“Let us play it, and let the audience look to their eyes! Yet my chief humour is for a tyrant,” says the General.
“The tragedy, the tragedy! Go and fetch the tragedy this moment, Gumbo!” calls Mrs. Lambert to the black. Gumbo makes a low bow and says, “Tragedy? yes, madam.”
“In the great cowskin trunk, Gumbo,” George says, gravely.
Gumbo bows and says, “Yes, sir,” with still superior gravity.
“But my tragedy is at the bottom of I don't know how much linen, packages, books, and boots, Hetty.”
“Never mind, let us have it, and fling the linen out of window!” cries Miss Hetty.
“And the great cowskin trunk is at our agent's at Bristol: so Gumbo must get post-horses, and we can keep it up till he returns the day after to-morrow,” says George.
The ladies groaned a comical “Oh!” and papa, perhaps more seriously, said, “Let us be thankful for the escape. Let us be thinking of going home too. Our young gentlemen have treated us nobly, and we will all drink a parting bumper to Madam Esmond Warrington of Castlewood, in Virginia. Suppose, boys, you were to find a tall, handsome stepfather when you got home? Ladies as old as she have been known to marry before now.”
“To Madam Esmond Warrington, my old schoolfellow!” cries Mrs. Lambert. “I shall write and tell her what a pretty supper her sons have given us: and, Mr. George, I won't say how ill you behaved at the play!” And, with this last toast, the company took leave; the General's coach and servant, with a flambeau, being in waiting to carry his family home.
After such an entertainment as that which Mr. Warrington had given, what could be more natural or proper than a visit from him to his guests, to inquire how they had reached home and rested? Why, their coach might have taken the open country behind Montague House, in the direction of Oxford Road, and been waylaid by footpads in the fields. The ladies might have caught cold or slept ill after the excitement of the tragedy. In a word, there was no reason why he should make any excuse at all to himself or them for visiting his kind friends; and he shut his books early at the Sloane Museum, and perhaps thought, as he walked away thence, that he remembered very little about what he had been reading.