“And don’t you see what it is, Sir?” said Rickards, with one eye knowingly closed; “don’t you see it, Sir?”
“No, Rickards, I do not.”
“It’s all the way that little sarpent has of comin’ round her. Of all the creatures ever I seen, I never knew her equal for cunning. It ain’t any use knowing she’s a fox—not a bit of it, Sir—she’ll get round you all the same. It’s not an easy thing to get to the blind side of Mrs. Byles, I promise you. She’s a very knowledgeable woman, lived eleven years under a man-cook at Lord Wandsford’s, and knows jellies, and made French dishes as well as Monsieur Honoré himself. Well, Sir, that imp there winds her round her finger like a piece of packthread. She goes and says, ‘Byles’—she doesn’t as much as Mrs. Byles her, the way my lady would—but ‘Byles,’ says she, ‘if ever I come to be a great lady and very rich, I’ll have you to keep my house, and you shall have your own nice sittin’-room, and your own maid to wait on you, and a hundred a year settled on you for your life.’ I vow it’s a fact, Sir, wherever she heard of such a thing, but she said ‘settled on you for life;’ and then, Sir, she’ll sit down and help her with the strawberry-jam, or the brandy-peaches, or whatever it is, and Mrs. Byles says there wouldn’t be her equal in all England, if she only took to be a still-room maid.”
“And can she humbug Mr. Rickards? Tell me that,” asked the lawyer, with the leer of an old cross-examiner.
“Well, I do think, Sir, she can’t do that. It’s not every one as could.”
“No, Rickards; you and I know how to sleep with one eye open. But what does she mean by all this cunning—what does she intend by it?”
“There’s what I can’t come at, nohow, Sir; for, as I say, what’s the good of plotting when you have everything at your hand? She hasn’t no need for it, Mr. M’Kinlay. She has the same treatment here as Miss Ada herself—it was the master’s orders.”
“It puzzles me, Rickards: I own it puzzles me,” said the lawyer, as, with his hands deep! in his pockets, he took a turn or two in the room.
“They say, Sir, it’s the way of them Irish,” said Rickards, with the air of a man enunciating a profound sentiment; but M’Kinlay either did not hear, or did not value the remark, for, after a pause, he said, “Its just possible, after all, Rickards, that it’s only a way she has. Don’t you think so?”
“I do not, Sir,” replied he, stoutly. “If there wasn’t more than that in it, she wouldn’t go on as I have seen her do, when she thought she was all alone.”