“No; she confesses her sins to me and I grant her absolution,” truthfully answered Richard. “Anything more?”
“Don’t be frivolous,” she admonished him. “I have a right to know. She dresses real elegant, I must say—in good taste, but expensive. I’m saying nothing against your wife, but if she’s extravagant and slack how can you support her and keep her contented? Has she means of her own?”
“I didn’t marry her for money,” carelessly returned the son. “As far as I know, she didn’t have a penny when I met her. Now please take time to get your bearings and you’ll bless the day I first laid eyes on Teresa Fernandez.”
Mrs. Cary sighed, brightened a little, and tripped to the kitchen to look in the oven. In the low-raftered dining-room the table was already set with the pink luster ware, the Canton cups, the thin silver spoons, the hand-woven linen cloth treasured in Grandmother Cary’s cedar chest. When Teresa came downstairs she wore a white waist and skirt much like the uniform, plain, immaculate, in which Richard had first beheld her. She appeared so briskly efficient, so different from Mrs. Cary’s conceptions of the indolent ladies of Spanish America, that it was like a rift in the cloud.
At the dinner table it was Teresa, alert and light of foot, who left her chair when anything was needed from the sideboard or kitchen. To Mrs. Cary’s objections she replied, like a gay mutineer, that she was one of the family and expected to earn her passage. So gracefully did she wait on them that the infatuated young William could not eat for watching her. Richard Cary’s mother, a martinet of a New England housekeeper of the old school, felt her doubts and scruples fading.
They were nearer vanishing entirely when, after dinner, Teresa donned an apron and insisted upon washing the dishes and tidying up the kitchen. Sweetly but firmly she refused to listen to the mother’s protestations and sent her to the porch to sit and talk with Richard. William hovered in the doorway until he was permitted to ply a dish-towel, subject to a rigid supervision of his handiwork. Teresa sang lilting snatches of Spanish ballads as she toiled. These New England women, she reflected, so proud of their housekeeping? Pouf! Had they ever lived in a steamer of a first-class passenger service?
When, at length, Ricardo’s mother was permitted to enter the kitchen from which she had been so amazingly evicted, her demeanor was critical in the extreme, as if expecting to have to do the work all over again. The competent Teresa, still singing, was wiping the last specks of dust from remote shelves and corners. William was polishing the copper hot-water boiler for dear life.
“Captain’s inspection?” cried the blithe Teresa. “We are not quite ready, Bill and I, but to-morrow—Valgame Dios, I will help you make your house shine from the main deck to the top.”
Mrs. Cary inspected, marveled, and was conquered. It was beyond belief that her careless, absent-minded Richard should have shown the surpassing judgment to select a jewel of a wife like this! Inherited reserve breaking its bonds, the mother exclaimed:
“Teresa, my dear, you are smarter than chain lightning. First thing you know, I’ll be bragging about you to every woman in Fairfield. I intend to propose you for membership in the home economics department of our Woman’s Club.”