"Exactly; so now keep a bright look out, and hang it all, we have been in enough rum adventures to be able to get the better of a rascally barber, I should think. Look out—look out; there's somebody going in now."
CHAPTER LI.
JOHANNA RUSHES TO HER DESTINY.
Johanna had enough confidants now. Her father—Colonel Jeffery—Big Ben—and Arabella Wilmot, all knew
"The sad story of her love."
It will be a hard case if, among so many councillors, she hits upon the worst—a most truly hazardous course of proceeding; but then it is a fault of the young to mistake daring for ability, and to fancy that that course of proceeding which involves the most personal risk is necessarily the most likely to be successful. Colonel Jeffery was, of all Johanna Oakley's advisers, the one who was most likely to advise her well, but unfortunately he had told her that he loved her, and from that time, with an instinctive delicacy of feeling which no one could have to greater perfection than Johanna, she had shunned him. And yet the reader, who knows the colonel well, knows that, quite irrespective of the attachment that had sprung up in his bosom for the beautiful and heart-stricken girl, he would have played the part of a sincere friend to her and stood manfully between her and all danger. But it was not to be. From the moment that he had breathed to her the secret of his attachment, a barrier was, in her imagination, raised between them. Her father evidently was not one who could or who would advise anything at all energetic; and as for Big Ben, the conversation she had had with him upon the subject had quite been sufficient to convince her that to take him out of the ordinary routine of his thoughts and habits was thoroughly to bewilder him, and that he was as little calculated to plot and to plan in any emergency as a child. She would indeed have trembled at the result of the confidential communication to Big Ben, if she had been aware of the frightfully imprudent manner in which he had thrown himself into communication and collision with Todd, the consequences of which glaring act of indiscretion he was only saved from by Sir Richard Blunt entering the shop, and remaining there until he (Ben) was shaved. Under all these circumstances, then, Johanna found herself thrown back upon her old friend Arabella Wilmot. Now, Arabella was the worst adviser of all, for the romantic notions she had received from her novel reading, imparted so strong a tone to her character, that she might be said in imagination to live in a world of the mind. It was, as the reader will recollect, to Arabella Wilmot that Johanna owed the idea of going to Todd in boy's apparel—a measure fraught with frightful danger, and yet, to the fancy of the young girl, fascinating upon that very account, because it had the appearance as though she were doing something really serious for Mark Ingestrie. To Arabella, then, Johanna went, after Ben had left her, and finding her young friend within, she told her all that had occurred since they last met.
"What shall I do?" she said. "I tell my tale of woe, and people look kind upon me, but no one helps me."
"Oh, Johanna, can you say that of me?"
"No, no. Not of you, Arabella, for you see I have come to you again; but of all others, I can and may say it."
"Comfort yourself, my dear Johanna. Comfort yourself, my dear friend. Come, now—you will make me weep too, if I see those tears."
"What shall I do?—what shall I do?"