At length the patience of Mrs. Sandboys became exhausted; for, though it was hardly daylight, she felt satisfied they would be hours too late for the ceremony, unless the tedious operation of shaving could be immediately performed by her husband; and the lady accordingly insisted that Mr. Sandboys should slip on his trousers and proceed to the maid’s door, with the view of rousing the sluggard from her slumbers. She would go herself, she said, but swarming as the establishment was with foreigners, and considering her late perilous adventure with one of the French lodgers, she did not consider it prudent to hazard a repetition of the circumstances.
Cursty therefore proceeded to do the bidding of his wife, and groping his way in the twilight—for it was not yet morning—to the apartment of their serving-maid, he mounted the stairs as softly as he could, so that he might not alarm the other sleepers in the house.
On gaining the landing that led to Ann Lightfoot’s room, the sounds of a gentle tapping caught Mr. Sandboys’ ear, and in the dusk he could just perceive the figure of a man standing outside the door. He paused for a minute, and then heard the individual, as he softly repeated the tapping, request, in broken English, that the “angel” would get up and heat him a flat iron at the kitchen fire.
Now Mr. Sandboys had been informed by the partner of his fortunes and four-poster of the pattern of a huge pair of moustachios, in black wax, having been discovered imprinted on the cheek of Ann Lightfoot, after her late visit to the Frenchmen’s apartment, and no sooner heard the term “angel” applied to the maid, than immediately a shrewd suspicion flashed across his mind, that the individual then at the girl’s door was none other than the owner of the original moustachios, of which Ann had borne away so faithful a copy.
In an instant he made a rush at the hirsute gentleman, and, seizing him by the shoulders, proceeded to shake him violently, and to rate him in no very gentle terms, threatening to throw the scoundrel over the stairs.
The proprietor of the moustachios immediately grew as indignant as the hot-blooded native of Cumberland, and declaring, with several violent taps of his bosom, that his honour had been mortally wounded, demanded the gentleman’s card, in order that he might obtain satisfaction for the insult.
Mr. Sandboys, though unused to such a mode of redressing injury, and far more disposed to use his fists than pistols as a means of settling a quarrel, still was sufficient of the gentleman to fall in upon such an occasion with the French, rather than the English mode of terminating a dispute. Accordingly he thrust his hand into his breeches’ pocket, and drawing forth his pocket-book, gave the foreigner the first piece of card-board that he could lay his hands upon, and received in exchange the address of his adversary; after which, having seen the gentleman safely down the stairs, he proceeded to rouse the girl, and then returned to his apartment.
Cursty, as he descended to his room, decided within himself that it would be better not to inform his wife of the occurrence until he saw what turn the affair might take. The consequence was, that his pocket-book, once consigned to its usual abiding place, was not opened again. This was especially unfortunate, for, had he done so, he could not have failed to have discovered, that in the excitement of the moment and the darkness of the morning he had parted with his season ticket to the Great Exhibition instead of his card of address.
At length the toilet of the Cumbrian couple was settled, and Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys proceeded forth on their way to the “World’s Show,” happy in the unconsciousness of the loss they had sustained, and overjoyed at the idea of the attainment of the object of their visit to London being so near at hand.
After considerable difficulty, and some hours’ delay, they were at length able to procure a couple of seats in the Putney omnibus, one “in,” and the other “out.” While Mrs. Sandboys was stowed away in the interior of the vehicle, Cursty proceeded to mount the roof, already covered with the sight-seers as thick as a house-top on a coronation day. Mr. Sandboys, being what his dearest Aggy delighted to term a remarkably fine man, was no “feather-weight,” and as he took his seat on the exterior of the long conveyance, the roofing, already considerably depressed with the load, was seen to belly downwards, very much like a fat sailor’s hammock.