In short, as far as their speech was concerned, thanks to a.s.sociation with Harriet, Jennie and Harry were as perfect little c.o.c.kneys as ever ignored an aspirate.
The visit of the Bradleys, like all other things, came to an end, and Bessie, Thaddeus, and the children were once more left to themselves. Teddy junior, it was observed, after his day with Harry, developed a slight tendency to misplace the letter "h" in his conversation, but it was soon corrected, and things ran smoothly as of yore. Only--the Only being the natural sequence of the But referred to some time since--Mr. and Mrs. Perkins changed their minds about the French nurse, and it came about in this way:
"Thaddeus," said Bessie, after the Bradleys had departed, "what is the tile of a rockin"-"orse?"
"I don"t know. Why?" asked Thaddeus.
"Why, don"t you remember," she said, "young Harry Bradley accused Jennie of pulling out the tile of his rockin"-"orse?"
"Oh yes! Ha, ha!" laughed Thaddeus. "So she did. I know now.
Tile is c.o.c.kney for tail."
"Did you notice the accent those children had?"
"Yes."
"All got from the nurse, too?"
"True."
"Ah, Teddy, what do you think of our getting a French maid, after all? Don"t you think that we"d run a great risk?"
"Of what?"
"Of having Ted speak--er--c.o.c.kney French."
"H"m--yes. Very likely," said Thaddeus. "I"d thought of that myself, and, I guess, perhaps we"d better stick to Irish."
"So do I. We can correct any tendency to a brogue, don"t you think?"
"Certainly," said Thaddeus. "Or, if we couldn"t, it wouldn"t be fatal to the boy"s prospects. It might even help him if he--"
"Help him? If what?"
"If he ever went into polities," said Perkins.
And that was the object-lesson which a kindly fate gave to the Perkinses in time to prevent their engaging a French maid for the children.
As to its value as a lesson, as to the value of its results, those who are familiar with French as spoken by nurse-instructed youths can best judge.
I am not unduly familiar with that or any other kind of French, but I have ideas in the matter.
THE CHRISTMAS GIFTS OF THADDEUS
That you may thoroughly comprehend how it happened that on last Christmas Day Thaddeus meted out gifts of value so unprecedented to the domestics of what he has come to call his "menagerie"--the term menage having seemed to him totally inadequate to express the state of affairs in his household--I must go back to the beginning of last autumn, and narrate a few of the incidents that took place between that period and the season of Peace on Earth and Good-will to Men.
Should I not do so there would be many, I doubt not, who would deem Thaddeus"s course unjustifiable, especially when we are all agreed that Christmas Day should be for all sorts and conditions of men the gladdest, happiest day of all the year.
Thaddeus and Bessie and the little Thad had returned to their attractive home after an absence of two months in a section of the Adirondacks whither the march of civilization had not carried such comforts as gas, good beds, and other luxuries, to which the little family had become so accustomed that real camp-life, with its beds of balsam, lights of tallow, and "fried coffee," possessed no charms for them. They were all renewed in spirit and quite ready to embark once more upon the troubled seas of house-keeping; and, as they saw it on that first night at home, their crew was a most excellent one.
The cook rose almost to the exalted level of a chef in the estimation of Thaddeus as course upon course, to the number of seven, each made up of some delicacy of the season, came to the table and received the indors.e.m.e.nt which comes from total consumption. They were well served, too, these courses; and the two heads of the family, when Mary, the waitress, would enter the butler"s pantry, leaving them alone and un.o.bserved, nodded their satisfaction to each other across the snow-white cloth, and by means of certain well-established signals, such as shaking their own hands and winking the left eye simultaneously, with an almost vicious jerk of the head, silently congratulated themselves upon the prospects of a peaceful future in a domestic sense.
"That was just the best dinner I have had in centuries," said Thaddeus, as they adjourned to the library after the meal was over.
"The broiled chicken was so good, Bess, that for a moment I wished I were a bachelor again, so that I could have it all; and after I got over my first feeling of hesitation over the oysters, and realized that it was September with an R--belated, it is true, but still there--and ate six of them, I think I could have gone downstairs and given cook a diamond ring with seven solitaires in it and a receipted bill for a seal-skin sacque. I don"t see how we ever could have thought of discharging her last June, do you?"
"It was a good dinner," said Bessie, discreetly ignoring the allusion to their intentions in June; for she had a well-defined recollection that at that time Bridget had given signs of emotional insanity every time she was asked to prepare a five-o"clock breakfast for Thaddeus and his friends, to the number of six, who had acquired the habit of going off on little shooting trips every Sat.u.r.day, making the home of Thaddeus their headquarters over Sunday, when the game the huntsmen had bagged the day before had to be plucked, cleaned, and cooked by her own hands for dinner. "And it was nicely selected, too," she added. "I sometimes think that I"ll let Bridget do the ordering at the market."
"H"m! Well," said Thaddeus, shaking his head dubiously, "I haven"t a doubt that Bridget could do it, and would be very glad to do it; but I don"t believe in setting a cook up in business."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean that I haven"t any doubt that Bridget would in a very short time become a highly successful produce-broker with bull tendencies.
The chicken market would be buoyant, and the quotations on the Stock Exchange of, say, B., S., and P.-U.-C.--otherwise, Beef, Succotash, and Picked-Up-Codfish--would rise to the highest point in years.
Why, my dear, by Christmas-time cook would have our surplus in her own pocket-book; and in the place of the customary five oranges and an apple she would receive from the butcher a Christmas-card in the shape of a check of ma.s.sive, if not graceful, proportions. No, Bess, I think the old way is the best."
"Perhaps it is. By-the-way, John has kept the grounds looking well, hasn"t he? The lawn doesn"t seem to have a weed on it," said Bessie, walking to the window and gazing out at the soft velvety sward in the glow of twilight.
"Yes, it looks pretty well; but there"s a small heap of stuff over there near the fence which rather inclines me to believe that the weeds have been pulled out within the last few days--in fact, since you wrote to announce our return. John is an energetic man in an emergency, and I haven"t a doubt he has been here at least once a week ever since we left. I"ll keep a record of John this fall."
And so the two contented home-comers talked happily along, and when they closed their eyes in sleep that night they were, upon the whole, very well satisfied with life.
Weeks elapsed, and with them some of the air-castles collapsed.
Whether custom staled the infinite variety of the cook"s virtues, and age withered the efficiency of Mary, the waitress, or whether something was really and radically wrong with the girls, Thaddeus and Bessie could not make out. Certain it was, however, that by slow degrees the satisfaction for which that first dinner seemed to stand as guarantor wore away, and dissatisfaction entered the household. Mary developed a fondness for church at most inconvenient hours--hours at which in fact, neither Thaddeus nor Bessie had ever supposed church could be. That it was eternal they both knew, but they had always supposed there were intermissions.
Then the cook"s family, which had hitherto been moderately healthful, began to show signs of invalidism, though no such calamity as actual dissolution ever set its devastating step within the charmed circle of her relatives. Cousins fell ill whom she alone could comfort; nephews developed maladies for which she alone could care; and, according to Thaddeus"s record, John had been compelled on penalty of a fine to attend the funerals of some twenty-four deceased intimate friends in less than two months, although the newspapers contained no mention of the existence of a possible epidemic in the Celtic quarter. It is true that John showed a more p.r.o.nounced desire to make his absence less inconvenient to his employer than did Mary and the cook, by providing a subst.i.tute when the Ancient Order of Funereal Hibernians compelled him to desert the post of duty; but Thaddeus declared the "remedy worse than the disease," for the reason that John"s subst.i.tute--his own brother-in-law--was a weaver by trade, whose baskets the public did not appreciate, and whose manner of cutting gra.s.s in the early fall and of tending furnace later on was atrocious.
"If I could hire that man in summer," Thaddeus remarked one night when John"s subst.i.tute had "fixed" the furnace so that the library resembled a cold-storage room, "I think we could make this house an arctic paradise. He seems to have a genius for taking warmth by the neck and shaking enough degrees of heat out of it to turn a conflagration into an iceberg. I think I"ll tell the Fire Commissioners about him."
"He can"t compare with John," was Bessie"s answer to this.
"No. I think that"s why John sends him here when he is off riding in carriages in honor of his deceased chums. By the side of Dennis, John is a jewel."
"John is very faithful with the furnace," said Bessie. "He never lets it go down. Why, day before yesterday I turned off every register in the house, and even then had to open all the windows to keep from suffocating."
"But that wasn"t all John, my dear," said Thaddeus. "The Weather Bureau had something to do with it. It was a warm day for this season of the year, anyhow. If John could combine the two businesses of selling coal and feeding furnaces, I think he would become a millionaire. And, by-the-way, I think you ought to speak to him, Bess, about the windows. Since you gave him the work of window-cleaning to do, it is evident that he thinks I have nothing to say in the matter, for he persistently ignores my requests that he clean them in squares as they are made, and not rub up a little circle in the middle, so that they look like blocks of opalescent gla.s.s with plate-gla.s.s bulls"-eyes let into the centre. Look at them now."
"Dennis did that. John had to go to Mount Vernon with his militia company to-day."
"Dennis is well named, for his name is--But never mind. I"ll credit John with his twelfth day off in four weeks."
From John to Bridget, in the matter of days off, was an easy step, though such was Bessie"s consummate diplomacy that Thaddeus would probably have continued in ignorance of the extent to which Bridget absented herself had they not both taken occasion one day to visit some relatives in Philadelphia, and on their return home at night found no dinner awaiting them.
"What"s the matter now?" asked Thaddeus, a little crossly, perhaps, for visiting relatives in Philadelphia irritated him--possibly because he and they did not agree in politics, and their a.s.sumption that Thaddeus"s party was entirely made up of the ignorant and self- seeking was galling to him. "Why isn"t dinner ready?"
"Mary says that an hour after we left cook got a telegram from New York saying that her brother was dying, and she had to go right off."
"I thought that brother was dying last week?"