The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary | Page 3

letter an' you'll see. And, anyway, how could a man shootin' at a cat hit a cook?--not 'nless she was up a tree birds'-nestin' after owls' eggs. You don't seem to pay much attention to what I read to you, Lucinda; only I should think your commonsense would help you out some when it comes to a boy you've known from the time he could walk, an' a strange cook. But, anyhow, that's neither here nor there. The question that bothers me is, what's to pay with this damage suit? I think myself five hundred dollars is too much for any cook's arm. A cook ain't in no such vital need of two arms. If she has to shut the door of the oven while she's stirrin' somethin' on the top of the stove, she can easy kick it to with her foot. It won't be for long, anyway, and I'm a great believer in making the best of things when you've got to."
Lucinda screwed up her face and made no comment. Lucinda's face in repose was a cross between a monkey's and a peanut; screwed up, it was particularly awful, and always exasperated her mistress.
"Well, why don't you say somethin', Lucinda? I ain't askin' your advice, but, all the same, you can say anything if you've got a mind to."
"I ain't got a mind to say anythin'," the faithful maid rejoined.
"I guess you hit the nail on the head that time," said Aunt Mary, without any unnecessary malevolence concealed behind her sarcasm; then she re-read the note and frowned afresh.
"Five hundred dollars is too much," she said again. "I'm going to write to Mr. Stebbins an' tell him so to-night. He can compromise on two hundred and fifty, just as well as not. Get me some paper and my desk, Lucinda. Now get a spryness about you."
Lucinda laid aside her work and forthwith got a spryness about her, bringing her mistress' writing-desk with commendable alacrity. Aunt Mary took the writing-desk and wrote fiercely for some time, to the end that she finally wrote most of the fierceness out of herself.
"After all, boys will be boys," she said, as she sealed her letter, "and if this is the end I shan't feel it's money wasted. I'm a great believer in bein' patient. Most always, that is. Here, Lucinda you take this to Joshua and tell him to take it right to mail. Be prompt, now. I'm a great believer in doin' things prompt."
Lucinda took the letter and was prompt. "She wants this letter took right to the mail," she said to Joshua, Aunt Mary's longest-tried servitor.
"Then it'll be took right to mail," said Joshua.
"She's pretty mad," said Lucinda.
"Then she'll soon get over it," replied the other, taking up his hat and preparing to depart for the barn forthwith.
Lucinda returned to Aunt Mary with a species of dried-up sigh. One is not the less a slave because one has been enslaved for twenty years, and Lucinda at moments did sort of peek out through her bars--possibly envying Joshua the daily drives to mail when he had full control of something that was alive.
Lucinda had been, comparatively speaking, young when she had come to wait upon the pleasure of the Watkins millions, and her waiting had been so pertinent and so patient that it had endured over a quarter of a century. Aunt Mary had been under fifty in the hour of Lucinda's dawn; she was over seventy now. Jack hadn't been born then; he was in college now; and Jack's older brothers and sisters and his dead-and-gone father and mother had been living somewhere out West then, quite hopeful as to their own lives and quite hopeless as to the stern old great-aunt who never had paid any attention to her niece since she had chosen to elope with the doctor's reprobate son. Now the father and mother were dead and buried, the brothers and sisters reinstated in their rights and had all grown up and become great credits to the old lady, whose heart had suddenly melted at the arrival of five orphans all at once. And there was only Jack to continue to worry about.
Jack was not anything particularly remarkable; he was just one of those lovable good-for-nothings that seem born to get better people into trouble all their lives long. He had been spoiled originally by being ten years younger than the next youngest in the family; and then, when the children had been shipped on to Aunt Mary's tender mercies, Jack had won her heart immediately because she accidentally discovered that he had never been baptized, and so felt fully justified in re-naming him after her own father and having the name branded into him for keeps by her own religious apparatus. It followed naturally that John