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For several successive days he had been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow, where the captain was reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body, anything but friendly or hospitable, the pair of them were discovered comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away!
There was a kind of tremulous defiance in her tone, as if she half expected me to question it. "I've heard it before, I believe," said I stupidly for, in fact, I had scarcely yet got myself together. "You live here?" She nodded, with a perplexed and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and once more her expression challenged me.
Pendarves, first saw it, the centre was a swamp, where in winter a quantity of snipe congregated, and Harris in his History of Dublin alludes to the presence of snipe and swamp as an agreeable and uncommon circumstance not to be met with perhaps in any other great city in the world.
The great singers had drawn the public to listen to Handel's operas, but it is clear from many contemporary allusions that Handel's music was too severe to be an attraction in itself, except to cultivated musicians like Mrs. Pendarves.
Lady Walpole succeeded in getting both to sing at her house; neither would sing in the presence of the other, but the hostess tactfully managed to draw first one and then the other out of the music-room while her rival enchanted the guests. Mrs. Pendarves also contrived to be on good terms with both.
"Deny it if you can, sir!" was evidently her unspoken thought. "And how long has my ahem! has Captain Pendarves been employing you, may I ask?" I said, wondering that Crump had not prepared me for this as for the other changes. "Young man," said Mary Smith severely, "I have no time to stand here answering idle questions.
Pendarves, truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make it, and I never had a home before, I knew, if you ever came back, that would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!" "It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested. She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way," she said. "But yes, I suppose any one would put it so.
At some period during the summer of 1741 Handel received an invitation from the fourth Duke of Devonshire, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, to go over to Dublin and give concerts there for the benefit of the local hospitals. It is very probable that Mrs. Pendarves may have helped to secure this engagement for Handel.
It seemed wisest for me not to show myself again before Captain Pendarves, but I am afraid I did not repine greatly at the banishment.
She had spent a year and a half in Ireland in 1731-32, and her letters give a lively account of society in Dublin. Matthew Dubourg, an excellent violinist, was at the head of the Viceroy's band, and musical entertainments were frequent, for to judge from Mrs. Pendarves' descriptions the Irish bishops and deans lived almost as magnificently as the cardinals in Rome. Mrs.
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