Jane’s Career: A Story of Jamaica
Chapter 5
“To teck off de dirt, ma’am.”
Emma only laughed, not being bad-natured; but Mrs Mason, arriving on the scene just then, was exceeding wroth, declaring that she had never heard of such foolishness before.
Then it was presently discovered that Jane was clumsy. While she was setting the table for breakfast that same Sunday morning, one of the plates slipped from her hand and broke in two. She took up the pieces hastily, put them together, and placed them on the dinner-wagon, in the vain hope that the accident would not be discovered just then, and that, later on, it might be attributed to some other person.
But the dinner-wag-n was small; Mrs Mason had not a large stock of crockery; and within five minutes after the plate was broken, that lady had the pieces in her hands and was shrilly calling to Jane to come and explain to her what had happened, although she already knew quite well.
“It fall out of me hand and broke, ma’am,” stammered Jane, with a sinking sensation in her heart. “It just drop like that,” she added, giving this additional bit of information with a view to showing that the accident was entirely the plate’s fault.
Mrs Mason had heard the same. sort of excuse a hundred times before. But as she believed in bringing guilt home by a rigid system of cross-examination, she sat in front of Jane and asked her where she had been standing when the plate fell.
“Right by de table, ma’am,” Jane said, indicating the spot with her finger.
“And what were y’u doing?”
“I was wipin’ it, ma’am.”
“An’ what were y’u looking at?”
“Noten, ma’am.”
“Well, if you were looking at nothing, you couldn’t ‘ave been doing you’ work properly, Jane.”
“I doan’t mean dat, ma’am. I mean dat I was not lookin’ at anyt’ing dat didn’t concern me.”
“Then how the plate come to drop?”
“As I tell you, ma’am. It just teck an’ drop out of me hand, an’ before I could catch it up, it broke in two.”
“Now gurl,” said Mrs Mason, with a fine show of righteous indignation, “don’t talk stupidness to me! How can a plate drop out of your ‘and if you was holding it properly? You ever hear a plate have life? How can it broke itself?”
As Jane had no reply to make to this, Mrs Mason turned to another section of the indictment.
“And why instead of coming to tell me you had broken me plate, y’u try to piece it up, an’ put it on me dinner-wagon? Don’t you see you are not a good gurl? Why did you put the broken plate on me dinner-wagon, I say?”
Jane stood dumbly before her, tears beginning to appear at the corners of her eyes.
“Aren’t y’u going to answer me?” loudly demanded Mrs Mason, who felt that the girl must be brought to a proper state of contrition before final judgment was pronounced against her.
“What’s it, Aunt Charlotte?” asked Cynthia, putting her head and shoulders out of her aunt’s bedroom and looking into the dining-room. Cynthia was dressing for church, and at that moment was in deshabille. But she knew there were no men about, and so fel