I obeyed. Did my hair somehow, crammed my hat on anyhow, and down the stairs I went. A pretty task to set me! Down the kitchen stairs I hurried, to the area door, on the glass window of which vigorous knuckles were beating a sort of tattoo. The moment I opened it I was greeted in the most surprising way.
“Now then, slowcoach, you seem to take some time a-washing of yourself! Think I’ve got nothing else to do except keep on a-waiting here all day?”
I was astonished. I fancy, when he saw me, that the speaker was astonished too, though he scarcely showed it in a manner which I thought fitting.
“Hollo! beg pardon! my crikey! Are you the new young lady?”
Evidently this was a person who needed a good deal of freezing. I wondered that even Jane had not succeeded in snubbing him into better manners. I assumed my most dignified bearing—which is not saying much, for dignity is not my strongest point—and was as frigid as the fact that my actual temperature was somewhere about boiling point permitted.
“Please give me the bread.”
“That’s all right! I’ll give it you with the very greatest pleasure; and I’d like to give you something else as well.”
And before I could stop him, this remarkable individual was off at a gallop on a line which was distinctly his very own.
“My name’s Bob Stevens. I’ve been walking out with the young lady what was here before you. She left yesterday; cruel hard they treated her; no young lady couldn’t have stood it what had any spirit. This is a nice place, this is—five scratch-catting young women, and an old geeser of a mother. It won’t suit you; you’ll leave at the end of your month, they all of them do.”
That was an outrageous falsehood. Some of our servants have stopped with us more than a year. But it was impossible for me to contradict him.