CHAPTER XX

AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE

THE leisurely promenade up and down the lawn with ladies and

deferential gentlemen, in anticipation of the dinner-bell, was Dr.

Middleton's evening pleasure. He walked as one who had formerly danced

(in Apollo's time and the young god Cupid's), elastic on the muscles of

the calf and foot, bearing his broad iron-grey head in grand elevation.

The hard labour of the day approved the cooling exercise and the

crowning refreshments of French cookery and wines of known vintages. He

was happy at that hour in dispensing wisdom or nugae to his hearers,

like the Western sun whose habit it is, when he is fairly treated, to

break out in quiet splendours, which by no means exhaust his treasury.

Blessed indeed above his fellows, by the height of the bow-winged bird

in a fair weather sunset sky above the pecking sparrow, is he that ever

in the recurrent evening of his day sees the best of it ahead and soon

to come. He has the rich reward of a youth and manhood of virtuous

living. Dr. Middleton misdoubted the future as well as the past of the

man who did not, in becoming gravity, exult to dine. That man he

deemed unfit for this world and the next.

An example of the good fruit of temperance, he had a comfortable pride

in his digestion, and his political sentiments were attuned by his

veneration of the Powers rewarding virtue. We must have a stable world

where this is to be done.

The Rev. Doctor was a fine old picture; a specimen of art peculiarly

English; combining in himself piety and epicurism, learning and

gentlemanliness, with good room for each and a seat at one another's

table: for the rest, a strong man, an athlete in his youth, a keen

reader of facts and no reader of persons, genial, a giant at a task, a

steady worker besides, but easily discomposed. He loved his daughter

and he feared her. However much he liked her character, the dread of

her sex and age was constantly present to warn him that he was not tied

to perfect sanity while the damsel Clara remained unmarried. Her mother

had been an amiable woman, of the poetical temperament nevertheless,

too enthusiastic, imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a sober

scholar; an admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a fire-work.

The girl resembled her. Why should she wish to run away from Patterne

Hall for a single hour? Simply because she was of the sex born mutable

and explosive. A husband was her proper custodian, justly relieving a

father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at home, philosophy is

needed for us to keep erect. Let the girl be Cicero's Tullia: well, she

dies! The choicest of them will furnish us examples of a strange

perversity.

Miss Dale was beside Dr. Middleton. Clara came to them and took the

other side.

"I was telling Miss Dale that the signal for your subjection is my

enfranchisement," he said to her, sighing and smiling. "We know the

date. The date of an event to come certifies to it as a fact to be

counted on."

"Are you anxious to lose me?" Clara faltered.

"My dear, you have planted me on a field where I am to expect the

trumpet, and when it blows I shall be quit of my nerves, no more."

Clara found nothing to seize on for a reply in these words. She thought

upon the silence of Laetitia.

Sir Willoughby advanced, appearing in a cordial mood.

"I need not ask you whether you are better," he said to Clara, sparkled

to Laetitia, and raised a key to the level of Dr. Middleton's breast,

remarking, "I am going down to my inner cellar."

"An inner cellar!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Sacred from the butler. It is interdicted to Stoneman. Shall I offer

myself as guide to you? My cellars are worth a visit."

"Cellars are not catacombs. They are, if rightly constructed, rightly

considered, cloisters, where the bottle meditates on joys to bestow,

not on dust misused! Have you anything great?"

"A wine aged ninety."

"Is it associated with your pedigree that you pronounce the age with

such assurance?"

"My grandfather inherited it."

"Your grandfather, Sir Willoughby, had meritorious offspring, not to

speak of generous progenitors. What would have happened had it fallen

into the female line! I shall be glad to accompany you. Port?

Hermitage?"

"Port."

"Ah! We are in England!"

"There will just be time," said Sir Willoughby, inducing Dr. Middleton

to step out.

A chirrup was in the reverend doctor's tone: "Hocks, too, have

compassed age. I have tasted senior Hocks. Their flavours are as a

brook of many voices; they have depth also. Senatorial Port! we say. We

cannot say that of any other wine. Port is deep-sea deep. It is in its

flavour deep; mark the difference. It is like a classic tragedy,

organic in conception. An ancient Hermitage has the light of the

antique; the merit that it can grow to an extreme old age; a merit.

Neither of Hermitage nor of Hock can you say that it is the blood of

those long years, retaining the strength of youth with the wisdom of

age. To Port for that! Port is our noblest legacy! Observe, I do not

compare the wines; I distinguish the qualities. Let them live together

for our enrichment; they are not rivals like the Idaean Three. Were

they rivals, a fourth would challenge them. Burgundy has great genius.

It does wonders within its period; it does all except to keep up in the

race; it is short-lived. An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I

cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom, Burgundy

sings the inspired Ode. Or put it, that Port is the Homeric hexameter,

Burgundy the pindaric dithyramb. What do you say?"

"The comparison is excellent, sir."

"The distinction, you would remark. Pindar astounds. But his elder

brings us the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious

ascent. One is the unsounded purple sea of marching billows."

"A very fine distinction."

"I conceive you to be now commending the similes. They pertain to the

time of the first critics of those poets. Touch the Greeks, and you can

nothing new; all has been said: 'Graiis . . . praeter, laudem nullius

avaris.' Genius dedicated to Fame is immortal. We, sir, dedicate genius

to the cloacaline floods. We do not address the unforgetting gods, but

the popular stomach."

Sir Willoughby was patient. He was about as accordantly coupled with

Dr. Middleton in discourse as a drum duetting with a bass-viol; and

when he struck in he received correction from the

paedagogue-instrument. If he thumped affirmative or negative, he was

wrong. However, he knew scholars to be an unmannered species; and the

doctor's learnedness would be a subject to dilate on.

In the cellar, it was the turn for the drum. Dr. Middleton was

tongue-tied there. Sir Willoughby gave the history of his wine in heads

of chapters; whence it came to the family originally, and how it had

come down to him in the quantity to be seen. "Curiously, my

grandfather, who inherited it, was a water-drinker. My father died

early."

"Indeed! Dear me!" the doctor ejaculated in astonishment and

condolence. The former glanced at the contrariety of man, the latter

embraced his melancholy destiny.

He was impressed with respect for the family. This cool vaulted cellar,

and the central square block, or enceinte, where the thick darkness was

not penetrated by the intruding lamp, but rather took it as an eye,

bore witness to forethoughtful practical solidity in the man who had

built the house on such foundations. A house having a great wine stored

below lives in our imaginations as a joyful house, fast and splendidly

rooted in the soil. And imagination has a place for the heir of the

house. His grandfather a water-drinker, his father dying early, present

circumstances to us arguing predestination to an illustrious heirship

and career. Dr Middleton's musings were coloured by the friendly

vision of glasses of the great wine; his mind was festive; it pleased

him, and he chose to indulge in his whimsical, robustious,

grandiose-airy style of thinking: from which the festive mind will

sometimes take a certain print that we cannot obliterate immediately.

Expectation is grateful, you know; in the mood of gratitude we are

waxen. And he was a self-humouring gentleman.

He liked Sir Willoughby's tone in ordering the servant at his heels to

take up "those two bottles": it prescribed, without overdoing it, a

proper amount of caution, and it named an agreeable number.

Watching the man's hand keenly, he said:

"But here is the misfortune of a thing super-excellent:--not more than

one in twenty will do it justice."

Sir Willoughby replied: "Very true, sir; and I think we may pass over

the nineteen."

"Women, for example; and most men."

"This wine would be a scaled book to them."

"I believe it would. It would be a grievous waste."

"Vernon is a claret man; and so is Horace De Craye. They are both below

the mark of this wine. They will join the ladies. Perhaps you and I,

sir, might remain together."

"With the utmost good-will on my part."

"I am anxious for your verdict, sir."

"You shall have it, sir, and not out of harmony with the chorus

preceding me, I can predict. Cool, not frigid." Dr. Middleton summed

the attributes of the cellar on quitting it. "North side and South. No

musty damp. A pure air. Everything requisite. One might lie down one's

self and keep sweet here."

Of all our venerable British of the two Isles professing a suckling

attachment to an ancient port-wine, lawyer, doctor, squire, rosy

admiral, city merchant, the classic scholar is he whose blood is most

nuptial to the webbed bottle. The reason must be, that he is full of

the old poets. He has their spirit to sing with, and the best that Time

has done on earth to feed it. He may also perceive a resemblance in the

wine to the studious mind, which is the obverse of our mortality, and

throws off acids and crusty particles in the piling of the years, until

it is fulgent by clarity. Port hymns to his conservatism. It is

magical: at one sip he is off swimming in the purple flood of the

ever-youthful antique.

By comparison, then, the enjoyment of others is brutish; they have not

the soul for it; but he is worthy of the wine, as are poets of Beauty.

In truth, these should be severally apportioned to them, scholar and

poet, as his own good thing. Let it be so.

Meanwhile Dr. Middleton sipped.

After the departure of the ladies, Sir Willoughby had practised a

studied curtness upon Vernon and Horace.

"You drink claret," he remarked to them, passing it round. "Port, I

think, Doctor Middleton? The wine before you may serve for a preface.

We shall have your wine in five minutes."

The claret jug empty, Sir Willoughby offered to send for more. De Craye

was languid over the question. Vernon rose from the table.

"We have a bottle of Doctor Middleton's port coming in," Willoughby

said to him.

"Mine, you call it?" cried the doctor.

"It's a royal wine, that won't suffer sharing," said Vernon.

"We'll be with you, if you go into the billiard-room, Vernon."

"I shall hurry my drinking of good wine for no man," said the Rev.

Doctor.

"Horace?"

"I'm beneath it, ephemeral, Willoughby. I am going to the ladies."

Vernon and De Craye retired upon the arrival of the wine; and Dr.

Middleton sipped. He sipped and looked at the owner of it.

"Some thirty dozen?" he said.

"Fifty."

The doctor nodded humbly.

"I shall remember, sir," his host addressed him, "whenever I have the

honour of entertaining you, I am cellarer of that wine."

The Rev. Doctor set down his glass. "You have, sir, in some sense, an

enviable post. It is a responsible one, if that be a blessing. On you

it devolves to retard the day of the last dozen."

"Your opinion of the wine is favourable, sir?"

"I will say this:--shallow souls run to rhapsody:--I will say, that I

am consoled for not having lived ninety years back, or at any period

but the present, by this one glass of your ancestral wine."

"I am careful of it," Sir Willoughby said, modestly; "still its natural

destination is to those who can appreciate it. You do, sir."

"Still my good friend, still! It is a charge; it is a possession, but