Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
Fidgfumblasquidiot.
The Vicar of Dulham agreed with his wife and sister in one thing at all events, they preferred old-fashioned domestics fished out of odd rustic corners to the ladyising and gentlemanising persons whom the town registry offices of to-day mostly supply. One we have already seen—the old gardener and general outdoor man Fenrake; his wife, a few years younger, was cook and housekeeper, and both were thoroughly efficient in their places. As much cannot be said for Mrs Fenrake’s niece Fidgfumblasquidiot Grewel, who had been taken into the vicarage at the same time. Some four-and-twenty years before the opening of this story, Mr Bristley, then newly installed at Dulham, had represented to the village-girl’s mother—a plump, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, silly little woman, whose idol was royalty and ‘haristocracy’—that Fidgfumblasquidiot was a very aristocratic name, and he had obtained Mrs Grewel’s consent to have her christened by it one Sunday afternoon, while a titter ran through the congregation. ‘Great thing, you know,’ Mr Bristley explained after the service was over, ‘for girls to have original names, and not to be all just Polly and Susey and Lizzie.’ Honest, comely little Fidge—for she was of slight make—was specially Lesbia’s attendant, and had lived with the family about eleven years in the capacity of a maid-of-no-work. Her mornings were spent in dawdling over her small jobs, and her entire afternoons in dawdling over the change of her gown. This latter operation generally lasted from about three to six p.m., but it must be said that when it was done she always looked very neat and even graceful.
To see Fidgfumblasquidiot dust a room was a study worth coming down early for on a cold morning. After a prolonged struggle with the handle of the door, she would come rolling in like a fishing-smack broadside on to a ground swell, a habit which had originated with her in the wearing of tight boots. Having rolled up to the china shelf or the mantelpiece, she would begin to swing a feather brush, held by the very top of the handle between her finger and thumb, lightly over two or three objects without touching them, muttering ‘Oh?’ interrogatively all the while to herself, and glancing now over one shoulder now over the other, as if she fancied a ghost were about to pounce upon her. This done, she would consider that the room was dusted, and still muttering ‘Oh?’ and glancing wildly about with her clear expressive eyes, she would roll lightly away into another apartment, and go through a similar dusting. All her other housemaid’s work was conducted on these principles, until the welcome afternoon arrived when she could retire to her bedroom for the three hours’ toilet. But she was trusty in all ways, and strongly attached to Lesbia, who liked her in return because Fidge had no taste for gossiping and flirtation, and what little she said could be relied upon, although she was not an intellectual companion.
‘What an irreclaimable blockhead that girl is!’ said Lesbia, when she rejoined the party downstairs, her little maid having brought some nitric acid to mark linen, instead of the marking-ink she had been told to fetch.
‘Not quite irreclaimable, perhaps, Lesbie,’ answered her uncle. ‘Give a girl, even a half-wit like that, a chance to associate with persons such as—a—’
‘Ahem! such as the Vicar of Dulham near Frogmore, and his still more remarkable niece,’ interposed Mrs Bristley. ‘Don’t be modest, Theo.’
‘I never am, Kitty,’ was the reply, ‘and I endorse your suggestion. My belief is, that if I were to superintend the training of a half-witted girl from childhood, she would pass the average mark. But with such treatment as most girls still undergo, the wonder is they don’t all turn out Fidgfumblasquidiots.’