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The landlady was too much astonished to reply; Miss Rodney's tones and bearing had so impressed her that she was at a loss for her usual loquacity, and could only stammer respectfully broken answers to whatever was asked.
Would she have refused Rodney's offer of help, she wondered, if she had known an hour ago, that the two hundred dollars she'd relied on so confidently to pull her out of this rut and give her a fresh start whenever she was ready to attempt it, were gone into the pockets of that fat-faced politician?
There, joining with a force of Spaniards from Cuba, he was to conduct a campaign against Jamaica. It was Rodney's business to break up this plan. During a period of preparation on both sides, reënforcements joined the rival fleets, that of the British amounting to enough to give Rodney a marked superiority in numbers.
"While you were up to camp to-day did any of the boys tell you that I am a candidate for second lieutenant of the company?" continued Randolph. "You?" exclaimed Rodney, in genuine astonishment. "Yes, me," replied Randolph, mimicing Rodney's tone and look of surprise. "And why haven't I as good a right as anybody, I should be pleased to know?"
And, in a slightly defiant tone: "Rodney's is a costume dance, you know." "Do you mean you are in fancy dress?" "I am, indeed." He was rather startled. The annual dinner of the board of governors of the City Club and their wives was a most dignified function always. He was the youngest by far of the men; the women were all frankly dowagers.
His mastery of meters was very great; and, if the beauty of a drama depended upon the variety of measures in which the personages speak, Rodney's plays must have challenged the works of Shakespeare.
Yet her nature was stronger than Rodney's, larger and more mature; it was only his experience she lacked. Rodney was and had always been charming; there could be no doubt about that, whatever else you might come to think about him.
He meant to wring all the pleasure out of it he could by way of compensating himself for that other dinner when Violet had decided that all Rodney's most intimate friends ought really to be told what Rose had done, in order that they might be scrupulous enough in avoiding subjects which he might take as a reference to his disgrace.
The old mother toiled without a servant, the old man without a helper, save in harvest time. But the great blow came when Rodney married the designing milliner who flaunted her wares opposite his bar-room; and, somehow, from the date of that marriage, Rodney's good fortune and the hotel declined.
Hood's subsequent career places it beyond doubt that had he been to windward there would have been a severe action, whatever the result; but it is not possible to decide positively between his statement and Rodney's, as to where the fault of being to leeward lay. The writer believes that Hood would have been to windward, if in any way possible.
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