Page:The crater; or, Vulcan's peak.djvu/27

OR, VULCAN S PEAK. 21 Bridget Yardley had now fairly budded, to pursue the figure with which we commenced the description of this blooming-flower, and, if not actually expanded into perfect womanhood, was so near it as to show beyond all question that the promises of her childhood were to be very amply redeemed. Mark found her in black, however; or, in mourning for her mother. An only child, this serious loss had thrown her more than ever in the way of Anne, the parents on both sides winking at an association that could do no harm, and which might prove so useful. It was very different, however, with the young sailor. He had not been a fortnight at home, and getting to be intimate with the roof-tree of Doctor Yardley, before that person saw fit to pick a quarrel with him, and to forbid him his house. As the dispute was wholly gratuitous on the part of the Doctor, Mark behaving with perfect propiiety on the occasion, it may be well to explain its real cause. The fact was, that Bridget was an heiress ; if not on a very large scale, still an heiress, and, what was more, unalter ably so in right of her mother ; and the thought that a son of his competitor, Doctor Woolston, should profit by this fact, was utterly insupportable to him. Accordingly he quarrelled with Mark, the instant he was apprised of the character of his attentions, and forbade him the house. To do Mark justice, he knew nothing of Bridget s worldly possessions. That she was beautiful, and warm-hearted, and frank, and sweet-tempered, and feminine, and affec tionate, he both saw and felt; but beyond this he neither saw anything, nor cared about seeing anything. The young sailor was as profoundly ignorant that Bridget was the actual owner of certain three per cents, that brought twelve hundred a year, as if she did not own a copper, 1 as it was the fashion of that period to say, cents being then very little, if at all, used. Nor did he know anything of the farm she had inherited from her mother, or of the store in town, that brought three hundred and fifty more in rent. It is true that some allusions were made to these matters by Doctor Yardley, in his angry comments on the Wool ston family generally, Anne always excepted, and in whose favour he made a salvo, even in the height of his denun ciations. Still, Mark thought so much of that which was ...