The darky nodded.
“Well, be good enough to carry this here bundle of cushions to Mrs. Ford. And be careful, Moses.”
Moses, without a word in reply, swung the bundle to his shoulder, mounted the few steps and deposited the pillows at Mrs. Ford’s feet, and resumed his place on the sidewalk. He was making up his mind as to the character and personality of the new tenants, and nothing had so far escaped him. The old janitor’s likes and dislikes had a very important bearing on the status occupied by the various tenants.
Furthermore, his diagnosis was invariably correct.
Thus far, two things had impressed him. That the young lady should have addressed her stepfather as if he had been a mere acquaintance, and that that master of the house should have prefaced his order to him with a “be good enough.” Nobody had ever, so far as he could remember, addressed him in any such way. His former master’s customary formula, generally with a laugh, was: “Here, Moses, you infernal scoundrel.” His later employers had been contented with Moses, Mose, or Mr. Harris (the latter he despised). The new young gentlemen had begun with Moses, and had then passed on to “You ebony gargoyle,” or “Bulrushes,” “Pottifer’s Kid.” But the order came direct as if they meant it, and was always carried out by him in the same kind of spirit. “Be good enough, eh,” he kept saying to himself, “’spec’ he ain’t ’customed to nuffin’.”
The young lady seemed to be cast in a different mould.
“That’s too heavy for you, Uncle,” she had said in a low, soft voice, the more surprising to him when he remembered the tones in addressing her stepfather. He was struggling under the weight of one end of the dining-room table at the time. “Come here, one of you men, and help him. Put it down, Uncle. You’ll break your poor old back, first thing you know.”
“Thank you, young mistiss. ’Tis little mite heavy,” he had answered humbly, as the leg he was carrying sagged to the sidewalk, adding as he watched her disappear again into the house: “Befo’ God, she’s one of my own people, dat she is. I ain’t been called Uncle by nobody, since I went back home dat Christmas time.”
The van was empty now, and the supplementary cart, carrying the odds and ends, a rusty, well-burnt-out stove, two pieces of pipe, a big mirror with a gilt frame, a set of wooden shelves, two wash-tubs, and on top, a dainty work-table with spindle legs, was being backed to the sidewalk.
Some article must have been forgotten or broken or scraped, for the language of the man from Clapham Four Corners had lost its soft edge, his outburst ending with: