“Do go in and welcome her,” urged Mr. Welsh.
“I cannot in this condition. You know I have no cook, and must attend to everything. The girl has been impudent this morning, and has given me notice.”
Whilst this discussion was being carried on, Arminell tried not to listen, but the whispers were pitched so high, and were so articulate that scarce a word escaped her.
Then Mr. Welsh whispered, “Do lower your voice, Tryphœna,” and the pair drifted down the passage to the head of the kitchen steps, and what was further discussed there was inaudible.
Arminell looked round the room. Its most prominent feature was the gas-lamp with double burner and globes—the latter a little smoked, suspended from the ceiling by a telescopic tube that allowed just sufficient gas to escape at the joints to advertise itself as gas, not paraffin or electric fluid. This room was the one in which, apparently, Mrs. Welsh sat when she had a cook, and was not engrossed in domestic affairs. Her workbox, knitting, a railway novel, bills paid and unpaid, and one of Mr. Welsh’s stockings with a hole in the heel, showed that she occupied this apartment occasionally.
The door opened, and Mrs. Welsh entered, followed by her husband. She was a stout lady with a flat face, and a pair of large dark eyes, her only beauty. Her hair was not tidy, nor were all the buttons and hooks in place and performing their proper functions about her body.
“How do you do?” she said, extending her hand; “I’m sorry to say I have no cook; nothing is more difficult than to find cooks with characters now-a-days; ladies will give such false characters. What I say is, tell the truth, whatever comes of it. My last cook had a glowing character from the lady with whom she lived in Belgrave Square. I assure you she was in a superior house, quite aristocratic—carriage people; but I could not keep her. I did not myself find out that she drank. I did not suspect it. I knew she was flighty—but at last she went up a ladder, sixty feet high, and could hardly be got down again. It was in an adjoining builder’s yard. The ladder leaned against nothing, it pointed to the sky, and she went up it, and though a stout and elderly woman, looked no bigger than a fly when she had reached the top. Won’t you sit down? or stay—let me take you up to the parlour. We will have the table laid directly for lunch. Mr. Welsh does not generally come home at this time of day, so I was unprepared, and I have no cook. The ladder began to sway with her, for she became nervous at the top, and afraid to come down; quite a crowd collected. Do take off your things. Your room will be ready presently. In the meantime you can lay your bonnet in the drawing-room. I am short of hands now. The steps are rather narrow and steep, but I will lead the way. I’ll see to having water and soap and a towel taken to the best bed-room presently, but my servant is now making herself neat. None of the police liked to go up the ladder after my cook. The united weights at the top, sixty feet, would have made it sway like a bulrush, and perhaps break. This is the drawing-room. Do make yourself comfortable in it and excuse me. My father and mother were carriage people. There he is in his uniform, between the windows, taken when he was courting my mother. You will excuse me, or the girl will spread a dirty instead of a clean tablecloth for lunch. Dear me, the blinds have not been drawn up!”
Then Mrs. Welsh departed. All men and women trail shadows behind them when the sun shines in their faces, but some women, in all conditions of the heavens, drag behind them braid. It would seem as if they had their skirts bound to come undone. As in the classic world certain females were described as being with relaxed zones, so are there females in the modern world in a perpetual condition of relaxed bindings. If Mrs. Welsh had lived in a palæozoic period, when the beasts that inhabited the globe impressed their footprints on the pliant ooze, what perplexity her traces would now produce among the palæontologists, and what triumph in the minds of the anthropologists, who would conclude that these were the footprints of the homo caudatus, the missing link between the ape and man, and point in evidence to the furrow accompanying the impressions of the feet; and Mrs. Welsh always did wear a tail, but the tail was of black binding, sometimes looped, sometimes dragging in ends. As Arminell followed Mrs. Welsh up the stairs, she had to keep well in the rear to avoid treading on this tail.
On reaching the drawing-room, Arminell laid her bonnet and cloak on the sofa, and looked round the room as she looked about that below. The latter had been dreary to the eyes, the former had the superadded dreariness of pretence.
Houses that are uninhabited are haunted by ghosts, and unoccupied rooms by smells. The carpet, the curtains, the wall-paper, the chintz covers, the cold fire-place, send forth odours urgent to attract attention, as soon as the door opens. They are so seldom seen that they will be smelt.