Vanity Fair - Page 335/573

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.