“The General likes his whisky-bottle more than anything in life,” the other answered; “we live together from habit and convenience; and he cares for me no more than you do. What is it you want to ask me, Mr. Warrington? You ain’t come to visit me, I know very well. Nobody comes to visit me. It is about Fanny, the porter’s daughter, you are come—I see that—very well. Is Mr. Pendennis, now he has got well, anxious to see her again? Does his lordship the Sultan propose to throw his ’andkerchief to her? She has been very ill, sir, ever since the day when Mrs. Pendennis turned her out of doors—kind of a lady, wasn’t it? The poor girl and myself found the young gentleman raving in a fever, knowing nobody, with nobody to tend him but his drunken laundress—she watched day and night by him. I set off to fetch his uncle. Mamma comes and turns Fanny to the right-about. Uncle comes and leaves me to pay the cab. Carry my compliments to the ladies and gentleman, and say we are both very thankful, very. Why, a countess couldn’t have behaved better, and for an apothecary’s lady, as I’m given to understand Mrs. Pendennis was—I’m sure her behaviour is most uncommon aristocratic and genteel. She ought to have a double-gilt pestle and mortar to her coach.”
It was from Mr. Huxter that Bows had learned Pen’s parentage, no doubt, and if he took Pen’s part against the young surgeon, and Fanny’s against Mr. Pendennis, it was because the old gentleman was in so savage a mood, that his humour was to contradict everybody.
Warrington was curious, and not ill pleased at the musician’s taunts and irascibility. “I never heard of these transactions,” he said, “or got but a very imperfect account of them from Major Pendennis. What was a lady to do? I think (I have never spoken with her on the subject) she had some notion that the young woman and my friend Pen were on—on terms of—of an intimacy which Mrs. Pendennis could not, of course, recognise——”
“Oh, of course not, sir. Speak out, sir; say what you mean at once, that the young gentleman of the Temple had made a victim of the girl of Shepherd’s Inn, eh? And so she was turned to be out of doors—or brayed alive in the double-gilt pestle and mortar, by Jove! No, Mr. Warrington, there was no such thing: there was no victimising, or if there was, Mr. Arthur was the victim, not the girl. He is an honest fellow, he is, though he is conceited, and a puppy sometimes. He can feel like a man, and run away from temptation like a man. I own it, though I suffer by it, I own it. He has a heart, he has: but the girl hasn’t, sir. That girl will do anything to win a man, and fling him away without a pang, sir. If she’s flung away herself, sir, she’ll feel it and cry. She had a fever when Mrs. Pendennis turned her out of doors; and she made love to the Doctor, Doctor Goodenough, who came to cure her. Now she has taken on with another chap—another sawbones, ha, ha! d—— it, sir, she likes the pestle and mortar, and hangs round the pill-boxes, she’s so fond of ’em, and she has got a fellow from Saint Bartholomew’s, who grins through a horse-collar for her sisters, and charms away her melancholy. Go and see, sir: very likely he’s in the lodge now. If you want news about Miss Fanny, you must ask at the Doctor’s shop, sir, not of an old fiddler like me—Good-bye, sir. There’s my patient calling.”
And a voice was heard from the Captain’s bedroom, a well-known voice, which said, “I’d loike a dthrop of dthrink, Bows, I’m thirstee.” And not sorry, perhaps, to hear that such was the state of things, and that Pen’s forsaken was consoling herself, Warrington took his leave of the irascible musician.
As luck would have it, he passed the lodge door just as Mr. Huxter was in the act of frightening the children with the mask whereof we have spoken, and Fanny was smiling languidly at his farces. Warrington laughed bitterly. “Are all women like that?” he thought. “I think there’s one that’s not,” he added, with a sigh.
At Piccadilly, waiting for the Richmond omnibus, George fell in with Major Pendennis, bound in the same direction, and he told the old gentleman of what he had seen and heard respecting Fanny.
Major Pendennis was highly delighted: and as might be expected of such a philosopher, made precisely the same observation as that which had escaped from Warrington. “All women are the same,” he said. “La petite se console. Daymy, when I used to read ‘Telemaque’ at school, Calypso ne pouvait se consoler,—you know the rest, Warrington,—I used to say it was absard. Absard, by Gad, and so it is. And so she’s got a new soupirant, has she, the little porteress? Dayvlish nice little girl. How mad Pen will be—eh, Warrington? But we must break it to him gently, or he’ll be in such a rage that he will be going after her again. We must menager the young fellow.”
“I think Mrs. Pendennis ought to know that Pen acted very well in the business. She evidently thinks him guilty, and according to Mr. Bows, Arthur behaved like a good fellow,” Warrington said.
“My dear Warrington,” said the Major, with a look of some alarm, “in Mrs. Pendennis’s agitated state of health and that sort of thing, the best way, I think, is not to say a single word about the subject—or, stay, leave it to me: and I’ll talk to her—break it to her gently, you know, and that sort of thing. I give you my word I will. And so Calypso’s consoled, is she,” And he sniggered over this gratifying truth, happy in the corner of the omnibus during the rest of the journey.