The Argosy — page 387: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

cw? — — —- 5, i en a eee ee - —— ee ee ee eee ane Om. 364 The House of Halliwell. the notice of gentlemen. Hester was even more displeased. She thought it exceedingly wrong of her aunt to introduce a stranger to their home in that unceremonious manner. What did she know of Captain Kerleton? He might be an adventurer, a swindler, for all she could tell to the contrary. As it afterwards turned out, he was a gentleman, of good family and fortune, but that was no thanks to Aunt Copp’s prudence. ‘The fact was, Mrs. Copp had been con- nected with seafaring people so long that she had imbibed a touch of their free-and-easy notions, and had become almost as open-hearted in her manners as her late husband, the merchant-captain. Captain Kerleton took up his residence at the Seaford Arms, and a gay time of it ensued. The whole neighbourhood undertook to patronise him, especially the houses which contained grown-up daughters, for his fortune, really a good one, report considerably magnified. Pic-nic parties, evening parties, hay-making parties, followed close upon each other, some of which owned Aunt Copp for the projector; none remembered the quiet village ever to have been so gay. Captain Kerleton did his utmost to render himself agreeable: would run his head off to fetch and carry at any lady’s whim ; dance himself lame and sing himself hoarse ; and when once he zvas set on to dance and sing there was no stopping him. On the whole, Hester liked his manners, and the Seaford Arms gave a pleasant account of his quiet, gentlemanly habits ; but there was one trick of his which was a strange one—that of staring. He would sometimes be seized with one of these staring fits, and then he would sit in his chair, and look someone straight in the face for a quarter of an hour together, and never once move his eyes. Sometimes it would be Aunt Copp, sometimes Hester, sometimes Lucy, and some- times others ; it seemed to be all the same to the Captain. Once it was Phceby. He had gone into the kitchen to ask her to brush his coat, which had accidentally acquired some dust, and there he sat. himself down and stared at Pheeby, till the girl grew so confused that she sidled out of the kitchen and left him to it, bolting herself in the back-house. One morning they were seated at the open window of their front parlour, busy over some shirts and bands for Alfred (whose poor wife had enough to do with her children and her household cares without thinking of new shirts and bands for the parson), and were conversing, sadly enough, of their future prospects, which were anything but distinct, when some scarlet object came looming up the opposite road. Lucy saw it first, and they all looked up through the closed Venetian blinds. The sun shone on it, hot and bright, and the scarlet was intermingled with something that glittered like gold, and dazzled the sight. “Goodness heart alive!” uttered Aunt Copp, after a puzzled gaze through her spectacles, ‘if it is not Captain Kerleton in his regi- mentals ! ” Gomicbooks.co