Three ladies, a widow, a widow bewitched, and a middle-aged single woman, namely, Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Hawkins, and Miss Cross, had gone immediately, on observing that the stage had dropped two passengers with the widow, to ascertain who they were, where they came from, what they had in view, and whither they were going next. All the information, however, that Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Hawkins, and Miss Cross had been enabled to obtain, (albeit they would have wormed the one secret which a man ought to keep from his wife out of him, after the Holy Inquisition had given him up in despair,) was, that Mrs. Wilkins had taken a man and his wife to board at her house; and that their name was Tompkins. They had retired to their own apartment, and had not been seen by the respectable triad; yet Miss Cross said, she thought from the looks of an old pair of boots, which were tied to one of Mr. Tompkins's trunks, which was standing in the entry, that 'they were no great shakes.' As to this point she had a right also to speak her opinion, seeing that her father had been a respectable retail shoe-maker. So, therefore, the report of Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Hawkins, and Miss Cross, did but whet the curiosity of the congregation as to the private history, present estate, and future prospects of poor Mr. Tompkins and his wife. Many supposed that his name was assumed for the occasion. So many, they urged, were indicted or sued, who had such an alias, that he must have broken out of the state prison, or run away and left his bail in the lurch. An inveterate reader of all the newspapers observed, that a Mr. Tompkins was advertised as having left his wife without any means of subsistence, who would pay no debts contracted by him. It was probable that he had a female partner of his flight; and the circumstance of his coming in such a clandestine way to the house of the widow Wilkins, was certainly a singular coincidence. It would be endless, and scarcely amusing, to mention all the suppositions broached on the subject. One, which was quite popular, was, that this Mr. Tompkins must be the man who had been hanged in Alabama some months before, and who, it was rumored, had been resuscitated.
The most speculatively benevolent hoped that these people would be able to pay their board to the widow, as she was a good sort of woman, though none of the wisest, and could not afford to lose it. The most scrupulously decorous hoped this couple were actually married, and had not come to bring disgrace into Mrs. Wilkins's house, as she had always passed for an honest woman, as had her mother before her, though there had been some strange stories about her aunt and the Yankee doctor.
The next morning, after breakfast, Mr. Tompkins came forth from the widow's house, and walked through the village to the barber's shop. His gait was that of a grave gentleman who has passed the meridian of life, and has nothing to excite him immediately to unnecessary action. There was nothing in his manner that was at all singular, nor was there even the inquisitive expression in his countenance, which would be natural in that of an entire stranger in the place. He walked as a man walks who is going over ground he has trodden all his life, in the usual routine of his occupations. His clothes were plain black, cut after no particular fashion or fancy, but such as old gentlemen generally wear. His walking-stick was plain, with a horn handle. He wore apparently no ornaments, not even a watch. Those whom he met in the street, or passed as they stood in their doors, looked hard and sharply at him; but he neither evaded nor responded to their glances of interrogation.
The barber who shaved him, extracted from him the facts that he had come last from York city, where there was no news; and that he meant to stay for some time in the village. After leaving him in possession of this valuable information, Mr. Tompkins sallied forth, and strayed, at the same leisurely pace, up a hill, the summit of which commanded a picturesque view of the village, and of the adjacent country. The barber observed something like a cicatrix, in a rather suspicious part of his neck, but he did not feel justified in pronouncing an opinion as to whether he had ever been actually hanged or not.
In the mean time, or not long after, Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Hawkins, and Miss Cross, paid a visit to the widow, to tell her not to forget to come to a charitable sewing society that afternoon, and to make another effort to relieve their minds about the case of poor Mrs. Tompkins. They found the latter lady sitting with her hostess. She was knitting cotton stockings. She was a plain middle-aged woman, forty years old or upward, attired in a dark-colored silk dress, with a cambric ruff and cap, not exactly like those worn by the straitest sects of Methodists and Friends, but without any ornament. An introduction having been effected, the ingenuity of the three ladies was immediately exercised in framing interrogatories to the stranger. She was civil, amiable, and apparently devoid of art or mystery; but never was there a more unsuccessful examination, conducted with so much ability on the part of the catechists, and so much seeming simplicity in the witness. Without resorting to downright impertinence, these ladies could extract no more from Mrs. Tompkins, than that she had come with her husband last from New-York, where they had left no family nor connexions, and that they meant to spend some time in the village.
'Had she always lived in New-York?'
'No—she had travelled a great deal.'
'Was it her native place?'
'No—she was born at sea.'
'Had her husband been long settled in New-York?'