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As my footsteps sounded on the threshold, one and all spun round to look at me in fresh dread. "Mon dieu, it is his lackey!" a chambermaid cried. In the next second a little wiry dame, her eyes blazing with fury, darted out of the group and seized me by the arm with a grip of her nails that made me think a panther had got me. "So here you are," she screamed.
While I slept the down-mail stopped for supper; it chanced that one of the passengers left behind a copy of the Edinburgh Courant, and the next morning my pretty chambermaid set the paper before me at breakfast, with the remark that there was some news from my lady-love.
Miss Temple swallowed all this with even greater pleasure than the sweetmeats; and the officious Hobart, not to lose time, was helping her off with her clothes, while the chambermaid was coming.
Mary, the Hungarian chambermaid, came to the door, stood between the plush portieres, beckoned to Thea, and made an inarticulate sound in her throat. Thea jumped up and ran into the hall, where Ottenburg stood smiling, his caped cloak open, his silk hat in his white-kid hand. The Hungarian girl stood like a monument on her flat heels, staring at the pink carnation in Ottenburg's coat.
The glasses were filled before they were emptied; a chambermaid dipped a handkerchief in hers, which was full of water, and bathed her forehead with it because her head was going round, she said. It was time that it should end; in fact, an electric bell, ringing loudly in the hall, warned us that the footman on duty at the theatre had called the coachmen.
At one of the quietest, most elegant and most comfortable hotels in the Federal Capital, I found the establishment conducted by a colored man, all of whose employes, from the clerks in the office to the waiters and chambermaids, were colored. Our chambermaid was a delightful old lady, and insisted ere we left that we should give her a receipt for a real old English Christmas plum pudding.
"But not with three razors at once; and three hair-brushes, and half a dozen toothbrushes, and a small collection of combs, and four or five little glass bottles, looking as though they contained poison, all with silver tops. I can only suppose you desired to startle the weak mind of the chambermaid. I have put them all up; but remember this, if they are taken out again you are responsible.
For the lamp hung high, having been pushed up out of reach for the day. The St. Clair ran off, and Miss Macy followed; but the two others consulted, and Lansing ran down to waylay the chambermaid and beg a broom. By the help of the broom handle my cap was at length dislodged from its perch, and restored to me. But I was angry.
"The General has not been to see me since the first day of my illness; then the half insolent air of this girl the discharge of my old servant, what can it mean?" "More 'an this," continued Ben, warming up, "Nelly the chambermaid is a going. She says that things don't suit her, and she's got too many mistresses, by half, for her money!"
All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic of a sighing chambermaid. In the morning Pettit came to my room. I read him his doom mercilessly. He laughed idiotically. "All right, Old Hoss," he said, cheerily, "make cigar-lighters of it. What's the difference? I'm going to take her to lunch at Claremont to-day."
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