“You haven’t told me yet how it happened,” I said to Mrs. Malkin.
She set her lips and eyed me, sharply.
“Didn’t you talk with the coroner, sir?”
“Yes, of course,” I admitted; “but as I understand you found my uncle, I
thought——”
“Well, I wouldn’t care to say anything about it,” she interrupted, with
decision.
This housekeeper of my uncle’s was somewhat taller than I, and much
heavier—two physical preponderances which afford any woman possessing
them an advantage over the inferior male. She appeared a subject for
diplomacy rather than argument.
Noting her ample jaw, her breadth of cheek, the unsentimental glint of
her eye, I decided on conciliation. I placed a chair for her, there in my
Uncle Godfrey’s study, and dropped into another, myself.
“At least, before we go over the other parts of the house, suppose we
rest a little,” I suggested, in my most unctuous manner. “The place
rather gets on one’s nerves—don’t you think so?”
It was sheer luck—I claim no credit for it. My chance reflection found
the weak spot in her fortifications. She replied to it with an undoubted
smack of satisfaction:
“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?”