Harry was just outside when I turned cook out, and she began at him. He saw how the land lay, and he made short work of her, though she kept going on about me all the time. He made her pack and be off within a quarter of an hour; and I had to go into the kitchen, hot and crying and excited as I was, and the kitchenmaid and I had to dish up the dinner, and do all the rest of the cooking that evening.
When I had five minutes I went upstairs and bathed my face and put myself tidy; but I had such a dreadful splitting headache, I could hardly see out of my eyes.
When I came down again, Harry was in the parlour smoking his pipe and staring at the ceiling, and he didn’t look very good-tempered.
“Oh, that wretched woman,” I said; “she’s upset everything.”
Harry didn’t speak.
“Harry,” I said, “haven’t you anything to say? Aren’t you sorry for me to have been so upset?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I’m sorry; but I wish that d——d policeman was at Jericho!”
That cat!—that ever I should call her so—to go and drag that policeman off the cover of my book and throw him at Harry, and all because I wouldn’t let her go and see her young man before she’d cooked the best sitting-room’s dinner!
It was a blow to me to have what I’d said in my book thrown in my face by my own servant. After that I felt inclined to ask a girl before I engaged her if she’d read my “Memoirs,” and if she said she had, to say, “Then you won’t suit me,” because that book puts wrong notions into girls’ heads. If ever there’s a second edition, there’s one or two things about servants in it that I shall certainly alter. And every bit about that policeman will come out. I made up my mind to that long ago.
Writing about the cook who threw my “Memoirs” in my face, and the rage she put me in, has quite put poor Mr. Wilkins’s nose out of joint. I told you how he was always bringing me things to put in my “Memoirs” of the village and our inn. Lots of the things he came to me full of were no use at all, and I had to tell him so. He seemed to think a book was a sort of dust-bin, into which you shot any rubbish you picked up. But, of course, people who are not authors don’t understand these things—they don’t know that everybody isn’t interested in just what interests them.