When Last I Died

"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.