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.”