Читать книгу Son of a Hundred Kings - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 11

Table of Contents

With a disdainful smile the butler made his way to the kitchen where the two women servants were preparing furiously for the reception the Tanner Cravens were giving, an annual affair to which all the best people in town were invited and to which, moreover, all the best people came; with a few exceptions, as will be seen later. He disliked his employers and he felt a contempt for the comparative inadequacies of the household. The kitchen, for instance, was very old-fashioned, cavernous and dark and cockroachy, with a huge coal range and wooden cabinets on the walls, from which the green and purple paint was peeling. The kitchen at Ransley had been old-fashioned also, but there had been something impressive about its massive discomfort.

The butler, whose name was Twiller, allowed his eyes to rove over the pleasantly plump figure of Mary Cayne, the cook, and the more slender charms of Delia Connor, the housemaid, who had a dimpled face under her frilled white cap. He was inclined to approve of them both. “Master Norman has been h’extinguishing himself,” he announced. “The miserable little blighter has engaged in fisticuffs with his cousin, Master Joseph Craven.”

Mary Cayne, who was making chicken salad and being very careful about the proportion of meat to the other ingredients, said in an indignant tone: “Stuff and nonsense, Mr. Twiller! Master Norman was at the party the minister’s daughter was giving for her Sunday-school class. They wouldn’t fight there.”

The butler elevated his nose triumphantly. “But they did fight, Cook. Miss Daisy Grange, the pastor’s daughter, has just brought Master Norman home. He was in quite a state, the loathsome little nuisance! I heard Madame Still-Waters say, ‘Now, Daisy, I must know everything. Everything. I must get to the bottom of this.’ And I’m willing to wager, ladies, that she will. Then she’ll patter down to the office and tell Sniffle-and-Roar about it.” His eyes lit up with a gleam of sheer delight. “I’d give a lot more than a cold muffin to have an ear at the keyhole.”

“You have no proper respect for Mr. and Mrs. Craven,” admonished Mary Cayne.

The butler answered easily, “Oh, I have some respect for Lady Easy-Does-It, but as for the nooker himself——”

“It’s fear of him you have,” charged the cook.

“Fear I may have,” conceded Twiller, “but respect, none.”

Delia Connor, who had the telephone to answer (it had been ringing steadily, although there were no more than a handful of them in town), had fallen behind with the sandwiches. She went right on working as she asked, “And did Mummy’s little pet get his darling little face bashed in?”

“Unfortunately,” replied the butler, “the conflict, if I may call it such, was stopped before our young hopeful could get his just deserts.” He looked over the preparations with a critical eye. “Ladies, you’ll have to get a ruddy hurry on if you expect to be ready in time.”

He turned with slow dignity and left the room.

“English bloke!” said Delia Connor viciously. “Why don’t he help us, then, ’stead of walking round and giving orders? Someday—and it won’t be long, Mary—I’ll smash his silly nose with a broom handle!”

The cook had begun on the mixing of a dressing for the salad in a huge earthenware bowl. She stopped, with the spoon suspended over the dish. “Whirrah-whirrah! How people will be laughing! They’ve started fighting already, the spalpeens, just like their fathers. Mother of all of us, and them not seven years old yet!”

“What’s all this talk about the Cravens?” asked the maid. “I’ve heard a word dropped here and there.”

“You can’t expect to get all the gossip when you’re so new.” The cook had started to beat the eggs with a fast and sure hand. “You see, Delia, it’s this way. Mr. Langley Craven is the oldest son and he was president of all the companies, and he lived in the Homestead—he still does, to be sure—and he had the say in everything. But the two brothers, they didn’t agree about a single thing. So Mr. Tanner Craven, he went to work and he picked up more stock and he got people to giving him little bits of paper—I don’t know rightly about such things, Delia, my girl, but I think it meant he got votes that way—and when it came to the meeting, why, he was able to get his brother’s place away from him. Mr. Langley Craven is a very—oh, a very great gentleman, and his manners are always perfect, even if he is running a furniture repair shop now. But he was so taken by surprise that he forgot all his manners and he walked over to his brother, right in meeting with everyone looking on, and ladies present, I’ll have you know, and he smashed Tanner Craven right in the face. There was a battle then, and they broke a chair and a lamp and some other things not so easy fixed.”

The housemaid was so interested that she had suspended work entirely. “Mary,” she asked in a whisper, “which one got the best of it?”

The cook lowered her voice also. “Langley Craven got the best of it. He gave his brother a black eye and he knocked out a tooth. You know the gold tooth he has in front? That was the one. And it’s my opinion that he”—motioning in the direction of the front of the house—“took it very hard. I’m telling you this in confidence, my girl, but it’s my opinion the master has been brooding over it ever since.”

The housemaid nodded her head. “I bet it was just like something I heard a teacher say at school. About—well, about something repeating itself.”

“Could it be the newspapers?”

“No, that wasn’t it, Mary. But what I mean is, I bet it’s been the same this time. I bet Master Norman’s cousin had the best of it.”

In the meantime Mr. Twiller had returned to his post in the butler’s pantry, where he proceeded to polish the silver with the slowest of movements. As he did so he allowed his eyes to rest with repugnance on the snow outside the window. It was piled up over the rose trellis and had even blotted out all traces of the rear terrace. Beyond what had been the terrace, and just over the line of the next property, were two ponds, one small and one large. On the smaller some girls from the neighborhood—which meant they belonged to good families—were sliding and laughing shrilly. On the larger one the boys of the same families were playing shinny with an old baseball.

“One might as well be at the North Pole!” groaned the butler. “And it’s all your own ruddy fault, Aubrey Twiller. There you were, butler to the Baron Birdedge of Ransley, with three footmen and twenty-two servants under you. But you wanted to be your own man, and nothing would do but to come out to this ruddy country! You thought they’d take one look at you and make you president of a bank or a railroad.” He groaned again with disgust over the magnitude of his mistake. “And here you are, a butler again, for a maker of tables and stools and high chairs—an ill-bred boor who hasn’t a drop of wine in his cellar and pinches the pennies. It’s a comedown for you, Aubrey Twiller!”

He was not being fair in one respect at least to his employer. Mr. Tanner Craven was a penny pincher and had never spent a ten-cent piece on the purchase of proper wines, and he was president of the Craven Carriage and Furniture Company, where the family fortune had been made in the first place. The company had become, however, one of his lesser interests. He owned a bank and a block of stores on Holbrook Street and he had, in fact, a finger in every pie in town. It was quite possible that his resources would equal those of the Baron Birdedge of Ransley.

The reflections of the despondent butler were cut short by the ringing of a bell behind him. He glanced at the indicator on the wall, said in a voice of the most intense irritation, “It’s the nooker himself!” and set off to answer the summons.