CHAPTER XLV.
Miss Anne Cooper was a maiden lady of forty-two; a satellite who was well contented to revolve year after year round Madame Vincent, and reflect her golden rays. Madame Vincent had been a beauty in her day, and was still tenacious of her claims to that title. It was Miss Anne's constant study to foster this bump of self-conceit, and so cunningly did she play her part, so indignantly did she deny the advances of Old Time, that madame was flattered into the belief that he had really given her a quit claim.
Miss Anne's disinterested care of the silver, linen, and store-room was quite praiseworthy to those who did not know that she supplied a family of her relatives with all necessary articles from the Vincent resources. It was weary waiting for the expected codicil, and Miss Anne thought "a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush;" so if she occasionally abducted a pound or two of old Hyson or loaf-sugar, or a loaf of cake, or a pair of pies, she reasoned herself into the belief that they were, after all, only her lawful perquisites.
Yes, it was weary waiting for the codicil. Madame Vincent was an invalid, 'tis true; but so she had been these twenty years, having one of those india-rubber constitutions, which seem to set all medical precedents at defiance. She might last along for ten years to come—who knew?
Ten years! Miss Anne looked in the glass; the crow's-feet were planted round her own eyes, and it needed no microscope to see the silver threads in her once luxuriant black locks. Not that Miss Anne did not smile just as sweetly on her patroness as if she would not at any time have welcomed a call upon her from the undertaker. Miss Anne's voice, as she glided through the house with her bunch of keys, had that oily, hypocritical whine which is inseparable from your genuine toady, be it man or woman.
Miss Anne sat in the "blue chamber" of the Vincent mansion—a chamber that had once been occupied by young Master Vincent. Whether this gave it a charm in the lady's eyes or no, Miss Anne never had said. It was true that young Master Vincent, when he had nothing else to do, amused himself with irritating Miss Anne up to the snapping-point. They scarce met without a war of words, half jest, half earnest; but for all that, young Vincent's every wish was anticipated by Miss Anne. It was she who reinserted the enameled buttons in his vests, when they came from the laundress; it was she who righted his room, and kept all his little dandy apparatus (in the shape of perfumes, gold shirt-buttons, hair-oil, watch-guards, rings, etc.) in their appropriate places.
Your D'Orsay abroad, is generally a brute at home; selfish, sarcastic, ill-tempered, and exacting where he thinks it does not pay to be otherwise. All this Miss Anne turned aside with the skill and tact of a woman; occasionally quite quenching him with her witty replies, and forcing him to laugh even in his most diabolical moods. To be sure he would mutter some uncanonical words after it, and tell her to go to the torrid zone; and Miss Anne would smile as usual, drop a low courtesy, and glide from his presence; sometimes to go round making all sorts of housekeeping blunders; sometimes to sit down in her room, with her hands folded in her lap, and her great black eyes fixed immovably on the carpet, for all the world just as if Miss Anne were in love.