Vanity Fair - Page 334/573

"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.