She went about it slowly and with downcast mien—sighing and sniffing—tears welling over her lids. When she had put the perfected achievement away in the pantry to await its modern Dom Paradis, she sank down in the kitchen rocker and let woe take its way with her. She thought of her high hopes of the morning and marvelled at the malevolent power of fate, which could change those hopes, at the noon hour, into vague, insidious griefs. Her body seemed to have lost its substance, to be let out into space. She felt vacant and psychic.
“Something dreadful is going to happen,” she whimpered. “I feel my heart sinking right out of me.”
She wished that she were not alone. The big house, so silent and aloof, was oppressive. She questioned if it were safe for her to remain there, solitary, and decided that she would have Blake sleep in the house that night.
“I’d give anything right now to have His Friggets walk in and say ‘It’s a quarter to one, Mrs. Mearely. I persoom you’ll like your lunch.’ That reminds me,” she added, “I suppose it must be almost that time now.”
Unable to see the clock from where she sat she rose listlessly.
“Ten minutes past one? Why—no! It is the long hand that is at one. Surely it can’t be five minutes past two!”
She was still denying this when the bell rang from the tower by the river.
“Two o’clock! Two—and I haven’t had my lunch. Why, I—I’m starving!”
Discovery of the true cause of her sudden malady went far toward curing it. She ran to the larder, to see what cold fare she could find there, all ready to be devoured without delay in preparation. She thought, with compunction, of the faithful Friggets, always as punctual as time itself, who would never have let her fall into this pathos of the interior vacuum, had a greater grief not called them from her service.
She found so many dishes, that she might have wondered if His Friggets had not been secretly preparing for a party, except that she knew well their one extravagance. They would cook, when the spirit moved them. They were proud of their cooking; and they argued that what was uneaten could always be given to the clergyman, whose stipend was meagre, and what he did not devour he could pass on to the thirteen McGuires, who embodied Roseborough’s poor. It must be confessed not only that the vicar was tempted from spiritual yearnings, by the tasty abundance of His Friggets’ art, but that the thirteen McGuires were fattening like pigs. Their sleek looks mocked at sweet charity’s very name. Mrs. McGuire, herself, had given up her random profession of charwoman, because, as she said: “Sure an’ I’ve got too heavy to be bendin’ me waist, and up and down on me knees, and the loike.”