Part 58 (1/2)

”And may I enquire where you'd go to?” asked Hilda with a sneer. ”At this time of night you couldn't possibly get home to your parents.”

”Oh!” answered Ada brightly. ”I could go to me cousin's up at Toft End.

And her could send down a lad with a barrow for me box.”

The plot, then, had been thought out. ”Her cousin's!” thought Hilda, and seemed to be putting her finger on the cause of Ada's disloyalty.

”Her cousin's!” It was a light in a dark mystery. ”Her cousin's!”

”I suppose you know you're forfeiting the wages due to you the day after to-morrow?”

”I shall ask me cousin about that, m'm,” said Ada, as it were menacingly.

”I should!” Hilda sarcastically agreed. ”I certainly should.” And she thought with bitter resignation: ”She'll have to leave anyhow after this. She may as well leave on the spot.”

”There's those as'll see as I have me rights,” said Ada pugnaciously, with another toss of the head.

Hilda had a mind to retort in anger; but she controlled herself.

Already that afternoon she had imperilled her dignity in the altercation with the cook. The cook, however, had not Ada's ready tongue, and, while the mistress had come off best against the cook, she might through impulsiveness find herself worsted by Ada's more youthful impudence, were it once unloosed.

”That will do, then, Ada,” she said. ”You can go and pack your box first thing.”

In less than three quarters of an hour Ada was gone, and her corded trunk lay just within the scullery door, waiting the arrival of the cousin's barrow. She had b.u.mped it down the stairs herself.

All solitary in the house, which had somehow been transformed into a strange and unusual house, Hilda wept. She had only parted with an unfaithful and ungrateful servant, but she wept. She dashed into the kitchen and began to do Ada's work, still weeping, and she was savage against her own tears; yet they continued softly to fall, misting her vision of fire and utensils and earthenware vessels. Ada had left everything in a moment; she had left the kettle on the fire, and the grease in the square tin in which the dinner-joint had been cooked, and the ashes in the fender, and tea-leaves in the kitchen teapot and a cup and saucer unwashed. She had cared naught for the inconvenience she was causing; had shewn not the slightest consideration; had walked off without a pang, smilingly hoity-toity. And all servants were like that.

Such conduct might be due as much to want of imagination, to a simple inability to picture to themselves the consequences of certain acts, as to stark ingrat.i.tude; but the consequences remained the same; and Hilda held fiercely to the theory of stark ingrat.i.tude.

She had made Ada; she had created her. When Hilda engaged her, Ada was little more than an ”oat-cake girl,”--that is to say, one of those girls who earn a few pence by delivering oat-cakes fresh from the stove at a halfpenny each before breakfast at the houses of gormandising superior artisans and the middle-cla.s.ses. True, she had been in one situation prior to Hilda's, but it was a situation where she learnt nothing and could have learnt nothing. Nevertheless, she was very quick to learn, and in a month Hilda had done wonders with her. She had taught her not only her duties, but how to respect herself, to make the best of herself, and favourably to impress others. She had enormously increased Ada's value in the universe. And she had taught her some worldly wisdom, and permitted and even encouraged certain coquetries, and in the bed-room during dressings and undressings had occasionally treated her as a soubrette if not as a confidante; had listened to her at length, and had gone so far as to ask her views on this matter or that--the supreme honour for a menial. Also she had very conscientiously nursed her in sickness. She had really liked Ada, and had developed a sentimental weakness for her. She had taken pleasure in her prettiness, in her natural grace, and in her crude youth. She enjoyed seeing Ada arrange a bedroom, or answer the door, or serve a meal. And Ada's stupidity--that half-cunning stupidity of her cla.s.s, which immovably underlay her superficial apt.i.tudes--had not sufficed to spoil her affection for the girl. She had been indulgent to Ada's stupidity; she had occasionally in some soft moods hoped that it was curable. And she had argued in moments of discouragement that at any rate stupidity could be faithful. In her heart she had counted Ada as a friend, as a true standby in the more or less tragic emergencies of the household. And now Ada had deserted her. Stupidity had proved to be neither faithful nor grateful. Why had Ada been so silly and so base? Impossible to say! A nothing! A whim! Nerves! Fatuity! The whole affair was horribly absurd. These creatures were incalculable. Of course Hilda would have been wiser not to upbraid her so soon after the scene with the cook, and to have spoken more smoothly to the chit in the boudoir.

Hilda admitted that. But what then? Was that an excuse for the chit's turpitude? There must be a limit to the mistress's humouring. And probably after all the chit had meant to go.... If she had not meant to go she would not have entered the boudoir ap.r.o.nless and capless. Some rankling word, some ridiculous sympathy with the cook, some wild dream of a Christmas holiday--who could tell what might have influenced her?

Hilda gave it up--and returned to it a thousand times. One truth emerged--and it was the great truth of housemistresses--namely, that it never, never, never pays to be too kind to servants. ”Servants do not understand kindness.” You think they do; they themselves think they do; but they don't,--they don't and they don't. Hilda went back into the immensity of her desolating experience as an employer of female domestic servants of all kinds, but chiefly bad--for the landlady of a small boarding house must take what servants she can get--and she raged at the persistence of the proof that kindness never paid. What did pay was severity and inhuman strictness, and the maintenance of an impa.s.sable gulf between employer and employed. Not again would she make the mistake which she had made a hundred times. She hardened herself to the consistency of a slave-driver. And all the time it was the woman in her, not the mistress, that the hasty thoughtless Ada had wounded. To the woman the kitchen was not the same place without Ada--Ada on whom she had utterly relied in the dilemma caused by the departure of the cook.

As with angrily wet eyes she went about her new work in the kitchen, she could almost see the graceful ghost of Ada tripping to and fro therein.

And all that the world, and the husband, would know or understand was that a cook had been turned out for drunkenness, and that a quite sober parlour-maid had most preposterously walked after her. Hilda was aware that in Edwin she had a severe, though a taciturn, critic of her activities as employer of servants. She had no hope whatever of his sympathy, and so she closed all her gates against him. She waited for him as for an adversary, and all the l.u.s.tre faded from her conception of their love.

III

When Edwin approached his home that frosty evening, he was disturbed to perceive that there was no light from the hall-gas s.h.i.+ning through the panes of the front-door, though some light showed at the dining-room window, the blinds of which had not been drawn. ”What next?” he thought crossly. He was tired, and the keenness of the weather, instead of bracing him, merely made him petulant. He was astonished that several women in a house could all forget such an important act as the lighting of the hall-gas at nightfall. Never before had the hall-gas been forgotten, and the negligence appeared to Edwin as absolutely monstrous.

The effect of it on the street, the effect on a possible caller, was bad enough (Edwin, while pretending to scorn social opinion, was really very deferential towards it), but what was worse was the revelation of the feminine mentality.

In opening the door with his latchkey he was purposely noisy, partly in order to give expression to his justified annoyance, and partly to warn all peccant women that the male had arrived, threatening.

As his feet fumbled into the interior gloom and he banged the door, he quite expected a rush of at least one apologetic woman with a box of matches. But n.o.body came. Nevertheless he could hear sharp movements through the half-open door of the kitchen. a.s.suredly women had the irresponsibility of infants. He glanced for an instant into the dining-room; the white cloth was laid, but the table was actually not set. With unusual righteous care he wiped the half-congealed mud off his boots on the mat; then removed his hat and his overcoat, took a large new piece of indiarubher from his pocket and put it on the hall-table, felt the radiator (which despite all his injunctions and recommendations was almost cold); and lastly he lighted the gas himself. This final act was contrary to his own rule, for he had often told Hilda that half her trouble with servants arose through her impatiently doing herself things which they had omitted, instead of ringing the bell and seeing the things done. But he was not infrequently inconsistent, both in deed and in thought. For another example, he would say superiorly that a woman could never manage women, ignoring that he the all-wise had never been able to manage Hilda.

He turned to go upstairs. At the same moment somebody emerged obscurely from the kitchen. It was Hilda, in a white ap.r.o.n.

”Oh! I'm glad you've lighted it,” said she curtly, without the least symptom of apology, but rather affrontingly.

He continued his way.