3. CHAPTER III.
MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON.
The last of August came sweltering in, hot, dusty,
and faint, and the most indefatigable belles of Saratoga
began to show symptoms of weariness. The stars
disappeared gradually from the ballroom; the barkeeper
grew thin under the thickening accounts for
lemonades; the fat fellow in the black band, who
“vexed” the basson, had blown himself from the
girth of Falstaff to an “eagle's talon in the waist;”
papas began to be waylaid in their morning walks by
voung gentlemen with propositions; and stage-coaches
that came in with their baggageless tails in the air, and
he driver's weight pressing the foot-board upon the
astonished backs of his wheelers, went out with the
rim of a Venetian gondola—the driver's up-hoisted
figure answering to the curved proboscis of that sternladen
craft.
The vocation of tin-tumblers and water-dippers was
gone. The fashionable world (brazen in its general
habit) had drank its fill of the ferrugineous waters.
Mammas thanked Heaven for the conclusion of the
chaperon's summer solstice; and those who came to
bet, and those who came to marry, “made up their
books,” and walked off (if they had won) with their
winnings.
Having taken a less cordial farewell of Van Pelt
than I might have done had not Miss Ellerton been
hanging confidingly on his arm, I followed my baggage
to the door, where that small epitome of the inheritance
of the prince of darkness, an American stage-coach,
awaited me as its ninth inside passenger. As
the last person picked up, I knew very well the seat
to which I was destined, and drawing a final cool
breath in the breezy colonnade, I summoned resolution
and abandoned myself to the tender mercies of
the driver.
The “ray of contempt” that “will pierce through
the shell of the tortoise,” is a shaft from the horn of
a new moon in comparison with the beating of an
American sun through the top of a stage-coach. This
“accommodation,” as it is sometimes bitterly called,
not being intended to carry outside passengers, has a
top as thin as your grandmother's umbrella, black, porous,
and cracked; and while intended for a protection
from the heat, it just suffices to collect the sun's
rays with an incredible power and sultriness, and exclude
the air that makes it sufferable to the beasts of
the field. Of the nine places inside this “dilly,” the
four seats in the corners are so far preferable that the
occupant has the outer side of his body exempt from
a perspirative application of human flesh (the thermometer
at 100 degrees of Fahrenheit), while, of the
three middle places on the three seats, the man in the
centre of the coach, with no support for his back, yet
buried to the chin in men, women, and children, is at
the ninth and lowest degree of human suffering. I
left Saratoga in such a state of happiness as you
might suppose for a gentleman, who, besides fulfilling
this latter category, had been previously unhappy in
his love.
I was dressed in a white roundabout and trowsers
of the same, a straw hat, thread stockings, and pumps,
and was so far a blessing to my neighbors that I looked
cool. Directly behind me, occupying the middle of
the back seat, sat a young woman with a gratis passenger
in her lap (who, of course, did not count among
the nine), in the shape of a fat and a very hot child
of three years of age, whom she called John, Jacky,
Johnny, Jocket, Jacket, and the other endearing diminutives
of the namesakes of the great apostle. Like
the saint who had been selected for his patron, he was
a “voice crying in the wilderness.” This little gentleman
was exceedingly unpopular with his two neighbors
at the windows, and his incursions upon their legs
and shoulders in his occasional forays for fresh air,
ended in his being forbidden to look out at either window,
and plied largely with gingerbread to content him
with the warm lap of his mother. Though I had no
eyes in the back of my straw hat, I conceived very
well the state in which a compost of soft gingerbread,
tears, and perspiration, would soon leave the two unscrupulous
hands behind me; and as the jolts of the
coach frequently threw me back upon the knees of
his mother, I could not consistently complain of the
familiar use made of my roundabout and shoulders in
Master John's constant changes of position. I vowed
my jacket to the first river, the moment I could make
sure that the soft gingerbread was exhausted—but I
kept my temper.
How an American Jehu gets his team over ten
miles in the hour, through all the variety of sand, ruts,
clay-pits, and stump-thickets, is a problem that can
only be resolved by riding beside him on the box. In
the usual time we arrived at the pretty village of Troy,
some thirty miles from Saratoga; and here, having exchanged
my bedaubed jacket for a clean one, I freely
forgave little Pickle his freedoms, for I hoped never
to set eyes on him again during his natural life. I was
going eastward by another coach.
Having eaten a salad for my dinner, and drank a
bottle of iced claret, I stepped forth in my “blanched
and lavendered” jacket to take my place in the other
coach, trusting Providence not to afflict me twice in
the same day with the evil I had just escaped, and feeling,
on the whole, reconciled to my troubled dividend
of eternity. I got up the steps of the coach with as
much alacrity as the state of the thermometer would
permit, and was about drawing my legs after me upon
the forward seat, when a clammy hand caught me
unceremoniously by the shirt-collar, and the voice I
was just beginning to forget cried out with a chuckle,
“
Dada!”
“Madam!” I said, picking off the gingerbread from
my shirt as the coach rolled down the street, “I had
hoped that your infernal child—”
I stopped in the middle of the sentence, for a pair
of large blue eyes were looking wonderingly into mine,
and for the first time I observed that the mother of
this familiar nuisance was one of the prettiest women I
had seen since I had become susceptible to the charms
of the sex.
“Are you going to Boston, sir?” she inquired, with
a half-timid smile, as if, in that case, she appealed to
me for protection on the road.
“Yes, madam!” I answered, taking little Jocket's
pasty hand into mine, affectionately, as I returned her
hesitating look; “may I hope for your society so
far?”
My fresh white waistcoat was soon embossed with a
dingy yellow, where my enterprising fellow-passenger
had thrust his sticky fist into the pockets, and my sham
shirt-bosom was reduced incontinently to the complexion
of a painter's rag after doing a sunset in gamboge.
I saw everything, however, through the blue eyes of
his mother, and was soon on such pleasant terms with
Master John, that, at one of the stopping-places, I inveigled
him out of the coach and dropped him accidentally
into the horse-trough, contriving to scrub him
passably clean before he could recover breath enough
for an outcry. I had already thrown the residuum
of his gingerbread out of the window, so that his familiarities
for the rest of the day were, at least, less
adhesive.
We dropped one or two way-passengers at Lebanon,
and I was left in the coach with Mrs. Captain and
Master John Thompson, in both whose favors I made
a progress that (I may as well depone) considerably
restored my spirits—laid flat by my unthrift wooing at
Saratoga. If a fly hath but alit on my nose when my
self-esteem hath been thus at a discount, I have
soothed myself with the fancy that it preferred me—a
drowning vanity will so catch at a straw!
As we bowled along through some of the loveliest
scenery of Massachusetts, my companion (now become
my charge), let me a little into her history, and at the
same time, by those shades of insinuation of which
women so instinctively know the uses, gave me perfectly
to comprehend that I might as well economize
my tenderness. The father of the riotous young gentleman
who had made so free with my valencia waistcoat
and linen roundabouts, had the exclusive copyhold
of her affections. He had been three years at
sea (I think I said before), and she was hastening to
show him the pledge of their affections—come into
the world since the good brig Dolly made her last
clearance from Boston bay.
I was equally attentive to Mrs. Thompson after this
illumination, though I was, perhaps, a shade less enamored
of the interesting freedoms of Master John.
One's taste for children depends so much upon one's
love for their mothers!
It was twelve o'clock at night when the coach rattled
in upon the pavements of Boston. Mrs. Thompson
had expressed so much impatience during the last
few miles, and seemed to shrink so sensitively from
being left to herself in a strange city, that I offered my
services till she should find herself in better hands,
and, as a briefer way of disposing of her, had bribed
the coachman, who was in a hurry with the mail, to
turn a little out of his way, and leave her at her husband's
hotel.
We drew up with a prodigious clatter, accordingly
at the Marlborough hotel, where, no coach being expected,
the boots and bar-keeper were not immediately
forthcoming. After a rap “to wake the dead,” I set
about assisting the impatient driver in getting off the
lady's trunks and boxes, and they stood in a large
pyramid on the sidewalk when the door was opened.
A man in his shirt, three parts asleep, held a flaring
candle over his head, and looked through the half-opened
door.
“Is Captain Thompson up?” I asked rather brusquely,
irritated at the sour visage of the bar-keeper.
“Captain Thompson, sir!”
“Captain Thompson, sir!” I repeated my words
with a voice that sent him three paces back into the
hall.
“No, sir,” he said at last, slipping one leg into his
trowsers, which had hitherto been under his arm.
“Then wake him immediately, and tell him Mrs.
Thompson is arrived.” Here's a husband, thought I,
as I heard something between a sob and a complaint
issue from the coach-window at the bar-keeper's intelligence.
To go to bed when he expected his wife and
child, and after three years' separation! She might
as well have made a parenthesis in her constancy!
“Have you called the captain?” I asked, as I set
Master John upon the steps, and observed the man
still standing with the candle in his hand, grinning
from ear to ear.
“No, sir,” said the man.
“No!” I thundered, “and what in the devil's name
is the reason?”
“Boots!” he cried out in reply, “show this gentleman
`forty-one.' Them may wake Captain Thompson
as likes! I never hearn of no Mrs. Thompson!”
Rejecting an ungenerous suspicion that flashed
across my mind, and informing the bar-keeper en passant,
that he was a brute and a donkey, I sprang up
the staircase after a boy, and quite out of breath, arrived
at a long gallery of bachelors' rooms on the fifth
floor. The boy pointed to a door at the end of the
gallery, and retreated to the banisters as if to escape
the blowing up of a petard.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
“Come in!” thundered a voice like a hailing trumpet.
I took the lamp from the boy, and opened the
door. On a narrow bed well tucked up, lay a most
formidable looking individual, with a face glowing
with carbuncles, a pair of deep-set eyes inflamed and
fiery, and hair and eyebrows of glaring red, mixed
slightly with gray; while outside the bed lay a hairy
arm, with a fist like the end of the club of Hercules.
His head tied loosely in a black silk handkerchief, and
on the light-stand stood a tumbler of brandy-and-water.
“What do you want?” he thundered again, as I stepped
over a threshold and lifted my hat, struck speechless
for a moment with this unexpected apparition.
“Have I the pleasure,” I asked, in a hesitating
voice, “to address Captain Thompson?”
“That's my name!”
“Ah! then, captain, I have the pleasure to inform
you that Mrs. Thompson and little John are arrived.
They are at the door at this moment.”
A change in the expression of Captain Thompson's
face checked my information in the middle, and as I
took a step backward, he raised himself on his elbow,
and looked at me in a way that did not diminish my
embarrassment.
“I'll tell you what, Mr. Milk-and-water,” said he,
with an emphasis on every word like the descent of a
sledge-hammer; “if you're not out of this room in
two seconds with your `Mrs. Thompson and little
John,' I'll slam you through that window, or the devil
take me!”
I reflected as I took another step backward, that if
I were thrown down to Mrs. Thompson from a fifth
story window I should not be in a state to render her
the assistance she required; and remarking with an
ill-feigned gayety to Captain Thompson that so decided
a measure would not be necessary, I backed
expeditiously over the threshold. As I was closing
his door, I heard the gulp of his brandy-and-water,
and the next instant the empty glass whizzed past my
retreating head, and was shattered to pieces on the
wall behind me.
I gave the “boots” a cuff for an untimely roar of
laughter as I reached the staircase, and descended,
very much discomfited and embarrassed, to Mrs.
Thompson. My delay had thrown that lady into a
very moving state of unhappiness. Her tears were
glistening in the light of the street lamp, and Master
John was pulling away unheeded at her stomacher,
and crying as if he would split his diaphragm. What
to do? I would have offered to take her to my paternal
roof till the mystery could be cleared up—but I
had been absent two years, and to arrive at midnight
with a woman and a young child, and such an improbable
story—I did not think my reputation at
home would bear me out. The coaçhman, too, began
to swear and make demonstrations of leaving us in the
street, and it was necessary to decide.
“Shove the baggage inside the coach,” I said at
last, “and drive on. Don't be unhappy Mrs. Thompson!
Jocket, stop crying, you villain! I'll see that
you are comfortably disposed of for the night where
the coach stops, madam, and to-morrow I'll try a
little reason with Captain Thompson. How the devil
can she love such a volcanic specimen!” I muttered
to myself, dodging instinctively at the bare remembrance
of the glass of brandy-and-water.
The coachman made up for lost time, and we rattled
over the pavements at a rate that made Jocket's hullybaloo
quite inaudible. As we passed the door of my
own home, I wondered what would be the impression
of my respectable parent, could he see me whisking
by, after midnight, with a rejected woman and her
progeny upon my hands; but smothering the unworthy
doubt that re-arose in my mind, touching the
legitimacy of Master John, I inwardly vowed that I
would see Mrs. Thompson at all risks fairly out of
her imbroglio.
We pulled up with a noise like the discharge of a
load of paving-stones, and I was about saying something
both affectionate and consolatory to my weeping
charge, when a tall handsome fellow, with a face as
brown as a berry, sprang to the coach-door, and seized
her in his arms! A shower of kisses and tender epithets
left me not a moment in doubt. There was
another Captain Thompson!
He had not been able to get rooms at the Marlborough,
as he had anticipated when he wrote, and
presuming that the mail would come first to the post-office,
he had waited for her there.
As I was passing the Marlborough a week or two
afterward, I stopped to inquire about Captain Thompson.
I found that he was an old West India captain,
who had lived there between his cruises for twenty
years more or less, and had generally been supposed a
bachelor. He had suddenly gone to sea, the landlord
told me, smiling at the same time, as if thereby
hung a tale if he chose to tell it.
“The fact is,” said Boniface, when I pushed him a
little on the subject, “he was skeared off.”
“What scared him?” I asked very innocently.
“A wife and child from some foreign port!” he answered
laughing as if he would burst his waistband,
and taking me into the back parlor to tell me the particulars.
