Apparently not. One morning the servants at Marston Moor House got
up, to find their mistress had risen before them, or rather had not
been to bed at all, having decamped during the night with the plate
and all the portable valuables, and left an enormous army of creditors
behind her. There was weeping and wailing round the neighbourhood for
months; but tears and outcries did not pay the defrauded tradespeople,
and they never had any money. Nobody ever knew who received the money
realised by the sale of the furniture, &c, though that ought to have
been something considerable, for there never was a sale so tremendously
attended, or at which things fetched such high prices. All the ladies
of high rank who combined frightful stupidity with rigid virtue, and
who would as soon have thought of walking into Tophet as of crossing
Madame Della Crusca's threshold, rushed to Marston Moor House so soon
as its proprietress had fled, and bought eagerly at the sale. The large
looking-glass which formed the back of the alcove in which Madame
Delia Crusca's bed was placed now figures in the boudoir, or, as it
is generally called, the work-room, of the Countess of Textborough,
and is scarcely so happy in its reflections as in former days. The
satinwood desk fell to the nod of Mrs. Quisby, who used to follow the
Queen's hounds in a deep-pink jacket and a short skirt, and who now
holds forth on Sunday afternoons at the infant schools in Badger's
Buildings, Mayfair, and is especially hard on the Scarlet Woman. Many
of the old _habitués_ attended, and bought well-remembered scraps for
_souvenirs_. Finally everything, down to the kitchen pots and pans, the
stable buckets and the gardeners' implements, were cleared off, and a
big painted board frowned in the great courtyard, informing the British
public that that eligible mansion was to let.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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