‘I wouldn’t,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘I wouldn’t be a man and have such a think upon my mind!—but nobody as owned the name of man, could do it!’
Tom and his sister glanced at each other; and Ruth, after a moment’s hesitation, asked Mrs Gamp what troubled her so much.
‘My dear,’ returned that lady, dropping her voice, ‘you are single, ain’t you?’
Ruth laughed blushed, and said ‘Yes.’
‘Worse luck,’ proceeded Mrs Gamp, ‘for all parties! But others is married, and in the marriage state; and there is a dear young creetur a-comin’ down this mornin’ to that very package, which is no more fit to trust herself to sea, than nothin’ is!’
She paused here to look over the deck of the packet in question, and on the steps leading down to it, and on the gangways. Seeming to have thus assured herself that the object of her commiseration had not yet arrived, she raised her eyes gradually up to the top of the escape-pipe, and indignantly apostrophised the vessel:
‘Oh, drat you!’ said Mrs Gamp, shaking her umbrella at it, ‘you’re a nice spluttering nisy monster for a delicate young creetur to go and be a passinger by; ain’t you! you never do no harm in that way, do you? With your hammering, and roaring, and hissing, and lamp-iling, you brute! Them Confugion steamers,’ said Mrs Gamp, shaking her umbrella again, ‘has done more to throw us out of our reg’lar work and bring ewents on at times when nobody counted on ‘em (especially them screeching railroad ones), than all the other frights that ever was took. I have heerd of one young man, a guard upon a railway, only three years opened—well does Mrs Harris know him, which indeed he is her own relation by her sister’s marriage with a master sawyer—as is godfather at this present time to six-and-twenty blessed little strangers, equally unexpected, and all on ‘um named after the Ingeines as was the cause. Ugh!’ said Mrs Gamp, resuming her apostrophe, ‘one might easy know you was a man’s inwention, from your disregardlessness of the weakness of our naturs, so one might, you brute!’
It would not have been unnatural to suppose, from the first part of Mrs Gamp’s lamentations, that she was connected with the stage-coaching or post-horsing trade. She had no means of judging of the effect of her concluding remarks upon her young companion; for she interrupted herself at this point, and exclaimed:
‘There she identically goes! Poor sweet young creetur, there she goes, like a lamb to the sacrifige! If there’s any illness when that wessel gets to sea,’ said Mrs Gamp, prophetically, ‘it’s murder, and I’m the witness for the persecution.’
She was so very earnest on the subject, that Tom’s sister (being as kind as Tom himself) could not help saying something to her in reply.