Chapter: In Which Jos Takes Flight, and the War Is Brought to a Close

We of peaceful London City have never beheld--and please God never
shall witness--such a scene of hurry and alarm, as that which Brussels
presented.  Crowds rushed to the Namur gate, from which direction the
noise proceeded, and many rode along the level chaussee, to be in
advance of any intelligence from the army.  Each man asked his
neighbour for news; and even great English lords and ladies
condescended to speak to persons whom they did not know.  The friends
of the French went abroad, wild with excitement, and prophesying the
triumph of their Emperor.  The merchants closed their shops, and came
out to swell the general chorus of alarm and clamour.  Women rushed to
the churches, and crowded the chapels, and knelt and prayed on the
flags and steps.  The dull sound of the cannon went on rolling,
rolling.  Presently carriages with travellers began to leave the town,
galloping away by the Ghent barrier.  The prophecies of the French
partisans began to pass for facts.  "He has cut the armies in two," it
was said.  "He is marching straight on Brussels.  He will overpower the
English, and be here to-night." "He will overpower the English,"
shrieked Isidor to his master, "and will be here to-night." The man
bounded in and out from the lodgings to the street, always returning
with some fresh particulars of disaster.  Jos's face grew paler and
paler. Alarm began to take entire possession of the stout civilian.
All the champagne he drank brought no courage to him.  Before sunset he
was worked up to such a pitch of nervousness as gratified his friend
Isidor to behold, who now counted surely upon the spoils of the owner
of the laced coat.

The women were away all this time.  After hearing the firing for a
moment, the stout Major's wife bethought her of her friend in the next
chamber, and ran in to watch, and if possible to console, Amelia.  The
idea that she had that helpless and gentle creature to protect, gave
additional strength to the natural courage of the honest Irishwoman.
She passed five hours by her friend's side, sometimes in remonstrance,
sometimes talking cheerfully, oftener in silence and terrified mental
supplication.  "I never let go her hand once," said the stout lady
afterwards, "until after sunset, when the firing was over." Pauline,
the bonne, was on her knees at church hard by, praying for son homme a
elle.

When the noise of the cannonading was over, Mrs. O'Dowd issued out of
Amelia's room into the parlour adjoining, where Jos sate with two
emptied flasks, and courage entirely gone.  Once or twice he had
ventured into his sister's bedroom, looking very much alarmed, and as
if he would say something.  But the Major's wife kept her place, and he
went away without disburthening himself of his speech.  He was ashamed
to tell her that he wanted to fly.

But when she made her appearance in the dining-room, where he sate in
the twilight in the cheerless company of his empty champagne bottles,
he began to open his mind to her.

"Mrs. O'Dowd," he said, "hadn't you better get Amelia ready?"

"Are you going to take her out for a walk?" said the Major's lady;
"sure she's too weak to stir."

"I--I've ordered the carriage," he said, "and--and post-horses; Isidor
is gone for them," Jos continued.

"What do you want with driving to-night?" answered the lady.  "Isn't
she better on her bed?  I've just got her to lie down."

"Get her up," said Jos; "she must get up, I say":  and he stamped his
foot energetically.  "I say the horses are ordered--yes, the horses are
ordered.  It's all over, and--"

"And what?" asked Mrs. O'Dowd.

"I'm off for Ghent," Jos answered.  "Everybody is going; there's a
place for you!  We shall start in half-an-hour."

The Major's wife looked at him with infinite scorn.  "I don't move till
O'Dowd gives me the route," said she. "You may go if you like, Mr.
Sedley; but, faith, Amelia and I stop here."

"She SHALL go," said Jos, with another stamp of his foot.  Mrs. O'Dowd
put herself with arms akimbo before the bedroom door.

"Is it her mother you're going to take her to?" she said; "or do you
want to go to Mamma yourself, Mr. Sedley?  Good marning--a pleasant
journey to ye, sir. Bon voyage, as they say, and take my counsel, and
shave off them mustachios, or they'll bring you into mischief."

"D--n!" yelled out Jos, wild with fear, rage, and mortification; and
Isidor came in at this juncture, swearing in his turn.  "Pas de
chevaux, sacre bleu!" hissed out the furious domestic.  All the horses
were gone.  Jos was not the only man in Brussels seized with panic that
day.

But Jos's fears, great and cruel as they were already, were destined to
increase to an almost frantic pitch before the night was over. It has
been mentioned how Pauline, the bonne, had son homme a elle also in the
ranks of the army that had gone out to meet the Emperor Napoleon.  This
lover was a native of Brussels, and a Belgian hussar.  The troops of
his nation signalised themselves in this war for anything but courage,
and young Van Cutsum, Pauline's admirer, was too good a soldier to
disobey his Colonel's orders to run away. Whilst in garrison at
Brussels young Regulus (he had been born in the revolutionary times)
found his great comfort, and passed almost all his leisure moments, in
Pauline's kitchen; and it was with pockets and holsters crammed full of
good things from her larder, that he had take leave of his weeping
sweetheart, to proceed upon the campaign a few days before.

As far as his regiment was concerned, this campaign was over now. They
had formed a part of the division under the command of his Sovereign
apparent, the Prince of Orange, and as respected length of swords and
mustachios, and the richness of uniform and equipments, Regulus and his
comrades looked to be as gallant a body of men as ever trumpet sounded
for.

When Ney dashed upon the advance of the allied troops, carrying one
position after the other, until the arrival of the great body of the
British army from Brussels changed the aspect of the combat of Quatre
Bras, the squadrons among which Regulus rode showed the greatest
activity in retreating before the French, and were dislodged from one
post and another which they occupied with perfect alacrity on their
part.  Their movements were only checked by the advance of the British
in their rear.  Thus forced to halt, the enemy's cavalry (whose
bloodthirsty obstinacy cannot be too severely reprehended) had at
length an opportunity of coming to close quarters with the brave
Belgians before them; who preferred to encounter the British rather
than the French, and at once turning tail rode through the English
regiments that were behind them, and scattered in all directions.  The
regiment in fact did not exist any more.  It was nowhere.  It had no
head-quarters.  Regulus found himself galloping many miles from the
field of action, entirely alone; and whither should he fly for refuge
so naturally as to that kitchen and those faithful arms in which
Pauline had so often welcomed him?

At some ten o'clock the clinking of a sabre might have been heard up
the stair of the house where the Osbornes occupied a story in the
continental fashion.  A knock might have been heard at the kitchen
door; and poor Pauline, come back from church, fainted almost with
terror as she opened it and saw before her her haggard hussar.  He
looked as pale as the midnight dragoon who came to disturb Leonora.
Pauline would have screamed, but that her cry would have called her
masters, and discovered her friend.  She stifled her scream, then, and
leading her hero into the kitchen, gave him beer, and the choice bits
from the dinner, which Jos had not had the heart to taste.  The hussar
showed he was no ghost by the prodigious quantity of flesh and beer
which he devoured--and during the mouthfuls he told his tale of
disaster.

His regiment had performed prodigies of courage, and had withstood for
a while the onset of the whole French army.  But they were overwhelmed
at last, as was the whole British army by this time. Ney destroyed each
regiment as it came up.  The Belgians in vain interposed to prevent the
butchery of the English.  The Brunswickers were routed and had
fled--their Duke was killed.  It was a general debacle.  He sought to
drown his sorrow for the defeat in floods of beer.

Isidor, who had come into the kitchen, heard the conversation and
rushed out to inform his master.  "It is all over," he shrieked to Jos.
"Milor Duke is a prisoner; the Duke of Brunswick is killed; the British
army is in full flight; there is only one man escaped, and he is in the
kitchen now--come and hear him." So Jos tottered into that apartment
where Regulus still sate on the kitchen table, and clung fast to his
flagon of beer.  In the best French which he could muster, and which
was in sooth of a very ungrammatical sort, Jos besought the hussar to
tell his tale.  The disasters deepened as Regulus spoke.  He was the
only man of his regiment not slain on the field. He had seen the Duke
of Brunswick fall, the black hussars fly, the Ecossais pounded down by
the cannon. "And the --th?" gasped Jos.

"Cut in pieces," said the hussar--upon which Pauline cried out, "O my
mistress, ma bonne petite dame," went off fairly into hysterics, and
filled the house with her screams.

Wild with terror, Mr. Sedley knew not how or where to seek for safety.
He rushed from the kitchen back to the sitting-room, and cast an
appealing look at Amelia's door, which Mrs. O'Dowd had closed and
locked in his face; but he remembered how scornfully the latter had
received him, and after pausing and listening for a brief space at the
door, he left it, and resolved to go into the street, for the first
time that day.  So, seizing a candle, he looked about for his
gold-laced cap, and found it lying in its usual place, on a
console-table, in the anteroom, placed before a mirror at which Jos
used to coquet, always giving his side-locks a twirl, and his cap the
proper cock over his eye, before he went forth to make appearance in
public.  Such is the force of habit, that even in the midst of his
terror he began mechanically to twiddle with his hair, and arrange the
cock of his hat.  Then he looked amazed at the pale face in the glass
before him, and especially at his mustachios, which had attained a rich
growth in the course of near seven weeks, since they had come into the
world.  They WILL mistake me for a military man, thought he,
remembering Isidor's warning as to the massacre with which all the
defeated British army was threatened; and staggering back to his
bedchamber, he began wildly pulling the bell which summoned his valet.

Isidor answered that summons.  Jos had sunk in a chair--he had torn off
his neckcloths, and turned down his collars, and was sitting with both
his hands lifted to his throat.

"Coupez-moi, Isidor," shouted he; "vite!  Coupez-moi!"

Isidor thought for a moment he had gone mad, and that he wished his
valet to cut his throat.

"Les moustaches," gasped Joe; "les moustaches--coupy, rasy, vite!"--his
French was of this sort--voluble, as we have said, but not
remarkable for grammar.

Isidor swept off the mustachios in no time with the razor, and heard
with inexpressible delight his master's orders that he should fetch a
hat and a plain coat.  "Ne porty ploo--habit militair--bonn--bonny a
voo, prenny dehors"--were Jos's words--the coat and cap were at last
his property.

This gift being made, Jos selected a plain black coat and waistcoat
from his stock, and put on a large white neckcloth, and a plain beaver.
If he could have got a shovel hat he would have worn it. As it was, you
would have fancied he was a flourishing, large parson of the Church of
England.

"Venny maintenong," he continued, "sweevy--ally--party--dong la roo."
And so having said, he plunged swiftly down the stairs of the house,
and passed into the street.

Although Regulus had vowed that he was the only man of his regiment or
of the allied army, almost, who had escaped being cut to pieces by Ney,
it appeared that his statement was incorrect, and that a good number
more of the supposed victims had survived the massacre. Many scores of
Regulus's comrades had found their way back to Brussels, and all
agreeing that they had run away--filled the whole town with an idea of
the defeat of the allies.  The arrival of the French was expected
hourly; the panic continued, and preparations for flight went on
everywhere.  No horses!  thought Jos, in terror. He made Isidor inquire
of scores of persons, whether they had any to lend or sell, and his
heart sank within him, at the negative answers returned everywhere.
Should he take the journey on foot?  Even fear could not render that
ponderous body so active.

Almost all the hotels occupied by the English in Brussels face the
Parc, and Jos wandered irresolutely about in this quarter, with crowds
of other people, oppressed as he was by fear and curiosity. Some
families he saw more happy than himself, having discovered a team of
horses, and rattling through the streets in retreat; others again there
were whose case was like his own, and who could not for any bribes or
entreaties procure the necessary means of flight. Amongst these
would-be fugitives, Jos remarked the Lady Bareacres and her daughter,
who sate in their carriage in the porte-cochere of their hotel, all
their imperials packed, and the only drawback to whose flight was the
same want of motive power which kept Jos stationary.

Rebecca Crawley occupied apartments in this hotel; and had before this
period had sundry hostile meetings with the ladies of the Bareacres
family.  My Lady Bareacres cut Mrs. Crawley on the stairs when they met
by chance; and in all places where the latter's name was mentioned,
spoke perseveringly ill of her neighbour.  The Countess was shocked at
the familiarity of General Tufto with the aide-de-camp's wife.  The
Lady Blanche avoided her as if she had been an infectious disease.
Only the Earl himself kept up a sly occasional acquaintance with her,
when out of the jurisdiction of his ladies.

Rebecca had her revenge now upon these insolent enemies.  If became
known in the hotel that Captain Crawley's horses had been left behind,
and when the panic began, Lady Bareacres condescended to send her maid
to the Captain's wife with her Ladyship's compliments, and a desire to
know the price of Mrs. Crawley's horses.  Mrs. Crawley returned a note
with her compliments, and an intimation that it was not her custom to
transact bargains with ladies' maids.

This curt reply brought the Earl in person to Becky's apartment; but he
could get no more success than the first ambassador.  "Send a lady's
maid to ME!" Mrs. Crawley cried in great anger; "why didn't my Lady
Bareacres tell me to go and saddle the horses!  Is it her Ladyship that
wants to escape, or her Ladyship's femme de chambre?" And this was all
the answer that the Earl bore back to his Countess.

What will not necessity do?  The Countess herself actually came to wait
upon Mrs. Crawley on the failure of her second envoy.  She entreated
her to name her own price; she even offered to invite Becky to
Bareacres House, if the latter would but give her the means of
returning to that residence.  Mrs. Crawley sneered at her.

"I don't want to be waited on by bailiffs in livery," she said; "you
will never get back though most probably--at least not you and your
diamonds together.  The French will have those. They will be here in two
hours, and I shall be half way to Ghent by that time.  I would not sell
you my horses, no, not for the two largest diamonds that your Ladyship
wore at the ball."  Lady Bareacres trembled with rage and terror.  The
diamonds were sewed into her habit, and secreted in my Lord's padding
and boots. "Woman, the diamonds are at the banker's, and I WILL have
the horses," she said.  Rebecca laughed in her face. The infuriate
Countess went below, and sate in her carriage; her maid, her courier,
and her husband were sent once more through the town, each to look for
cattle; and woe betide those who came last!  Her Ladyship was resolved
on departing the very instant the horses arrived from any quarter--with
her husband or without him.

Rebecca had the pleasure of seeing her Ladyship in the horseless
carriage, and keeping her eyes fixed upon her, and bewailing, in the
loudest tone of voice, the Countess's perplexities.  "Not to be able to
get horses!" she said, "and to have all those diamonds sewed into the
carriage cushions!  What a prize it will be for the French when they
come!--the carriage and the diamonds, I mean; not the lady!" She gave
this information to the landlord, to the servants, to the guests, and
the innumerable stragglers about the courtyard.  Lady Bareacres could
have shot her from the carriage window.

It was while enjoying the humiliation of her enemy that Rebecca caught
sight of Jos, who made towards her directly he perceived her.

That altered, frightened, fat face, told his secret well enough.  He
too wanted to fly, and was on the look-out for the means of escape. "HE
shall buy my horses," thought Rebecca, "and I'll ride the mare."

Jos walked up to his friend, and put the question for the hundredth
time during the past hour, "Did she know where horses were to be had?"

"What, YOU fly?" said Rebecca, with a laugh.  "I thought you were the
champion of all the ladies, Mr. Sedley."

"I--I'm not a military man," gasped he.

"And Amelia?--Who is to protect that poor little sister of yours?"
asked Rebecca.  "You surely would not desert her?"

"What good can I do her, suppose--suppose the enemy arrive?" Jos
answered.  "They'll spare the women; but my man tells me that they have
taken an oath to give no quarter to the men--the dastardly cowards."

"Horrid!" cried Rebecca, enjoying his perplexity.

"Besides, I don't want to desert her," cried the brother. "She SHAN'T
be deserted.  There is a seat for her in my carriage, and one for you,
dear Mrs. Crawley, if you will come; and if we can get horses--" sighed
he--

"I have two to sell," the lady said.  Jos could have flung himself into
her arms at the news.  "Get the carriage, Isidor," he cried; "we've
found them--we have found them."

"My horses never were in harness," added the lady. "Bullfinch would kick
the carriage to pieces, if you put him in the traces."

"But he is quiet to ride?" asked the civilian.

"As quiet as a lamb, and as fast as a hare," answered Rebecca.

"Do you think he is up to my weight?" Jos said.  He was already on his
back, in imagination, without ever so much as a thought for poor
Amelia.  What person who loved a horse-speculation could resist such a
temptation?

In reply, Rebecca asked him to come into her room, whither he followed
her quite breathless to conclude the bargain.  Jos seldom spent a
half-hour in his life which cost him so much money. Rebecca, measuring
the value of the goods which she had for sale by Jos's eagerness to
purchase, as well as by the scarcity of the article, put upon her
horses a price so prodigious as to make even the civilian draw back.
"She would sell both or neither," she said, resolutely.  Rawdon had
ordered her not to part with them for a price less than that which she
specified. Lord Bareacres below would give her the same money--and with
all her love and regard for the Sedley family, her dear Mr. Joseph must
conceive that poor people must live--nobody, in a word, could be more
affectionate, but more firm about the matter of business.

Jos ended by agreeing, as might be supposed of him. The sum he had to
give her was so large that he was obliged to ask for time; so large as
to be a little fortune to Rebecca, who rapidly calculated that with
this sum, and the sale of the residue of Rawdon's effects, and her
pension as a widow should he fall, she would now be absolutely
independent of the world, and might look her weeds steadily in the face.

Once or twice in the day she certainly had herself thought about
flying.  But her reason gave her better counsel.  "Suppose the French
do come," thought Becky, "what can they do to a poor officer's widow?
Bah!  the times of sacks and sieges are over.  We shall be let to go
home quietly, or I may live pleasantly abroad with a snug little
income."

Meanwhile Jos and Isidor went off to the stables to inspect the newly
purchased cattle.  Jos bade his man saddle the horses at once. He would
ride away that very night, that very hour.  And he left the valet busy
in getting the horses ready, and went homewards himself to prepare for
his departure.  It must be secret.  He would go to his chamber by the
back entrance.  He did not care to face Mrs. O'Dowd and Amelia, and own
to them that he was about to run.

By the time Jos's bargain with Rebecca was completed, and his horses
had been visited and examined, it was almost morning once more.  But
though midnight was long passed, there was no rest for the city; the
people were up, the lights in the houses flamed, crowds were still
about the doors, and the streets were busy.  Rumours of various natures
went still from mouth to mouth:  one report averred that the Prussians
had been utterly defeated; another that it was the English who had been
attacked and conquered:  a third that the latter had held their ground.
This last rumour gradually got strength.  No Frenchmen had made their
appearance.  Stragglers had come in from the army bringing reports more
and more favourable:  at last an aide-de-camp actually reached Brussels
with despatches for the Commandant of the place, who placarded
presently through the town an official announcement of the success of
the allies at Quatre Bras, and the entire repulse of the French under
Ney after a six hours' battle.  The aide-de-camp must have arrived
sometime while Jos and Rebecca were making their bargain together, or
the latter was inspecting his purchase.  When he reached his own hotel,
he found a score of its numerous inhabitants on the threshold
discoursing of the news; there was no doubt as to its truth.  And he
went up to communicate it to the ladies under his charge. He did not
think it was necessary to tell them how he had intended to take leave
of them, how he had bought horses, and what a price he had paid for
them.

But success or defeat was a minor matter to them, who had only thought
for the safety of those they loved. Amelia, at the news of the victory,
became still more agitated even than before.  She was for going that
moment to the army.  She besought her brother with tears to conduct her
thither.  Her doubts and terrors reached their paroxysm; and the poor
girl, who for many hours had been plunged into stupor, raved and ran
hither and thither in hysteric insanity--a piteous sight.  No man
writhing in pain on the hard-fought field fifteen miles off, where lay,
after their struggles, so many of the brave--no man suffered more
keenly than this poor harmless victim of the war.  Jos could not bear
the sight of her pain.  He left his sister in the charge of her stouter
female companion, and descended once more to the threshold of the
hotel, where everybody still lingered, and talked, and waited for more
news.

It grew to be broad daylight as they stood here, and fresh news began
to arrive from the war, brought by men who had been actors in the
scene.  Wagons and long country carts laden with wounded came rolling
into the town; ghastly groans came from within them, and haggard faces
looked up sadly from out of the straw.  Jos Sedley was looking at one
of these carriages with a painful curiosity--the moans of the people
within were frightful--the wearied horses could hardly pull the cart.
"Stop!  stop!" a feeble voice cried from the straw, and the carriage
stopped opposite Mr. Sedley's hotel.

"It is George, I know it is!" cried Amelia, rushing in a moment to the
balcony, with a pallid face and loose flowing hair.  It was not George,
however, but it was the next best thing:  it was news of him.

It was poor Tom Stubble, who had marched out of Brussels so gallantly
twenty-four hours before, bearing the colours of the regiment, which he
had defended very gallantly upon the field.  A French lancer had
speared the young ensign in the leg, who fell, still bravely holding to
his flag.  At the conclusion of the engagement, a place had been found
for the poor boy in a cart, and he had been brought back to Brussels.

"Mr. Sedley, Mr. Sedley!" cried the boy, faintly, and Jos came up
almost frightened at the appeal.  He had not at first distinguished who
it was that called him.

Little Tom Stubble held out his hot and feeble hand. "I'm to be taken
in here," he said.  "Osborne--and--and Dobbin said I was; and you are
to give the man two napoleons: my mother will pay you." This young
fellow's thoughts, during the long feverish hours passed in the cart,
had been wandering to his father's parsonage which he had quitted only
a few months before, and he had sometimes forgotten his pain in that
delirium.

The hotel was large, and the people kind, and all the inmates of the
cart were taken in and placed on various couches.  The young ensign was
conveyed upstairs to Osborne's quarters.  Amelia and the Major's wife
had rushed down to him, when the latter had recognised him from the
balcony.  You may fancy the feelings of these women when they were told
that the day was over, and both their husbands were safe; in what mute
rapture Amelia fell on her good friend's neck, and embraced her; in
what a grateful passion of prayer she fell on her knees, and thanked
the Power which had saved her husband.

Our young lady, in her fevered and nervous condition, could have had no
more salutary medicine prescribed for her by any physician than that
which chance put in her way.  She and Mrs. O'Dowd watched incessantly
by the wounded lad, whose pains were very severe, and in the duty thus
forced upon her, Amelia had not time to brood over her personal
anxieties, or to give herself up to her own fears and forebodings after
her wont.  The young patient told in his simple fashion the events of
the day, and the actions of our friends of the gallant --th.  They had
suffered severely.  They had lost very many officers and men.  The
Major's horse had been shot under him as the regiment charged, and they
all thought that O'Dowd was gone, and that Dobbin had got his majority,
until on their return from the charge to their old ground, the Major
was discovered seated on Pyramus's carcase, refreshing him-self from a
case-bottle.  It was Captain Osborne that cut down the French lancer
who had speared the ensign. Amelia turned so pale at the notion, that
Mrs. O'Dowd stopped the young ensign in this story.  And it was Captain
Dobbin who at the end of the day, though wounded himself, took up the
lad in his arms and carried him to the surgeon, and thence to the cart
which was to bring him back to Brussels.  And it was he who promised
the driver two louis if he would make his way to Mr. Sedley's hotel in
the city; and tell Mrs. Captain Osborne that the action was over, and
that her husband was unhurt and well.

"Indeed, but he has a good heart that William Dobbin," Mrs. O'Dowd
said, "though he is always laughing at me."

Young Stubble vowed there was not such another officer in the army, and
never ceased his praises of the senior captain, his modesty, his
kindness, and his admirable coolness in the field.  To these parts of
the conversation, Amelia lent a very distracted attention:  it was only
when George was spoken of that she listened, and when he was not
mentioned, she thought about him.

In tending her patient, and in thinking of the wonderful escapes of the
day before, her second day passed away not too slowly with Amelia.
There was only one man in the army for her:  and as long as he was
well, it must be owned that its movements interested her little. All
the reports which Jos brought from the streets fell very vaguely on her
ears; though they were sufficient to give that timorous gentleman, and
many other people then in Brussels, every disquiet.  The French had
been repulsed certainly, but it was after a severe and doubtful
struggle, and with only a division of the French army. The Emperor,
with the main body, was away at Ligny, where he had utterly annihilated
the Prussians, and was now free to bring his whole force to bear upon
the allies. The Duke of Wellington was retreating upon the capital, and
a great battle must be fought under its walls probably, of which the
chances were more than doubtful. The Duke of Wellington had but twenty
thousand British troops on whom he could rely, for the Germans were raw
militia, the Belgians disaffected, and with this handful his Grace had
to resist a hundred and fifty thousand men that had broken into Belgium
under Napoleon.  Under Napoleon!  What warrior was there, however
famous and skilful, that could fight at odds with him?

Jos thought of all these things, and trembled.  So did all the rest of
Brussels--where people felt that the fight of the day before was but
the prelude to the greater combat which was imminent.  One of the
armies opposed to the Emperor was scattered to the winds already.  The
few English that could be brought to resist him would perish at their
posts, and the conqueror would pass over their bodies into the city.
Woe be to those whom he found there! Addresses were prepared, public
functionaries assembled and debated secretly, apartments were got
ready, and tricoloured banners and triumphal emblems manufactured, to
welcome the arrival of His Majesty the Emperor and King.

The emigration still continued, and wherever families could find means
of departure, they fled.  When Jos, on the afternoon of the 17th of
June, went to Rebecca's hotel, he found that the great Bareacres'
carriage had at length rolled away from the porte-cochere.  The Earl
had procured a pair of horses somehow, in spite of Mrs. Crawley, and
was rolling on the road to Ghent.  Louis the Desired was getting ready
his portmanteau in that city, too.  It seemed as if Misfortune was
never tired of worrying into motion that unwieldy exile.

Jos felt that the delay of yesterday had been only a respite, and that
his dearly bought horses must of a surety be put into requisition.  His
agonies were very severe all this day.  As long as there was an English
army between Brussels and Napoleon, there was no need of immediate
flight; but he had his horses brought from their distant stables, to
the stables in the court-yard of the hotel where he lived; so that they
might be under his own eyes, and beyond the risk of violent abduction.
Isidor watched the stable-door constantly, and had the horses saddled,
to be ready for the start. He longed intensely for that event.

After the reception of the previous day, Rebecca did not care to come
near her dear Amelia.  She clipped the bouquet which George had brought
her, and gave fresh water to the flowers, and read over the letter
which he had sent her.  "Poor wretch," she said, twirling round the
little bit of paper in her fingers, "how I could crush her with
this!--and it is for a thing like this that she must break her heart,
forsooth--for a man who is stupid--a coxcomb--and who does not care for
her.  My poor good Rawdon is worth ten of this creature." And then she
fell to thinking what she should do if--if anything happened to poor
good Rawdon, and what a great piece of luck it was that he had left his
horses behind.

In the course of this day too, Mrs. Crawley, who saw not without anger
the Bareacres party drive off, bethought her of the precaution which
the Countess had taken, and did a little needlework for her own
advantage; she stitched away the major part of her trinkets, bills, and
bank-notes about her person, and so prepared, was ready for any
event--to fly if she thought fit, or to stay and welcome the conqueror,
were he Englishman or Frenchman.  And I am not sure that she did not
dream that night of becoming a duchess and Madame la Marechale, while
Rawdon wrapped in his cloak, and making his bivouac under the rain at
Mount Saint John, was thinking, with all the force of his heart, about
the little wife whom he had left behind him.

The next day was a Sunday.  And Mrs. Major O'Dowd had the satisfaction
of seeing both her patients refreshed in health and spirits by some
rest which they had taken during the night.  She herself had slept on a
great chair in Amelia's room, ready to wait upon her poor friend or the
ensign, should either need her nursing. When morning came, this robust
woman went back to the house where she and her Major had their billet;
and here performed an elaborate and splendid toilette, befitting the
day.  And it is very possible that whilst alone in that chamber, which
her husband had inhabited, and where his cap still lay on the pillow,
and his cane stood in the corner, one prayer at least was sent up to
Heaven for the welfare of the brave soldier, Michael O'Dowd.

When she returned she brought her prayer-book with her, and her uncle
the Dean's famous book of sermons, out of which she never failed to
read every Sabbath; not understanding all, haply, not pronouncing many
of the words aright, which were long and abstruse--for the Dean was a
learned man, and loved long Latin words--but with great gravity, vast
emphasis, and with tolerable correctness in the main.  How often has my
Mick listened to these sermons, she thought, and me reading in the
cabin of a calm!  She proposed to resume this exercise on the present
day, with Amelia and the wounded ensign for a congregation.  The same
service was read on that day in twenty thousand churches at the same
hour; and millions of British men and women, on their knees, implored
protection of the Father of all.

They did not hear the noise which disturbed our little congregation at
Brussels.  Much louder than that which had interrupted them two days
previously, as Mrs. O'Dowd was reading the service in her best voice,
the cannon of Waterloo began to roar.

When Jos heard that dreadful sound, he made up his mind that he would
bear this perpetual recurrence of terrors no longer, and would fly at
once.  He rushed into the sick man's room, where our three friends had
paused in their prayers, and further interrupted them by a passionate
appeal to Amelia.

"I can't stand it any more, Emmy," he said; "I won't stand it; and you
must come with me.  I have bought a horse for you--never mind at what
price--and you must dress and come with me, and ride behind Isidor."

"God forgive me, Mr. Sedley, but you are no better than a coward," Mrs.
O'Dowd said, laying down the book.

"I say come, Amelia," the civilian went on; "never mind what she says;
why are we to stop here and be butchered by the Frenchmen?"

"You forget the --th, my boy," said the little Stubble, the wounded
hero, from his bed--"and and you won't leave me, will you, Mrs. O'Dowd?"

"No, my dear fellow," said she, going up and kissing the boy.  "No harm
shall come to you while I stand by. I don't budge till I get the word
from Mick.  A pretty figure I'd be, wouldn't I, stuck behind that chap
on a pillion?"

This image caused the young patient to burst out laughing in his bed,
and even made Amelia smile.  "I don't ask her," Jos shouted out--"I
don't ask that--that Irishwoman, but you Amelia; once for all, will you
come?"

"Without my husband, Joseph?" Amelia said, with a look of wonder, and
gave her hand to the Major's wife. Jos's patience was exhausted.

"Good-bye, then," he said, shaking his fist in a rage, and slamming the
door by which he retreated.  And this time he really gave his order for
march:  and mounted in the court-yard.  Mrs. O'Dowd heard the
clattering hoofs of the horses as they issued from the gate; and
looking on, made many scornful remarks on poor Joseph as he rode down
the street with Isidor after him in the laced cap.  The horses, which
had not been exercised for some days, were lively, and sprang about the
street.  Jos, a clumsy and timid horseman, did not look to advantage in
the saddle.  "Look at him, Amelia dear, driving into the parlour
window.  Such a bull in a china-shop I never saw." And presently the
pair of riders disappeared at a canter down the street leading in the
direction of the Ghent road, Mrs. O'Dowd pursuing them with a fire of
sarcasm so long as they were in sight.

All that day from morning until past sunset, the cannon never ceased to
roar.  It was dark when the cannonading stopped all of a sudden.

All of us have read of what occurred during that interval.  The tale is
in every Englishman's mouth; and you and I, who were children when the
great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and
recounting the history of that famous action.  Its remembrance rankles
still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men
who lost the day.  They pant for an opportunity of revenging that
humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part,
should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy
of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory
and shame, and to the alternations of successful and unsuccessful
murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage.  Centuries
hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each
other still, carrying out bravely the Devil's code of honour.

All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great
field.  All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away, the
lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and repelling
the furious charges of the French horsemen.  Guns which were heard at
Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades falling, and the
resolute survivors closing in.  Towards evening, the attack of the
French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened in its fury.  They
had other foes besides the British to engage, or were preparing for a
final onset.  It came at last:  the columns of the Imperial Guard
marched up the hill of Saint Jean, at length and at once to sweep the
English from the height which they had maintained all day, and spite of
all:  unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled death from
the English line--the dark rolling column pressed on and up the hill.
It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began to wave and
falter.  Then it stopped, still facing the shot.  Then at last the
English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy had been able
to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.

No more firing was heard at Brussels--the pursuit rolled miles away.
Darkness came down on the field and city:  and Amelia was praying for
George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his
heart.



In Which Miss Crawley's Relations Are Very Anxious About Her

The kind reader must please to remember--while the army is marching
from Flanders, and, after its heroic actions there, is advancing to
take the fortifications on the frontiers of France, previous to an
occupation of that country--that there are a number of persons living
peaceably in England who have to do with the history at present in
hand, and must come in for their share of the chronicle. During the
time of these battles and dangers, old Miss Crawley was living at
Brighton, very moderately moved by the great events that were going on.
The great events rendered the newspapers rather interesting, to be
sure, and Briggs read out the Gazette, in which Rawdon Crawley's
gallantry was mentioned with honour, and his promotion was presently
recorded.

"What a pity that young man has taken such an irretrievable step in the
world!" his aunt said; "with his rank and distinction he might have
married a brewer's daughter with a quarter of a million--like Miss
Grains; or have looked to ally himself with the best families in
England. He would have had my money some day or other; or his children
would--for I'm not in a hurry to go, Miss Briggs, although you may be
in a hurry to be rid of me; and instead of that, he is a doomed pauper,
with a dancing-girl for a wife."

"Will my dear Miss Crawley not cast an eye of compassion upon the
heroic soldier, whose name is inscribed in the annals of his country's
glory?" said Miss Briggs, who was greatly excited by the Waterloo
proceedings, and loved speaking romantically when there was an
occasion.  "Has not the Captain--or the Colonel as I may now style
him--done deeds which make the name of Crawley illustrious?"

"Briggs, you are a fool," said Miss Crawley: "Colonel Crawley has
dragged the name of Crawley through the mud, Miss Briggs.  Marry a
drawing-master's daughter, indeed!--marry a dame de compagnie--for she
was no better, Briggs; no, she was just what you are--only younger, and
a great deal prettier and cleverer.  Were you an accomplice of that
abandoned wretch, I wonder, of whose vile arts he became a victim, and
of whom you used to be such an admirer?  Yes, I daresay you were an
accomplice. But you will find yourself disappointed in my will, I can
tell you:  and you will have the goodness to write to Mr. Waxy, and say
that I desire to see him immediately." Miss Crawley was now in the
habit of writing to Mr. Waxy her solicitor almost every day in the
week, for her arrangements respecting her property were all revoked,
and her perplexity was great as to the future disposition of her money.

The spinster had, however, rallied considerably; as was proved by the
increased vigour and frequency of her sarcasms upon Miss Briggs, all
which attacks the poor companion bore with meekness, with cowardice,
with a resignation that was half generous and half hypocritical--with
the slavish submission, in a word, that women of her disposition and
station are compelled to show.  Who has not seen how women bully women?
What tortures have men to endure, comparable to those daily repeated
shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the
tyrants of their sex?  Poor victims!  But we are starting from our
proposition, which is, that Miss Crawley was always particularly
annoying and savage when she was rallying from illness--as they say
wounds tingle most when they are about to heal.

While thus approaching, as all hoped, to convalescence, Miss Briggs was
the only victim admitted into the presence of the invalid; yet Miss
Crawley's relatives afar off did not forget their beloved kinswoman,
and by a number of tokens, presents, and kind affectionate messages,
strove to keep themselves alive in her recollection.

In the first place, let us mention her nephew, Rawdon Crawley.  A few
weeks after the famous fight of Waterloo, and after the Gazette had
made known to her the promotion and gallantry of that distinguished
officer, the Dieppe packet brought over to Miss Crawley at Brighton, a
box containing presents, and a dutiful letter, from the Colonel her
nephew.  In the box were a pair of French epaulets, a Cross of the
Legion of Honour, and the hilt of a sword--relics from the field of
battle:  and the letter described with a good deal of humour how the
latter belonged to a commanding officer of the Guard, who having sworn
that "the Guard died, but never surrendered," was taken prisoner the
next minute by a private soldier, who broke the Frenchman's sword with
the butt of his musket, when Rawdon made himself master of the
shattered weapon.  As for the cross and epaulets, they came from a
Colonel of French cavalry, who had fallen under the aide-de-camp's arm
in the battle: and Rawdon Crawley did not know what better to do with
the spoils than to send them to his kindest and most affectionate old
friend. Should he continue to write to her from Paris, whither the army
was marching?  He might be able to give her interesting news from that
capital, and of some of Miss Crawley's old friends of the emigration,
to whom she had shown so much kindness during their distress.

The spinster caused Briggs to write back to the Colonel a gracious and
complimentary letter, encouraging him to continue his correspondence.
His first letter was so excessively lively and amusing that she should
look with pleasure for its successors.--"Of course, I know," she
explained to Miss Briggs, "that Rawdon could not write such a good
letter any more than you could, my poor Briggs, and that it is that
clever little wretch of a Rebecca, who dictates every word to him; but
that is no reason why my nephew should not amuse me; and so I wish to
let him understand that I am in high good humour."

I wonder whether she knew that it was not only Becky who wrote the
letters, but that Mrs. Rawdon actually took and sent home the trophies
which she bought for a few francs, from one of the innumerable pedlars
who immediately began to deal in relics of the war.  The novelist, who
knows everything, knows this also.  Be this, however, as it may, Miss
Crawley's gracious reply greatly encouraged our young friends, Rawdon
and his lady, who hoped for the best from their aunt's evidently
pacified humour:  and they took care to entertain her with many
delightful letters from Paris, whither, as Rawdon said, they had the
good luck to go in the track of the conquering army.

To the rector's lady, who went off to tend her husband's broken
collar-bone at the Rectory at Queen's Crawley, the spinster's
communications were by no means so gracious.  Mrs. Bute, that brisk,
managing, lively, imperious woman, had committed the most fatal of all
errors with regard to her sister-in-law.  She had not merely oppressed
her and her household--she had bored Miss Crawley; and if poor Miss
Briggs had been a woman of any spirit, she might have been made happy
by the commission which her principal gave her to write a letter to
Mrs. Bute Crawley, saying that Miss Crawley's health was greatly
improved since Mrs. Bute had left her, and begging the latter on no
account to put herself to trouble, or quit her family for Miss
Crawley's sake.  This triumph over a lady who had been very haughty and
cruel in her behaviour to Miss Briggs, would have rejoiced most women;
but the truth is, Briggs was a woman of no spirit at all, and the
moment her enemy was discomfited, she began to feel compassion in her
favour.

"How silly I was," Mrs. Bute thought, and with reason, "ever to hint
that I was coming, as I did, in that foolish letter when we sent Miss
Crawley the guinea-fowls. I ought to have gone without a word to the
poor dear doting old creature, and taken her out of the hands of that
ninny Briggs, and that harpy of a femme de chambre.  Oh! Bute, Bute,
why did you break your collar-bone?"

Why, indeed?  We have seen how Mrs. Bute, having the game in her hands,
had really played her cards too well. She had ruled over Miss Crawley's
household utterly and completely, to be utterly and completely routed
when a favourable opportunity for rebellion came. She and her
household, however, considered that she had been the victim of horrible
selfishness and treason, and that her sacrifices in Miss Crawley's
behalf had met with the most savage ingratitude. Rawdon's promotion,
and the honourable mention made of his name in the Gazette, filled this
good Christian lady also with alarm.  Would his aunt relent towards him
now that he was a Lieutenant-Colonel and a C.B.? and would that odious
Rebecca once more get into favour? The Rector's wife wrote a sermon for
her husband about the vanity of military glory and the prosperity of
the wicked, which the worthy parson read in his best voice and without
understanding one syllable of it.  He had Pitt Crawley for one of his
auditors--Pitt, who had come with his two half-sisters to church, which
the old Baronet could now by no means be brought to frequent.

Since the departure of Becky Sharp, that old wretch had given himself
up entirely to his bad courses, to the great scandal of the county and
the mute horror of his son.  The ribbons in Miss Horrocks's cap became
more splendid than ever.  The polite families fled the hall and its
owner in terror.  Sir Pitt went about tippling at his tenants' houses;
and drank rum-and-water with the farmers at Mudbury and the
neighbouring places on market-days.  He drove the family coach-and-four
to Southampton with Miss Horrocks inside:  and the county people
expected, every week, as his son did in speechless agony, that his
marriage with her would be announced in the provincial paper.  It was
indeed a rude burthen for Mr. Crawley to bear.  His eloquence was
palsied at the missionary meetings, and other religious assemblies in
the neighbourhood, where he had been in the habit of presiding, and of
speaking for hours; for he felt, when he rose, that the audience said,
"That is the son of the old reprobate Sir Pitt, who is very likely
drinking at the public house at this very moment." And once when he was
speaking of the benighted condition of the king of Timbuctoo, and the
number of his wives who were likewise in darkness, some gipsy miscreant
from the crowd asked, "How many is there at Queen's Crawley, Young
Squaretoes?" to the surprise of the platform, and the ruin of Mr.
Pitt's speech. And the two daughters of the house of Queen's Crawley
would have been allowed to run utterly wild (for Sir Pitt swore that no
governess should ever enter into his doors again), had not Mr. Crawley,
by threatening the old gentleman, forced the latter to send them to
school.

Meanwhile, as we have said, whatever individual differences there might
be between them all, Miss Crawley's dear nephews and nieces were
unanimous in loving her and sending her tokens of affection. Thus Mrs.
Bute sent guinea-fowls, and some remarkably fine cauliflowers, and a
pretty purse or pincushion worked by her darling girls, who begged to
keep a LITTLE place in the recollection of their dear aunt, while Mr.
Pitt sent peaches and grapes and venison from the Hall.  The
Southampton coach used to carry these tokens of affection to Miss
Crawley at Brighton:  it used sometimes to convey Mr. Pitt thither too:
for his differences with Sir Pitt caused Mr. Crawley to absent himself
a good deal from home now:  and besides, he had an attraction at
Brighton in the person of the Lady Jane Sheepshanks, whose engagement
to Mr. Crawley has been formerly mentioned in this history. Her
Ladyship and her sisters lived at Brighton with their mamma, the
Countess Southdown, that strong-minded woman so favourably known in
the serious world.

A few words ought to be said regarding her Ladyship and her noble
family, who are bound by ties of present and future relationship to the
house of Crawley. Respecting the chief of the Southdown family, Clement
William, fourth Earl of Southdown, little need be told, except that his
Lordship came into Parliament (as Lord Wolsey) under the auspices of
Mr. Wilberforce, and for a time was a credit to his political sponsor,
and decidedly a serious young man.  But words cannot describe the
feelings of his admirable mother, when she learned, very shortly after
her noble husband's demise, that her son was a member of several
worldly clubs, had lost largely at play at Wattier's and the Cocoa
Tree; that he had raised money on post-obits, and encumbered the
family estate; that he drove four-in-hand, and patronised the ring; and
that he actually had an opera-box, where he entertained the most
dangerous bachelor company.  His name was only mentioned with groans in
the dowager's circle.

The Lady Emily was her brother's senior by many years; and took
considerable rank in the serious world as author of some of the
delightful tracts before mentioned, and of many hymns and spiritual
pieces.  A mature spinster, and having but faint ideas of marriage, her
love for the blacks occupied almost all her feelings.  It is to her, I
believe, we owe that beautiful poem.

  Lead us to some sunny isle,
  Yonder in the western deep;
  Where the skies for ever smile,
  And the blacks for ever weep, &c.

She had correspondences with clerical gentlemen in most of our East and
West India possessions; and was secretly attached to the Reverend Silas
Hornblower, who was tattooed in the South Sea Islands.

As for the Lady Jane, on whom, as it has been said, Mr. Pitt Crawley's
affection had been placed, she was gentle, blushing, silent, and timid.
In spite of his falling away, she wept for her brother, and was quite
ashamed of loving him still.  Even yet she used to send him little
hurried smuggled notes, and pop them into the post in private. The one
dreadful secret which weighed upon her life was, that she and the old
housekeeper had been to pay Southdown a furtive visit at his chambers
in the Albany; and found him--O the naughty dear abandoned
wretch!--smoking a cigar with a bottle of Curacao before him.  She
admired her sister, she adored her mother, she thought Mr. Crawley the
most delightful and accomplished of men, after Southdown, that fallen
angel:  and her mamma and sister, who were ladies of the most superior
sort, managed everything for her, and regarded her with that amiable
pity, of which your really superior woman always has such a share to
give away.  Her mamma ordered her dresses, her books, her bonnets, and
her ideas for her. She was made to take pony-riding, or piano-exercise,
or any other sort of bodily medicament, according as my Lady Southdown
saw meet; and her ladyship would have kept her daughter in pinafores up
to her present age of six-and-twenty, but that they were thrown off
when Lady Jane was presented to Queen Charlotte.

When these ladies first came to their house at Brighton, it was to them
alone that Mr. Crawley paid his personal visits, contenting himself by
leaving a card at his aunt's house, and making a modest inquiry of Mr.
Bowls or his assistant footman, with respect to the health of the
invalid.  When he met Miss Briggs coming home from the library with a
cargo of novels under her arm, Mr. Crawley blushed in a manner quite
unusual to him, as he stepped forward and shook Miss Crawley's
companion by the hand.  He introduced Miss Briggs to the lady with whom
he happened to be walking, the Lady Jane Sheepshanks, saying, "Lady
Jane, permit me to introduce to you my aunt's kindest friend and most
affectionate companion, Miss Briggs, whom you know under another title,
as authoress of the delightful 'Lyrics of the Heart,' of which you are
so fond."  Lady Jane blushed too as she held out a kind little hand to
Miss Briggs, and said something very civil and incoherent about mamma,
and proposing to call on Miss Crawley, and being glad to be made known
to the friends and relatives of Mr. Crawley; and with soft dove-like
eyes saluted Miss Briggs as they separated, while Pitt Crawley treated
her to a profound courtly bow, such as he had used to H.H. the Duchess
of Pumpernickel, when he was attache at that court.

The artful diplomatist and disciple of the Machiavellian Binkie!  It
was he who had given Lady Jane that copy of poor Briggs's early poems,
which he remembered to have seen at Queen's Crawley, with a dedication
from the poetess to his father's late wife; and he brought the volume
with him to Brighton, reading it in the Southampton coach and marking
it with his own pencil, before he presented it to the gentle Lady Jane.

It was he, too, who laid before Lady Southdown the great advantages
which might occur from an intimacy between her family and Miss
Crawley--advantages both worldly and spiritual, he said:  for Miss
Crawley was now quite alone; the monstrous dissipation and alliance of
his brother Rawdon had estranged her affections from that reprobate
young man; the greedy tyranny and avarice of Mrs. Bute Crawley had
caused the old lady to revolt against the exorbitant pretensions of
that part of the family; and though he himself had held off all his
life from cultivating Miss Crawley's friendship, with perhaps an
improper pride, he thought now that every becoming means should be
taken, both to save her soul from perdition, and to secure her fortune
to himself as the head of the house of Crawley.

The strong-minded Lady Southdown quite agreed in both proposals of her
son-in-law, and was for converting Miss Crawley off-hand.  At her own
home, both at Southdown and at Trottermore Castle, this tall and awful
missionary of the truth rode about the country in her barouche with
outriders, launched packets of tracts among the cottagers and tenants,
and would order Gaffer Jones to be converted, as she would order Goody
Hicks to take a James's powder, without appeal, resistance, or benefit
of clergy.  My Lord Southdown, her late husband, an epileptic and
simple-minded nobleman, was in the habit of approving of everything
which his Matilda did and thought. So that whatever changes her own
belief might undergo (and it accommodated itself to a prodigious
variety of opinion, taken from all sorts of doctors among the
Dissenters) she had not the least scruple in ordering all her tenants
and inferiors to follow and believe after her.  Thus whether she
received the Reverend Saunders McNitre, the Scotch divine; or the
Reverend Luke Waters, the mild Wesleyan; or the Reverend Giles Jowls,
the illuminated Cobbler, who dubbed himself Reverend as Napoleon
crowned himself Emperor--the household, children, tenantry of my Lady
Southdown were expected to go down on their knees with her Ladyship,
and say Amen to the prayers of either Doctor.  During these exercises
old Southdown, on account of his invalid condition, was allowed to sit
in his own room, and have negus and the paper read to him.  Lady Jane
was the old Earl's favourite daughter, and tended him and loved him
sincerely:  as for Lady Emily, the authoress of the "Washerwoman of
Finchley Common," her denunciations of future punishment (at this
period, for her opinions modified afterwards) were so awful that they
used to frighten the timid old gentleman her father, and the physicians
declared his fits always occurred after one of her Ladyship's sermons.

"I will certainly call," said Lady Southdown then, in reply to the
exhortation of her daughter's pretendu, Mr. Pitt Crawley--"Who is Miss
Crawley's medical man?"

Mr. Crawley mentioned the name of Mr. Creamer.

"A most dangerous and ignorant practitioner, my dear Pitt.  I have
providentially been the means of removing him from several houses:
though in one or two instances I did not arrive in time.  I could not
save poor dear General Glanders, who was dying under the hands of that
ignorant man--dying.  He rallied a little under the Podgers' pills
which I administered to him; but alas!  it was too late.  His death was
delightful, however; and his change was only for the better; Creamer,
my dear Pitt, must leave your aunt."

Pitt expressed his perfect acquiescence.  He, too, had been carried
along by the energy of his noble kinswoman, and future mother-in-law.
He had been made to accept Saunders McNitre, Luke Waters, Giles Jowls,
Podgers' Pills, Rodgers' Pills, Pokey's Elixir, every one of her
Ladyship's remedies spiritual or temporal.  He never left her house
without carrying respectfully away with him piles of her quack theology
and medicine.  O, my dear brethren and fellow-sojourners in Vanity
Fair, which among you does not know and suffer under such benevolent
despots?  It is in vain you say to them, "Dear Madam, I took Podgers'
specific at your orders last year, and believe in it.  Why, why am I to
recant and accept the Rodgers' articles now?"  There is no help for it;
the faithful proselytizer, if she cannot convince by argument, bursts
into tears, and the refusant finds himself, at the end of the contest,
taking down the bolus, and saying, "Well, well, Rodgers' be it."

"And as for her spiritual state," continued the Lady, "that of course
must be looked to immediately:  with Creamer about her, she may go off
any day:  and in what a condition, my dear Pitt, in what a dreadful
condition! I will send the Reverend Mr. Irons to her instantly.  Jane,
write a line to the Reverend Bartholomew Irons, in the third person,
and say that I desire the pleasure of his company this evening at tea
at half-past six.  He is an awakening man; he ought to see Miss Crawley
before she rests this night.  And Emily, my love, get ready a packet of
books for Miss Crawley.  Put up 'A Voice from the Flames,' 'A
Trumpet-warning to Jericho,' and the 'Fleshpots Broken; or, the
Converted Cannibal.'"

"And the 'Washerwoman of Finchley Common,' Mamma," said Lady Emily. "It
is as well to begin soothingly at first."

"Stop, my dear ladies," said Pitt, the diplomatist. "With every
deference to the opinion of my beloved and respected Lady Southdown, I
think it would be quite unadvisable to commence so early upon serious
topics with Miss Crawley.  Remember her delicate condition, and how
little, how very little accustomed she has hitherto been to
considerations connected with her immortal welfare."

"Can we then begin too early, Pitt?" said Lady Emily, rising with six
little books already in her hand.

"If you begin abruptly, you will frighten her altogether. I know my
aunt's worldly nature so well as to be sure that any abrupt attempt at
conversion will be the very worst means that can be employed for the
welfare of that unfortunate lady.  You will only frighten and annoy
her. She will very likely fling the books away, and refuse all
acquaintance with the givers."

"You are as worldly as Miss Crawley, Pitt," said Lady Emily, tossing
out of the room, her books in her hand.

"And I need not tell you, my dear Lady Southdown," Pitt continued, in a
low voice, and without heeding the interruption, "how fatal a little
want of gentleness and caution may be to any hopes which we may
entertain with regard to the worldly possessions of my aunt. Remember
she has seventy thousand pounds; think of her age, and her highly
nervous and delicate condition; I know that she has destroyed the will
which was made in my brother's (Colonel Crawley's) favour: it is by
soothing that wounded spirit that we must lead it into the right path,
and not by frightening it; and so I think you will agree with me
that--that--'

"Of course, of course," Lady Southdown remarked. "Jane, my love, you
need not send that note to Mr. Irons. If her health is such that
discussions fatigue her, we will wait her amendment.  I will call upon
Miss Crawley tomorrow."

"And if I might suggest, my sweet lady," Pitt said in a bland tone, "it
would be as well not to take our precious Emily, who is too
enthusiastic; but rather that you should be accompanied by our sweet
and dear Lady Jane."

"Most certainly, Emily would ruin everything," Lady Southdown said; and
this time agreed to forego her usual practice, which was, as we have
said, before she bore down personally upon any individual whom she
proposed to subjugate, to fire in a quantity of tracts upon the menaced
party (as a charge of the French was always preceded by a furious
cannonade).  Lady Southdown, we say, for the sake of the invalid's
health, or for the sake of her soul's ultimate welfare, or for the sake
of her money, agreed to temporise.

The next day, the great Southdown female family carriage, with the
Earl's coronet and the lozenge (upon which the three lambs trottant
argent upon the field vert of the Southdowns, were quartered with sable
on a bend or, three snuff-mulls gules, the cognizance of the house of
Binkie), drove up in state to Miss Crawley's door, and the tall serious
footman handed in to Mr. Bowls her Ladyship's cards for Miss Crawley,
and one likewise for Miss Briggs.  By way of compromise, Lady Emily
sent in a packet in the evening for the latter lady, containing copies
of the "Washerwoman," and other mild and favourite tracts for Miss B.'s
own perusal; and a few for the servants' hall, viz.:  "Crumbs from the
Pantry," "The Frying Pan and the Fire," and "The Livery of Sin," of a
much stronger kind.



James Crawley's Pipe Is Put Out

The amiable behaviour of Mr. Crawley, and Lady Jane's kind reception of
her, highly flattered Miss Briggs, who was enabled to speak a good word
for the latter, after the cards of the Southdown family had been
presented to Miss Crawley.  A Countess's card left personally too for
her, Briggs, was not a little pleasing to the poor friendless
companion.  "What could Lady Southdown mean by leaving a card upon you,
I wonder, Miss Briggs?" said the republican Miss Crawley; upon which
the companion meekly said "that she hoped there could be no harm in a
lady of rank taking notice of a poor gentlewoman," and she put away
this card in her work-box amongst her most cherished personal
treasures.  Furthermore, Miss Briggs explained how she had met Mr.
Crawley walking with his cousin and long affianced bride the day
before:  and she told how kind and gentle-looking the lady was, and
what a plain, not to say common, dress she had, all the articles of
which, from the bonnet down to the boots, she described and estimated
with female accuracy.

Miss Crawley allowed Briggs to prattle on without interrupting her too
much.  As she got well, she was pining for society.  Mr. Creamer, her
medical man, would not hear of her returning to her old haunts and
dissipation in London.  The old spinster was too glad to find any
companionship at Brighton, and not only were the cards acknowledged the
very next day, but Pitt Crawley was graciously invited to come and see
his aunt.  He came, bringing with him Lady Southdown and her daughter.
The dowager did not say a word about the state of Miss Crawley's soul;
but talked with much discretion about the weather:  about the war and
the downfall of the monster Bonaparte:  and above all, about doctors,
quacks, and the particular merits of Dr. Podgers, whom she then
patronised.

During their interview Pitt Crawley made a great stroke, and one which
showed that, had his diplomatic career not been blighted by early
neglect, he might have risen to a high rank in his profession. When the
Countess Dowager of Southdown fell foul of the Corsican upstart, as the
fashion was in those days, and showed that he was a monster stained
with every conceivable crime, a coward and a tyrant not fit to live,
one whose fall was predicted, &c., Pitt Crawley suddenly took up the
cudgels in favour of the man of Destiny.  He described the First Consul
as he saw him at Paris at the peace of Amiens; when he, Pitt Crawley,
had the gratification of making the acquaintance of the great and good
Mr. Fox, a statesman whom, however much he might differ with him, it
was impossible not to admire fervently--a statesman who had always had
the highest opinion of the Emperor Napoleon.  And he spoke in terms of
the strongest indignation of the faithless conduct of the allies
towards this dethroned monarch, who, after giving himself generously up
to their mercy, was consigned to an ignoble and cruel banishment, while
a bigoted Popish rabble was tyrannising over France in his stead.

This orthodox horror of Romish superstition saved Pitt Crawley in Lady
Southdown's opinion, whilst his admiration for Fox and Napoleon raised
him immeasurably in Miss Crawley's eyes.  Her friendship with that
defunct British statesman was mentioned when we first introduced her in
this history.  A true Whig, Miss Crawley had been in opposition all
through the war, and though, to be sure, the downfall of the Emperor
did not very much agitate the old lady, or his ill-treatment tend to
shorten her life or natural rest, yet Pitt spoke to her heart when he
lauded both her idols; and by that single speech made immense progress
in her favour.

"And what do you think, my dear?" Miss Crawley said to the young lady,
for whom she had taken a liking at first sight, as she always did for
pretty and modest young people; though it must be owned her affections
cooled as rapidly as they rose.

Lady Jane blushed very much, and said "that she did not understand
politics, which she left to wiser heads than hers; but though Mamma
was, no doubt, correct, Mr. Crawley had spoken beautifully." And when
the ladies were retiring at the conclusion of their visit, Miss Crawley
hoped "Lady Southdown would be so kind as to send her Lady Jane
sometimes, if she could be spared to come down and console a poor sick
lonely old woman." This promise was graciously accorded, and they
separated upon great terms of amity.

"Don't let Lady Southdown come again, Pitt," said the old lady. "She is
stupid and pompous, like all your mother's family, whom I never could
endure.  But bring that nice good-natured little Jane as often as ever
you please." Pitt promised that he would do so.  He did not tell the
Countess of Southdown what opinion his aunt had formed of her Ladyship,
who, on the contrary, thought that she had made a most delightful and
majestic impression on Miss Crawley.

And so, nothing loth to comfort a sick lady, and perhaps not sorry in
her heart to be freed now and again from the dreary spouting of the
Reverend Bartholomew Irons, and the serious toadies who gathered round
the footstool of the pompous Countess, her mamma, Lady Jane became a
pretty constant visitor to Miss Crawley, accompanied her in her drives,
and solaced many of her evenings.  She was so naturally good and soft,
that even Firkin was not jealous of her; and the gentle Briggs thought
her friend was less cruel to her when kind Lady Jane was by.  Towards
her Ladyship Miss Crawley's manners were charming.  The old spinster
told her a thousand anecdotes about her youth, talking to her in a very
different strain from that in which she had been accustomed to converse
with the godless little Rebecca; for there was that in Lady Jane's
innocence which rendered light talking impertinence before her, and
Miss Crawley was too much of a gentlewoman to offend such purity.  The
young lady herself had never received kindness except from this old
spinster, and her brother and father:  and she repaid Miss Crawley's
engoument by artless sweetness and friendship.

In the autumn evenings (when Rebecca was flaunting at Paris, the gayest
among the gay conquerors there, and our Amelia, our dear wounded
Amelia, ah! where was she?) Lady Jane would be sitting in Miss
Crawley's drawing-room singing sweetly to her, in the twilight, her
little simple songs and hymns, while the sun was setting and the sea
was roaring on the beach.  The old spinster used to wake up when these
ditties ceased, and ask for more.  As for Briggs, and the quantity of
tears of happiness which she now shed as she pretended to knit, and
looked out at the splendid ocean darkling before the windows, and the
lamps of heaven beginning more brightly to shine--who, I say can
measure the happiness and sensibility of Briggs?

Pitt meanwhile in the dining-room, with a pamphlet on the Corn Laws or
a Missionary Register by his side, took that kind of recreation which
suits romantic and unromantic men after dinner.  He sipped Madeira:
built castles in the air:  thought himself a fine fellow: felt himself
much more in love with Jane than he had been any time these seven
years, during which their liaison had lasted without the slightest
impatience on Pitt's part--and slept a good deal.  When the time for
coffee came, Mr. Bowls used to enter in a noisy manner, and summon
Squire Pitt, who would be found in the dark very busy with his pamphlet.

"I wish, my love, I could get somebody to play piquet with me," Miss
Crawley said one night when this functionary made his appearance with
the candles and the coffee. "Poor Briggs can no more play than an owl,
she is so stupid" (the spinster always took an opportunity of abusing
Briggs before the servants); "and I think I should sleep better if I
had my game."

At this Lady Jane blushed to the tips of her little ears, and down to
the ends of her pretty fingers; and when Mr. Bowls had quitted the
room, and the door was quite shut, she said:

"Miss Crawley, I can play a little.  I used to--to play a little with
poor dear papa."

"Come and kiss me.  Come and kiss me this instant, you dear good little
soul," cried Miss Crawley in an ecstasy: and in this picturesque and
friendly occupation Mr. Pitt found the old lady and the young one, when
he came upstairs with him pamphlet in his hand. How she did blush all
the evening, that poor Lady Jane!

It must not be imagined that Mr. Pitt Crawley's artifices escaped the
attention of his dear relations at the Rectory at Queen's Crawley.
Hampshire and Sussex lie very close together, and Mrs. Bute had friends
in the latter county who took care to inform her of all, and a great
deal more than all, that passed at Miss Crawley's house at Brighton.
Pitt was there more and more.  He did not come for months together to
the Hall, where his abominable old father abandoned himself completely
to rum-and-water, and the odious society of the Horrocks family. Pitt's
success rendered the Rector's family furious, and Mrs. Bute regretted
more (though she confessed less) than ever her monstrous fault in so
insulting Miss Briggs, and in being so haughty and parsimonious to
Bowls and Firkin, that she had not a single person left in Miss
Crawley's household to give her information of what took place there.
"It was all Bute's collar-bone," she persisted in saying; "if that had
not broke, I never would have left her.  I am a martyr to duty and to
your odious unclerical habit of hunting, Bute."

"Hunting; nonsense!  It was you that frightened her, Barbara," the
divine interposed.  "You're a clever woman, but you've got a devil of a
temper; and you're a screw with your money, Barbara."

"You'd have been screwed in gaol, Bute, if I had not kept your money."

"I know I would, my dear," said the Rector, good-naturedly. "You ARE a
clever woman, but you manage too well, you know":  and the pious man
consoled himself with a big glass of port.

"What the deuce can she find in that spooney of a Pitt Crawley?" he
continued.  "The fellow has not pluck enough to say Bo to a goose. I
remember when Rawdon, who is a man, and be hanged to him, used to flog
him round the stables as if he was a whipping-top:  and Pitt would go
howling home to his ma--ha, ha!  Why, either of my boys would whop him
with one hand.  Jim says he's remembered at Oxford as Miss Crawley
still--the spooney.

"I say, Barbara," his reverence continued, after a pause.

"What?" said Barbara, who was biting her nails, and drumming the table.

"I say, why not send Jim over to Brighton to see if he can do anything
with the old lady.  He's very near getting his degree, you know.  He's
only been plucked twice--so was I--but he's had the advantages of
Oxford and a university education.  He knows some of the best chaps
there. He pulls stroke in the Boniface boat.  He's a handsome feller.
D---- it, ma'am, let's put him on the old woman, hey, and tell him to
thrash Pitt if he says anything. Ha, ha, ha!

"Jim might go down and see her, certainly," the housewife said; adding
with a sigh, "If we could but get one of the girls into the house; but
she could never endure them, because they are not pretty!"  Those
unfortunate and well-educated women made themselves heard from the
neighbouring drawing-room, where they were thrumming away, with hard
fingers, an elaborate music-piece on the piano-forte, as their mother
spoke; and indeed, they were at music, or at backboard, or at
geography, or at history, the whole day long.  But what avail all these
accomplishments, in Vanity Fair, to girls who are short, poor, plain,
and have a bad complexion?  Mrs. Bute could think of nobody but the
Curate to take one of them off her hands; and Jim coming in from the
stable at this minute, through the parlour window, with a short pipe
stuck in his oilskin cap, he and his father fell to talking about odds
on the St. Leger, and the colloquy between the Rector and his wife
ended.

Mrs. Bute did not augur much good to the cause from the sending of her
son James as an ambassador, and saw him depart in rather a despairing
mood.  Nor did the young fellow himself, when told what his mission was
to be, expect much pleasure or benefit from it; but he was consoled by
the thought that possibly the old lady would give him some handsome
remembrance of her, which would pay a few of his most pressing bills at
the commencement of the ensuing Oxford term, and so took his place by
the coach from Southampton, and was safely landed at Brighton on the
same evening with his portmanteau, his favourite bull-dog Towzer, and
an immense basket of farm and garden produce, from the dear Rectory
folks to the dear Miss Crawley. Considering it was too late to disturb
the invalid lady on the first night of his arrival, he put up at an
inn, and did not wait upon Miss Crawley until a late hour in the noon
of next day.

James Crawley, when his aunt had last beheld him, was a gawky lad, at
that uncomfortable age when the voice varies between an unearthly
treble and a preternatural bass; when the face not uncommonly blooms
out with appearances for which Rowland's Kalydor is said to act as a
cure; when boys are seen to shave furtively with their sister's
scissors, and the sight of other young women produces intolerable
sensations of terror in them; when the great hands and ankles protrude
a long way from garments which have grown too tight for them; when
their presence after dinner is at once frightful to the ladies, who are
whispering in the twilight in the drawing-room, and inexpressibly
odious to the gentlemen over the mahogany, who are restrained from
freedom of intercourse and delightful interchange of wit by the
presence of that gawky innocence; when, at the conclusion of the second
glass, papa says, "Jack, my boy, go out and see if the evening holds
up," and the youth, willing to be free, yet hurt at not being yet a
man, quits the incomplete banquet.  James, then a hobbadehoy, was now
become a young man, having had the benefits of a university education,
and acquired the inestimable polish which is gained by living in a fast
set at a small college, and contracting debts, and being rusticated,
and being plucked.

He was a handsome lad, however, when he came to present himself to his
aunt at Brighton, and good looks were always a title to the fickle old
lady's favour.  Nor did his blushes and awkwardness take away from it:
she was pleased with these healthy tokens of the young gentleman's
ingenuousness.

He said "he had come down for a couple of days to see a man of his
college, and--and to pay my respects to you, Ma'am, and my father's and
mother's, who hope you are well."

Pitt was in the room with Miss Crawley when the lad was announced, and
looked very blank when his name was mentioned.  The old lady had plenty
of humour, and enjoyed her correct nephew's perplexity.  She asked
after all the people at the Rectory with great interest; and said she
was thinking of paying them a visit.  She praised the lad to his face,
and said he was well-grown and very much improved, and that it was a
pity his sisters had not some of his good looks; and finding, on
inquiry, that he had taken up his quarters at an hotel, would not hear
of his stopping there, but bade Mr. Bowls send for Mr. James Crawley's
things instantly; "and hark ye, Bowls," she added, with great
graciousness, "you will have the goodness to pay Mr. James's bill."

She flung Pitt a look of arch triumph, which caused that diplomatist
almost to choke with envy.  Much as he had ingratiated himself with his
aunt, she had never yet invited him to stay under her roof, and here
was a young whipper-snapper, who at first sight was made welcome there.

"I beg your pardon, sir," says Bowls, advancing with a profound bow;
"what 'otel, sir, shall Thomas fetch the luggage from?"

"O, dam," said young James, starting up, as if in some alarm, "I'll go."

"What!" said Miss Crawley.

"The Tom Cribb's Arms," said James, blushing deeply.

Miss Crawley burst out laughing at this title.  Mr. Bowls gave one
abrupt guffaw, as a confidential servant of the family, but choked the
rest of the volley; the diplomatist only smiled.

"I--I didn't know any better," said James, looking down. "I've never
been here before; it was the coachman told me." The young story-teller!
The fact is, that on the Southampton coach, the day previous,
James Crawley had met the Tutbury Pet, who was coming to Brighton to
make a match with the Rottingdean Fibber; and enchanted by the Pet's
conversation, had passed the evening in company with that scientific
man and his friends, at the inn in question.

"I--I'd best go and settle the score," James continued. "Couldn't think
of asking you, Ma'am," he added, generously.

This delicacy made his aunt laugh the more.

"Go and settle the bill, Bowls," she said, with a wave of her hand,
"and bring it to me."

Poor lady, she did not know what she had done!  "There--there's a
little dawg," said James, looking frightfully guilty.  "I'd best go for
him.  He bites footmen's calves."

All the party cried out with laughing at this description; even Briggs
and Lady Jane, who was sitting mute during the interview between Miss
Crawley and her nephew:  and Bowls, without a word, quitted the room.

Still, by way of punishing her elder nephew, Miss Crawley persisted in
being gracious to the young Oxonian. There were no limits to her
kindness or her compliments when they once began.  She told Pitt he
might come to dinner, and insisted that James should accompany her in
her drive, and paraded him solemnly up and down the cliff, on the back
seat of the barouche.  During all this excursion, she condescended to
say civil things to him: she quoted Italian and French poetry to the
poor bewildered lad, and persisted that he was a fine scholar, and was
perfectly sure he would gain a gold medal, and be a Senior Wrangler.

"Haw, haw," laughed James, encouraged by these compliments; "Senior
Wrangler, indeed; that's at the other shop."

"What is the other shop, my dear child?" said the lady.

"Senior Wranglers at Cambridge, not Oxford," said the scholar, with a
knowing air; and would probably have been more confidential, but that
suddenly there appeared on the cliff in a tax-cart, drawn by a bang-up
pony, dressed in white flannel coats, with mother-of-pearl buttons, his
friends the Tutbury Pet and the Rottingdean Fibber, with three other
gentlemen of their acquaintance, who all saluted poor James there in
the carriage as he sate.  This incident damped the ingenuous youth's
spirits, and no word of yea or nay could he be induced to utter during
the rest of the drive.

On his return he found his room prepared, and his portmanteau ready,
and might have remarked that Mr. Bowls's countenance, when the latter
conducted him to his apartments, wore a look of gravity, wonder, and
compassion.  But the thought of Mr. Bowls did not enter his head.  He
was deploring the dreadful predicament in which he found himself, in a
house full of old women, jabbering French and Italian, and talking
poetry to him. "Reglarly up a tree, by jingo!" exclaimed the modest
boy, who could not face the gentlest of her sex--not even Briggs--when
she began to talk to him; whereas, put him at Iffley Lock, and he could
out-slang the boldest bargeman.

At dinner, James appeared choking in a white neckcloth, and had the
honour of handing my Lady Jane downstairs, while Briggs and Mr. Crawley
followed afterwards, conducting the old lady, with her apparatus of
bundles, and shawls, and cushions.  Half of Briggs's time at dinner was
spent in superintending the invalid's comfort, and in cutting up
chicken for her fat spaniel.  James did not talk much, but he made a
point of asking all the ladies to drink wine, and accepted Mr.
Crawley's challenge, and consumed the greater part of a bottle of
champagne which Mr. Bowls was ordered to produce in his honour.  The
ladies having withdrawn, and the two cousins being left together, Pitt,
the ex-diplomatist, he came very communicative and friendly.  He asked
after James's career at college--what his prospects in life were--hoped
heartily he would get on; and, in a word, was frank and amiable.
James's tongue unloosed with the port, and he told his cousin his life,
his prospects, his debts, his troubles at the little-go, and his rows
with the proctors, filling rapidly from the bottles before him, and
flying from Port to Madeira with joyous activity.

"The chief pleasure which my aunt has," said Mr. Crawley, filling his
glass, "is that people should do as they like in her house. This is
Liberty Hall, James, and you can't do Miss Crawley a greater kindness
than to do as you please, and ask for what you will.  I know you have
all sneered at me in the country for being a Tory. Miss Crawley is
liberal enough to suit any fancy.  She is a Republican in principle,
and despises everything like rank or title."

"Why are you going to marry an Earl's daughter?" said James.

"My dear friend, remember it is not poor Lady Jane's fault that she is
well born," Pitt replied, with a courtly air.  "She cannot help being a
lady.  Besides, I am a Tory, you know."

"Oh, as for that," said Jim, "there's nothing like old blood; no,
dammy, nothing like it.  I'm none of your radicals.  I know what it is
to be a gentleman, dammy. See the chaps in a boat-race; look at the
fellers in a fight; aye, look at a dawg killing rats--which is it wins?
the good-blooded ones.  Get some more port, Bowls, old boy, whilst I
buzz this bottle here.  What was I asaying?"

"I think you were speaking of dogs killing rats," Pitt remarked mildly,
handing his cousin the decanter to "buzz."

"Killing rats was I? Well, Pitt, are you a sporting man? Do you want to
see a dawg as CAN kill a rat? If you do, come down with me to Tom
Corduroy's, in Castle Street Mews, and I'll show you such a bull-terrier
as--Pooh! gammon," cried James, bursting out laughing at his
own absurdity--"YOU don't care about a dawg or rat; it's all nonsense.
I'm blest if I think you know the difference between a dog and a duck."

"No; by the way," Pitt continued with increased blandness, "it was
about blood you were talking, and the personal advantages which people
derive from patrician birth.  Here's the fresh bottle."

"Blood's the word," said James, gulping the ruby fluid down. "Nothing
like blood, sir, in hosses, dawgs, AND men.  Why, only last term, just
before I was rusticated, that is, I mean just before I had the measles,
ha, ha--there was me and Ringwood of Christchurch, Bob Ringwood, Lord
Cinqbars' son, having our beer at the Bell at Blenheim, when the
Banbury bargeman offered to fight either of us for a bowl of punch.  I
couldn't.  My arm was in a sling; couldn't even take the drag down--a
brute of a mare of mine had fell with me only two days before, out with
the Abingdon, and I thought my arm was broke. Well, sir, I couldn't
finish him, but Bob had his coat off at once--he stood up to the
Banbury man for three minutes, and polished him off in four rounds
easy.  Gad, how he did drop, sir, and what was it? Blood, sir, all
blood."

"You don't drink, James," the ex-attache continued. "In my time at
Oxford, the men passed round the bottle a little quicker than you young
fellows seem to do."

"Come, come," said James, putting his hand to his nose and winking at
his cousin with a pair of vinous eyes, "no jokes, old boy; no trying it
on on me.  You want to trot me out, but it's no go.  In vino veritas,
old boy.  Mars, Bacchus, Apollo virorum, hey? I wish my aunt would send
down some of this to the governor; it's a precious good tap."

"You had better ask her," Machiavel continued, "or make the best of
your time now.  What says the bard? 'Nunc vino pellite curas, Cras
ingens iterabimus aequor,'" and the Bacchanalian, quoting the above
with a House of Commons air, tossed off nearly a thimbleful of wine
with an immense flourish of his glass.

At the Rectory, when the bottle of port wine was opened after dinner,
the young ladies had each a glass from a bottle of currant wine.  Mrs.
Bute took one glass of port, honest James had a couple commonly, but as
his father grew very sulky if he made further inroads on the bottle,
the good lad generally refrained from trying for more, and subsided
either into the currant wine, or to some private gin-and-water in the
stables, which he enjoyed in the company of the coachman and his pipe.
At Oxford, the quantity of wine was unlimited, but the quality was
inferior:  but when quantity and quality united as at his aunt's house,
James showed that he could appreciate them indeed; and hardly needed
any of his cousin's encouragement in draining off the second bottle
supplied by Mr. Bowls.

When the time for coffee came, however, and for a return to the ladies,
of whom he stood in awe, the young gentleman's agreeable frankness left
him, and he relapsed into his usual surly timidity; contenting himself
by saying yes and no, by scowling at Lady Jane, and by upsetting one
cup of coffee during the evening.

If he did not speak he yawned in a pitiable manner, and his presence
threw a damp upon the modest proceedings of the evening, for Miss
Crawley and Lady Jane at their piquet, and Miss Briggs at her work,
felt that his eyes were wildly fixed on them, and were uneasy under
that maudlin look.

"He seems a very silent, awkward, bashful lad," said Miss Crawley to
Mr. Pitt.

"He is more communicative in men's society than with ladies," Machiavel
dryly replied:  perhaps rather disappointed that the port wine had not
made Jim speak more.

He had spent the early part of the next morning in writing home to his
mother a most flourishing account of his reception by Miss Crawley.
But ah! he little knew what evils the day was bringing for him, and how
short his reign of favour was destined to be.  A circumstance which Jim
had forgotten--a trivial but fatal circumstance--had taken place at the
Cribb's Arms on the night before he had come to his aunt's house.  It
was no other than this--Jim, who was always of a generous disposition,
and when in his cups especially hospitable, had in the course of the
night treated the Tutbury champion and the Rottingdean man, and their
friends, twice or thrice to the refreshment of gin-and-water--so that
no less than eighteen glasses of that fluid at eightpence per glass
were charged in Mr. James Crawley's bill.  It was not the amount of
eightpences, but the quantity of gin which told fatally against poor
James's character, when his aunt's butler, Mr. Bowls, went down at his
mistress's request to pay the young gentleman's bill.  The landlord,
fearing lest the account should be refused altogether, swore solemnly
that the young gent had consumed personally every farthing's worth of
the liquor:  and Bowls paid the bill finally, and showed it on his
return home to Mrs. Firkin, who was shocked at the frightful
prodigality of gin; and took the bill to Miss Briggs as
accountant-general; who thought it her duty to mention the circumstance
to her principal, Miss Crawley.

Had he drunk a dozen bottles of claret, the old spinster could have
pardoned him.  Mr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan drank claret.  Gentlemen drank
claret.  But eighteen glasses of gin consumed among boxers in an
ignoble pot-house--it was an odious crime and not to be pardoned
readily.  Everything went against the lad:  he came home perfumed from
the stables, whither he had been to pay his dog Towzer a visit--and
whence he was going to take his friend out for an airing, when he met
Miss Crawley and her wheezy Blenheim spaniel, which Towzer would have
eaten up had not the Blenheim fled squealing to the protection of Miss
Briggs, while the atrocious master of the bull-dog stood laughing at
the horrible persecution.

This day too the unlucky boy's modesty had likewise forsaken him. He
was lively and facetious at dinner. During the repast he levelled one
or two jokes against Pitt Crawley:  he drank as much wine as upon the
previous day; and going quite unsuspiciously to the drawing-room, began
to entertain the ladies there with some choice Oxford stories.  He
described the different pugilistic qualities of Molyneux and Dutch Sam,
offered playfully to give Lady Jane the odds upon the Tutbury Pet
against the Rottingdean man, or take them, as her Ladyship chose: and
crowned the pleasantry by proposing to back himself against his cousin
Pitt Crawley, either with or without the gloves.  "And that's a fair
offer, my buck," he said, with a loud laugh, slapping Pitt on the
shoulder, "and my father told me to make it too, and he'll go halves in
the bet, ha, ha!" So saying, the engaging youth nodded knowingly at
poor Miss Briggs, and pointed his thumb over his shoulder at Pitt
Crawley in a jocular and exulting manner.

Pitt was not pleased altogether perhaps, but still not unhappy in the
main.  Poor Jim had his laugh out:  and staggered across the room with
his aunt's candle, when the old lady moved to retire, and offered to
salute her with the blandest tipsy smile:  and he took his own leave
and went upstairs to his bedroom perfectly satisfied with himself, and
with a pleased notion that his aunt's money would be left to him in
preference to his father and all the rest of the family.

Once up in the bedroom, one would have thought he could not make
matters worse; and yet this unlucky boy did.  The moon was shining very
pleasantly out on the sea, and Jim, attracted to the window by the
romantic appearance of the ocean and the heavens, thought he would
further enjoy them while smoking.  Nobody would smell the tobacco, he
thought, if he cunningly opened the window and kept his head and pipe
in the fresh air. This he did:  but being in an excited state, poor Jim
had forgotten that his door was open all this time, so that the breeze
blowing inwards and a fine thorough draught being established, the
clouds of tobacco were carried downstairs, and arrived with quite
undiminished fragrance to Miss Crawley and Miss Briggs.

The pipe of tobacco finished the business:  and the Bute-Crawleys never
knew how many thousand pounds it cost them.  Firkin rushed downstairs
to Bowls who was reading out the "Fire and the Frying Pan" to his
aide-de-camp in a loud and ghostly voice.  The dreadful secret was told
to him by Firkin with so frightened a look, that for the first moment
Mr. Bowls and his young man thought that robbers were in the house, the
legs of whom had probably been discovered by the woman under Miss
Crawley's bed.  When made aware of the fact, however--to rush upstairs
at three steps at a time to enter the unconscious James's apartment,
calling out, "Mr. James," in a voice stifled with alarm, and to cry,
"For Gawd's sake, sir, stop that 'ere pipe," was the work of a minute
with Mr. Bowls.  "O, Mr. James, what 'AVE you done!" he said in a voice
of the deepest pathos, as he threw the implement out of the window.
"What 'ave you done, sir! Missis can't abide 'em."

"Missis needn't smoke," said James with a frantic misplaced laugh, and
thought the whole matter an excellent joke.  But his feelings were very
different in the morning, when Mr. Bowls's young man, who operated upon
Mr. James's boots, and brought him his hot water to shave that beard
which he was so anxiously expecting, handed a note in to Mr. James in
bed, in the handwriting of Miss Briggs.

"Dear sir," it said, "Miss Crawley has passed an exceedingly disturbed
night, owing to the shocking manner in which the house has been
polluted by tobacco; Miss Crawley bids me say she regrets that she is
too unwell to see you before you go--and above all that she ever
induced you to remove from the ale-house, where she is sure you will be
much more comfortable during the rest of your stay at Brighton."

And herewith honest James's career as a candidate for his aunt's favour
ended.  He had in fact, and without knowing it, done what he menaced to
do.  He had fought his cousin Pitt with the gloves.

Where meanwhile was he who had been once first favourite for this race
for money? Becky and Rawdon, as we have seen, were come together after
Waterloo, and were passing the winter of 1815 at Paris in great
splendour and gaiety.  Rebecca was a good economist, and the price poor
Jos Sedley had paid for her two horses was in itself sufficient to keep
their little establishment afloat for a year, at the least; there was
no occasion to turn into money "my pistols, the same which I shot
Captain Marker," or the gold dressing-case, or the cloak lined with
sable.  Becky had it made into a pelisse for herself, in which she rode
in the Bois de Boulogne to the admiration of all:  and you should have
seen the scene between her and her delighted husband, whom she rejoined
after the army had entered Cambray, and when she unsewed herself, and
let out of her dress all those watches, knick-knacks, bank-notes,
cheques, and valuables, which she had secreted in the wadding, previous
to her meditated flight from Brussels!  Tufto was charmed, and Rawdon
roared with delighted laughter, and swore that she was better than any
play he ever saw, by Jove. And the way in which she jockeyed Jos, and
which she described with infinite fun, carried up his delight to a
pitch of quite insane enthusiasm.  He believed in his wife as much as
the French soldiers in Napoleon.

Her success in Paris was remarkable.  All the French ladies voted her
charming.  She spoke their language admirably.  She adopted at once
their grace, their liveliness, their manner.  Her husband was stupid
certainly--all English are stupid--and, besides, a dull husband at
Paris is always a point in a lady's favour.  He was the heir of the
rich and spirituelle Miss Crawley, whose house had been open to so many
of the French noblesse during the emigration.  They received the
colonel's wife in their own hotels--"Why," wrote a great lady to Miss
Crawley, who had bought her lace and trinkets at the Duchess's own
price, and given her many a dinner during the pinching times after the
Revolution--"Why does not our dear Miss come to her nephew and niece,
and her attached friends in Paris? All the world raffoles of the
charming Mistress and her espiegle beauty. Yes, we see in her the
grace, the charm, the wit of our dear friend Miss Crawley! The King
took notice of her yesterday at the Tuileries, and we are all jealous
of the attention which Monsieur pays her.  If you could have seen the
spite of a certain stupid Miladi Bareacres (whose eagle-beak and toque
and feathers may be seen peering over the heads of all assemblies) when
Madame, the Duchess of Angouleme, the august daughter and companion of
kings, desired especially to be presented to Mrs. Crawley, as your dear
daughter and protegee, and thanked her in the name of France, for all
your benevolence towards our unfortunates during their exile! She is of
all the societies, of all the balls--of the balls--yes--of the dances,
no; and yet how interesting and pretty this fair creature looks
surrounded by the homage of the men, and so soon to be a mother!  To
hear her speak of you, her protectress, her mother, would bring tears
to the eyes of ogres.  How she loves you! how we all love our
admirable, our respectable Miss Crawley!"

It is to be feared that this letter of the Parisian great lady did not
by any means advance Mrs. Becky's interest with her admirable, her
respectable, relative.  On the contrary, the fury of the old spinster
was beyond bounds, when she found what was Rebecca's situation, and how
audaciously she had made use of Miss Crawley's name, to get an entree
into Parisian society.  Too much shaken in mind and body to compose a
letter in the French language in reply to that of her correspondent,
she dictated to Briggs a furious answer in her own native tongue,
repudiating Mrs. Rawdon Crawley altogether, and warning the public to
beware of her as a most artful and dangerous person.  But as Madame the
Duchess of X--had only been twenty years in England, she did not
understand a single word of the language, and contented herself by
informing Mrs. Rawdon Crawley at their next meeting, that she had
received a charming letter from that chere Mees, and that it was full
of benevolent things for Mrs. Crawley, who began seriously to have
hopes that the spinster would relent.

Meanwhile, she was the gayest and most admired of Englishwomen:  and
had a little European congress on her reception-night.  Prussians and
Cossacks, Spanish and English--all the world was at Paris during this
famous winter:  to have seen the stars and cordons in Rebecca's humble
saloon would have made all Baker Street pale with envy. Famous warriors
rode by her carriage in the Bois, or crowded her modest little box at
the Opera. Rawdon was in the highest spirits. There were no duns in
Paris as yet:  there were parties every day at Very's or Beauvilliers';
play was plentiful and his luck good. Tufto perhaps was sulky.  Mrs.
Tufto had come over to Paris at her own invitation, and besides this
contretemps, there were a score of generals now round Becky's chair,
and she might take her choice of a dozen bouquets when she went to the
play.  Lady Bareacres and the chiefs of the English society, stupid and
irreproachable females, writhed with anguish at the success of the
little upstart Becky, whose poisoned jokes quivered and rankled in
their chaste breasts. But she had all the men on her side.  She fought
the women with indomitable courage, and they could not talk scandal in
any tongue but their own.

So in fetes, pleasures, and prosperity, the winter of 1815-16 passed
away with Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, who accommodated herself to polite life
as if her ancestors had been people of fashion for centuries past--and
who from her wit, talent, and energy, indeed merited a place of honour
in Vanity Fair.  In the early spring of 1816, Galignani's Journal
contained the following announcement in an interesting corner of the
paper:  "On the 26th of March--the Lady of Lieutenant-Colonel Crawley,
of the Life Guards Green--of a son and heir."

This event was copied into the London papers, out of which Miss Briggs
read the statement to Miss Crawley, at breakfast, at Brighton.  The
intelligence, expected as it might have been, caused a crisis in the
affairs of the Crawley family.  The spinster's rage rose to its height,
and sending instantly for Pitt, her nephew, and for the Lady Southdown,
from Brunswick Square, she requested an immediate celebration of the
marriage which had been so long pending between the two families.  And
she announced that it was her intention to allow the young couple a
thousand a year during her lifetime, at the expiration of which the
bulk of her property would be settled upon her nephew and her dear
niece, Lady Jane Crawley. Waxy came down to ratify the deeds--Lord
Southdown gave away his sister--she was married by a Bishop, and not by
the Rev. Bartholomew Irons--to the disappointment of the irregular
prelate.

When they were married, Pitt would have liked to take a hymeneal tour
with his bride, as became people of their condition.  But the affection
of the old lady towards Lady Jane had grown so strong, that she fairly
owned she could not part with her favourite.  Pitt and his wife came
therefore and lived with Miss Crawley: and (greatly to the annoyance of
poor Pitt, who conceived himself a most injured character--being
subject to the humours of his aunt on one side, and of his
mother-in-law on the other). Lady Southdown, from her neighbouring
house, reigned over the whole family--Pitt, Lady Jane, Miss Crawley,
Briggs, Bowls, Firkin, and all.  She pitilessly dosed them with her
tracts and her medicine, she dismissed Creamer, she installed Rodgers,
and soon stripped Miss Crawley of even the semblance of authority.  The
poor soul grew so timid that she actually left off bullying Briggs any
more, and clung to her niece, more fond and terrified every day.  Peace
to thee, kind and selfish, vain and generous old heathen!--We shall see
thee no more.  Let us hope that Lady Jane supported her kindly, and led
her with gentle hand out of the busy struggle of Vanity Fair.


Widow and Mother

The news of the great fights of Quatre Bras and Waterloo reached
England at the same time.  The Gazette first published the result of
the two battles; at which glorious intelligence all England thrilled
with triumph and fear. Particulars then followed; and after the
announcement of the victories came the list of the wounded and the
slain. Who can tell the dread with which that catalogue was opened and
read!  Fancy, at every village and homestead almost through the three
kingdoms, the great news coming of the battles in Flanders, and the
feelings of exultation and gratitude, bereavement and sickening dismay,
when the lists of the regimental losses were gone through, and it
became known whether the dear friend and relative had escaped or
fallen.  Anybody who will take the trouble of looking back to a file of
the newspapers of the time, must, even now, feel at second-hand this
breathless pause of expectation.  The lists of casualties are carried
on from day to day:  you stop in the midst as in a story which is to be
continued in our next.  Think what the feelings must have been as those
papers followed each other fresh from the press; and if such an
interest could be felt in our country, and about a battle where but
twenty thousand of our people were engaged, think of the condition of
Europe for twenty years before, where people were fighting, not by
thousands, but by millions; each one of whom as he struck his enemy
wounded horribly some other innocent heart far away.

The news which that famous Gazette brought to the Osbornes gave a
dreadful shock to the family and its chief. The girls indulged
unrestrained in their grief.  The gloom-stricken old father was still
more borne down by his fate and sorrow.  He strove to think that a
judgment was on the boy for his disobedience.  He dared not own that
the severity of the sentence frightened him, and that its fulfilment
had come too soon upon his curses.  Sometimes a shuddering terror
struck him, as if he had been the author of the doom which he had
called down on his son.  There was a chance before of reconciliation.
The boy's wife might have died; or he might have come back and said,
Father I have sinned.  But there was no hope now.  He stood on the
other side of the gulf impassable, haunting his parent with sad eyes.
He remembered them once before so in a fever, when every one thought
the lad was dying, and he lay on his bed speechless, and gazing with a
dreadful gloom.  Good God! how the father clung to the doctor then, and
with what a sickening anxiety he followed him:  what a weight of grief
was off his mind when, after the crisis of the fever, the lad
recovered, and looked at his father once more with eyes that recognised
him. But now there was no help or cure, or chance of reconcilement:
above all, there were no humble words to soothe vanity outraged and
furious, or bring to its natural flow the poisoned, angry blood.  And
it is hard to say which pang it was that tore the proud father's heart
most keenly--that his son should have gone out of the reach of his
forgiveness, or that the apology which his own pride expected should
have escaped him.

Whatever his sensations might have been, however, the stern old man
would have no confidant.  He never mentioned his son's name to his
daughters; but ordered the elder to place all the females of the
establishment in mourning; and desired that the male servants should be
similarly attired in deep black.  All parties and entertainments, of
course, were to be put off.  No communications were made to his future
son-in-law, whose marriage-day had been fixed:  but there was enough in
Mr. Osborne's appearance to prevent Mr. Bullock from making any
inquiries, or in any way pressing forward that ceremony. He and the
ladies whispered about it under their voices in the drawing-room
sometimes, whither the father never came.  He remained constantly in
his own study; the whole front part of the house being closed until
some time after the completion of the general mourning.

About three weeks after the 18th of June, Mr. Osborne's acquaintance,
Sir William Dobbin, called at Mr. Osborne's house in Russell Square,
with a very pale and agitated face, and insisted upon seeing that
gentleman. Ushered into his room, and after a few words, which neither
the speaker nor the host understood, the former produced from an
inclosure a letter sealed with a large red seal. "My son, Major
Dobbin," the Alderman said, with some hesitation, "despatched me a
letter by an officer of the --th, who arrived in town to-day.  My son's
letter contains one for you, Osborne." The Alderman placed the letter
on the table, and Osborne stared at him for a moment or two in silence.
His looks frightened the ambassador, who after looking guiltily for a
little time at the grief-stricken man, hurried away without another
word.

The letter was in George's well-known bold handwriting. It was that one
which he had written before daybreak on the 16th of June, and just
before he took leave of Amelia.  The great red seal was emblazoned with
the sham coat of arms which Osborne had assumed from the Peerage, with
"Pax in bello" for a motto; that of the ducal house with which the vain
old man tried to fancy himself connected. The hand that signed it would
never hold pen or sword more.  The very seal that sealed it had been
robbed from George's dead body as it lay on the field of battle.  The
father knew nothing of this, but sat and looked at the letter in
terrified vacancy.  He almost fell when he went to open it.

Have you ever had a difference with a dear friend? How his letters,
written in the period of love and confidence, sicken and rebuke you!
What a dreary mourning it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of
dead affection!  What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of love!
What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities! Most of us have got
or written drawers full of them. They are closet-skeletons which we
keep and shun. Osborne trembled long before the letter from his dead
son.

The poor boy's letter did not say much.  He had been too proud to
acknowledge the tenderness which his heart felt.  He only said, that on
the eve of a great battle, he wished to bid his father farewell, and
solemnly to implore his good offices for the wife--it might be for the
child--whom he left behind him.  He owned with contrition that his
irregularities and his extravagance had already wasted a large part of
his mother's little fortune.  He thanked his father for his former
generous conduct; and he promised him that if he fell on the field or
survived it, he would act in a manner worthy of the name of George
Osborne.

His English habit, pride, awkwardness perhaps, had prevented him from
saying more.  His father could not see the kiss George had placed on
the superscription of his letter.  Mr. Osborne dropped it with the
bitterest, deadliest pang of balked affection and revenge. His son was
still beloved and unforgiven.

About two months afterwards, however, as the young ladies of the family
went to church with their father, they remarked how he took a different
seat from that which he usually occupied when he chose to attend divine
worship; and that from his cushion opposite, he looked up at the wall
over their heads.  This caused the young women likewise to gaze in the
direction towards which their father's gloomy eyes pointed:  and they
saw an elaborate monument upon the wall, where Britannia was
represented weeping over an urn, and a broken sword and a couchant lion
indicated that the piece of sculpture had been erected in honour of a
deceased warrior.  The sculptors of those days had stocks of such
funereal emblems in hand; as you may see still on the walls of St.
Paul's, which are covered with hundreds of these braggart heathen
allegories.  There was a constant demand for them during the first
fifteen years of the present century.

Under the memorial in question were emblazoned the well-known and
pompous Osborne arms; and the inscription said, that the monument was
"Sacred to the memory of George Osborne, Junior, Esq., late a Captain
in his Majesty's --th regiment of foot, who fell on the 18th of June,
1815, aged 28 years, while fighting for his king and country in the
glorious victory of Waterloo. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

The sight of that stone agitated the nerves of the sisters so much,
that Miss Maria was compelled to leave the church.  The congregation
made way respectfully for those sobbing girls clothed in deep black,
and pitied the stern old father seated opposite the memorial of the
dead soldier.  "Will he forgive Mrs. George?" the girls said to
themselves as soon as their ebullition of grief was over. Much
conversation passed too among the acquaintances of the Osborne family,
who knew of the rupture between the son and father caused by the
former's marriage, as to the chance of a reconciliation with the young
widow. There were bets among the gentlemen both about Russell Square
and in the City.

If the sisters had any anxiety regarding the possible recognition of
Amelia as a daughter of the family, it was increased presently, and
towards the end of the autumn, by their father's announcement that he
was going abroad.  He did not say whither, but they knew at once that
his steps would be turned towards Belgium, and were aware that George's
widow was still in Brussels.  They had pretty accurate news indeed of
poor Amelia from Lady Dobbin and her daughters.  Our honest Captain had
been promoted in consequence of the death of the second Major of the
regiment on the field; and the brave O'Dowd, who had distinguished
himself greatly here as upon all occasions where he had a chance to
show his coolness and valour, was a Colonel and Companion of the Bath.

Very many of the brave --th, who had suffered severely upon both days
of action, were still at Brussels in the autumn, recovering of their
wounds.  The city was a vast military hospital for months after the
great battles; and as men and officers began to rally from their hurts,
the gardens and places of public resort swarmed with maimed warriors,
old and young, who, just rescued out of death, fell to gambling, and
gaiety, and love-making, as people of Vanity Fair will do.  Mr. Osborne
found out some of the --th easily.  He knew their uniform quite well,
and had been used to follow all the promotions and exchanges in the
regiment, and loved to talk about it and its officers as if he had been
one of the number.  On the day after his arrival at Brussels, and as he
issued from his hotel, which faced the park, he saw a soldier in the
well-known facings, reposing on a stone bench in the garden, and went
and sate down trembling by the wounded convalescent man.

"Were you in Captain Osborne's company?" he said, and added, after a
pause, "he was my son, sir."

The man was not of the Captain's company, but he lifted up his
unwounded arm and touched his cap sadly and respectfully to the haggard
broken-spirited gentleman who questioned him.  "The whole army didn't
contain a finer or a better officer," the soldier said. "The Sergeant
of the Captain's company (Captain Raymond had it now), was in town,
though, and was just well of a shot in the shoulder. His honour might
see him if he liked, who could tell him anything he wanted to know
about--about the --th's actions.  But his honour had seen Major Dobbin,
no doubt, the brave Captain's great friend; and Mrs. Osborne, who was
here too, and had been very bad, he heard everybody say.  They say she
was out of her mind like for six weeks or more.  But your honour knows
all about that--and asking your pardon"--the man added.

Osborne put a guinea into the soldier's hand, and told him he should
have another if he would bring the Sergeant to the Hotel du Parc; a
promise which very soon brought the desired officer to Mr. Osborne's
presence. And the first soldier went away; and after telling a comrade
or two how Captain Osborne's father was arrived, and what a free-handed
generous gentleman he was, they went and made good cheer with drink and
feasting, as long as the guineas lasted which had come from the proud
purse of the mourning old father.

In the Sergeant's company, who was also just convalescent, Osborne made
the journey of Waterloo and Quatre Bras, a journey which thousands of
his countrymen were then taking.  He took the Sergeant with him in his
carriage, and went through both fields under his guidance.  He saw the
point of the road where the regiment marched into action on the 16th,
and the slope down which they drove the French cavalry who were
pressing on the retreating Belgians.  There was the spot where the
noble Captain cut down the French officer who was grappling with the
young Ensign for the colours, the Colour-Sergeants having been shot
down.  Along this road they retreated on the next day, and here was the
bank at which the regiment bivouacked under the rain of the night of
the seventeenth.  Further on was the position which they took and held
during the day, forming time after time to receive the charge of the
enemy's horsemen and lying down under the shelter of the bank from the
furious French cannonade. And it was at this declivity when at evening
the whole English line received the order to advance, as the enemy fell
back after his last charge, that the Captain, hurraying and rushing
down the hill waving his sword, received a shot and fell dead.  "It was
Major Dobbin who took back the Captain's body to Brussels," the
Sergeant said, in a low voice, "and had him buried, as your honour
knows." The peasants and relic-hunters about the place were screaming
round the pair, as the soldier told his story, offering for sale all
sorts of mementoes of the fight, crosses, and epaulets, and shattered
cuirasses, and eagles.

Osborne gave a sumptuous reward to the Sergeant when he parted with
him, after having visited the scenes of his son's last exploits. His
burial-place he had already seen.  Indeed, he had driven thither
immediately after his arrival at Brussels.  George's body lay in the
pretty burial-ground of Laeken, near the city; in which place, having
once visited it on a party of pleasure, he had lightly expressed a wish
to have his grave made.  And there the young officer was laid by his
friend, in the unconsecrated corner of the garden, separated by a
little hedge from the temples and towers and plantations of flowers and
shrubs, under which the Roman Catholic dead repose.  It seemed a
humiliation to old Osborne to think that his son, an English gentleman,
a captain in the famous British army, should not be found worthy to lie
in ground where mere foreigners were buried.  Which of us is there can
tell how much vanity lurks in our warmest regard for others, and how
selfish our love is? Old Osborne did not speculate much upon the
mingled nature of his feelings, and how his instinct and selfishness
were combating together.  He firmly believed that everything he did was
right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way--and like the
sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous
against anything like opposition.  He was proud of his hatred as of
everything else.  Always to be right, always to trample forward, and
never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness
takes the lead in the world?

As after the drive to Waterloo, Mr. Osborne's carriage was nearing the
gates of the city at sunset, they met another open barouche, in which
were a couple of ladies and a gentleman, and by the side of which an
officer was riding.  Osborne gave a start back, and the Sergeant,
seated with him, cast a look of surprise at his neighbour, as he
touched his cap to the officer, who mechanically returned his salute.
It was Amelia, with the lame young Ensign by her side, and opposite to
her her faithful friend Mrs. O'Dowd.  It was Amelia, but how changed
from the fresh and comely girl Osborne knew.  Her face was white and
thin.  Her pretty brown hair was parted under a widow's cap--the poor
child.  Her eyes were fixed, and looking nowhere.  They stared blank in
the face of Osborne, as the carriages crossed each other, but she did
not know him; nor did he recognise her, until looking up, he saw Dobbin
riding by her:  and then he knew who it was.  He hated her.  He did not
know how much until he saw her there.  When her carriage had passed on,
he turned and stared at the Sergeant, with a curse and defiance in his
eye cast at his companion, who could not help looking at him--as much
as to say "How dare you look at me? Damn you!  I do hate her.  It is
she who has tumbled my hopes and all my pride down." "Tell the
scoundrel to drive on quick," he shouted with an oath, to the lackey on
the box. A minute afterwards, a horse came clattering over the pavement
behind Osborne's carriage, and Dobbin rode up.  His thoughts had been
elsewhere as the carriages passed each other, and it was not until he
had ridden some paces forward, that he remembered it was Osborne who
had just passed him.  Then he turned to examine if the sight of her
father-in-law had made any impression on Amelia, but the poor girl did
not know who had passed.  Then William, who daily used to accompany her
in his drives, taking out his watch, made some excuse about an
engagement which he suddenly recollected, and so rode off.  She did not
remark that either:  but sate looking before her, over the homely
landscape towards the woods in the distance, by which George marched
away.

"Mr. Osborne, Mr. Osborne!" cried Dobbin, as he rode up and held out
his hand.  Osborne made no motion to take it, but shouted out once more
and with another curse to his servant to drive on.

Dobbin laid his hand on the carriage side.  "I will see you, sir," he
said.  "I have a message for you."

"From that woman?" said Osborne, fiercely.

"No," replied the other, "from your son"; at which Osborne fell back
into the corner of his carriage, and Dobbin allowing it to pass on,
rode close behind it, and so through the town until they reached Mr.
Osborne's hotel, and without a word.  There he followed Osborne up to
his apartments.  George had often been in the rooms; they were the
lodgings which the Crawleys had occupied during their stay in Brussels.

"Pray, have you any commands for me, Captain Dobbin, or, I beg your
pardon, I should say MAJOR Dobbin, since better men than you are dead,
and you step into their SHOES?" said Mr. Osborne, in that sarcastic
tone which he sometimes was pleased to assume.

"Better men ARE dead," Dobbin replied.  "I want to speak to you about
one."

"Make it short, sir," said the other with an oath, scowling at his
visitor.

"I am here as his closest friend," the Major resumed, "and the executor
of his will.  He made it before he went into action.  Are you aware how
small his means are, and of the straitened circumstances of his widow?"

"I don't know his widow, sir," Osborne said.  "Let her go back to her
father." But the gentleman whom he addressed was determined to remain
in good temper, and went on without heeding the interruption.

"Do you know, sir, Mrs. Osborne's condition? Her life and her reason
almost have been shaken by the blow which has fallen on her.  It is
very doubtful whether she will rally.  There is a chance left for her,
however, and it is about this I came to speak to you.  She will be a
mother soon.  Will you visit the parent's offence upon the child's
head? or will you forgive the child for poor George's sake?"

Osborne broke out into a rhapsody of self-praise and imprecations;--by
the first, excusing himself to his own conscience for his conduct; by
the second, exaggerating the undutifulness of George. No father in all
England could have behaved more generously to a son, who had rebelled
against him wickedly.  He had died without even so much as confessing
he was wrong.  Let him take the consequences of his undutifulness and
folly.  As for himself, Mr. Osborne, he was a man of his word.  He had
sworn never to speak to that woman, or to recognize her as his son's
wife.  "And that's what you may tell her," he concluded with an oath;
"and that's what I will stick to to the last day of my life."

There was no hope from that quarter then.  The widow must live on her
slender pittance, or on such aid as Jos could give her.  "I might tell
her, and she would not heed it," thought Dobbin, sadly: for the poor
girl's thoughts were not here at all since her catastrophe, and,
stupefied under the pressure of her sorrow, good and evil were alike
indifferent to her.

So, indeed, were even friendship and kindness.  She received them both
uncomplainingly, and having accepted them, relapsed into her grief.

Suppose some twelve months after the above conversation took place to
have passed in the life of our poor Amelia.  She has spent the first
portion of that time in a sorrow so profound and pitiable, that we who
have been watching and describing some of the emotions of that weak and
tender heart, must draw back in the presence of the cruel grief under
which it is bleeding.  Tread silently round the hapless couch of the
poor prostrate soul. Shut gently the door of the dark chamber wherein
she suffers, as those kind people did who nursed her through the first
months of her pain, and never left her until heaven had sent her
consolation.  A day came--of almost terrified delight and wonder--when
the poor widowed girl pressed a child upon her breast--a child, with
the eyes of George who was gone--a little boy, as beautiful as a
cherub.  What a miracle it was to hear its first cry!  How she laughed
and wept over it--how love, and hope, and prayer woke again in her
bosom as the baby nestled there.  She was safe.  The doctors who
attended her, and had feared for her life or for her brain, had waited
anxiously for this crisis before they could pronounce that either was
secure.  It was worth the long months of doubt and dread which the
persons who had constantly been with her had passed, to see her eyes
once more beaming tenderly upon them.

Our friend Dobbin was one of them.  It was he who brought her back to
England and to her mother's house; when Mrs. O'Dowd, receiving a
peremptory summons from her Colonel, had been forced to quit her
patient. To see Dobbin holding the infant, and to hear Amelia's laugh
of triumph as she watched him, would have done any man good who had a
sense of humour.  William was the godfather of the child, and exerted
his ingenuity in the purchase of cups, spoons, pap-boats, and corals
for this little Christian.

How his mother nursed him, and dressed him, and lived upon him; how she
drove away all nurses, and would scarce allow any hand but her own to
touch him; how she considered that the greatest favour she could confer
upon his godfather, Major Dobbin, was to allow the Major occasionally
to dandle him, need not be told here.  This child was her being.  Her
existence was a maternal caress.  She enveloped the feeble and
unconscious creature with love and worship.  It was her life which the
baby drank in from her bosom.  Of nights, and when alone, she had
stealthy and intense raptures of motherly love, such as God's
marvellous care has awarded to the female instinct--joys how far
higher and lower than reason--blind beautiful devotions which only
women's hearts know.  It was William Dobbin's task to muse upon these
movements of Amelia's, and to watch her heart; and if his love made him
divine almost all the feelings which agitated it, alas! he could see
with a fatal perspicuity that there was no place there for him.  And
so, gently, he bore his fate, knowing it, and content to bear it.

I suppose Amelia's father and mother saw through the intentions of the
Major, and were not ill-disposed to encourage him; for Dobbin visited
their house daily, and stayed for hours with them, or with Amelia, or
with the honest landlord, Mr. Clapp, and his family.  He brought, on
one pretext or another, presents to everybody, and almost every day;
and went, with the landlord's little girl, who was rather a favourite
with Amelia, by the name of Major Sugarplums.  It was this little child
who commonly acted as mistress of the ceremonies to introduce him to
Mrs. Osborne.  She laughed one day when Major Sugarplums' cab drove up
to Fulham, and he descended from it, bringing out a wooden horse, a
drum, a trumpet, and other warlike toys, for little Georgy, who was
scarcely six months old, and for whom the articles in question were
entirely premature.

The child was asleep.  "Hush," said Amelia, annoyed, perhaps, at the
creaking of the Major's boots; and she held out her hand; smiling
because William could not take it until he had rid himself of his cargo
of toys.  "Go downstairs, little Mary," said he presently to the child,
"I want to speak to Mrs. Osborne." She looked up rather astonished, and
laid down the infant on its bed.

"I am come to say good-bye, Amelia," said he, taking her slender little
white hand gently.

"Good-bye? and where are you going?" she said, with a smile.

"Send the letters to the agents," he said; "they will forward them; for
you will write to me, won't you? I shall be away a long time."

"I'll write to you about Georgy," she said.  "Dear William, how good
you have been to him and to me.  Look at him.  Isn't he like an angel?"

The little pink hands of the child closed mechanically round the honest
soldier's finger, and Amelia looked up in his face with bright maternal
pleasure.  The cruellest looks could not have wounded him more than
that glance of hopeless kindness.  He bent over the child and mother.
He could not speak for a moment.  And it was only with all his strength
that he could force himself to say a God bless you.  "God bless you,"
said Amelia, and held up her face and kissed him.

"Hush!  Don't wake Georgy!" she added, as William Dobbin went to the
door with heavy steps.  She did not hear the noise of his cab-wheels as
he drove away:  she was looking at the child, who was laughing in his
sleep.



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 worldly 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 dying
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
governess and masters for the girls, the trip abroad, or to Eastbourne
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 wondering how the Jenkinses make out
matters? What is Jenkins? We all know--Commissioner of the Tape and
Sealing Wax Office, with 1200 pounds a year for a salary.  Had his wife
a private fortune? Pooh!--Miss Flint--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 which 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 entertained at dinner that did not ask the above question
regarding 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 have the benefit? My son, I would say,
were I blessed with a child--you 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
something 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 happily 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 arrival 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 nobility.  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 great ladies of
the Court.  The old women who played ecarte 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
appreciate, 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 presently 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 unknown;
meaning, simply, that we don't know how the gentleman in question
defrays the expenses of his establishment.  Now, our friend the Colonel
had a great aptitude for all games of chance: and exercising 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 cannot master any one of these 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 unfavourable to him
for a whole game, and the bets were consequently against him, he would,
with consummate skill and boldness, make some prodigious hits which
would restore 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 overpowering 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 newcomers were often inclined
to think meanly of his talent; yet when roused to action and awakened
to caution by repeated small losses, it was remarked that Crawley'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 envious 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 astonishing
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 headquarters 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 ardour, and gambling went on in private
houses as much as if there had been no public means for gratifying the
passion.  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 gentleman, and actually went on her knees to her
husband to beseech him to remit the debt, and burn the acknowledgement.
How could he? He had lost just as much himself to Blackstone of the
Hussars, and Count Punter of the Hanoverian Cavalry.  Green might have
any decent time; but pay?--of course he must pay; to talk of burning
IOU'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 reputation.  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 between 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
pistols "which he shot Captain Marker," and had such a conversation
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 one, and that, even although they paid
scarcely anybody, their little capital would end one day by dwindling
into zero.  "Gambling," 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., gentlemen 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:  nosegays could
not be laid by as 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 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.
Crawley and her child would remain behind until 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 Dunkirk, 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 Colonel was busy arranging the affairs
of the inheritance.  They could take the premier now, instead of the
little entresol of the hotel which they occupied. Mrs. Crawley and the
landlord had a consultation about the new hangings, 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 previous to the return of the fascinating little woman
and her husband.  He _serred_ the trunks which she left in his charge
with the greatest care.  They had been especially recommended to him by
Madame Crawley.  They were not, however, 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 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
Rawdon'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 haggle for
bargains with the pertinacity which now distinguishes 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 countryman 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 carriages, 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 until Madame
Marabou, the milliner, made repeated visits with her little bill for
articles supplied to Madame Crawley; 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 gardener'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--"ils m'ont affreusement vole." It was melancholy 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 creditors, 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 negotiation; 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 themselves do the business.  And Mr. Lewis
representing Mr. Davids, of Red Lion Square, and Mr. Moss acting for
Mr. Manasseh of Cursitor Street (chief creditors of the Colonel'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 modesty; 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 considerably neglected during his
mother's absence by Mademoiselle 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.



The Subject Continued

In the first place, and as a matter of the greatest necessity, 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
footboard of the carriage; from the footboard to the butler's pantry.
When he had been a certain number of years at the head of Miss
Crawley's establishment, 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 honourable 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 performed some
years back; although the news of Mr. Raggles' marriage was first
brought to Miss Crawley by a little boy and girl of seven and eight
years of age, whose continual 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 milk and cream, eggs and
country-fed pork to his 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 where he and Mrs.
Raggles 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, lately the residence of the Honourable Frederick Deuceace,
gone abroad, with its rich and appropriate furniture 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 borrowed, 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, regardless of expense, Charles was sent
to boarding at Dr. Swishtail's, Sugar-cane Lodge, and little Matilda to
Miss Peckover'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 mistress 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 Curzon 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 containing 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 connection with the Crawley family had
been kept up constantly, for Raggles helped Mr. Bowls whenever Miss
Crawley 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.  But who pities a poor barber who can't get
his money for powdering the footmen'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 patronizes,
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. Raggles himself had
to supply the greengroceries.  The bill for servants' porter at the
Fortune of War public house is a curiosity in the chronicles 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 unfrequently the way in which
people live elegantly on nothing a year.

In a little town such things cannot be done without remark.  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, 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
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 sat 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
confessed 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 customs, 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 perseverance 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
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 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 ambassadors 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 themselves in "society," than the
benighted squire's wife in Somersetshire 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 retreating a step
or two, placed herself in front of them, and stared at her little
enemy. To stare Becky out of countenance required a severer glance than
even the frigid old Bareacres 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 recognize her former
friend.  Even Mrs. Blenkinsop, the banker's wife, cut her at church.
Becky went regularly to church now; it was edifying to see her enter
there with Rawdon by 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
strongest 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.  "Remember, 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 meanwhile you must be a good
boy and obey your schoolmistress in everything she tells you to do.
When we heard that 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! fiddlede-dee!  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.

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 found that only five thousand pounds had been
left to him instead 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 family, and heartily congratulated his brother on
his good fortune.  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,
asking 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.

To her Ladyship's surprise, however, Pitt declined to accommodate 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 pronounced 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 possession of Miss Crawley's house there. But the new family did
not make its appearance; it was only through Raggles that she heard of
their movements--how Miss Crawley's domestics 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. "When 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 always 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
inseparable.  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 wholesome and moral one to me, as
jolly a reminder as that of the Death's-head which figured in the
repasts of Egyptian bon-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 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):  "I 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 greyhound, 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."

"I 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 of Steyne was standing by the fire sipping coffee. The
fire crackled and blazed pleasantly. There was a score of candles
sparkling round the mantel piece, in all sorts of quaint sconces, of
gilt and bronze and porcelain.  They lighted up Rebecca's figure to
admiration, as she sat 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
themselves 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 ankle, and always caressing his garter-knee.

"And so the shepherd is not enough," said he, "to defend 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 daring 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 did
not like an allusion to those bygone fredaines.  Rebecca saw the scowl
gathering over his heavy brow.

She rose up from her sofa and went and took his coffee 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
sat 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 wearisome 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. "Bah!" 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 dressing-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 indulgence; but just as he was going
to begin, the father interposed.

"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 everybody 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
ceiling, 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
patronizingly 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 sat 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 them!  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 brown holland was good enough when he stayed at
home. Sometimes, 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), plumping and patting the pillows of the bed.
Oh, 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!

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 paternal
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 occupation 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 pygmy
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 fellow-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 perfectly 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 himself at his
club during the performance, and came punctually back to fetch her when
due.  He would have liked her to be a little fonder of the boy, but
even to that he reconciled himself.  "Hang it, you know she's so
clever," he said, "and I'm not literary and that, you know." For, as we
have said before, it requires no great wisdom to be able to win at
cards and billiards, and Rawdon made no pretensions 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 companion!  Isn't it
good fun?" thought Mrs. Crawley to herself.  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 old
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 with delight.

"Good morning, your Honour," said Clink, in reply to the "How do,
Clink?" of the Colonel.  "This ere young gentleman is about the little
Colonel's age, sir," continued the corporal.

"His father was a Waterloo man, too," said the old gentleman, 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 patronizing 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?"

"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 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 looking 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 children 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.



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 whom 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 Waterloo flight.  However it might be, he
went back to his duties in Bengal very soon after Napoleon had taken up
his residence at St.  Helena, where Jos saw the ex-Emperor. To hear Mr.
Sedley talk on board ship you would have supposed 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 documents 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 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 speculations 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 making 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 Rothschild 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 daughter 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 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 patronize 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 committed, 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, sharing 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 account, and that it is probable . . . but we are
wandering 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 landlady's husband; the Munoz of private life; the
titular lord and master:  the carver, house-steward, and humble husband
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 downfall than in their prosperity. 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 regiment
of female domestics--her former household, about which the good lady
talked a hundred times a day. And besides 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,
dressed in her best, she went to church twice and read Blair's Sermons
in the evening.

On that day, for "business" prevented him on weekdays 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 redcoats, and his
grandpapa told him how his father had been a famous soldier, and
introduced him to many sergeants and others with Waterloo medals on
their breasts, to whom the old grandfather pompously 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 boy with apples and parliament, to the detriment 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
instinctively 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 everyday mortals, when she found this
meddling 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, rocking 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 NEWS."

"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--"

"Oh, no, my love,--only that I was a murderess; in which case I had
better go to the Old Bailey.  Though I didn't 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 between Mrs.
Sedley and her daughter was never thoroughly mended.  The quarrel gave
the elder lady numberless advantages 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. Osborne 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. 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 sensibilities 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 unmanned a Herod.  He was very soft-hearted many
years ago, and his wife was mortally jealous of Mrs. Amelia, then and
long afterwards.

Perhaps the doctor's lady had good reason for her jealousy:  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 extraordinarily
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
principal charm--a kind of sweet submission and softness, which seemed
to appeal to each man she met for his sympathy and protection.  We have
seen how in the regiment, though she spoke but to 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 frequented 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 tradesmen 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 purchases 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 anything went wrong with Georgy, he would drop in twice or
thrice in the day to see the little 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
compounded draughts and mixtures for him of miraculous sweetness, 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 indifference, 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 apartment 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 the 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 Brompton 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 she was one of the Graces, and
the favourite attendant of the Reine des Amours.

Instances might be multiplied of this easily gained and unconscious
popularity.  Did not Mr. Binny, the mild and genteel curate of the
district chapel, which the family attended, 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 besides, has twice as much character, and is a thousand
times more agreeable to my taste; and if she were good-looking I know
that you would think her perfection."

Very 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 pardonable? What dulness 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.
O 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.  Yes, 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, 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 his crib by her bedside) 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 from 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 communion 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--prayed 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 marriage--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 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,
clerklike hand.  One of these papers was sent to Major Dobbin,--Regt.,
care of Messrs.  Cox and Greenwood; 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 of 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 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, left 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 employment 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 particulars. 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,
blushing, and awkwardness added to the other's convictions that he had
a rogue 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 colloquy.  "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 bedroom, he produced from his desk Osborne's
accounts, and a bundle of IOU's which the latter had given, who, to do
him justice, was always ready to give an IOU.  "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 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
acknowledgement of this gift of his godpapa.  He sent over preserves
and pickles, which latter the young gentleman tried surreptitiously in
the sideboard and half-killed himself with eating.  He thought it was a
judgement 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 apiece 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, 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 miniature.  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 perfectly bored the
club at the tavern with stories about the little lad's learning and
genius.  He suffered his grandmother 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 a 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 birthday 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 at the
Major's order to measure the young gentleman 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 to 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 begged 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 interesting about their dear William.

"What was it:  was he coming home?" she asked with pleasure beaming in
her eyes.

"Oh, 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 acquaintance, 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.

 Two, Thirty Three, Thirty Four, Thirty Five, Thirty Six, Thirty Seven and Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Two details the preparations of the non-combatants as war looms. Joseph is terrified at the thought of the approaching French army and orders a carriage to take him and Amelia to the port to return to England. Amelia refuses, though, and wishes to stay with Mrs O'Dowd. Isidor tells of rumours that the British army is in flight and Joseph panics. He orders Isidor to shave off his moustache . The action shifts to Becky and the Bareacre family condescending to talk to her now as they want to buy her horses to leave town. She refuses to sell to them because of their previous snubs. However, she allows Joseph to buy them at an inflated price. She reads the note from Osborne and sews trinkets and bills into her clothes to avoid having them stolen. When Joseph hears the cannons at Waterloo, he tells Amelia he has horses, but she refuses to come with him as she will not leave without her husband. The chapter ends with her praying for Osborne, 'who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.' Chapter Thirty Three begins in Brighton with Briggs reading out the news of Rawdon's gallantry and how he is now a Colonel. Miss Crawley still refuses to accept his marriage, even though he sends her letters and war trophies . In Queen's Crawley, Sir Pitt is 'friendly' with Miss Horrocks, the butler's daughter, and Pitt worries his father will be marrying her next. Pitt visits his 'intended' and her mother agrees to 'temporize' when visiting Miss Crawley as Pitt does not want to be left out of her will. Miss Crawley takes a liking to Jane in Chapter Thirty Four, but is not so keen on her mother. Mrs Bute Crawley hears of these visits and sends her son, Jim, as an ambassador for their side of the family. At dinner, Pitt encourages Jim to get drunk . After numerous faux pas, including smoking in the house, Jim is asked to leave. The narrative moves to Paris, where Becky and Rawdon now live. She gives birth to a son in the spring of 1816. This news angers Miss Crawley as well as the information that Becky has found a place in Paris society by using her name. She requests that Pitt and Jane marry and Lady Southdown takes over the whole family. She doses Miss Crawley with tracts and medicine and strips her of her authority. The Gazette brings news of Osborne's death in Chapter Thirty Five and his family are in mourning. In the autumn, his father travels to Brussels and the battlefields where he was killed. He is angry with Amelia when he passes her carriage and Dobbin attempts to bring peace as the executor of Osborne's will. He tells Osborne senior that Amelia is to be a mother soon and asks him to forgive the child for his son's sake. Osborne senior refuses to comply. Amelia recovers a little from her grief when her son is born and Dobbin is named as the godfather. He comes to see her everyday and it is apparent to everyone but Amelia that he has affection for her. Dobbin comes to say goodbye as he is going away for a long time and she says she will write to let him know of her son's progress. She does not hear his carriage leave. In Chapter Thirty Six, we are told that Rawdon makes his money by gambling when the war is over. His aunt dies before he makes peace with her and the couple leave Paris without paying their bills. He returns to Brussels and Becky goes to England to affect a compromise with her husband's creditors. This is made possible and they return to England. Their home in London is described in Chapter Thirty Seven. It is rented from Mr Raggles and they live there rent free and eventually ruin him. They are popular, but the ladies remain aloof from Becky. Under her advice, Rawdon conducts himself well when he discovers he only received PS100 in his aunt's will. His brother, Pitt, received most of it - PS60,000 - and their uncle Bute only managed PS5,000. Becky decides she needs a 'moral sheepdog' to gain acceptance in society. We are then told that Rawdon is now known as Mrs Crawley's husband and she barely notices their son, little Rawdon. Father and son are extremely close, though. When Rawdon takes his son to the park, they meet Sedley and Georgy. He is allowed to ride on little Rawdon's pony. Chapter Thirty Eight gives an update on Joseph's life. He returns to India not long after leaving Brussels and allows people to believe he knew the Duke of Wellington. He gives his parents a PS120 annuity and this is their chief means of support as Sedley has had no business success since his bankruptcy. Amelia lives with her parents and is close to her son, but a rift develops when her mother tries to give him an elixir the doctor did not prescribe. She is popular with the men around her, but turns down a proposal from Reverend Binny. Sedley incorrectly accuses Dobbin of cheating Amelia out of money, but Dobbin finally explains that Osborne did not even have PS100 left when he died. The PS500 left for Amelia was a sum raised by Dobbin and other fellow officers. This is untrue, however, as Dobbin has paid for everything including Osborne's burial. Dobbin has since moved to Madras and sends the Sedleys many gifts. Dobbin's sisters are also still in touch with Amelia and let her know they believe he is to be married to Glorvina O'Dowd, who is the sister-in-law of Mrs O'Dowd. Amelia claims to be happy for him, but 'her eyes were quite moist'.

