Vanity Fair (69 page)

The library looked out on the front walk and park. Sir Pitt had
opened one of the windows, and was bawling out thence to the
postilion and Pitt's servant, who seemed to be about to take the
baggage down.

"Don't move none of them trunks," he cried, pointing with a pipe
which he held in his hand. "It's only a morning visit, Tucker, you
fool. Lor, what cracks that off hoss has in his heels! Ain't there
no one at the King's Head to rub 'em a little? How do, Pitt? How do,
my dear? Come to see the old man, hay? 'Gad—you've a pretty face,
too. You ain't like that old horse-godmother, your mother. Come and
give old Pitt a kiss, like a good little gal."

The embrace disconcerted the daughter-in-law somewhat, as the
caresses of the old gentleman, unshorn and 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."

"Give up your keys, you hardened hussy," hissed out the virtuous
little lady in the calash.