“I had to get rid of him for insolence,” she replied, with still smouldering wrath. “I told him my shoes hadn’t been cleaned this morning, and the young brat contradicted me to my face, and said he couldn’t do them any better. The lazy little wretch hadn’t touched them. I asked him if he knew who he was talking to, and he became insolent. So I just ordered him to pack up and leave the house.”
Stuart listened without much interest to this story, the counterpart of which he had often heard before. Somehow Molly’s servants were perpetually incurring dismissal for similar behaviour. It was rare for her to keep them more than a couple of months, and it was not uncommon for them to be sent away the day after they arrived; and always for the same cause—disrespect to the mistress of the house.
“I can’t think what’s the matter with the servants nowadays,” Molly complained. She was not the only mistress to whom it had never occurred that there could be, by any possibility, a servants’ side to the great question. “I had a Scotchwoman here to-day, applying for the cook’s place”—the cook had been under notice to leave for some time—“and she was most impertinent.”
Molly stopped rather unexpectedly, as though she had been going to give particulars of the impertinence, but had suddenly thought better of it. The Scotchwoman, in fact, had presumed so far as to inquire into the character of the relationship between the lady of the house and the Lord Alistair Stuart who was indicated as its master, and had withdrawn her candidature for the situation on learning that the tie was merely one of friendship. Being told rather fiercely by Miss Finucane that this was not her business, the offender had replied uncompromisingly: “Excuse me, miss, I don’t set up to blame you, but I have my character to think of, and if it was known that I had taken a place in a house that wasn’t respectable, I might not be able to suit myself elsewhere.”
It was no doubt the irritation caused by this plain speaking which had vented itself on the unlucky page. Alistair shrugged his shoulders as though in sympathy, but inwardly the question suggested itself whether Miss Vanbrugh ever had to encounter insolence on the part of servants. He did not think it likely.
He had to go upstairs to dress for dinner, this being a point about which Miss Finucane was very particular. If ever a man ventured to present himself at her dinner-table in morning dress she was apt to take it as a carefully studied reflection on her character. Her own time hung so heavily on her hands that she spent half her day over her wardrobe. She breakfasted in a fur-lined dressing-gown, put on a walking-dress during the morning, lunched in a third costume, wore an æsthetic tea-gown in the afternoon, made a grand toilet for dinner, and exchanged it for a loose night-robe in which she drank whisky and water before going to bed. In all these changes of costume jewels played a great part. Diamonds and sapphires meant to Molly much what a table well covered with briefs means to a barrister, or the strips of ribbon on his breast to a soldier; they were the tangible tokens of success.
When Stuart came downstairs there was no sign of dinner. He sat down and tried to talk to Molly about the bazaar, but she listened sulkily, offended because he had not ventured to take her with him.
“There were lots of women there, I suppose?” she asked, in a grumbling voice.
“Yes, a good many. Women belonging to the Church, most of them, I expect.”
“Was there anyone you knew?”