“Pretty goin’s on I must sye,” Jane commented. “’Ope the best of everyone I will, but when you think that we was all on the top floor––”
“Pretty goin’s off there’ll be, I can tell you that,” Mrs. Courage declared in her rich, decided bass. “Just let me ’ave a word with Master Rashleigh. I’ll tell ’im what ’is ma would ’ave said. She left ’im to me, she did. ‘Courage,’ she’s told me many a time, ‘that boy’ll be your boy after I’m gone.’ As good as mykin’ a will, I call it. And now to think that with us right ’ere in the ’ouse.... Where’s Steptoe? Do ’e know anything about it?”
“Do ’e know anything about what?” The question came from Steptoe himself, who appeared on the threshold.
The three women maintained a dramatic silence, while the old butler-valet looked from one to another.
“Seems as if there was news,” he observed dryly.
“Tell ’im, Nettie,” Mrs. Courage commanded.
Nettie was the young thing of the establishment, Mrs. Courage’s own niece, brought from England when the housemaid’s place fell vacant on Bessie’s unexpected marriage to Walter Wildgoose, Miss Walbrook’s indoor man. Indeed she had been brought from England before Bessie’s marriage, of which Mrs. Courage had had advance information, so that as soon as Bessie left, Nettie was on the spot to be smuggled into the Allerton household. Steptoe had not forgiven this underhand movement on Mrs. Courage’s part, seeing that in the long-ago both she and Jane had been his own nominees, and that he considered the household posts as gifts at his disposal. “I’ll ’ave to make a clean sweep o’ the lot o’ them,” he had more than once declared at those gatherings at which the English butlers and valets of upper Fifth 45 Avenue discuss their complex of interests. Forty years in the Allerton family had made him not merely its major-domo but in certain respects its head. His tone toward Nettie was that of authority with a note of disapprobation.
“Speak, girl, and do it without giggling. What ’ave you to tell?”
Though she couldn’t do it without giggling Nettie repeated the story she had given to her aunt and Jane. She had gone into the small single back bedroom on the floor below Mr. Allerton’s, and there was a half-dressed girl ‘a-puttin’ up of ’er ’air.’ According to her own statement Nettie had passed away on the spot, being able, however, to articulate the question, “What are you a’doin’ of ’ere?” To this the young woman had replied that Mr. Allerton had brought her in on the previous evening, telling her to sleep there, and there she had slept. Nettie’s information could go no further, but it was considered to go far enough.