“Oh! quite well, bless you; and about to take a second husband. I hear they are to be proclaimed next week. She is making a good bargain.”
“Next week to be married!” ejaculated the gallant captain, turning up his eyes, and starting to his legs with a hurried perplexity.
“So I believe, sir,” continued Bill very calmly. “If you have come to the ceremony, you will find that it does not take place till then. Depend upon it, sir, you have mistaken the date of your invitation card.”
“Well, waiter, you may leave me,” said the captain, stroking his chin in evident embarrassment; “but stop, who is she about to get?”
“Oh, I thought everybody knew Mr Daniel Cathie, one of the town-council, sir; a tobacconist, and a respectable man; likely soon to come to the provostry, sir. He is rather up in years to be sure; but he is as rich as a Jew.”
“What do you say is his name?”
“Daniel Cathie, Esq., tobacconist, and a candlemaker near the Cross. That is his name and designation,—a very respectable man, sir.”
“Well, order the girl to have my bed well warmed, and to put pens, ink, and paper into the room. In the meantime, bring me the boot-jack.”
The captain kept his fiery feelings in restraint before Bill; but the intelligence hit him like a cannon-shot. He retired almost immediately to his bed-chamber; but a guest in the adjoining room declared in the morning, that he had never been allowed to close his eyes, from some person’s alternately snoring or speaking in his sleep, as if in violent altercation with some one; and that, whenever these sounds died away, they were only exchanged for the irregular tread of a foot measuring the apartment, seemingly in every direction.
It was nine in the morning; and Daniel, as he was ringing a shilling on the counter, which he had just taken for “value received,” and half ejaculating aloud as he peered at it through his spectacles—“Not a Birmingham, I hope”—had a card put into his hand by Jonas Bunting, the Salutation shoeblack.