All the stupid thing kept saying was, that I had promised her she was not to clean the boots and shoes, and knives and forks, and that she had had to do them ever since she had been with me—as if that had got anything to do with it. But my experience has taught me, that servants, directly one begins to find fault with anything they’ve been doing, have a clever knack of bringing up against one any little indulgence that one may have foolishly promised them, and very naturally forgotten to carry out.
I told Miss Emma that she needn’t be frightened about soiling her delicate hands with the blacking brushes, as she wouldn’t have to do it much longer, for I had engaged a man who was to come in on the day after to-morrow, and would take the boots off her hands.
The publican sent me a very nice, sharp, active man, of the name of Richard Farden, though, he told me, he was better known as Dick Farden. He said, in the low London dialect, “He should be werry glad on the place, as it was just the thing he had been a looken out for for these three weeks gone, as his perfession didn’t require looking arter till it were gone three, or so.”
“Indeed!” I said, in the hopes that he would go on, for really the idea of a professional gentleman coming in to clean my boots and shoes did strike me as being somewhat singular. “And where may your place of business be?”
“Why, marm,” he replied, twiddling his bushy whiskers, “you see, my place o’ business is wery like this ere climate of ourn—wariable. Ven the brometer points to wery vet, then, on course, I knows that it’s a-going to be fine, and then I hangs out in Regent Street; and ven it stands at wery dry, then, as I knows it’s goin’ to rain, I hemigrates to that there public humbrella, the Lowther Harcade.”
As I could make neither head nor tail of what he said, my curiosity was excited all the more; so I told Edward, when he came home, of what a strange creature I had picked up to do the boots and shoes, and he appeared to be as much in the dark as I was; but, as he said, Mr. Dick Farden’s business, whatever it was, could be no business of his, he wasn’t going to bother his brains about it, so long as the man did his duty to his Wellingtons.
However, one evening, Edward informed me that he had found out who Mr. Dick Farden was; for as he was stopping to look into a print-shop in Regent Street, on his way home that afternoon, somebody tapped him on the shoulder, and said in his ear, “Do you want any prime cigars, noble captain?” and on turning round, who should it be but our out-door valet. When he recognised Edward, he only laughed and said, “I hope no offence, master? I merely wanted to do a bit of business in the smuggling line.”
“Oh, dear me!” I cried. “You don’t mean to say that we’ve got a horrid wretch of a smuggler for a servant, now?”
“Lord bless you!” replied Edward, “don’t go frightening yourself about that. You may depend upon it the fellow’s too knowing for that.”
However, after what he had said, I wasn’t going to be put off in that way, and told Edward that I would have the man up the very next morning, before him; and that if he couldn’t give a good account of himself, why he should turn him out of the house then and there.