“Well, I never!” said Biddy, bursting into Ruth’s room in her usual thunder-clap way, and seating herself on the edge of a chair, as she polished her face with the skirt of her dress. “As sure as my name is Biddy, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Well, I’ve been expecting it. Folks that have ears can’t help hearing when folks quarrel.”
“What are you talking about?” said Ruth. “Who has quarreled? It is nothing that concerns me.”
“Don’t it though?” replied Biddy. “I’m thinking it will concern ye to pack up bag and baggage, and be off out of the house; for that’s what we are all coming to, and all for Mrs. Skiddy. You see it’s just here, ma’am. Masther has been threatnin’ for a long time to go to Californy, where the gould is as plenty as blackberries. Well, misthress tould him, if ever he said the like o’ that again, he’d rue it; and you know, ma’am, it’s she that has a temper. Well, yesterday I heard high words again; and, sure enough, after dinner to-day, she went off, taking Sammy and Johnny, and laving the bit nursing baby on his hands, and the boarders and all. And it’s Biddy McFlanigan who’ll be off, ma’am, and not be made a pack-horse of, to tend that teething child, and be here, and there, and everywhere in a minute. And so I come to bid you good-bye.”
“But, Biddy—”
“Don’t be afther keeping me, ma’am; Pat has shouldhered me trunk, and ye see I can’t be staying when things is as they is.”
The incessant cries of Mrs. Skiddy’s bereaved baby soon bore ample testimony to the truth of Biddy’s narration, appealing to Ruth’s motherly sympathies so vehemently, that she left her room and went down to offer her assistance.
There sat Mr. John Skiddy, the forlorn widower, the ambitious Californian, in the middle of the kitchen, in his absconded wife’s rocking-chair, trotting a seven months’ baby on the sharp apex of his knee, alternately singing, whistling, and wiping the perspiration from his forehead, while the little Skiddy threw up its arms in the most frantic way, and held its breath with rage, at the awkward attempts of its dry nurse to restore peace to the family.
“Let me sweeten a little cream and water and feed that child for you, Mr. Skiddy,” said Ruth. “I think he is hungry.”
“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Hall,” said Skiddy, with a man’s determined aversion to owning ‘checkmated.’ “I am getting along famously with the little darling. Papa will feed him, so he will,” said Skiddy; and, turning the maddened baby flat on his back, he poured down a whole tea-spoonful of the liquid at once; the natural consequence of which was a milky jet d’eau on his face, neckcloth, and vest, from the irritated baby, who resented the insult with all his mother’s spirit.