“So you’ve managed to get down, have you?” he growled, as he turned his weasel eyes on Nancy who was buttering bread.
“I’ve been down an hour or two,” she replied with studied indifference; “just long enough to get the dust out of my eyes.”
“It was nigh on ten before she landed,” Keturah explained, exaggerating the hour by something like forty minutes. “What we’re coming to I dursn’t think, but it’s plain to see who’s missus and who’s maid——”
Nancy dropped the knife and faced them both with flashing eyes.
“If it’s the maid you expect me to be then I hand in my notice,” she said scornfully. “As to being missus, it isn’t of this house I’d want the job, anyway. I’m neither missus nor maid I’d have you to know, but a lodger; and a lodger who pays well, as you don’t need to be told; and I don’t know that lodgers have to be at the beck and call of them they pay. You’ve only to say another word and I’ll leave to-morrow—they’d be glad enough to have me at Uncle John’s. I’m sick to death of your snappiness and bad temper, and you may as well know it.”
Keturah had lifted her apron to her eyes, cowed by this display of hot resolution which was much fiercer than anything that had preceded it; and Baldwin pushed back his chair and stamped his foot.
“Have done, will you!” he shouted. “Do you think I care if you take yourself to blazes this minute, and your brass with you? Am I fast, think you, for t’ few shillings a week you seem to think keeps t’ house going——?”
“Of course you’re not,” Nancy broke in with a cold disdain that lashed like a whip, “but you make a profit on them, and you’d sooner lose a tooth than lose money. You’ve stung me into saying this. I’ve held myself in till I’ve nearly choked, but I’ve stood your sneers and nasty talk as long as I’m going to. You quarrel with a man like Maniwel, and because you can’t get the best of him you come home and try to take it out of me. I’m not having any more—Good Heavens! Why should I? Here! you can butter the bread for yourself!”
She pushed the loaf towards the angry man and crossed over to the rug, where she leaned her head against the mantelpiece, and Baldwin’s anger bubbled up so furiously that at first he could only splutter out a succession of oaths. Then he said:
“But what can you expect?”—he was apparently directing the inquiry to Keturah, but his eyes were on Nancy’s averted head. “She’s like to side wi’ Maniwel, seeing ’at he’s Jagger’s father! Aye, even though he’s taking bite and sup out of her mouth. Isn’t her interests and mine t’ same? What ’ud John Clegg think to a man ’at reckons he’s fain to wed a lass, and at t’ same time sets up to rob her of her business...?”