Chapter VI: The Happy United Family.—curtain Crescent

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THE PRINGLES of course were furious when they read the
announcement of Billy’s marriage. Such a degradation to such a
respectable family, and communicated in such a way. We need
scarcely say that at first they all made the worst of it, running
Mrs. William down much below her real level, and declaring that
Billy though hard enough in money matters, was soft enough in
love affairs. Then Mrs. Half-a-yard-of-the-table Joe, who up to
that time had been the _belle_ of the family, essayed to pick her
to pieces, intimating that she was much indebted to her
dress—that fine feathers made fine birds—hoped that Billy would
like paying for the clothes, and wondered what her figure would
be like a dozen years thence. Mrs. Joe had preserved hers, never
having indeed having been in the way of spoiling it. Joe looked
as if he was to perpetuate the family name. By-and-by, when it
became known that the Countess Delacey’s yellow carriage, with
the high-stepping greys and the cocked-up-nose
beet-root-and-cherry-coloured Johnnies, was to be seen
astonishing the natives in Doughty Street, they began to think
better of it; and though they did not stint themselves for
rudeness (disguised as civility of course), they treated her less
like a show, more especially when Billy was present. Still,
though they could not make up their minds to be really civil to
her, they could not keep away from her, just as the moth will be
at the candle despite its unpleasant consequences. Indeed, it is
one of the marked characteristics of Snobbism, that they won’t be
cut. At least, if you do get a Snob cut, ten to one but he will
take every opportunity of rubbing up against you, or sitting down
beside you in public, or overtaking you on the road, or stopping
a mutual acquaintance with you in the street, either to show his
indifference or his independence, or in the hope of its passing
for intimacy. There are people who can’t understand any coolness
short of a kick. The Pringles were tiresome people. They would
neither be in with Mrs. William, nor out with her. So there was
that continual knag, knag, knagging going on in the happy united
family, that makes life so pleasant and enjoyable. Mrs. William
well knew, when any of them came to call upon her, that her
sayings and doings would furnish recreation for the rest of the
cage. It is an agreeable thing to have people in one’s house
acting the part of spies. One day Mrs. Joe, who lived in
Guildford Street, seeing the Countess’s carriage-horses
cold-catching in Doughty Street, while her ladyship discussed
some important millinery question with Mrs. William, could not
resist the temptation of calling, and not being introduced to the
Countess, said to Mis. William, with her best vinegar sneer, the
next time they met. She “‘oped she had told her fine friend that
the vulgar woman she saw at her ‘ouse was no connection of
her’s.” But enough of such nonsense. Let us on to something more
pleasant.

Well, then, of course the next step in our story is the
appearance of our hero, the boy Billy——Fine Billy, aforesaid.
Such a boy as never was seen! All other mammas went away
dissatisfied with theirs, after they had got a peep of our Billy.
If baby-shows had been in existence in those days, Mrs. Billy
might have scoured the country and carried away all the prizes.
Everybody was struck in a heap at the sight of him, and his
sayings and doings were worthy of a place in Punch. So thought
his parents, at least. What perfected their happiness, of course,
operated differently with the family, and eased the minds of the
ladies, as to the expediency of further outward civility to Mrs.
William, who they now snubbed at all points, and prophesied all
sorts of uncharitableness of. Mrs., on her side, surpassed them
all in dress and good looks, and bucked Billy up into a very
produceable-looking article. Though he mightn’t exactly do for
White’s bay-window on a summer afternoon, he looked uncommonly
well on “‘Change,” and capitally in the country. Of course, he
came in for one of the three cardinal sources of abuse the world
is always so handy with, viz., that a man either behaves ill to
his wife, is a screw, or is out-running the constable, the
latter, of course, being Billy’s crime, which admitted of a large
amount of blame being laid on the lady, though, we are happy to
say, Billy had no trial of speed with the constable, for his
wife, by whose permission men thrive, was a capital manager, and
Billy slapped his fat thigh over his beloved balance-sheets every
Christmas, exclaiming, as he hopped joyously round on one leg,
snapping his finger and thumb, “_Our Billy shall be a gent! Our
Billy shall be a gent!_” And he half came in to the oft-expressed
wish of his wife, that he might live to see him united to a
quality lady: Mr. and Lady Arabella Pringle, Mr. and Lady Sophia
Pringle, or Mr. and Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Pringle, as the case
might be.

Vainglorious ambition! After an inordinate kidney supper, poor
Billy was found dead in his chair. Great was the consternation
among the Pringle family at the lamentable affliction. All except
Jerry, who, speculating on his habits, had recently effected a
policy on his life, were deeply shocked at the event. They buried
him with all becoming pomp, and then, Jerry, who had always
professed great interest in the boy Billy—so great, indeed, as to
induce his brother (though with no great opinion of Jerry, but
hoping that his services would never be wanted, and that it might
ingratiate the nephew with the bachelor uncle,) to appoint him an
executor and guardian—waited upon the widow, and with worlds of
tears and pious lamentations, explained to her in the most
unexplanatory manner possible, all how things were left, but
begging that she would not give herself any trouble about her
son’s affairs, for, if she would attend to his spiritual wants,
and instil high principles of honour, morality, and fine feeling
into his youthful mind, he would look after the mere worldly
dross, which was as nothing compared to the importance of the
other. “Teach him to want nothin’ but what’s right,” continued
Jerry, as he thought most impressively. “Teach him to want
nothin’ but what’s right, and when he grows up to manhood marry
him to some nice, pious respectable young woman in his own rank
of life, with a somethin’ of her own; gentility is all very well
to talk about, but it gets you nothin’ at the market,” added he,
forgetting that he was against the mere worldly dross.

But Mrs. Pringle, who knew the value of the article, intimated at
an early day, that she would like to be admitted into the money
partnership as well, whereupon Jerry waxing wroth, said with an
irate glance of his keen grey eyes, “My dear madam, these family
matters, in my opinion, require to be treated not only in a
business-like way, but with a very considerable degree of
delicacy,” an undisputed dogma, acquiring force only by the
manner in which it was delivered. So the pretty widow saw she had
better hold her tongue, and hope for the best from the little
fawning bully.

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The melancholy catastrophe with which we closed our last chapter
found our hero at a preparatory school, studying for Eton,
whither papa proposed sending him on the old principle of getting
him into good society; though we believe it is an experiment that
seldom succeeds. The widow, indeed, took this view of the matter,
for her knowledge of high life caused her to know that though a
“proud aristocracy” can condescend, and even worship wealth, yet
that they are naturally clannish and exclusive, and tenacious of
pedigree. In addition to this, Mrs. Pringle’s experience of men
led her to think that the solemn pedantic “Greek and Latin ones,”
as she called them, who know all about Julius Cæsar coming,
“_summa diligentia_,” on the top of the diligence, were not half
so agreeable as those who could dance and sing, and knew all that
was going on in the present-day world; which, in addition to her
just appreciation of the delicate position of her son, made her
resolve not to risk him among the rising aristocracy at Eton,
who, instead of advancing, might only damage his future prospects
in life, but to send him to Paris, where, besides the three
R’s,—“reading, riting, and rithmetic,”—he would acquire all the
elegant accomplishments and dawn fresh upon the world an
unexpected meteor.

This matter being arranged, she then left Dirty Street, as she
called Doughty Street, with all the disagreeable Pringle family
espionage, and reminiscences, and migrated westward, taking up
her abode in the more congenial atmosphere of Curtain Crescent,
Pimlico, or Belgravia, as, we believe the owners of the houses
wish to have it called. Here she established herself in a very
handsome, commodious house, with porticoed doorway and balconied
drawing-rooms—every requisite for a genteel family in short; and
such a mansion being clearly more than a single lady required,
she sometimes accommodated the less fortunate, through the medium
of a house-agent, though both he and she always begged it to be
distinctly understood that she did not let lodgings, but
“apartments;” and she always requested that the consideration
might be sent to her in a sealed envelope by the occupants, in
the same manner as she transmitted them the bill. So she managed
to make a considerable appearance at a moderate expense, it being
only in the full season that her heart yearned towards the
houseless, when of course a high premium was expected. There is
nothing uncommon in people letting their whole houses; so why
should there be anything strange in Mrs. Pringle occasionally
letting a part of one? Clearly nothing. Though Mrs. Joe did say
she had turned a lodging-house keeper, she could not refrain from
having seven-and-sixpence worth of Brougham occasionally to see
how the land lay.

It is but justice to our fair friend to say that she commenced
with great prudence. So handsome unprotected a female being open
to the criticisms of the censorious, she changed her good-looking
footman for a sedate elderly man, whose name, Properjohn, John
Properjohn, coupled with the severe austerity of his manners, was
enough to scare away intruders, and to keep the young girls in
order, whom our friend had consigned to her from the country, in
the hopes that her drilling and recommendation would procure them
admission into quality families.

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Properjohn had been spoiled for high service by an attack of the
jaundice, but his figure was stately and good, and she sought to
modify his injured complexion by a snuff-coloured, Quaker-cut
coat and vest, with claret-coloured shorts, and buckled shoes.
Thus attired, with his oval-brimmed hat looped up with gold cord,
and a large double-jointed brass-headed cane in his hand, he
marched after his mistress, a damper to the most audacious.
Properjohn, having lived in good families until he got spoiled by
the jaundice, had a very extensive acquaintance among the
aristocracy, with whom Mrs. Pringle soon established a peculiar
intercourse. She became a sort of ultimate Court of Appeal, a
_Cour de Cassation_, in all matters of taste in apparel,—whether
a bonnet should be lilac or lavender colour, a dress deeply
flounced or lightly, a lady go to a ball in feathers or diamonds,
or both—in all those varying and perplexing points that so excite
and bewilder the female mind: Mrs. Pringle would settle all
these, whatever Mrs. Pringle said the fair applicants would abide
by, and milliners and dress-makers submitted to her judgment.
This, of course, let her into the privacies of domestic life. She
knew what husbands stormed at the milliners’ and dress-makers’
bills, bounced at the price of the Opera-box, and were eternally
complaining of their valuable horses catching cold. She knew who
the cousin was who was always to be admitted in Lavender Square,
and where the needle-case-shaped note went to after it had
visited the toy-shop in Arcadia Street. If her own information
was defective, Properjohn could supply the deficiency. The two,
between them, knew almost everything.

Nor was Mrs. Pringle’s influence confined to the heads of houses,
for it soon extended to many of the junior members also. It is a
well known fact that, when the gorgeous Lady Rainbow came to
consult her about her daughter’s goings on with Captain Conquest,
the Captain and Matilda saw Mamma alight from the flaunting
hammer-clothed tub, as they stood behind the figured yellow
tabaret curtains of Mrs. Pringle’s drawing-room window, whither
they had been attracted by the thundering of one of the old noisy
order of footmen. Blessings on the man, say we, who substituted
bells for knockers—so that lovers may not be disturbed, or
visitors unaccustomed to public knocking have to expose their
incompetence.

We should, however, state, that whenever Mrs. Pringle was
consulted by any of the juveniles upon their love affairs, she
invariably suggested that they had better “Ask Mamma,” though
perhaps it was only done as a matter of form, and to enable her
to remind them at a future day, if things went wrong, that she
had done so. Many people make offers that they never mean to have
accepted, but still, if they are not accepted, _they made them
you know_. If they are accepted, why then they wriggle out of
them the best way they can. But we are dealing in generalities,
instead of confining ourselves to Mrs. Pringle’s practice. If the
young lady or gentleman—for Mrs. Pringle was equally accessible
to the sexes—preferred “asking” her to “Asking Mamma,” Mrs.
Pringle was always ready to do what she could for them; and the
fine Sèvres and Dresden china, the opal vases, the Bohemian
scent-bottles, the beautiful bronzes, the or-molu jewel caskets,
and Parisian clocks, that mounted guard in the drawing-room when
it was not “in commission” (occupied as apartments), spoke
volumes for the gratitude of those she befriended. Mrs. Pringle
was soon the repository of many secrets, but we need not say that
the lady who so adroitly concealed Pheasant Feathers on her own
account was not likely to be entrapped into committing others;
and though she was often waited upon by pleasant
conversationalists on far-fetched errands, who endeavoured to
draw carelessly down wind to their point, as well as by seedy and
half-seedy gentlemen, who proceeded in a more business-like
style, both the pleasant conversationalists and the seedy and the
half-seedy gentlemen went away as wise as they came. She never
knew anything; it was the first she had heard of anything of the
sort.

Altogether, Mrs. Pringle was a wonderful woman, and not the least
remarkable trait in her character was that, although servants,
who, like the rest of the world, are so ready to pull people down
to their own level, knew her early professional career, yet she
managed them so well that they all felt an interest in elevating
her, from the Duke’s Duke, down to old quivering-calved Jeames de
la Pluche, who sipped her hop champagne, and told all he heard
while waiting at table—that festive period when people talk as if
their attendants were cattle or inanimate beings.

The reader will now have the goodness to consider our friend,
Fine Billy, established with his handsome mother in Curtain
Crescent—not Pimlico, but Belgravia—with all the airs and action
described in our opening chapter. We have been a long time in
working up to him, but the reader will not find the space wasted,
inasmuch as it has given him a good introduction to “Madam,”
under whose auspices Billy will shortly have to grapple with the
“Ask Mamma” world. Moreover, we feel that if there has been a
piece of elegance overlooked by novelists generally, it is the
delicate, sensitive, highly-refined lady’s-maid. With these
observations, we now pass on to the son He had exceeded, if
possible, his good mother’s Parisian anticipations, for if he had
not brought away any great amount of learning, if he did not know
a planet from a fixed star, the difference of oratory between
Cicero and Demosthenes, or the history of Cupid and the minor
heathen deities, he was nevertheless an uncommonly good hand at a
polka, could be matched to waltz with any one, and had a
tremendous determination of words to the mouth. His dancing
propensities, indeed, were likely to mislead him at starting;
for, not getting into the sort of society Mrs. Pringle wished to
see him attain, he took up with Cremorne and Casinos, and
questionable characters generally.

Mrs. Pringle’s own establishment, we are sorry to say, soon
furnished her with the severest cause of disquietude; for having
always acted upon the principle of having pretty maids—the
difference, as she said, between pretty and plain ones being,
that the men ran after the pretty ones, while the plain ones ran
after the men—having always, we say, acted upon the principle of
having pretty ones, she forgot to change her system on the return
of her hopeful son; and before she knew where she was, he had
established a desperate _liaison_ with a fair maid whose aptitude
for breakage had procured for her the _sobriquet_ of Butter
Fingers. Now, Butter Fingers, whose real name was Disher—Jane
Disher—was a niece of our old friend, Big Ben, now a flourishing
London hotel landlord, and Butter Fingers partook of the goodly
properties and proportions for which the Ben family are
distinguished. She was a little, plump, fair, round-about thing,
with every quality of a healthy country beauty.

Fine Billy was first struck with her one Sunday afternoon,
tripping along in Knightsbridge, as she was making her way home
from Kensington Gardens, when the cheap finery—the parasol, the
profusely-flowered white gauze bonnet, the veil, the machinery
laced cloak, the fringed kerchief, worked sleeves, &c., which she
kept at Chickory the greengrocer’s in Sun Street, and changed
there for the quiet apparel in which she left Mrs. Pringle’s
house in Curtain Crescent—completely deceived him; as much as did
the half-starting smile of recognition she involuntarily gave him
on meeting. Great was his surprise to find that such a smart,
neat-stepping, well-set-up, _bien chaussée_ beauty and he came
from the same quarters. We need not say what followed: how
Properjohn couldn’t see what everybody else saw; and how at
length poor Mrs. Pringle, having changed her mind about going to
hear Mr. Spurgeon, caught the two sitting together, on her richly
carved sofa of chaste design, in the then non-commissioned
put-away drawing room. There was Butter Fingers in a flounced
book-muslin gown with a broad French sash, and her hair clubbed
at the back _à la_ crow’s-nest. It was hard to say which of the
three got the greatest start, though the blow was undoubtedly the
severest on the poor mother, who had looked forward to seeing her
son entering the rank of life legitimately in which she had
occupied a too questionable position. The worst of it was, she
did not know what to do—whether to turn her out of the house at
the moment, and so infuriate the uncle and her son also, or give
her a good scolding, and get rid of her on the first plausible
opportunity. She had no one to consult. She knew what
“Want-nothin’-but-what’s-right Jerry” would say, and that nothing
would please Mrs. Half-a-yard-of-the-table Joe more than to read
the marriage of Billy and Butter Fingers.

Mrs. Pringle was afraid too of offending Big Ben by the abrupt
dismissal of his niece, and dreaded if Butter Fingers had gained
any ascendancy over William, that he too might find a convenient
marrying place as somebody else had done.

Altogether our fair friend was terribly perplexed. Thrown on the
natural resources of her own strong mind, she thought, perhaps,
the usual way of getting young ladies off bad matches, by showing
them something better, might be tried with her son. Billy’s
_début_ in the metropolis had not been so flattering as she could
have wished, but then she could make allowances for town
exclusiveness, and the pick and choice of dancing activity which
old family connections and associations supplied. The country was
very different; there, young men were always in request, and were
taken with much lighter credentials.

If, thought she, sweet William could but manage to establish a
good country connection, there was no saying but he might retain
it in town; at all events, the experiment would separate him from
the artful Butter Fingers, and pave the way for her dismissal.

To accomplish this desirable object, Mrs. Pringle therefore
devoted her undivided attention.