Next morning, when we came down, the parlour fire was not even laid, and all the supper-things were on the table just as we had left them over-night. For Mary had got up when I rang the up-stairs bell, at six o’clock, to a moment, and though she had come down and got the street-door key out of our room, she must have gone up-stairs immediately afterwards, and tumbled into bed again, for it was clear that she had never shown her face in the kitchen that day.

Edward flew into a tremendous passion, and rushed up to her room, where he thundered at the door so that I thought he would have broken it off its hinges, telling the lazy thing to get up and leave his house that very instant. As soon as she came down, Edward, being determined to see the creature clear off the premises, before he left for business, went and got her trunk and band-box himself, and paying her her wages up to the very day, bundled her into the street, things and all, where the brazen-faced hussy stopped ringing at the bell, and declaring that she would summon us if she did not receive a month’s warning; until she collected quite a crowd all round the house, and kept telling them in a loud voice, so that all the neighbours could hear, that I had behaved to her worse than a slave-driver would—and that she had been half-starved—and forced to live on sprats, (as I’m a living woman, she’d only had them once!) and that I took a delight in making her tipsy, (which the courteous reader knows to be a wicked falsehood,) and that we either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay her her wages. Nor did she cease her abuse, until Edward got the policemen to make her move on; which she did, vowing that she would have it all out before the magistrate, and make us suffer for it.

So that there was I in a pretty state, indeed, left without a servant, and obliged to have a charwoman in until that wild Irish cat—whom I, in my blessed innocence, fancied to be a Cornwall woman—was ready to come into the house, (I wish to goodness gracious, from the bottom of my heart, that I had never seen the face of the fury,) and I hardly know, I’m sure, how I shall be able to wait a whole month before telling the reader all about the shameful way in which she went on towards me—and how I really thought the vixen would have had my life before she had done with me.

CHAPTER V.
OF THE PRETTY STATE I WAS IN INDEED AFTER MARY LEFT ME.

“Oh, Mary, dear Mary, how lonely and drear
The scenes now ungrac’d by thy presence appear!
Each hall in my dwelling I fondly explore,
And list for thy footstep, but hear it no more.
Oh Mary, dear Mary!”
“Dear Mary.”

No sooner had Edward packed Mary out of the house, than I suddenly found myself thrown into as nice a mess as any lady could well be in. Twist it and turn it which way I would, the blacker it appeared, and I positively thought that I must have sunk under it. But really my husband is so hasty, (though I say it who should not perhaps,) that he never will look before he leaps; and the consequence is, that he is invariably plunging himself headlong into all kinds of pickles, (if I might be allowed the expression.) Indeed, my own dear Edward having no more control over his passions than “a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour,” of course could not keep his tongue between his teeth, but must go flying at our Mary before the proper time came for getting rid of the girl. And dear me! if one has not got strength of mind enough to put up with the faults of other people for a day or two, I should like to know how, in the name of goodness gracious, we can ever hope that men will wink when we walk out of the right path ourselves—or that, if we are so hard upon other persons, how can we expect that they will bear less heavily on us when they sit in judgment upon us. Though for myself, I must say, that I have always made it a rule to let the poisoned arrows of calumny go in at one ear and come out of the other.

I’m sure if Edward had only looked at poor Mary’s love of tippling with a proper spirit, he would have seen that it was not so much for a body to stomach after all, and that perhaps the love of drink, bad as it is, is but a trifling vice as compared with the love of tobacco—to which my husband, I regret to say, is a disgusting martyr. And such being the case, Edward ought to have remembered that those who ride about in glass coaches should not throw stones; for of all habits I must confess that smoking, in my eyes, is the most dreadful, and that if I was called upon to choose whether I would sooner be addicted to liquor or tobacco, I really think I should be inclined to take to drinking in preference.

Not that I was insensible to the wickedness of our Mary’s ways, but still I do think that my husband might have looked with more Christian charity upon the poor thing’s infirmity, until my other servant was ready to come into the house, and then he might have bundled the creature into the street, as she deserved indeed. For in her absence I was so terribly put to it, that really I should have blushed if anybody could have seen me making the shifts I did.

My Irish servant of a Norah (drat her!) couldn’t come in for a week or so, and the consequence was, that I was left all alone without anybody to assist me,—which pulled me down so low that it took several weeks to set me fairly on my legs again. For considering that I had Edward’s dinner every day on my mind, and the whole house thrown upon my hands, it was more than I could bear.

All that precious day long I had to answer every tiresome knock at the door myself, and really just because we had no maid, persons seemed to take a delight in calling. But thanks to goodness, they were all tradespeople, whom (of course) I did not so much care about, though I only opened the door to them just wide enough to take the things in, for fear of the neighbours, who I knew would be but too glad to laugh at me in my distress. Indeed, the only person that I showed myself to that day was the butcher’s boy, when he called for orders; and who being a mere lad, I didn’t mind about seeing me; and I got him, for a glass of table-beer and a penny, to take a letter to dear mother, asking her to look round immediately, and call and see her darling angel (that is myself) in her affliction, which I knew she would be happy to do.