 | CHAPTER III.
MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON. Inklings of adventure |  |
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 ball-room; the bar-keeper
grew thin under the thickening accounts for
lemonades; the fat fellow in the black band, who
“vexed” the bassoon, 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
young gentlemen with propositions; and stage-coaches
that came in with their baggageless tails in the air, and
the driver's weight pressing the foot-board upon the
astonished backs of his wheelers, went out with the
trim 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 ferruginous 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
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° 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
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
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
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 lovliest
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 enamoured
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,
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 the 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 bannisters 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 grey; 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
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
gaiety 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 coachman,
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 for the night where the coach
stops, Madam, and to-morrow I'll try a little reason
with Captain Thompson.—How the devil she can 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
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
afterwards, 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 Bonifiace, 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.
| CHAPTER III.
MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON. Inklings of adventure | |