“Swear on, sir! let the child hear your oaths! Let my blessed child, who is too ill to sit at table and picks her bite! sweetbread on her sofa,—which her poor mother prepares for her, Mr. Pendennis,—which I cooked it, and gave it to her with these hands,—let her hear your curses and blasphemies, Clive Newcome! They are loud enough.”
“Do let us have a quiet life,” groans out Clive; and for me, I must confess, I kept my eyes steadily down upon my plate, nor dared to lift them until my portion of cold beef had vanished.
No further outbreak took place until the appearance of the second course, which consisted, as the ingenious reader may suppose, of the plum-pudding, now in a grilled state, and the remanent of mince-pies from yesterday’s meal. Maria, I thought, looked particularly guilty as these delicacies were placed on the table: she set them down hastily, and was for operating an instant retreat.
But the Campaigner shrieked after her, “Who has eaten that pudding? I insist upon knowing who has eaten it. I saw it at two o’clock when I went down to the kitchen and fried a bit for my darling child, and there’s pounds of it gone since then! There were five mince-pies! Mr. Pendennis! you saw yourself there were five that went away from table yesterday—where’s the other two Maria? You leave the house this night, you thieving, wicked wretch—and I’ll thank you to come back to me afterwards for a character. Thirteen servants have we had in nine months, Mr. Pendennis, and this girl is the worst of them all, and the greatest liar and the greatest thief.”
At this charge the outraged Maria stood up in arms, and as the phrase is, gave the Campaigner as good as she got. Go! wouldn’t she go? Pay her her wages, and let her go out of that ell upon hearth, was Maria’s prayer. “It isn’t you, sir,” she said, turning to Clive. “You are good enough, and works hard enough to git the guineas which you give out to pay that doctor; and she don’t pay him—and I see five of them in her purse wrapped up in paper, myself I did, and she abuses you to him—and I heard her, and Jane Black, who was here before, told me she heard her. Go! won’t I just go, I dispises your puddens and pies!” and with a laugh of scorn this rude Maria snapped her black fingers in the immediate vicinity of the Campaigner’s nose.
“I will pay her her wages, and she shall go this instant!” says Mrs. Mackenzie, taking her purse out.
“Pay me with them suvverings that you have got in it, wrapped up in paper. See if she haven’t, Mr. Newcome,” the refractory waiting-woman cried out, and again she laughed a strident laugh.
Mrs. Mackenzie briskly shut her portemonnaie, and rose up from table, quivering with indignant virtue. “Go!” she exclaimed, “go and pack your trunks this instant! you quit the house this night, and a policeman shall see to your boxes before you leave it!”
Whilst uttering this sentence against the guilty Maria, the Campaigner had intended, no doubt, to replace her purse in her pocket,—a handsome filagree gimcrack of poor Ross’s, one of the relics of former splendours,—but, agitated by Maria’s insolence, the trembling hand missed the mark, and the purse fell to the ground.
Maria dashed at the purse in a moment, with a scream of laughter shook its contents upon the table, and sure enough, five little packets wrapped in paper rolled out upon the cloth, besides bank-notes and silver and golden coin. “I’m to go, am I? I’m a thief, am I?” screamed the girl, clapping her hands. “I sor ’em yesterday when I was a-lacing of her; and thought of that pore young man working night and day to get the money;—me a thief, indeed!—I despise you, and I give you warning.”