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 wrong in the last bill, Mrs. Moper says. Ask him to come down and correctify it, will you, Liza?”
Liza ascends the area steps and parleys with the milkman; presently he comes jingling down, with his pails swinging against the railings; he is rather awkward with his pails, this milkman, and I’m afraid he must spill more milk than he sells, as the Park Lane pavements testify.
“It isn’t Bugden,” says Liza, explanatory, as she ushers him into the kitchen. “Bugden ’as ’urt his leg, a-milkin’ a cow wot kicks when the flies worrits, and ’as sent this young man, as is rather new to the business, but is anxious to do his best.”
The new milkman enters the kitchen as she concludes her speech, and releasing himself from the pails, expresses his readiness to settle any mistake in the weekly bill.
He is rather a good-looking fellow, this milkman, and he has a very curly head of flaxen hair, preposterously light eyebrows, and dark hazel eyes, which form rather a piquant contrast. I don’t suppose Mrs. Moper and Liza think him bad-looking, for they beg him to sit down, and the scullerymaid thrusts the black stocking, on which she was heretofore engaged, into a table-drawer, and gives her hair a rapid extemporary smoothing with the palms of her hands. Mr. Bugden’s man seems by no means disinclined for a little friendly chat: he tells them how new he is to the business; how he thinks he should scarcely have chosen cowkeeping for his way of life, if he’d known as much about it as he does now; how there’s many things in the milk business, such as horses’ brains, warm water and treacle, and suchlike, as goes against his conscience; how he’s quite new to London and London ways, having come up only lately from the country.
“Whereabouts in the country?” Mrs. Moper asks.
“Berkshire,” the young man replies.
“Lor’,” Mrs. Moper says, “never was anything so remarkable. Poor Moper come from Berkshire, and knowed every inch of the country, and so I think do I, pretty well. What part of Berkshire, Mr.—Mr.—?”
“Volpes,” suggested the young man.
“What part of Berkshire, Mr. Volpes?”
Mr. Volpes looks, strange to say, rather at a loss to answer this very natural and simple inquiry. He looks at Mrs. Moper, then at Liza, and lastly at the pails. The pails seem to assist his memory, for he says, very distinctly, “Burley Scuffers.”
It is Mrs. Moper’s turn to look puzzled now, and she exclaims “Burley—”
“Scuffers,” replies the young man. “Burley Scuffers, market town, fourteen miles on this side of Reading. The ‘Chicories,’ Sir Yorrick Tristram’s place, is a mile and a half out of the town.”
There’s no disputing such an accurate and detailed description as this. Mrs. Moper says it’s odd, all the times she’s been to Reading—“which I wish I had as many sovereigns,” she mutters in parenthesis—never did she remember passing through “Burley Scuffers.”
“It’s a pretty little town, too,” says the milkman; “there’s a lime-tree avenue just out of the High Street, called Pork-butchers’ Walk, as is crowded with young people of a Sunday evening after church.”
Mrs. Moper is quite taken with this description; and says, the very next time she goes to Reading to see poor Moper’s old mother, she will make a point of going to Burley Scuffers during her stay.
Mr. Volpes says, he would if he were she, and that she couldn’t employ her leisure time better.
They talk a good deal about Berkshire; and then Mrs. Moper relates some very interesting facts relative to the late Mr. Moper, and her determination, “which upon his dying bed it was
