FullReads

Unfortunately, when Mrs. Perkins reached home that night she was so very tired with her exertions in the shops that Thaddeus hadn’t the heart to tell her what had happened, and when morning came the episode was forgotten. When it did recur to his mind it so happened that Mrs. Perkins was out of reach. The result was that a month had passed before Mrs. Perkins cane into possession of the facts, and it was then, of course, too late to mention it to Jane.

“You should have given her a good talking to at the time,” said Mrs. Perkins. “It’s awful! I don’t know what has got into Jane. My best table-cloth has got a great hole in it, and she is very careless with the silver. My fruit-knife last night was not clean.”

“I suppose YOU spoke to her about that?” said Perkins, smiling.

“Not exactly; I sent for another, and handed her the dirty one,” returned Mrs. Perkins. “I guess she felt all that I could have said.”

And time went on, and Jane continued to decay. She pulled corks from olive-bottles with the carving-fork prongs and bent them backwards. She developed a habit of going out and leaving her work undone. The powdered sugar was allowed to resolve itself into small, hard, pill-shaped lumps of various sizes. Breakfast had a way of being served cold. The coffee was at times merely tepid; in short, it seemed as if she really ought to be discharged; but then there was invariably some reason for postponing the fatal hour. Either her kindness to the children or a week or two of the old-time efficiency, her unyielding civility, her scrupulous honesty, her willing acquiescence in any new duty imposed, an impression that she was suffering, any one or all of these reasons kept her on in her place until she became so much a fixture in the household, so much one of the family, that the idea of getting rid of her seemed beyond the possibility of realization. That the axe should fall her employers knew well, and many a resolve was taken that at the end of the season she should go, yet neither Mrs. Perkins nor her husband liked to tell her so. Her good points were still too potent, although none could deny that all confidence in her efficiency was shattered past repair. The situation finally reached a point where it inspired reflections of a more or less humorous order.

“I tell you what I think,” said Thaddeus one evening, after a particularly flagrant breach on Jane’s part, involving a streak of cranberry sauce across a supposititiously clean plate: “you won’t discharge her, Bess, and I won’t; suppose we send for Mr. Burke, and get him to do it.”

Mr. Burke was the one reliable man in town. It didn’t make much difference what the Perkinses wanted done, they generally sent for Mr. Burke to do it, largely because when he attempted a commission he saw it through. A carpenter and builder by trade, he had for many years looked after the repairs needful to the Perkins’ dwelling; he had come often between Thaddeus and unskilled labor; he had made bookcases which were dreams of convenience and sufficiently pleasing to the eye; he had “fixed up” Mrs. Perkins’s garden; he had supplied the family with a new gardener when the old one had taken on habits of drink, which destroyed not only himself but the cabbages; he had kept an eye on the plumbers; he had put up, taken down, and repaired awnings–in short, as Perkins said, he was a “Universal.” Once, when a delicate piece of bric-a-brac had been broken and the china-mender asserted that it could not be mended, Perkins had said, “See if Burke can’t fix it,” and Burke had fixed it; and as final tribute to this wonder, Perkins had said, in suffering: