“Tenby oysters!—Welsh rabbits!” repeated Angelina, in a disdainful tone. “Oh, detain me not in this cruel manner!—I want no Tenby oysters, I want no Welsh rabbits; only let me be gone—I am all impatience to see a dear friend. Oh, if you have any feeling, any humanity, detain me not!” cried she, clasping her hands.
Miss Warwick had an ungovernable propensity to make a display of sensibility; a fine theatrical scene upon every occasion; a propensity which she had acquired from novel-reading. It was never more unluckily displayed than in the present instance; for her audience and spectators, consisting of the landlady, a waiter, and a Welsh boy, who just entered the room with a knife-tray in his hand, were all more inclined to burst into rude laughter than to join in gentle sympathy. The chaise did not come to the door one moment sooner than it would have done without this pathetic wringing of the hands. As soon as Angelina drove from the door, the landlady’s curiosity broke forth—
“Pray tell me, Hugh Humphries,” said Mrs. Hoel, turning to the postilion, who drove Angelina from Newport, “pray, now, does not this seem strange, that such a young lady as this should be travelling about in such wonderful haste? I believe, by her flighty airs, she is upon no good errand—and I would have her to know, at any rate, that she might have done better than to sneer, in that way, at Mrs. Hoel of Cardiffe, and her Tenby oysters, and her Welsh rabbit. Oh, I’ll make her repent her pehaviour to Mrs. Hoel, of Cardiffe. ‘Not high-born Hoel,’ forsooth! How does she know that, I should be glad to hear? The Hoels are as high born, I’ll venture to say, as my young miss herself, I’ve a notion! and would scorn, moreover, to have a runaway lady for a relation of theirs. Oh, she shall learn to repent her disrespects to Mrs. Hoel, of Cardiffe. I pelieve she shall soon meet herself in the public newspapers—her eyes, and her nose, and her hair, and her inches, and her description at full length she shall see—and her friends shall see it too—and maybe they shall thank, and maybe they shall reward handsomely Mrs. Hoel, of Cardiffe.”
Whilst the angry Welsh landlady was thus forming projects of revenge for the contempt with which she imagined that her high birth and her Tenby oysters had been treated, Angelina pursued her journey towards the cottage of her unknown friend, forming charming pictures, in her imagination, of the manner in which her amiable Araminta would start, and weep, and faint, perhaps with joy and surprise, at the sight of her Angelina. It was a fine moonlight night—an unlucky circumstance; for the by-road which led to Angelina Bower was so narrow and bad, that if the night had been dark, our heroine must infallibly have been overturned, and this overturn would have been a delightful incident in the history of her journey; but Fate ordered it otherwise. Miss Warwick had nothing to lament, but that her delicious reveries were interrupted, for several miles, by the Welsh postilion’s expostulations with his horses.
“Good Heavens!” exclaimed she, “cannot the man hold his tongue? His uncouth vociferations distract me! So fine a scene, so placid the moonlight—but there is always something that is not in perfect unison with one’s feelings.”
“Miss, if you please, you must light here, and walk for a matter of a quarter of a mile, for I can’t drive up to the house door, because there is no carriage-road down the lane; but if you be pleased, I’ll go on before you—my horses will stand quite quiet here—and I’ll knock the folks up for you, miss.”
“Folks!—Oh, don’t talk to me of knocking folks up,” cried Angelina, springing out of the carriage “stay with your horses, man, I beseech you. You shall be summoned when you are wanted—I choose to walk up to the cottage alone.”
“As you please, miss,” said the postilion; “only hur had better take care of the dogs.”
This last piece of sage counsel was lost upon our heroine; she heard it not—she was “rapt into future times.”
“By moonlight will be our first interview—just as I had pictured to myself—but can this be the cottage?—It does not look quite so romantic as I expected—but ‘tis the dwelling of my Araminta—Happy, thrice happy moment!—Now for our secret signal—I am to sing the first, and my unknown friend the second part of the same air.”