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.