The picture Gabriel had drawn, indeed, threatened serious consequences,
and would indubitably have led to them, but luckily at that moment a
light footstep crossed the threshold, and Dolly, running in, threw her
arms round her old father's neck and hugged him tight.
'Here she is at last!' cried Gabriel. 'And how well you look, Doll, and
how late you are, my darling!'
How well she looked? Well? Why, if he had exhausted every laudatory
adjective in the dictionary, it wouldn't have been praise enough. When
and where was there ever such a plump, roguish, comely, bright-eyed,
enticing, bewitching, captivating, maddening little puss in all this
world, as Dolly! What was the Dolly of five years ago, to the Dolly of
that day! How many coachmakers, saddlers, cabinet-makers, and professors
of other useful arts, had deserted their fathers, mothers, sisters,
brothers, and, most of all, their cousins, for the love of her! How many
unknown gentlemen--supposed to be of mighty fortunes, if not titles--had
waited round the corner after dark, and tempted Miggs the incorruptible,
with golden guineas, to deliver offers of marriage folded up in
love-letters! How many disconsolate fathers and substantial tradesmen
had waited on the locksmith for the same purpose, with dismal tales of
how their sons had lost their appetites, and taken to shut themselves up
in dark bedrooms, and wandering in desolate suburbs with pale faces,
and all because of Dolly Varden's loveliness and cruelty! How many
young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned
suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of
unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes
of rheumatic watchmen! How had she recruited the king's service, both
by sea and land, through rendering desperate his loving subjects between
the ages of eighteen and twenty-five! How many young ladies had publicly
professed, with tears in their eyes, that for their tastes she was much
too short, too tall, too bold, too cold, too stout, too thin, too fair,
too dark--too everything but handsome! How many old ladies, taking
counsel together, had thanked Heaven their daughters were not like her,
and had hoped she might come to no harm, and had thought she would come
to no good, and had wondered what people saw in her, and had arrived at
the conclusion that she was 'going off' in her looks, or had never
come on in them, and that she was a thorough imposition and a popular
mistake!
And yet here was this same Dolly Varden, so whimsical and hard to please
that she was Dolly Varden still, all smiles and dimples and pleasant
looks, and caring no more for the fifty or sixty young fellows who at
that very moment were breaking their hearts to marry her, than if so
many oysters had been crossed in love and opened afterwards.
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