the door, you may as well seek at the "Grapes" public-house, in the little lane round the corner. He varnishes the japan-boots of the dandy lodgers; reads Mr. Pinkney's Morning Post before he lets him have it; and neglects the letters of the inmates of the chambers generally.
The great rooms, which were occupied as the salons of the noble Levant, the coffee-rooms of the "Pococurante" (a club where the play was furious, as I am told), and the board-room and manager's-room of the West Diddle***, are tenanted now by a couple of artists: young Pinkney the miniaturist, and George Rumbold the historical painter. Miss Rumbold, his sister lives with him, by the way; but with that young lady of course we have nothing to do.
I knew both these gentlemen at Rome, where George wore a velvet doublet and a beard down to his chest, and used to talk about high art at the "Caffe Greco." How it smelled of smoke, that velveteen doublet of his, with which his stringy red beard was likewise perfumed! It was in his studio that I had the honor to be introduced to his sister, the fair Miss Clara: she had a large casque with a red horse-hair plume (I thought it had been a wisp of her brother's beard at first), and held a tin-headed spear in her hand, representing a Roman warrior in the great picture of "Caractacus" George was painting--a piece sixty-four feet by eighteen. The Roman warrior blushed to be discovered in that attitude: the tin-headed spear trembled in the whitest arm in the world. So she put it down, and taking off the helmet also, went and sat in a far corner of the studio, mending George's stockings;whilst we smoked a couple of pipes, and talked about Raphael being a good deal overrated.
I think he is; and have never disguised my opinion about the "Transfiguration.". And all the time we talked, there were Clara's eyes looking lucidly out from the dark corner in which she was sitting, working away at the stockings. The lucky fellow! They were in a dreadful state of bad repair when she came out to him at Rome, after the death of their father, the Reverend Miles Rumbold.
George, while at Rome, painted "Caractacus;" a picture of "Non Angli sed Angeli" of course; a picture of "Alfred in the Neatherd's Cottage," seventy-two feet by forty-eight--(an idea of the gigantic size and Michel-Angelesque proportions of this picture may be formed, when I state that the mere muffin, of which the outcast king is spoiling the baking, is two feet three in diameter) and the deaths of Socrates, of Remus, and of the Christians under Nero respectively. I shall never forget how lovely Clara looked in white muslin, with her hair down, in this latter picture, giving herself up to a ferocious Carnifex (for which Bob Gaunter the architect sat), and refusing to listen to the mild suggestions of an insinuating Flamen: which character was a gross caricature of myself.
None of George's pictures sold. He has enough to tapestry Trafalgar Square. He has painted, since he came back to England, "The Flaying of Marsyas," "The Smothering of the Little Boys in the Tower," "A Plague Scene during the Great Pestilence," "Ugolino on the Seventh Day after he was deprived of Victuals," &c. For although these pictures have great merit, and the writhings of Marsyas, the convulsions of the little prince, the look of agony of St. Lawrence on the gridiron, &c. are quite true to nature, yet the subjects somehow are not agreeable; and if he hadn't a small patrimony, my friend George would starve.