"Ah, yes, of course. Now what was that about the tin of lobster which Miss Bella brought back with her after she had been out for the afternoon?"
"Crayfish, not lobster, madam. She asked me to have some, but it always gives me such terrible indigestion that I asked her to excuse me, and she ate it all herself for her tea. I remember thinking it was too big a tin for one person, but there! Miss Bella would sooner belly bust than good stuff be lost, as my Yorkshire uncle used to say when we were children and didn't want to finish up our food."
"Splendid!" said Mrs. Bradley, leaving the old servant with the impression that the exclamation referred less to the Yorkshire uncle's proverb than to some secret satisfaction which she felt over something else which had been disclosed to her. "And then, of course, came the extraordinary business of the grated carrot."
"Extraordinary you may rightly call it, madam," assented Eliza immediately. "I can't imagine the mistress calling for such heathenish food. She liked carrot well enough in a stew, but never in my life had I known her eat them raw."
"Raw carrot is good for the system," observed Mrs. Bradley. "Perhaps one of the relatives persuaded her that it would be good for her to eat some."
"Well, Miss Bella actually grated it for her, I think, because she asked me for the nutmeg grater to do it on, but Miss Bella wasn't a vegetarian or any thing of that, that I know of. In fact, I don't see how she could have been, living in the Institution like she did. I'm sure she had no time for fads and fancies there."
"Mr. Tom, perhaps, was a vegetarian?" Mrs. Bradley suggested.
"Mr. Tom? Oh, no, madam. He might hunt ghosts and the like rubbish of that, but he was always one for his cut from the joint and two veg., with anybody. And with him like that, I don't see how his wife could have been anything but a meat-eater too."
"Well, then, who do you suggest is the author of the grated carrot, Miss Hodge?"
"I couldn't say, I'm sure, madam. It seems out of all reason, as I remember saying at the time, that she should have ate such stuff. My poor mistress! I only hope she died easy of it, weak as she was with the fall."
Mrs. Bradley concurred sympathetically in this pious wish, and then added that she supposed Aunt Flora had been a churchwoman.''
"Indeed not, madam, no. Not if she was ever such friends with the vicar. Which she was. Friendly enemies they were, so to speak, both being interested in rock gardens, and the vicar having more knowledge and the mistress more money. Oh, many's the time, as I remember well, that he would call, and they would go over the rock garden plant by plant, and sometimes he would bring her nice little white painted bits of pointed wood with the Latin name on in black, and stoop down and push them into the ground, so we always knew what we were looking at, even if we couldn't pronounce it. But Church! Oh, no. No more than me, and I, I am rather ashamed to say, have never gone anywhere since I was about twenty, although brought up to it by a pious father and mother. I was jilted at twenty by a young fellow. We used to sing out of the same hymnbook, and I never fancied Church after that. But the mistress—if she ever went anywhere those last years—she went to the Congregational at Raddleton in Mr. Tripps' car. One of her uncles was a Congregational minister, or so she told me once."
Mrs. Bradley glanced at the portrait of the gentleman with whiskers, and Eliza, following her glance, exclaimed :
"Oh, no, that wouldn't be him, madam! But he's in the family album if you'd like to have a look. That there was the mistress's husband. That was before I knew her. He died when she was sixty. I've only been with her the last twenty years."
She went to the bureau, unlocked one of the drawers, and, after removing various books and papers, came over to Mrs. Bradley with a black-bound, Biblical-looking volume with thick, gold-edged leaves.
"Don't be alarmed when you first open it, madam. It's got one of those little musical-boxes inside the front cover. Very pretty it plays."
Mrs. Bradley turned back the cover, and a small prickly metal cylinder was disclosed under a sheet of glass. The cylinder revolved, and the thin sweet tune it played was Annie Laurie. When Mrs. Bradley turned the leaves over to look at the photographs, however, the music ceased.
Eliza came over and stood beside her, laying work-roughened fingers on the pages as she talked. Anecdote followed description, and Mrs. Bradley was taken relentlessly from photograph to photograph, and was not allowed to miss one. She did not object at all to this, however (but only begged Eliza to draw up a chair so that they could rest the book on the table and both look at it in comfort), because a great many of the photographs, which were mainly of groups of people, showed either Aunt Flora or one or both of the nieces. Miss Tessa figured more often than Miss Bella, but never, when only one of them was in the group, did the old servant falter, even for so much as a moment, in naming which niece it was. They were, Mrs. Bradley could see, women of widely different appearance, the one large, square and resolute, the other smaller, more timid, more completely feminine.
It took more than an hour to go through the whole of the album, and at the end of it Eliza said how much she had enjoyed herself, and that she supposed she ought to be going. At this, Mrs. Bradley produced two decanters, one containing port and the other sherry, and a tin of biscuits. Possibly under the influence of the port, Eliza suddenly said :
"You know, madam, there was something very funny about that carrot. I don't say Miss Bella exactly forced it on the poor mistress, but I do say it was funny."
"Yes, if she had never eaten such a thing before, it does seem odd, but sick people take these fancies," said Mrs. Bradley.
"But she wasn't all that sick, madam, not at that time. It was when the doctor told us she would recover. And she was perfectly sensible; not wandering in her mind, or anything. And it wasn't like when one might be expecting. I grant you people do have strange fancies then in the eating line. I remember my own sister. Nothing would content her but duck eggs, although she never would touch one at other times. And the job we had to get them for her, us then living in London! Such nasty, indigestible things! I can't abear them myself. I said to her, afterwards, a wonder the baby wasn't born with webbed feet, I said. And the queer thing about that is that he became quite a champion swimmer, madam. So it all goes to show, doesn't it?"
"Yes, indeed," agreed Mrs. Bradley politely.
The next day she called in the doctor because her maid complained of a sore throat. He had heard of Mrs. Bradley and was anxious to make her acquaintance. As there was no servant except the maid who was ill, Mrs. Bradley herself opened the door.
"Ah, Doctor!" she said.
"Ah, Doctor!" he replied. Then, when he had examined the patient and prescribed for her, he remained for a bit to gossip, confessing that the village never troubled him much throughout the summer, and that he had plenty of time on his hands.
"A good many months since I was here," he said. "The last time was when Eliza had an accident with a gardening fork and stuck it into her foot. That would have been two years ago last Easter. And before that—no, I don't believe I was in this house between that time and the previous time when the old lady choked herself with the carrot. I'd only just come here then. Hardly knew a soul in the village. I was called in by Eliza, of course, to see her mistress after a fall she had had. Tripped over, or something. I forget the details. They don't matter, anyway, because she was soon on the highroad. Must have had marvellous recuperative powers, considering her age. Can't think how she got over it as she did. Anyhow, point is, she did get over it. I tell you I was absolutely staggered when she pulled round. Then came the knock-out—that beastly grated carrot."