PUNCH OFFICE, LONDON
THE HARVARD CLASSICS SHELF OF FICTION
SELECTED BY CHARLES W ELIOT LL D
VANITY FAIR
VOLUME II
BY
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
EDITED WITH NOTES AND INTRODUCTIONS BY WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON PhD
P F COLLIER & SON COMPANY NEW YORK
Copyright, 191 7 By P. F. Collier & Son
MANUFACTURED IN U. S. A.
CONTENTS
VANITY FAIR, A NOVEL WITHOUT A HERO
PART n
CHAPTER PAQS
L How TO Live Well on Nothing a- Year .... 3
II. The Subject Continued 13
III. A Family in a Very Small Way 30
IV. A Cynical Chapter 46
V. In Which Becky Is Recognised by thb Family . 57
VI. In Which Becky Revisits the Halls op Her
Ancestors 67
VII. Which Treats op the Osborne Family .... 8t
VIII. In Which the Reader Has to Double the Cape . 90 IX. A Roundabout Chapter Between London and
Hampshire loi
X. Between Hampshire and London 113
XI. Struggles and Trials 1^4
XIL Gaunt House 134
XIII. In Which the Reader Is Introduced to the Very
Best of Company 144
XIV. In Which We Enjoy Three Courses and a Dessert 137 XV. Contains a Vulgar Incident 166
XVI. In Which a Charade Is Acted Which May or May
Not Puzzle the Reader 176
XVII. In Which Lord Steyne Shows Himself in a Most
Amiable Light 197
XVI II. A Rescue and a Catastrophe 209
XIX. Sunday After the Battle 2ig
XX. In Which the Same Subject Is Pursued . . . 209
XXI. Georgy Is Made a Gentleman 247
XXII, Eothen 261
XXIII. Our Friend the Major . « aji
XXIV. The Old Pu^sro . . . e 284
i
ii CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XXV. Returns to the Genteel World ..... 296
XXVI. In Which Two Lights Are Put Out .... 303
XXVII. Am Rhein 319
XXVIII. In Which We Meet an Old Acquaintance . . 331
XXIX. A Vagabond Chapter 344
XXX. Full of Business and Pleasure 362
XXXI. Amantium Irje 37i
XXXII. Which Contains Births^ Marriages, and Deaths 388
VANITY FAIR
PART II
CHAPTER I How TO Live Well on Nothing a- Year
I SUPPOSE there is no man in this Vanity Fair of ours so little observant as not to think sometimes about the v^orldly affairs of his acquaintances, or so extremely charitable as not to wonder how his neighbour Jones, or his neighbour Smith, can make both ends meet at the end of the year. With the utmost regard for the family, for instance (for I dine with them twice or thrice in the season), I cannot but own that the appearance of the Jenkinses in the Park, in the large barouche with the grenadier-footmen, will surprise and mystify me to my dy- ing day: for though I know the equipage is only jobbed, and all the Jenkins people are on board wages, yet those three men and the carriage must represent an expense of six hundred a-year at the very least — and then there are the splendid dinners, the two boys at Eton, the prize gover- ness and masters for the girls, the trip abroad, or to East- bourne or Worthing, in the autumn, the annual ball with a supper from Gunter's (who, by the way, supplies most of the first-rate dinners which J. gives, as I know very well, having been invited to one of them to fill a vacant place, when I saw at once that these repasts are very superior to the common run of entertainments for which the humbler sort of J 's acquaintances get cards) — who, I say, with the most good-natured feelings in the world, can help won- dering how the Jenkinses make out matters? What is Jenkins? We all know — Commissioner of the Taps and Sealing Wax Office, with £1200 a-year for a salary. Had
3
4 WILLIAAI MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
his wife a private fortune? Pooh — Miss FHnt — one of eleven children of a small squire in Buckinghamshire. All she ever gets from her family is a turkey at Christmas, in exchange for v^hich she has to board two or three of her sisters in the off season ; and lodge and feed her brothers when they come to town. How does Jenkins balance his income? I say, as every friend of his must say, How is it that he has not been outlawed long since; and that he ever came back (as he did to the surprise of everybody) last year from Boulogne?
"I" is here introduced to personify the world in general — the Mrs. Grundy of each respected reader's private circle — every one of whom can point to some families of his acquaintance who live nobody knows how. Many a glass of wine have we all of us drunk, I have very little doubt, hob-and-nobbing with the hospitable giver, and wondering how the deuce he paid for it.
Some three or four years after his stay in Paris, when Rawdon Crawley and his wife were established in a very small comfortable house in Curzon Street, May Fair, there was scarcely one of the numerous friends whom they enter- tained at dinner that did not ask the above question regard- ing them. The novelist, it has been said before, knows everything, and as I am in a situation to be able to tell the public how Crawley and his wife lived without any income, may I entreat the public newspapers which are in the habit of extracting portions of the various periodical works now published, not to reprint the following exact narrative and calculations — of which I ought, as the discoverer (and at some expense, too), to hare the benefit? My son, I would say, were I blessed with a child — ^>^ou may by deep inquiry and constant intercourse with him, learn how a man lives comfortably on nothing a-year. But it is best not to be intimate with gentlemen of this profession, and to take the calculations at second-hand, as you do logarithms, for to work them yourself, depend upon it, will cost you some- thing considerable.
On nothing per annum then, and during a course of some two or three years, of which we can afford to give but a very brief history, Crawley and his wife lived very hap-
VANITY PAIR 5
pily and comfortably at Paris. It was in this period that he quitted the Guards, and sold out of the army. When we find him again, his mustachios and the title of Colonel on his card are the only relics of his military profession.
It has been mentioned that Rebecca, soon after her ar- rival in Paris, took a very smart and leading position in the society of that capital, and was welcomed at some of the most distinguished houses of the restored French nobil- ity. The English men of fashion in Paris courted her, too, to the disgust of the ladies their wives, who could not bear the parvenue. For some months the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain, in which her place was secured, and the splendours of the new Court, where she was received with much distinction, delighted, and perhaps a little intoxicated Mrs. Crawley, who may have been disposed during this period of elation to slight the people — honest young military men mostly — who formed her husband's chief society.
But the Colonel yawned sadly among the duchesses and g^eat ladies of the Court. The old women who played icarte made such a noise about a five-franc piece, that it was not worth Colonel Crawley's while to sit down at a card-table. The wit of their conversation he could not ap- preciate, being ignorant of their language. And what good could his wife get, he urged, by making curtsies every night to a whole circle of Princesses? He left Rebecca pres- ently to frequent these parties alone; resuming his own simple pursuits and amusements amongst the amiable friends of his own choice.
The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he lives elegantly on nothing a-year, we use the word "nothing" to signify something unknowTi; meaning, simply, that we don't know how the gentleman in question defrays the ex- penses of his establishment. Now, our friend the Colonel had a great aptitude for all games of chance: and exercis- ing himself, as he continually did, with the cards, the dice- box, or the cue, it is natural to suppose that he attained a much greater skill in the use of these articles than men can possess who only occasionally handle them. To use a cue at billiards well is like using a pencil, or a German flute, or a small-sword — ^you camiot master any one of these
e WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
implements at first, and it is only by repeated study and perseverance, joined to a natural taste, that a man can excel in the handling of either. Now Crawley, from being only a brilliant amateur, had grown to be a consummate master of billiards. Like a great general, his genius used to rise with the danger, and when the luck had been unfa- vourable to him for a whole game, and the bets were con- sequently against him, he would, with consummate skill and boldness, make some prodigious hits which would re- store the battle, and come in a victor at the end, to the astonishment of everybody — of everybody, that is, who was a stranger to his play. Those who were accustomed to see it were cautious how they staked their money against a man of such sudden resources, and brilliant and over- powering skill.
At games of cards he was equally skilful; for though he would constantly lose money at the commencement of an evening, playing so carelessly and making such blunders, that new comers were often inclined to think meanly of his talent; yet when roused to action, and awakened to cau- tion by repeated small losses, it was remarked that Craw- ley's play became quite different, and that he was pretty sure of beating his enemy thoroughly before the night was over. Indeed, very few men could say that they ever had the better of him.
His successes were so repeated that no wonder the envi- ous and the vanquished spoke sometimes with bitterness regarding them. And as the French say of the Duke of Wellington, who never suffered a defeat, that only an as- tonishing series of lucky accidents enabled him to be an invariable winner; yet even they allow that he cheated at Waterloo, and was enabled to win the last great trick: — so it was hinted at head-quarters in England, that some foul play must have taken place in order to account for the continuous successes of Colonel Crawley.
Though Frascati's and the Salon were open at that time in Paris, the mania for play was so widely spread, that the public gambling-rooms did not suffice for the general ar- dour, and gambling went on in private houses as much as if there had been no public means for gratifying the pas-
VANITY FAIR 1
sion. At Crawley's charming little reunions of an evening this fatal amusement commonly was practised — much to good-natured little Mrs. Crawley's annoyance. She spoke about her husband's passion for dice with the deepest grief; she bewailed it to everybody who came to her house. She besought the young fellows never, never to touch a box; and when young Green, of the Rifles, lost a very considerable sum of money, Rebecca passed a whole night in tears, as the servant told the unfortunate young gentle- man, and actually went on her knees to her husband to be- seech him to remit the debt, and burn the acknowledgment. How could he? He had lost just as much himself to Blackstone of the Hussars, and Count Punter of the Han- overian Cavalry. Green might have any decent time; but pay? — of course he must pay; to talk of burning I O U's was child's-play.
Other officers, chiefly young — for the young fellows gathered round Mrs. Crawley — came from her parties with long faces, having dropped more or less money at her fatal card-tables. Her house began to have an unfortunate repu- tation. The old hands warned the less experienced of their danger. Colonel O'Dowd, of the — th regiment, one of those occupying in Paris, warned Lieutenant Spooney of that corps. A loud and violent fracas took place be- tween the infantry-colonel and his lady, who were dining at the Cafe de Paris, and Colonel and Mrs. Crawley, who were also taking their meal there. The ladies engaged on both sides. Mrs. O'Dowd snapped her fingers in Mrs. Crawley's face, and called her husband "no betther than a black-leg." Colonel Crawley challenged Colonel O'Dowd, C.B. The Commander-in-Chief hearing of the dispute sent for Colonel Crawley, who was getting ready the same pis- tols "which he shot Captain Marker," and had such a con- versation with him that no duel took place. If Rebecca had not gone on her knees to General Tufto, Crawley would have been sent back to England; and he did not play, except with civilians, for some weeks after.
But, in spite of Rawdon's undoubted skill and constant successes, it became evident to Rebecca, considering these things, that their position was but a precarious on§, and
8 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
that, even although they paid scarcely anybody, their little capital would end one day by dwindling into zero. "Gam- bling," she would say, "dear, is good to help your income, but not as an income itself. Some day people may be tired of play, and then where are we?" Rawdon acquiesced in the justice of her opinion; and in truth he had remarked that after a few nights of his little suppers, &c., gentle- men were tired of play with him, and, in spite of Rebecca's charms, did not present themselves very eagerly.
Easy and pleasant as their life at Paris was, it was after all only an idle dalliance and amiable trifling; and Rebecca saw that she must push Rawdon's fortune in their own country. She must get him a place or appointment at home or in the colonies; and she determined to make a move upon England as soon as the way could be cleared for her. As a first step she had made Crawley sell out of the Guards, and go on half -pay. His function as aide-de- camp to General Tufto had ceased previously. Rebecca laughed in all companies at that officer, at his toupee (which he mounted on coming to Paris), at his waistband, at his false teeth, at his pretensions to be a lady-killer above all, and his absurd vanity in fancying every woman whom he came near was in love with him. It was to Mrs. Brent, the beetle-browed wife of Mr. Commissary Brent, to whom the General transferred his attentions now — his bouquets, his dinners at the restaurateurs', his opera-boxes, and his knick-knacks. Poor Mrs. Tufto was no more happy than before, and had still to pass long evenings alone with her daughters, knowing that her General was gone off scented and curled to stand behind Mrs. Brent's chair at the play. Becky had a dozen admirers in his place to be sure; and could cut her rival to pieces with her wit. But, as we have said, she was growing tired of this idle social life: opera-boxes and restaurateur-dinners palled upon her: nose- gays could not be laid by a provision for future years: and she could not live upon knick-knacks, laced handkerchiefs, and kid gloves. She felt the frivolity of pleasure, and longed for more substantial benefits.
At this juncture news arrived which was spread among the many creditors of the Colonel at Paris, and which
VANITY FAIB 9
caused them great satisfaction. Miss Crawley, the rich aunt from whom he expected his immense inheritance, was dying; the Colonel must haste to her bedside. Mrs. Craw- ley and her child would remain behind unti he came to reclaim them. He departed for Calais, and having reached that place in safety, it might have been supposed that he went to Dover ; but instead he took the diligence to Dun- kirk, and thence travelled to Brussels, for which place he had a former predilection. The fact is, he owed more money at London than at Paris; and he preferred the quiet little Belgian city to either of the more noisy capitals.
Her aunt was dead. Mrs. Crawley ordered the most intense mourning for herself and little Rawdon. The Col- onel was busy arranging the affairs of the inheritance. They could take the premier now, instead of the little en- tresol of the hotel which they occupied. Mrs. Crawley and the landlord had a consultation about the new hang- ings, an amicable wrangle about the carpets, and a final adjustment of everything except the bill. She went off in one of his carriages; her French bonne with her; the child by her side; the admirable landlord and landlady smiling farewell to her from the gate. General Tufto was furious when he heard she was gone, and Mrs. Brent furious with him for being furious; Lieutenant Spooney was cut to the heart; and the landlord got ready his best apartments pre- vious to the return of the fascinating little woman and her husband. He served the trunks which she left in his charge with the greatest care. They had been especially recom- mended to him by Madame Crawley. They were not, how- ever, found to be particularly valuable when opened some time after.
But before she went to join her husband in the Belgic capital, Mrs. Crawley made an expedition into England, leaving behind her her little son upon the continent, under the care of her French maid.
The parting between Rebecca and the little Rawdon did not cause either party much pain. She had not, to say truth, seen much of the young gentleman since his birth. After the amiable fashion of French mothers, she had placed him out at nurse in a village in the neighbourhood
10 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
of Paris, where little Rawdon passed the first months of his life, not unhappily, with a numerous family of foster- brothers in wooden shoes. His father would ride over many a time to see him here, and the elder P.awdon's paternal heart glowed to see him rosy and dirty, shouting lustily, and happy in the making of mud-pies under the superintendence of the gardener's wife, his nurse.
Rebecca did not care much to go and see the son and heir. Once he spoiled a new dove-coloured pelisse of hers. He preferred his nurse's caresses to his mamma's, and when finally he quitted that jolly nurse and almost parent, he cried loudly for hours. He was only consoled by his mother's promise that he should return to his nurse the next day; indeed the nurse herself, who probably would have been pained at the parting too, was told that the child would immediately be restored to her, and for some time awaited quite anxiously his return.
In fact, our friends may be said to have been among the first of that brood of hardy English adventurers who have subsequently invaded the Continent, and swindled in all the capitals of Europe. The respect in those happy days of 1817-18 was very great for the wealth and honour of Britons. They had not then learned, as I am told, to hag- gle for bargains with the pertinacity which now distin- guishes them. The great cities of Europe had not been as yet open to the enterprise of our rascals. And whereas there is now hardly a town of France or Italy in which you shall not see some noble countrym.an of our own, with that happy swagger and insolence of demeanour which we carry everywhere, swindling inn-landlords, passing fictitious cheques upon credulous bankers, robbing coach-makers of their carriage, goldsmiths of their trinkets, easy travellers of their money at cards, — even public libraries of their books: — thirty years ago you needed but to be a Milor Anglais, travelling in a private carriage, and credit was at your hand wherever you chose to seek it, and gentlemen, instead of cheating, were cheated. It was not for some weeks after the Crawleys' departure that the landlord of the hotel which they occupied during their residence at Paris, found out the losses which he had sustained; not
VANITY FAIR 11
until Madame Marabou, the milliner, made repeated visits, with her little bill for articles supplied to Madame Craw- ley; not until Monsieur Didelot from Boule d'Or in the Palais Royal had asked half-a-dozen times whether cette charmante Miladi who had bought watches and bracelets of him was de retour. It is a fact that even the poor gar- dener's wife, who had nursed Madame's child, was never paid after the first six months for that supply of the milk of human kindness with which she had furnished the lusty and healthy little Rawdon. No, not even the nurse was paid — the Crawleys were in too great a hurry to remember their trifling debt to her. As for the landlord of the hotel, his curses against the English nation were violent for the rest of his natural life. He asked all travellers whether they knew a certain Colonel Lor Crawley — avec sa femme — une petite dame, tres spirituelle. "Ah, Monsieur!" he would add — 'His m'ont affreusement vole" It was melan- choly to hear his accents as he spoke of that catastrophe.
Rebecca's object in her journey to London was to effect a kind of compromise with her husband's numerous credi- tors, and by offering them a dividend of ninepence or a shilling in the pound, to secure a return for him into his own country. It does not become us to trace the steps which she took in the conduct of this most difficult negoti- ation; but, having shown them to their satisfaction, that the sum which she was empowered to offer was all her husband's available capital, and having convinced them that Colonel Crawley would prefer a perpetual retirement on the Continent to a residence In this country with his debts unsettled; having proved to them that there was no possibility of money accruing to him from other quarters, and no earthly chance of their getting a larger dividend than that which she was empowered to offer, she brought the Colonel's creditors unanimously to accept her proposals, and purchased with fifteen hundred pounds of ready money, more than ten times that amount of debts.
Mrs. Crawley employed no lawyer in the transaction. The matter was so simple, to have or to leave, as she justly observed, that she made the lawyers of the creditors them- selves do the business. And Mr, Lewis representing Mr,
12 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Davids, of Red Lion Square, and Mr. Moss acting for Mr. Manassch of Cursitor Street (chief creditors of the Col- onel's), complimented his lady upon the brilliant way in which she did business, and declared that there was no professional man who could beat her.
Rebecca received their congratulations with perfect mod- esty; ordered a bottle of sherry and a bread cake to the little dingy lodgings where she dwelt, while conducting the business, to treat the enemy's lawyers: shook hands with them at parting, in excellent good humour, and returned straightway to the Continent, to rejoin her husband and son, and acquaint the former with the glad news of his entire liberation. As for the latter, he had been consider- ably neglected during his mother's absence by Mademoi- selle Genevieve, her French maid; for that young woman, contracting an attachment for a soldier in the garrison of Calais, forgot her charge in the society of this militaire, and little Rawdon very narrowly escaped drowning on Calais sands at this period, where the absent Genevieve had left and lost him.
And so, Colonel and Mrs, Crawley came to London: and it is at their house in Curzon Street, May Fair, that they really showed the skill which must be possessed by those who would live on the resources above named
CHAPTER II The Subject Continued
IN th« first place, and as a matter of the greatest neces- sity, we are bound to describe how a house may be got for nothing a-year. These mansions are to be had either unfurnished, where, if you have credit with Messrs. Gillows or Bantings, you can get them splendidly montees and decorated entirely according to your own fancy ; or they are to be let furnished; a less troublesome and complicated arrangement to most parties. It was so that Crawley and his wife preferred to hire their house.
Before Mr. Bowls came to preside over Miss Crawley's house and cellar in Park Lane, that lady had had for a butler a Mr. Raggles, who was born on the family estate of Queen's Crawley, and indeed was a younger son of a gardener there. By good conduct, a handsome person and calves, and a grave demeanour, Raggles rose from the knife-board to the foot-board of the carriage; from the foot-board to the butler's pantry. When he had been a certain number of years at the head of Miss Crawley's es- tablishment, where he had had good wages, fat perquisites, and plenty of opportunities of saving, he announced that he was about to contract a matrimonial alliance with a late cook of Miss Crawley's, who had subsisted in an honour- able manner by the exercise of a mangle, and the keeping of a small greengrocer's shop in the neighbourhood. The truth is, that the ceremony had been clandestinely per- formed some years back; although the news of Mr. Rag- gles' marriage was first brought to Miss Crawley by a little boy and girl of seven and eight years of age, whose con- tinual presence in the kitchen had attracted the attention of Miss Briggs.
Mr. Raggles then retired and personally undertook the superintendence of the small shop and the greens. He added m.ilk and cream, eggs and country- fed pork to his
13
U WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Stores, contenting himself, whilst other retired butlers were vending spirits in public-houses, by dealing in the simplest country produce. And having a good connection amongst the butlers in the neighbourhood, and a snug back parlour v^^here he and Mrs. Haggles received them, his milk, cream, and eggs got to be adopted by many of the fraternity, and his profits increased every year. Year after year he quietly and modestly amassed money, and when at length that snug and complete bachelor's residence at No. 201, Curzon Street, May Fair, late the residence of the Honourable Frederick Deuceace, gone abroad, v/ith its rich and appropriate furni- ture by the first makers, was brought to the hammer, who should go in and purchase the lease and furniture of the house but Charles Raggles? A part of the money he bor- rowed, it is true, and at rather a high interest, from a brother butler, but the chief part he paid down, and it was with no small pride that Mrs. Raggles found herself sleeping in a bed of carved mahogany, with silk curtains, with a prodigious cheval glass opposite to her, and a wardrobe which would contain her, and Raggles, and all the family.
Of course, they did not intend to occupy permanently an apartment so splendid. It was in order to let the house again that Raggles purchased it. As soon as a tenant was found he subsided into the greengrocer's shop once more ; but a happy thing it was for him to walk out of that tenement and into Curzon Street, and there survey his house — his own house — with geraniums in the window and a carved bronze knocker. The footman occasionally lounging at the area railing, treated him with respect; the cook took her green stuff at his house and called him Mr. Landlord; and there was not one thing the tenants did, or one dish which they had for dinner, that Raggles might not know of, if he liked.
He was a good man ; good and happy. The house brought him in so handsome a yearly income, that he was determined to send his children to good schools, and accordingly, regard- less of expense, Charles was sent to boarding at Dr. Swish- tail's, Sugar-cane Lodge, and little Matilda to Miss Peck- over's, Laurentinum House, Clapham.
Raggles loved and adored the Crawley family as the author of all his prosperity in life. He had a silhouette of his mis*
VANITY FAIR 15
trcis in his back shop, and a drawing of the Porter's Lodge at Queen's Crawley, done by that spinster herself in India ink-^and the only addition he made to the decorations of the Curaon Street House was a print of Queen's Crawley in Hampshire, the seat of Sir Walpole Crawley, Baronet, who was represented in a gilded car drawn by six white horses, and passing by a lake covered with swans, and barges con- taining ladies in hoops, and musicians with flags and periwigs. Indeed Raggles thought there was no such palace in all the world and no such august family.
As luck would have it, Raggles' house in Curzon Street was to let when Rawdon and his wife returned to London. The Colonel knew it and its owner quite well; the latter's connexion with the Crawley family had been kept up con- stantly, for Raggles helped Mr. Bowls whenever Miss Craw- ley received friends. And the old man not only let his house to the Colonel, but officiated as his butler whenever he had company; Mrs. Raggles operating in the kitchen below, and sending up dinners of which old Miss Crawley herself might have approved. This was the way, then, Crawley got his house for nothing ; for though Raggles had to pay taxes and rates, and the interest of the mortgage to the brother butler ; and the insurance of his life ; and the charges for his children at school; and the value of the meat and drink which his own family — and for a time that of Colonel Crawley too — consumed ; and though the poor wretch was utterly ruined by the transaction, his children being flung on the streets and himself driven into the Fleet Prison ; yet somebody must pay even for gentlemen who live for nothing a-year — and so it was this unlucky Raggles was made the representative of Colonel Crawley's defective capital.
I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawley's way? — how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums, and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house — and that one or other owes six or seven millions, the defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim in the vastness of his ruin.
16 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
But who pities a poor barber who can*t get his money for powderinof the footman's heads ; or a poor carpenter who has ruined himself by fixing up ornaments and pavilions for my lady's dejeuner; or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronises, and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries ready, which my lord has done him the honour to bespeak? — When the great house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed: as they say in the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.
Rawdon and his wife generously gave their patronage to all such of Miss Crawley's tradesmen and purveyors as chose to serve them. Some were willing enough, especially the poor ones. It was wonderful to see the pertinacity with which the washerwoman from Tooting brought the cart every Saturday, and her bills week after week. Mr. Haggles himself had to supply the greengroceries. The bill for servants' porter at the Fortune of War public-house is a curiosity in the chron- icles of beer. Every servant also was owed the greater part of his wages, and thus kept up perforce an interest in the house. Nobody in fact was paid. Not the blacksmith who opened the lock; nor the glazier who mended the pane; nor the jobber who let the carriage ; nor the groom who drove it; nor the butcher who provided the leg of mutton ; nor the coals which roasted it ; nor the cook who basted it ; nor the servants who ate it; and this I am given to understand is not unfre- quently the way in which people live elegantly on nothing a-year.
In a little town such things cannot be done without re- mark. We know there the quantity of milk our neighbour takes, and espy the joint or the fowls which are going in for his dinner. So, probably, 200 and 202 in Curzon Street might know what was going on in the house between them, the servants communicating through the area-railings; but Crawley and his wife and his friends did not know 200 and 202. When you came to 201 there was a hearty welcome, and a kind smile, a good dinner, and a jolly shake of the hand from the host and hostess there, just for all the world as if they had been undisputed masters of three or four thousand a-year — and so they were not in money, but in produce and
VANITY FAIR 17
labour — if they did not pay for the mutton, they had it: if they did not give bullion in exchange for their wine, how should we know ? Never was better claret at any man's table than at honest Rawdon's; dinners more gay and neatly served. His drawing-rooms were the prettiest, little, modest salons conceivable : they were decorated with the greatest taste, and a thousand knick-knacks from Paris, by Rebecca: and when she sate at her piano trilling songs with a lightsome heart, the stranger voted himself in a little paradise of domestic comfort, and agreed that, if the husband was rather stupid, the wife was charming, and the dinners the pleasantest in the world- Rebecca's wit, cleverness, and flippancy, made her speedily the vogue in London among a certain class. You saw demure chariots at her door, out of which stepped very great people. You beheld her carriage in the Park, surrounded by dandies of note- The little box in the third tier of the Opera was crowded with heads constantly changing ; but it must be con- fessed that the ladies held aloof from her, and that their doors were shut to our little adventurer.
With regard to the world of female fashion and its cus- toms, the present writer of course can only speak at second hand. A man can no more penetrate or understand those mysteries than he can know what the ladies talk about when they go upstairs after dinner. It is only by inquiry and per- severance, that one sometimes gets hints of those secrets; and by a similar diligence every person who treads the Pall Mall pavement and frequents the clubs of this metropolis, knows, either through his own experience or through some acquaintance with whom he plays at billiards or shares the joint, something about the genteel world of London, and how, as there are men (such as Rawdon Crawley, whose position we mentioned before), who cut a good figure to the eyes of the ignorant world and to the apprentices in the Park, who behold them consorting with the most notorious dandies there, so there are the ladies, who may be called men's women, being welcomed entirely by all the gentlemen, and cut or slighted by all their wives. Mrs. Firebrace is of this sort ; the lady with the beautiful fair ringlets whom you see every day in Hyde Park, surrounded by the greatest and most
18 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
famous dandies of this empire. Mrs. Rockwood is another, whose parties are announced laboriously in the fashionable newspapers, and with whom you see that all sorts of ambas- sadors and great noblemen dine; and many more might be mentioned had they to do with the history at present in hand. But while simple folks who are out of the world, or country people with a taste for the genteel, behold these ladies in their seeming glory in public places, or envy them from afar off, persons who are better instructed could inform them that these envied ladies have no more chance of establishing them- selves in ''Society," than the benighted squire's wife in Som- ersetshire, who reads of their doings in the Morning Post. Men living about London are aware of these awful truths. You hear how pitilessly many ladies of seeming rank and wealth are excluded from this "Society." The frantic efforts which they make to enter this circle, the meannesses to which they submit, the insults which they undergo, are matters of wonder to those who take human or womankind for a study ; and the pursuit of fashion under difficulties would be a fine theme for any very great person who had the wit, the leisure, and the knowledge of the English language necessary for the compiling of such a history.
Now the few female acquaintances whom Mrs. Crawley had known abroad, not only declined to visit her when she came to this side of the channel, but cut her severely when they met in public places. It was curious to see how the great ladies forgot her, and no doubt not altogether a pleasant study to Rebecca. When Lady Bareacres met her in the waiting- room at the Opera, she gathered her daughters about her as if they would be contaminated by a touch of Becky, and re- treating a step or two, placed herself in front of them, and stared at her little enemy. To stare Becky out of counte- nance required a severer glance than even the frigid old Bare- acres could shoot out of her dismal eyes. When Lady de la Mole, who had ridden a score of times by Becky's side at Brussels, met Mrs. Crawley's open carriage in Hyde Park, her Ladyship was quite blind, and could not in the least rec- ognise her former friend. Even Mrs. Blenkinsop, the bank- er's wife, cut her at church. Becky went regularly to church now ; it was edifying to see her enter there with Rawdon by
VANITY FAIR W
her side, carrying a couple of large gilt prayer-books, and afterwards going through the ceremony with the gravest resignation.
Rawdon at first felt very acutely the slights which were passed upon his wife, and was inclined to be gloomy and savage. He talked of calling out the husbands or brothers of every one of the insolent women who did not pay a proper respect to his wife; and it was only by the strong- est commands and entreaties on her part, that he was brought into keeping a decent behaviour. "You can't shoot me into society," she said, good-naturedly. "Re- member, my dear, that I was but a governess, and you, you poor silly old man, have the worst reputation for debt, and dice, and all sorts of wickedness. We shall get quite as many friends as we want by and by, and in the mean- while you must be a good boy, and obey your schoolmis- tress in everything she tells you to do. When we heard ihat your aunt had left almost everything to Pitt and his wife, do you remember what a rage you were in? You would have told all Paris, if I had not made you keep your temper, and where would you have been now? — in prison at Ste. Pelagie for debt, and not established in London in a handsome house, with every comfort about you — ^you were in such a fury you were ready to murder your brother, you wicked Cain you, and what good would have come of remaining angry? All the rage in the world won't get us your aunt's money; and it is much better that we should be friends with your brother's family than enemies, as those foolish Butes are. When your father dies. Queen's Crawley will be a pleasant house for you and me to pass the winter in. If we are ruined, you can carve and take charge of the stable, and I can be a governess to Lady Jane's children. Ruined! fiddlededee! I will get you a good place before that; or Pitt and his little boy will die, and we will be Sir Rawdon and my lady. While there is life, there is hope, my dear, and I intend to make a man of you yet. Who sold your horses for you? Who paid your debts for you?" Rawdon was obliged to confess that he owed all these benefits to his wife, and to trust himself to her guidance for the future.
20 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Indeed, when Miss Crawley quitted the world, and that money for which all her relatives had been fighting so eagerly was finally left to Pitt, Bute Crawley, who fotmd that only five thousand pounds had been left to him in- stead of the twenty upon which he calculated, was in such a fury at his disappointment, that he vented it in savage abuse upon his nephew; and the quarrel always rankling between them ended in an utter breach of intercourse. Rawdon Crawley*s conduct, on the other hand, who got but a hundred pounds, was such as to astonish his brother and delight his sister-in-law, who was disposed to look kindly upon all the members of her husband's family. He wrote to his brother a very frank, manly, good-humoured letter from Paris. He was aware, he said, that by his own marriage he had forfeited his aunt's favour; and though he did not disguise his disappointment that she should have been so entirely relentless towards him, he was glad that the money was still kept in their branch of the fam- ily, and heartily congratulated his brother on his good for- tune. He sent his affectionate remembrances to his sister, and hoped to have her good-will for Mrs. Rawdon; and the letter concluded with a postscript to Pitt in the latter lady's own handwriting. She, too, begged to join in her husband's congratulations. She should ever remember Mr. Crawley's kindness to her in early days when she was a friendless orphan, the instructress of his little sisters, in whose welfare she still took the tenderest interest. She wished him every happiness in his married life, and, ask- ing his permission to offer her remembrances to Lady Jane (of whose goodness all the world informed her), she hoped that one day she might be allowed to present her little boy to his uncle and aunt, and begged to bespeak for him their good-will and protection.
Pitt Crawley received this communication very graciously — more graciously than Miss Crawley had received some of Rebecca's previous compositions in Rawdon's handwriting; and as for Lady Jane, she was so charmed with the letter, that she expected her husband would instantly divide his aunt's legacy into two equal portions, and send off one-half to his brother at Paris.
VANITY FAIR 21
To her ladyship's surprise, however, Pitt declined to ac- commodate his brother with a cheque for thirty thousand pounds. But he made Rawdon a handsome offer of his hand whenever the latter should come to England and choose to take it; and, thanking Mrs. Crawley for her good opinion of himself and Lady Jane, he graciously pro- nounced his willingness to take any opportunity to serve her little boy.
Thus an almost reconciliation was brought about between the brothers. When Rebecca came to town Pitt and his wife were not in London. Many a time she drove by the old door in Park Lane to see whether they had taken pos- session of Miss Crawley's house there. But the new fam- ily did not make its appearance; it was only through Rag- gles that she heard of their movements — how Miss Craw- ley's domestic had been dismissed with decent gratuities, and how Mr. Pitt had only once made his appearance in London, when he stopped for a few days at the house, did business with his lawyers there, and sold off all Miss Crawley's French novels to a bookseller out of Bond Street Becky had reasons of her own which caused her to long for the arrival of her new relation. "WHien Lady Jane comes," thought she, "she shall be my sponsor in London society ; and as for the women ! bah ! the women will ask me when they find the men want to see me."
An article as necessary to a lady in this position as her brougham or her bouquet, is her companion. I have al- ways admired the way in which the tender creatures, who cannot exist without sympathy, hire an exceedingly plain friend of their own sex from whom they are almost insep- arable. The sight of that inevitable woman in her faded gown seated behind her dear friend in the opera-box, or occupying the back seat of the barouche, is always a whole- some and moral one to me, as jolly as a reminder as that of the Death's-head which figured in the repasts of Egyptian hon-vivants, a strange sardonic memorial of Vanity Fair, What? — even battered, brazen, beautiful, conscienceless, heartless, Mrs. Firebrace, whose father died of her shame: even lovely, daring Mrs. Mantrap, who will ride at any
22 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
fence which any man in England will take, and who drives her greys in the Park, while her mother keeps a huckster's stall in Bath still; — even those who are so bold, one might fancy they could face anything, dare not face the world without a female friend. They must have somebody to cling to, the affectionate creatures ! And you will hardly see them in any public place without a shabby companion in a dyed silk, sitting somewhere in the shade close behind them.
"Rawdon," said Becky, very late one night, as a party of gentlemen were seated round her crackling drawing- room fire (for the men came to her house to finish the night; and she had ice and coffee for them, the best in London) : "1 must have a sheep-dog."
"A what ?" said Rawdon, looking up from an ecarte table.
"A sheep-dog!" said young Lord Southdown. "My dear Mrs. Crawley, what a fancy ! Why not have a Danish dog? I know of one as big as a camel-leopard, by Jove. It would almost pull your brougham. Or a Persian grey- hound, eh? (I propose, if you please) ; or a little pug that would go into one of Lord Steyne's snuff-boxes. There's a man at Bayswater got one with such a nose that you might, — I mark the king and play, — that you might hang your hat on it."
*T mark the trick," Rawdon gravely said. He attended to his game commonly, and didn't much meddle with the conversation except when it was about horses and betting.
"What can you want with a shepherd's dog?" the lively little Southdown continued.
"I mean a moral shepherd's dog," said Becky, laughing, and looking up at Lord Steyne.
"What the devil's that ?" said his Lordship.
"A dog to keep the wolves off me," Rebecca continued. "A companion."
"Dear little innocent lamb, you want one," said the Marquis; and his jaw thrust out, and he began to grin hideously, his little eyes leering towards Rebecca.
The great Lord Steyne was standing by the fire sipping coffee. The fire crackled and blazed pleasantly. There was a score of candles sparkling around the mantlepiece, in
VANITY FAIR 2S
all sorts of quaint sconces, of gilt and bronze and porce- lain. They lighted up Rebecca's figure to admiration, as she sate on a sofa covered with a pattern of gaudy flowers. She was in a pink dress, that looked as fresh as a rose; her dazzling white arms and shoulders were half-covered with a thin hazy scarf through which they sparkled; her hair hung in curls round her neck; one of her little feet peeped out from the fresh crisp folds of the silk: the prettiest little foot in the prettiest little sandal in the finest silk stocking in the world.
The candles lighted up Lord Steyne's shining bald head, which was fringed with red hair. He had thick bushy eyebrows, with little twinkling bloodshot eyes, surrounded by a thousand wrinkles. His jaw was underhung, and when he laughed, two white buck-teeth protruded them- selves and glistened savagely in the midst of the grin. He had been dining with royal personages, and wore his garter and ribbon. A short man was his Lordship, broad-chested, and bow-legged, but proud of the fineness of his foot and ancle, and always caressing his garter-knee.
**And so the Shepherd is not enough," said he, "to de- fend his lambkin?"
"The Shepherd is too fond of playing at cards and going to his clubs," answered Becky, laughing.
" 'Gad, what a debauched Corydon !" said my lord — "what a mouth for a pipe !"
"I take your three to two," here said Rawdon, at the card-table.
"Hark at Meliboeus," snarled the noble Marquis; "he*s pastorally occupied too: he's shearing a Southdown. What an innocent mutton, hey ? Damme, what a snowy fleece !"
Rebecca's eyes shot out gleams of scornful humour. "My lord," she said, "you are a knight of the Order." He had the collar round his neck, indeed— a gift of the restored Princes of Spain.
Lord Steyne in early life had been notorious for his dar- ing and his success at play. He had sat up two days and two nights with Mr. Fox at hazard. He had won money of the most august personages of the realm: he had won his marquisate, it was said, at the gaming-table; but he
24 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
did not like an allusion to those bygone fredaines. Re- becca saw the scowl gathering over his heavy brow.
She rose up from her sofa, and went and took his cofifee cup out of his hand with a little curtsey. "Yes/* she said, "I must get a watchdog. But he won't bark at you'' And, going into the other drawing-room, she sate down to the piano, and began to sing little French songs in such a charming, thrilling voice, that the mollified nobleman speedily followed her into that chamber, and might be seen nodding his head and bowing time over her.
Rawdon and his friend meanwhile played ecarte until they had enough. The Colonel won; but, say that he won ever so much and often, nights like these, which occurred many times in the week — his wife having all the talk and all the admiration, and he sitting silent without the circle, not comprehending a word of the jokes, the allusions, the mystical language within — must have been rather weari- some to the ex-dragoon.
"How is Mrs. Crawley*s husband?" Lord Steyne used to say to him by way of a good day when they met: and indeed that was now his avocation in life. He was Colonel Crawley no more. He was Mrs. Crawley's husband.
About the little Rawdon, if nothing has been said all this while, it is because he is hidden upstairs in a garret somewhere, or has crawled below into the kitchen for companionship. His mother scarcely ever took notice of him.
He passed the days with his French bonne as long as that domestic remained in Mr. Crawley's family, and when the Frenchwoman went away, the little fellow, howling in the loneliness of the night, had compassion taken on him by a housemaid, who took him out of his solitary nursery into her bed in the garret hard by, and comforted him.
Rebecca, my Lord Steyne, and one or two more were in the drawing-room taking tea after the Opera, when this shouting was heard overhead "It's my cherub crying for his nurse," she said. She did not offer to move to go and see the child. "Don't agitate your feelings by going to look for him," said Lord Steyne sardonically. "Bahl"
VANITY FAIR 35
replied the other, with a sort of blush, "he'll cry himself to sleep;" and they fell to talking about the Opera.
Rawdon had stolen off though, to look after his son and heir; and came back to the company when he found that honest Dolly was consoling the child. The Colonel's dress- ing room was in those upper regions. He used to see the boy there in private. They had interviews together every morning when he shaved; Rawdon minor sitting on a box by his father's side and watching the operation with never- ceasing pleasure. He and the sire were great friends. The father would bring him sweetmeats from the dessert, and hide them in a certain old epaulet box, where the child went to seek them, and laughed with joy on discovering the treasure; laughed, but not too loud: for mamma was below asleep and must not be disturbed. She did not go to rest till very late, and seldom rose till after noon.
Rawdon bought the boy plenty of picture-books, and crammed his nursery with toys. Its walls were covered with pictures pasted up by the father's own hand, and purchased by him for ready money. When he was off duty with Mrs, Rawdon in the Park, he would sit up here, passing hours with the boy; who rode on his chest, who pulled his great mustachios as if they were driving-reins, and spent days with him in indefatigable gambols. The room was a low room, and once, when the child was not five years old, his father, who was tossing him wildly up in his arms, hit the poor little chap's skull so violently against the ceiling that he almost dropped the child, so terrified was he at the disaster.
Rawdon minor had made up his face for a tremendous howl — the severity of the blow indeed authorized that indul- gence; but just as he was going to begin, the father inter- posed.
"For God's sake, Rawdy, don't wake mamma," he cried. And the child, looking in a very hard and piteous way at his father, bit his lips, clenched his hands, and didn't cry a bit. Rawdon told that story at the clubs, at the mess, to every- body in town, "By Gad, sir," he explained to the public in general, "what a good plucked one that boy of mine is — what a trump he is ! — I half sent his head through the ceil*
S6 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
ing, by Gad, and he wouldn't cry for fear of disturbing his mother."
Sometimes — once or twice in a week — that lady visited the upper regions in which the child lived. She came like a vivified figure out of the Magasin des Modes — blandly smiling in the most beautiful new clothes and little gloves and boots. Wonderful scarfs, laces, and jewels glittered about her. She had always a new bonnet on: and flowers bloomed perpetually in it: or else magnificent curling ostrich feathers, soft and snowy as camellias. She nodded twice or thrice patronisingly to the little boy, who looked up from his dinner or from the pictures of soldiers he was painting. When she left the room, an odour of rose, or some other magical fragrance, lingered about the nursery. She was an unearthly being in his eyes, superior to his father — to all the world: to be worshipped and admired at a distance.
To drive with that lady in the carriage was an awful rite : he sate up in the back seat, and did not dare to speak : he gazed with all his eyes at the beautifully dressed princess opposite to him. Gentlemen on splendid prancing horses came up and smiled and talked with her. How her eyes beamed upon all of theml Her hand used to quiver and wave gracefully as they passed. When he went out with her he had his new red dress on. His old hrown holland was good enough when he stayed at home. Some- times, when she was away, and Dolly his maid was making his bed, he came into his mother's room. It was as the abode of a fairy to him — a mystic chamber of splendour and delights. There in the wardrobe hung those wonderful robes — pink and blue, and many-tinted. There was the jewel-case, silver-clasped: and the wondrous bronze hand on the dressing-table, glistening all over with a hundred rings. There was the cheval-glass, that miracle of art, in which he could just see his own wondering head, and the reflection of Dolly (queerly distorted, and as if up in the ceiling), plump- ing and patting the pillows of the bed. O, thou poor lonely little benighted boy! Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children; and here was one who was worshipping a stone.
VANITY FAIR 27
Now Rawdon Crawley, rascal as the Colonel was, had certain manly tendencies of affection in his heart, and could love a child and a woman still. For Rawdon minor he had a great secret tenderness then, which did not escape Rebecca, though she did not talk about it to her husband. It did not annoy her : she was too good-natured. It only increased her scorn for him. He felt somehow ashamed of this pa- ternal softness, and hid it from his wife — only indulging in it when alone with the boy.
He used to take him out of mornings when they would go to the stables together and to the Park. Little Lord Southdown, the best-natured of men, who would make you a present of the hat from his head, and whose main occu- pation in life was to buy knick-knacks that he might give them away afterwards, bought the little chap a pony not much bigger than a large rat, the donor said, and on this little black Shetland pigmy young Rawdon's great father was pleased to mount the boy, and to walk by his side in the Park.
It pleased him to see his old quarters, and his old fel- low-guardsmen at Knightsbridge : he had begun to think of his bachelorhood with something like regret. The old troopers were glad to recognize their ancient officer, and dandle the little Colonel. Colonel Crawley found dining at mess and with his brother-officers very pleasant. "Hang it, I ain't clever enough for her — I know it. She won't miss me," he used to say: and he was right, his wife did not miss him.
Rebecca was fond of her husband. She was always per- fectly good-humoured and kind to him. She did not even show her scorn much for him; perhaps she liked him the better for being a fool. He was her upper servant and maitre d'hotel. He went on her errands: obeyed her orders without question : drove in the carriage in the ring with her without repining; took her to the Opera-box; solaced him- self at his club during the performance, and came punctu- ally back to fetch her when due. He would have liked her to be a little fonder of the boy: but even to that he recon- ciled himself. "Hang it, you know she's so clever," he said, "and I'm not literary and that, you know " For, as we
28 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
have said before, it requires no great wisdom to be able to win at cards and billiards, and Rawdon made no pretentions to any other sort of skill.
When the companion came, his domestic duties became very light. His wife encouraged him to dine abroad: she would let him off duty at the Opera. "Don't stay and stupefy yourself at home to-night, my dear," she would say. "Some men are coming who will only bore you. I would not ask them, but you know it's for your good, and now I have a sheep-dog, I need not be afraid to be alone.'*
**A sheep-dog — a companion ! Becky Sharp with a com* panion I Isn't it good fun ?" thought Mrs. Crawley to her- self. The notion tickled hugely her sense of humour.
One Sunday morning, as Rawdon Crawley, his little son, and the pony were taking their accustomed walk in the Park, they passed by an eld acquaintance of the Colonel's, Corporal Clink, of the regiment, who was in conversation with a friend, an old gentleman, who held a boy in his arms about the age of little Rawdon. This other youngster had seized hold of the Waterloo medal which the Corporal wore, and was examining it w4th delight.
"Good morning, your honour," said Clink, in reply to the *'How do. Clink?" of the Colonel. "This ere young gentle- man is about the little Colonel's age, sir," continued the Cor- poral.
"His father was a Waterloo man, too," said the old gentle- man, who carried the boy. "Wasn't he, Georgy ?"
"Yes," said Georgy. He and the little chap on the pony were looking at each other with all their might — solemnly scanning each other as children do.
"In a line regiment," Clink said, with a patronising air.
"He was a Captain in the — th regiment," said the old gentleman rather pompously. "Captain George Osborne, sir — perhaps you knew him. He died the death of a hero, sir, fighting against the Corsican tyrant/*
Colonel Crawley blushed quite red. "I knew him very well, sir," he said, "and his wife, his dear little wife, sir- how is she ?**
VANITY FAIR 39
"She is my daughter, sir," said the old gentleman, putting down the boy, and taking out a card with great solemnity, which he handed to the Colonel. On it was written —
**Mr. Sedley, Sole Agent for the Black Diamond and Anti'^ Cinder Coal Association, Bunker*s Wharf, Thames Street, and Anna-Maria Cottages, Fulham Road West."
Little Georgy went up and looked at the Shetland pony.
"Should you like to have a ride?" said Rawdon minor from the saddle.
"Yes," said Georgy. The Colonel, who had been look- ing at him with some interest, took up the child and put him on the pony behind Rawdon minor.
"Take hold of him, Georgy," he said — "take my little boy round the waist — his name is Rawdon." And both the chil- dren began to laugh.
"You won't see a prettier pair, I think, this summer's day, sir," said the good-natured Corporal; and the Colonel, the Corporal, and old Mr. Sedley with his umbrella, walked by the side of the children.
CHAPTER III A Family in a Very Small Way
WE must suppose little George Osborne has ridden from Knightsbridge towards Fulham, and will stop and make inquiries at that village regarding some friends w^hom we have left there. How is Mrs. Amelia after the storm of Waterloo? Is she living and thriving? What has come of Major Dobbin, whose cab was always hankering about her premises? and is there any news of the Collector of Boggley Wollah? The facts concerning the latter are briefly these :
Our worthy fat friend Joseph Sedley returned to India not long after his escape from Brussels. Either his furlough was up, or he dreaded to meet any witnesses of his Water- loo flight. However it might be, he went back to his duties in Bengal very soon after Napoleon had taken up his resi- dence at St. Helena, where Jos saw the ex-Emperor, To hear Mr. Sedley talk on board ship you would have sup- posed that it was not the first time he and the Corsican had met, and that the civilian had bearded the French General at Mount St. John. He had a thousand anecdotes about the famous battles; he knew the position of every regiment, and the loss which each had incurred. He did not deny that he had been concerned in those victories — that he had been with the army, and carried despatches for the Duke of Wellington. And he described what the Duke did and said on every conceivable moment of the day of Waterloo, with such an accurate knowledge of his Grace's sentiments and proceedings, that it was clear he must have been by the conqueror's side throughout the day; though, as a non- combatant, his name was not mentioned in the public docu- ments relative to the battle. Perhaps he actually worked himself up to believe that he had been engaged with the army; certain it is that he made a prodigious sensation for
30
VANITY FAIR 31
some time at Calcutta, and was called Waterloo Sedley during the whole of his subsequent stay in Bengal,
The bills which Jos had given for the purchase of those unlucky horses were paid without question by him and his agents. He never was heard to allude to the bargain, and nobody knows for a certainty what became of the horses, or how he got rid of them, or of Isidor, his Belgian servant, who sold a grey horse, very like the one which Jos rode, at Valenciennes sometime during the autumn of 1815.
Jos's London agents had orders to pay one hundred and twenty pounds yearly to his parents at Fulham. It was the chief support of the old couple; for Mr. Sedley's specu- lations in life subsequent to his bankruptcy did not by any means retrieve the broken old gentleman's fortune. He tried to be a wine-merchant, a coal-merchant, a commission lottery agent, &c., &c. He sent round prospectuses to his friends whenever he took a new trade, and ordered a new brass plate for the door, and talked pompously about mak- ing his fortune still. But Fortune never came back to the feeble and stricken old man. One by one his friends dropped off, and were weary of buying dear coals and bad wine from him; and there was only his wife in all the world who fancied, when he tottered off to the City of a morning, that he was still doing any business there. At evening he crawled slowly back; and he used to go of nights to a little club at a tavern, where he disposed of the finances of the nation. It was wonderful to hear him talk about millions, and agios, and discounts, and what Roths- child was doing, and Baring Brothers. He talked of such vast sums that the gentlemen of the club (the apothecary, the undertaker, the great carpenter and builder, the parish clerk, who was allowed to come stealthily, and Mr. Clapp, our old acquaintance), respected the old gentleman. *'I was better off once, sir," he did not fail to tell everybody who "used the room." **My son, sir, is at this minute chief magistrate of Ramgunge in the Presidency of Bengal, and touching his four thousand rupees per mensem. My daugh- ter might be a Colonel's lady if she liked. I might draw upon my son, the first magistrate, sir, for two thousand pounds to-morrow, and Alexander would cash my bill, down
32 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
sir, down on the counter, sir. But the Sedleys were always a proud family." You and I, my dear reader, may drop into this condition one day: for have not many of our friends attained it? Our luck may fail: our powers forsake us: our place on the boards be taken by better and younger mimes — the chance of life roll away and leave us shattered and stranded. Then men will walk across the road when they meet you — or, worse still, hold you out a couple of fingers and patronise you in a pitying way — then you will know, as soon as your back is turned, that your friend begins with a **Poor devil, what imprudences he has com- mitted, what chances that chap has thrown away!" Well, well — a carriage and three thousand a year is not the summit of the reward nor the end of God's judgment of men, If quacks prosper as often as they go to the wall — if zanies succeed and knaves arrive at fortune, and, vice versa, shar- ing ill luck and prosperity for all the world like the ablest and most honest amongst us — I say, brother, the gifts and pleasures of Vanity Fair cannot be held of any great ac- count, and that it is probable .... but we are wander- ing out of the domain of the story.
Had Mrs, Sedley been a woman of energy, she would have exerted it after her husband's ruin, and, occupying a large house, would have taken in boarders. The broken Sedley would have acted well as the boarding-house land- lady's husband; the Munoz of private life; the titular lord and master: the carver, house-steward, and humble hus- band of the occupier of the dingy throne. I have seen men of good brains and breeding, and of good hopes and vigour once, who feasted squires and kept hunters in their youth, meekly cutting up legs of mutton for rancorous old harridans, and pretending .to preside over their dreary tables — ^but Mrs. Sedley, we say, had not spirit enough to bustle about for "a few select inmates to join a cheerful musical family,'' such as one reads of in the Times. She was content to lie on the shore where fortune had stranded her — and you could see that the career of this old couple was over.
I don't think they were unhappy. Perhaps they were a little prouder in their downiaU than in tUeir prosperity.
VANITY FAIR 33
Mrs. Sedley was always a great person for her landlady, Mrs. Clapp, when she descended and passed many hours with her in the basement or ornamented kitchen. The Irish maid Betty Flanagan's bonnets and ribbons, her sauciness, her idleness, her reckless prodigality of kitchen candles, her consumption of tea and sugar, and so forth, occupied and amused the old lady almost as much as the doings of her former household, when she had Sambo and the coachman, and a groom, and a footboy, and a housekeeper with a regi- ment of female domestics — her former household, about which the good lady talked a hundred times a day. And be- sides Betty Flanagan, Mrs. Sedley had all the maids-of-all- work in the street to superintend. She knew how each tenant of the cottages paid or owed his little rent. She stepped aside when Mrs. Rougemont the actress passed with her dubious family. She flung up her head when Mrs. Pestler, the apothecary's lady, drove by in her husband's professional one-horse chaise. She had colloquies with the greengrocer about the pennorth of turnips which Mr. Sedley loved: she kept an eye upon the milkman, and the baker's boy; and made visitations to the butcher, who sold hundreds of oxen very likely with less ado than was made about Mrs. Sedley's loin of mutton: and she counted the potatoes under the joint on Sundays, on which days, drest in her best, she went to church twice, and read Blair^s Sermons in the evening.
On that day, for ^'business" prevented him on week days from taking such a pleasure, it was old Sedley's delight to take out his little grandson Georgy to the neighbouring Parks or Kensington Gardens, to see the soldiers or to feed the ducks. Georgy loved the red-coats, and his grandpapa told him how his father had been a famous soldier, and in- troduced him to many sergeants and others with Waterloo medals on their breasts, to whom the old grandfather pom- pously presented the child as the son of Captain Osborne of the — th, who died gloriously on the glorious eighteenth. He has been known to treat some of these non-commissioned gentlemen to a glass of porter, and, indeed, in their first Sunday walks was disposed to spoil little Georgy, sadly gorging the bov with apples and parliament, to the detri-
2— F
84 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
ment of his health — until Amelia declared that George should never go out with his grandpapa, unless the latter promised solemnly, and on his honour, not to give the child any cakes, lollipops, or stall produce whatever.
Between Mrs. Sedley and her daughter there was a sort of coolness about this boy, and a secret jealousy — for one evening in George's very early days, Amelia, who had been seated at work in their little parlour scarcely remarking that the old lady had quitted the room, ran upstairs instinc- tively to the nursery at the cries of the child, who had been asleep until that moment — and there found Mrs. Sedley in the act of surreptitiously administering Daffy's Elixir to the infant. Amelia, the gentlest and sweetest of every-day mortals, when she found this meddUng with her maternal authority, thrilled and trembled all over with anger. Her cheeks, ordinarily pale, now flushed up, until they were as red as they used to be when she was a child of twelve years old. She seized the baby out of her mother's arms, and then grasped at the bottle, leaving the old lady gaping at her, furious, and holding the guilty tea-spoon.
Amelia flung the bottle crashing into the fire-place. "I will not have baby poisoned, mamma," cried Emmy, rock- ing the infant about violently with both her arms round him, and turning with flashing eyes at her mother.
"Poisoned, Amelia!" said the old lady; "this language to me?"
"He shall not have any medicine but that which Mr. Pestler sends for him. He told me that Daffy's Elixir was poison."
"Very good: you think I'm a murderess, then," replied Mrs. Sedley. "This is the language you use to your mother. I have met with misfortunes: I have sunk low in life: I have kept my carriage, and now walk on foot: but I did not know I was a murderess before, and thank you for the nezvs/*
"Mamma," said the poor girl, who was always ready for tears — "you shouldn't be hard upon me. I — I didn't mean — I mean, I did not wish to say you would do any wrong to this dear child : only — "
"O, no, my love, — only that I was a murderess; in which case, I had better go to the Old Bailey. Though I didn't
VANITY FAIR 35
poison you, when you were a child; but gave you the best of education, and the most expensive masters money could procure. Yes; I've nursed five children, and buried three; and the one I loved the best of all, and tended through croup, and teething, and measles, and hooping-cough, and brought up with foreign masters, regardless of expense, and with accomplishments at Minerva House — which I never had when I was a girl — when I was too glad to honour my father and mother, that I might live long in the land, and to be useful, and not to mope all day in my room and act the fine lady — says I'm a murderess. Ah, Mrs. Osborne! may you never nourish a viper in your bosom, that's my prayer."
"Mamma, mamma!" cried the bewildered girl: and the child in her arms set up a frantic chorus of shouts.
*'A murderess, indeed ! Go down on your knees and pray to God to cleanse your wicked ungrateful heart, Amelia, and may He forgive you as I do;" and Mrs. Sedley tossed out of the room, hissing out the word poison, once more, and so ending her charitable benediction
Till the termination of her natural life, this breach be- tween Mrs. Sedley and her daughter was never thoroughly mended. The quarrel gave the elder lady numberless ad- vantages which she did not fail to turn to account with female ingenuity and perseverance. For instance, she scarcely spoke to Amelia for many weeks afterwards. She warned the domestics not to touch the child, as Mrs. Os- borne might be offended. She asked her daughter to see and satisfy herself that there was no poison prepared in the little daily messes that were concocted for Georgy. When neighbours asked after the boy's health, she referred them pointedly to Mrs. Osborne. She never ventured to ask whether the baby was well or not. She would not touch the child, although he was her grandson, and own precious darling, for she was not used to children, and might kill it. And whenever Mr. Pestler came upon his healing inquisition, she received the Doctor with such a sarcastic and scornful demeanour, as made the surgeon declare that not Lady Thistlewood herself, whom he had the honour of attending professionally, could give herself greater airs than old Mrs.
36 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Sedley, from whom he never took a fee. And very likely Emmy was jealous too, upon her own part, as what mother is not, of those who would manage her children for her, or become candidates for the first place in their affections? It is certain that when anybody nursed the child, she was uneasy, and that she would no more allow Mrs. Clapp or the domestic to dress or tend him, than she would have let them wash her husband's miniature which hung up over her little bed: — the same little bed from which the poor girl had gone to his; and to which she retired now for many long, silent, tearful, but happy years.
In this room was all Amelia's heart and treasure. Here it was that she tended her boy, and watched him through the many ills of childhood, with a constant passion of love. The elder George returned in him somehow, only improved, and as if come back from heaven. In a hundred little tones, looks, and movements, the child was so like his father, that the widow's heart thrilled as she held him to it; and he would often ask the cause of her tears. It was because of his likeness to his father, she did not scruple to tell him. She talked constantly to him about this dead father, and spoke of her love for George to the innocent and wondering child; much more than she ever had done to George himself, or to any confidante of her youth. To her parents she never talked about this matter; shrinking from baring her heart to them. Little George very likely could understand no better than they; but into his ears she poured her sentimental secrets unreservedly, and into his only.
The very joy of this woman was a sort of grief, or so tender, at least, that its expression was tears. Her sen- sibilities were so weak and tremulous, that perhaps they ought not to be talked about in a book. I was told by Dr. Pestler (now a most flourishing lady's physician, with a sumptuous dark green carriage, a prospect of speedy knighthood, and a house in Manchester Square), that her grief at weaning the child was a sight that would have un- manned a Herod. He was very soft-hearted many years ago, and, his wife was mortally jealous of Mrs. Amelia, then and long afterwards.
VANITY FAIR 37
Perhaps the Doctor's lady had good reason for her jeal- ousy : most women shared it, of those who formed the small circle of Amelia's acquaintance, and were quite angry at the enthusiasm with which the other sex regarded her. For almost all men who came near her loved her; though no doubt they would be at a loss to tell you why. She was not brilliant, nor witty, nor wise over much, nor extraordi narily handsome. But wherever she went she touched and charmed every one of the male sex, as invariably as she awakened the scorn and incredulity of her own sisterhood. I think it was her weakness which was her prmcipal charm : — a kind of sweet submission and softness, which seemed to appeal to each man she met for his sympathy and pro- tection. We have seen how in the regiment, .though she spoke to but few of George's comrades there, all the swords of the young fellows at the mess-table would have leapt from their scabbards to fight round her; and so it was in the little narrow lodging-house and circle at Fulham, she interested and pleased everybody. If she had been Mrs. Mango herself, of the great house of Mango, Plantain, and Co., Crutched Friars, and the magnificent proprietress of the Pineries, Fulham, who gave summer dejeuners fre- quented by Dukes and Earls, and drove about the parish with magnificent yellow liveries and bay horses, such as the royal stables at Kensington themselves could not turn out — I say had she been Mrs. Mango herself, or her son's wife, Lady Mary Mango (daughter of the Earl of Castlemouldy, who condescended to marry the head of the firm), the trades- men of the neighbourhood could not pay her more honour than they invariably showed to the gentle young widow, when she passed by their doors, or made her humble pur- chases at their shops.
Thus it was not only Mr. Pestler, the medical man, but Mr. Linton the young assistant, who doctored the servant maids and small tradesmen, and might be seen any day reading the Times in the surgery, who openly declared himself the slave of Mrs. Osborne. He was a personable young gentleman, more welcome at Mrs. Sedley's lodgings than his principal ; and if anythmg went wrong with Georgy, he would drop in twice or thrice in the day, to see the little
38 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
chap, and without so much as the thought of a fee. He would abstract lozenges, tamarinds, and other produce from the surgery-drawers for little Georgy's benefit, and com- pound draughts and mixtures for him of miraculous sweet- ness, so that it was quite a pleasure to the child to be ailing. He and Pestler, his chief, sat up two whole nights by the boy in that momentous and awful week when Georgy had the measles; and when you would have thought, from the mother's terror, that there had never been measles in the world before. Would they have done as much for other people ? Did they sit up for the folks at the Pineries, when Ralph Plantagenet, and Gwendoline, and Guinever Mango had the same juvenile complaint? Did they sit up for little Mary Clapp, the landlord's daughter, who actually caught the disease of little Georgy? Truth compels one to say, no. They slept quite undisturbed, at least as far as she was concerned — pronounced hers to be a slight case, which would almost cure itself, sent her in a draught or two, and threw in bark when the child rallied, with perfect indiffer- ence, and just for form's sake.
Again, there was the little French chevalier opposite, who gave lessons in his native tongue at various schools in the neighbourhood, and who might be heard in his apartments of nights playing tremulous old gavottes and minuets, on a wheezy old fiddle. Whenever this powdered and courteous old man, who never missed a Sunday at the convent chapel at Hammersmith, and who was in all respects, thoughts, conduct, and bearing, utterly unlike the bearded savages of his nation, who curse perfidious Albion, and scowl at you from over their cigars, in the Quadrant arcades at the present day — whenever th6 old Chevalier de Talonrouge spoke of Mistress Osborne, he would first finish his pinch of snuff, flick away the remaining particles of dust with a graceful wave of his hand, gather up his fingers again into a bunch, and, bringing them up to his mouth, blow them open with a kiss, exclaiming. Ah! la divine creature! He vowed and protested that when Amelia walked in the Bromp- ton Lanes flowers grew in profusion under her feet. He called little Georgy Cupid, and asked him news of Venus, his mamma; and told the astonished Betty Flanagan that
VANITY FAIR 30
she was one of the Graces, and the favourite attendant of the Reines dcs Amours.
Instances might be multipHed of this easily gained and iniconscious popularity. Did not Mr. Binny, the mild and genteel curate of the district chapel, which the family at- tended, call assiduously upon the widow, dandle the little boy on his knee, and offer to teach him Latin, to the anger of the elderly virgin, his sister, who kept house for him? "There is nothing in her, Beilby," the latter lady would say. "When she comes to tea here she does not speak a word during the whole evening. She is but a poor lackadaisical creature, and it is my belief has no heart at all. It is only her pretty face which all you gentlemen admire so. Miss Grits, who has five thousand pounds, and expectations be- sides, has twice as much character, and a thousand times more agreeable to 7ny taste ; and if she were good-looking I know that you would think her perfection."
Ytry likely Miss Binny was right to a great extent. It is the pretty face which creates sympathy in the hearts of men, those wicked rogues. A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face.
What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardon- able? What dullness may not red lips and sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. Oh ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.
These are but trivial incidents to recount in the life of our heroine. Her tale does not deal in wonders, as the gentle reader has already no doubt perceived ; and if a journal had been kept of her proceedings during the seven years after the birth of her son, there would be found few incidents more remarkable in it than that of the measles, recorded in the foregoing page. Yet, one day, and greatly to her wonder, the Reverend Mr. Binny, just mentioned, asked her to change her name of Osborne for his own ; when, with deep blushes, and tears in her eyes and voice, she thanked him for his regard for her, expressed gratitude for his attentions to her and to her poor little boy, but said that she never.
40 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
never could think of any but — ^but the husband whom she had lost.
On the twenty-fifth of April, and the eighteenth of June, the days of marriage and widowhood, she kept her room entirely, consecrating them (and we do not know how many hours of solitary night-thought, her little boy sleeping in liis crib by her bed-side) to the memory of that departed friend. During the day she was more active. She had to teach George to read and to write, and a little to draw. She read books, in order that she might tell him stories irom them. As his eyes opened, and his mind expanded, under the influence of the outward nature round about him, she taught the child, to the best of her humble power, to acknowledge the Maker of all; and every night and every morning he and she — (in that awful and touching com- munion which I think must bring a thrill to the heart of every man who witnesses or who remembers it) — the mother and the little boy — sprayed to Our Father together, the mother pleading with all her gentle heart, the child lisping after her as she spoke. And each time they prayed to God to bless dear papa, as if he were alive and in the room with them.
To wash and dress this young gentleman — to take him for a run of the mornings, before breakfast, and the retreat of grandpapa for ^'business" — to make for him the most wonderful and ingenious dresses, for which end the thrifty widow cut up and altered every available little bit of finery which she possessed out of her wardrobe during her mar- riage— for Mrs. Osborne herself (greatly to her mother's vexation, who preferred fine clothes, especially since her misfortunes) always wore a black gown, and a straw bonnet with a black ribbon — occupied her many hours of the day. Others she had to spare, at the service of her mother and her old father. She had taken the pains to learn, and used to play cribbage with this gentleman on the nights when he did not go to his club. She sang for him when he was so minded, and it was a good sign, for he invariably fell into a comfortable sleep during the music. She wrote out his numerous memorials, letters, prospectuses, and projects. It was in her handwriting that most of the old gentleman's
VANITY FAIR 41
former acquaintances were informed that he had become an agent for the Black Diamond and Anti-Cinder Coal Company, and could supply his friends and the public with the best coals at — s. per chaldron. All he did was to sign the circulars with his flourish and signature, and direct them in a shaky, clerk-like hand. One of these papers was sent to Major Dobbin, — Regt., care of Messrs. Cox and Green- wood; but the Major being in Madras at the time, had no particular call for coals. He knew, though, the hand which had written the prospectus. Good God ! what would he not have given to hold it in his own! A second prospectus came out, informing the Major that J. Sedley and Company, having established agencies at Oporto, Bordeaux, and St. Mary's, were enabled to offer to their friends and the public generally, the finest and most celebrated growths of ports, sherries, and claret wines at reasonable prices, and under extraordinary advantages. Acting upon this hint, Dobbin furiously canvassed the governor, the commander-in-chief, the judges, the regiments, and everybody whom he knew in the Presidency, and sent home to Sedley and Co. orders for wine which perfectly astonished Mr. Sedley and Mr. Clapp, who was the Co. in the business. But no more orders came after that first burst of good fortune, on which poor old Sedley was about to build a house in the City, a regiment ot clerks, a dock to himself, and correspondents all over the world. The old gentleman's former taste in wine had gone : the curses of the mess-room assailed Major Dobbin for the vile drinks he had been the means of introducing there ; and he bought back a great quantity of the wine, and sold it at public outcry, at an enormous loss to himself. As for Jos, who was by this time promoted to a seat at the Revenue Board at Calcutta, he was wild with rage when the post brought him out a bundle of these Bacchanalian prospectuses, with a private note from his father, telling Jos that his senior counted upon him in this enterprise, and had consigned a quantity of select wines to him, as per invoice, drawing bills upon him for the amount of the same. Jos, who would no more have it supposed that his father, Jos Sedley's father, of the Board of Revenue, was a wine merchant asking for orders, than that he was Jack Ketch, refused
45 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
the bills with scorn, wrote back contumeliously to the old gentleman, bidding him to mind his own affairs; and the protested paper coming back, Sedley and Co. had to take it up, with the profits which they had made out of the Madras venture, and with a little portion of Emmy's savings.
Besides her pension of fifty pounds a-year, there had been five hundred pounds, as her husband's executor stated, ieft in the agent's hands at the time of Osborne's demise, which sum, as George's guardian, Dobbin proposed to put out at 8 per cent, in an Indian house of agency. Mr. Sedley, who thought the Major had some roguish intentions of his own about the money, was strongly against this plan ; and he went to the agents to protest personally against the employ- ment of the money in question, when he learned, to his surprise, that there had been no such sum in their hands, that all the late Captain's assets did not amount to a hundred pounds, and that the five hundred pounds in question must be a separate sum, of which Major Dobbin knew the par- ticulars. More than ever convinced that there was some roguery, old Sedley pursued the Major. As his daughter's nearest friend, he demanded with a high hand, a statement of the late Captain's accounts. Dobbin's stammering, blush- ing, and awkwardness added to the other's convictions that he had a rogvte to deal with; and in a majestic tone he told that officer a piece of his mind, as he called it, simply stating his belief that the Major was unlawfully detaining his late son-in-law's money.
Dobbin at this lost all patience, and if his accuser had not been so old and so broken, a quarrel might have ensued between them at the Slaughters* Coffee-house, in a box of which place of entertainment the gentlemen had their col- loquy. "Come upstairs, sir," lisped out the Major. "I insist on your coming up the stairs, and I will show which is the injured party, poor George or I ;'* and, dragging the old gentleman up to his bed-room, he produced from his desk Osborne's accounts, and a bundle of I O U's which the latter had given, who, to do him justice, was always ready to give an I O U. *'He paid his bills in England," Dobbin added, "but he had not a hundred pounds in the world when he fell. I and one or two of his brother-officers
VANITY PAIR 43
made up the little sum. which was all that we could spare, and you dare tell us that we are trying to cheat the widow and the orphan." Sedley was very contrite and humbled, though the fact is, that William Dobbin had told a great falsehood to the old gentleman; having himself given every shilling of the money, having buried his friend, and paid all the fees and charges incident upon the calamity and removal of poor Amelia.
About these expenses old Osborne had never given himself any trouble to think, nor any other relative of Amelia, nor Amelia herself, indeed. She trusted to Major Dobbin as an accountant, took his somewhat confused calculations for granted : and never once suspected how much she was in his debt.
Twice or thrice in the year, according to her promise, she wrote him letters to Madras, letters all about little Georgy. How he treasured these papers! Whenever Amelia wrote he answered, and not until then. But he sent over endless remembrances of himself to his godson and to her. He ordered and sent a box of scarfs, and a grand ivory set of chess-men from China. The pawns were little green and white men, with real swords and shields! the knights were on horseback, the castles were on the backs of elephants. "Mrs. Mango's own set at the Pineries was not so fine," Mr. Pestler remarked. These chess-men were the delight of Georgy's life, who printed his first letter in acknowledgment of this gift of his godpapa. He sent over preserves and pickles, which latter the young gentleman tried surrepti- tiously in the sideboard, and half-killed himself with eating. He thought it was a judgment upon him for stealing, they were so hot. Emmy wrote a comical little account of this mishap to the major : it pleased him to think that her spirits were rallying, and that she could be merry sometimes now. He sent over a pair of shawls, a white one for her, and a black one with palm-leaves for her mother, and a pair of red scarfs, as winter wrappers, for old Mr. Sedley and George. The shawls were worth fifty guineas a piece at the very least, as Mrs. Sedley knew. She wore hers in state at church at Brompton, and was congratulated by her female friends upon the splendid acquisition. Emmy's, too,
44 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
became prettily her modest black gown. "What a pity it is she won't think of him!" Mrs. Sedley remarked to Mrs. Clapp, and to all her friends of Brompton. "Jos never sent us such presents, I am sure, and grudges us everything. It is evident that the Major is over head and ears in love with her: and yet, whenever I so much as hint it, she turns red and begins to cry, and goes and sits upstairs with her minia- ture. I'm sick of that miniature. I wish we had never seen those odious purse-proud Osbornes.''
Amidst such humble scenes and associates George's early youth was passed, and the boy grew up delicate, sensitive, imperious, woman-bred — domineering the gentle mother whom he loved with passionate affection. He ruled all the rest of the little world round about him. As he grew, the elders were amazed at his haughty manner and his constant likeness to his father. He asked questions about everything, as inquiring youth will do. The profundity of his remarks and interrogatories astonished his old grandfather, who per- fectly bored the club at the tavern with stories about the little lad's learning and genius. He suffered his grand- mother with a good-humoured indifference. The small circle round about him believed that the equal of the boy did not exist upon the earth. Georgy inherited his father's pride, and perhaps thought they were not wrong.
When he grew to be about six years old, Dobbin began to write to him very much. The Major wanted to hear that Georgy was going to school, and hoped he would acquit himself with credit there: or would he have a good tutor at home? it was time that he should begin to learn; and his godfather and guardian hinted that he hoped to be allowed to defray the charges of the boy's education, which would fall heavily upon his mother's straitened income. The Major, in a word, was always thinking about Amelia and her little boy, and by orders to his agents kept the latter provided with picture-books, paint-boxes, desks, and all conceivable implements of amusement and instruction. Three days before George's sixth birth-day a gentleman in a gig, accompanied by a servant, drove up to Mr. Sedley's house, and asked to see Master George Osborne: it was Mr. Woolsey, military tailor, of Conduit Street, who came
VANITY FAIR 45
at the Major's order to measure the young gcntltman for a suit of clothes. He had had the honour of making for the Captain, the young gentleman's father.
Sometimes, too, and by the Major's desire no doubt, his sisters, the Misses Dobbin, would call in the family carriage to take Amelia and the little boy for a drive if they were so inclined. The patronage and kindness of these ladies was very uncomfortable to Amelia, but she bore it meekly enough, for her nature was to yield; and, besides, the carriage and its splendours gave little Georgy immense pleasure. The ladies l)egged occasionally that the child might pass a day with them, and he was always glad to go to that fine garden- house at Denmark Hill, where they lived, and where there were such fine grapes in the hot-houses and peaches on the walls.
One day they kindly came over to Amelia with news which they were sure would delight her — something very interest- ing about their dear William.
"What was it: was he coming home?" she asked with pleasure beaming in her eyes.
"O, no — ^not the least — but they had very good reason to believe that dear William was about to be married — and to a relation of a very dear friend of Amelia's — to Miss Glorvina O'Dowd, Sir Michael O'Dowd's sister, who had gone out to join Lady O'Dowd at Madras — a very beautiful and accomplished girl, everybody said."
Amelia said "Oh !" Amelia was very very happy indeed. But she supposed Glorvina could not be like her old ac- quaintance, who was most kind — but — but she was very happy indeed. And by some impulse of which I cannot explain the meaning, she took George in her arms and kissed him with an extraordinary tenderness. Her eyes were quite moist when she put the child down ; and she scarcely spoke a word during the whole of the drive — though she was so very happy indeed.
CHAPTER IV A Cynical Chapter '
OUR duty now takes us back for a brief space to some old Hampshire acquaintances of ours, whose hopes respecting the disposal of their rich kinswoman's property were so wofully disappointed. After counting upon thirty thousand pounds from his sister, it was a heavy blow to Bute Crawley to receive but five; out of which sum, when he had paid his own debts and those of Jim, his son at college, a very small fragment remained to portion off his four plain daughters. Mrs. Bute never knew, or at least never acknowledged, how far her own tyrannous behaviour had tended to ruin her husband. All that woman could do, she vowed and protested she had done. Was it her fault if she did not possess those sycophantic arts which her hypo- critical nephew, Pitt Crawley, practised ? She wished him all the happiness which he merited out of his ill-gotten gains. "At least the money will remain in the family," she said, charitably. *Titt will never spend it, my dear, that is quite certain; for a greater miser does not exist in England, and he is as odious, though in a different way, as his spendthrift brother, the abandoned Rawdon."
So Mrs. Bute, after the first shock of rage and disappoint- ment, began to accommodate herself as best she could to her altered fortunes, and to save and retrench with all her might. She instructed her daughters how to bear poverty cheerfully, and invented a thousand notable methods to con- ceal or evade it. She took them about to balls and public places in the neighbourhood, with praiseworthy energy: nay, she entertained her friends in a hospitable comfortable manner at the Rectory, and much more frequently than before dear Miss Crawley's legacy had fallen in. From her outward bearing nobody would have supposed that the family had been disappointed in their expectations : or have guessed from her frequent appearance in public how she pinched
46
VANITY FAIR 47
and starved at home. Her girls had more milliners' furni- ture than they had ever enjoyed before. They appeared perseveringly at the Winchester and Southampton assem- blies; they penetrated to Cowes for the race-balls and re- gatta-gaieties there; and their carriage, with the horses taken from the plough, was at work perpetually, until it began almost to be believed that the four sisters had had fortunes left them by their aunt, whose name the family never mentioned in public but with the most tender grati- tude and regard. I know no sort of lying which is more frequent in Vanity Fair than this; and it may be remarked how people who practise it take credit to themselves for their hypocrisy, and fancy that they are exceedingly vir- tuous and praiseworthy, because they are able to deceive the world with regard to the extent of their means.
Mrs. Bute certainly thought herself one of the most virtuous women in England, and the sight of her happy family was an edifying one to strangers. They were so cheerful, so loving, so well-educated, so simple ! Martha painted flowers exquisitely, and furnished half the charity- bazaars in the county. Emma was a regular County Bulbul, and her verses in the "Hampshire Telegraph" were the glory of its Poet's Corner. Fanny and Matilda sang duets to- gether, mamma playing the piano, and the other two sisters sitting with their arms round each other's waists, and listen- ing affectionately. Nobody saw the poor girls drumming at the duets in private. No one saw mamma drilling them rigidly hour after hour. In a word, Mrs. Bute put a good face against fortune, and kept up appearances in the most virtuous manner.
Everything that a good and respectable mother could do Mrs. Bute did. She got over yachting men from South- ampton, parsons from the Cathedral Close at Winchester, and officers from the barracks there. She tried to inveigle the young barristers at assizes, and encouraged Jim to bring home friends with whom he went out hunting with the H. H. What will not a mother do for the benefit of her beloved
ones
Between such a woman and her brother-in-law, the odious Baronet at the Hall, it is manifest that there could be very
48 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
little in common. The rupture between Bute and his brother Sir Pitt was complete; indeed, between Sir Pitt and the whole county, to which the old man was a scandal. His dislike for respectable society increased with age, and the lodge-gates had not opened to a gentleman's carriage-wheels since Pitt and Lady Jane came to pay their visit of duty) after their marriage. /
That was an awful and unfortunate visit, never to be thought of by the family without horror. Pitt begged his wife, with a ghastly countenance, never to speak of it; and it was only through Mrs. Bute herself, who still knew every- thing which took place at the Hall, that the circumstances of Sir Pitt's reception of his son and daughter-in-law were ever known at all.
As they drove up the avenue of the park in their neat and well-appointed carriage, Pitt remarked with dismay and wrath great gaps among the trees — ^his trees, — ^which the old Baronet was felling entirely without license. The park wore an aspect of utter dreariness and ruin. The drives were ill-kept, and the neat carriage splashed and floundered in muddy pools along the road. The great sweep in front of the terrace and entrance stair was black and covered with mosses ; the once trim flower-beds rank and weedy. Shutters were up along almost the whole line of the house ; the great hall-door was unbarred after much ringing of the bell; an individual in ribbons was seen flitting up the black oak stair, as Horrocks at length admitted the heir of Queen's Crawley and his bride into the halls of their fathers. He led the way into Sir Pitt's "Library," as it was called, the fumes of tobacco growing stronger as Pitt and Lady Jane approached that apartment. "Sir Pitt ain't very well/' Hor- rocks remarked apologetically, and hinted that his master was afllicted with lumbago.
The library looked out on the front walk and park. Sir Pitt had opened one of the windows, and was bawling out thence to the postilion and Pitt's servant, who seemed to be about to take the baggage down.
"Don't move none of them trunks," he cried, pointing with a pipe which he held in his hand. "It's only a morning visit, Tucker, you fool. Lor, what cracks that off hoss ha 9
VANITY FAIR 49
in his heels ! Ain't there no one at the King's Head to rub *em a little? How do, Pitt? How do, my dear? Come to see the old man, hay? 'Gad — youVe a pretty face, too. You ain't like that old horse-godmother, your mother. Come and give old Pitt a kiss, like a good little gal.*'
The embrace disconcerted the daughter-in-law somewhat, as the caresses of the old gentleman, unshorn and perfumed with tobacco, might well do. But she remembered that her brother Southdown had mustachios, and smoked cigars, and submitted to the Baronet with a tolerable grace.
'Titt has got vat," said the Baronet, after this mark of affection. "Does he read ee very long sermons, my dear? Hundredth Psalm, Evening Hymn, hay Pitt? Go and get a glass of Malmsey and a cake for my Lady Jane, Horrocks, you great big booby, and don't stand stearing there like a fat pig. I won't ask you to stop, my dear; you'll find it too stoopid, and so should I too along a Pitt. I'm an old man now, and like my own ways, and my pipe and backgammon of a night."
''I can play at backgammon, sir," said Lady Jane, laugh- ing. "I used to play with Papa and Miss Crawley, didn't I, Mr. Crawley?"
"Lady Jane can play, sir, at the g^me to which you state that you are so partial," Pitt said, haughtily,
**But she wawn't stop for all that. Naw, naw, goo back to Mudbury and give Mrs. Rincer a benefit: or drive down to the Rectory, and ask Buty for a dinner. He'll be charmed to see you, you know ; he's so much obliged to you for gettin' the old woman's money. Ha. ha ! Some of it will do to patch up the Hall when I'm gone."
"I perceive, sir," said Pitt, with a heightened voice, "that your people will cut down the timber."
"Yees, yees, very fine weather, and seasonable for the time of year," Sir Pitt answered, who had suddenly grown deaf. "But I'm gittin' old, Pitt, now. Law bless you, you ain't far from fifty yourself. But he wears well, my pretty Lady Jane, don't he? It's all godliness, sobriety, and a moral life. Look at me, I'm not very fur from fowr-score — he, he :" and he laughed, and took snuff, and leered at her and pinched her hand.
50 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Pitt once more brought the conversation back to the timber; but the Baronet was deaf again in an instant.
"Fm gittin' very old, and have been cruel bad this year with the lumbago. I shan't be here now for long; but I'm glad ee've come, daughter-in-law. I like your face, Lady Jane : it's got none of the damned high-boned Binkie look in it ; and I'll give ee something pretty, my dear, to go to Court in." And he shuffled across the room to a cupboard, from which he took a little old case containing jewels of some value. "Take that," said he, "my dear; it belonged to my mother, and afterwards to the first Lady Crawley. Pretty pearls — never gave 'em the ironmonger's daughter. No, no. Take 'em and put 'em up quick," said he, thrusting the case into his daughter's hands, and clapping the door of the cabinet to, as Horrocks entered with a salver and refresh- ments.
"What have you a been and given Pitt's wife?" said the individual in ribbons, when Pitt and Lady Jane had taken leave of the old gentleman. It was Miss Horrocks, the butler's daughter — the cause of the scandal throughout the county, — the lady who reigned now almost supreme at Queen's Crawley.
The rise and progress of those Ribbons had been marked with dismay by the county and family. The Ribbons opened an account at the Mudbury Branch Savings Bank; the Ribbons drove to church, monopolising the pony-chaise, which was for the use of the servants at the Hall. The domestics were dismissed at her pleasure. The Scotch gardener, who still lingered on the premises, taking a pride in his walls and hot-houses, and indeed making a pretty good livelihood by the garden, which he farmed, and of which he sold the produce at Southampton, found the Ribbons eating peaches on a sunshiny morning at the south- wall, and had his ears boxed when he remonstrated about this attack on his property. He and his Scotch wife and his Scotch children, the only respectable inhabitants of Queen's Crawley, were forced to migrate, with their goods and their chattels, and left the stately comfortable gardens to go to waste, and the flower-beds to run to seed. Poor Lady Crawley's rose-garden became the dreariest wilderness
VANITY FAIR 51
Only two or three domestics shuddered in the bleak old servants* hall. The stables and offices were vacant, and shut up, and half ruined. Sir Pitt lived in private, and boozed nightly with Horrocks, his butler or house-steward (as he now began to be called), and the abandoned Ribbons. The times were very much changed since the period when she drove to Mudbury in the spring-cart, and called the small tradesmen "Sir." It may have been shame, or it may have been dislike of his neighbours, but the old Cynic of Queen's Crawley hardly issued from his park-gates at all now. He quarrelled with his agents, and screwed his tenants by letter. His days were passed in conducting his own correspondence ; the lawyers and farm-bailiffs who had to do business with him, could not reach him but through the Ribbons, who received them at the door of the housekeeper's room, which commanded the back entrance by which they were admitted ; and so the Baronet's daily perplexities increased, and his embarrassments multiplied round him.
The horror of Pitt Crawley may be imagined, as these reports of his father's dotage reached the most exemplary and correct of gentlemen. He trembled daily lest he should hear that the Ribbons was proclaimed his second legal mother-in- law. After that first and last visit, his father's name was never mentioned in Pitt's polite and genteel establishment. It was the skeleton in his house, and all the family walked by it in terror and silence. The Countess Southdown kept on dropping per coach at the lodge-gate the most exciting tracts, tracts which ought to frighten the hair off your head, Mrs. Bute at the parsonage nightly looked out to see if the sky was red over the elms behind which the Hall stood, and the mansion was on fire. Sir G. Wapshot and Sir H. Fuddle- stone, old friends of the house, wouldn't sit on the bench with Sir Pitt at Quarter Sessions, and cut him dead in the High-street of Southampton, where the reprobate stood offering his dirty old hands to them. Nothing had any effect upon him ; he put his hands into his pockets, and burst out laughing, as he scrambled into his carriage and four; he used to burst out laughing at Lady Southdown's tracts; and he laughed at his sons, and at the world, and at the Ribbons when she was angry, which was not seldom.
59 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Miss Horrocks was installed as housekeeper at Queen's Crawley, and ruled all the domestics there with great majesty and rigour. All the servants were instructed to address her as "Mum," or "Madam" — and there was one little maid, on her promotion, who persisted in calling her "My Lady," without any rebuke on the part of the house- keeper. "There has been better ladies, and there has been worser, Hester," was Miss Horrocks' reply to this compli- ment of her inferior: so she ruled, having supreme power over all except her father, whom, however, she treated with considerable haughtiness, warning him not to be too fa- miliar in his behaviour to one "as was to be a Baronet's lady."
indeed, she rehearsed that exalted part in life with great satisfaction to herself, and to the amusement of old Sir Pitt, who chuckled at her airs and graces, and would laugh by the hour together at her assumptions of dignity and imitations of genteel life. He swore it was as good as a play to see her in the character of a fine dame, and he made her put on one of the first Lady Crawley's court dresses, swearing (entirely to Miss Horrocks' own concurrence,) that the dress became her prodigiously, and threatening to drive her off that very instant to Court in a coach-and-four. She had the ransacking of the wardrobes of the two defunct ladies, and cut and hacked their posthumous finery so as to suit her own tastes and figure. And she would have liked to take possession of their jewels and trinkets too; but the old Baronet had locked them away in his private cabinet, nor could she coax or wheedle him out of the keys. And it is a fact, that some time after she left Queen's Crawley a copy-book belonging to this lady was discovered, which showed that she had taken great pains in private to learn the art of writing in general, and especially of writing her own name as Lady Crawley, Lady Betsy Horrocks, Lady Elizabeth Crawley, &c.
Though the good people of the Parsonage never went to the Hall, and shunned the horrid old dotard its owner, yet they kept a strict knowledge of all that happened there, and were looking out every day for the catastrophe for which Miss Horrocks was also eager. But fate intervened envi-
VANITY FAIR 53
ously, and prevented her from receiving the reward due to such immaculate love and virtue.
One day the Baronet surprised "her ladyship," as he jocularly called her, seated at that old and tuneless piano in the drawing-room, which had scarcely been touched since Becky Sharp played quadrilles upon it — seated at the piano with the utmost gravity, and squalling to the best of her power in imitation of the music which she had sometimes heard. The little kitchen-maid on her promotion was standmg at her mistress's side, quite delighted during the operation, and wagging her head up and down, and crying, "Lor, Mum, 'tis bittiful,*' — just like a genteel sycophant in a real drawing-room.
This incident made the old Baronet roar with laughter, as usual. He narrated the circumstance a dozen times to Horrocks in the course of the evening, and greatly to the discomfiture of Miss Horrocks. He thrummed on the table as if it had been a musical instrument, and squalled in imitation of her manner of singing. He vowed that such a beautiful voice ought to be cultivated, and declared she ought to have singing-masters, in which proposals she saw nothing ridiculous. He was in great spirits that night; and drank with his friend and butler an extraordinary quantity of rum-and-water — at a very late hour the faithful friend and domestic conducted his master to his bedroom.
Half an hour afterwards there was a great hurry and bustle m the house. Lights went about from window to window in the lonely desolate old Hall, whereof but two or three rooms were ordinarily occupied by its owner. Presently, a boy on a pony went galloping off to Mudbury, to the Doctor's house there. And in another hour (by which fact we ascertain how carefully the excellent Mrs. Bute Crawley had always kept up an understanding with the great house), that lady in her clogs and calash, the Reverend Bute Crawley, and James Crawley, her son, had w^alked over from the Rectory through the park, and had entered the mansion by the open hall-door.
They passed through the hall and the small oak parlour, on the table of which stood the three tumblers and the
54 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
empty rum-bottle which had served for Sir Pitt's carouse, and through that apartment into Sir Pitt's study, where they found Miss Horrocks, of the guilty ribbons, with a wild air, trying at the presses and escritoires with a bunch of keys. She dropped them with a scream of terror, as little Mrs. Bute's eyes flashed out at her from under her black calash-
"Look at that, James and Mr. Crawley," cried Mrs. Bute, pointing at the scared figure of the black-eyed, guilty wench.
"He gave 'em me ; he gave 'em me !" she cried.
"Gave them you, you abandoned creature !" screamed Mrs. Bute. "Bear witness, Mr. Crawley, we found this good-for-nothing woman in the act of stealing your brother's property; and she will be hanged, as I always said she would."
Betsy Horrocks, quite daunted, flung herself down on her knees, bursting into tears. But those who know a really good woman are aware that she is not in a hurry to forgive, and that the humiliation of an enemy is a triumph to her soul.
"Ring the bell, James," Mrs. Bute said. "Go on ring- ing it till the people come." The three or four domestics resident in the deserted old house came presently at that jangling and continued summons.
"Put that woman in the strong-room," she said. "We caught her in the act of robbing Sir Pitt. Mr. Crawley, you'll make out her committal — and, Beddoes, you'll drive her over in the spring-cart, in the morning, to Southampton Gaol."
"My dear," interposed the Magistrate and Rector — "she's only—"
"Are there no handcuffs?" Mrs. Bute continued, stamp- ing in her clogs. "There used to be handcuffs. Where's the creature's abominable father?"
"He did give 'em me," still cried poor Betsy; "didn't he, Hester? You saw Sir Pitt — ^you know you did — give 'em me, ever so long ago — the day after Mudbury fair: not that I want 'em. Take 'em if you think they ain't mine." And here the unhappy wretch pulled out from her pocket
VANITY FAIR 6$
a large pair of paste shoe-buckles which had excited her admiration, and which she had just appropriated out of one of the bookcases in the study, where they had lain.
"Law, Betsy, how could you go for to tell such a wicked story!" said Hester, the little kitchen-maid late on her promotion — "and to Madame Crawley, so good and kind, and his Rev'rince (with a curtsey), and you may search all my boxes, Mum, I'm sure, and here's my keys as I'm an honest girl though of pore parents and workhouse bred — and if you find so much as a beggarly bit of lace or a silk stock- ing out of all the gownds as you've had the picking of may I never go to church agin.'*
"Give up your keys, you hardened hussy," hissed out the v^irtuous little lady in the calash.
"And here's a candle. Mum, and if you please. Mum, I can show you her room, Mum, and the press in the house- keeper's room, Mum, where she keeps heaps and heaps of things, Mum," cried out the eager little Hester with a profusion of curtseys.
"Hold your tongue, if you please. I know the room which the creature occupies perfectly well. Mrs. Brown, have the goodness to come with me, and Beddoes don't you lose sight of that woman," said Mrs. Bute, seizing the candle. — "Mr. Crawley, you had better go upstairs, and see that they are not murdering your unfortunate brother" — and the calash, escorted by Mrs. Brown, walked away to the apartment which, as she said truly, she knew perfectly well.
Bute went upstairs, and found the Doctor from Mudbury, with the frightened Horrocks over his master in a chair. They were trying to bleed Sir Pitt Crawley.
With the early morning an express was sent off to Mr, Pitt Crawley by the Rector's lady, who assumed the com* mand of everything, and had watched the old Baronet through the night. He had been brought back to a sort of life; he could not speak, but seemed to recognise people. Mrs. Bute kept resolutely by his bed-side. She never seemed to want to sleep, that little woman, and did not close her fiery black eyes once, though the Doctor snored in the arm'
56 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
chair. Horrocks made some wild efforts to assert his authority and assist his master; but Mrs. Bute called him a tipsy old wretch, and bade him never show his face again in that house, or he should be transported like his abominable daughter.
Terrified by her manner, he slunk down to the oak parlour where Mr. James was, who, having tried the bottle stand- ing there and found no liquor in it, ordered Mr. Horrocks to get another bottle of rum, which he fetched, with clean glasses, and to which the Rector and his son sat down: ordering Horrocks to put down the keys at that instant and never to show his face again.
Cowed by this behaviour, Horrocks gave up the keys ; and he and his daughter slunk off silently through the night, and gave up possession of the house of Queen's Crawley.
CHAPTER V In Which Becky Is Recognised by the Family
THE heir of Crawley arrived at home, in due time, after this catastrophe, and henceforth may be said to have reigned in Queen's Crawley. For though the old Baronet survived many months, he never recovered the use of his intellect or his speech completely, and the govern- ment of the estate devolved upon his elder son. In a strange condition Pitt found it. Sir Pitt was always buying and mortgaging; he had twenty men of business, and quarrels with each; quarrels with all his tenants, and lawsuits with them; lawsuits with the lawyers; lawsuits with the Mining and Dock Companies in which he was proprietor; and with every person with whom he had business. To unravel these difficulties, and to set the estate clear, was a task worthy of the orderly and persevering diplomatist of Pumpernickel : and he set himself to work with prodigious assiduity. His whole family, of course, was transported to Queen's Crawley, whither Lady Southdown, of course, came too; and she set about converting the parish under the Rector's nose, and brought down her irregular clergy to the dismay of the angry Mrs. Bute. Sir Pitt had concluded no bargain for the sale of the living of Queen's Crawley; when it should drop, her Ladyship proposed to take the patronage into her own hands, and present a young protege to the Rectory; on which subject the diplomatic Pitt said nothing.
Mrs. Bute's intentions with regard to Miss Betsy Horrocks were not carried into effect: and she paid no visit to Southampton Gaol. She and her father left the Hall, when the latter took possession of the Crawley Arms in the village, of which he had got a lease from Sir Pitt. The ex-butler had obtained a small freehold there likewise, which gave him a vote for the borough. The Rector had another of these votes, and these and tour others formed
57
58 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
the representative body which returned the two members for Queen's Crawley.
There was a show of courtesy kept up between the Rectory and the Hall ladies, between the younger ones at least, for Mrs. Bute and Lady Southdown never could meet without battles, and gradually ceased seeing each other. Her Ladyship kept her room when the ladies from the Rectory visited their cousins at the Hall. Perhaps Mr. Pitt was not very much displeased at these occasional absences of his mamma-in-law. He believed the Binkie family to be the greatest and wisest, and most interesting in the world, and her Ladyship and his aunt had long held ascendency over him; but sometimes he felt that she com- manded him too much. To be considered young was com- plimentary doubtless; but at six-and-forty to be treated as a boy was sometimes mortifying. Lady Jane yielded up everything, however, to her mother. She was only fond of her children in private; and it was lucky that Lad)? Southdown's multifarious business, her conferences with ministers, and her correspondence with all the missionaries of Africa, Asia, and Australasia, &c., occupied the venerable Countess a great deal, so that she had but little time to devote to her granddaughter, the little Matilda, and her grandson, Master Pitt Crawley, The latter was a feeble child: and it was only by prodigious quantities of cal- omel that Lady Southdown was able to keep him in life at all.
As for Sir Pitt he retired into those very apartments where Lady Crawley had been previously extinguished, and here was tended by Miss Hester, the girl upon her promo- tion, with constant care and assiduity. What love, what fidelity, what constancy is there equal to that of a nurse with good wages? They smooth pillows: and make arrow- root: they get up at nights: they bear complaints and querulousness : they see the sun shining out of doors and don't want to go abroad: they sleep on armchairs, and eat their meals in solitude: they pass long long evenings doin^ nothing, watching the embers, and the patient's drink simmering in the jug : they read the weekly paper the whole week through; and Law's Serious Call or the Whole Duty
VANITY FAIR 59
of Man suffices them for literature for the year — and we quarrel with them because, when their relations come to see them once a week, a little gin is smuggled in in their linen basket. Ladies, what man's love is there that would stand a year's nursing of the object of his affection? Whereas a nurse will stand by you for ten pounds a quarter, and we think her too highly paid. At least Mr. Crawley grumbled a good deal about paying half as much to Miss Hester for her constant attendance upon the Baronet his father.
Of sunshiny days this old gentleman was taken out in a chair on the terrace — the very chair which Miss Crawley had had at Brighton, and which had been transported thence with a number of Lady Southdown's effects to Queen's Crawley. Lady Jane always walked by the old man; and was an evident favourite with him. He used to nod many times to her and smile when she came in, and utter in- articulate deprecatory moans when she was going away. When the door shut upon her he would cry and sob- whereupon Hester's face and manner, which was always exceedingly bland and gentle while her lady was present, would change at once, and she would make faces at him and clench her fist, and scream out "Hold your tongue, you stoopid old fool," and twirl away his chair from the fire which he loved to look at — at which he would cry more. For this was all that was left after more than seventy years of cunning and struggling, and drinking, and scheming, and sin and selfishness — a whimpering old idiot put in and out of bed and cleaned and fed like a baby.
At last a day came when the nurse's occupation was over. Early one morning, as Pitt Crawley was at his steward's and bailiff's books in the study, a knock came to the door, and Hester presented herself dropping a curtsey, and said,
"If you please, Sir Pitt, Sir Pitt died this morning. Sir Pitt. I was a-making of his toast, Sir Pitt, for his gruel. Sir Pitt, which he took every morning regular at six. Sir Pitt, and — I thought I heard a moan-like. Sir Pitt — and — and — and — ." She dropped another curtsey.
What was it that made Pitt's pale face flush quite red? Was it because he was Sir Pitt at last, with a seat in Parliament, and perhaps future honours in prospect? "I'll
60 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
clear the estate now with the ready money/' he thought, and rapidly calculated its incumbrances and the improve- ments which he would make. He would not use his aunt's money previously lest Sir Pitt should recover, and his out- lay be in vain.
All the blinds were pulled down at the Hall and Rectory : the church bell was tolled, and the chancel hung in black; and Bute Crawley didn't go to a coursing meeting, but went and dined quietly at Fuddleston, where they talked about his deceased brother and young Sir Pitt over their port. Miss Betsy, who was by this time married to a saddler at Mudbury, cried a good deal. The family surgeon rode over and paid his respectful compliments, and inquiries for the health of their ladyships. The death was talked about at Mudbury and at the Crawley Arms ; the landlord whereof had become reconciled with the Rector of late, who was occasionally known to step into the parlour and taste Mr. Horrocks' mild beer.
"Shall I write to your brother — or will you?" asked Lady Jane of her husband, Sir Pitt.
"I will write, of course," Sir Pitt said, "and invite him to the funeral; it will be but becoming."
"And — and — Mrs. Rawdon," said Lady Jane, timidly.
"Jane!" said Lady Southdown, "how can you think of such a thing?"
"Mrs. Rawdon must of course be asked," said Sir Pitt, resolutely.
"Not whilst / am in the house !" said Lady Southdown.
"Your Ladyship will be pleased to recollect that I am the head of this family," Sir Pitt replied. "If you please, Lady Jane, you will write a letter to Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, requesting her presence upon this melancholy occasion."
"Jane, I forbid you to put pen to paper !" cried the Countess.
"I believe I am the head of this family," Sir Pitt re- peated; "and however much I may regret any circumstance which may lead to your Ladyship quitting this house, must, if you please, continue to govern it as I see fit."
Lady Southdown rose up as magnificent as Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth, and ordered that horses might be put to
VANITY FAIR 61
her carriage. If her son and daughter turned her out of their house, she would hide her sorrows somewhere in lone- liness, and pray for their conversion to better thoughts.
"We don't turn you out of our house, Mamma," said the timid Lady Jane imploringly.
''You invite such company to it as no Christian lady should meet, and I will have my horses to-morrow morning."
"Have the goodness to write, Jane, under my dictation,'' said Sir Pitt, rising, and throwing himself into an attitude of command, like the portrait of a Gentleman in the Exhibi- tion, "and begin. 'Queen's Crawley, September 14, 1822. — My dear brother — ' "
Hearing these decisive and terrible words, Lady Macbeth, who had been waiting for a sign of weakness or vacillation on the part of her son-in-law, rose, and with a scared look, left the library. Lady Jane looked up to her husband as if she would fain follow and soothe her mamma: but Pitt forbade his wife to move.
"She won't go away," he said. "She has let her house at Brighton, and has spent her last half-year's dividends. A Countess living at an inn is a ruined woman. I have been waiting long for an opportunity to take this — this decisive step, my love; for, as you must perceive, it is im- possible that there should be two chiefs in a family: and now, if you please, we will resume the dictation. 'My dear brother, the melancholy intelligence which it is my duty to convey to my family must have been long antici- pated by,' " &c.
In a word, Pitt having come to his kingdom, and having by good luck, or desert rather, as he considered, assumed almost all the fortune which his other relatives had ex- pected, was determined to treat his family kindly and respectably, and make a house of Queen's Crawley once more. It pleased him to think that he should be its chiefc He proposed to use the vast influence that his commanding talents and position must speedily acquire for him in the county to get his brother placed and his cousins decently provided for, and perhaps had a little sting of repentance as he thought that he was the proprietor of all that they had hoped for. In the course of three or four days* reign
r»2 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
his bearing was changed, and his plans quite fixed: he determined to rule justly and honestly, to depose Lady Southdown, and to be on the friendliest possible terms with all the relations of his blood.
So he dictated a letter to his brother Rawdon — a solemn and elaborate letter, containing the profoundest observa- tions, couched in the longest words, and filling with wonder the simple little secretary, who wrote under her husband's order. "What an orator this will be," thought she, "when he enters the House of Commons" (on which point, and on the tyranny of Lady Southdown, Pitt had sometimes dropped hints to his wife in bed) ; "how wise and good, and what a genius my husband is 1 I fancied him a little cold ; but how good, and what a genius !"
The fact is, Pitt Crawley had got every word of the let- ter by heart and had studied it, with diplomatic secrecy, deeply and perfectly, long before he thought fit to communi- cate it to his astonished wife.
This letter, with a huge black border and seal, was accord- ingly despatched by Sir Pitt Crawley to his brother the Colonel, in London. Rawdon Crawley was but half-pleased at the receipt of it. "What's the use of going down to that stupid place?" thought he. "I can't stand being alone with Pitt after dinner, and horses there and back will cost us twenty pound."
He carried the letter, as he did all difficulties, to Becky, upstairs in her bed-room — with her chocolate, which he always made and took to her of a morning.
He put the tray with the breakfast and the letter on the dressing-table, before which Becky sate combing her yellow hair. She took up the black-edged missive, and having read it, she jumped up from the chair, crying "Hurray!" and waving the note round her head.
"Hurray?" said Rawdon, wondering at the little figure capering about in a streaming flannel dressing-gown, with tawny locks dishevelled. "He's not left us anything, Becky. I had my share when I came of age."
"You'll never be of age, you silly old man," Becky re- plied. "Run out now to Madam Brunoy's, for I must have some mourning: and get a crape on your hat, and a black
VANITY FAIR 65
waistcoat — I don't think you've got one; order it to be brought home to-morrow, so that we may be able to start on Thursday."
"You don't mean to go?" Rawdon interposed.
"Of course I mean to go. I mean that Lady Jane shall present me at Court next year. I mean that your brother shall give you a seat in Parliament, you stupid old creature. I mean that Lord Steyne shall have your vote and his, my dear, old silly man; and that you shall be an Irish Secretary, or a West Indian Governor: or a Treasurer, or a Consul, or some such thing."
"Posting will cost a dooce of a lot of money," grumbled Rawdon,
"We might take Southdown's carriage, which ought to be present at the funeral, as he is a relation of the family: but, no — I intend that we shall go by the coach. They'll like it better. It seems more humble "
"Rawdy goes of course?" the Colonel asked.
"No such thing; why pay an extra place? He's too big to travel bodkin between you and me. Let him stay here in the nursery, and Briggs can make him a black frock. Go you: and do as I bid you. And you had best tell Sparks, your man, that old Sir Pitt is dead, and that you will come xh for something ronsiderable when the affairs are arranged. He'll tell this to kaggles, who has been pressing for money, and it will console poor Raggles." And so Becky began sipping her chocolate.
When the faithful Lord Steyne arrived in the evening, he found Becky and her companion, who was no other than our friend Briggs, busy cutting, ripping, snipping, and tearing all sorts of black stuffs available for the melancholy occasion.
"Miss Briggs and I are plunged in grief and despondency for the death of our Papa," Rebecca said. "Sir Pitt Crawley is dead, my lord. We have been tearing our hair all the morning, and now we are tearing up our old clothes."
"Oh, Rebecca, how can you — ^"was all that Briggs could say as she turned up her eyes.
"Oh, Rebecca, how can you — " echoed my Lord. "So that old scoundrel's dead, is he? He might have been a
Gi WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Peer if he had played his cards better. Mr. Pitt had very nearly made him; but he ratted always at the wrong time. What an old Silenus it was !"
"I might have been Silenus's widow/' said Rebecca. ''Don't you remember, Miss Briggs, how you peeped in at the door, and saw old Sir Pitt on his knees to me?" Miss Briggs, our old friend, blushed very much at the remi- niscence; and was glad when Lord Steyne ordered her to go downstairs and make him a cup of tea.
Briggs was the house-dog whom Rebecca had provided as guardian of her innocence and reputation. Miss Crawley had left her a little annuity. She would have been content to remain in the Crawley family with Lady Jane, who was good to her and to everybody; but Lady Southdown dis- missed poor Briggs as quickly as decency permitted; and Mr. Pitt (who thought himself much injured by the un- called-for generosity of his deceased relative towards a lady who had only been Miss Crawley's faithful retainer a score of years) made no objection to that exercise of the dowager's authority. Bowls and Firkin likewise received their legacies, and their dismissals; and married and set x\p a lodging-house, according to the custom of their kind.
Briggs tried to live with her relations in the country, but found that attempt was vain after the better society to which she had been accustomed. Briggs's friends, small tradesmen, in a country town, quarrelled over Miss Briggs's forty pounds a-year, as eagerly and more openly than Miss Crawley's kinsfolk had for that lady's inheritance. Briggs's brother, a radical hatter and grocer, called his sister a purse-proud aristocrat, because she would not advance a part of her capital to stock his shop: and she would have done so most likely, but that their sister, a dissenting shoe- maker's lady, at variance with the hatter and grocer, who ^vent to another chapel, showed how their brother was on the verge of bankruptcy, and took possession of Briggs for a while. The dissenting shoemaker wanted Miss Briggs to send his son to college, and make a gentleman of him. Be- tween them the two families got a great portion of her private savings out of her: and finally she fled to London
VANITY FAIR 65
followed by the anathemas of both, and determined to seek for servitude again as infinitely less onerous than liberty. And advertising in the papers that a "Gentlewoman of agreeable manners, and accustomed to the best society, was anxious to," &c., she took up her residence with Mr. Bowls in Half Moon Street, and waited the result of the advertisement.
So it was that she fell in with Rebecca. Mrs. Rawdon's dashing little carriage and ponies was whirling down the street one day, just as Miss Briggs, fatigued, had reached Mr. Bowls's door, after a weary walk to the Times Office in the City, to insert her advertisement for the sixth time. Rebecca was driving, and at once recognized the gentle- woman with agreeable manners, and being a perfectly good- humoured woman, as we have seen, and having a regard for Briggs, she pulled up the ponies at the door-steps, g^ve the reins to the groom, and jumping out, had hold of both Briggs's hands, before she of the agreeable manners had recovered from the shock of seeing an old friend.
Briggs cried, and Becky laughed a great deal, and kissed the gentlewoman as soon as they got into the passage; and thence into Mrs. Bowls's front parlour, with the red moreen curtains, and the round looking-glass, with the chained eagle above, gazing upon the back of the ticket in the win- dow which announced "Apartments to Let."
Briggs told all her history amidst those perfectly un- called-for sobs and ejaculations of wonder with which women of her soft nature salute an old acquaintance, or regard a rencontre in the street; for though people meet other people every day, yet some there are who insist upon discovering miracles; and women, even though they have disliked each other, begin to cry when they meet, deploring and remembering the time when they last quarrelled. So, in a word, Briggs told all her history, and Becky gave a narrative of her own life, with her usual artlessness and candour.
Mrs. Bowls, late Firkin, came and listened grimly in the passage to the hysterical sniffling and giggling which went on in the front parlour. Becky had never been a favourite of hers. Since the establishment of the married couple
3-P
66 WILLIAM MAKEfBACE THACKERAY
in London they had frequented their former friends of the house of Raggles, and did not like the latter's account of the Colonel's menage. '7 wouldn't trust him, Ragg, my boy," Bowls remarked: and his wife, when Mrs. Rawdon issued from the parlour, only saluted the lady with a very sour curtsey; and her fingers were like so many sausages, cold and lifeless, when she held them out in deference to Mrs. Rawdon, who persisted in shaking hands with the retired lady's maid. She whirled away into Piccadilly, nodding with the sweetest of smiles towards Miss Briggs, w^ho hung nodding at the window close under the advertise- ment-card, and at the next moment was in the Park with a half dozen of dandies cantering after her carriage.
When she found how her friend was situated, and how having a snug legacy from Miss Crawley, salary was no object to our gentlewoman, Becky instantly formed some benevolent little domestic plans concerning her. This was just such a companion as would suit her establishment, and she invited Briggs to come to dinner with her that very evening, when she should see Becky's dear little darling Rawdon.
Mrs. Bowls cautioned her lodger against venturing into the lion's den, "wherein you will rue it, Miss B., mark my words, and as sure as my name is Bowls." And Briggs promised to be very cautious. The upshot of which cau- tion was that she went to live with Mrs. Rawdon the next week, and had lent Rawdon Crawley six hundred pounds upon annuity before six months were over.
CHAPTER VI In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors
SO the mourning being ready, and Sir Pitt Crawley I warned of their arrival, Colonel Crawley and his wife took a couple of places in the same old Highflyer coach, by which Rebecca had travelled in the defunct Baronet's company, on her first journey into the world some nine years before. How well she remembered the Inn Yard, and the ostler to whom she refused money, and the insinuating Cam- bridge lad who wrapped her in his coat on the journey! Rawdon took his place outside, and would have liked to drive, but his grief forbade him. He sat by the coachman, and talked about horses and the road the whole way; and who kept the inns, and who horsed the coach by which he had travelled so many a time, when he and Pitt were boys going to Eton. At Mudbury a carriage and a pair of horses received them, with a coachman in black. "It's the old drag, Rawdon," Rebecca said, as they got in. 'The worms have eaten the cloth a good deal — there's the stain which Sir Pitt — ha ! I see Dawson the Ironmonger has his shutters up — which Sir Pitt made such a noise about. It was a bottle of cherry brandy he broke which we went to fetch for your aunt from Southampton. How time flies, to be sure ! that can't be Polly Talboys, that bouncing girl standing by her mother at the cottage there. I remember her a mangy little urchin picking weeds in the garden."
"Fine gal," said Rawdon, returning the salute which the cottage gave him, by two fingers applied to his crape hat- band. Becky bowed and saluted, and recognised people here and there graciously. These recognitions were inex- pressibly pleasant to her. It seemed as if she was not an impostor any more, and was coming to the home of her ancestors. Rawdon was rather abashed, and cast down on the other hand. What recollections of boyhood and inno-
67
68 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
cence might have been flitting across his brain? What pangs of dim remorse and doubt and shame?
"Your sisters must be young women now/' Rebecca said, thinking of those girls for the first time perhaps since she had left them.
"Don't know, I'm shaw,'' replied the Colonel. "Hullo! here's old Mother Lock. How-dy-do, Mrs. Lock? Remem- ber me, don't you? Master Rawdon, hey? Dammy how those old women last ; she was a hundred when I was a boy."
They were going through the lodge-gates kept by old Mrs. Lock, whose hand Rebecca insisted upon shaking, as she flung open the creaking old iron gate, and the carriage passed between the two moss-grown pillars surmounted by the dove and serpent.
"The governor has cut into the timber," Rawdon said, looking about, and then was silent — so was Becky. Both of them were rather agitated, and thinking of old times. He about Eton, and his mother, whom he remembered, a frigid demure woman, and a sister who died, of whom he had been passionately fond; and how he used to thrash Pitt; and about little Rawdy at home. And Rebecca thought about her own youth, and the dark secrets of those early tainted days ; and of her entrance into life by yonder gates; and of Miss Pinkerton, and Joe, and Amelia.
The gravel walk and terrace had been scraped quite clean. A grand painted hatchment was already over the great entrance, and two very solemn and tall personages in black flung open each a leaf of the door as the carriage pulled up at the familiar steps. Rawdon turned red, and Becky somewhat pale, as they passed through the old hall, arm in arm. She pinched her husband's arm as they entered the oak parlour, where Sir Pitt and his wife were ready to receive them. Sir Pitt in black, Lady Jane in black, and my Lady Southdown with a large black head piece of bugles and feathers, which waved on her Ladyship's head like an undertaker's tray.
Sir Pitt had judged correctly, that she would not quit the premises. She contented herself by preserving a solemn and stony silence, when in company of Pitt and his rebellious wife, and by frightening the children in the nursery by the
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ghastly gloom of her demeanour. Only a very faint bending of the head-dress and plumes welcomed Rawdon and his wife, as those prodigals returned to their family.
To say the truth, they were not affected very much one way or other by this coolness. Her Ladyship was a person only of secondary consideration in their minds just then — they were intent upon the reception which the reigning brother and sister would afford them.
Pitt, with rather a heightened colour, went up and shook his brother by the hand; and saluted Rebecca with a hand- shake and a very low bow. But Lady Jane took both the hands of her sister-in-law and kissed her affectionately. The embrace somehow brought tears into the eyes of the little adventuress — which ornaments, as we know, she wore very seldom.
The artless mark of kindness and confidence touched and pleased her; and Rawdon, encouraged by this demonstra- tion on his sister's part, twirled up his mustachios, and took leave to salute Lady Jane with a kiss, which caused her Ladyship to blush exceedingly.
"Dev'lish nice little woman. Lady Jane," was his verdict, when he and his wife were together again. "Pitt's got fat, too, and is doing the thing handsomely." "He can afford it," said Rebecca, and agreed in her husband's farther opinion, "that the mother-in-law was a tremendous old Guy — and that the sisters were rather well-looking young women."
They, too, had been summoned from school to attend the funeral ceremonies. It seemed Sir Pitt Crawley, for the dignity of the house and family, had thought right to have about the place as many persons in black as could possibly be assembled. All the men and maids of the house, the old women of the Alms House, whom the elder Sir Pitt had cheated out of a great portion of their due, the Parish Clerk's family, and the special retainers of both Hall and Rectory were habited in sable; added to these, the under- taker's men, at least a score, with crapes and hat-bands, and who made a goodly show when the great burying show took place — but these are mute personages in our drama; and having nothing to do or say, need occupy a very little space here.
70 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
With regard to her sisters-in-law Rebecca did not attempt to forget her former position of Governess towards them, but recalled it frankly and kindly, and asked them about their studies with great gravity, and told them that she had thought of them many and many a day, and longed to know of their welfare. In fact you would have supposed that ever since she had left them she had not ceased to keep them uppermost in her thoughts, and to take the tenderest interest in their welfare. So supposed Lady Crawley herself and her young sisters.
"She's hardly changed since eight years,*' said Miss Rosalind to Miss Violet, as they were preparing for dinner.
"Those red-haired women look wonderfully well,'* replied the other.
"Hers is much darker than it was; I think she must dye it,** Miss Rosalind added. "She is stouter, too, and altogether improved," continued Miss Rosalind, who was disposed to be very fat.
"At least she gives herself no airs, and remembers that she was our Governess once," Miss Violet said, intimating that it befitted all governesses to keep their proper place, and forgetting altogether that she was granddaughter no^ only of Sir Walpole Crawley, but of Mr. Dawson Mudbury^ and so had a coal-scuttle in her scutcheon. There are other very well-meaning people whom one meets every day in Vanity Fair, who are surely equally oblivious.
"It can't be true what the girls at the Rectory said, that her mother was an opera-dancer — "
"A person can't help their birth," Rosalind replied with great liberality. "And I agree with our brother, that as she is in the family, of course we are bound to notice her. I am sure Aunt Bute need not talk: she v/ants to marry Kate to young Hooper, the wine-merchant, and absolutely asked him to come to the Rectory for orders."
"I wonder whether Lady Southdown will go away; she looked very glum upon Mrs. Rawdon," the other said.
"I wish she would. / won't read the *Washer woman of Finchley Common/" vowed Violet; and so saying, and avoiding a passage at the end of which a certain coffin was placed with a couple of watchers, and lights perpetually
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burning in the closed room, these young women came down to the family dinner, for which the bell rang as usual.
But before this, Lady Jane conducted Rebecca to the apartments prepared for her, which, with the rest of the house, had assumed a very much improved appearance of order and comfort during Pitt's regency, and here beholding that Mrs. Rawdon's modest little trunks had arrived, and were placed in the bed-room and dressing-room adjoining, helped her to take off her neat black bonnet and cloak, and asked her sister-in-law in what more she could be useful.
"What I should like best," said Rebecca, "would be to go to the nursery; and see your dear little children." On which the two ladies looked very kindly at each other, and went to that apartment hand in hand.
Becky admired little Matilda, who was not quite four years old, as the most charming little love in the world ; and the boy, a little fellow of two years — pale, heavy-eyed, and large-headed, she pronounced to be a perfect prodigy in point of size, intelligence, and beauty.
*'I wish Mamma would not insist on giving him so much medicine," Lady Jane said, with a sigh. "I often think we should all be better without it." And then Lady Jane and her new-found friend had one of those confidential medical conversations about the children, which all mothers, and most women, as I am given to understand, delight in. Fifty years ago, and when the present writer, being an interesting little boy, was ordered out of the room with the ladies after dinner, I remember quite well that their talk was chiefly about their ailments; and putting this question directly to two or three since, I have always got from them the acknowledgment that times are not changed. Let my fair readers remark for themselves this very evening when they quit the dessert-table, and assemble to celebrate the drawing-room mysteries. Well — in half-an-hour Becky and Lady Jane were close and intimate friends — and in the course of the evening her Ladyship informed Sir Pitt that she thought her new sister-in-law was a kind, frank, unaffected, and aft'ectionate young woman.
And so having easily won the daughter's good-will, the indefatigable little woman bent herself to conciliate the
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august Lady Southdown. As soon as she found her Ladyship alone, Rebecca attacked her on the nursery question at once, and said that her own little boy was saved, actually saved, by calomel, freely administered, when all the physicians in Paris had given the dear child up. And then she mentioned how often she had heard of Lady Southdown from that excellent man the Reverend Lawrence Grills, Minister oi the chapel in May Fair, which she frequented ; and how her views were very much changed by circumstances and mis- fortunes; and how she hoped that a past life spent in world- liness and error might not incapacitate her from more serious thought for the future. She described how in former days she had been indebted to Mr. Crawley for religious instruction, touched upon the "Washerwoman of Finchley Common," which she had read with the greatest profit, and asked about Lady Emily, its gifted author, now Lady Emily Hornblower, at Cape Town, where her husband had strong hopes of becoming Bishop of Caffraria.
But she crowned all, and confirmed herself in Lady Southdown's favour, by feeling very much agitated and un* well after the funeral, and requesting her Ladyship's med- ical advice, which the Dowager not only gave, but, wrapped up in a bed-gown, and looking more like Lady Macbeth than ever, came privately in the night to Beck/s room, with a parcel of favourite tracts, and a medicine of her own composition, which she insisted that Mrs. Rawdon should take,
Becky first accepted the tracts, and began to examine them with great interest, engaging the Dowager in a con- versation concerning them and the welfare of her soul, by which means she hoped that her body might escape medi- cation. But after the religious topics were exhausted. Lady Macbeth would not quit Becky's chamber until her cup of night-drink was emptied too; and poor Mrs. Rawdon was compelled actually to assume a look of gratitude, and to swallow the medicine under the unyielding old Dow- ager's nose, who left her victim finally with a benediction.
It did not much comfort Mrs. Rawdon; her countenance was very queer when Rawdon came in and heard what had happened; and his explosions of laughter were as loud as
VANITY FAIK 73
usual, when Becky, with a fun which she could not dis- guise, even though it was at her own expense, described the occurrence, and how she had been victimised by Lady Southdown. Lord Steyne, and her son in London, had many a laugh over the story, when Rawdon and his wife returned to their quarters in May Fair. Becky acted the whole scene for them. She put on a night-cap and gown. She preached a great sermon in the true serious manner; she lectured on the virtue of the medicine which she pre- tended to administer, with gravity of imitation so perfect, that you would have thought it was the Countess's own Roman nose through which she snuffled. "Give us Lady Southdown and the black dose," was a constant cry amongst the folks in Becky's little drawing-room in May Fair. And for the first time in her life the Dowager Q)untess of South- down was made amusing.
Sir Pitt remembered the testimonies of respect and ven- eration which Rebecca had paid personally to himself in early days, and was tolerably well disposed towards her. The marriage, ill-advised as it was, had improved Rawdon very much — that was clear from the Colonel's altered habits and demeanour — and had it not been a lucky union as regarded Pitt himself? The cunning diplomatist smiled in- wardly as he owned that he owed his fortune to it, and acknowledged that he at least ought not to cry out against it. His satisfaction was not removed by Rebecca's own statements, behaviour, and conversation.
She doubled the deference which before had charmed him, calling out his conversational powers in such a man- ner as quite to surprise Pitt himself, who, always inclined to respect his own talents, admired them the more when Rebecca pointed them out to him. With her sister-in-law, Rebecca was satisfactorily able to prove, that it was Mrs. Bute Crawley who brought about the marriage w^hich she afterwards so caluminated: that it was Mrs. Bute's avarice — who hoped to gain all Miss Crawley's fortune, and de- prive Rawdon of his aunt's favour — which caused and invented all the wicked reports against Rebecca. "She succeeded in making us poor," Rebecca said, with an air of angelical patience ; "but how can I be angry with a woman
74 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
who has given me one of the best husbands in the world? And has not her own avarice been sufficiently punished by the ruin of her own hopes, and the loss of the property by which she sat so much store? Poor!" she cried. "Dear Lady Jane, what care we for poverty? I am used to it from childhood, and I am often thankful that Miss Craw- ley's money has gone to restore the splendour of the noble old family of which I am so proud to be a member. I am sure Sir Pitt will make a much better use of it than Raw- don would."
All these speeches were reported to Sir Pitt by the most faithful of wives, and increased the favourable impression which Rebecca made; so much so, that when on the third day after the funeral the family party were at dinner, Sir Pitt Crawley, carving fowls at the head of the table, ac- tually said to Mrs. Rawdon, "Ahem! Rebecca, may I give you a wing?" — a speech which made the little woman's eyes sparkle with pleasure.
While Rebecca was prosecuting the above schemes and hopes, and Pitt Crawley arranging the funeral ceremonial and other matters connected with his future progress and dignity, and Lady Jane busy with her nursery, as far as her mother would let her, and the sun rising and setting, and the clock-tower bell of the Hall ringing to dinner and to prayers as usual, the body of the late owner of Queen's Crawley lay in the apartment which he had occupied, watched unceasingly by the professional attendants who were en- gaged for that rite. A woman or two, and three or four undertaker's men, the best whom Southampton could fur- nish, dressed in black, and of a proper stealthy and tragical demeanour, had charge of the remains which they watched turn about, having the housekeeper's room for their place of rendezvous when off duty, where they played at cards in privacy and drank their beer.
The members of the family and servants of the house kept away from the gloomy spot, where the bones of the descendant of an ancient line of knights and gentlemen lay, awaiting their final consignment to the family crypt. No regrets attended them, save those of the poor woman who had hoped to be Sir Pitt's wife and widow, and who
VANITY FAIR U
had fled in disgrace from the Hall over which she had so nearly been a ruler. Beyond her and a favourite old pointer he had, and between whom and himself an attach- ment subsisted during the period of his imbecility, the old man had not a single friend to mourn him, having indeed, during the whole course of his life, never taken the least pains to secure one. Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth, have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our sur- vivors were consoled. And so Sir Pitt was forgotten — like the kindest and best of us — only a few weeks sooner.
Those who will may follow his remains to the grave, whither they were borne on the appointed day, in the most becoming manner, the family in black coaches, with their handkerchiefs up to their noses, ready for the tears which did not come: the undertaker and his gentlemen in deep tribulation: the select tenantry mourning out of compli- ment to the new landlord: the neighbouring gentry*s car- riages at three miles an hour, empty, and in profound afflic- tion: the parson speaking out the formula about **our dear brother departed." As long as we have a man's body, we play our Vanities upon it, surrounding it with humbug and ceremonies, laying it in state, and packing it up in gilt nails and velvet : and we finish our duty by placing over it a stone, written all over with lies. Bute's curate, a smart young fellow from Oxford, and Sir Pitt Crawley, composed between them an appropriate Latin epitaph for the late lamented Baronet: and the former preached a classical ser- mon, exhorting the survivors not to give way to grief, and informing them in the most respectful terms that they also would be one day called upon to pass that gloomy and mysterious portal which had just closed upon the remains of their lamented brother. Then the tenantry mounted on horseback again, or stayed and refreshed themselves at the Crawley Arms. Then, after a lunch in the servants* hall at Queen's Crawley, the gentry's carriages wheeled off to their different destinations: then the undertaker's men, taking the ropes, palls, velvets, ostrich feathers, and other
76 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
mortuary properties, clambered up on the roof of the hearse, and rode off to Southampton. Their faces relapsed into a natural expression as the horses, clearing the lodge- gates, got into a brisker trot on the open road; and squads of them might have been seen, speckling with black the public-house entrances, with pewter-pots flashing in the sunshine. Sir Pitt*s invalid-chair was wheeled away into a tool-house in the garden: the old pointer used to howl sometimes at first, but these were the only accents of grief which were heard in the Hall of which Sir Pitt Crawley, Baronet, had been master for some three-score years.
As the birds were pretty plentiful, and partridge- shoot- ing is as it were the duty of an English gentleman of states- manlike propensities, Sir Pitt Crawley, the first shock of grief over, went out a little and partook of that diversion in a white hat with crape around it. The sight of those fields of stubble and turnips, now his own, gave him many secret joys. Sometimes, and with an exquisite humility, he took no gun, but went out with a peaceful bamboo cane; Rawdon, his big brother, and the keepers blazing away at his side.
Pitt's money and acres had a great effect upon his brother. The penniless Colonel became quite obsequious and respectful to the head of his house, and despised the milk-sop Pitt no longer. Rawdon listened with sympathy to his senior's prospects of planting and draining: gave his advice about the stables and cattle, rode over to Mud- bury to look at a mare, which he thought would carry Lady Jane, and offered to break her, &c. : the rebellious dragoon was quite humbled and subdued, and became a most creditable younger brother. He had constant bul- letins from Miss Briggs in London respecting little Rawdon, who was left behind there: who sent messages of his own. *T am very well," he wrote. "I hope you are very well. I hope Mamma is very well. The pony is very well. Grey takes me to ride in the Park. I can canter. I met the little boy who rode before. He cried when he cantered. I do not cry." Rawdon read these letters to his brother, and Lady
VANITY FAIR T7
Jane, who was delighted with them. The Baronet promised to take charge of the lad at school; and his kind-hearted wife gave Rebecca a bank-note, begging her to buy a present with it for her little nephew.
One day followed another, and the ladies of the house passed their life in those calm pursuits and amusements which satisfy country ladies. Bells rang to meals, and to prayers. The young ladies took exercise on the pianoforte every morning after breakfast, Rebecca giving them the benefit of her instruction. Then they put on thick shoes and walked in the park or shrubberies, or beyond the pal- ings into the village, descending upon the cottages, with Lady Southdown's medicine and tracts for the sick people there. Lady Southdown drove out in a pony-chaise, when Rebecca would take her place by the Dowager's side, and listen to her solemn talk ' /ith the utmost interest She sang Handel and Haydn to the family of evenings, and engaged in a large piece of worsted work, as if she had been born to the business, and as if this kind of life was to continue with her until she should sink to the grave in a polite old age, leaving regrets and a great quantity of consols behind her — as if there were not cares and dims, schemes, shifts, and poverty, waiting outside the park gates to pounce upon her when she issued into the world again.
"It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife," Re- becca thought. "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a-year. I could dawdle about in the nursery, and count the apricots on the wall. I could water plants in a green-house, and pick off dead leaves from the geraniums. I could ask old women about their rheumatisms, and order half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor. I shouldn't miSvS it much, out of five thousand a-year. I could even drive out ten miles to dine at a neighbour's, and dress in the fashions of the year before last. I could go to church and keep awake in the great family pew: or go to sleep behind the curtains, with my veil down, if I only had practice. I could pay every^ body, if I had but the money. This is what the conjurors here pride themselves upon doing. They look down with pity upon us miserable sinners who have none. They think
t8 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY )
themselves generous If they give our children a five-pounq note, and us contemptible if we are without one/* And who knows but Rebecca was right in her speculations — and that it was only a question of money and fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman? If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbour? A comfortable career of pros- perity, if it does not make people honest, at least keeps them so.
An alderman coming from a turtle feast will not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton; but put him to starve, and see If he will not purloin a loaf. Becky consoled herself by so balancing the chances and equalising the distribution of good and evil in the world.
The old haunts, the old fields and woods, the copses, ponds, and gardens, the rooms of the old house where she had spent a couple of years seven years ago, were all care- fully revisited by her. She had been young there, or com- paratively so, for she forgot the time when she ever was young — but she remembered her thoughts and feelings seven years back, and contrasted them with those which she had at present, now that she had seen the world and lived with great people, and raised herself far beyond her original humble station.
"I have passed beyond it, because I have brains," Becky thought, "and almost all the rest of the world are fools. I could not go back, and consort with those people now, whom I used to meet In my father's studio. Lords come up to my door with stars and garters instead of poor artists with screws of tobacco In their pockets. I have a gentle- man for my husband, and an EarFs daughter for my sister, In the very house where I was little better than a servant a few years ago. But am I much better to do now In the world than I was when I was the poor painter's daughter, and wheedled the grocer round the corner for sugar and tea? Suppose I had married Francis who was so fond of me — I couldn't have been much poorer than I am now. Heigho! I wish I could exchange my position in society, and all my relations for a snug sum in the Three per Cent. Consols ;" for so it was that Becky felt the Vanity of human
VANITY FAIR 19
affairs, and it was in those securities that she would have liked to cast anchor.
It may, perhaps, have struck her that to have been honest and humble, to have done her duty, and to have marched .straightforward on her way, would have brought her as near happiness as that path by which she was striving to attain it. But, — ^just as the children at Queen's Crawley went round the room, where the body of their father lay; — if ever Becky had these thoughts, she was accustomed to walk round them, and not look in. She eluded them, and despised them — or at least she was committed to the other path from which retreat was now impossible. And for my part I believe that re- morse is the least active of all a man's moral senses — the very easiest to be deadened when wakened: and in some never wakened at all. We grieve at being found out, and at the idea of shame or punishment; but the mere sense of wrong makes very few people unhappy in Vanity Fair.
So Rebecca, during her stay at Queen's Crawley, made as many friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness as she could possibly bring under control. Lady Jane and her hus- band bade her farewell with the warmest demonstrations oi good-will. They looked forward with pleasure to the time when, the family-house in Gaunt Street being repaired and beautified, they were to meet again in London. Lady South- down made her up a packet of medicine, and sent a letter by her to the Rev. Lawrence Grills, exhorting that gentle- man to save the brand who "honoured" the letter from the burning. Pitt accompanied them with four horses in the carriage to Mudbury, having sent on their baggage in a cart previously, accompanied with loads of game.
"How happy you will be to see your darling little boy again!" Lady Crawley said, taking leave of her kins- woman.
"O so happy !" said Rebecca, throwing up the green eyes. She was immensely happy to be free of the place, and yet loth to go. Queen's Crawley was abominably stupid; and yet the air there was somehow purer than that which she had been accustomed to breathe. Everybody had been dull, but had been kind in their way. "It is all the influence of a
80 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
long course of Three per Cents," Becky said to herself, anc was right very likely.
However, the London lamps flashed joyfully as the stage rolled into Piccadilly, and Briggs had made a beautiful fire in Curzon Street, and little Rawdon was up to welcome back his papa and mamma.
CHAPTER VII Which Treats of the Osborne Family
CONSIDERABLE time has elapsed since we have seen our respectable friend, old Mr. Osborne of Russell Square. He has not been the happiest of mortals since last we met him. Events have occurred which have not improved his temper, and in more instances than one he has not been allowed to have his own way. To be thwarted in this reasonable desire was always very injurious to the old gentleman ; and resistance became doubly exasperating w'hen gout, age, loneliness, and the force of many disappointments combined to weigh him down. His stiff black hair began to grow quite white soon after his son's death; his face grew redder; his hands trembled more and more as he poured out his glass of port wine. He led his clerks a dire life in the City: his family at home were not much happier. I doubt if Rebecca, whom we have seen piously praying for Consols, would have exchanged her poverty and the dare-devil excite- ment and chances of her life, for Osborne's money and the humdrum gloom which enveloped him. He had proposed for Miss Swartz, but had been rejected scornfully by the parti- zans of that lady, who married her to a young sprig of Scotch nobility.
He was a man to have married a woman out of low life, and bullied her dreadfully afterwards: but no person presented herself suitable to his taste ; and, instead, he tyran- nised over his unmarried daughter, at home. She had a fine carriage and fine horses, and sate at the head of a table loaded with the grandest plate. She had a cheque-book, a prize footman to follow her when she walked, unlimited credit, and bows and compliments from all the tradesmen, and all the appurtenances of an heiress; but she spent a woful time. The little charity-girls at the Foundling, the sweep- eress at the crossing, the poorest under-kitchen-maid in the
61
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
servants' hall, was happy compared to that unfortunate and now middle-aged young lady. ]
Frederick Bullock, Esq., of the house of Bullock, Hulke^ and Bullock, had married Maria Osborne, not without a great deal of difficulty and grumbling on Mr. Bullock's part George being dead and cut out of his father's will, Frederick insisted that the half of the old gentleman's property should be settled upon his Maria, and indeed, for a long time, re- fused "to come to the scratch" (it was Mr. Frederick's own expression) on any other terms. Osborne said Fred had agreed to take his daughter with twenty thousand, and he should bind himself to no more. "Fred might take it, and welcome, or leave it, and go and be hanged." Fred, whose hopes had been raised when George had been disinherited, thought himself infamously swindled by the old merchant, and for some time made as if he would break off the match altogether. Osborne withdrew his account from Bullock and Hulker's, went on 'Change with a horsewhip which he swore he would lay across the back of a certain scoundrel that should be nameless, and demeaned himself in his usual violent manner. Jane Osborne condoled with her sister Maria during this family feud. "I always told you, Maria, that it was your money he loved, and not you," she said, soothingly.
*He selected me and my money at any rate : he didn't choose you and yours," replied Maria, tossing up her head.
The rupture was, however, only temporary. Fred's father and senior partners counselled him to take Maria, even with the twenty thousand settled, half down, and half at the death of Mr. Osborne, with the chances of the further division of the property. So he "knuckled down," again to use his own phrase ; and sent old Hulker with peaceable over- tures to Osborne. It was his father, he said, who would not hear of the match, and had made the difficulties ; he was most anxious to keep the engagement. The excuse was sulkily accepted by Mr. Osborne. Hulker and Bullock were a high family of the City aristocracy, and connected with the "nobs" at the West End. It was something for the old man to be able to say, "My son, sir, of the house of Hulker, Bullock, and Co., sir; my daughter's cousin, Lady Mango, sir, daugh-
VANITY FAIR SJ?
ter of the Right Hon. the Earl of Castlemouldy." In his imagination he saw his house peopled by the "nobs/* So he forgave young Bullock, and consented that the marriage should take place.
It was a grand affair — the bridegroom's relatives giving the breakfast, their habitations being near St. George's, Hanover Square, where the business took place. The "nobs of the West End" were invited, and many of them signed the book. Mr. Mango and Lady Mary Mango were there, with the dear young Gwendoline and Guinever Mango as bridesmaids; Colonel Bludyer of the Dragoon Guards (eldest son of the house of Bludyer Brothers, Mincing Lane), an- other cousin of the bridegroom, and the Honourable Mrs. Bludyer ; the Honourable George Boulter, Lord Levant's son, and his lady, Miss Mango that was; Lord Viscount Castle- toddy; Honourable James McMull and Mrs. McMull (form- erly Miss Swartz), and a host of fashionables, who have all married into Lombard Street, and done a great deal to en- noble Cornhill.
The young couple had a house near Berkeley Square, and a small villa at Roehampton, among the banking colony there. Fred was considered to have made rather a mesal- liance by the ladies of his family, whose grandfather had been in a Charity School, and who were allied through the husbands with some of the best blood in England. And Maria was bound, by superior pride and great care In the composition of her visiting-book, to make up for the defects of birth ; and felt it her duty to see her father and sister as little as possible.
That she should utterly break with the old man, who had still so many scores of thousand pounds to give away, is absurd to suppose. Fred Bullock would never allow her to do that. But she was still young and incapable of hiding her feelings : and by inviting her papa and sister to her third- rate parties, and behaving very coldly to them when they came, and by avoiding Russell Square, and indiscreetly beg- ging her father to quit that odious vulgar place; she did more harm than all Frederick's diplomacy could repair, and perilled her chance of her inheritance like a giddy heedless creature as she was.
84 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
**So Russell Square is not good enough for Mrs. Maria^ hay?" said the old gentleman, rattling up the carriagef windows as he and his daughter drove away one night from Mrs. Frederick Bullock's, after dinner. **So she invites her father and sister to a second day's dinner (if those sides, or ontrys, as she calls 'em, weren't served yesterday, I'm d— d), and to meet City folks and littery men, and keeps the Earls and the Ladies, and the Honourables to herself. Honour- ables? Damn Honourables. I am a plain British merchant I am: and could buy the beggarly hounds over and over. Lords, indeed ! — why, at one of her swarreys I saw one of *em speak to a damn fiddler — a fellar 1 despise. And they won't come to Russell Square, won't they ? \Vhy, I'll lay my life I've got a better glass of wine, and pay a better figure for it, and can show a handsomer service of silver, and can lay a better dinner on my mahogany, than ever they see on theirs — ^the cringing, sneaking, stuck-up fools. Drive on quick, James: I want to get back to Russell Square — ^ha, ha!" and he sank back into the corner with a furious laugh. With such reflections on his own superior merit, it was the custom of the old gentleman not un frequently to console himself.
Jane Osborne could not but concur in these opinions re- specting her sister's conduct; and when Mrs. Frederick's first-born, Frederick Augustus Howard Stanley Devereux Bullock, was born, old Osborne, who was invited to the christening and to be godfather, contented himself with sending the child a gold cup, with twenty guineas inside it for the nurse. "That's more than any of your Lords will give, m warrant," he said, and refused to attend at the ceremony.
The splendour of the gift, however, caused great satis- faction to the house of Bullock. Maria thought that her father was very much pleased with her, and Frederick augured the best for his little son and heir.
One can fancy the pangs with which Miss Osborne in her solitude in Russell Square read the Morning Post, where her sister's name occurred every now and then, in the articles headed "Fashionable Reunions," and where she had an opportunity of reading a description of Mrs. F. Bullock's cos- tume, when presented at the Drawing-room by Lady Fred-
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erica BuflocTc. Jane's own life, as we have said, admitted of no such grandeur. It was an awful existence. She had to get up of black winter's mornings to make breakfast for her scowling old father, who would have turned the whole house out of doors if his tea had not been ready at half-past eight. She remained silent opposite to him, listening to the urn hiss- ing, and sitting in tremor while the parent read his paper, and consumed his accustomed portion of muffins and tea. At half -past nine he rose and went to the City, and she was almost free till dinner-time, to make visitations in the kitchen, and to scold the servants: to drive abroad and descend upon the tradesmen, who were prodigiously respectful: to leave her cards and her papa's at the great glum respectable houses of their City friends; or to sit alone in the large drawing- room, expecting visitors; and working at a huge piece of worsted by the fire, on the sofa, hard by the great Iphigenia clock, which ticked and tolled with mournful loudness in the dreary room. The great glass over the mantel-piece, faced by the other great console glass at the opposite end of the room, increased and multiplied between them the brown Holland bag in which the chandelier hung; until you saw these brown Holland bags fading away in endless perspec- tives, and this apartment of Miss Osborne's seemed the centre of a system of drawing-rooms. WTien she removed the cordovan leather from the grand piano, and ventured to play a few notes on it, it sounded with a mournful sadness, start- ling the dismal echoes of the house. George's picture was gone, and laid upstairs in a lumber-room in the garret; and though there was a consciousness of him, and father and daughter often instinctively knew that they were thinking of him, no mention was ever made of the brave and once darling son.
At five o'clock Mr. Osborne came back to his dinner, which he and his daughter took in silence (seldom broken, except when he swore and was savage, if the cooking was not to his liking), or which they shared twice in a month with a party of dismal friends of Osborne's rank and age. Old Dr. Gulp and his lady from Bloomsbury Square: old Mr. Frowser, the attorney, from Bedford Row, a very great man, and from his business, hand-in-glove with the "nobs at
86 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
the West End ;" old Colonel Livermore, of the Bombay Army, and Mrs. Livermore, from Upper Bedford Place: old Ser- jeant Toffy and Mrs. Toffy; and sometimes old Sir Thomas Coffin and Lady Coffin, from Bedford Square. Sir Thomas was celebrated as a hanging judge, and the particular tawny port was produced when he dined with Mr. Osborne.
These people and their like gave the pompous Russell Square merchant pompous dinners back again. They had solemn rubbers of whist, when they went upstairs after drinking, and their carriages were called at half-past ten. Many rich people, whom we poor devils are in the habit of envying, lead contentedly an existence like that above de- scribed. Jane Osborne scarcely ever met a man under sixty, and almost the only bachelor who appeared in their society was Mr. Smirk, the celebrated ladies' doctor.
I can't say that nothing had occurred to disturb the monot- ony of this awful existence: the fact is, there had been a secret in poor Jane's life which had made her father more savage and morose than even nature, pride, and over-feeding had made him. This secret was connected with Miss Wirt, who had a cousin an artist, Mr. Smee, very celebrated since as a portrait-painter and R.A., but who once was glad enough to give drawing-lessons to ladies of fashion. Mr. Smee has forgotten where Russell Square is now, but he was glad enough to visit it in the year 1818, when Miss Osborne had instruction from him.
Smee (formerly a pupil of Sharpe of Frith Street, a dis- solute, irregular, and unsuccessful man, but a man with great knowledge of his art) being the cousin of Miss Wirt, we say, and introduced by her to Miss Osborne, whose hand and heart were still free after various incomplete love affairs, felt a great attachment for this lady, and it is believed in- spired one in her bosom. Miss Wirt was the confidante of this intrigue. I know not whether she used to leave the room where the master and his pupil were painting, in order to give them an opportunity for exchanging those vows and sentiments which cannot be uttered advantageously in the presence of a third party : I know not whether she hoped that should her cousin succeed in carrying off the rich merchant's daughter, he would give Miss Wirt a portion of the wealth
VANITY FAIR B7
which she had enabled him to win — all that is certain is, that Mr. Osborne got some hint of the transaction, came back from the City abruptly, and entered the drawing-room with his bamboo cane ; found the painter, the pupil, and the com- panion all looking exceedingly pale there ; turned the former out of doors with menaces that he would break every bone in his skin, and half-an-hour afterwards dismissed Miss Wirt likewise, kicking her trunks down the stairs, trampling on her band-boxes, and shaking his fist at her hackney coach, as it bore her away.
Jane Osborne kept her bed-room for many days. She was not allowed to have a companion afterwards. Her father swore to her that she should not have a shilling of his money if she made any match without his concurrence; and as he wanted a woman to keep his house, he did not choose that she should marry : so that she was obliged to give up all projects with which Cupid had any share. During her papa's life, then, she resigned herself to the manner of existence here described, and was content to be an Old Maid. Her sister, meanwhile, was having children with finer names every year — and the intercourse between the two grew fainter continu- ally. *7ane and I do not move in the same sphere of life," Mrs. Bullock said. ''I regard her as a sister, of course" — which means — what does it mean when a lady says that she regards Jane as a sister ?
It has been described how the Misses Dobbin lived with their father at a fine villa at Denmark Hill, where there were beautiful graperies and peach-trees which delighted little Georgy Osborne. The Misses Dobbin, who drove often to Brompton to see our dear Amelia, came sometimes to Russell Square too, to pay a visit to their old acquaintance Miss Osborne. I believe it was in consequence of the com- mands of their brother the Major in India (for whom their papa had a prodigious respect), that they paid attention to Mrs. George ; for the Major, the godfather and guardian of Amelia's little boy, still hoped that the child's grandfather might be induced to relent towards him, and acknowle'dge him for the sake of his son. The Misses Dobbin kept Miss Osborne acquainted with the state of Amelia's affairs;
88 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
how she was living with her father and mother; how poor they were; how they wondered what men, and such men as their brother and dear Captain Osborne, could find in such an insignificant little chit; how she was still, as heretofore, a namby-pamby milk-and-water aflFected creature — but how the boy was really the noblest little boy ever seen — for the hearts of all women warm towards young children, and the sourest spinster is kind to them.
One day, after great entreaties on the part of the Misses Dobbin, Amelia allowed little George to go and pass a day with them at Denmark Hill — a, part of which day she spent herself in writing to the Major in India. She congratulated him on the happy news which his sisters had just conveyed to her. She prayed for his prosperity, and that of the bride he had chosen. She thanked him for a thousand thousand kind offices and proofs of steadfast friendship to her in her affliction. She told him the last news about little Georgy, and how he was gone to spend that very day with his sisters in the country. She underlined the letter a great deal, and she signed herself affectionately his friend, Amelia Osborne. She forgot to send any message of kindness to Lady O'Dowd, as her wont was — and did not mention Glorvina by name, and only in italics, as the Major's bride, for whom she begged blessings. But the news of the marriage removed the re- serve which she had kept up towards him. She was glad to be able to own and feel how warmly and gratefully she regarded him — and as for the idea of being jealous of Glor- vina, (Glorvina, indeed!) Amelia would have scouted it, if an angel from heaven had hinted it to her.
That night, when Georgy came back in the pony-carriage in which he rejoiced, and in which he was driven by Sir Wm. Dobbin's old coachman, he had round his neck a fine gold chain and watch. He said an old lady, not pretty, had given it him, who cried and kissed him a great deal. But he didn't like her. He liked grapes very much. And he only liked his mamma. Amelia shrank and started: the timid soul felt a presentiment of terror when she heard that the relations of the child's father had seen him.
Miss Osborne came back to give her father his dinner. He had made a good speculation in the City, and was rather in a
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good humour that day, and chanced to remark the agitation under which she laboured. *'What's the matter, Miss Os- borne?" he deigned to say.
The woman burst into tears. "O, sir," she said, "I've seen little George. He is as beautiful as an angel — and so like him !" The old man opposite to her did not say a word, but flushed up, and began to tremble in every limb.
CHAPTER VIII In Which the Reader Has to Double the Cape
THE astonished reader must be called upon to transport himself ten thousand miles to the military station of Bundlegunge, in the Madras division of our Indian empire, where our gallant old friends of the — th regiment are quartered under the command of the brave Colonel, Sir Michael O'Dowd. Time has dealt kindly w^ith that stout officer, as it does ordinarily w^ith men who have good stom- achs and good tempers, and are not perplexed over much by fatigue of the brain. The Colonel plays a good knife and fork at tiffin, and resumes those weapons with great success at dinner. He smokes his hookah after both meals, and puffs as quietly while his wife scolds him, as he did under the fire of the French at Waterloo. Age and heat have not diminished the activity or the eloquence of the descendant of the Malonys and the Molloys. Her Ladyship, our old acquaintance, is as much at home at Madras as at Brussels — in the cantonment as under the tents. On the march you saw her at the head of the regiment seated on a yoyal elephant, a noble sight. Mounted on that beast, she has been into action with tigers in the jungle: she has been received by native princes, who have welcomed her and Glorvina into the recesses of their zenanas and offered her shawls and jewels which it went to her heart to refuse. The sentries of all arms salute her wherever she makes her appearance: and she touches her hat gravely to their salu- tation. Lady O'Dowd is one of the greatest ladies in the Presidency of Madras — her quarrel with Lady Smith, wife of Sir Minos Smith the puisne judge, is still remembered by some at Madras when the Colonel's lady snapped her fingers in the Judge's lady's face, and said she'd never walk behind ever a beggarly civilian. Even now, though it is five-and- twenty years ago, people remember Lady O'Dowd perform-
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ing a jig at Government House, where she danced down. two Aides-de-Camp, a Major of Madras cavalry, and two gentle- men of the Civil Service; and, persuaded by Major Dobbin, C.B., second in command of the — th, to retire to the supper- room, lassata notidum satiata recessit.
Peggy O'Dowd is indeed the same as ever: kind in act and thought: impetuous in temper; eager to command: a tyrant over her Michael: a dragon amongst all the ladies of the regiment: a mother to all the young men, whom she tends in their sickness, defends in all their scrapes, and with whom Lady Peggy is immensely popular. But the Subalterns' and Captains' ladies (the Major is unmarried) cabal against her a good deal. They say that Glorvina gives herself airs, and that Peggy herself is intolerably domineering. She in- terfered with a little congregation which Mrs. Kirk had got up, and laughed the young men away from her sermons, stating that a soldier's wife had no business to be a parson: that Mrs. Kirk would be much better mending her husband's clothes: and, if the regiment wanted sermons, that she had the finest in the world, those of her uncle, the Dean. She abruptly put a termination to a flirtation which Lieutenant Stubble of the regiment had commenced with the Surgeon's wife, threatening to come down upon Stubble for the money which he had borrowed from her (for the young fellow was still of an extravagant turn) unless he broke off at once and went to the Cape, on sick leave. On the other hand, she housed and sheltered Mrs. Posky, who fled from her bun- galow one night, pursued by her infuriate husband, wielding his second brandy bottle, and actually carried Posky through the delirium tremens, and broke him of the habit of drinking, which had grown upon that officer, as all evil habits will g^ow upon men. In a word, in adversity she was the best of comforters, in good fortune the most troublesome of friends; having a perfectly good opinion of herself always, and an indomitable resolution to have her own way.
Among other points, she had made up her mind that Glorvina should marry our old friend Dobbin. Mrs. O'Dowd knew the Major's expectations and appreciated his good qualities, and the high character which he enjoyed in his profession. Glorvina, a very handsome, fresh-coloured
92 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
black-haired, blue-eyed young lady, who could ride a horse, or play a sonata with any girl out of the County Cork, seemed to be the very person destined to insure Dobbin's happiness — much more than that poor good little weak- spur'ted Amelia, about whom he used to take on so. — "Look at Glorvina enter a room," Mrs. O'Dowd would say, "and compare her with that poor Mrs. Osborne, who couldn't say bo to a goose. She'd be worthy of you, Major — you're a quiet man yourself, and want some one to talk for ye. And though she does not come of such good blood as the Malonys or Molloys, let me tell ye, she's of an ancient family that any nobleman might be proud to marry into."
But before she had come to such a resolution, and deter- mined to subjugate Major Dobbin by her endearments, it must be owned that Glorvina had practised them a good deal elsewhere. She had had a season in Dublin, and who knows how many in Cork, Killamey, and Mallow? She had flirted with all the marriageable officers whom the depots of her country afforded, and all the bachelor squires who seemed eligible. She had been engaged to be married a half score times in Ireland, besides the clergyman at Bath who used her so ill. She had flirted all the way to Madras with the Captain and chief -mate of the Ramchunder East India- man, and had a season at the Presidency with her brother and Mrs. O'Dowd, who was staying there, while the Major of the regiment was in command at the station. Everybody admired her there: everybody danced with her: but no one proposed who was worth the marrying; one or two exceed- ingly young subalterns sighed after her, and a beardless civilian or two; but she rejected these as beneath her pre- tensions ; and other and younger virgins than Glorvina were married before her. There are women, and handsome women too, who have this fortune in life. They fall in love with the utmost generosity; they ride and walk with half the Army-list, though they draw near to forty, and yet the Misses O'Grady are the Misses O'Grady still: Glorvina persisted that but for Lady O'Dowd's unlucky quarrel with the Judge's lady, she would have made a good match at Madras, where old Mr. Chutney, who was at the head of the civil service (and who afterwards married Miss Dolby, a young lady only
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thirteen years of age, who had just arrived from school in Europe), was just at the point of proposing to her.
Well, although Lady O'Dowd and Glorvina quarrelled a great number of times every day, and upon almost every conceivable subject — indeed, if Mick O'Dowd had not pos- sessed the temper of an angel two such women constantly about his ears would have driven him out of his senses — yet they agreed between themselves on this point, that Glor- vina should marry Major Dobbin, and were determined that the Major should have no rest until the arrangement was brought about Undismayed by forty or fifty previous defeats, Glorvina laid siege to him. She sang Irish Melodies at him unceasingly. She asked him so frequently and pathetically, Will ye come to the bower ? that it is a wonder how any man of feeling could have resisted the invitation. She was never tired of inquiring, if Sorrow had his young days faded; and was ready to listen and weep like Desdemona at the stories of his dangers and his campaigns. It has been said that our honest and dear old friend used to perform on the flute in private: Glorvina insisted upon having duets with him, and Lady O'Dowd would rise and artlessly quit the room, when the young couple were so engaged. Glorvina forced the Major to ride with her of mornings. The whole cantonment saw them set out and return. She was constantly writing notes over to him at his house, borrowing his books, and scoring with her great pencil-marks such passages of senti- ment or humour as awakened her sympathy. She borrowed his horses, his servants, his spoons, and palankin ; — no won- der that public rumour assigned her to him, and that the Major's sisters in England should fancy they were about ta have a sister-in-law.
Dobbin, who was thus vigorously besieged, was in the meanwhile in a state of the most odious tranquillity. He used to laugh when the young fellows of the regiment joked him about Glorvina's manifest attentions to him. "Bah!" said he, "she is only keeping her hand in — she practises upon me as she does upon Mrs, Tozer's piano, because it's the most handy instrument in the station. I am much too battered and old for such a fine young lady as Glorvina.'* And so he went on riding with her, and copying music and
94 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
verses into her albums, and playing at chess with her very submissively; for it is with these simple amusements that some officers in India are accustomed to while away their leisure moments; while others of a less domestic turn hunt hogs, and shoot snipes, or gamble and smoke cheroots, and betake themselves to brandy-and-water. As for Sir Michael O'Dowd, though his lady and her sister both urged him to call upon the Major to explain himself, and not keep on torturing a poor innocent girl in that shameful way, the old soldier refused point-blank to have anything to do with the conspiracy. "Faith, the Major's big enough tQ choose for himself," Sir Michael said; "he'll ask ye when he wants ye;" — or else he would turn the matter off jocularly, declaring that "Dobbin was too young to keep house, and had written home to ask lave of his mamma." Nay, he went farther, and in private communications with his Major, would caution and rally him — crying, "Mind your oi, Dob, my boy, them girls is bent on mischief — me Lady has just got a box of gowns from Europe, and there's a pink satin for Glorvina, which will finish ye. Dob, if it's in the power of woman or satin to move ye."
But the truth is, neither beauty nor fashion could conquer him. Our honest friend had but one idea of a woman in his head, and that one did not in the least resemble Miss Glorvina O'Dowd in pink satin. A gentle little woman in black, with large eyes and brown hair, seldom speaking save when spoken to, and then in a voice not the least re- sembling Miss Glorvina's — a soft young mother tending an infant and beckoning the Major up with a smile to look at him — a rosy-cheeked lass coming singing into the room in Russell Square or hanging on George Osborne's arm, happy and loving — there was but this image that filled our honest Major's mind by day and by night, and reigned over it al- ways. Very likely Amelia was not like the portrait the Major had formed of her: there was a figure in a book of fashions which his sisters had in England, and with which William had made away privately, pasting it into the lid of his desk, and fancying he saw some resemblance to Mrs. Osborne in the print, whereas I have seen it, and can vouch that it is but the picture of a high-waisted gown with an
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impossible doll's face simpering over it — and, perhaps, Mr. Dobbin's sentimental Amelia was no more like the real one than this absurd little print which he cherished. But what man in love, of us, is better informed? — or is he much hap- pier when he sees and owns his delusion ? Dobbin was under this spell. He did not bother his friends and the public much about his feelings, or indeed lose his natural rest or appetite on account of them. His head has grizzled since we saw him last ; and a line or two of silver may be seen in the soft brown hair likewise. But his feelings are not in the least changed or oldened ; and his love remains as fresh as a man's recollections of boyhood are.
We have said how the two Misses Dobbin and Amelia, the Major's corespondents in Europe, wrote him letters from England; Mrs. Osborne congratulating him with great can- dour and cordiality upon his approaching nuptials with Miss O'Dowd.
"Your sister has just kindly visited me," Amelia wrote in her letter, "and informed me of an interesting event, upon which I beg to offer my most sincere congratulations. I hope the young lady to whom I hear you are to be united will in every respect prove worthy of one who is himself all kind- ness and goodness. The poor widow has only her prayers to offer, and her cordial cordial wishes for your prosperity! Georgy sends his love to his dear godpapa, and hopes that you will not forget him. I tell him that you are about to form other tics, with one who I am sure merits all your affection, but that, although such ties must of course be the strongest and most sacred, and supersede all others, yet that I am sure the widow and the child whom you have ever protected and loved will always have a corner in your heart." The letter, which has been before alluded to, went on in this strain, protesting throughout as to the extreme satisfaction of the writer.
This letter, which arrived by the very same ship which brought out Lady O'Dowd's box of millinery from London (and which you may be sure Dobbin opened before any one of the other packets which the mail brought him), put the receiver into such a state of mind that Glorvina, and her pink satin, and everything belonging to her, became per-
96 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
fectly odious to him. The Major cursed the talk of women; and the sex in general. Everything annoyed him that day — the parade was insufferably hot and wearisome. Good heavens ! was a man of intellect to waste his life, day after day, inspecting cross-belts, and putting fools through their manoeuvres? The senseless chatter of the young men at mess was more than ever jarring. What cared he, a man on the high road to forty, to know how many snipes Lieu- tenant Smith had shot, or what were the performances of Ensign Brown's mare? The jokes about the table filled him with shame. He was too old to listen to the banter of the assistant-surgeon and the slang of the youngsters, at which old O'Dowd, with his bald head and red face, laughed quite easily. The old man had listened to those jokes any time these thirty years — Dobbin himself had been fifteen years hearing them. And after the boisterous dulness of the mess- table, the quarrels and scandal of the ladies of the regiment ! It was unbearable, shameful. "O Amelia, Amelia," he thought, "yovL to whom I have been so faithful — you reproach me! It is because you cannot feel for me, that I drag on this wearisome life. And you reward me after years of de- votion by giving me your blessing upon my marriage, for- sooth with this flaunting Irish girl!" Sick and sorry felt poor William: more than ever wretched and lonely. He would like to have done with life and its vanity altogether — so bootless and unsatisfactory the struggle, so cheerless and dreary the prospect seemed to him. He lay all that night sleepless, and yearning to go home. Amelia's letter had fallen as a blank upon him. No fidelity, no constant truth and pas- sion, could move her into warmth. She would not see that he loved her. Tossing in his bed, he spoke out to her. "Good God, Amelia!" he said, "don't you know that I only love you in the world — you, who are a stone to me — you, whom I tended through months and months of illness and grief, and who bade me farewell with a smile on your face, and forgot me before the door shut between us!" The native servants lying outside his verandahs beheld with wonder the Major, so cold and quiet ordinarily, at present so pas- sionately moved and cast down. Would she have pitied him had she seen him? He read over and over all the letters
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which he ever had from her — letters of business relative to the little property which he had made her believe her husband had left to her — brief notes of invitation — every scrap of writing that she had ever sent to him — how cold, how kind, how hopeless, how selfish they were !
Had there been some kind gentle soul near at hand who could read and appreciate this silent generous heart, who knows but that the reign of Amelia might have been over, and that friend William's love might have flowed into a kinder channel? But there was only Glorvina of the jetty ringlets with whom his intercourse was familiar, and this dashing young woman was not bent upon loving the Major, but rather on making the Major admire her — a most vain and hopeless task, too, at least considering the means that the poor girl possessed to carry it out. She curled her hair and showed her shoulders at him, as much as to say, did ye ever see such jet ringlets and such a complexion? She grinned at him so that he might see that every tooth in her head was sound — and he never heeded all these charms. Very soon after the arrival of the box of millinery, and perhaps indeed in honour of it, Lady O'Dowd and the ladies of the King's Regiment gave a ball to the Company's Regi- ments and the civilians at the station. Glorvina sported the killing pink frock, and the Major, who attended the party and walked very ruefully up and down the rooms, never so much as perceived the pink garment. Glorvina danced past him in a fury with all the young subalterns of the station, and the Major was not in the least jealous of her perform- ance, or angry because Captain Bangles of the Cavalry handed her to supper. It was not jealousy, or frocks or shoulders, that could move him, and Glorvina had nothing more.
So these two were each exemplifying the Vanity of this life, and each longing for what he or she could not get. Glorvina cried with rage at the failure. She had set her mind on the Major "more than on any of the others," she owned, sobbing. "YLtll break my heart, he will, Peggy,'' she would whimper to her sister-in-law when they were good friends; "sure every one of me frocks must be taken in — it's such a skeleton Fm growing." Fat or thin, laugh-
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98 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
ing or melancholy, on horseback or the music-stool, it was all the same to the Major. And the Colonel, puffing his pipe and Hstening to these complaints, would suggest that Glory should have some black frocks out in the next box from London, and told a mysterious story of a lady in Ire- land who died of grief for the loss of her husband before she got ere a one.
While the Major was going on in this tantalizing way, not proposing, and declining to fall in love, there came another ship from Europe bringing letters on board, and amongst them some more for the heartless man. These were home letters bearing an earlier post-mark than that of the former packets, and as Major Dobbin recognised among his the handwriting of his sister, who always crossed and recrossed her letters to her brother, — gathered together all the possible bad news which she could collect, abused him and read him lectures with sisterly frankness, and always left him miserable for the day after "dearest William" had achieved the perusal of one of her epistles — the truth must be told that dearest William did not hurry himself to break the seal of Miss Dobbin's letter, but waited for a particularly favourable day and mood for doing so. A fortnight before, he had written to scold her for telling those absurd stories to Mrs. Osborne, and had despatched a letter in reply to that lady, undeceiving her with respect to the reports con- cerning him, and assuring her that "he had no sort of present intention of altering his condition."
Two or three nights after the arrival of