George Fenn - The Story of Antony Grace

“I’ve been waiting all this time for you to wake and have tea,” she said, placing the pot and the toast on the table. “Now then, see if you can’t sit up and have some.”

“I couldn’t drink any, thank you,” I said faintly.

“Such stuff and nonsense! It’s quite fresh, and I’ve put in some extra as Miss Hetty give me. Come now, sit up and try, there’s a dear.”

I tried to sit up, but the pain was so great that I sank back, having hard work not to cry out; and seeing this, with a tenderness for which I should not have given her credit, she gently raised me and backed the pillows up, so as to support me; and then, finding that this was not sufficient, she ran out of the kitchen, to return in a few minutes, doubling up what I knew was her best shawl, which she now formed into a cushion.

“There, now we shall do,” she said cheerily; and, pouring out a cup of tea, she tasted and added milk till it was to her liking, and then held it to my lips.

It was like nectar, and I gave her a grateful look for that which seemed to impart new life to my bruised body.

“Now, you’ve got to eat some toast,” she said, and I stared at her in wonder, for it seemed to be a new Mary upon whom I gazed.

“I couldn’t eat a bit,” I said helplessly.

“But you must,” she said imperatively. “Now look here, you have had hardly anything since breakfast, and if you don’t eat, you can’t get well.”

I took the toast she held to me, and managed to eat it. That done, I had another cup of tea, and the sickly faint feeling I had had every time I moved seemed less overpowering; and at last I lay back there, listening helplessly to Mary as she chatted to me and washed up the tea-things.

“Don’t you trouble about them; they won’t come in my kitchen. He’s ill in bed, or pretending to be, and the doctor says he ain’t to move for a week. I hope he mayn’t for a month – a brute! I never see such a cowardly trick. I wish my William had him. He’s going to have the law of Mr Wooster, so Mr Emmett the constable told me; and him and the doctor’ll make out a nice case between ’em, I know. Pah! I hate lawyers and doctors. So you make yourself comfortable. I’ll be your doctor, and if they ain’t pretty civil to me, I’ll be your lawyer, too, and go to the madgistrits, see if I don’t. If I was you I wouldn’t stay with ’em a minnit after I got well. I shan’t; I’m sick of ’em.”

“I wish I could go, Mary,” I said, “but I don’t want to go now you’ve been so kind.”

“Kind! Stuff! It’s only my way. There ain’t a better-tempered girl nowheres than I am; only when you come to live in a house where the master’s a snarling, biting, growling hound, and the missus is a fault-finding, scolding, murmuring himidge, it’s enough to put out a hartchangel. But I say, if I was you, and could write such a lovely hand, I should send and tell my father and mother. Oh, I am sorry, dear – I forgot about your poor father and mother. But I would write and tell somebody.”

Mary’s allusion to my lovely handwriting was consequent upon my having copied a letter for her to one Mr William Revitts, who was a policeman in London. She had asked me to copy it for her, and direct it “proper,” because her hands were so dirty when she wrote that she was afraid he might not be able to read it. All the same, Mary’s hands seemed to have been perfectly clean, though the probabilities were that the said Mr William Revitts, “mi one dere willim,” would certainly not have been able to read the letter. In fact, I broke down over the very beginning by mistaking “one” for the number, and had to be corrected, Mary having meant to say own .

Her allusion to my parents touched a tender chord, and my face worked as I recalled the happy times gone by. “I have nobody to write to,” I said at last – “only my uncle.”

“Then I’d write and tell him, that I would.”

“I am not quite sure where he lives,” I said. “I never saw him till – till he came to the funeral.”

“But haven’t you got nobody belonging to you – no friends at all?”

“I think not,” I said helplessly. “No one who would help me.”

“Well, you are a one,” said Mary, pausing in the act of wiping out the tea-tray after half filling it and pouring the dirty water off at one corner. “Why, I’ve got no end o’ people belonging to me; and if that brute upstairs – as I wish he may ache bad for a week! – was to raise his hand against me, my William would be down and serve him worse than Mr Wooster did, I can tell him – a wretch!”

“Is that Mr William Revitts,” I asked, “the policeman?”

“Yes; but he wouldn’t come down here as a policeman, but as a gentleman, and he’d soon teach Mr Blakeford what he ought to – Yes! What is it?”

This was in answer to a shrill call for Mary in Mrs Blakeford’s voice, and that lady came in immediately after, to Mary’s great disgust.

“You must get hot water ready directly, Mary,” she began in an ill-used way. “I’m sure I don’t know what I shall do. He’s very bad indeed.”

“Oh, there’s lots of hot water,” said Mary shortly. “Biler’s full, and kettle’s full, and I’ll put on the great black saucepan and light the copper if you like.”

As she spoke Mary seized the big poker, and began stoking and hammering away at the fire in a most vicious manner, as if determined to vent her spleen upon Mr Blakeford’s coals.

“Your poor master’s dreadfully bad,” said Mrs Blakeford again, and she kept on looking at me in a way that seemed quite to indicate that I alone was to blame.

“Oh, yes, mum, I dessay he is, and so’s other people too, and wuss. I dessay he’ll get better again if he don’t die.”

Mrs Blakeford stared at Mary in a half-terrified way, and backed to the door.

“You ring the bell when you want it, and I’ll bring you a can of water upstairs,” continued Mary ungraciously.

“And couldn’t you help me a little in attending upon your master, Mary?”

“No, I couldn’t, mum,” she said shortly, “for I’m the worst nuss as ever was; and besides, I’ve got my kitchen work to do; and if you wants a nuss, there’s Mrs Jumfreys over the way would be glad to come, I dessay, only I ain’t going to have her here in my kitchen.”

Mrs Blakeford hastily backed out of the kitchen and retreated upstairs, while Mary’s rough mask dropped off as soon as she had gone.

“I wasn’t going to tell her as I nussed an invalid lady two years ’fore I came here,” she said, smiling. “Besides, I didn’t want to have nothing to do with him, for fear I should be tempted to give him his lotion ’stead of his physic, he aggravates me so. Lotions is pison, you know – outward happlication only.”

That night I had a bed made up down in the kitchen, and passed a weary, feverish time; but towards morning a pleasant feeling of drowsiness came over me. I fell asleep to dream that I was at home once more, and all was bright and sunshiny as I sat half asleep in the summer-house, when my mother came and laid her hand upon my forehead, and I opened my eyes to find it was Mary, ready to ask me whether I was better; and though the sweet, bright dream had gone, there was something very tender in the eyes that looked in mine.

I was very stiff and sore, and there was a peculiar giddiness ready to assail me as soon as I moved, so Mary, in her double capacity of doctor and nurse, decided that I was not to attempt to walk about that day.

The consequence was that she made no scruple about dragging a little couch out of the parlour into the kitchen, and after I was dressed, making me lie down near the fire.