Hornbull led the beneficiaire forward amidst bursts of enthusiasm—and she looked so handsome and radiant, with her hair still over her shoulders, that Pen hardly could contain himself for rapture; and he leaned over his mother's chair and shouted, and hurrayed and waved his hat. It was all he could do to keep his secret from Helen, and not say, "Look! That's the woman! Isn't she peerless? I tell you I love her." But he disguised these feelings under an enormous bellowing and hurraying.
As for Miss Fotheringay and her behavior, the reader is referred to a former page for an account of that. She went through precisely the same business. She surveyed the house all round with glances of gratitude; and trembled, and almost sank with emotion, over her favorite trap-door. She seized the flowers (Foker discharged a prodigious bouquet at her, and even Smirke made a feeble shy with a rose, and blushed dreadfully when it fell into the pit). She seized the flowers and pressed them to her swelling heart—&c. &c.—in a word—we refer the reader to page 46. Twinkling in her breast poor old Pen saw a locket which he had bought of Mr. Nathan in High-street, with the last shilling he was worth and a sovereign borrowed from Smirke.
"Black-Eyed Susan" followed, at which sweet story our gentle-hearted friends were exceedingly charmed and affected: and in which Susan, with a russet gown and a pink ribbon in her cap, looked to the full as lovely as Ophelia. Bingley was great in William. Goll, as the admiral, looked like the figure-head of a seventy-four; and Garbetts, as Captain Boldweather, a miscreant who forms a plan for carrying off Black-eyed Susan, and, waving an immense cocked hat, says, "Come what may, he will be the ruin of her"—all these performed their parts with their accustomed talent; and it was with a sincere regret that all our friends saw the curtain drop down and end that pretty and tender story.
If Pen had been alone with his mother in the carriage as they went home, he would have told her all that night; but he sate on the box in the moonshine smoking a cigar by the side of Smirke, who warmed himself with a comforter. Mr. Foker's tandem and lamps whirled by the sober old Clavering posters, as they were a couple of miles on their road home, and Mr. Spavin saluted Mrs. Pendennis's carriage with some considerable variations of Rule Britannia on the key-bugle.
It happened two days after the above gayeties that Mr. Dean of Chatteries entertained a few select clerical friends at dinner at his Deanery House. That they drank uncommonly good port wine, and abused the bishop over their dessert, are very likely matters; but with such we have nothing at present to do. Our friend Doctor Portman, of Clavering, was one of the dean's guests, and being a gallant man, and seeing from his place at the mahogany, the dean's lady walking up and down the grass, with her children sporting around her, and her pink parasol over her lovely head—the doctor stepped out of the French windows of the dining-room into the lawn, which skirts that apartment, and left the other white neckcloths to gird at my lord bishop. Then the doctor went up and offered Mrs. Dean his arm, and they sauntered over the ancient velvet lawn, which had been mowed and rolled for immemorial deans, in that easy, quiet, comfortable manner, in which people of middle age and good temper walk after a good dinner, in a calm golden summer evening, when the sun has but just sunk behind the enormous cathedral-towers, and the sickle-shaped moon is growing every instant brighter in the heavens.
Now at the end of the dean's garden, there is, as we have stated, Mrs. Creed's house, and the windows of the first-floor room were open to admit the pleasant summer air. A young lady of six-and-twenty, whose eyes were perfectly wide open, and a luckless boy of eighteen, blind with love and infatuation, were in that chamber together; in which persons, as we have before seen them in the same place, the reader will have no difficulty in recognizing Mr. Arthur Pendennis and Miss Costigan.