“Sure,” Nora interrupted in a richly sentimental tone. “It hasn’t been like I was workin’ here at all! Ye couldn’t have treated me any better if I’d been one of the family!”
“Oh, one of the family my eye!” Mrs. Jack said impatiently. “Don’t make me laugh! There’s no one in the family—unless maybe it’s my daughter, Alma—who doesn’t do more in a day than you girls do in a week! You’ve lived the life of Riley…here! The life of Riley!” she repeated, almost comically, and then she sat looking at the servant for a moment, a formidable little dynamo trembling with her indignation, slowly clenching and unclenching her small hands at her sides. “Good heavens, Nora!” she burst out in a furious tone. “It’s not as if we ever begrudged you anything! We’ve never denied you anything you asked for! It’s not the value of the dress! You know very well that Miss Edith would have given it to any one of you if you had gone to her and asked her for it! But—oh, it’s intolerable!—intolerable!” she exclaimed suddenly in uncontrollable anger—“that you should have no more sense or decency than to do a thing like that to people who have always been your friends!”
“Sure, an’ do ye think I’d be the one who’d do a thing like that?” cried Nora in a trembling voice. “Is it me ye’re accusin’, Mrs. Jack, when I’ve lived here wit’ yez all this time? They could take me right hand”—in her rush of feeling she held the member up—“an’ chop it from me arm before I’d take a button that belonged to one of yez. An’ that’s God’s truth,” she added solemnly. “I swear it to ye as I hope to live an’ be forgiven fer me sins!” she declared more passionately as her mistress started to speak. “I never took a pin or penny that belonged to any one of yez—an’ so help me God, that’s true! An’ yes! I’ll swear it to ye be everything that’s holy!” she now cried, tranced in a kind of ecstasy of sacred vows. “By the soul an’ spirit of me blessed mother who is dead----”
“Ah, Nora!” Mrs. Jack said pityingly, shaking her head and turning away, and, in spite of her indignation, breaking into a short laugh at the extravagance of the servant’s oaths. And she thought with a bitter, scornful humour: “God! You can’t talk to her! She’ll swear a thousand oaths and think that makes everything all right! Yes! and will drink Fritz’s whisky and go to Mass if she has to crawl to get there—and cross herself with holy water—and listen to the priest say words she cannot understand—and come out glorified—to act like this when she knows that one of the girl’s is taking things that don’t belong to her! What strange and magic things these oaths and ceremonies are!” she thought. “They give a kind of life to people who have none of their own. They make a kind of truth for people who have found none for themselves. Love, beauty, everlasting truth, salvation—all that we hope and suffer for on earth is in them for these people. Everything that the rest of us have to get with our blood and labour, and by the anguish of our souls, is miraculously accomplished for them, somehow,” she thought ironically, “if they can only swear to it ‘by the soul an’ spirit of me blessed mother who is dead.’”
“—An’ so help me God, by all the Blessed Saints, an’ by the Holy Virgin, too!” she heard Nora’s voice intoning; and, wearily, she turned to the maid again and spoke to her softly, with an almost pleading earnestness:
“Nora, for God’s sake have a little sense,” she said. “What is the use of all this swearing by the Virgin and the Saints, and getting up and going out to Mass, when all you do is come back home to swill down Mr. Jack’s whisky? Yes, and deceive the people who have been the best friends you ever had!” she cried out bitterly. Then, seeing the old mutinous look flaring again in the maid’s sullen and distempered eyes, she went on almost tearfully: “Nora, try to have a little wisdom. Is this all you’ve been able to get from life—to come in here and act this way and blow your stinking breath on me, when all we’ve ever done has been to help you?” Her voice was trembling with her pity and her sense of passionate outrage, yet her anger was more than personal. She felt that the maid had betrayed something decent and inviolable in life—a faith and integrity in human feeling that should be kept and \honoured everywhere.
“Well, ma’am,” said Nora with a toss of her black head, “as I was sayin’, if it’s me ye’re accusing’----”
“No, Nora. Enough of that.” Mrs. Jack’s voice was sad, tired, dispirited, but its tone was also firm and final. She made a little dismissing gesture with her hand. “You may go now. I don’t need anything more.”
The maid marched to the door, her head held high, her stiff back and neck eloquently expressive of outraged innocence and suppressed fury. Then she paused, her hand upon the knob, and half-turned as she delivered her parting shot.