She bent down, and lifted the hem of her dress just two inches--the discreetest, the modestest gesture. He had a transient vision of something fair--it was gone again.
"I don"t know as I dislike it," said he.
He was standing facing her, his back to the range, and his head on a level with the high narrow mantelpiece, upon which glittered a row of small tin canisters. Suddenly he turned to the corner to the right of the range, where, next to an oak cupboard, a velvet Turkish smoking cap depended from a nail. He put on the cap, of which the long ta.s.sel curved down to his ear. Then he faced her again, putting his hands behind him, and raising himself at intervals on his small, well-polished toes. She lifted her two hands simultaneously to her head, and began to draw pins from her hat, which pins she placed one after another between her lips.
Then she lowered the hat carefully from her head, and transfixed it anew with the pins.
"Will you mind hanging it on that nail?" she requested.
He took it, as though it had been of gla.s.s, and hung it on the nail.
Without her hat she looked as if she lived there, a jewel in a pipe-case. She appeared to be just as much at home as he was. And they were so at home together that there was no further necessity to strain after a continuous conversation. With a vague smile she gazed round and about, at the warm, cracked, smooth red tiles of the floor; at the painted green walls, at a Windsor chair near the cupboard--a solitary chair that had evidently been misunderstood by the large family of relatives in the other room and sent into exile; at the pair of bellows that hung on the wall above the chair, and the rich gaudiness of the grocer"s almanac above the bellows; at the tea-table, with its coa.r.s.e grey cloth and thick crockery spread beneath the window.
"So you have all your meals here?" she ventured.
"Ay," he said. "I have what I call my meals here."
"Why," she cried, "don"t you enjoy them?"
"I eat "em," he said.
"What time do you have tea?" she inquired.
"Four o"clock," said he. "Sharp!"
"But it"s a quarter to, now!" she exclaimed, pointing to a clock with weights at the end of bra.s.s chains and a long pendulum. "And didn"t you say your servant was out?"
"Ay," he mysteriously lied. "Her"s out. But her"ll come back. Happen her"s gone to get a bit o" fish or something."
"Fish! Do you always have fish for tea?"
"I have what I"m given," he replied. "I fancy a snack for my tea.
Something tasty, ye know."
"Why," she said, "you"re just like me. I adore tea. I"d sooner have tea than any other meal of the day. But I never yet knew a servant who could get something tasty every day. Of course, it"s quite easy if you know how to do it; but servants don"t--that is to say, as a rule--but I expect you"ve got a very good one."
"So-so!" James murmured.
"The trouble with servants is that they always think that if you like a thing one day you"ll like the same thing every day for the next three years."
"Ay," he said, drily. "I used to like a kidney, but it"s more than three years ago." He stuck his lips out, and raised himself higher than ever on his toes.
He did not laugh. But she laughed, almost boisterously.
"I can"t help telling you," she said, "you"re perfectly lovely, great-stepuncle. Are we both going to drink out of the same cup?" In such manner did the current of her talk gyrate and turn corners.
He approached the cupboard.
"No, no!" She sprang up. "Let me. I"ll do that, as the servant is so long."
And she opened the cupboard. Among a miscellany of crocks therein was a blue-and-white cup and saucer, and a plate to match underneath it, that seemed out of place there. She lifted down the pile.
"Steady on!" he counselled her. "Why dun you choose that?"
"Because I like it," she replied, simply.
He was silenced. "That"s a bit o" real Spode," he said, as she put it on the table and dusted the several pieces with a corner of the tablecloth.
"It won"t be in any danger," she retorted, "until it comes to be washed up. So I"ll stop afterwards and wash it up myself. There!"
"Now you can"t find the teaspoons, miss!" he challenged her.
"I think I can," she said.
She raised the tablecloth at the end, discovered the k.n.o.b of a drawer, and opened it. And, surely, there were teaspoons.
"Can"t I just take a peep into the scullery?" she begged, with a bewitching supplication. "I won"t stop. It"s nearly time your servant was back, if she"s always so dreadfully prompt as you say. I won"t touch anything. Servants are so silly. They always think one wants to interfere with them."
Without waiting for James"s permission, she burst youthfully into the scullery.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "there"s some one here!"
Of course there was. There was Mrs. b.u.t.t.
Although the part played by Mrs. b.u.t.t in the drama was vehement and momentous, it was nevertheless so brief that a description of Mrs. b.u.t.t is hardly called for. Suffice it to say that she had so much waist as to have no waist, and that she possessed both a beard and a moustache.
This curt catalogue of her charms is unfair to her; but Mrs. b.u.t.t was ever the victim of unfairness.
James Ollerenshaw looked audaciously in at the door. "It"s Mrs. b.u.t.t,"
said he. "Us thought as ye were out."
"Good-afternoon, Mrs. b.u.t.t," Helen began, with candid pleasantness.
A pause.
"Good-afternoon, miss."
"And what have you got for uncle"s tea to-day? Something tasty?"
"I"ve got this," said Mrs. b.u.t.t, with candid unpleasantness. And she pointed to an oblate spheroid, the colour of brick, but smoother, which lay on a plate near the gas-stove. It was a kidney.
"H"m!"--from James.
"It"s not cooked yet, I see," Helen observed. "And--"
The clock finished her remark.
"No, miss, it"s not cooked," said Mrs. b.u.t.t. "To tell ye the honest truth, miss, I"ve been learning, "stead o" cooking this "ere kidney."
She picked up the kidney in her pudding-like hand and gazed at it. "I"m glad the bra.s.ses is clean, miss, at any rate, though the house _does_ look as though there was no woman about the place, and servants _are_ silly. I"m thankful to Heaven as the bra.s.ses is clean. Come into my scullery, and welcome."
She ceased, still holding up the kidney.