"Phat"s that?" she demanded.
She weighed one hundred and ninety and was nearly six feet tall. He was barely five feet five and could not have tipped the beam at one hundred and twenty-five without his winter suit and overcoat. He moved back a corresponding step or two.
"Don"t argue," he said, hurriedly.
"Argue?" she snorted. "Phy, ye little shrimp, who are you to be talkin" back to me? For two cents I"d----"
"You are discharged!" he cried, hastily putting a chair in her path--but wisely retaining a grip on it.
She threw back her head and laughed, loudly, insultingly. Her broad hands, now gloveless and as red as broiled lobsters, found resting-places on her hips. He allowed his gaze to take them in with one hurried, sweeping glance. They were as big and as menacing as a prizefighter"s.
"We"ll discuss it when you"re sober," he made haste to say, trying to wink amiably.
"So help me Mike, I haven"t touched a----" she began, but caught herself in time. "So yez discharge me, do yez?" she shouted.
"I understood you had quit, anyway."
"Well, me fine little man, I"ll see yez further before I"ll quit now.
I came back this minute to give notice, but I wouldn"t do it now for twenty-five dollars."
"You don"t have to give notice. You"re discharged. Good-bye." He started for the sitting-room.
She slapped the dining-table with one of her big hands. The dishes bounced into the air, and so did he.
"I"ll give this much notice to yez," she roared, "and ye"ll bear it in mind as long as yez stay in the same house wid me. I don"t take no orders from the likes of you. I was employed by Miss Duluth. I cook for her, I get me pay from her, and I"ll not be fired by anybody but her. Do yez get that? I"d as soon take orders from the kid as from you, ye little pinhead. Who are yez anyhow? Ye"re n.o.body. Begorry, I don"t even know yer name. Discharge me! Phy, phy, ye couldn"t discharge a firecracker. What"s that?"
"I--I didn"t say anything," he gasped.
"Ye"d better not."
"I shall speak to--to Miss Duluth about this," he muttered, very red in the face.
"Do!" she advised, sarcastically. "She"ll tell yez to mind yer own business, the same as I do. The idee! Talkin" about firing me! Fer the love av Mike, Annie, what do yez think av the nerve? Phy Miss Duluth kapes him on the place I can"t fer the life av me see. She"s that tinder-hearted she----"
But he had bolted through the door, slamming it after him. As he reached the bottom of the stairs leading to his bedroom the door opened again and Annie called out to him:--
"Are you through lunch, sir?"
He was halfway up the steps before he could frame an answer. Tears of rage and humiliation were in his baby-blue eyes.
"Tell her to go to the devil," he sputtered.
As he disappeared at the bend in the stairs he distinctly heard Annie say:--
"I can see myself doing it--not."
For an hour he paced the floor of his little bed-chamber, fuming and swearing to himself in a mild, impotent fashion--and in some dread of the door. Such words and sentences as these fell from his lips:--"n.o.body!" "Keeps me on the place!" "Because she"s tender-hearted!" "I will fire her!" "Can"t talk back to me!" "d.a.m.ned Irisher!" And so on and so forth until he quite wore himself out. Then he sat down at the window and let the far-away look slip back into his troubled blue eyes. They began to smart, but he did not blink them.
Phoebe found him there at four when she came in for her nap. He promised to play croquet with her.
Dinner was served promptly that evening, and it was the best dinner Bridget had cooked in a month.
"That little talk of mine did some good," said he to himself, as he selected a toothpick and went in to read "Nicholas Nickleby" till bedtime. "They can"t fool with me."
He was reading d.i.c.kens. His wife had given him a complete set for Christmas. To keep him occupied, she said.
CHAPTER II
MISS NELLIE DULUTH
Nellie Duluth had an apartment up near the Park, the upper end of the Park, in fact, and to the east of it. She went up there, she said, so that she could be as near as possible to her husband and daughter.
Besides, she hated taking the train at the Grand Central on Sundays.
She always went to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street in her electric brougham. It didn"t seem so far to Tarrytown from One Hundred and Twenty-fifth. In making her calculations Nellie always went through the process of subtracting forty-two from one-twenty-five, seldom correctly. She had no difficulty in taking the two from the five, but it wasn"t so simple when it came to taking four from two with one to carry over. It was the one that confused her. For the life of her she couldn"t see what became of it. Figures of that sort were not in her line.
Nellie"s career had been meteoric. She literally had leaped from the chorus into the role of princ.i.p.al comedienne--one of those pranks of fortune that cannot be explained or denied. She was one of the "Jack-in-the-Box" girls in a big New York production. On the opening night, when the lid of her box flew open and she was projected into plain view, she lost her bearings and missed the tiny platform in coming down. To save herself from an ignominious tumble almost to the footlights she hopped off the edge of her box, where she had been "teetering" helplessly, and did a brief but exceedingly graceful little "toe spin," hopping back into the box an instant later with all the agility of a scared rabbit. She expected "notice" from the stage manager for her inexcusable slip.
But the spectators liked it. They thought it was in the play. She was so pretty, so sprightly, so graceful, and so astoundingly modest that they wanted more of her. After the performance no fewer than a dozen men asked the producer why he didn"t give that little girl with the black hair more of a chance.
The next night she was commanded to repeat the trick. Then they permitted her to do it over in the "encore." Before the end of a fortnight she was doing a dance with the comedian, exchanging lines with him. Then a little individual song-and-dance specialty was introduced. At the close of the engagement on Broadway she announced that she would not sign for the next season unless given a "ripping"
part and the promise to be featured.
That was three years ago. Now she was the feature in the big, musical comedy success, "Up in the Air" and had New York at her feet. The critics admitted that she saved the "piece" in spite of composer and librettist. Some one is always doing that very thing for the poor wretches, Heaven pity them.
Nellie was not only pretty and sprightly, but as clever as they make them. She never drew the short straw. She had a brain that was quite as active as her feet. It was not a very big brain; for that matter, her feet were tiny. She had the good sense to realise that her brain would last longer than her feet, so she got as much for them as she could while the applause lasted. She drove shrewd bargains with the managers and shrewder ones with Wall Street admirers, who experienced a slim sense of gratification in being able to give her tips on the market, with the a.s.surance that they would see to it that she didn"t lose.
She put her money into diamonds as fast as she got it. Some one in the profession had told her that diamonds were safer than banks or railroad bonds. She could get her interest by looking at them and she could always sell them for what she paid for them.
The card on the door of her cosey apartment bore the name, "Miss Nellie Duluth."
There was absolutely nothing inside or outside the flat to lead one to suspect that there was a Mr. Duluth. A husband was the remotest figure in her household. When the management concluded to put her name in the play-bill, after the memorable Jack-in-the-Box leap, she was requested to drop her married name, because it would not look well in print.
"Where were you born?" the manager had asked.
"Duluth."
"Take Duluth for luck," said he, and Duluth it was. She changed the baptismal name Ella to Nellie. At home in Blakeville she had been called Eller or Ell.
Her apartment was an attractive one. Her housemaid was a treasure. She was English and her name was Rachel. Nellie"s personal maid and dresser was French. Her name was Rebecca. When Miss Duluth and Rebecca left the apartment to go to the theatre in the former"s electric brougham, Rachel put the place in order. So enormous was the task that she barely had it finished when her mistress returned, tired and sleepy, to litter it all up again with petticoats, stockings, roses, orchids, lobster sh.e.l.ls, and cigarette stubs. More often than otherwise Nellie brought home girls from the theatre to spend the night with her. Poor things, they were chorus girls, just as she had been, and they had so far to go. Besides, they served as excuses for declining unwelcome invitations to supper. Be that as it may, Rachel had to clean up after them, finding their puffs, rats, and switches in the morning and the telephone number at their lodgings in the middle of the night. She had her instructions to say that such young ladies were spending the night with Miss Duluth.
"If you don"t believe it, call up Miss Duluth"s number in the telephone book," she always concluded, as if the statement needed verification.
Nellie had not been in Tarrytown for a matter of three weeks; what with rehearsals, revisions, consultations, and suppers, she just couldn"t get around to it. The next day after Harvey"s inglorious stand before Bridget she received a letter from him setting forth the whole affair in a peculiarly vivid light. He said that something would have to be done about Bridget and advised her to come out on the earliest day possible to talk it over with him. He confessed to a hesitancy about discharging the cook, recalling the trouble she had experienced in getting her away from a neighbour in the first place.
But Bridget was drinking and quarrelling with Annie and using strong language in the presence of Phoebe. He would have discharged her long ago if it hadn"t been for the fear of worrying her during rehearsals and all that. She wasn"t to be bothered with trifling household squabbles at such an important time as this. No, sir! Not if he could help it. But, just the same, he thought she"d better come out and talk it over before Bridget took it into her head to poison some one.
"I really, truly must go up to Tarrytown next Sunday," said Nellie to the select company supping in her apartment after the performance that night. "Harvey"s going to discharge the cook."