Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The “Kidneys” did not like this behaviour. Clinker ceased to come.
Bustard, the poulterer, ceased to come. As for Snaffle, he also
disappeared, for Woolsey wished to make him answerable for the
misbehaviour of Eglantine, and proposed to him the duel which the latter
had declined. So Snaffle went. Presently they all went, except the
tailor and Tressle, who lived down the street, and these two would
sit and pug their tobacco, one on each side of Crump, the landlord, as
silent as Indian chiefs in a wigwam. There grew to be more and more room
for poor old Crump in his chair and in his clothes; the “Kidneys” were
gone, and why should he remain? One Saturday he did not come down to
preside at the club (as he still fondly called it), and the Saturday
following Tressle had made a coffin for him; and Woolsey, with the
undertaker by his side, followed to the grave the father of the
“Kidneys.”
Mrs. Crump was now alone in the world. “How alone?” says some innocent
and respected reader. Ah! my dear sir, do you know so little of human
nature as not to be aware that, one week after the Richmond affair,
Morgiana married Captain Walker? That did she privately, of course; and,
after the ceremony, came tripping back to her parents, as young people
do in plays, and said, “Forgive me, dear Pa and Ma, I'm married, and
here is my husband the Captain!” Papa and mamma did forgive her, as why
shouldn't they? and papa paid over her fortune to her, which she carried
home delighted to the Captain. This happened several months before the
demise of old Crump; and Mrs. Captain Walker was on the Continent with
her Howard when that melancholy event took place; hence Mrs. Crump's
loneliness and unprotected condition. Morgiana had not latterly seen
much of the old people; how could she, moving in her exalted sphere,
receive at her genteel new residence in the Edgware Road the old
publican and his wife?
Being, then, alone in the world, Mrs. Crump could not abear, she said,
to live in the house where she had been so respected and happy: so she
sold the goodwill of the “Bootjack,” and, with the money arising from
this sale and her own private fortune, being able to muster some sixty
pounds per annum, retired to the neighbourhood of her dear old “Sadler's
Wells,” where she boarded with one of Mrs. Serle's forty pupils. Her
heart was broken, she said; but, nevertheless, about nine months after
Mr. Crump's death, the wallflowers, nasturtiums, polyanthuses, and
convolvuluses began to blossom under her bonnet as usual; in a year she
was dressed quite as fine as ever, and now never missed “The Wells,” or
some other place of entertainment, one single night, but was as regular
as the box-keeper. Nay, she was a buxom widow still, and an old flame of
hers, Fisk, so celebrated as pantaloon in Grimaldi's time, but now doing
the “heavy fathers” at “The Wells,” proposed to her to exchange her name
for his.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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