“It’s more than seven years that I’ve been doing for Mr. Sarston, sir: Bringing him his meals regular as clockwork, keeping the house clean—as clean as he’d let me—and sleeping at my own home, o’ nights; and in all that time I’ve said, over and over, there ain’t a house in New York the equal of this for queerness.”
“Nor anywhere else,” I encouraged her, with a laugh; and her confidences opened another notch:
“You’re likely right in that, too, sir. As I’ve said to poor Mr. Sarston, many a time, ‘It’s all well enough,’ says I, ‘to have bugs for a hobby. You can afford it; and being a bachelor and by yourself, you don’t have to consider other people’s likes and dislikes. And it’s all well enough if you want to,’ says I, ‘to keep thousands and thousands o’ them in cabinets, all over the place, the way you do. But when it comes to pinnin’ them on the walls in regular armies,’ I says, ‘and on the ceiling of your own study; and even on different parts of the furniture, so that a body don’t know what awful thing she’s agoin’ to find under her hand of a sudden when she does the dusting; why, then,’ I says to him, ‘it’s drivin’ a decent woman too far.’”
“And did he never try to reform his ways when you told him that?” I asked, smiling.
“To be frank with you, Mr. Robinson, when I talked like that to him, he generally raised my pay. And what was a body to do then?”
“I can’t see how Lucy Lawton stood the place as long as she did,” I observed, watching Mrs. Malkin’s red face very closely.
She swallowed the bait, and leaned forward, hands on knees.
“Poor girl, it got on her nerves. But she was the quiet kind. You never saw her, sir?”
I shook my head.