“What I say is,” continued the cook, who, having a blunter tongue, stood on her defence, but heaping up dull verbiage round her position as a guard against the Frenchwoman’s sharp attack, “that a man’s a man, and if he’s a furrener it ain’t no fault of his. I should say he’s a count at least, and he’s very handsome.”
“Counts don’t count in this country,” said Robbins smiling, and waiting for the applause of the table.
“Count indeed!” cried Mademoiselle Justine. “Count you the fork and spoons, Mr Robbins, and see that these canaille music men come not down the air—ree. As for that green-goose girl Preen—Bah! she is a little shild for her mamma to vip and send to bed wizout her soop—paire. Madame Downes, you are a vairy foolish woman.”
Mademoiselle Justine rose from her seat, and made a movement as if to push back a chair; but she had been seated upon a form which accommodated half a dozen more domestics, and in consequence she had to climb out and glide toward the door, through which she passed with a rustle like that of a cloud of dead leaves swept into a barn.
“You’ve put ma’amselle out, Mrs Downes,” said Robbins with condescension.
“That’s easy enough done, Mr Robbins. It’s her furren blood. I don’t like young people to be sneered at if they’re a bit tender. I’ve got a heart of my own.”
“And a very good heart too, Mrs Downes,” said the butler.
“Hear, hear,” said Joseph the footman.
“Hear, hear, hear, hear, hear!” cried the page-boy, a young gentleman who lived in a constant state of suppression, and consequently in his youthful vivacity was always seeking an opportunity to come to the surface. This appeared to him to be one. His chief had paid a compliment which had been cheered by the said chief’s first-lieutenant Joseph, so Henry, the bearer of three rows of buttons, every one of which he longed to annex for purposes of play, cried “hear, hear, hear,” as the footman’s echo, and rapped loudly upon the table with the haft of his knife.
A dead silence fell upon the occupants of the servants’ hall, and Henry longed to take flight; but the butler fixed him as the Ancient Mariner did the wedding guest, and held him with his glittering eye.