Weeks elapsed, and with them some of the air-castles collapsed. Whether custom staled the infinite variety of the cook’s virtues, and age withered the efficiency of Mary, the waitress, or whether something was really and radically wrong with the girls, Thaddeus and Bessie could not make out. Certain it was, however, that by slow degrees the satisfaction for which that first dinner seemed to stand as guarantor wore away, and dissatisfaction entered the household. Mary developed a fondness for church at most inconvenient hours—hours at which in fact, neither Thaddeus nor Bessie had ever supposed church could be. That it was eternal they both knew, but they had always supposed there were intermissions. Then the cook’s family, which had hitherto been moderately healthful, began to show signs of invalidism, though no such calamity as actual dissolution ever set its devastating step within the charmed circle of her relatives. Cousins fell ill whom she alone could comfort; nephews developed maladies for which she alone could care; and, according to Thaddeus’s record, John had been compelled on penalty of a fine to attend the funerals of some twenty-four deceased intimate friends in less than two months, although the newspapers contained no mention of the existence of a possible epidemic in the Celtic quarter. It is true that John showed a more pronounced desire to make his absence less inconvenient to his employer than did Mary and the cook, by providing a substitute when the Ancient Order of Funereal Hibernians compelled him to desert the post of duty; but Thaddeus declared the “remedy worse than the disease,” for the reason that John’s substitute—his own brother-in-law—was a weaver by trade, whose baskets the public did not appreciate, and whose manner of cutting grass in the early fall and of tending furnace later on was atrocious.
“If I could hire that man in summer,” Thaddeus remarked one night when John’s substitute had “fixed” the furnace so that the library resembled a cold-storage room, “I think we could make this house an arctic paradise. He seems to have a genius for taking warmth by the neck and shaking enough degrees of heat out of it to turn a conflagration into an iceberg. I think I’ll tell the Fire Commissioners about him.”
“He can’t compare with John,” was Bessie’s answer to this.
“No. I think that’s why John sends him here when he is off riding in carriages in honor of his deceased chums. By the side of Dennis, John is a jewel.”
“John is very faithful with the furnace,” said Bessie. “He never lets it go down. Why, day before yesterday I turned off every register in the house, and even then had to open all the windows to keep from suffocating.”
“But that wasn’t all John, my dear,” said Thaddeus. “The Weather Bureau had something to do with it. It was a warm day for this season of the year, anyhow. If John could combine the two businesses of selling coal and feeding furnaces, I think he would become a millionaire. And, by-the-way, I think you ought to speak to him, Bess, about the windows. Since you gave him the work of window-cleaning to do, it is evident that he thinks I have nothing to say in the matter, for he persistently ignores my requests that he clean them in squares as they are made, and not rub up a little circle in the middle, so that they look like blocks of opalescent glass with plate-glass bulls’-eyes let into the centre. Look at them now.”
“Dennis did that. John had to go to Mount Vernon with his militia company to-day.”
“Dennis is well named, for his name is—But never mind. I’ll credit John with his twelfth day off in four weeks.”
From John to Bridget, in the matter of days off, was an easy step, though such was Bessie’s consummate diplomacy that Thaddeus would probably have continued in ignorance of the extent to which Bridget absented herself had they not both taken occasion one day to visit some relatives in Philadelphia, and on their return home at night found no dinner awaiting them.
“What’s the matter now?” asked Thaddeus, a little crossly, perhaps, for visiting relatives in Philadelphia irritated him—possibly because he and they did not agree in politics, and their assumption that Thaddeus’s party was entirely made up of the ignorant and self-seeking was galling to him. “Why isn’t dinner ready?”