"Humph! well, he has been keen enough, it seems, to mismark his handkerchief too!"
"And you are ungenerous enough, Captain Hector Coles, first to do an improper action and then to find fault with your own discomfiture!" was the reply, as the lady once more took the proffered arm of the officer and left the alley, the combatants still pursuing the concluding game of that most memorable match of left hand against scanty practice. Whither one of them went, an hour or two later, may possibly be discovered at no distant period of this narration.
There were stormy times, that night, in the chamber of connubial bliss occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame; and poor Caudle, belabored as he was in the imaginative mind of Douglas Jerrold, never suffered as much in one hour as on that occasion did the ex-contractor, ex-Alderman and ex-purveyor of mettled steeds for the United States cavalry service. Shoddy was in an ill-humor, and Shoddy had a right to be in an ill-humor. Every thing had gone wrong, specially and collectively, from the moment of their entering those fatal mountains. Mishap the first: Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame had fainted and been called "Bridget," before company. Mishap the second: Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame had overeaten himself and come near to leaving the whole family in mourning as loud as his own wails. Mishap the third: Master Brooks Brooks had badgered the bears, in plain sight of all, caused a serious accident, and been visited, both loudly and silently, with objurgations not pleasant to remember. Mishap the fourth: Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame had been herself badgered, worse than the bears, by an irreverent scamp who threw discredit at once upon her foreign travels and her geography. Mishap the fifth: Master Brooks Brooks had tumbled into the Pool, been nearly drowned, and come out a limp rag requiring some washing and several hours wringing before recovering its original consistency. Mishap the sixth: Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, in the agitation of that serious accident, had called the dear boy by a name, that of "Patsey," which would be likely to stick to him, in taunting mouths, during his whole stay at the Profile. Mishap the seventh: Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had fallen in, that day, with the before-mentioned certain stage-drivers, who consented to drink brandy, wine and punch at his expense, enticing him thereafter into low stories of the days when he drove a horse and cart about town, and leaving him eventually in a state of fuddle amusing to their hard heads and harder hearts but by no means conducive to his standing in fashionable watering-place society. Mishap the eighth: Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame had passed two evenings in the parlor and one day among the guests in their rides and walks, bedizened in successive fineries of the most enticing order; and not one person had desired the honor of her acquaintance out of doors, asked her to dance in the parlor, or paid her any more attention than might have been bestowed upon a very ungraceful lay-figure carried around for the showing off of modes and millinery.
All this in thirty hours; and all this was certainly enough to disturb more equable pulses than those which beat under the coarse red skin of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame.
And when, that night while the moon was high in heaven and nearly all the guests had left parlor and piazza to silence after such an eventful day—while poor Marianna in her chamber wept over the cruel neglect which had made mockery of all her rosy anticipations, and Master Brooks Brooks moaned out at her side his petulant complaints born of ill-breeding, fright and weakness,—when Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame opened upon her not-yet-sobered husband the battery of her tongue, and accused him of being the author of all the mishaps before named, those with which he had nothing to do quite as much as those in which he had been really instrumental,—then and there, for the moment, the Nemesis of the outraged republic was duly asserting the power delegated to her by the gods, and Shoddy, in the person of one of its humblest representatives, was undergoing a slight foretaste of that eternal torture to be hereafter enforced.
Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, on that occasion, declared her intention of not remaining another day among "such low people," and she further intimated to Mr. Brooks Cunninghame that if he did not learn to behave himself in a manner more becoming to his high position (or at least the high position of his wife and children!) she would "take him home at once and never bring him out agin into respectable society while her head was warrum."
At the end of which exordium the berated husband not unnaturally remarked, in a brogue nearly as broad as it had ever been:
"And fwhat the divil did ye come trapesin here for at all at all? Ye'd be doin' well enough at home, if ye'd only sthay there, Bridget—I mane Julia. Ye'r no more fit to be kapin company wid dhe quality, nor meself; and I'm as much out of place here as a pig 'ud be goin' to mass! Sure Mary Ann 'il niver be gettin' a husband among these people wid dhe turned-up noses, and poor little Pat'll be dhrouned and kilt and murthered intirely! You'd betther be gettin' out of this as soon as ye can, and I'd be savin' me hard-earned money!"
"The money you have cheated for, ye mane, Pat Cunningham," said Mrs. Brooks, who when alone with the object of her devoted affection and in a temper the reverse of amiable, could unveil some of the household skeletons of language and history quite as readily as he. "Pretty things them was that ye sold for horses to the government! and there's a good dale of the money ye made when ye was Alderman, that they'd send ye to the State Prison for if they knowed all about it!"