“I always stay, madam,” she said quietly.
Edith stared at her. “Why always? I don’t quite understand.”
“I came here to Mrs. Millicent, and”—here there was again the ghost of a smile—“I even stayed with Mrs. Thursby, and I’m quite willing to stay with you. People come and go, but nothing has really changed.”
This announcement was made with such calmness that Miss Derrick found herself for a moment robbed of speech. Whoever came or went, this woman would always be at Beech Lodge, no more detachable than the roof which covered it. Jack had suggested that his sister try to imagine the place without Perkins, and now she saw what he meant. She began to recognize herself as part of a procession which passed before the sphinx-like eyes of this house-parlor-maid, a procession to which the woman ministered in order that she might live, but to which she revealed no fraction of her inner self. It was strange to be thus classified. But what was the alternative?
“I am glad you are so fond of the house,” she said uncertainly; “and now it comes to a matter of wages.”
Perkins’s eyes wandered to the portrait over the mantel. Wages, it seemed, were the last thing in her mind. “There will be no difficulty about that, madam.”
Miss Derrick leaned forward involuntarily. “I don’t quite understand. They are very important, to me.”
“I mean, madam, that I don’t ask for high wages.”
Miss Derrick, though greatly puzzled, breathed a sigh of relief. “The most I can pay is forty pounds a year. And of course there’s a cook to be found. Can you help me there?”
Perkins’s face softened a shade. “Forty pounds will be quite sufficient, and you will not need a cook.”