But Mrs. Courage barred the way. “My niece will wyte on people of doubtful conduck over my dead corpse.”
“Very well, then, Mrs. Courage,” Steptoe reasoned. “If you won’t serve the new missus, Mr. Rashleigh, will ’ave to get some one else who will.”
“Mr. Rashleigh will ’ave to do that very selfsame 60 thing. Not another night will none of us sleep hunder this paternal roof with them that their very presence is a houtrage. ’Enery Steptoe was always a time-server, and a time-server ’e will be, but as for us women, we shall see the new missus in goin’ in to give ’er notice. Not a month’s notice, it won’t be. This range as I’ve cooked at for nearly thirty years I shall cook at no more, not so much as for lunch. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What’s the world comin’ to?”
In spite of her strength of character Mrs. Courage threw her apron over her head and burst into tears. Jane was weeping already.
“There, there, aunt,” Nettie begged, patting her relative between the shoulders. “What’s the good o’ goin’ on like that just because a silly ass ’as married beneath ’im?”
Mrs. Courage pulled her apron from her face to cry out with passion:
“If ’e was goin’ to disgryce ’imself like that, why couldn’t ’e ’a taken you?”
So Steptoe waited on Letty himself, bringing in the grapefruit, the coffee, the egg, and the toast, and seeing that she knew how to deal with each in the proper forms. He was so brooding, so yearning, so tactful, as he bent over her, that she was never at a loss as to the fork or spoon she ought to use, or the minute at which to use it. Under his protection Letty ate. She ate, first because she was young and hungry, and then because she felt him standing between her and all vague terrors. By the time she had finished, he moved in front of her, where he could speak as one human being to another.
61
Taking an empty plate from the table to put it on the sideboard, he said: “I ’ope madam is chyngin’ ’er mind about leavin’ us.”
Letty glanced up shyly in spite of being somewhat reassured. “What’ud be the good of my changin’ my mind when—when I’m not fit to stay?”
“Madam means not fit in the sense that––”
“I’m not a lady.”
Resting one hand on the table, he looked down into her eyes with an expression such as Letty had never before seen in a human face.
“I could myke a lydy of madam.”
At the sound of these quiet words, so confidently spoken, something passed through Letty’s frame to be described only by the hard-worked word, a thrill. It was a double current of vibration, partly of upleaping hope, partly of the desperate sense of her own limitations. A hundred points of gold dust were aflame in her irises as she said:
“You mean that you’d put me wise? Oh, but I’d never learn!”
“On the contrary, I think madam would pick up very quick.”
“And I’d never be able to talk the right––”
“I could learn madam to talk just as good as me.”
It seemed too much. She clasped her hands. It was the nearest point she had ever reached to ecstasy. “Oh, do you think you could? You talk somethin’ beautiful, you do!”
He smiled modestly. “I’ve always lived with the best people, and I suppose I ketch their wyes. I know 62 what a gentleman is—and a lydy. I know all a lydy’s little ’abits, and before two or three months was over madam ’ud ’ave them as natural as natural, if she wouldn’t think me overbold.”
“When ’ud you begin?”
The bright spot deepened in each cheek. “I’ve begun already, if madam won’t think me steppin’ out o’ my plyce to sye so, in showin’ madam the spoons and forks for the different––”
Letty colored, too. “Yes, I saw that. I take it as very kind. But—” she looked at him with a puzzled knitting of the brows—“but what makes you take all this trouble for me?”
“I’ve two reasons, madam, but I’ll only tell you one of ’em just now. The other’ll keep. I’ll myke it known to you if—if all goes as I ’ope.” He straightened himself up. “I don’t often speak o’ this,” he continued, “because among us butlers and valets it wouldn’t be understood. Most of us is what’s known as conservative, all for the big families and the old wyes. Well, so am I—to a point. But––”
He moved a number of objects on the table before he could go on. “I wasn’t born to the plyce I ’old now,” he explained after getting his material at command. “I wasn’t born to nothink. I was what they calls in England a foundlin’—a byby what’s found—what ’is parents ’ave thrown awye. I don’t know who my father and mother was, or what was my real nyme. ’Enery Steptoe is just a nyme they give me at the Horphanage. But I won’t go into that. I’m just tryin’ to tell madam that my life was a ’ard one, quite a ’ard one, till I come to New York as footman for 63 Mr. Allerton’s father, and afterward worked up to be ’is valet and butler.”
He cleared his throat. Expressing ideals was not easy. “I ’ope madam will forgive me if I sye that what it learned me was a fellow-feelin’ with my own sort—with the poor. I’ve often wished as I could go out among the poor and ryse them up. I ain’t a socialist—a little bit of a anarchist perhaps, but nothink extreme—and yet—Well, if Mr. Rashleigh had married a rich girl, I would ’a tyken it as natural and done my best for ’im, but since ’e ’asn’t—Oh, can’t madam see? It’s—it’s a kind o’ pride with me to find some one like—like what I was when I was ’er age—out in the cold like—and bring ’er in—and ’elp ’er to tryne ’erself—so—so as—some day—to beat the best—them as ’as ’ad all the chances––”
He was interrupted by the tinkle of the telephone. It was a relief. He had said all he needed to say, all he knew how to say. Whether madam understood it or not he couldn’t tell, since she didn’t seize ideas quickly.
“If madam will excuse me now, I’ll go and answer that call.”
But Letty sprang up in alarm. “Oh, don’t leave me. Some of them women will blow in––”
“None of them women will come—” he threw a delicate emphasis on the word—“if madam’ll just sit down. They don’t mean to come. I’ll explyne that to madam when I come back, if she’ll only not leave this room.”
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Chapter VI
“Good morning, Steptoe. Will you ask Mr. Allerton if he’ll speak to Miss Walbrook?”
“Mr. Allerton ’as gone to the New Netherlands club for ’is breakfast, miss.”
“Oh, thanks. I’ll call him up there.”
She didn’t want to call him up there, at a club, where a man must like to feel safe from feminine intrusion, but the matter was too pressing to permit of hesitation. Since the previous afternoon she had gone through much searching of heart. She was accustomed to strong reactions from tempestuousness to penitence, but not of the violence of this one.
Summoned to the telephone, Allerton felt as if summoned to the bar of judgment. He divined who it was, and he divined the reason for the call.
“Good morning, Rash!”
His voice was absolutely dead. “Good morning, Barbara!”
“I