“Oh, I had got you by heart,” she returned, “from books and drawings and photos; I had you in my pocket when I came: so, you see, as soon as you were so good as to give me my head and let me loose, I knew my way about. It’s all here, every inch of it,” she competently continued, “and now at last I can do what I want!”
A light of consternation, at this, just glimmered in Chivers’s face. “And pray, mum, what might that be?”
“Why, take you right back with me—to Missoura Top.”
This answer seemed to fix his bewilderment, but he was there for the general convenience.
“Do I understand you, mum, that you require to take me?”
Her particular convenience, on the spot, embraced him, so new and delightful a sense had he suddenly read into her words. “Do you mean to say you’d come—as the old Family Servant? Then do, you nice real thing: it’s just what I’m dying for—an old Family Servant! You’re somebody’s else, yes—but everything, over here, is somebody’s else, and I want, too, a first-rate second-hand one, all ready made, as you are, but not too much done up. You’re the best I’ve seen yet, and I wish I could have you packed—put up in paper and bran—as I shall have my old pot there.” She whisked about, remembering, recovering, eager: “Don’t let me forget my precious pot!” Excited, with quick transitions, she quite sociably appealed to her companion, who shuffled sympathetically to where, out of harm, the object had been placed on a table. “Don’t you just love old crockery? That’s awfully sweet old Chelsea.”
He took up the piece with tenderness, though, in his general agitation, not perhaps with all the caution with which, for daily service, he handled ancient frailties. He at any rate turned on this fresh subject an interested, puzzled eye. “Where is it I’ve known this very bit—though not to say, as you do, by name?” Suddenly it came to him. “In the pew-opener’s front parlour!”
“No,” his interlocutress cried, “in the pew-opener’s best bedroom: on the old chest of drawers, you know—with those ducks of brass handles. I’ve got the handles too—I mean the whole thing; and the brass fender and fire-irons, and the chair her grandmother died in. Not in the fly,” she added—“it was such a bore that they have to be sent.”
Chivers, with the pot still in his hands, fairly rocked in the high wind of so much confidence and such great transactions. He had nothing for these, however, but approval. “You did right to take this out, mum, when the fly went to the stables. Them flymen do be cruel rash with anything that’s delicate.” Of the delicacy of the vessel it now rested with him to deposit safely again he was by this time so appreciatively aware that in returning with it to its safe niche he stumbled into some obscure trap literally laid for him by his nervousness. It was the matter of a few seconds, of a false movement, a knock of the elbow, a gasp, a shriek, a complete little crash. There was the pot on the pavement, in several pieces, and the clumsy cup-bearer blue with fear. “Mercy on us, mum,—I’ve brought shame on my old grey hairs!”
The little shriek of his companion had smothered itself in the utterance, and the next minute, with the ruin between them, they were contrastedly face to face. The charming woman, who had already found more voices in the air than anyone had found before, could, in the happy play of this power, find a poetry in her accident. “Oh, but the way you take it!” she laughed—“you’re too quaint to live!” She looked at him as if he alone had suffered—as if his suffering indeed positively added to his charm. “The way you said that now—it’s just the very ‘type’! That’s all I want of you now—to be the very type. It’s what you are, you poor dear thing—for you can’t help it; and it’s what everything and everyone else is, over here; so that you had just better all make up your minds to it and not try to shirk it. There was a type in the train with me—the ‘awfully nice girl’ of all the English novels, the ‘simple maiden in her flower’ of—who is it?—your great poet. She couldn’t help it either—in fact I wouldn’t have let her!” With this, while Chivers picked up his fragments, his lady had a happy recall. His face, as he stood there with the shapeless elements of his humiliation fairly rattling again in his hands, was a reflection of her extraordinary manner of enlarging the subject, or rather, more beneficently perhaps, the space that contained it. “By the way, the girl was coming right here. Has she come?”