Paste Jewels, John Kendrick Bangs [read aloud TXT] 📗

rose to the occasion, and committed an act, and committed it thoroughly. The Thaddeus of old, the meek, long-suffering, too amiable Thaddeus, disappeared. The famous smile was given no chance to play. His wife was absent, and the smile was far away with her. Thaddeus, with one fell blow, burst his fetters and became free.

That afternoon, when he had returned to the seaboard, Bessie asked him, "How was the house?"

"Beautiful," said Thaddeus, quite truthfully; for it was.

"Did Ellen say anything about the hamper?"

"Not a word."

"Did you speak to her about it?"

"Nope."

"Oh, Teddy! How could you forget it?"

To the lasting honor of Thaddeus be it said that he bore up under this unflinchingly.

"Did you have a good breakfast, Ted?" Bessie asked, returning to the subject later.

"Very," said Thaddeus, thinking of the hearty meal he and his fellow-sufferer had eaten at the club after getting back to town. "We had a tomato omelet, coffee, toast, rice cakes, tenderloin steak, and grits."

"Dear me!" smiled Bessie; she was so glad her Teddy had been so well treated. "All that? Ellen must have laid herself out."

"Yes," said Thaddeus; "I think she did."

All the following week Thaddeus seemed to have a load on his mind--a load which he resolutely refused to share with his wife--and on Friday he found it necessary to go up to town.

"I thought this was your vacation," remonstrated Bessie.

"Well, so it is," said Thaddeus. "But--but I've got one or two matters to attend to--matters of very great importance--so that I think I'll have to go."

"If you must, you must," said Bessie. "But I think it's horrid of your partner to make you go back to town this hot weather."

"Don't be cross with my partner," said Thaddeus; "especially my partner in this matter."

"Have you different partners for different matters?" queried Bessie.

"Never mind about that, my dear; you'll know all about it in time, so don't worry."

"All right, Teddy. But I don't like to have you running away from me when I'm at a hotel. I'd rather be home, anyhow. Can't I go with you? Little Ted is well enough now to go home."

"Not this time; but you can go up next Wednesday if you wish," returned Thaddeus, with a slight show of embarrassment.

And so it was settled, and Thaddeus went to town. On Wednesday they all left the sea-shore to return to Phillipseburg.

"Oh, how lovely it looks!" ejaculated Bessie, as she entered the house, Norah having opened the door. "But--er--where's Jane, Norah?"

"Cookin' the dinner, mim."

"Why, Jane can't cook."

"If you please, mim, this is a new Jane."

Bessie's parasol fell to the floor. "A wha-a-at?" she cried.

"A new Jane. Misther Perkins has dispinsed with old Jane and Ellen, mim."

Bessie rushed up-stairs to her room and cried. The shock was too sudden. She longed for Thaddeus, who had remained at the station collecting the bath-tubs and other luxuries of the baby from the luggage-van, to come. What did it all mean? Jane and Ellen gone! New girls in their places!

And then Thaddeus came, and made all plain to the little woman, and when he was all through she was satisfied. He had discharged the tyrants, and had supplied their places. The latter was the important business which had taken him to town.

"But, Teddy," Bessie said, with a smile, when she had heard all, "how did poor mild little you ever have the courage to face those two women and give them their discharge?"

Teddy blushed. "I didn't," he answered, meekly; "I wrote it."

Five years have passed since then, and all has gone well. Thaddeus has remained free, and, as he proudly observes, domestics now tremble at his approach--that is, all except Norah, who remembers him as of old. Ellen and Jane are living together in affluence, having saved their wages for nearly the whole of their term of "service." Bessie is happy in the possession of two fine boys, to whom all her attention--all save a little reserved for Thaddeus--is given; and, as for the dubious, auburn-haired, and distinctly Celtic Norah, Thaddeus is afraid that she is developing into a "treasure."

"Why do you think so?" Bessie asked him, when he first expressed that fear.

"Oh, she has the symptoms," returned Thaddeus. "She has taken three nights off this week."



MR. BRADLEY'S JEWEL

Thaddeus was tired, and, therefore, Thaddeus was grumpy. One premise only was necessary for the conclusion--in fact, it was the only premise upon which a conclusion involving Thaddeus's grumpiness could find a foothold. If Thaddeus felt rested, everything in the world could go wrong and he would smile as sweetly as ever; but with the slightest trace of weariness in his system the smile would fade, wrinkles would gather on his forehead, and grumpiness set in whether things were right or wrong. On this special occasion to which I refer, things were just wrong enough to give him a decent excuse-- outside of his weariness--for his irritation. Norah, the housemaid, had officiously undertaken to cover up the shortcomings of John, who should have blacked Thaddeus's boots, and who had taken his day off without preparing the extra pair which the lord of the manor had expected to wear that evening. It was nice of the housemaid, of course, to try to black the extra pair to keep John out of trouble, but she might have been more discriminating. It was not necessary for her to polish, until they shone like Claude Lorraine glasses, two right boots, one of which, paradoxical as it may seem, was consequently the wrong boot; so that when Thaddeus came to dress for the evening's diversion there was nowhere to be found in his shoe- box a bit of leathern gear in which his left foot might appear in polite society to advantage. Possibly Thaddeus might have endured the pain of a right boot on a left foot, had not Norah unfortunately chosen for that member a box-toed boot, while for the right she had selected one with a very decided acute angle at its toe-end.

"Just like a woman!" ejaculated Thaddeus, angrily.

"Yes," returned Bessie, missing Thaddeus's point slightly. "It was very thoughtful of Norah to look after John's work, knowing how important it was to you."

Fortunately Thaddeus was out of breath trying to shine up the other pointed-toe shoe, so that his only reply to this was a look, which Bessie, absorbed as she was in putting the studs in Thaddeus's shirt, did not see. If she had seen it, I doubt if she would have been so entirely happy as the tender little song she was humming softly to herself seemed to indicate that she was.

"Some people are born lucky!" growled Thaddeus, as he finished rubbing up the left boot, giving it a satin finish which hardly matched the luminous brilliance of its mate, though he said it would do. "There's Bradley, now; he never has any domestic woes of this sort, and he pays just half what we do for his servants."

"Oh, Mr. Bradley. I don't like him!" ejaculated Bessie. "You are always talking about Mr. Bradley, as if he had an automaton for a servant."

"No, I don't say he has an automaton," returned Thaddeus. "Automatons don't often work, and Bradley's jewel does. Her name is Mary, but Bradley always calls her his jewel."

"I've heard of jewels," said Bessie, thinking of the two Thaddeus and she had begun their married life with, "but they've always seemed to me to be paste emeralds--awfully green, and not worth much."

"There's no paste emerald about Bradley's girl," said Thaddeus. "Why, he says that woman has been in Mrs. Bradley's employ for seven weeks now, and she hasn't broken a bit of china; never sweeps dust under the beds or bureaus; keeps the silver polished so that it looks as if it were solid; gets up at six every morning; cooks well; is civil, sober, industrious; has no hangers-on--"

"Is Mr. Bradley a realist or a romancer?" asked Bessie.

"Why do you ask that?" replied Thaddeus.

"That jewel story sounds like an Arabian Nights tale," said Bessie. "I don't believe that it is more than half true, and that half is exaggerated."

"Well, it IS true," said Thaddeus. "And, what is more, the girl helps in the washing, plays with the children, and on her days out she stays at home and does sewing."

Bessie laughed. "She must be a regular Koh-i-noor," she said. "I suppose Mr. Bradley pays her a thousand dollars a month."

"No, he doesn't; he pays her twelve," said Thaddeus.

"Then he is just what I said he was," snapped Bessie--"a mean thing. The idea--twelve dollars a month for all that! Why, if she could prove she was all that you say she is, she could make ten times that amount by exhibiting herself. She is a curiosity. But if I were Mrs. Bradley I wouldn't have her in the house. So many virtues piled one on the other are sure to make an unsafe structure, and I believe some poor, miserable little vice will crop out somewhere and upset the whole thing."

"You are jealous," said Thaddeus; and then he went out.

The next day, meeting his friend Bradley on the street, Thaddeus greeted him with a smile, and said, "Mrs. Perkins thinks you ought to take up literature."

"Why so?" asked Bradley.

"She thinks De Foe and Scott and Dumas and Stevenson would be thrown into the depths of oblivion if you were to write up that jewel of yours," said Thaddeus. "She thinks your Mary is one of the finest, most imaginative creations of modern days."

"She doubts her existence, eh?" smiled Bradley.

"Well, she thinks she's more likely to be a myth than a Smith," said Thaddeus. "She told me to ask you if Mary has a twin-sister, and to say that if you hear of her having any relatives at all--and no domestic ever lived who hadn't--to send her their addresses. She'd like to employ a few."

"I am sorry Mrs. Perkins is so blinded by jealousy," said Bradley, with a smile. "And I regret to say that Mary hasn't a cousin on the whole police force, or, in fact, any kind of a relative whatsoever, unless she prevaricates."

"Too bad," said Thaddeus. "I had a vague hope we could stock up on jewels of her kind. Where did you get her, anyhow--Tiffany's?"

"No. At an unintelligence office," said Bradley. "She was a last resort. We had to have some one, and she was the only girl there. We took her for a week on trial without references, and, by Jove! she turned out a wonder."

Thaddeus grinned, and said: "Give her time, Bradley. By-the-way, at what hours is she on exhibition? I'd like to see her."

"Come up to-night and test the truth of what I say," said Bradley. "I won't let anybody know you are coming, and you'll see her just as we see her. What do you say?"

The temptation was too strong for Thaddeus to resist, and so it was that