“Yes, it looks pretty well; but there’s
a small heap of stuff over there near the fence which
rather inclines me to believe that the weeds have
been pulled out within the last few days—in
fact, since you wrote to announce our return.
John is an energetic man in an emergency, and I haven’t
a doubt he has been here at least once a week ever
since we left. I’ll keep a record of John
this fall.”
And so the two contented home-comers talked happily
along, and when they closed their eyes in sleep that
night they were, upon the whole, very well satisfied
with life.
Weeks elapsed, and with them some of the air-castles
collapsed. Whether custom staled the infinite
variety of the cook’s virtues, and age withered
the efficiency of Mary, the waitress, or whether something
was really and radically wrong with the girls, Thaddeus
and Bessie could not make out. Certain it was,
however, that by slow degrees the satisfaction for
which that first dinner seemed to stand as guarantor
wore away, and dissatisfaction entered the household.
Mary developed a fondness for church at most inconvenient
hours—hours at which in fact, neither Thaddeus
nor Bessie had ever supposed church could be.
That it was eternal they both knew, but they had
always supposed there were intermissions. Then
the cook’s family, which had hitherto been moderately
healthful, began to show signs of invalidism, though
no such calamity as actual dissolution ever set its
devastating step within the charmed circle of her
relatives. Cousins fell ill whom she alone could
comfort; nephews developed maladies for which she alone
could care; and, according to Thaddeus’s record,
John had been compelled on penalty of a fine to attend
the funerals of some twenty-four deceased intimate
friends in less than two months, although the newspapers
contained no mention of the existence of a possible
epidemic in the Celtic quarter. It is true that
John showed a more pronounced desire to make his absence
less inconvenient to his employer than did Mary and
the cook, by providing a substitute when the Ancient
Order of Funereal Hibernians compelled him to desert
the post of duty; but Thaddeus declared the “remedy
worse than the disease,” for the reason that
John’s substitute—his own brother-in-law—was
a weaver by trade, whose baskets the public did not
appreciate, and whose manner of cutting grass in the
early fall and of tending furnace later on was atrocious.
“If I could hire that man in summer,”
Thaddeus remarked one night when John’s substitute
had “fixed” the furnace so that the library
resembled a cold-storage room, “I think we could
make this house an arctic paradise. He seems
to have a genius for taking warmth by the neck and
shaking enough degrees of heat out of it to turn a
conflagration into an iceberg. I think I’ll
tell the Fire Commissioners about him.”
“He can’t compare with John,” was
Bessie’s answer to this.
“No. I think that’s why John sends
him here when he is off riding in carriages in honor
of his deceased chums. By the side of Dennis,
John is a jewel.”
