"No, no, Pen, dearest Pen," cried out Helen in an excess of joy. "I told, I told you, doctor, he was not—not what you thought;" and the tender creature coming trembling forward flung herself on Pen's shoulder.
Pen felt himself a man, and a match for all the doctors in doctordom. He was glad this explanation had come. "You saw how beautiful she was," he said to his mother, with a soothing, protecting air, like Hamlet with Gertrude in the play. "I tell you, dear mother, she is as good. When you know her you will say so. She is of all, except you, the simplest, the kindest, the most affectionate of women. Why should she not be on the stage?—She maintains her father by her labor."
"Drunken old reprobate," growled the doctor, but Pen did not hear or heed.
"If you could see, as I have, how orderly her life is, how pure and pious her whole conduct, you would—as I do—yes, as I do"—(with a savage look at the doctor)—"spurn the slanderer who dared to do her wrong. Her father was an officer, and distinguished himself in Spain. He was a friend of His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, and is intimately known to the Duke of Wellington, and some of the first officers of our army. He has met my uncle Arthur at Lord Hill's, he thinks. His own family is one of the most ancient and respectable in Ireland, and indeed is as good as our own. The—the Costigans, were kings of Ireland."
"Why, God bless my soul," shrieked out the doctor, hardly knowing whether to burst with rage or laughter, "you don't mean to say you want to marry her?"
Pen put on his most princely air. "What else, Dr. Portman," he said, "do you suppose would be my desire?"
Utterly foiled in his attack, and knocked down by this sudden lunge of Pen's, the doctor could only gasp out, "Mrs. Pendennis, ma'am, send for the major."
"Send for the major? with all my heart," said Arthur, Prince of Pendennis and Grand Duke of Fairoaks, with a most superb wave of the hand. And the colloquy terminated by the writing of those two letters which were laid on Major Pendennis's breakfast-table, in London, at the commencement of Prince Arthur's most veracious history.