to Mr. Tom, but continued, from time to time, to express solicitude about Dandy. They heard the door open, and old Tom laughing in a capital good temper, and then Dandy came down, evidently full of ship’s rum.
“He’s pumped me!” said Dandy, nodding heavily at his mistress.
Mrs. Mel took him up to his bed-room, and locked the door. On her way back she passed old Tom’s chamber, and his chuckles were audible to her.
“They finished the rum,” said Mrs. Hawkshaw.
“I shall rate him for that to-morrow,” said Mrs. Mel. “Giving that poor beast liquor!”
“Rate Mr. Tom? Oh! Mrs. Harrington! Why, he’ll snap your head off for a word.”
Mrs. Mel replied that her head would require a great deal of snapping to come off.
During this conversation they had both heard a singular intermittent noise above. Mrs. Hawkshaw was the first to ask:
“What can it be? More trouble with him? He’s in his bedroom now.”
“Mad with drink, like Dandy, perhaps,” said Mrs. Mel.
“Hark!” cried the landlady. “Oh!”
It seemed that old Tom was bouncing about in an extraordinary manner. Now came a pause, as if he had sworn to take his rest: now the room shook, and the windows rattled.
“One’d think, really, his bed was a frying-pan, and him a live fish in it,” said the landlady. “Oh—there, again! My goodness! have he got a flea?”
The thought turned Mrs. Hawkshaw white. Mrs. Mel joined in:
“Or a ”
“Don’t! don’t, my dear!” she was cut short. “Oh! one o’ them little things’d be ruin to me. To think o’ that! Hark at him! It must be. And what’s to do? I’ve sent the maids to bed. We haven’t a man. If I was to go and knock at his door, and ask?”
“Better try and get him to be quiet somehow.”
“Ah! I dare say I shall make him fire out fifty times worse.”
Mrs. Hawkshaw stipulated that Mrs. Mel should stand by her, and the two women went up-stairs and stood at old Tom’s door. There they could hear him fuming and muttering unearthly imprecations, and anon there was an interval of silence, and then the room was shaken, and the cursings recommenced.
“It must be a fight he’s having with a flea,” said the landlady. “Oh! pray heaven, it is a flea. For a flea, my dear—gentlemen may bring that theirselves; but a b—, that’s a stationary, and born of a bed. Don’t you hear? The other thing’d give him a minute’s rest; but a flea’s hop—hop—off and on. And he sound like an old gentleman worried by a flea. What are you doing?”
Mrs. Mel had knocked at the door. The landlady waited breathlessly for the result. It appeared to have quieted old Tom.
“What’s the matter?” said Mrs. Mel, severely.
The landlady implored her to speak him fair, and reflect on the desperate things he might attempt.
“What’s the matter? Can anything be done for you?”
Mr. Tom Cogglesby’s reply comprised an insinuation so infamous regarding women when they have a solitary man in their power, that I refuse to place it on record.
“Is anything the matter with your bed?”
“Anything? Yes; anything is the matter, ma’am. Hope twenty live geese inside it’s enough—eh? Bed, do you call it? It’s the rack! It’s damnation! Bed? Ha!”
After delivering this, he was heard stamping up and down the room.
“My very best bed!” whispered the landlady. “Would it please you, sir, to change—I can give you another?”
“I’m not a man of experiments, ma’am—’specially in strange houses.”
“So very, very sorry!”
“What the deuce!” Old Tom came close to the door. “You whimpering! You put a man in a beast of a bed—you drive him half mad—and then begin to blubber! Go away.”
“I am so sorry, sir!”
“If you don’t go away, ma’am, I shall think your intentions are improper.”
“Oh, my goodness!” cried poor Mrs. Hawkshaw. “What can you do with him? I never was suspected of such a thing.”
“And I’ll open the door, ma’am, and then—ha! Then!—though I am the only man in the house—”
Mrs. Mel put Mrs. Hawkshaw behind her.
“Are you dressed?” she called out.
In this way Mrs. Mel tackled old Tom. He was told that should he consent to cover himself decently, she would come into his room and make his bed comfortable. And in a voice that dispersed armies of inuendoes, she bade him take his choice, either to rest quiet or do her bidding.
Had old Tom found his master at last, and in one of the hated sex?
Breathlessly Mrs. Hawkshaw waited his answer, and she was an astonished woman when it came.
“Very well, ma’am. Wait a couple of minutes. Do as you like.”
On their admission to the interior of the chamber, old Tom was exhibited in his daily garb, sufficiently subdued to be civil and explain the cause of his discomfort. Lumps in his bed. He was bruised by them. He supposed he couldn’t ask women to judge for themselves—they’d be shrieking—but he could assure them he was blue all down his back. He knew it by the glass. No mistake. He believed the geese in the bed were not alive now, or they took a deuced deal of killing.
Mrs. Mel and Mrs. Hawkshaw turned the bed about, and punched it, and rolled it.
“Ha!” went old Tom, “what’s the good of that? That’s just how I found it. Moment I got into bed geese began to put up their backs.”
Mrs. Mel seldom indulged in a joke, and then only when it had a proverbial cast. On the present occasion, the truth struck her forcibly, and she said:
