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I was once greatly surprised, on asking a Dutchman if there were any women-servants who could not read, to hear myself answered, "Well, yes. I remember twenty years ago that my mother had a servant who did not know her alphabet, and we thought it a very strange thing."
Before entering the house they met the women-servants and some neighbours, who had come to bring Kamal Mani from the ghat. Both she and her husband were extremely anxious to know if the marriage had taken place, but neither could put a single question. How could they speak to strangers of such a shameful subject?
Two women-servants came out with pails and brooms and brushes, and gave the sidewalk a thorough scrubbing; meanwhile two others scrubbed the four marble steps which led up to the door; beyond these we could see some men-servants taking up the carpet of the grand staircase.
Who was the last witness who had seen the missing person? Who was the last servant who had seen Anne Silvester? Begin with the men-servants, from the butler at the top to the stable boy at the bottom. Go on with the women-servants, from the cook in all her glory to the small female child who weeds the garden.
To have imposed any derogatory work upon him, would have been to inflict a wanton insult on the feelings of a most respectable man. And of this, I noticed the women-servants in the household were so intuitively conscious, that they always did such work themselves, and generally while he read the paper by the pantry fire. Such a self-contained man I never saw.
From his place at the grating he saw her glide down the corridor to the staircase door. She passed through it, and locked it. Then there was silence. The next sound was the sound of the women-servants' voices. Two of them came up to put the sheets on the beds in Number Three and Number Four. The women were in high good-humor, laughing and talking to each other through the open doors of the rooms.
Now all the women-servants, down to the little kitchen-maid with her dirty apron at her eyes, crept up stairs, one after the other, to the door of what had been such a silent, mysterious room, and listened, unhindered, to the ravings that issued thence.
The girls, holding one another's arms, in groups of six or eight, kept bawling out songs; the young men followed them making jokes, with their caps over their ears, and their blouses stiffened with starch, swollen out like blue balloons. The whole country-side was there masters, laboring men, and women-servants.
We were out across the front lawn in a moment and round the corner of the house, the Colonel leading, Silence and I at his heels, and the portly butler puffing some distance in the rear, getting more and more mixed in his addresses to God and the devil; and the moment we passed the stables and came into view of the laundry building, we saw a wicked-looking volume of smoke pouring out of the narrow windows, and the frightened women-servants and grooms running hither and thither, calling aloud as they ran.
I discovered this, from overhearing the lady in the bow-window say to the guard, 'Take care of that child, George, or he'll burst! and from observing that the women-servants who were about the place came out to look and giggle at me as a young phenomenon.
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