perfumed with tobacco, might well do. But she
remembered that her brother Southdown had mustachios,
and smoked cigars, and submitted to the Baronet with a
tolerable grace.
"Pitt has got vat," said the Baronet, after this mark of
affection. "Does he read ee very long zermons, my dear?
Hundredth Psalm, Evening Hymn, hay Pitt? Go and get
a glass of Malmsey and a cake for my Lady Jane, Horrocks,
you great big booby, and don't stand stearing there like
a fat pig. I won't ask you to stop, my dear; you'll find it too
stoopid, and so should I too along a Pitt. I'm an old man
now, and like my own ways, and my pipe and backgammon
of a night."
"I can play at backgammon, sir," said Lady Jane,
laughing. "I used to play with Papa and Miss Crawley, didn't
I, Mr. Crawley?"
"Lady Jane can play, sir, at the game to which you
state that you are so partial," Pitt said haughtily.
But she wawn't stop for all that. Naw, naw, goo back
to Mudbury and give Mrs. Rincer a benefit; or drive down
to the Rectory and ask Buty for a dinner. He'll be charmed
to see you, you know; he's so much obliged to you for
gettin' the old woman's money. Ha, ha! Some of it will
do to patch up the Hall when I'm gone."
"I perceive, sir," said Pitt with a heightened voice,
"that your people will cut down the timber."
"Yees, yees, very fine weather, and seasonable for the
time of year," Sir Pitt answered, who had suddenly
grown deaf. "But I'm gittin' old, Pitt, now. Law bless you,
you ain't far from fifty yourself. But he wears well, my
pretty Lady Jane, don't he? It's all godliness, sobriety, and
a moral life. Look at me, I'm not very fur from fowr-score
--he, he"; and he laughed, and took snuff, and leered
at her and pinched her hand.
Pitt once more brought the conversation back to the
timber, but the Baronet was deaf again in an instant.
"I'm gittin' very old, and have been cruel bad this year
with the lumbago. I shan't be here now for long; but I'm
glad ee've come, daughter-in-law. I like your face, Lady
Jane: it's got none of the damned high-boned Binkie look
in it; and I'll give ee something pretty, my dear, to go to
Court in." And he shuffled across the room to a cupboard,
from which he took a little old case containing jewels of
some value. "Take that," said he, "my dear; it belonged
to my mother, and afterwards to the first Lady Binkie.
Pretty pearls--never gave 'em the ironmonger's daughter.
No, no. Take 'em and put 'em up quick," said he, thrusting
the case into his daughter's hand, and clapping the door of
the cabinet to, as Horrocks entered with a salver and
refreshments.
"What have you a been and given Pitt's wife?" said
the individual in ribbons, when Pitt and Lady Jane had
taken leave of the old gentleman. It was Miss Horrocks,
the butler's daughter--the cause of the scandal
throughout the county--the lady who reigned now almost
supreme at Queen's Crawley.
The rise and progress of those Ribbons had been
marked with dismay by the county and family. The
Ribbons opened an account at the Mudbury Branch Savings
Bank; the Ribbons drove to church, monopolising the
pony-chaise, which was for the use of the servants at
the Hall. The domestics were dismissed at her pleasure.
The Scotch gardener, who still lingered on the premises,
taking a pride in his walls and hot-houses, and indeed
making a pretty good livelihood by the garden, which he
farmed, and of which he sold the produce at Southampton,
found the Ribbons eating peaches on a sunshiny morning
at the south-wall, and had his ears boxed when he
remonstrated about this attack on his property. He and
his Scotch wife and his Scotch children, the only
respectable inhabitants of Queen's Crawley, were forced to
migrate, with their goods and their chattels, and left the
stately comfortable gardens to go to waste, and the
flower-beds to run to seed. Poor Lady Crawley's rose-garden
became the dreariest wilderness. Only two or three
domestics shuddered in the bleak old servants' hall. The
stables and offices were vacant, and shut up, and half
ruined. Sir Pitt lived in private, and boozed nightly with
Horrocks, his butler or house-steward (as he now began
to be called), and the abandoned Ribbons. The times
were very much changed since the period when she drove
to Mudbury in the spring-cart and called the small tradesmen
"Sir." It may have been shame, or it may have been
dislike of his neighbours, but the old Cynic of Queen's
Crawley hardly issued from his park-gates at all now. He
quarrelled with his agents and screwed his tenants by
letter. His days were passed in conducting his own
correspondence; the lawyers and farm-bailiffs who had to
do business with him could not reach him but through the
Ribbons, who received them at the door of the
housekeeper's room, which commanded the back entrance by
which they were admitted; and so the Baronet's daily
perplexities increased, and his embarrassments multiplied
round him.
The horror of Pitt Crawley may be imagined, as these
reports of his father's dotage reached the most exemplary
and correct of gentlemen. He trembled daily lest he should
hear that the Ribbons was proclaimed his second legal
mother-in-law. After that first and last visit, his father's
name was never mentioned in Pitt's polite and genteel
establishment. It was the skeleton in his house, and all the
family walked by it in terror and silence. The Countess
Southdown kept on dropping per coach at the lodge-gate
the most exciting tracts, tracts which ought to frighten
the hair off your head. Mrs. Bute at the parsonage
nightly looked out to see if the sky was red over the
elms behind which the Hall stood, and the mansion was on
fire. Sir G. Wapshot and Sir H. Fuddlestone, old friends of
the house, wouldn't sit on the bench with Sir Pitt at
Quarter Sessions, and cut him dead in the High Street
of Southampton, where the reprobate stood offering his
dirty old hands to them. Nothing had any effect upon him;
he put his hands into his pockets, and burst out laughing,
as he scrambled into his carriage and four; he used to
burst out laughing at Lady Southdown's tracts; and he
laughed at his sons, and at the world, and at the
Ribbons when she was angry, which was not seldom.
Miss Horrocks was installed as housekeeper at Queen's
Crawley, and ruled all the domestics there with great
majesty and rigour. All the servants were instructed to
address her as "Mum," or "Madam"--and there was one
little maid, on her promotion, who persisted in calling
her "My Lady," without any rebuke on the part of the
housekeeper. "There has been better ladies, and there
has been worser, Hester," was Miss Horrocks' reply to
this compliment of her inferior; so she ruled, having
supreme power over all except her father, whom,
however, she treated with considerable haughtiness, warning
him not to be too familiar in his behaviour to one "as was
to be a Baronet's lady." Indeed, she rehearsed that exalted
part in life with great satisfaction to herself, and to the
amusement of old Sir Pitt, who chuckled at her airs and
graces, and would laugh by the hour together at her
assumptions of dignity and imitations of genteel life.
He swore it was as good as a play to see her in the
character of a fine dame, and he made her put on one of
the first Lady Crawley's court-dresses, swearing (entirely
to Miss Horrocks' own concurrence) that the dress
became her prodigiously, and threatening to drive her off
that very instant to Court in a coach-and-four. She had
the ransacking of the wardrobes of the two defunct ladies,
and cut and hacked their posthumous finery so as to suit
her own tastes and figure. And she would have liked to
take possession of their jewels and trinkets too; but the
old Baronet had locked them away in his private cabinet;
nor could she coax or wheedle him out of the keys. And
it is a fact, that some time after she left Queen's Crawley
a copy-book belonging to this lady was discovered, which
showed that she had taken great pains in private to learn
the art of writing in general, and especially of writing
her own name as Lady Crawley, Lady Betsy Horrocks,
Lady Elizabeth Crawley, &c.
Though the good people of the Parsonage never went to
the Hall and shunned the horrid old dotard its owner, yet
they kept a strict knowledge of all that happened there,
and were looking out every day for the catastrophe for
which Miss Horrocks was also eager. But Fate intervened
enviously and prevented her from receiving the reward due
to such immaculate love and virtue.
One day the Baronet surprised "her ladyship," as he
jocularly called her, seated at that old and tuneless piano
in the drawing-room, which had scarcely been touched
since Becky Sharp played quadrilles upon it--seated at
the piano with the utmost gravity and squalling to the
best of her power in imitation of the music which she
had sometimes heard. The little kitchen-maid on her
promotion was standing at her mistress's side, quite delighted
during the operation, and wagging her head up and down
and crying, "Lor, Mum, 'tis bittiful"--just like a genteel
sycophant in a real drawing-room.
This incident made the old Baronet roar with laughter,
as usual. He narrated the circumstance a dozen times to
Horrocks in the course of the evening, and greatly to the
discomfiture of Miss Horrocks. He thrummed on the table
as if it had been a musical instrument, and squalled in
imitation of her manner of singing. He vowed that such
a beautiful voice ought to be cultivated and declared she
ought to have singing-masters, in which proposals she
saw nothing ridiculous. He was in great spirits that night,
and drank with his friend and butler an extraordinary
quantity of rum-and-water--at a very late hour the
faithful friend and domestic conducted his master to his
bedroom.
Half an hour afterwards there was a great hurry and
bustle in the house. Lights went about from window to
window in the lonely desolate old Hall, whereof but two or
three rooms were ordinarily occupied by its owner.
Presently, a boy on a pony went galloping off to Mudbury,
to the Doctor's house there. And in another hour (by
which fact we ascertain how carefully the excellent Mrs.
Bute Crawley had always kept up an understanding with
the great house), that lady in her clogs and calash, the
Reverend Bute Crawley, and James Crawley, her son,
had walked over from the Rectory through the park, and
had entered the mansion by the open hall-door.
They passed through the hall and the small oak parlour,
on the table of which stood the three tumblers and the
empty rum-bottle which had served for Sir Pitt's carouse,
and through that apartment into Sir Pitt's study, where
they found Miss Horrocks, of the guilty ribbons, with a
wild air, trying at the presses and escritoires with a
bunch of keys. She dropped them with a scream of
terror, as little Mrs. Bute's eyes flashed out at her from
under her black calash.
"Look at that, James and Mr. Crawley,?" cried Mrs.
Bute, pointing at the scared figure of the black-eyed,
guilty wench.
"He gave 'em me; he gave 'em me!" she cried.
"Gave them you, you abandoned creature!" screamed
Mrs. Bute. "Bear witness, Mr. Crawley, we found this
good-for-nothing woman in the act of stealing your
brother's property; and she will be hanged, as I always
said she would."
Betsy Horrocks, quite daunted, flung herself down on
her knees, bursting into tears. But those who know a really
good woman are aware that she is not in a hurry to
forgive, and that the humiliation of an enemy is a triumph
to her soul.
"Ring the bell, James," Mrs. Bute said. "Go on ringing it
till the people come." The three or four domestics
resident in the deserted old house came presently at that
jangling and continued summons.
"Put that woman in the strong-room," she said. "We
caught her in the act of robbing Sir Pitt. Mr. Crawley,
you'll make out her committal--and, Beddoes, you'll
drive her over in the spring cart, in the morning, to
Southampton Gaol."
"My dear," interposed the Magistrate and Rector--
"she's only--"
"Are there no handcuffs?" Mrs. Bute continued,
stamping in her clogs. "There used to be handcuffs.
Where's the creature's abominable father?"
"He DID give 'em me," still cried poor Betsy; "didn't
he, Hester? You saw Sir Pitt--you know you did--
give 'em me, ever so long ago--the day after Mudbury
fair: not that I want 'em. Take 'em if you think they
ain't mine." And here the unhappy wretch pulled out
from her pocket a large pair of paste shoe-buckles which
had excited her admiration, and which she had just
appropriated out of one of the bookcases in the study,
where they had lain.
"Law, Betsy, how could you go for to tell such a wicked
story!" said Hester, the little kitchen-maid late on her
promotion--"and to Madame Crawley, so good and kind,
and his Rev'rince (with a curtsey), and you may search
all MY boxes, Mum, I'm sure, and here's my keys as I'm
an honest girl, though of pore parents and workhouse
bred--and if you find so much as a beggarly bit of lace
or a silk stocking out of all the gownds as YOU'VE had the
picking of, may I never go to church agin."
