Miss Gastonguay would not allow these servants to wear livery. Her coachman was obliged to do so. He had always been an underling, but tyrannical as she often showed herself with these two favourites, she never allowed them to forget that she remembered a time when they had been in a position of independence.
Therefore their lives were happy. They followed the whims of their mistress with childish enjoyment, and just now they were as frolicsome as two schoolboys over this departure from the usual order of the day.
The cold dishes were all arranged carefully on the table. Flaming cardinal flowers and spikes of blue pickerel weed lay loosely about the white cloth; the hot dishes watched by the cook O'Toole were growing hotter by a leaping fire, yet Miss Gastonguay would not give the signal to serve the meal.
"Hush," she said, at last, "Mrs. Mercer is going to recite to us."
Prosperity and Tribulation demurely seated themselves and listened to the young lady as she drew herself up erect on her heap of cushions, and, with eyes wandering across the river, declaimed in a girlish way Whittier's exquisite lines on the fabled city of the early Maine Voyagers.
Captain White could not listen. He tried to follow the fortunes of the Christian knight, "who, with his henchman bold, sought through the dim wood the domes and spires of Norumbega's town," but the effort was a failure.
Just as Derrice was plaintively revealing the heart-sickness of the disappointed knight, Captain White wriggled toward his wife. "Hippy," he whispered in her ear, "that supper looks good, but you will excuse me from it. I must have a look at H. Robinson."
She nodded, and followed him with her eyes as he stole out of sight.
On occasions like the present, when the three house servants were withdrawn, the woman from the cottages took charge of affairs at French Cross. This woman Captain White found in the kitchen, gazing at a row of tin covers on the wall as fixedly as if she were mesmerised by them.
When he saluted her with a sudden "Good afternoon," she turned slowly.