Whether it was the mushrooms, or a little very weak shrub punch that Mary Anne made, disagreed with me, I can't tell, but I had a nightmare every time I went to sleep, and always woke up with a screech. That's the way I spent the blessed night, and it was only as day began to break that I felt a regular drowsiness over me and went off into a good comfortable doze. Just then there came a rattling of horses' hoofs, and a cracking of whips under the window, and Mary Anne came up to say something, but I would n't listen, but covered my head up in the bedclothes till she went away.
It was twenty minutes to four when I awoke, and a gloomy day, with a thick, soft rain falling, that I knew well would bring on one of my bad headaches, and I was just preparing myself for suffering, when Mary Anne came to the bedside.
"Yes," said she; "they went off before six o'clock."
"Thanks be to Providence," said I. "I hope I 'll never see one of them again."
"And why wouldn't I say it, Mary Anne?" said I. "Would you have me nurse a serpent,--harbor a boa-constrictor in my bosom?"
"Let him come up," said I. "Let him see the wreck he has made of me. Let him come and feast his eyes over the ruin his own cruelty has worked."
"Papa. He's gone with Mrs. Gore Hampton!"
With that, Molly, I gave a scream that was heard all over the house. And so it was for two hours--screech after screech--tearing my hair and destroying everything within reach of me. To think of the old wretch--for I know his age right well; Sam Davis was at school with him forty-eight years ago, at Dr. Bell's, and that shows he's no chicken--behaving this way. I knew the depravity of the man well enough. I did n't pass twenty years with him without learning the natural wickedness of his disposition, but I never thought he 'd go the length of this. Oh, Molly! the shock nearly killed me; and coming as it did after the dreadful disappointment about Jones M'Carthy's affairs, I don't know at all how I bore up against it. I must tell you that James and Mary Anne did n't see it with my eyes. They thought, or they pretended to think, that he was only going as far as Ems, to accompany her, as they call it, on a visit to the Princess,--just as if there was a princess at all, and that the whole story wasn't lies from beginning to end.