CHAPTER II.
MRS. PIGGOTT’S ASSISTANT.
It was late on in the autumn by this time, and most of the visitors who had come down to the Hollow in the bright summer weather were now elsewhere.
Miss Hope, having patched up a peace with her nephew, was at Copt Hall; Mrs. Ormson at Torquay, with her eldest son, the state of whose health was considered unsatisfactory; Mrs. Black, at Hastings; Mr. Black, much in town; Mr. Harcourt, in Scotland; and Bessie, at home, keeping house for her father.
There was no one left at Berrie Down, in fact, excepting Master Marsden, who remained on at the Hollow, because the state of Dr. Marsden’s finances prevented the boy being sent to school; while the state of his mother’s health rendered it an act of real charity to keep the “noisy, ill-mannered, ill-conditioned young whelp” (this was Arthur’s summary of him) away from that small, uncomfortable, wretchedly-managed suburban house.
Early in November, Alick was to enter on his new duties; and at Christmas, by special desire of Arthur, there was to be another and, larger family gathering in Berrie Down. All kinds of people were to meet all other kinds of people; and the Hollow, he said, “should see Christmas kept in thorough good old English style, for once.”
Already the younger Dudleys were speculating as to whether there would be an abundance of berries on the holly bushes, and Mrs. Piggott was looking to the fattening of her turkeys, and meditatively calculating how many of those unfortunate birds the expected guests would, in all probability, consume.
Already she was pouring into the ears of her youthful handmaiden, Prissy Dobbin by name, tales which sounded to that unsophisticated damsel like romances, anent the number of plums she should have to stone, currants to wash and dry and pick, about the quantity of mixed peel she must cut up, and the amount of suet she would have to chop, for the Christmas puddings. As for mincemeat, Mrs. Piggott avowed her intention of commencing that whenever the twenty-first of November was come and past; and had the Israelites been journeying, for a second time, out of Egypt, and purposed making a halt at Berrie Down on their way, the worthy housekeeper could scarcely have “salted down” a larger quantity of butter, nor looked more anxiously at the tenants of the poultry-yard and the contents of the nests than she did.
As for herbs—Miss Priscilla Dobbin’s private opinion was, that “the deuce was in Mrs. Piggott about them.” For ever, so she told her mother, she was rubbing off those herbs into bottles, and tying them down; while, in respect of pickles, it is on record, the assistant made herself so frightfully ill with devouring those exhilarating articles of diet wholesale, that the cook assured her she should be sent home forthwith if she could not content herself for the future with cooler viands than chilies and chutnee.
“Drat them girls!” exclaimed Mrs. Piggott; “they’re every one alike now—for crinolines, and vinegar, and piccalilly. I remember a young housemaid as used to come and see me when I was taking care of General Furdie’s house in Gloucester Place—I believe she used to live on pickles—bought them at the oilman’s, sixpenny-worth at a time, and if she came and sat with me for half an hour, she would finish the lot while she sat talking. Ah! girls ain’t like what they used to be.”
“And a good job too that they bain’t,” retorted Priscilla, who was certainly as unlike one of Mrs. Piggott’s ideal maidens as can well be conceived.
Except that she could “get through her work,” when she chose to devote herself to it, and that she was sufficiently “owdacious and comical” to make time pass fast in the Berrie Down kitchen, Priscilla Dobbin was not possessed, in Mrs. Piggott’s eyes, of a solitary virtue.
She was not “one” the cook would ever have had about the house; but, of course, Mrs. Dudley knew best—a severely ironical expression, which meant that Mrs. Dudley knew nothing whatever about the matter; indeed, Mrs. Piggott had been heard to say, that “a baby in arms was as fit to choose a servant as her mistress.”
After all, however, Priscilla was not exactly an importation of Mrs. Dudley’s. A girl had been wanted, and this girl, a protégée of Bessie’s, stepped at once from a wretched home to service at Berrie Down, where she worked harder, and idled more persistently, than any young person “of her inches,” that it had ever been Mrs. Piggott’s misfortune previously to come into contact with.
And yet with all she was as good company, in her rank, as Bessie Ormson in a higher; better, perhaps, for she possessed artistic, histrionic, and imitative powers, of which the young lady was utterly destitute.
Miss Dobbin had been taught at school to curtsey, or “bob,” as she called it; but elsewhere she had learned to dance with anybody, and to execute “steps” which were the delight and envy of the kitchen at Berrie Down. At school she had been taught psalms and hymns and spiritual songs; but out of hours she had acquired a stock of ballads that would have horrified the propriety of the vicar of North Kemms, Priscilla’s native parish, had he been privileged to hear them. At school she was taught to read, write, cipher, and do sampler work; out of school it had ever been her pleasure and delight to mimic the peculiarities of mistress and master, of clergyman and clergyman’s wife, of the ladies who visited the school, and of her fellow-companions, playmates, father, mother, and society generally.
She was but a young thing when she came to the Hollow, sixteen or thereabouts, with a scanty supply of clothes, a crinoline which was at once the plague and delight of her life, a net to contain her hair, and induce people to believe it was long like a grownup woman’s, and a stock of impudence that was, were Mrs. Piggott’s testimony on the subject reliable, “more than enough.”
With Priscilla it was not, however, perhaps, that she had so much impudence as that she had so little reverence; and for this reason, spite of Mrs. Piggott’s high social position, her imposing cap, her stately manner, and her reminiscences of the good old times, the young girl treated her with as little ceremony as she might one of her playmates, and “answered the housekeeper back,”—an indignity which had never previously been inflicted on that individual by anyone, gentle or simple.
“She had always lived with people above and below, as knew their places and kept to them, till ‘you came,’” she stated to Miss Dobbin; whereupon Miss Dobbin inquired—
“O Lor’, there, ain’t you glad I am come, that you may see some new life?”
Did Mrs. Piggott threaten to report Prissy to Mrs. Dudley, that young person entreated of her to make haste and do so, “before her shoes wore out.” Did the housekeeper, talking at Priscilla, endeavour to point a moral and adorn a tale by stating what was done in her young days—and what her first mistress, the lady of Mr. Serjeant Hickley, counsellor to the King (so Mrs. Piggott understood K.C.), said when she saw a servant with a bow or a bonnet, let alone a flower, added Mrs. Piggott parenthetically—Priscilla, rich in ribbons, flowers, and laces, flung to her from Miss Ormson’s stores, thanked her stars “she had not lived in them days, and thought it was quite time the good old times were gone and past, if anybody was to have any comfort of their lives.”
“I’m sure I’m glad I warn’t born then, Mrs. Piggott; for one thing I’d be as old as you, and have nothing before me; I’d have lived it all, and not have a thing to look forward to.”
“Better have nothing to look forward to than some things to look back upon,” answered Mrs. Piggott, sententiously; which immediately elicited from Miss Dobbin the inquiry whether she had got that out of her own head or somebody else’s, and if these were some things she did not care to look back upon.
Clearly, the housekeeper said the girl could come to no good, and yet in her heart Mrs. Piggott liked this feminine ne’er-do-weel, and would have felt the house lonely without her.
On the whole, she preferred Prissy’s chatter to the more staid and sensible discourse of Jane, the housemaid, or Sarah, her assistant in dairy and kitchen. Though torture could not have wrung such a confession from her, Mrs. Piggott dearly loved gossip; and, if she had searched the home counties through, she could not have discovered a more industrious collector and retailer of news than Priscilla Dobbin.
From the colour of the moire antique the vicar’s wife wore when she went to dine at Moorlands, to the name of Miss Amy Raidsford’s “intended,” Priscilla had every atom of parish information at her fingers’ ends. Why the lady’s-maid was dismissed from Moorlands—what Lord Kemms said when he found his gardener sending all the best fruit to Covent Garden, and only retaining windfalls for dessert at the Park—Prissy knew as well as though she had been present.
Nor was it only from the neighbourhood of North Kemms that Miss Dobbin collected materials for conversation. She knew all about the low marriage Mr. Harry Camperdon, the Fifield rector’s son, had contracted with the sexton’s daughter from Palinsbridge.
“And I wouldn’t ha’ married her if she had been hung with diamonds—should always ha’ felt or thought she had been dug up out of the graves. Seen her?—to be sure I have, Mrs. Piggott—as thin as a hurdle, and as pale and sickly-looking as a bit of your underdone crust. She’s a contrast to Mrs. Raidsford. You don’t mean to say you have never had a sight of Mrs. Raidsford! then you have a treat to come; like the side of a house, and mean! would look after the candles’ ends, if her husband let her, and grudges throwing away her nail-parings. There is not a servant in the house dare give a glass of beer unbeknown, and they all say a nicer gentleman nobody need wish to serve. It is thought Lord Kemms would make up to one of the daughters, if it wasn’t for her; but he can’t abide her. Well, if I was Lord Kemms, I know who I’d have—money or no money.”
And so on, ad libitum, the whole day long. Making beds, cleaning plates, shelling peas, stirring preserves, Priscilla Dobbin’s tongue never ceased; and let the burden of her song be what it would, the refrain never varied, and that refrain was to the effect, that, since time began, there never had been before, and never would be again, such a young lady as Bessie Ormson. Bessie had made her acquaintance at a period of (to Miss Dobbin) infinite trouble. Having been despatched to the mill to purchase some flour, she contrived by the way to lose the money entrusted to her. Feeling it useless to proceed, and being afraid to return home, she did the only thing which seems natural to boys and girls under such circumstances, namely, lifted up her voice and wept.
While she sat on the stile leading away towards North Kemms, with her bonnet tilted over her face, her knuckles in her eyes, and making a display of feet encased in strong leather boots, and a pair of sturdy legs, which only the extremest distress could excuse being exhibited to public view, Bessie, coming along the field path, paused to inquire into the cause of such despair.
A greater contrast than that presented by the pair could scarcely have been imagined. Hot and weary with running about searching after the lost money, sick and tired with crying, and the fear of the “hiding,” which she explained to Bessie was sure to follow on confession; her cheeks wet with tears, and her face generally smeared by reason of having been rubbed over with her dirty hands, Priscilla’s personal appearance alone entitled her to the profoundest commiseration.
Attired, on the other hand, in the coolest of muslin dresses, with the most coquettish of hats for head-gear, with a lace shawl thrown carelessly round her, holding a parasol, edged with deep fringe, a little on one side, more apparently to protect the trimming of her hat than her bright, fresh, beautiful face from the rays of the sun, Bessie, leaning against the stile, held converse with Miss Dobbin concerning the loss she had experienced.
“It was a whole harf a crown, Miss,” said the girl, amid a perfect gust of sobs, “and I put it in my pocket, and I never left the path the whole way, except to pull a branch of roses (the poor things were lying withered and miserable, sodden and faded in her lap), and I suppose it was when I reached up to get them the money jumped out; but I have looked and looked, and I can’t see it. No, no more nor if it had had legs and run away. See, it was over in the corner of that far held. I’ll show you, if you like,” she added, with a faint hope, perhaps, that Bessie might be able to find where she had searched in vain.
“The scene of such a catastrophe has not the slightest interest for me,” answered Bessie. “I will take your word that the half-crown is lost, and I will give you another in its place, or at least two shillings and sixpence, which comes to much the same thing. You go, or have gone, to school, I suppose?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“Then you know what a moral means?”
“I think so, Miss.”
“Well, the moral of this afternoon’s work is: For the future, when your mother sends you out for flour, don’t stop to gather roses by the way, for it is extremely unlikely that you will a second time meet any one in these fields worth half-a-crown.”
Having finished which speech, Bessie, toying with her dainty parasol, still stood looking at the girl, for whom she felt that compassion, which always moved her when she saw anything of the feminine gender unkempt, forlorn, untidy, unhopeful, uglier than she had “a right to be.”
To her, an ill-dressed girl or woman was precisely what a daub is to an artist, a series of discords to a musician. She loved prettiness. Let a woman’s dress be of cotton or of velvet, she still loved to see that dress worn with a certain consciousness; and the terrible want of self-assertion, the utter abandonment of all self-appreciation in the girl who now stood opposite to her, was so distressing to Bessie, that she entreated of her as a parting favour to wash her face, and push her hair out of her eyes before she proceeded to the mill.
“There is plenty of water in the stream,” Bessie added; “and do make use of it freely, for at present you look as if you had been buried without a coffin.”
A week after, the young lady, who had forgotten all about this occurrence, was told that a girl wanted to speak to her—a girl from North Kemms—Priscilla Dobbin by name.
“She does not want another half-crown, I hope,” laughed Bessie, when she heard the name; and she went out into the hall, looking, as she always did, pretty enough to drive any man to distraction.
“Well, Priscilla, you have not lost your money again, have you?” thus Bessie commenced the conversation.
“No, Miss—I found it. I could not rest; and so, the first afternoon mother could spare me, I had a good look, and I took one of my little brothers, and he got it in among a lot of weeds growing in the ditch; and here it is back again, please, Miss—and—my duty to you,” finished Prissy, who evidently considered the last four words an appropriate ending to her sentence.
Bessie took the half-crown, and held it in the palm of her hand for a moment, doubtfully.
The coin had evidently been washed, as had also Miss Dobbins face, which was painfully red and shiny. Then she looked at the thick clump boots, laced up with a leathern thong—at the sturdy legs, showing below the short, scanty, hailstorm-pattern cotton gown—at the little old-fashioned black pelerine—at the coarse school bonnet—at the light brown hair, cut so short all round—at the greenish-grey eyes, sparkling with pleasure—at the unmanageable mouth, which would smile and break into grins of delight at the recovery of so great a treasure—at the hard hands, that seemed to have done so much work—before she said—
“Sit down for a moment, I shall be back presently.” She wanted to tell the story to Heather, and ask her advice; but, as Heather happened to be out of the way, Bessie returned to the hall discomforted.
She did not like to give the girl back the money, or its equivalent, and she was racking her brains what to offer, when Lally appeared on the scene of action, with a huge wedge of cake in her hand, which it is only right to state she was absolutely unable to eat.
“Lally, come here,” exclaimed Bessie. “I wish to give this little girl something by which to remember me—something to remind her of having been very careless and very good. What do you think she would like best?” and Bessie took the child in her arms and waited, hoping, perhaps, the stranger might suggest some desirable memento for herself.
But Prissy never spoke, nor, for some time, did Lally, who first stared at Priscilla from head to foot, and then gravely turned and looked at Bessie, wondering apparently whether that young lady could conveniently part with her face as an appropriate offering to the stranger. Then her eyes wandered to Bessie’s throat, and so fell on a tiny brooch which fastened her collar. The moment they did so—
“Dive her ’at,” said Lally, unhesitatingly, a suggestion which she would have made all the same had the trinket been worth a hundred guineas; as it was, Bessie abode by her decision, and taking out the brooch, handed it to Priscilla, remarking at the same time that, “although she might not care for it then, she would perhaps when she grew up to be a woman.”
Not to be outdone in generosity, Lally at once presented the girl with her piece of cake, assuring her it was “very dood,” the truth of which statement Bessie doubted exceedingly.
Next day, over came Mrs. Dobbin to know whether it was “correct as a young lady at Berrie Down had given her gal a golden brooch? She did not think her gal would tell a lie, but still young uns wanted to be looked arter.”
Assured of the rectitude of the transaction, Mrs. Dobbin, after having been refreshed with ale and a slice of bread and meat, was permitted to depart. “Altogether, the half-crown threatens to prove a costly matter,” Bessie remarked; but Heather only said they seemed to be very honest, worthy people, and the subject dropped.
But when, a little later on in the summer, Mrs. Dudley perceived it would be necessary to procure some young person to assist in the housework, Bessie proposed that a trial should be given to Priscilla; and never ceased her entreaties for the girl to be engaged until Heather said Bessie and the girls might walk over to North Kemms and talk to Mrs. Dobbin about the matter.
Nothing loath was Mrs. Dobbin for Priscilla to “go out,” “except,” she said, “that in the matter of clothes she feared Prissy warn’t fit to be seen in a gentleman’s house.”
“Let her come over to me, and we will arrange that,” Miss Ormson answered; and accordingly, when Prissy came, out of her own wardrobe the young lady furnished that of the new servant—telling her at the same time, laughingly, she was “made up for life.”
“And you may think yourself a lucky gal,” remarked the mother on the first Sunday when Priscilla went home, about a month after her entrance on her duties at Berrie Down—“having plenty of victuals, and good clothes to your back, and a kind mistress.”
John Dobbin was sitting in the porch during this colloquy, looking askance at his daughter’s finery the while. When she came to exhibit her new dress to him, he observed, first, that “fine feathers didn’t make fine birds,” and then inquired—
“Who was that chap I saw thee talking to last evening, this side Moorlands?”
“I warn’t out yesterday evening, father,” answered the girl.
“Warn’t thou?”
“No,” was the reply.
“Thou mayn’t have told a lie about that half-a-crown piece, but I doubt thou’rt telling a lie now, my lass,” he said.
“Well, you can ask Mrs. Dudley if I went out yesterday,” retorted Prissy, defiantly.
“I take it Madam Dudley has something else to do than watch the coming and going of a wench like thou,” he answered; “mayhap she don’t know the one-half of what anybody in the house does; but I can tell thee this much, Prissy—that if I catches thee going wrong, I’ll break every bone in thy body, if it was covered an inch thick with silks and satins.”
“I warn’t out,” persisted Prissy.
“See that thou bain’t then,” returned her uncompromising parent; and as the weeks and the months passed by without John having any further occasion to find fault with his first-born, it may reasonably be presumed that she heeded his admonition.
Further, in a general way, she gave satisfaction at the Hollow, where she was on good terms with every one, unless, indeed, it might be Master Marsden, who was, as she took various opportunities of informing him, an “ill-behaved limb,” and no “young gentleman.”
The last occasion on which Priscilla found herself moved to this confession of faith, was when she boxed Master Marsden’s ears for holding Muff, and instructing Leonard to rub turpentine over her coat, preliminary—so she ascertained from Lally, who came rushing to her in an agony of distress—to “making a bonfire of my poor tittens.”
That Master Marsden never forgave this interference with his legitimate pleasures, and that his wrath was very grievously moved, both at Lally’s tale-bearing and Prissy’s prompt interference, may be gathered from the fact that he informed Lally she was a “nasty little tell-tale tit.”
“Lally not,” lamented the child.
“Yes, you are—and ‘your tongue shall be slit, and every little puppy-dog shall get a little bit,’” persisted Master Marsden, with his own tongue very far out; adding, to Priscilla, by way of appendix to this poem—
“As for you, you ugly, snub-nosed, green-eyed little——”
“No names, Harry,” interposed Alick, who chanced to come up at the instant; “and what have you been doing with the cat? What’s all this, I ask?” and he looked angrily round the group.
“I was only going to singe her hair; it is too long, like some people’s tongues,” answered the boy, impudently.
“Now look here, Harry,” said Alick; “I won’t take you to Arthur, because he would not lay a finger on you; but I’m your brother, and I’ll give you a thrashing for this you’ll perhaps remember. Teaching Leonard such tricks, too, you cruel little cur!”
“Cur yourself!” retorted Harry; and in a moment he was grappling with Alick, trying to wrest the riding-whip he held out of his hand—kicking, plunging, biting even; and all the time Alick kept shaking and striking him,—Lally crying bitterly the while—till, panting and frightened, the boy shrieked out for mercy.
Then the elder loosed his grasp and bade him go, saying, “Though you make such a noise I know you are not much hurt, but never let me catch you playing such tricks again, or I will hurt you next time.”
“I’ll be even with you all yet,” observed Harry, gratefully, as he skulked away; and this threat, which probably had not the slightest meaning attached to it in the boy’s mind, was remembered to his disadvantage subsequently.
When the day came that it was remembered, no one believed his declaration of not having “meant anything”—of not having intended to do anybody any harm. When every creature in the house treated him like a pariah, and avoided him as though he had leprosy, Harry felt that he could better have endured a dozen worse thrashings than such social ostracism. When his assertions were received with silent incredulity—when his questions were answered reluctantly and with withering disdain and dislike—when his food was handed to him as if he were some unclean animal, unfit to eat or associate with civilized beings—when there was a great silence in the house—when people went about on tiptoe, and, if they met the boy, passed him either with averted heads or with looks of reproach and anger—when Leonard turned king’s evidence and bore testimony against him—when he sat in his own room, or else wandered about the farm, kicking twigs and stones listlessly before him—Harry felt it was all more than he could bear, and, turning at last on Cuthbert, told that youth he did not see why they were all so hard upon him. “You were not a bit better, any one of you, when you were young,” he finished, passionately.
“We did not try to kill people,” answered his step-brother, with dignity, as he retreated from the room, followed by Harry’s indignant remonstrance of—
“No more didn’t I—no more didn’t I!”