Chesney, I want one to share this with me. I want you to give her to me. Your daughter.”
Mr. Carlton spoke in a low tone of emotion, and it may be doubted whether the captain heard him aright. Certain it is that he made no reply, but stared at Mr. Carlton as if he had become moonstruck.
“I speak of Miss Laura Chesney,” continued the surgeon. “Oh, sir, give her to me! I will make her a loving husband. She shall want for nothing to render her happy that the most anxious care and tenderness can bestow.”
Captain Chesney wondered whether he himself had gone mad, or whether Mr. Carlton had. He had a firm conviction that it must be one or the other. He no more believed it within the range of possibility that any common country practitioner should presume to aspire to an alliance with the aristocratic family of Chesney, than that he, the captain, should dare to aspire to one of the royal princesses. His stick trembled ominously, but did not as yet come down.
"What did you say, sir?” he demanded, with set teeth.
“Sir, I love your daughter; I love Laura Chesney as I have never yet loved, and never shall love another. Will you suffer me to make her my wife?”
Down came the stick in all its thunder, and out roared the captain’s voice as an accompaniment, shouting for Pompey. The black servant flew up, as if impelled by something behind him.
“Was massa ill?”
“Ill!” chafed the captain. "He is!” he added, pointing the stick at Mr. Carlton. “He’s mad, Pompey; gone stark staring mad: you’ve shut me up here with a mad fellow. Get him out of the house, somehow.”
The bewildered Pompey stood in confusion. He knew his choleric master said anything that came uppermost, and he glanced at the calm face, the still, self-possessed bearing of Mr. Carlton; certainly he looked like anything but a madman.
Mr. Carlton rose, his manner haughty, his voice cold. “Captain Chesney, I am a gentleman; and my proposal to you at least required courtesy. Have the kindness to favour me with an intelligible answer.”
“I’ll be shot if you get any other answer from me, You are mad, sir; nobody but a fool or a madman would dream of such a thing as you have now been proposing. Do you know, sir, that my daughter is a Chesney?"
“And I am a Carlton, If the names were to be picked to pieces in the Heralds’ College, the one might prove equal, if not superior to the other.”
“Why—goodness bless my soul!” retorted the amazed captain, “you—you are a common apothecary, sir—a dispenser of medicine! and you would aspire to a union with the family of Chesney?”
“I am a member of the Royal College of Surgeons,” angrily repeated Mr. Carlton, who was beginning to lose his temper.
“If you were the whole College of Surgeons rolled into one,—their head, and their tail, and their middle,—you wouldn’t dare to glance at my daughter, had you any sense of propriety within you. Do you mean to show this gentleman out, you rascal?” added the inflamed captain, menacing with his stick the head of the unhappy Pompey.
“Door open, Misser Doctor,” cried Pompey. But Mr. Carlton motioned him away with a gesture of the hand.
“Captain Chesney, I have told you that I love your daughter; I have told you that my prospects are sufficiently assured to justify me in marrying. Once more I ask you—will you give her to me?”
“No, by Jove!” raved the captain, “I’d see your coffin walk first. Here—stop—listen to me; I’d rather see her in her coffin, than disgraced by contact with you. You wed Laura Chesney? Never, never.”
“What if I tell you that her hopes—her life, I may almost say—are bound up in me?” cried Mr. Carlton in a low tone.
“What if I tell you that you are a bad and wicked man?” shrieked the captain. “How dared you take advantage of your being called into my house professionally, to cast your covetous eye on any of my family? Was that gentlemanly, sir? was it the act of a man of honour? You confounded old idiot, standing there with your great goggle eyes, what possesses you to disobey me? Haven’t I ordered you to show this—this person—to the door!”
The last two sentences, as the reader may divine, were addressed to the bewildered Pompey. Mr. Carlton wore a resolute expression of face just then. He took it with him, and stood before Captain Chesney, folding his arms.
“It is said in Scripture, that a woman shall leave father and mother, and cleave unto her husband. I would ask you a question, Captain Chesney. By what right, her affections being engaged, and my means suitable, do you deny me your daughter?”
“The right of power, sir,” was the sarcastic retort. “And, now that I have answered your question, allow me to ask you one. By what right did you seek her affections? You came into my house with one ostensible object, and clandestinely availed yourself of your foot-