Knowing her idiosyncrasies, I asked Abigail where she was at the moment.
“In the kitchen, sitting in my wicker easy-chair,” Abigail replied, still with elevated nose. “She just walked right in and plumped herself down.”
Whereupon I indicated, by dumb pantomime, that she was on no account to be left there without personal oversight; and Abigail intimated, by means of nods and becks and wreathèd scowls, that she was keeping her left eye on the visitor, over her shoulder, even while she was talking to me. We both knew that all was fish that came to Mrs. Price’s net, and she would negotiate with absolute impartiality a piece of soap, a duster, or a half-crown, should they lie in her way.
Not long before, Miss Bretherton, the Rector’s niece, a middle-aged lady who keeps house for him, had tried to give one of the Price girls—Esmeralda by name—a good start in life, taking her into the rectory kitchen. But things disappeared with such alarming rapidity during the first month she was in residence, that she had to be sent back home again.
She left on a Saturday after middle-day dinner. In the afternoon the house was observing the all-pervading quiet that was customary on Saturdays while the Rector was in his study preparing for Sunday.
Miss Bretherton, requiring something in the dining-room that adjoined the study, went in on tiptoe so as not to disturb him, when, to her amazement, she came upon the discharged Esmeralda sitting on the floor beside an open sideboard cupboard where some jars of pickles were stored, ladling out pickled walnuts as fast as she could into one of the maternal pudding basins. Seeing Miss Bretherton, she just picked up her basin, walnuts and all, and hastily retired the same way that she had come, through the French window.
Now, obviously her ex-mistress—over fifty years of age and liable to rheumatism—couldn’t chase after her in house-slippers and minus a bonnet, seeing it was raining; so the bereft lady just closed the sideboard door and communed with her own feelings, womanfully stifling her desire to burst into the study and tell the Rector about it, even though it was his Saturday silence time.
Next morning, Sunday, just as she was buttoning her gloves, preparatory to crossing the rectory lawn by the short cut to the church, the cook came to her with the agitated inquiry: Had the mistress done anything with the leg of mutton left by the butcher yesterday morning?