“My dear madam,” he stammered, sitting down inadvertently on Mrs Stoutley’s bonnet—for it was to the good lady’s private dressing-room that he had been summoned by Gillie White—“hold on! don’t now, please! What ever have I done to—”
“You’ve done nothing, my dear Captain,” said Mrs Stoutley, endeavouring to check her tears. “There, I’m very foolish, but I can’t help it. Indeed I can’t.”
In proof of the truth of this assertion she broke down again, and the Captain, moving uneasily on his chair, ground the bonnet almost to powder—it was a straw one.
“You have been a kind friend, Captain Wopper,” said Mrs Stoutley, drying her eyes, “a very kind friend.”
“I’m glad you think so, ma’am; I’ve meant to be—anyhow.”
“You have, you have,” cried Mrs Stoutley, earnestly, as she looked through her tears into the seaman’s rugged countenance, “and that is my reason for venturing to ask you now to trouble yourself with—with—”
There was an alarming symptom here of a recurrence of “squally weather,” which caused the Captain to give the bonnet an “extra turn,” but she recovered herself and went on—
“With my affairs. I would not have thought of troubling you, but with poor Lewie so ill, and Dr Lawrence being so young, and probably inexperienced in the ways of life, and Emma so innocent and helpless, and—in short I’m—hee!—that is to say—ho dear! I am so silly, but I can’t—indeed I can’t—hoo–o–o!”
It blew a regular gale now, and a very rain of straw débris fell through the cane-bottomed chair on which the Captain sat, as he vainly essayed to sooth his friend by earnest, pathetic, and even tender adjurations to “clap a stopper upon that,” to “hold hard,” to “belay”, to “shut down the dead-lights of her peepers,” and such-like expressive phrases.
At length, amid many sobs, the poor lady revealed the overwhelming fact that she was a beggar; that she had actually come down to her last franc; that her man of business had flatly declined to advance her another sovereign, informing her that the Gorong mine had declared “no dividend;” that the wreck of her shattered fortune had been swallowed up by the expenses of their ill-advised trip to Switzerland, and that she had not even funds enough to pay their travelling expenses home; in short that she was a miserable boulder, at the lowest level of the terminal moraine!