The Captain dropped a glove in the hall when he went away. It had his initials marked inside in great big sprawling characters; but even without the inky “G. M’C.” my Aunt Julietta would have known to whom it belonged....
Ah! in what a pure, sweet hiding-place it was lying, that clumsy hand-cover of dogskin,—while the Captain was routing in the litter of bills, and writs, and dunning-letters that strewed the table in his quarters, and cursing at his soldier-servant for losing his things. And he came to tea yet again, and one of his extra-sized feet accidentally touched, beneath the shelter of the well-spread board, a little foot in a velvet sandal-slipper; and She blushed like an armful of roses, and He crimsoned to the parting of his sandy curls. And thenceforwards the Captain’s wooing proceeded smoothly enough, save for a few manifestations of jealousy on the part of Lieutenant Thady, who was inclined to resent the appropriation of my Aunt Julietta’s smiles.
“For I inthrojuiced you—and you’d heard me say the black-eyed wan was the natest pacer of the sthring—and you’ve cut me out with her—so you have!—and begad! the thing’s joocedly unfair!”
Upon which Captain Goliath extracted a shilling from his waistcoat-pocket, and suggested that the goddess of Chance be called in to decide the issue.
“I’m wit’ you!” said the Lieutenant, with alacrity. “And the best two out of three takes Black Eyes!”
“Done!” agreed his senior, rubbing the edge of his coin carelessly with a stout, muscular thumb. “And the loser will have his pick of the five girrls that’s left. He’ll not have a pin to choose between them in the way of fortune, for the old man left them share and share alike; but the fella that gets the high-nosed wan”—in these disrespectful terms the Captain alluded to my Aunt Marietta—“will have a vixen, take my word for it! Call, now! Heads or tails?—shame or honor?”
Lieutenant Thady called “Tails,” and Captain Goliath spun, and the Lieutenant lost the toss three times running, unaware that the astute Captain carried a double-headed shilling for contingencies of this kind.
A few days later, with the consent of my grandmother—now beginning to realize that the sacrifice of her best plum-cake and Souchong had not been all in vain—the Captain drove my Aunt Julietta out in the family chaise. That drive was, at the outset, a painful experience for Browney, the younger of the stout, elderly carriage pair, who was attached to the vehicle. Never had such pace been got out of him before. Never had such scientific handling of the reins, such artistic touches of the whip, been known to the experience of that respectable cob. But it is on record that he returned home at his own pace, with an engaged couple behind him; and that when my Aunt Julietta was assisted to descend by the hand of the brave and gallant man, to whom, as she wrote to her confidential friend, the daughter of Sir Wackton Tackton, “I have plighted the fondest vow that a woman’s lips may breathe,” she went to the sedate animal’s head and thanked him for the happiest day in all her maiden life, and kissed him on the nose.
Thus Captain Goliath M’Creedy and my Aunt Julietta became definitely betrothed. And the Lieutenant, after some hesitation between blue eyes and brown, arch, coquettish ringlets and Grecian coils, “plumped,” as he afterwards said, for my Aunt Elisabetta.
And Ensign Con, being ordered by his seniors to choose a bride of three-hundred a year pin-money from amongst my grandmother’s remaining daughters, wrote her a note in his best round-hand, soliciting an interview upon a “mater of importanse very near my hart”; and upon the receipt of an elegant billet naming a fitting hour, set out, attired in his best; curled, pomatumed, gloved, and booted beyond anything you can imagine, to conquer Fate.