Great was the surprise of Flora, when, instead of entering the house by a front door, they walked up an interminable flight of stone stairs, every landing comprising a distinct dwelling, or flat (as it is technically termed), with the names of the proprietors marked on the doors. At last they reached the flat occupied by good Mistress Waddel, situated at the very top of this stony region. Mrs. Waddel was at the door ready to receive them. She showed them into a comfortable sitting-room with windows fronting the street, where a bright fire was blazing in a very old-fashioned grate. She welcomed her new lodgers with a torrent of kindly words, pronounced in the broadest Scotch dialect, only half understood by the English portion of her audience.
A large portly personage was Mrs. Waddel,—ugly, amiable, and by no means particular in her dress; which consisted of a woollen plaid, very much faded, and both ragged and dirty. Her large mutch with its broad frills formed a sort of glory round her head, setting off to no advantage her pock-marked, flabby face, wide mouth and yellow projecting teeth. She had a comical, good-natured obliquity of vision in her prominent light-grey eyes, which were very red about the rims; and Flora thought, as she read with an inquiring eye the countenance of their landlady, that without being positively disgusting, she was the most ordinary, uncouth woman she ever beheld.
Mrs. Waddel was eloquent in the praise of her apartments, which she said had been occupied by my Leddy W. when his Majesty George the Fourth, God bless his saucy face, landed at Leith, on his visit to Scotland. Her lodgings, it seemed, had acquired quite an aristocratic character since the above-named circumstance; and not a day passed, but the good woman enumerated all the particulars of that memorable visit. But her own autobiography was the stock theme with the good landlady. The most minute particulars of her private history she daily divulged, to the unspeakable delight of the mischievous laughter-loving James Hawke, who, because he saw that it annoyed Mrs. Lyndsay, was sure to lead the conversation slily to some circumstance which never failed to place the honest-hearted Scotchwoman on her high-horse: and then she would talk,—ye gods!—how she would talk—and splutter away in her broad provincial dialect, until the wicked boy was convulsed with laughter.
“Ay, Mister Jeames,” she would say, “ye will a’ be maken’ yer fun o’ a’ puir auld bodie, but ’tis na’ cannie o’ ye.”
“Making fun of you, Mrs. Waddel,” said he, with a sly glance at Flora, “how can you take such an odd notion into your head! It is so good of you to tell me all about your courtship: it’s giving me a hint of how I’m to go about it when I’m a man. I am sure you were a very pretty, smart girl in your young days”—with another quizzical glance at Flora.
The old lady drew herself up, and smiled approvingly upon her black-eyed tormentor.
“Na, na, Mister Jeames, my gude man that’s dead an’ gane said to me, the verra day that he made me his ain—‘Katie, ye are nae bonnie, but ye a’ gude, which is a’ hantle better.’”
“No doubt he was right, Mrs. Waddel; but I really think he was very ungallant to say so on his wedding-day, and did not do you half justice.”
“Weel, weel,” said the good dame, “every ain to his taste. He was not ow’r gifted that way himsel; but we are nane sensible o’ our ain defects.”
The great attraction in the small, windowless closet in which James slept, was an enormous calabash, which her son, the idol of Mrs. Waddel’s heart, had brought home with him from the South Seas. Over this calabash, the simple-hearted mother daily rehearsed all the wonderful adventures she had gathered from that individual, during his short visits home; and as she possessed a surprisingly retentive memory, her maternal reminiscences would have filled volumes,—to all of which James listened with the most earnest attention, not on account of the adventures, for they were commonplace enough, but for the mere pleasure of hearing Mrs. Waddel talk broad Scotch, from which he seemed to derive the most ludicrous enjoyment. Mrs. Waddel had two daughters, to whom nature had been less bountiful than even to herself. Tall, awkward, shapeless dawdles, whose unlovely youth was more repulsive than the mother’s full-blown, homely age,—with them the old lady’s innocent obliquity of vision had degenerated into a downright squint, and the redness round the rims of their large, fishy-looking, light eyes, gave the idea of perpetual weeping,—a pair of Niobes, versus the beauty, whose swollen orbs were always dissolved in tears. They crept slip-shod about the house, their morning wrappers fitting so easily their slovenly figures, that you expected to see them suddenly fall to the ground, and the young ladies walk on in native simplicity.