"I am not come seeking charity," said Dilly, cutting short the woman's brawling speech; "Mr. Pimble wished me to come and wash for him to day."
"He did?" said the bold-visaged housekeeper, opening her large, buttermilk-colored eyes with astonishment; "well, for sure!"—and here she seemed debating some matter in her mind for several moments, her hand still holding the door in forbidding proximity to poor Mrs. Danforth's pale, grief-worn face.
"Well, you can come in then, I s'pose," she said, at length, flinging it open spitefully, and returning to the wiping of her breakfast dishes, which she sent together with such a crash, that poor Dilly, as she stood over the stove trying to warm her chilly fingers by a decaying fire, momentarily expected to see them scattered over the floor in a thousand fragments.
"Sakes! are you cold this warm spring morning?" snarled the plump, well-fed housekeeper, as she thumped back and forth, carrying her piles of plates to the cupboard. "Why don't you shut the outside door after you, then? For my part, I'm most roasted to death."
"You have been in a warm room, while I have not seen a fire this morning," said Dilly, meekly, as she closed the door and returned to her place by the stove.
"Well, I wish I hadn't," answered the ireful Mrs. Peggy Nonce;—"a hard fate is mine; sweltering over a great fire all my life, to cook for a family that don't know nothing only to make the work as hard as they can. Now, here's Mr. Pimble goes and gets you here to wash; never tells me a word about it till you come right in upon me just as I have got my breakfast things cleared away, settin'-room swept out, and fire all down in the kitchen. I s'pose you have had nothing to eat to-day, for you always come half starved, though why you do so I don't know, save to make me work and get all you can out of us. When Mr. Pimble rents you that great house so cheap, too! I declare, I should think, with all that man's trials, he would get to be a hypocrite and believe in total annihilation."
Dilly made no reply to this speech. Probably the latter part was beyond her simple comprehension.
Mr. Pimble himself, the man of trials, as his housekeeper affirmed, now opened the sitting-room door and looked forth. He was habited in a long, faded, palm-figured bed-gown, all muffled up round his chin, and sheep-skin slippers without heels. He had a lank, pale, discouraged visage, and thin, light hair, streaked with gray, in a very untidy state straggling about his face. He pulled his wrapper up yet closer about his head, when he discovered the washerwoman, and shambled across the clean-swept floor, his heelless slippers going clip-clap after him, as he stalked along. What a gaunt, unhealthy-looking personage was the rich Peter Paul Pimble, Esq., of Mudget Square!
"Well, you are come, then, are you?" said he, glancing toward the kitchen clock, which was on the stroke of eight; "pretty time to commence a day's work."
"And she has had no breakfast; and the water is not in the kettles," put in dame Peggy. "I could have had that all hot for her, if you had just told me she was comin' to wash. But some folks always like to be so sly and underhanded."