Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/225

Rh post of kitchenmaid in the household of the Count de Marolles is no unimportant one, and Mrs. Moper is accounted a person of some consequence in the servants' hall. The French chef, who has his private sitting-room, wherein he works elaborate and scientific culinary combinations, which, when he condescends to talk English, he designates "plates," has of course very little communication with the household. Mrs. Moper is his prime minister; he gives his orders to her for execution, and throws himself back in his easy-chair to think out a dish, while his handmaiden collects for him the vulgar elements of his noble art. Mrs. Moper is a very good cook herself; and when she leaves the Count de Marolles she will go into a family where there is no foreigner kept, and will have forty pounds per annum and a still-room of her own. She is in the caterpillar stage now, Mrs. Sarah Moper, and is content to write herself down kitchenmaid ad interim.

The servants'-hall dinner and the housekeeper's repast are both over; but the preparations for the dinner have not yet begun, and Mrs. Moper and Liza, the scullerymaid, snatch half-an-hour's calm before the coming storm, and sit down to darn stockings,—

"Which," Mrs. Moper says, "my toes is through and my heels is out, and never can I get the time to set a stitch. For time there isn't any in this house for a under-servant, which under-servant I will be no more than one year longer; or say my name's not Sarah Moper."

Liza, who is mending a black stocking with white thread (and a very fanciful effect it has too), evidently has no wish to dispute such a proposition.

"Indeed, Mrs. Moper," she said, "that's the truest word as ever you've spoke. It's well for them as takes their wages for wearin' silk gowns, and oilin' of their hair, and lookin' out of winder to watch the carriages go in at Grosvenor Gate; which, don't tell me as Life Guardsmen would look up imperdent, if they hadn't been looked down to likewise." Eliza gets rather obscure here. "This 'ouse, Mrs. M., for upper-servants may be 'eaven, but for unders it's more like the place as is pronounced like a letter of the alphabet, and isn't to be named by me."

There is no knowing how far this rather revolutionary style of conversation might have gone, for at this moment there came that familiar sound of the clink of milk-pails on the pavement above, and the London cry of milk.

"It's Bugden with the milk, Liza; there was a pint of cream