I had to add immediately, “Remember your place, William.”
“But Mr. B—— knows I swore,” he insisted.
“A gentleman,” I replied stiffly, “cannot remember for many hours what a waiter has said to him.”
“No, sir, but—”
To stop him I had to say, “And—ah—William, your wife is decidedly better. She has eaten the tapioca—all of it.”
“How can you know, sir?”
“By an accident.”
“Irene signed to the window?”
“No.”
“Then you saw her and went out and—”
“How dare you, William?”
“Oh, sir, to do that for me! May God bl—”
“William.”
He was reinstated in the dining-room, but often when I looked at him I seemed to see a dying wife in his face, and so the relations between us were still strained. But I watched the girl, and her pantomime was so illuminating that I knew the sufferer had again cleaned the platter on Tuesday, had attempted a boiled egg on Wednesday (you should have seen Irene chipping it in Pall Mall, and putting in the salt), but was in a woful state of relapse on Thursday.
“Is your mother very ill to-day, Miss Irene?” I asked, as soon as I had drawn her out of range of the club-windows.
“My!” she exclaimed again, and I saw an ecstatic look pass between her and a still smaller girl with her, whom she referred to as a neighbour.
I waited coldly. William’s wife, I was informed, had looked like nothing but a dead one till she got the brandy.
“Hush, child,” I said, shocked. “You don’t know how the dead look.”
“Bless yer!” she replied.
Assisted by her friend, who was evidently enormously impressed by Irene’s intimacy with me, she gave me a good deal of miscellaneous information, as that William’s real name was Mr. Hicking, but that he was known in their street, because of the number of his shirts, as Toff Hicking. That the street held he should get away from the club before two in the morning, for his missus needed him more than the club needed him. That William replied (very sensibly) that if the club was short of waiters at supper-time some of the gentlemen might be kept waiting for their marrow-bone. That he sat up with his missus most of the night, and pretended to her that he got some nice long naps at the club. That what she talked to him about mostly was the kid. That the kid was in another part of London (in charge of a person called the old woman), because there was an epidemic in Irene’s street.
“And what does the doctor say about your mother?”
“He sometimes says she would have a chance if she could get her kid back.”
“Nonsense.”
“And if she was took to the country.”
“Then why does not William take her?”
“My! And if she drank porty wine.”
“Doesn’t she?”
“No. But father, he tells her ‘bout how the gentlemen drinks it.”
I turned from her with relief, but she came after me.
“Ain’t yer going to do it this time?” she demanded with a falling face. “You done it last time. I tell her you done it”—she pointed to her friend who was looking wistfully at me—“ain’t you to let her see you doing of it?”
For a moment I thought that her desire was another shilling, but by a piece of pantomime she showed that she wanted me to lift my hat to her. So I lifted it, and when I looked behind she had her head in the air and her neighbour was gazing at her awestruck. These little creatures are really not without merit.
About a week afterward I was in a hired landau, holding a newspaper before my face lest anyone should see me in company of a waiter and his wife. William was taking her into Surrey to stay with an old nurse of mine, and Irene was with us, wearing the most outrageous bonnet.
I formed a mean opinion of Mrs. Hicking’s intelligence from her pride in the baby, which was a very ordinary one. She created a regrettable scene when it was brought to her, because “she had been feared it would not know her again.” I could have told her that they know no one for years had I not been in terror of Irene, who dandled the child on her knees and talked to it all the way. I have never known a bolder little hussy than this Irene. She asked the infant improper questions, such as “Oo know who gave me this bonnet?” and answered them herself. “It was the pretty gentleman there,” and several times I had to affect sleep, because she announced, “Kiddy wants to kiss the pretty gentleman.”
Irksome as all this necessarily was to a man of taste, I suffered still more acutely when we reached our destination, where disagreeable circumstances compelled me to drink tea with a waiter’s family. William knew that I regarded thanks from persons of his class as an outrage, yet he looked them though he dared not speak them. Hardly had he sat down at the table by my orders than he remembered that I was a member of the club and jumped up. Nothing is in worse form than whispering, yet again and again he whispered to his poor, foolish wife, “How are you now? You don’t feel faint?” and when she said she felt like another woman already, his face charged me with the change. I could not but conclude from the way she let the baby pound her that she was stronger than she pretended.
I remained longer than was necessary because I had something to say to William which I feared he would misunderstand, but when he announced that it was time for him to catch a train back to London, at which his wife paled, I delivered the message.
“William,” I said, backing away from him, “the head-waiter asked me to say that you could take a fortnight’s holiday. Your wages will be paid as usual.”
Confound him.
“William,” I cried furiously, “go away.”
Then I saw his wife signing to him, and I knew she wanted to be left alone with me.
“William,” I cried in a panic, “stay where you are.”
But he was gone, and I was alone with a woman whose eyes were filmy. Her class are fond of scenes. “If you please, ma’am!” I said imploringly.
But she kissed my hand; she was like a little dog.
“It can be only the memory of some woman,” said she, “that makes you so kind to me and mine.”
Memory was the word she used, as if all my youth were fled. I suppose I really am quite elderly.
“I should like to know her name, sir,” she said, “that I may mention her with loving respect in my prayers.”
I raised the woman and told her the name. It was not Mary. “But she has a home,” I said, “as you have, and I have none. Perhaps, ma’am, it would be better worth your while to mention me.”
It was this woman, now in health, whom I intrusted with the purchase of the outfits, “one for a boy of six months,” I explained to her, “and one for a boy of a year,” for the painter had boasted to me of David’s rapid growth. I think she was a little surprised to find that both outfits were for the same house; and she certainly betrayed an ignoble curiosity about the mother’s Christian name, but she was much easier to brow-beat than a fine lady would have been, and I am sure she and her daughter enjoyed themselves hugely in the shops, from one of which I shall never forget Irene emerging proudly with a commissionaire, who conducted her under an umbrella to the cab where I was lying in wait. I think that was the most celestial walk of Irene’s life.
I told Mrs. Hicking to give the articles a little active ill-treatment that they might not look quite new, at which she exclaimed, not