“There’s not much pith in that Captain Bold,” interposed Slap-Jack, contemptuously. “You put a strain on him, and see if he don’t start somewhere. Captain, indeed! It’s a queer ship’s company where they made him skipper, askin’ your pardon, Mrs. Dodge.”
Slap-Jack had on one occasion interrupted the captain in a warmer declaration to his sweetheart than he quite relished, and hated him honestly enough in consequence.
“Hoity-toity!” laughed the landlady. “The captain’s nothing to me. I never could abide your black men; and I don’t know that they’re a bit better set off by wearing a red nose. The captain’s Alice’s admirer, not mine; and I think Alice likes him a bit too sometimes, I do!”
This was said, as the French express it, “with intention.” It made Alice toss her head; but Slap-Jack only winked.
“I know better,” said he. “Alice always was heart-of-oak; as true as the compass; wasn’t you, my lass? See how she hoists her colours if you do but hail her. No, no, Aunt Dodge—for aunt you’ll be to me afore another year is out—it’s your broad bows and buxom figure-head as brings the customers cruising about this here bar, like flies round a honey-pot. Come, let’s have the rights now of your gold cross. Is it a keepsake, or a charm, or a love-token, or what?”
“Love-token!” repeated Mrs. Dodge, in high glee. “What do you know of love-tokens? Got a wisp of that silly girl’s brown hair, may be, and a broken sixpence done up in a rag of canvas all stained with sea-water! Why, when my poor Bob was a-courtin’ me, the first keepsake as ever he gave me was eighteen yards of black satin, all off of the same piece, and two real silver bodkins for my hair, as thick a’most as that kitchen poker. Ay, lass! it was something like keeping company in my day to have a pedlar for a bachelor. Well, well; our poor sailor lad maybe as good as here and there a one after all. Who knows?”
“Good enough for me, aunt,” whispered Alice, looking shyly up at her lover from the dish she was wiping, ere she put it carefully on the shelf.
Mrs. Dodge laughed again. “There’s as good fish in the sea, Alice, as ever came out of it; and a maid may take her word back again, ay, at the church door, if she has a mind. The foreign gentleman in the blue room, him as gave me this little cross, he says to me only yesterday morning, ‘Madame,’ says he, as polite as you please, ‘no man was ever yet deceived by a woman if he trusted her entirely. I repose entire confidence in madame,’ that was me, Alice; ‘her face denotes good manners, a good heart, a good life.’ Perhaps he meant good living; but that’s what he said. ‘I am going to ask madame to charge herself with an important trust for me, because I rely securely on her integrity.’ Oh! he spoke beautiful, I can tell you. ‘In case of my absence,’ says he, ‘from your respectable apartments, I will confide to you a sealed packet, to be delivered to a young man who will call for it at a certain hour on a certain day that I shall indicate before I leave. If the young man does not appear, I can trust madame to commit this packet to the flames.’ He was fool enough to add,” simpered Mrs. Dodge, looking a little conscious, “‘that it was rare to see so much discretion joined to so much beauty,’ or some such gammon; but of course I made no account of that.”
“If he paid out his palaver so handsome,” observed Slap-Jack, “take my word for it the chap’s a papist.”
But Mrs. Dodge would not hear of such a construction being put on her lodger’s gallantry.