Chapter: A Cynical Chapter

Our duty now takes us back for a brief space to some old Hampshire
acquaintances of ours, whose hopes respecting the disposal of their
rich kinswoman's property were so woefully disappointed.  After
counting upon thirty thousand pounds from his sister, it was a heavy
blow to Bute Crawley to receive but five; out of which sum, when he
had paid his own debts and those of Jim, his son at college, a very
small fragment remained to portion off his four plain daughters.  Mrs.
Bute never knew, or at least never acknowledged, how far her own
tyrannous behaviour had tended to ruin her husband. All that woman
could do, she vowed and protested she had done.  Was it her fault if
she did not possess those sycophantic arts which her hypocritical
nephew, Pitt Crawley, practised? She wished him all the happiness which
he merited out of his ill-gotten gains.  "At least the money will
remain in the family," she said charitably.  "Pitt will never spend it,
my dear, that is quite certain; for a greater miser does not exist in
England, and he is as odious, though in a different way, as his
spendthrift brother, the abandoned Rawdon."

So Mrs. Bute, after the first shock of rage and disappointment, began
to accommodate herself as best she could to her altered fortunes and to
save and retrench with all her might.  She instructed her daughters how
to bear poverty cheerfully, and invented a thousand notable methods to
conceal or evade it.  She took them about to balls and public places in
the neighbourhood, with praiseworthy energy; nay, she entertained her
friends in a hospitable comfortable manner at the Rectory, and much
more frequently than before dear Miss Crawley's legacy had fallen in.
From her outward bearing nobody would have supposed that the family had
been disappointed in their expectations, or have guessed from her
frequent appearance in public how she pinched and starved at home.  Her
girls had more milliners' furniture than they had ever enjoyed before.
They appeared perseveringly at the Winchester and Southampton
assemblies; they penetrated to Cowes for the race-balls and
regatta-gaieties there; and their carriage, with the horses taken from
the plough, was at work perpetually, until it began almost to be
believed that the four sisters had had fortunes left them by their
aunt, whose name the family never mentioned in public but with the most
tender gratitude and regard.  I know no sort of lying which is more
frequent in Vanity Fair than this, and it may be remarked how people
who practise it take credit to themselves for their hypocrisy, and
fancy that they are exceedingly virtuous and praiseworthy, because they
are able to deceive the world with regard to the extent of their means.

Mrs. Bute certainly thought herself one of the most virtuous women in
England, and the sight of her happy family was an edifying one to
strangers.  They were so cheerful, so loving, so well-educated, so
simple!  Martha painted flowers exquisitely and furnished half the
charity bazaars in the county.  Emma was a regular County Bulbul, and
her verses in the Hampshire Telegraph were the glory of its Poet's
Corner.  Fanny and Matilda sang duets together, Mamma playing the
piano, and the other two sisters sitting with their arms round each
other's waists and listening affectionately.  Nobody saw the poor girls
drumming at the duets in private.  No one saw Mamma drilling them
rigidly hour after hour.  In a word, Mrs. Bute put a good face against
fortune and kept up appearances in the most virtuous manner.

Everything that a good and respectable mother could do Mrs. Bute did.
She got over yachting men from Southampton, parsons from the Cathedral
Close at Winchester, and officers from the barracks there. She tried to
inveigle the young barristers at assizes and encouraged Jim to bring
home friends with whom he went out hunting with the H. H.  What will
not a mother do for the benefit of her beloved ones?

Between such a woman and her brother-in-law, the odious Baronet at the
Hall, it is manifest that there could be very little in common. The
rupture between Bute and his brother Sir Pitt was complete; indeed,
between Sir Pitt and the whole county, to which the old man was a
scandal.  His dislike for respectable society increased with age, and
the lodge-gates had not opened to a gentleman's carriage-wheels since
Pitt and Lady Jane came to pay their visit of duty after their marriage.

That was an awful and unfortunate visit, never to be thought of by the
family without horror.  Pitt begged his wife, with a ghastly
countenance, never to speak of it, and it was only through Mrs. Bute
herself, who still knew everything which took place at the Hall, that
the circumstances of Sir Pitt's reception of his son and
daughter-in-law were ever known at all.

As they drove up the avenue of the park in their neat and
well-appointed carriage, Pitt remarked with dismay and wrath great gaps
among the trees--his trees--which the old Baronet was felling entirely
without license.  The park wore an aspect of utter dreariness and ruin.
The drives were ill kept, and the neat carriage splashed and floundered
in muddy pools along the road.  The great sweep in front of the terrace
and entrance stair was black and covered with mosses; the once trim
flower-beds rank and weedy. Shutters were up along almost the whole
line of the house; the great hall-door was unbarred after much ringing
of the bell; an individual in ribbons was seen flitting up the black
oak stair, as Horrocks at length admitted the heir of Queen's Crawley
and his bride into the halls of their fathers.  He led the way into Sir
Pitt's "Library," as it was called, the fumes of tobacco growing
stronger as Pitt and Lady Jane approached that apartment, "Sir Pitt
ain't very well," Horrocks remarked apologetically and hinted that his
master was afflicted with lumbago.

The library looked out on the front walk and park. Sir Pitt had opened
one of the windows, and was bawling out thence to the postilion and
Pitt's servant, who seemed to be about to take the baggage down.

"Don't move none of them trunks," he cried, pointing with a pipe which
he held in his hand.  "It's only a morning visit, Tucker, you fool.
Lor, what cracks that off hoss has in his heels!  Ain't there no one at
the King's Head to rub 'em a little? How do, Pitt? How do, my dear?
Come to see the old man, hay? 'Gad--you've a pretty face, too. You
ain't like that old horse-godmother, your mother. Come and give old
Pitt a kiss, like a good little gal."

The embrace disconcerted the daughter-in-law somewhat, as the caresses
of the old gentleman, unshorn and perfumed with tobacco, might well do.
But she remembered that her brother Southdown had mustachios, and
smoked cigars, and submitted to the Baronet with a tolerable grace.

"Pitt has got vat," said the Baronet, after this mark of affection.
"Does he read ee very long zermons, my dear? Hundredth Psalm, Evening
Hymn, hay Pitt? Go and get a glass of Malmsey and a cake for my Lady
Jane, Horrocks, you great big booby, and don't stand stearing there
like a fat pig.  I won't ask you to stop, my dear; you'll find it too
stoopid, and so should I too along a Pitt.  I'm an old man now, and
like my own ways, and my pipe and backgammon of a night."

"I can play at backgammon, sir," said Lady Jane, laughing.  "I used to
play with Papa and Miss Crawley, didn't I, Mr. Crawley?"

"Lady Jane can play, sir, at the game to which you state that you are
so partial," Pitt said haughtily.

"But she wawn't stop for all that.  Naw, naw, goo back to Mudbury and
give Mrs. Rincer a benefit; or drive down to the Rectory and ask Buty
for a dinner.  He'll be charmed to see you, you know; he's so much
obliged to you for gettin' the old woman's money.  Ha, ha! Some of it
will do to patch up the Hall when I'm gone."

"I perceive, sir," said Pitt with a heightened voice, "that your people
will cut down the timber."

"Yees, yees, very fine weather, and seasonable for the time of year,"
Sir Pitt answered, who had suddenly grown deaf.  "But I'm gittin' old,
Pitt, now.  Law bless you, you ain't far from fifty yourself.  But he
wears well, my pretty Lady Jane, don't he? It's all godliness,
sobriety, and a moral life.  Look at me, I'm not very fur from
fowr-score--he, he"; and he laughed, and took snuff, and leered at her
and pinched her hand.

Pitt once more brought the conversation back to the timber, but the
Baronet was deaf again in an instant.

"I'm gittin' very old, and have been cruel bad this year with the
lumbago.  I shan't be here now for long; but I'm glad ee've come,
daughter-in-law.  I like your face, Lady Jane:  it's got none of the
damned high-boned Binkie look in it; and I'll give ee something pretty,
my dear, to go to Court in." And he shuffled across the room to a
cupboard, from which he took a little old case containing jewels of
some value.  "Take that," said he, "my dear; it belonged to my mother,
and afterwards to the first Lady Binkie. Pretty pearls--never gave 'em
the ironmonger's daughter. No, no.  Take 'em and put 'em up quick,"
said he, thrusting the case into his daughter's hand, and clapping the
door of the cabinet to, as Horrocks entered with a salver and
refreshments.

"What have you a been and given Pitt's wife?" said the individual in
ribbons, when Pitt and Lady Jane had taken leave of the old gentleman.
It was Miss Horrocks, the butler's daughter--the cause of the scandal
throughout the county--the lady who reigned now almost supreme at
Queen's Crawley.

The rise and progress of those Ribbons had been marked with dismay by
the county and family.  The Ribbons opened an account at the Mudbury
Branch Savings Bank; the Ribbons drove to church, monopolising the
pony-chaise, which was for the use of the servants at the Hall.  The
domestics were dismissed at her pleasure. The Scotch gardener, who
still lingered on the premises, taking a pride in his walls and
hot-houses, and indeed making a pretty good livelihood by the garden,
which he farmed, and of which he sold the produce at Southampton, found
the Ribbons eating peaches on a sunshiny morning at the south-wall, and
had his ears boxed when he remonstrated about this attack on his
property.  He and his Scotch wife and his Scotch children, the only
respectable inhabitants of Queen's Crawley, were forced to migrate,
with their goods and their chattels, and left the stately comfortable
gardens to go to waste, and the flower-beds to run to seed.  Poor Lady
Crawley's rose-garden became the dreariest wilderness.  Only two or
three domestics shuddered in the bleak old servants' hall.  The stables
and offices were vacant, and shut up, and half ruined.  Sir Pitt lived
in private, and boozed nightly with Horrocks, his butler or house-steward
(as he now began to be called), and the abandoned Ribbons. The
times were very much changed since the period when she drove to Mudbury
in the spring-cart and called the small tradesmen "Sir." It may have
been shame, or it may have been dislike of his neighbours, but the old
Cynic of Queen's Crawley hardly issued from his park-gates at all now.
He quarrelled with his agents and screwed his tenants by letter.  His
days were passed in conducting his own correspondence; the lawyers and
farm-bailiffs who had to do business with him could not reach him but
through the Ribbons, who received them at the door of the housekeeper's
room, which commanded the back entrance by which they were admitted;
and so the Baronet's daily perplexities increased, and his
embarrassments multiplied round him.

The horror of Pitt Crawley may be imagined, as these reports of his
father's dotage reached the most exemplary and correct of gentlemen. He
trembled daily lest he should hear that the Ribbons was proclaimed his
second legal mother-in-law.  After that first and last visit, his
father's name was never mentioned in Pitt's polite and genteel
establishment.  It was the skeleton in his house, and all the family
walked by it in terror and silence.  The Countess Southdown kept on
dropping per coach at the lodge-gate the most exciting tracts, tracts
which ought to frighten the hair off your head.  Mrs. Bute at the
parsonage nightly looked out to see if the sky was red over the elms
behind which the Hall stood, and the mansion was on fire.  Sir G.
Wapshot and Sir H.  Fuddlestone, old friends of the house, wouldn't sit
on the bench with Sir Pitt at Quarter Sessions, and cut him dead in the
High Street of Southampton, where the reprobate stood offering his
dirty old hands to them.  Nothing had any effect upon him; he put his
hands into his pockets, and burst out laughing, as he scrambled into
his carriage and four; he used to burst out laughing at Lady
Southdown's tracts; and he laughed at his sons, and at the world, and
at the Ribbons when she was angry, which was not seldom.

Miss Horrocks was installed as housekeeper at Queen's Crawley, and
ruled all the domestics there with great majesty and rigour.  All the
servants were instructed to address her as "Mum," or "Madam"--and
there was one little maid, on her promotion, who persisted in calling
her "My Lady," without any rebuke on the part of the housekeeper.
"There has been better ladies, and there has been worser, Hester," was
Miss Horrocks' reply to this compliment of her inferior; so she ruled,
having supreme power over all except her father, whom, however, she
treated with considerable haughtiness, warning him not to be too
familiar in his behaviour to one "as was to be a Baronet's lady."
Indeed, she rehearsed that exalted part in life with great satisfaction
to herself, and to the amusement of old Sir Pitt, who chuckled at her
airs and graces, and would laugh by the hour together at her
assumptions of dignity and imitations of genteel life. He swore it was
as good as a play to see her in the character of a fine dame, and he
made her put on one of the first Lady Crawley's court-dresses, swearing
(entirely to Miss Horrocks' own concurrence) that the dress became her
prodigiously, and threatening to drive her off that very instant to
Court in a coach-and-four.  She had the ransacking of the wardrobes of
the two defunct ladies, and cut and hacked their posthumous finery so
as to suit her own tastes and figure.  And she would have liked to take
possession of their jewels and trinkets too; but the old Baronet had
locked them away in his private cabinet; nor could she coax or wheedle
him out of the keys.  And it is a fact, that some time after she left
Queen's Crawley a copy-book belonging to this lady was discovered,
which showed that she had taken great pains in private to learn the art
of writing in general, and especially of writing her own name as Lady
Crawley, Lady Betsy Horrocks, Lady Elizabeth Crawley, &c.

Though the good people of the Parsonage never went to the Hall and
shunned the horrid old dotard its owner, yet they kept a strict
knowledge of all that happened there, and were looking out every day
for the catastrophe for which Miss Horrocks was also eager.  But Fate
intervened enviously and prevented her from receiving the reward due to
such immaculate love and virtue.

One day the Baronet surprised "her ladyship," as he jocularly called
her, seated at that old and tuneless piano in the drawing-room, which
had scarcely been touched since Becky Sharp played quadrilles upon
it--seated at the piano with the utmost gravity and squalling to the
best of her power in imitation of the music which she had sometimes
heard.  The little kitchen-maid on her promotion was standing at her
mistress's side, quite delighted during the operation, and wagging her
head up and down and crying, "Lor, Mum, 'tis bittiful"--just like a
genteel sycophant in a real drawing-room.

This incident made the old Baronet roar with laughter, as usual.  He
narrated the circumstance a dozen times to Horrocks in the course of
the evening, and greatly to the discomfiture of Miss Horrocks.  He
thrummed on the table as if it had been a musical instrument, and
squalled in imitation of her manner of singing.  He vowed that such a
beautiful voice ought to be cultivated and declared she ought to have
singing-masters, in which proposals she saw nothing ridiculous. He was
in great spirits that night, and drank with his friend and butler an
extraordinary quantity of rum-and-water--at a very late hour the
faithful friend and domestic conducted his master to his bedroom.

Half an hour afterwards there was a great hurry and bustle in the
house.  Lights went about from window to window in the lonely desolate
old Hall, whereof but two or three rooms were ordinarily occupied by
its owner. Presently, a boy on a pony went galloping off to Mudbury, to
the Doctor's house there.  And in another hour (by which fact we
ascertain how carefully the excellent Mrs. Bute Crawley had always kept
up an understanding with the great house), that lady in her clogs and
calash, the Reverend Bute Crawley, and James Crawley, her son, had
walked over from the Rectory through the park, and had entered the
mansion by the open hall-door.

They passed through the hall and the small oak parlour, on the table of
which stood the three tumblers and the empty rum-bottle which had
served for Sir Pitt's carouse, and through that apartment into Sir
Pitt's study, where they found Miss Horrocks, of the guilty ribbons,
with a wild air, trying at the presses and escritoires with a bunch of
keys.  She dropped them with a scream of terror, as little Mrs. Bute's
eyes flashed out at her from under her black calash.

"Look at that, James and Mr. Crawley," cried Mrs. Bute, pointing at the
scared figure of the black-eyed, guilty wench.

"He gave 'em me; he gave 'em me!" she cried.

"Gave them you, you abandoned creature!" screamed Mrs. Bute.  "Bear
witness, Mr. Crawley, we found this good-for-nothing woman in the act
of stealing your brother's property; and she will be hanged, as I
always said she would."

Betsy Horrocks, quite daunted, flung herself down on her knees,
bursting into tears.  But those who know a really good woman are aware
that she is not in a hurry to forgive, and that the humiliation of an
enemy is a triumph to her soul.

"Ring the bell, James," Mrs. Bute said.  "Go on ringing it till the
people come." The three or four domestics resident in the deserted old
house came presently at that jangling and continued summons.

"Put that woman in the strong-room," she said.  "We caught her in the
act of robbing Sir Pitt.  Mr. Crawley, you'll make out her
committal--and, Beddoes, you'll drive her over in the spring cart, in
the morning, to Southampton Gaol."

"My dear," interposed the Magistrate and Rector--"she's only--"

"Are there no handcuffs?" Mrs. Bute continued, stamping in her clogs.
"There used to be handcuffs. Where's the creature's abominable father?"

"He DID give 'em me," still cried poor Betsy; "didn't he, Hester? You
saw Sir Pitt--you know you did--give 'em me, ever so long ago--the day
after Mudbury fair:  not that I want 'em.  Take 'em if you think they
ain't mine." And here the unhappy wretch pulled out from her pocket a
large pair of paste shoe-buckles which had excited her admiration, and
which she had just appropriated out of one of the bookcases in the
study, where they had lain.

"Law, Betsy, how could you go for to tell such a wicked story!" said
Hester, the little kitchen-maid late on her promotion--"and to Madame
Crawley, so good and kind, and his Rev'rince (with a curtsey), and you
may search all MY boxes, Mum, I'm sure, and here's my keys as I'm an
honest girl, though of pore parents and workhouse bred--and if you find
so much as a beggarly bit of lace or a silk stocking out of all the
gownds as YOU'VE had the picking of, may I never go to church agin."

"Give up your keys, you hardened hussy," hissed out the virtuous little
lady in the calash.

"And here's a candle, Mum, and if you please, Mum, I can show you her
room, Mum, and the press in the housekeeper's room, Mum, where she
keeps heaps and heaps of things, Mum," cried out the eager little
Hester with a profusion of curtseys.

"Hold your tongue, if you please.  I know the room which the creature
occupies perfectly well.  Mrs. Brown, have the goodness to come with
me, and Beddoes don't you lose sight of that woman," said Mrs. Bute,
seizing the candle.  "Mr. Crawley, you had better go upstairs and see
that they are not murdering your unfortunate brother"--and the calash,
escorted by Mrs. Brown, walked away to the apartment which, as she said
truly, she knew perfectly well.

Bute went upstairs and found the Doctor from Mudbury, with the
frightened Horrocks over his master in a chair.  They were trying to
bleed Sir Pitt Crawley.

With the early morning an express was sent off to Mr. Pitt Crawley by
the Rector's lady, who assumed the command of everything, and had
watched the old Baronet through the night.  He had been brought back to
a sort of life; he could not speak, but seemed to recognize people.
Mrs. Bute kept resolutely by his bedside.  She never seemed to want to
sleep, that little woman, and did not close her fiery black eyes once,
though the Doctor snored in the arm-chair. Horrocks made some wild
efforts to assert his authority and assist his master; but Mrs. Bute
called him a tipsy old wretch and bade him never show his face again in
that house, or he should be transported like his abominable daughter.

Terrified by her manner, he slunk down to the oak parlour where Mr.
James was, who, having tried the bottle standing there and found no
liquor in it, ordered Mr. Horrocks to get another bottle of rum, which
he fetched, with clean glasses, and to which the Rector and his son sat
down, ordering Horrocks to put down the keys at that instant and never
to show his face again.

Cowed by this behaviour, Horrocks gave up the keys, and he and his
daughter slunk off silently through the night and gave up possession of
the house of Queen's Crawley.



In Which Becky Is Recognized by the Family

The heir of Crawley arrived at home, in due time, after this
catastrophe, and henceforth may be said to have reigned in Queen's
Crawley.  For though the old Baronet survived many months, he never
recovered the use of his intellect or his speech completely, and the
government of the estate devolved upon his elder son.  In a strange
condition Pitt found it.  Sir Pitt was always buying and mortgaging; he
had twenty men of business, and quarrels with each; quarrels with all
his tenants, and lawsuits with them; lawsuits with the lawyers;
lawsuits with the Mining and Dock Companies in which he was proprietor;
and with every person with whom he had business.  To unravel these
difficulties and to set the estate clear was a task worthy of the
orderly and persevering diplomatist of Pumpernickel, and he set himself
to work with prodigious assiduity.  His whole family, of course, was
transported to Queen's Crawley, whither Lady Southdown, of course, came
too; and she set about converting the parish under the Rector's nose,
and brought down her irregular clergy to the dismay of the angry Mrs
Bute.  Sir Pitt had concluded no bargain for the sale of the living of
Queen's Crawley; when it should drop, her Ladyship proposed to take the
patronage into her own hands and present a young protege to the
Rectory, on which subject the diplomatic Pitt said nothing.

Mrs. Bute's intentions with regard to Miss Betsy Horrocks were not
carried into effect, and she paid no visit to Southampton Gaol.  She
and her father left the Hall when the latter took possession of the
Crawley Arms in the village, of which he had got a lease from Sir Pitt.
The ex-butler had obtained a small freehold there likewise, which gave
him a vote for the borough.  The Rector had another of these votes, and
these and four others formed the representative body which returned the
two members for Queen's Crawley.

There was a show of courtesy kept up between the Rectory and the Hall
ladies, between the younger ones at least, for Mrs. Bute and Lady
Southdown never could meet without battles, and gradually ceased seeing
each other.  Her Ladyship kept her room when the ladies from the
Rectory visited their cousins at the Hall.  Perhaps Mr. Pitt was not
very much displeased at these occasional absences of his mamma-in-law.
He believed the Binkie family to be the greatest and wisest and most
interesting in the world, and her Ladyship and his aunt had long held
ascendency over him; but sometimes he felt that she commanded him too
much.  To be considered young was complimentary, doubtless, but at
six-and-forty to be treated as a boy was sometimes mortifying.  Lady
Jane yielded up everything, however, to her mother.  She was only fond
of her children in private, and it was lucky for her that Lady
Southdown's multifarious business, her conferences with ministers, and
her correspondence with all the missionaries of Africa, Asia, and
Australasia, &c., occupied the venerable Countess a great deal, so that
she had but little time to devote to her granddaughter, the little
Matilda, and her grandson, Master Pitt Crawley. The latter was a feeble
child, and it was only by prodigious quantities of calomel that Lady
Southdown was able to keep him in life at all.

As for Sir Pitt he retired into those very apartments where Lady
Crawley had been previously extinguished, and here was tended by Miss
Hester, the girl upon her promotion, with constant care and assiduity.
What love, what fidelity, what constancy is there equal to that of a
nurse with good wages? They smooth pillows; and make arrowroot; they
get up at nights; they bear complaints and querulousness; they see the
sun shining out of doors and don't want to go abroad; they sleep on
arm-chairs and eat their meals in solitude; they pass long long
evenings doing nothing, watching the embers, and the patient's drink
simmering in the jug; they read the weekly paper the whole week
through; and Law's Serious Call or the Whole Duty of Man suffices them
for literature for the year--and we quarrel with them because, when
their relations come to see them once a week, a little gin is smuggled
in in their linen basket. Ladies, what man's love is there that would
stand a year's nursing of the object of his affection? Whereas a nurse
will stand by you for ten pounds a quarter, and we think her too highly
paid.  At least Mr. Crawley grumbled a good deal about paying half as
much to Miss Hester for her constant attendance upon the Baronet his
father.

Of sunshiny days this old gentleman was taken out in a chair on the
terrace--the very chair which Miss Crawley had had at Brighton, and
which had been transported thence with a number of Lady Southdown's
effects to Queen's Crawley.  Lady Jane always walked by the old man,
and was an evident favourite with him.  He used to nod many times to
her and smile when she came in, and utter inarticulate deprecatory
moans when she was going away.  When the door shut upon her he would
cry and sob--whereupon Hester's face and manner, which was always
exceedingly bland and gentle while her lady was present, would change
at once, and she would make faces at him and clench her fist and scream
out "Hold your tongue, you stoopid old fool," and twirl away his chair
from the fire which he loved to look at--at which he would cry more.
For this was all that was left after more than seventy years of
cunning, and struggling, and drinking, and scheming, and sin and
selfishness--a whimpering old idiot put in and out of bed and cleaned
and fed like a baby.

At last a day came when the nurse's occupation was over.  Early one
morning, as Pitt Crawley was at his steward's and bailiff's books in
the study, a knock came to the door, and Hester presented herself,
dropping a curtsey, and said,

"If you please, Sir Pitt, Sir Pitt died this morning, Sir Pitt.  I was
a-making of his toast, Sir Pitt, for his gruel, Sir Pitt, which he took
every morning regular at six, Sir Pitt, and--I thought I heard a
moan-like, Sir Pitt--and--and--and--" She dropped another curtsey.

What was it that made Pitt's pale face flush quite red? Was it because
he was Sir Pitt at last, with a seat in Parliament, and perhaps future
honours in prospect? "I'll clear the estate now with the ready money,"
he thought and rapidly calculated its incumbrances and the improvements
which he would make.  He would not use his aunt's money previously lest
Sir Pitt should recover and his outlay be in vain.

All the blinds were pulled down at the Hall and Rectory: the church
bell was tolled, and the chancel hung in black; and Bute Crawley didn't
go to a coursing meeting, but went and dined quietly at Fuddleston,
where they talked about his deceased brother and young Sir Pitt over
their port.  Miss Betsy, who was by this time married to a saddler at
Mudbury, cried a good deal. The family surgeon rode over and paid his
respectful compliments, and inquiries for the health of their
ladyships.  The death was talked about at Mudbury and at the Crawley
Arms, the landlord whereof had become reconciled with the Rector of
late, who was occasionally known to step into the parlour and taste Mr.
Horrocks' mild beer.

"Shall I write to your brother--or will you?" asked Lady Jane of her
husband, Sir Pitt.

"I will write, of course," Sir Pitt said, "and invite him to the
funeral:  it will be but becoming."

"And--and--Mrs. Rawdon," said Lady Jane timidly.

"Jane!" said Lady Southdown, "how can you think of such a thing?"

"Mrs. Rawdon must of course be asked," said Sir Pitt, resolutely.

"Not whilst I am in the house!" said Lady Southdown.

"Your Ladyship will be pleased to recollect that I am the head of this
family," Sir Pitt replied.  "If you please, Lady Jane, you will write a
letter to Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, requesting her presence upon this
melancholy occasion."

"Jane, I forbid you to put pen to paper!" cried the Countess.

"I believe I am the head of this family," Sir Pitt repeated; "and
however much I may regret any circumstance which may lead to your
Ladyship quitting this house, must, if you please, continue to govern
it as I see fit."

Lady Southdown rose up as magnificent as Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth
and ordered that horses might be put to her carriage.  If her son and
daughter turned her out of their house, she would hide her sorrows
somewhere in loneliness and pray for their conversion to better
thoughts.

"We don't turn you out of our house, Mamma," said the timid Lady Jane
imploringly.

"You invite such company to it as no Christian lady should meet, and I
will have my horses to-morrow morning."

"Have the goodness to write, Jane, under my dictation," said Sir Pitt,
rising and throwing himself into an attitude of command, like the
portrait of a Gentleman in the Exhibition, "and begin.  'Queen's
Crawley, September 14, 1822.--My dear brother--'"

Hearing these decisive and terrible words, Lady Macbeth, who had been
waiting for a sign of weakness or vacillation on the part of her
son-in-law, rose and, with a scared look, left the library. Lady Jane
looked up to her husband as if she would fain follow and soothe her
mamma, but Pitt forbade his wife to move.

"She won't go away," he said.  "She has let her house at Brighton and
has spent her last half-year's dividends. A Countess living at an inn
is a ruined woman.  I have been waiting long for an opportunity--to
take this--this decisive step, my love; for, as you must perceive, it
is impossible that there should be two chiefs in a family: and now, if
you please, we will resume the dictation.  'My dear brother, the
melancholy intelligence which it is my duty to convey to my family must
have been long anticipated by,'" &c.

In a word, Pitt having come to his kingdom, and having by good luck, or
desert rather, as he considered, assumed almost all the fortune which
his other relatives had expected, was determined to treat his family
kindly and respectably and make a house of Queen's Crawley once more.
It pleased him to think that he should be its chief.  He proposed to
use the vast influence that his commanding talents and position must
speedily acquire for him in the county to get his brother placed and
his cousins decently provided for, and perhaps had a little sting of
repentance as he thought that he was the proprietor of all that they
had hoped for.  In the course of three or four days' reign his bearing
was changed and his plans quite fixed:  he determined to rule justly
and honestly, to depose Lady Southdown, and to be on the friendliest
possible terms with all the relations of his blood.

So he dictated a letter to his brother Rawdon--a solemn and elaborate
letter, containing the profoundest observations, couched in the longest
words, and filling with wonder the simple little secretary, who wrote
under her husband's order.  "What an orator this will be," thought she,
"when he enters the House of Commons" (on which point, and on the
tyranny of Lady Southdown, Pitt had sometimes dropped hints to his wife
in bed); "how wise and good, and what a genius my husband is!  I
fancied him a little cold; but how good, and what a genius!"

The fact is, Pitt Crawley had got every word of the letter by heart and
had studied it, with diplomatic secrecy, deeply and perfectly, long
before he thought fit to communicate it to his astonished wife.

This letter, with a huge black border and seal, was accordingly
despatched by Sir Pitt Crawley to his brother the Colonel, in London.
Rawdon Crawley was but half-pleased at the receipt of it. "What's the
use of going down to that stupid place?" thought he.  "I can't stand
being alone with Pitt after dinner, and horses there and back will cost
us twenty pound."

He carried the letter, as he did all difficulties, to Becky, upstairs
in her bedroom--with her chocolate, which he always made and took to
her of a morning.

He put the tray with the breakfast and the letter on the dressing-table,
before which Becky sat combing her yellow hair.  She took up the
black-edged missive, and having read it, she jumped up from the chair,
crying "Hurray!" and waving the note round her head.

"Hurray?" said Rawdon, wondering at the little figure capering about in
a streaming flannel dressing-gown, with tawny locks dishevelled. "He's
not left us anything, Becky.  I had my share when I came of age."

"You'll never be of age, you silly old man," Becky replied.  "Run out
now to Madam Brunoy's, for I must have some mourning:  and get a crape
on your hat, and a black waistcoat--I don't think you've got one; order
it to be brought home to-morrow, so that we may be able to start on
Thursday."

"You don't mean to go?" Rawdon interposed.

"Of course I mean to go.  I mean that Lady Jane shall present me at
Court next year.  I mean that your brother shall give you a seat in
Parliament, you stupid old creature.  I mean that Lord Steyne shall
have your vote and his, my dear, old silly man; and that you shall be
an Irish Secretary, or a West Indian Governor:  or a Treasurer, or a
Consul, or some such thing."

"Posting will cost a dooce of a lot of money," grumbled Rawdon.

"We might take Southdown's carriage, which ought to be present at the
funeral, as he is a relation of the family:  but, no--I intend that we
shall go by the coach. They'll like it better.  It seems more humble--"

"Rawdy goes, of course?" the Colonel asked.

"No such thing; why pay an extra place? He's too big to travel bodkin
between you and me.  Let him stay here in the nursery, and Briggs can
make him a black frock.  Go you, and do as I bid you. And you had best
tell Sparks, your man, that old Sir Pitt is dead and that you will come
in for something considerable when the affairs are arranged.  He'll
tell this to Raggles, who has been pressing for money, and it will
console poor Raggles." And so Becky began sipping her chocolate.

When the faithful Lord Steyne arrived in the evening, he found Becky
and her companion, who was no other than our friend Briggs, busy
cutting, ripping, snipping, and tearing all sorts of black stuffs
available for the melancholy occasion.

"Miss Briggs and I are plunged in grief and despondency for the death
of our Papa," Rebecca said.  "Sir Pitt Crawley is dead, my lord.  We
have been tearing our hair all the morning, and now we are tearing up
our old clothes."

"Oh, Rebecca, how can you--" was all that Briggs could say as she
turned up her eyes.

"Oh, Rebecca, how can you--" echoed my Lord.  "So that old scoundrel's
dead, is he? He might have been a Peer if he had played his cards
better.  Mr. Pitt had very nearly made him; but he ratted always at the
wrong time.  What an old Silenus it was!"

"I might have been Silenus's widow," said Rebecca. "Don't you remember,
Miss Briggs, how you peeped in at the door and saw old Sir Pitt on his
knees to me?" Miss Briggs, our old friend, blushed very much at this
reminiscence, and was glad when Lord Steyne ordered her to go
downstairs and make him a cup of tea.

Briggs was the house-dog whom Rebecca had provided as guardian of her
innocence and reputation.  Miss Crawley had left her a little annuity.
She would have been content to remain in the Crawley family with Lady
Jane, who was good to her and to everybody; but Lady Southdown
dismissed poor Briggs as quickly as decency permitted; and Mr. Pitt
(who thought himself much injured by the uncalled-for generosity of his
deceased relative towards a lady who had only been Miss Crawley's
faithful retainer a score of years) made no objection to that exercise
of the dowager's authority. Bowls and Firkin likewise received their
legacies and their dismissals, and married and set up a lodging-house,
according to the custom of their kind.

Briggs tried to live with her relations in the country, but found that
attempt was vain after the better society to which she had been
accustomed.  Briggs's friends, small tradesmen, in a country town,
quarrelled over Miss Briggs's forty pounds a year as eagerly and more
openly than Miss Crawley's kinsfolk had for that lady's inheritance.
Briggs's brother, a radical hatter and grocer, called his sister a
purse-proud aristocrat, because she would not advance a part of her
capital to stock his shop; and she would have done so most likely, but
that their sister, a dissenting shoemaker's lady, at variance with the
hatter and grocer, who went to another chapel, showed how their brother
was on the verge of bankruptcy, and took possession of Briggs for a
while.  The dissenting shoemaker wanted Miss Briggs to send his son to
college and make a gentleman of him. Between them the two families got
a great portion of her private savings out of her, and finally she fled
to London followed by the anathemas of both, and determined to seek for
servitude again as infinitely less onerous than liberty.  And
advertising in the papers that a "Gentlewoman of agreeable manners, and
accustomed to the best society, was anxious to," &c., she took up her
residence with Mr. Bowls in Half Moon Street, and waited the result of
the advertisement.

So it was that she fell in with Rebecca.  Mrs. Rawdon's dashing little
carriage and ponies was whirling down the street one day, just as Miss
Briggs, fatigued, had reached Mr. Bowls's door, after a weary walk to
the Times Office in the City to insert her advertisement for the sixth
time.  Rebecca was driving, and at once recognized the gentlewoman with
agreeable manners, and being a perfectly good-humoured woman, as we
have seen, and having a regard for Briggs, she pulled up the ponies at
the doorsteps, gave the reins to the groom, and jumping out, had hold
of both Briggs's hands, before she of the agreeable manners had
recovered from the shock of seeing an old friend.

Briggs cried, and Becky laughed a great deal and kissed the gentlewoman
as soon as they got into the passage; and thence into Mrs. Bowls's
front parlour, with the red moreen curtains, and the round
looking-glass, with the chained eagle above, gazing upon the back of
the ticket in the window which announced "Apartments to Let."

Briggs told all her history amidst those perfectly uncalled-for sobs
and ejaculations of wonder with which women of her soft nature salute
an old acquaintance, or regard a rencontre in the street; for though
people meet other people every day, yet some there are who insist upon
discovering miracles; and women, even though they have disliked each
other, begin to cry when they meet, deploring and remembering the time
when they last quarrelled.  So, in a word, Briggs told all her history,
and Becky gave a narrative of her own life, with her usual artlessness
and candour.

Mrs. Bowls, late Firkin, came and listened grimly in the passage to the
hysterical sniffling and giggling which went on in the front parlour.
Becky had never been a favourite of hers.  Since the establishment of
the married couple in London they had frequented their former friends
of the house of Raggles, and did not like the latter's account of the
Colonel's menage.  "I wouldn't trust him, Ragg, my boy," Bowls
remarked; and his wife, when Mrs. Rawdon issued from the parlour, only
saluted the lady with a very sour curtsey; and her fingers were like so
many sausages, cold and lifeless, when she held them out in deference
to Mrs. Rawdon, who persisted in shaking hands with the retired lady's
maid.  She whirled away into Piccadilly, nodding with the sweetest of
smiles towards Miss Briggs, who hung nodding at the window close under
the advertisement-card, and at the next moment was in the park with a
half-dozen of dandies cantering after her carriage.

When she found how her friend was situated, and how having a snug
legacy from Miss Crawley, salary was no object to our gentlewoman,
Becky instantly formed some benevolent little domestic plans concerning
her.  This was just such a companion as would suit her establishment,
and she invited Briggs to come to dinner with her that very evening,
when she should see Becky's dear little darling Rawdon.

Mrs. Bowls cautioned her lodger against venturing into the lion's den,
"wherein you will rue it, Miss B., mark my words, and as sure as my
name is Bowls." And Briggs promised to be very cautious.  The upshot of
which caution was that she went to live with Mrs. Rawdon the next week,
and had lent Rawdon Crawley six hundred pounds upon annuity before six
months were over.



In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors

So the mourning being ready, and Sir Pitt Crawley warned of their
arrival, Colonel Crawley and his wife took a couple of places in the
same old High-flyer coach by which Rebecca had travelled in the defunct
Baronet's company, on her first journey into the world some nine years
before.  How well she remembered the Inn Yard, and the ostler to whom
she refused money, and the insinuating Cambridge lad who wrapped her in
his coat on the journey!  Rawdon took his place outside, and would have
liked to drive, but his grief forbade him. He sat by the coachman and
talked about horses and the road the whole way; and who kept the inns,
and who horsed the coach by which he had travelled so many a time, when
he and Pitt were boys going to Eton.  At Mudbury a carriage and a pair
of horses received them, with a coachman in black.  "It's the old drag,
Rawdon," Rebecca said as they got in.  "The worms have eaten the cloth
a good deal--there's the stain which Sir Pitt--ha!  I see Dawson the
Ironmonger has his shutters up--which Sir Pitt made such a noise about.
It was a bottle of cherry brandy he broke which we went to fetch for
your aunt from Southampton.  How time flies, to be sure!  That can't be
Polly Talboys, that bouncing girl standing by her mother at the cottage
there.  I remember her a mangy little urchin picking weeds in the
garden."

"Fine gal," said Rawdon, returning the salute which the cottage gave
him, by two fingers applied to his crape hatband.  Becky bowed and
saluted, and recognized people here and there graciously.  These
recognitions were inexpressibly pleasant to her.  It seemed as if she
was not an imposter any more, and was coming to the home of her
ancestors.  Rawdon was rather abashed and cast down, on the other hand.
What recollections of boyhood and innocence might have been flitting
across his brain? What pangs of dim remorse and doubt and shame?

"Your sisters must be young women now," Rebecca said, thinking of those
girls for the first time perhaps since she had left them.

"Don't know, I'm shaw," replied the Colonel.  "Hullo! here's old Mother
Lock.  How-dy-do, Mrs. Lock? Remember me, don't you? Master Rawdon,
hey? Dammy how those old women last; she was a hundred when I was a
boy."

They were going through the lodge-gates kept by old Mrs. Lock, whose
hand Rebecca insisted upon shaking, as she flung open the creaking old
iron gate, and the carriage passed between the two moss-grown pillars
surmounted by the dove and serpent.

"The governor has cut into the timber," Rawdon said, looking about, and
then was silent--so was Becky.  Both of them were rather agitated, and
thinking of old times. He about Eton, and his mother, whom he
remembered, a frigid demure woman, and a sister who died, of whom he
had been passionately fond; and how he used to thrash Pitt; and about
little Rawdy at home.  And Rebecca thought about her own youth and the
dark secrets of those early tainted days; and of her entrance into life
by yonder gates; and of Miss Pinkerton, and Joe, and Amelia.

The gravel walk and terrace had been scraped quite clean.  A grand
painted hatchment was already over the great entrance, and two very
solemn and tall personages in black flung open each a leaf of the door
as the carriage pulled up at the familiar steps.  Rawdon turned red,
and Becky somewhat pale, as they passed through the old hall, arm in
arm.  She pinched her husband's arm as they entered the oak parlour,
where Sir Pitt and his wife were ready to receive them. Sir Pitt in
black, Lady Jane in black, and my Lady Southdown with a large black
head-piece of bugles and feathers, which waved on her Ladyship's head
like an undertaker's tray.

Sir Pitt had judged correctly, that she would not quit the premises.
She contented herself by preserving a solemn and stony silence, when in
company of Pitt and his rebellious wife, and by frightening the
children in the nursery by the ghastly gloom of her demeanour. Only a
very faint bending of the head-dress and plumes welcomed Rawdon and his
wife, as those prodigals returned to their family.

To say the truth, they were not affected very much one way or other by
this coolness.  Her Ladyship was a person only of secondary
consideration in their minds just then--they were intent upon the
reception which the reigning brother and sister would afford them.

Pitt, with rather a heightened colour, went up and shook his brother by
the hand, and saluted Rebecca with a hand-shake and a very low bow.
But Lady Jane took both the hands of her sister-in-law and kissed her
affectionately. The embrace somehow brought tears into the eyes of the
little adventuress--which ornaments, as we know, she wore very seldom.
The artless mark of kindness and confidence touched and pleased her;
and Rawdon, encouraged by this demonstration on his sister's part,
twirled up his mustachios and took leave to salute Lady Jane with a
kiss, which caused her Ladyship to blush exceedingly.

"Dev'lish nice little woman, Lady Jane," was his verdict, when he and
his wife were together again.  "Pitt's got fat, too, and is doing the
thing handsomely." "He can afford it," said Rebecca and agreed in her
husband's farther opinion "that the mother-in-law was a tremendous old
Guy--and that the sisters were rather well-looking young women."

They, too, had been summoned from school to attend the funeral
ceremonies.  It seemed Sir Pitt Crawley, for the dignity of the house
and family, had thought right to have about the place as many persons
in black as could possibly be assembled.  All the men and maids of the
house, the old women of the Alms House, whom the elder Sir Pitt had
cheated out of a great portion of their due, the parish clerk's family,
and the special retainers of both Hall and Rectory were habited in
sable; added to these, the undertaker's men, at least a score, with
crapes and hatbands, and who made goodly show when the great burying
show took place--but these are mute personages in our drama; and having
nothing to do or say, need occupy a very little space here.

With regard to her sisters-in-law Rebecca did not attempt to forget her
former position of Governess towards them, but recalled it frankly and
kindly, and asked them about their studies with great gravity, and told
them that she had thought of them many and many a day, and longed to
know of their welfare.  In fact you would have supposed that ever since
she had left them she had not ceased to keep them uppermost in her
thoughts and to take the tenderest interest in their welfare.  So
supposed Lady Crawley herself and her young sisters.

"She's hardly changed since eight years," said Miss Rosalind to Miss
Violet, as they were preparing for dinner.

"Those red-haired women look wonderfully well," replied the other.

"Hers is much darker than it was; I think she must dye it," Miss
Rosalind added.  "She is stouter, too, and altogether improved,"
continued Miss Rosalind, who was disposed to be very fat.

"At least she gives herself no airs and remembers that she was our
Governess once," Miss Violet said, intimating that it befitted all
governesses to keep their proper place, and forgetting altogether that
she was granddaughter not only of Sir Walpole Crawley, but of Mr.
Dawson of Mudbury, and so had a coal-scuttle in her scutcheon. There
are other very well-meaning people whom one meets every day in Vanity
Fair who are surely equally oblivious.

"It can't be true what the girls at the Rectory said, that her mother
was an opera-dancer--"

"A person can't help their birth," Rosalind replied with great
liberality.  "And I agree with our brother, that as she is in the
family, of course we are bound to notice her. I am sure Aunt Bute need
not talk; she wants to marry Kate to young Hooper, the wine-merchant,
and absolutely asked him to come to the Rectory for orders."

"I wonder whether Lady Southdown will go away, she looked very glum
upon Mrs. Rawdon," the other said.

"I wish she would.  I won't read the Washerwoman of Finchley Common,"
vowed Violet; and so saying, and avoiding a passage at the end of which
a certain coffin was placed with a couple of watchers, and lights
perpetually burning in the closed room, these young women came down to
the family dinner, for which the bell rang as usual.

But before this, Lady Jane conducted Rebecca to the apartments prepared
for her, which, with the rest of the house, had assumed a very much
improved appearance of order and comfort during Pitt's regency, and
here beholding that Mrs. Rawdon's modest little trunks had arrived, and
were placed in the bedroom and dressing-room adjoining, helped her to
take off her neat black bonnet and cloak, and asked her sister-in-law
in what more she could be useful.

"What I should like best," said Rebecca, "would be to go to the nursery
and see your dear little children." On which the two ladies looked very
kindly at each other and went to that apartment hand in hand.

Becky admired little Matilda, who was not quite four years old, as the
most charming little love in the world; and the boy, a little fellow of
two years--pale, heavy-eyed, and large-headed--she pronounced to be a
perfect prodigy in point of size, intelligence, and beauty.

"I wish Mamma would not insist on giving him so much medicine," Lady
Jane said with a sigh.  "I often think we should all be better without
it." And then Lady Jane and her new-found friend had one of those
confidential medical conversations about the children, which all
mothers, and most women, as I am given to understand, delight in. Fifty
years ago, and when the present writer, being an interesting little
boy, was ordered out of the room with the ladies after dinner, I
remember quite well that their talk was chiefly about their ailments;
and putting this question directly to two or three since, I have always
got from them the acknowledgement that times are not changed.  Let my
fair readers remark for themselves this very evening when they quit the
dessert-table and assemble to celebrate the drawing-room mysteries.
Well--in half an hour Becky and Lady Jane were close and intimate
friends--and in the course of the evening her Ladyship informed Sir
Pitt that she thought her new sister-in-law was a kind, frank,
unaffected, and affectionate young woman.

And so having easily won the daughter's good-will, the indefatigable
little woman bent herself to conciliate the august Lady Southdown. As
soon as she found her Ladyship alone, Rebecca attacked her on the
nursery question at once and said that her own little boy was saved,
actually saved, by calomel, freely administered, when all the
physicians in Paris had given the dear child up.  And then she
mentioned how often she had heard of Lady Southdown from that excellent
man the Reverend Lawrence Grills, Minister of the chapel in May Fair,
which she frequented; and how her views were very much changed by
circumstances and misfortunes; and how she hoped that a past life spent
in worldliness and error might not incapacitate her from more serious
thought for the future. She described how in former days she had been
indebted to Mr. Crawley for religious instruction, touched upon the
Washerwoman of Finchley Common, which she had read with the greatest
profit, and asked about Lady Emily, its gifted author, now Lady Emily
Hornblower, at Cape Town, where her husband had strong hopes of
becoming Bishop of Caffraria.

But she crowned all, and confirmed herself in Lady Southdown's favour,
by feeling very much agitated and unwell after the funeral and
requesting her Ladyship's medical advice, which the Dowager not only
gave, but, wrapped up in a bed-gown and looking more like Lady Macbeth
than ever, came privately in the night to Becky's room with a parcel of
favourite tracts, and a medicine of her own composition, which she
insisted that Mrs. Rawdon should take.

Becky first accepted the tracts and began to examine them with great
interest, engaging the Dowager in a conversation concerning them and
the welfare of her soul, by which means she hoped that her body might
escape medication.  But after the religious topics were exhausted, Lady
Macbeth would not quit Becky's chamber until her cup of night-drink was
emptied too; and poor Mrs. Rawdon was compelled actually to assume a
look of gratitude, and to swallow the medicine under the unyielding old
Dowager's nose, who left her victim finally with a benediction.

It did not much comfort Mrs. Rawdon; her countenance was very queer
when Rawdon came in and heard what had happened; and his explosions
of laughter were as loud as usual, when Becky, with a fun which she
could not disguise, even though it was at her own expense, described
the occurrence and how she had been victimized by Lady Southdown.  Lord
Steyne, and her son in London, had many a laugh over the story when
Rawdon and his wife returned to their quarters in May Fair.  Becky
acted the whole scene for them.  She put on a night-cap and gown.  She
preached a great sermon in the true serious manner; she lectured on the
virtue of the medicine which she pretended to administer, with a
gravity of imitation so perfect that you would have thought it was the
Countess's own Roman nose through which she snuffled. "Give us Lady
Southdown and the black dose," was a constant cry amongst the folks in
Becky's little drawing-room in May Fair.  And for the first time in her
life the Dowager Countess of Southdown was made amusing.

Sir Pitt remembered the testimonies of respect and veneration which
Rebecca had paid personally to himself in early days, and was tolerably
well disposed towards her.  The marriage, ill-advised as it was, had
improved Rawdon very much--that was clear from the Colonel's altered
habits and demeanour--and had it not been a lucky union as regarded
Pitt himself? The cunning diplomatist smiled inwardly as he owned that
he owed his fortune to it, and acknowledged that he at least ought not
to cry out against it.  His satisfaction was not removed by Rebecca's
own statements, behaviour, and conversation.

She doubled the deference which before had charmed him, calling out his
conversational powers in such a manner as quite to surprise Pitt
himself, who, always inclined to respect his own talents, admired them
the more when Rebecca pointed them out to him.  With her sister-in-law,
Rebecca was satisfactorily able to prove that it was Mrs. Bute Crawley
who brought about the marriage which she afterwards so calumniated;
that it was Mrs. Bute's avarice--who hoped to gain all Miss Crawley's
fortune and deprive Rawdon of his aunt's favour--which caused and
invented all the wicked reports against Rebecca.  "She succeeded in
making us poor," Rebecca said with an air of angelical patience; "but
how can I be angry with a woman who has given me one of the best
husbands in the world? And has not her own avarice been sufficiently
punished by the ruin of her own hopes and the loss of the property by
which she set so much store? Poor!" she cried.  "Dear Lady Jane, what
care we for poverty? I am used to it from childhood, and I am often
thankful that Miss Crawley's money has gone to restore the splendour of
the noble old family of which I am so proud to be a member.  I am sure
Sir Pitt will make a much better use of it than Rawdon would."

All these speeches were reported to Sir Pitt by the most faithful of
wives, and increased the favourable impression which Rebecca made; so
much so that when, on the third day after the funeral, the family party
were at dinner, Sir Pitt Crawley, carving fowls at the head of the
table, actually said to Mrs. Rawdon, "Ahem!  Rebecca, may I give you a
wing?"--a speech which made the little woman's eyes sparkle with
pleasure.

While Rebecca was prosecuting the above schemes and hopes, and Pitt
Crawley arranging the funeral ceremonial and other matters connected
with his future progress and dignity, and Lady Jane busy with her
nursery, as far as her mother would let her, and the sun rising and
setting, and the clock-tower bell of the Hall ringing to dinner and to
prayers as usual, the body of the late owner of Queen's Crawley lay in
the apartment which he had occupied, watched unceasingly by the
professional attendants who were engaged for that rite.  A woman or
two, and three or four undertaker's men, the best whom Southampton
could furnish, dressed in black, and of a proper stealthy and tragical
demeanour, had charge of the remains which they watched turn about,
having the housekeeper's room for their place of rendezvous when off
duty, where they played at cards in privacy and drank their beer.

The members of the family and servants of the house kept away from the
gloomy spot, where the bones of the descendant of an ancient line of
knights and gentlemen lay, awaiting their final consignment to the
family crypt. No regrets attended them, save those of the poor woman
who had hoped to be Sir Pitt's wife and widow and who had fled in
disgrace from the Hall over which she had so nearly been a ruler.
Beyond her and a favourite old pointer he had, and between whom and
himself an attachment subsisted during the period of his imbecility,
the old man had not a single friend to mourn him, having indeed, during
the whole course of his life, never taken the least pains to secure
one.  Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have
an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any
Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would
have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were
consoled.  And so Sir Pitt was forgotten--like the kindest and best of
us--only a few weeks sooner.

Those who will may follow his remains to the grave, whither they were
borne on the appointed day, in the most becoming manner, the family in
black coaches, with their handkerchiefs up to their noses, ready for
the tears which did not come; the undertaker and his gentlemen in deep
tribulation; the select tenantry mourning out of compliment to the new
landlord; the neighbouring gentry's carriages at three miles an hour,
empty, and in profound affliction; the parson speaking out the formula
about "our dear brother departed." As long as we have a man's body, we
play our Vanities upon it, surrounding it with humbug and ceremonies,
laying it in state, and packing it up in gilt nails and velvet; and we
finish our duty by placing over it a stone, written all over with lies.
Bute's curate, a smart young fellow from Oxford, and Sir Pitt Crawley
composed between them an appropriate Latin epitaph for the late
lamented Baronet, and the former preached a classical sermon, exhorting
the survivors not to give way to grief and informing them in the most
respectful terms that they also would be one day called upon to pass
that gloomy and mysterious portal which had just closed upon the
remains of their lamented brother. Then the tenantry mounted on
horseback again, or stayed and refreshed themselves at the Crawley
Arms.  Then, after a lunch in the servants' hall at Queen's Crawley,
the gentry's carriages wheeled off to their different destinations:
then the undertaker's men, taking the ropes, palls, velvets, ostrich
feathers, and other mortuary properties, clambered up on the roof of
the hearse and rode off to Southampton.  Their faces relapsed into a
natural expression as the horses, clearing the lodge-gates, got into a
brisker trot on the open road; and squads of them might have been seen,
speckling with black the public-house entrances, with pewter-pots
flashing in the sunshine.  Sir Pitt's invalid chair was wheeled away
into a tool-house in the garden; the old pointer used to howl sometimes
at first, but these were the only accents of grief which were heard in
the Hall of which Sir Pitt Crawley, Baronet, had been master for some
threescore years.

As the birds were pretty plentiful, and partridge shooting is as it
were the duty of an English gentleman of statesmanlike propensities,
Sir Pitt Crawley, the first shock of grief over, went out a little and
partook of that diversion in a white hat with crape round it. The sight
of those fields of stubble and turnips, now his own, gave him many
secret joys.  Sometimes, and with an exquisite humility, he took no
gun, but went out with a peaceful bamboo cane; Rawdon, his big brother,
and the keepers blazing away at his side.  Pitt's money and acres had a
great effect upon his brother.  The penniless Colonel became quite
obsequious and respectful to the head of his house, and despised the
milksop Pitt no longer.  Rawdon listened with sympathy to his senior's
prospects of planting and draining, gave his advice about the stables
and cattle, rode over to Mudbury to look at a mare, which he thought
would carry Lady Jane, and offered to break her, &c.:  the rebellious
dragoon was quite humbled and subdued, and became a most creditable
younger brother.  He had constant bulletins from Miss Briggs in London
respecting little Rawdon, who was left behind there, who sent messages
of his own.  "I am very well," he wrote.  "I hope you are very well.  I
hope Mamma is very well.  The pony is very well.  Grey takes me to ride
in the park. I can canter.  I met the little boy who rode before.  He
cried when he cantered.  I do not cry." Rawdon read these letters to
his brother and Lady Jane, who was delighted with them.  The Baronet
promised to take charge of the lad at school, and his kind-hearted wife
gave Rebecca a bank-note, begging her to buy a present with it for her
little nephew.

One day followed another, and the ladies of the house passed their life
in those calm pursuits and amusements which satisfy country ladies.
Bells rang to meals and to prayers.  The young ladies took exercise on
the pianoforte every morning after breakfast, Rebecca giving them the
benefit of her instruction.  Then they put on thick shoes and walked in
the park or shrubberies, or beyond the palings into the village,
descending upon the cottages, with Lady Southdown's medicine and tracts
for the sick people there.  Lady Southdown drove out in a pony-chaise,
when Rebecca would take her place by the Dowager's side and listen to
her solemn talk with the utmost interest.  She sang Handel and Haydn to
the family of evenings, and engaged in a large piece of worsted work,
as if she had been born to the business and as if this kind of life was
to continue with her until she should sink to the grave in a polite old
age, leaving regrets and a great quantity of consols behind her--as if
there were not cares and duns, schemes, shifts, and poverty waiting
outside the park gates, to pounce upon her when she issued into the
world again.

"It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife," Rebecca thought.
"I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.  I
could dawdle about in the nursery and count the apricots on the wall.
I could water plants in a green-house and pick off dead leaves from the
geraniums.  I could ask old women about their rheumatisms and order
half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor.  I shouldn't miss it much,
out of five thousand a year.  I could even drive out ten miles to dine
at a neighbour's, and dress in the fashions of the year before last. I
could go to church and keep awake in the great family pew, or go to
sleep behind the curtains, with my veil down, if I only had practice.
I could pay everybody, if I had but the money.  This is what the
conjurors here pride themselves upon doing.  They look down with pity
upon us miserable sinners who have none.  They think themselves
generous if they give our children a five-pound note, and us
contemptible if we are without one." And who knows but Rebecca was
right in her speculations--and that it was only a question of money and
fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman? If
you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than
his neighbour? A comfortable career of prosperity, if it does not make
people honest, at least keeps them so.  An alderman coming from a
turtle feast will not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton;
but put him to starve, and see if he will not purloin a loaf.  Becky
consoled herself by so balancing the chances and equalizing the
distribution of good and evil in the world.

The old haunts, the old fields and woods, the copses, ponds, and
gardens, the rooms of the old house where she had spent a couple of
years seven years ago, were all carefully revisited by her.  She had
been young there, or comparatively so, for she forgot the time when she
ever WAS young--but she remembered her thoughts and feelings seven
years back and contrasted them with those which she had at present, now
that she had seen the world, and lived with great people, and raised
herself far beyond her original humble station.

"I have passed beyond it, because I have brains," Becky thought, "and
almost all the rest of the world are fools. I could not go back and
consort with those people now, whom I used to meet in my father's
studio.  Lords come up to my door with stars and garters, instead of
poor artists with screws of tobacco in their pockets.  I have a
gentleman for my husband, and an Earl's daughter for my sister, in the
very house where I was little better than a servant a few years ago.
But am I much better to do now in the world than I was when I was the
poor painter's daughter and wheedled the grocer round the corner for
sugar and tea? Suppose I had married Francis who was so fond of me--I
couldn't have been much poorer than I am now.  Heigho!  I wish I could
exchange my position in society, and all my relations for a snug sum in
the Three Per Cent.  Consols"; for so it was that Becky felt the Vanity
of human affairs, and it was in those securities that she would have
liked to cast anchor.

It may, perhaps, have struck her that to have been honest and humble,
to have done her duty, and to have marched straightforward on her way,
would have brought her as near happiness as that path by which she was
striving to attain it.  But--just as the children at Queen's Crawley
went round the room where the body of their father lay--if ever Becky
had these thoughts, she was accustomed to walk round them and not look
in.  She eluded them and despised them--or at least she was committed
to the other path from which retreat was now impossible.  And for my
part I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral
senses--the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never
wakened at all.  We grieve at being found out and at the idea of shame
or punishment, but the mere sense of wrong makes very few people
unhappy in Vanity Fair.

So Rebecca, during her stay at Queen's Crawley, made as many friends of
the Mammon of Unrighteousness as she could possibly bring under
control.  Lady Jane and her husband bade her farewell with the warmest
demonstrations of good-will.  They looked forward with pleasure to the
time when, the family house in Gaunt Street being repaired and
beautified, they were to meet again in London.  Lady Southdown made her
up a packet of medicine and sent a letter by her to the Rev. Lawrence
Grills, exhorting that gentleman to save the brand who "honoured" the
letter from the burning.  Pitt accompanied them with four horses in the
carriage to Mudbury, having sent on their baggage in a cart previously,
accompanied with loads of game.

"How happy you will be to see your darling little boy again!" Lady
Crawley said, taking leave of her kinswoman.

"Oh so happy!" said Rebecca, throwing up the green eyes. She was
immensely happy to be free of the place, and yet loath to go. Queen's
Crawley was abominably stupid, and yet the air there was somehow purer
than that which she had been accustomed to breathe. Everybody had been
dull, but had been kind in their way.  "It is all the influence of a
long course of Three Per Cents," Becky said to herself, and was right
very likely.

However, the London lamps flashed joyfully as the stage rolled into
Piccadilly, and Briggs had made a beautiful fire in Curzon Street, and
little Rawdon was up to welcome back his papa and mamma.



Which Treats of the Osborne Family

Considerable time has elapsed since we have seen our respectable
friend, old Mr. Osborne of Russell Square.  He has not been the
happiest of mortals since last we met him. Events have occurred which
have not improved his temper, and in more instances than one he has
not been allowed to have his own way.  To be thwarted in this
reasonable desire was always very injurious to the old gentleman; and
resistance became doubly exasperating when gout, age, loneliness, and
the force of many disappointments combined to weigh him down.  His
stiff black hair began to grow quite white soon after his son's death;
his face grew redder; his hands trembled more and more as he poured out
his glass of port wine.  He led his clerks a dire life in the City:
his family at home were not much happier.  I doubt if Rebecca, whom we
have seen piously praying for Consols, would have exchanged her poverty
and the dare-devil excitement and chances of her life for Osborne's
money and the humdrum gloom which enveloped him.  He had proposed for
Miss Swartz, but had been rejected scornfully by the partisans of that
lady, who married her to a young sprig of Scotch nobility.  He was a
man to have married a woman out of low life and bullied her dreadfully
afterwards; but no person presented herself suitable to his taste, and,
instead, he tyrannized over his unmarried daughter, at home.  She had a
fine carriage and fine horses and sat at the head of a table loaded
with the grandest plate.  She had a cheque-book, a prize footman to
follow her when she walked, unlimited credit, and bows and compliments
from all the tradesmen, and all the appurtenances of an heiress; but
she spent a woeful time. The little charity-girls at the Foundling, the
sweeperess at the crossing, the poorest under-kitchen-maid in the
servants' hall, was happy compared to that unfortunate and now
middle-aged young lady.

Frederick Bullock, Esq., of the house of Bullock, Hulker, and Bullock,
had married Maria Osborne, not without a great deal of difficulty and
grumbling on Mr. Bullock's part. George being dead and cut out of his
father's will, Frederick insisted that the half of the old gentleman's
property should be settled upon his Maria, and indeed, for a long time,
refused, "to come to the scratch" (it was Mr. Frederick's own
expression) on any other terms.  Osborne said Fred had agreed to take
his daughter with twenty thousand, and he should bind himself to no
more.  "Fred might take it, and welcome, or leave it, and go and be
hanged." Fred, whose hopes had been raised when George had been
disinherited, thought himself infamously swindled by the old merchant,
and for some time made as if he would break off the match altogether.
Osborne withdrew his account from Bullock and Hulker's, went on 'Change
with a horsewhip which he swore he would lay across the back of a
certain scoundrel that should be nameless, and demeaned himself in his
usual violent manner.  Jane Osborne condoled with her sister Maria
during this family feud.  "I always told you, Maria, that it was your
money he loved and not you," she said, soothingly.

"He selected me and my money at any rate; he didn't choose you and
yours," replied Maria, tossing up her head.

The rapture was, however, only temporary.  Fred's father and senior
partners counselled him to take Maria, even with the twenty thousand
settled, half down, and half at the death of Mr. Osborne, with the
chances of the further division of the property.  So he "knuckled
down," again to use his own phrase, and sent old Hulker with peaceable
overtures to Osborne.  It was his father, he said, who would not hear
of the match, and had made the difficulties; he was most anxious to
keep the engagement.  The excuse was sulkily accepted by Mr. Osborne.
Hulker and Bullock were a high family of the City aristocracy, and
connected with the "nobs" at the West End. It was something for the old
man to be able to say, "My son, sir, of the house of Hulker, Bullock,
and Co., sir; my daughter's cousin, Lady Mary Mango, sir, daughter of
the Right Hon.  The Earl of Castlemouldy." In his imagination he saw
his house peopled by the "nobs." So he forgave young Bullock and
consented that the marriage should take place.

It was a grand affair--the bridegroom's relatives giving the breakfast,
their habitations being near St.  George's, Hanover Square, where the
business took place.  The "nobs of the West End" were invited, and many
of them signed the book.  Mr. Mango and Lady Mary Mango were there,
with the dear young Gwendoline and Guinever Mango as bridesmaids;
Colonel Bludyer of the Dragoon Guards (eldest son of the house of
Bludyer Brothers, Mincing Lane), another cousin of the bridegroom, and
the Honourable Mrs. Bludyer; the Honourable George Boulter, Lord
Levant's son, and his lady, Miss Mango that was; Lord Viscount
Castletoddy; Honourable James McMull and Mrs. McMull (formerly Miss
Swartz); and a host of fashionables, who have all married into Lombard
Street and done a great deal to ennoble Cornhill.

The young couple had a house near Berkeley Square and a small villa at
Roehampton, among the banking colony there.  Fred was considered to
have made rather a mesalliance by the ladies of his family, whose
grandfather had been in a Charity School, and who were allied through
the husbands with some of the best blood in England.  And Maria was
bound, by superior pride and great care in the composition of her
visiting-book, to make up for the defects of birth, and felt it her
duty to see her father and sister as little as possible.

That she should utterly break with the old man, who had still so many
scores of thousand pounds to give away, is absurd to suppose. Fred
Bullock would never allow her to do that.  But she was still young and
incapable of hiding her feelings; and by inviting her papa and sister
to her third-rate parties, and behaving very coldly to them when they
came, and by avoiding Russell Square, and indiscreetly begging her
father to quit that odious vulgar place, she did more harm than all
Frederick's diplomacy could repair, and perilled her chance of her
inheritance like a giddy heedless creature as she was.

"So Russell Square is not good enough for Mrs. Maria, hay?" said the
old gentleman, rattling up the carriage windows as he and his daughter
drove away one night from Mrs. Frederick Bullock's, after dinner.  "So
she invites her father and sister to a second day's dinner (if those
sides, or ontrys, as she calls 'em, weren't served yesterday, I'm
d--d), and to meet City folks and littery men, and keeps the Earls and
the Ladies, and the Honourables to herself. Honourables? Damn
Honourables.  I am a plain British merchant I am, and could buy the
beggarly hounds over and over.  Lords, indeed!--why, at one of her
swarreys I saw one of 'em speak to a dam fiddler--a fellar I despise.
And they won't come to Russell Square, won't they? Why, I'll lay my
life I've got a better glass of wine, and pay a better figure for it,
and can show a handsomer service of silver, and can lay a better dinner
on my mahogany, than ever they see on theirs--the cringing, sneaking,
stuck-up fools.  Drive on quick, James:  I want to get back to Russell
Square--ha, ha!" and he sank back into the corner with a furious laugh.
With such reflections on his own superior merit, it was the custom of
the old gentleman not unfrequently to console himself.

Jane Osborne could not but concur in these opinions respecting her
sister's conduct; and when Mrs. Frederick's first-born, Frederick
Augustus Howard Stanley Devereux Bullock, was born, old Osborne, who
was invited to the christening and to be godfather, contented himself
with sending the child a gold cup, with twenty guineas inside it for
the nurse.  "That's more than any of your Lords will give, I'LL
warrant," he said and refused to attend at the ceremony.

The splendour of the gift, however, caused great satisfaction to the
house of Bullock.  Maria thought that her father was very much pleased
with her, and Frederick augured the best for his little son and heir.

One can fancy the pangs with which Miss Osborne in her solitude in
Russell Square read the Morning Post, where her sister's name occurred
every now and then, in the articles headed "Fashionable Reunions," and
where she had an opportunity of reading a description of Mrs. F.
Bullock's costume, when presented at the drawing room by Lady Frederica
Bullock.  Jane's own life, as we have said, admitted of no such
grandeur.  It was an awful existence. She had to get up of black
winter's mornings to make breakfast for her scowling old father, who
would have turned the whole house out of doors if his tea had not been
ready at half-past eight.  She remained silent opposite to him,
listening to the urn hissing, and sitting in tremor while the parent
read his paper and consumed his accustomed portion of muffins and tea.
At half-past nine he rose and went to the City, and she was almost free
till dinner-time, to make visitations in the kitchen and to scold the
servants; to drive abroad and descend upon the tradesmen, who were
prodigiously respectful; to leave her cards and her papa's at the great
glum respectable houses of their City friends; or to sit alone in the
large drawing-room, expecting visitors; and working at a huge piece of
worsted by the fire, on the sofa, hard by the great Iphigenia clock,
which ticked and tolled with mournful loudness in the dreary room.  The
great glass over the mantelpiece, faced by the other great console
glass at the opposite end of the room, increased and multiplied between
them the brown Holland bag in which the chandelier hung, until you saw
these brown Holland bags fading away in endless perspectives, and this
apartment of Miss Osborne's seemed the centre of a system of
drawing-rooms. When she removed the cordovan leather from the grand
piano and ventured to play a few notes on it, it sounded with a
mournful sadness, startling the dismal echoes of the house.  George's
picture was gone, and laid upstairs in a lumber-room in the garret; and
though there was a consciousness of him, and father and daughter often
instinctively knew that they were thinking of him, no mention was ever
made of the brave and once darling son.

At five o'clock Mr. Osborne came back to his dinner, which he and his
daughter took in silence (seldom broken, except when he swore and was
savage, if the cooking was not to his liking), or which they shared
twice in a month with a party of dismal friends of Osborne's rank and
age.  Old Dr. Gulp and his lady from Bloomsbury Square; old Mr.
Frowser, the attorney, from Bedford Row, a very great man, and from his
business, hand-in-glove with the "nobs at the West End"; old Colonel
Livermore, of the Bombay Army, and Mrs. Livermore, from Upper Bedford
Place; old Sergeant Toffy and Mrs. Toffy; and sometimes old Sir Thomas
Coffin and Lady Coffin, from Bedford Square.  Sir Thomas was celebrated
as a hanging judge, and the particular tawny port was produced when he
dined with Mr. Osborne.

These people and their like gave the pompous Russell Square merchant
pompous dinners back again.  They had solemn rubbers of whist, when
they went upstairs after drinking, and their carriages were called at
half past ten. Many rich people, whom we poor devils are in the habit
of envying, lead contentedly an existence like that above described.
Jane Osborne scarcely ever met a man under sixty, and almost the only
bachelor who appeared in their society was Mr. Smirk, the celebrated
ladies' doctor.

I can't say that nothing had occurred to disturb the monotony of this
awful existence:  the fact is, there had been a secret in poor Jane's
life which had made her father more savage and morose than even nature,
pride, and over-feeding had made him.  This secret was connected with
Miss Wirt, who had a cousin an artist, Mr. Smee, very celebrated since
as a portrait-painter and R.A., but who once was glad enough to give
drawing lessons to ladies of fashion.  Mr. Smee has forgotten where
Russell Square is now, but he was glad enough to visit it in the year
1818, when Miss Osborne had instruction from him.

Smee (formerly a pupil of Sharpe of Frith Street, a dissolute,
irregular, and unsuccessful man, but a man with great knowledge of his
art) being the cousin of Miss Wirt, we say, and introduced by her to
Miss Osborne, whose hand and heart were still free after various
incomplete love affairs, felt a great attachment for this lady, and it
is believed inspired one in her bosom.  Miss Wirt was the confidante of
this intrigue.  I know not whether she used to leave the room where the
master and his pupil were painting, in order to give them an
opportunity for exchanging those vows and sentiments which cannot be
uttered advantageously in the presence of a third party; I know not
whether she hoped that should her cousin succeed in carrying off the
rich merchant's daughter, he would give Miss Wirt a portion of the
wealth which she had enabled him to win--all that is certain is that
Mr. Osborne got some hint of the transaction, came back from the City
abruptly, and entered the drawing-room with his bamboo cane; found the
painter, the pupil, and the companion all looking exceedingly pale
there; turned the former out of doors with menaces that he would break
every bone in his skin, and half an hour afterwards dismissed Miss Wirt
likewise, kicking her trunks down the stairs, trampling on her
bandboxes, and shaking his fist at her hackney coach as it bore her
away.

Jane Osborne kept her bedroom for many days.  She was not allowed to
have a companion afterwards.  Her father swore to her that she should
not have a shilling of his money if she made any match without his
concurrence; and as he wanted a woman to keep his house, he did not
choose that she should marry, so that she was obliged to give up all
projects with which Cupid had any share. During her papa's life, then,
she resigned herself to the manner of existence here described, and was
content to be an old maid.  Her sister, meanwhile, was having children
with finer names every year and the intercourse between the two grew
fainter continually.  "Jane and I do not move in the same sphere of
life," Mrs. Bullock said.  "I regard her as a sister, of course"--which
means--what does it mean when a lady says that she regards Jane as a
sister?

It has been described how the Misses Dobbin lived with their father at
a fine villa at Denmark Hill, where there were beautiful graperies and
peach-trees which delighted little Georgy Osborne. The Misses Dobbin,
who drove often to Brompton to see our dear Amelia, came sometimes to
Russell Square too, to pay a visit to their old acquaintance Miss
Osborne.  I believe it was in consequence of the commands of their
brother the Major in India (for whom their papa had a prodigious
respect), that they paid attention to Mrs. George; for the Major, the
godfather and guardian of Amelia's little boy, still hoped that the
child's grandfather might be induced to relent towards him and
acknowledge him for the sake of his son.  The Misses Dobbin kept Miss
Osborne acquainted with the state of Amelia's affairs; how she was
living with her father and mother; how poor they were; how they
wondered what men, and such men as their brother and dear Captain
Osborne, could find in such an insignificant little chit; how she was
still, as heretofore, a namby-pamby milk-and-water affected
creature--but how the boy was really the noblest little boy ever
seen--for the hearts of all women warm towards young children, and the
sourest spinster is kind to them.

One day, after great entreaties on the part of the Misses Dobbin,
Amelia allowed little George to go and pass a day with them at Denmark
Hill--a part of which day she spent herself in writing to the Major in
India.  She congratulated him on the happy news which his sisters had
just conveyed to her.  She prayed for his prosperity and that of the
bride he had chosen.  She thanked him for a thousand thousand kind
offices and proofs of steadfast friendship to her in her affliction.
She told him the last news about little Georgy, and how he was gone to
spend that very day with his sisters in the country.  She underlined
the letter a great deal, and she signed herself affectionately his
friend, Amelia Osborne.  She forgot to send any message of kindness to
Lady O'Dowd, as her wont was--and did not mention Glorvina by name, and
only in italics, as the Major's BRIDE, for whom she begged blessings.
But the news of the marriage removed the reserve which she had kept up
towards him.  She was glad to be able to own and feel how warmly and
gratefully she regarded him--and as for the idea of being jealous of
Glorvina (Glorvina, indeed!), Amelia would have scouted it, if an angel
from heaven had hinted it to her.  That night, when Georgy came back in
the pony-carriage in which he rejoiced, and in which he was driven by
Sir Wm. Dobbin's old coachman, he had round his neck a fine gold chain
and watch.  He said an old lady, not pretty, had given it him, who
cried and kissed him a great deal.  But he didn't like her.  He liked
grapes very much.  And he only liked his mamma.  Amelia shrank and
started; the timid soul felt a presentiment of terror when she heard
that the relations of the child's father had seen him.

Miss Osborne came back to give her father his dinner.  He had made a
good speculation in the City, and was rather in a good humour that day,
and chanced to remark the agitation under which she laboured. "What's
the matter, Miss Osborne?" he deigned to say.

The woman burst into tears.  "Oh, sir," she said, "I've seen little
George.  He is as beautiful as an angel--and so like him!" The old man
opposite to her did not say a word, but flushed up and began to tremble
in every limb.


In Which the Reader Has to Double the Cape

The astonished reader must be called upon to transport himself ten
thousand miles to the military station of Bundlegunge, in the Madras
division of our Indian empire, where our gallant old friends of the
--th regiment are quartered under the command of the brave Colonel, Sir
Michael O'Dowd.  Time has dealt kindly with that stout officer, as it
does ordinarily with men who have good stomachs and good tempers and
are not perplexed over much by fatigue of the brain. The Colonel plays
a good knife and fork at tiffin and resumes those weapons with great
success at dinner.  He smokes his hookah after both meals and puffs as
quietly while his wife scolds him as he did under the fire of the
French at Waterloo.  Age and heat have not diminished the activity or
the eloquence of the descendant of the Malonys and the Molloys.  Her
Ladyship, our old acquaintance, is as much at home at Madras as at
Brussels in the cantonment as under the tents.  On the march you saw
her at the head of the regiment seated on a royal elephant, a noble
sight. Mounted on that beast, she has been into action with tigers in
the jungle, she has been received by native princes, who have welcomed
her and Glorvina into the recesses of their zenanas and offered her
shawls and jewels which it went to her heart to refuse.  The sentries
of all arms salute her wherever she makes her appearance, and she
touches her hat gravely to their salutation.  Lady O'Dowd is one of the
greatest ladies in the Presidency of Madras--her quarrel with Lady
Smith, wife of Sir Minos Smith the puisne judge, is still remembered by
some at Madras, when the Colonel's lady snapped her fingers in the
Judge's lady's face and said SHE'D never walk behind ever a beggarly
civilian.  Even now, though it is five-and-twenty years ago, people
remember Lady O'Dowd performing a jig at Government House, where she
danced down two Aides-de-Camp, a Major of Madras cavalry, and two
gentlemen of the Civil Service; and, persuaded by Major Dobbin, C.B.,
second in command of the --th, to retire to the supper-room, lassata
nondum satiata recessit.

Peggy O'Dowd is indeed the same as ever, kind in act and thought;
impetuous in temper; eager to command; a tyrant over her Michael; a
dragon amongst all the ladies of the regiment; a mother to all the
young men, whom she tends in their sickness, defends in all their
scrapes, and with whom Lady Peggy is immensely popular.  But the
Subalterns' and Captains' ladies (the Major is unmarried) cabal against
her a good deal.  They say that Glorvina gives herself airs and that
Peggy herself is intolerably domineering.  She interfered with a
little congregation which Mrs. Kirk had got up and laughed the young
men away from her sermons, stating that a soldier's wife had no
business to be a parson--that Mrs. Kirk would be much better mending
her husband's clothes; and, if the regiment wanted sermons, that she
had the finest in the world, those of her uncle, the Dean. She abruptly
put a termination to a flirtation which Lieutenant Stubble of the
regiment had commenced with the Surgeon's wife, threatening to come
down upon Stubble for the money which he had borrowed from her (for the
young fellow was still of an extravagant turn) unless he broke off at
once and went to the Cape on sick leave.  On the other hand, she housed
and sheltered Mrs. Posky, who fled from her bungalow one night, pursued
by her infuriate husband, wielding his second brandy bottle, and
actually carried Posky through the delirium tremens and broke him of
the habit of drinking, which had grown upon that officer, as all evil
habits will grow upon men.  In a word, in adversity she was the best of
comforters, in good fortune the most troublesome of friends, having a
perfectly good opinion of herself always and an indomitable resolution
to have her own way.

Among other points, she had made up her mind that Glorvina should marry
our old friend Dobbin.  Mrs. O'Dowd knew the Major's expectations and
appreciated his good qualities and the high character which he enjoyed
in his profession.  Glorvina, a very handsome, fresh-coloured,
black-haired, blue-eyed young lady, who could ride a horse, or play a
sonata with any girl out of the County Cork, seemed to be the very
person destined to insure Dobbin's happiness--much more than that poor
good little weak-spur'ted Amelia, about whom he used to take on
so.--"Look at Glorvina enter a room," Mrs. O'Dowd would say, "and
compare her with that poor Mrs. Osborne, who couldn't say boo to a
goose.  She'd be worthy of you, Major--you're a quiet man yourself, and
want some one to talk for ye.  And though she does not come of such
good blood as the Malonys or Molloys, let me tell ye, she's of an
ancient family that any nobleman might be proud to marry into."

But before she had come to such a resolution and determined to
subjugate Major Dobbin by her endearments, it must be owned that
Glorvina had practised them a good deal elsewhere.  She had had a
season in Dublin, and who knows how many in Cork, Killarney, and
Mallow? She had flirted with all the marriageable officers whom the
depots of her country afforded, and all the bachelor squires who seemed
eligible.  She had been engaged to be married a half-score times in
Ireland, besides the clergyman at Bath who used her so ill. She had
flirted all the way to Madras with the Captain and chief mate of the
Ramchunder East Indiaman, and had a season at the Presidency with her
brother and Mrs. O'Dowd, who was staying there, while the Major of the
regiment was in command at the station. Everybody admired her there;
everybody danced with her; but no one proposed who was worth the
marrying--one or two exceedingly young subalterns sighed after her, and
a beardless civilian or two, but she rejected these as beneath her
pretensions--and other and younger virgins than Glorvina were married
before her.  There are women, and handsome women too, who have this
fortune in life.  They fall in love with the utmost generosity; they
ride and walk with half the Army-list, though they draw near to forty,
and yet the Misses O'Grady are the Misses O'Grady still:  Glorvina
persisted that but for Lady O'Dowd's unlucky quarrel with the Judge's
lady, she would have made a good match at Madras, where old Mr.
Chutney, who was at the head of the civil service (and who afterwards
married Miss Dolby, a young lady only thirteen years of age who had
just arrived from school in Europe), was just at the point of proposing
to her.

Well, although Lady O'Dowd and Glorvina quarrelled a great number of
times every day, and upon almost every conceivable subject--indeed, if
Mick O'Dowd had not possessed the temper of an angel two such women
constantly about his ears would have driven him out of his senses--yet
they agreed between themselves on this point, that Glorvina should
marry Major Dobbin, and were determined that the Major should have no
rest until the arrangement was brought about. Undismayed by forty or
fifty previous defeats, Glorvina laid siege to him.  She sang Irish
melodies at him unceasingly.  She asked him so frequently and
pathetically, Will ye come to the bower? that it is a wonder how any
man of feeling could have resisted the invitation.  She was never tired
of inquiring, if Sorrow had his young days faded, and was ready to
listen and weep like Desdemona at the stories of his dangers and his
campaigns.  It has been said that our honest and dear old friend used
to perform on the flute in private; Glorvina insisted upon having duets
with him, and Lady O'Dowd would rise and artlessly quit the room when
the young couple were so engaged. Glorvina forced the Major to ride
with her of mornings.  The whole cantonment saw them set out and
return.  She was constantly writing notes over to him at his house,
borrowing his books, and scoring with her great pencil-marks such
passages of sentiment or humour as awakened her sympathy.  She borrowed
his horses, his servants, his spoons, and palanquin--no wonder that
public rumour assigned her to him, and that the Major's sisters in
England should fancy they were about to have a sister-in-law.

Dobbin, who was thus vigorously besieged, was in the meanwhile in a
state of the most odious tranquillity.  He used to laugh when the young
fellows of the regiment joked him about Glorvina's manifest attentions
to him. "Bah!" said he, "she is only keeping her hand in--she
practises upon me as she does upon Mrs. Tozer's piano, because it's the
most handy instrument in the station.  I am much too battered and old
for such a fine young lady as Glorvina." And so he went on riding with
her, and copying music and verses into her albums, and playing at chess
with her very submissively; for it is with these simple amusements that
some officers in India are accustomed to while away their leisure
moments, while others of a less domestic turn hunt hogs, and shoot
snipes, or gamble and smoke cheroots, and betake themselves to
brandy-and-water.  As for Sir Michael O'Dowd, though his lady and her
sister both urged him to call upon the Major to explain himself and not
keep on torturing a poor innocent girl in that shameful way, the old
soldier refused point-blank to have anything to do with the conspiracy.
"Faith, the Major's big enough to choose for himself," Sir Michael
said; "he'll ask ye when he wants ye"; or else he would turn the matter
off jocularly, declaring that "Dobbin was too young to keep house, and
had written home to ask lave of his mamma." Nay, he went farther, and
in private communications with his Major would caution and rally him,
crying, "Mind your oi, Dob, my boy, them girls is bent on mischief--me
Lady has just got a box of gowns from Europe,  and there's a pink satin
for Glorvina, which will finish ye,  Dob, if it's in the power of woman
or satin to move ye."

But the truth is, neither beauty nor fashion could conquer him.  Our
honest friend had but one idea of a woman in his head, and that one did
not in the least resemble Miss Glorvina O'Dowd in pink satin.  A gentle
little woman in black, with large eyes and brown hair, seldom speaking,
save when spoken to, and then in a voice not the least resembling Miss
Glorvina's--a soft young mother tending an infant and beckoning the
Major up with a smile to look at him--a rosy-cheeked lass coming
singing into the room in Russell Square or hanging on George Osborne's
arm, happy and loving--there was but this image that filled our honest
Major's mind, by day and by night, and reigned over it always.  Very
likely Amelia was not like the portrait the Major had formed of her:
there was a figure in a book of fashions which his sisters had in
England, and with which William had made away privately, pasting it
into the lid of his desk, and fancying he saw some resemblance to Mrs.
Osborne in the print, whereas I have seen it, and can vouch that it is
but the picture of a high-waisted gown with an impossible doll's face
simpering over it--and, perhaps, Mr. Dobbin's sentimental Amelia was no
more like the real one than this absurd little print which he
cherished.  But what man in love, of us, is better informed?--or is he
much happier when he sees and owns his delusion? Dobbin was under this
spell.  He did not bother his friends and the public much about his
feelings, or indeed lose his natural rest or appetite on account of
them.  His head has grizzled since we saw him last, and a line or two
of silver may be seen in the soft brown hair likewise.  But his
feelings are not in the least changed or oldened, and his love remains
as fresh as a man's recollections of boyhood are.

We have said how the two Misses Dobbin and Amelia, the Major's
correspondents in Europe, wrote him letters from England, Mrs. Osborne
congratulating him with great candour and cordiality upon his
approaching nuptials with Miss O'Dowd. "Your sister has just kindly
visited me," Amelia wrote in her letter, "and informed me of an
INTERESTING EVENT, upon which I beg to offer my MOST SINCERE
CONGRATULATIONS. I hope the young lady to whom I hear you are to be
UNITED will in every respect prove worthy of one who is himself all
kindness and goodness.  The poor widow has only her prayers to offer
and her cordial cordial wishes for YOUR PROSPERITY!  Georgy sends his
love to HIS DEAR GODPAPA and hopes that you will not forget him. I tell
him that you are about to form OTHER TIES, with one who I am sure
merits ALL YOUR AFFECTION, but that, although such ties must of course
be the strongest and most sacred, and supersede ALL OTHERS, yet that I
am sure the widow and the child whom you have ever protected and loved
will always HAVE A CORNER IN YOUR HEART." The letter, which has been
before alluded to, went on in this strain, protesting throughout as to
the extreme satisfaction of the writer.

This letter, which arrived by the very same ship which brought out
Lady O'Dowd's box of millinery from London (and which you may be sure
Dobbin opened before any one of the other packets which the mail
brought him), put the receiver into such a state of mind that Glorvina,
and her pink satin, and everything belonging to her became perfectly
odious to him.  The Major cursed the talk of women, and the sex in
general.  Everything annoyed him that day--the parade was insufferably
hot and wearisome.  Good heavens! was a man of intellect to waste his
life, day after day, inspecting cross-belts and putting fools through
their manoeuvres? The senseless chatter of the young men at mess was
more than ever jarring. What cared he, a man on the high road to forty,
to know how many snipes Lieutenant Smith had shot, or what were the
performances of Ensign Brown's mare? The jokes about the table filled
him with shame.  He was too old to listen to the banter of the
assistant surgeon and the slang of the youngsters, at which old O'Dowd,
with his bald head and red face, laughed quite easily.  The old man had
listened to those jokes any time these thirty years--Dobbin himself had
been fifteen years hearing them.  And after the boisterous dulness of
the mess-table, the quarrels and scandal of the ladies of the regiment!
It was unbearable, shameful.  "O Amelia, Amelia," he thought, "you to
whom I have been so faithful--you reproach me!  It is because you
cannot feel for me that I drag on this wearisome life.  And you reward
me after years of devotion by giving me your blessing upon my marriage,
forsooth, with this flaunting Irish girl!" Sick and sorry felt poor
William; more than ever wretched and lonely.  He would like to have
done with life and its vanity altogether--so bootless and
unsatisfactory the struggle, so cheerless and dreary the prospect
seemed to him.  He lay all that night sleepless, and yearning to go
home.  Amelia's letter had fallen as a blank upon him.  No fidelity, no
constant truth and passion, could move her into warmth.  She would not
see that he loved her.  Tossing in his bed, he spoke out to her. "Good
God, Amelia!" he said, "don't you know that I only love you in the
world--you, who are a stone to me--you, whom I tended through months
and months of illness and grief, and who bade me farewell with a smile
on your face, and forgot me before the door shut between us!" The
native servants lying outside his verandas beheld with wonder the
Major, so cold and quiet ordinarily, at present so passionately moved
and cast down.  Would she have pitied him had she seen him? He read
over and over all the letters which he ever had from her--letters of
business relative to the little property which he had made her believe
her husband had left to her--brief notes of invitation--every scrap of
writing that she had ever sent to him--how cold, how kind, how
hopeless, how selfish they were!

Had there been some kind gentle soul near at hand who could read and
appreciate this silent generous heart, who knows but that the reign of
Amelia might have been over, and that friend William's love might have
flowed into a kinder channel? But there was only Glorvina of the jetty
ringlets with whom his intercourse was familiar, and this dashing young
woman was not bent upon loving the Major, but rather on making the
Major admire HER--a most vain and hopeless task, too, at least
considering the means that the poor girl possessed to carry it out.
She curled her hair and showed her shoulders at him, as much as to say,
did ye ever see such jet ringlets and such a complexion? She grinned at
him so that he might see that every tooth in her head was sound--and he
never heeded all these charms.  Very soon after the arrival of the box
of millinery, and perhaps indeed in honour of it, Lady O'Dowd and the
ladies of the King's Regiment gave a ball to the Company's Regiments
and the civilians at the station.  Glorvina sported the killing pink
frock, and the Major, who attended the party and walked very ruefully
up and down the rooms, never so much as perceived the pink garment.
Glorvina danced past him in a fury with all the young subalterns of the
station, and the Major was not in the least jealous of her performance,
or angry because Captain Bangles of the Cavalry handed her to supper.
It was not jealousy, or frocks, or shoulders that could move him, and
Glorvina had nothing more.

So these two were each exemplifying the Vanity of this life, and each
longing for what he or she could not get. Glorvina cried with rage at
the failure.  She had set her mind on the Major "more than on any of
the others," she owned, sobbing.  "He'll break my heart, he will,
Peggy," she would whimper to her sister-in-law when they were good
friends; "sure every one of me frocks must be taken in--it's such a
skeleton I'm growing." Fat or thin, laughing or melancholy, on
horseback or the music-stool, it was all the same to the Major.  And
the Colonel, puffing his pipe and listening to these complaints, would
suggest that Glory should have some black frocks out in the next box
from London, and told a mysterious story of a lady in Ireland who died
of grief for the loss of her husband before she got ere a one.

While the Major was going on in this tantalizing way, not proposing,
and declining to fall in love, there came another ship from Europe
bringing letters on board, and amongst them some more for the heartless
man.  These were home letters bearing an earlier postmark than that of
the former packets, and as Major Dobbin recognized among his the
handwriting of his sister, who always crossed and recrossed her letters
to her brother--gathered together all the possible bad news which she
could collect, abused him and read him lectures with sisterly
frankness, and always left him miserable for the day after "dearest
William" had achieved the perusal of one of her epistles--the truth
must be told that dearest William did not hurry himself to break the
seal of Miss Dobbin's letter, but waited for a particularly favourable
day and mood for doing so.  A fortnight before, moreover, he had
written to scold her for telling those absurd stories to Mrs. Osborne,
and had despatched a letter in reply to that lady, undeceiving her with
respect to the reports concerning him and assuring her that "he had no
sort of present intention of altering his condition."

Two or three nights after the arrival of the second package of letters,
the Major had passed the evening pretty cheerfully at Lady O'Dowd's
house, where Glorvina thought that he listened with rather more
attention than usual to the Meeting of the Wathers, the Minsthrel Boy,
and one or two other specimens of song with which she favoured him (the
truth is, he was no more listening to Glorvina than to the howling of
the jackals in the moonlight outside, and the delusion was hers as
usual), and having played his game at chess with her (cribbage with the
surgeon was Lady O'Dowd's favourite evening pastime), Major Dobbin took
leave of the Colonel's family at his usual hour and retired to his own
house.

There on his table, his sister's letter lay reproaching him.  He took
it up, ashamed rather of his negligence regarding it, and prepared
himself for a disagreeable hour's communing with that crabbed-handed
absent relative. . . . It may have been an hour after the Major's
departure from the Colonel's house--Sir Michael was sleeping the sleep
of the just; Glorvina had arranged her black ringlets in the
innumerable little bits of paper, in which it was her habit to confine
them; Lady O'Dowd, too, had gone to her bed in the nuptial chamber, on
the ground-floor, and had tucked her musquito curtains round her fair
form, when the guard at the gates of the Commanding-Officer's compound
beheld Major Dobbin, in the moonlight, rushing towards the house with a
swift step and a very agitated countenance, and he passed the sentinel
and went up to the windows of the Colonel's bedchamber.

"O'Dowd--Colonel!" said Dobbin and kept up a great shouting.

"Heavens, Meejor!" said Glorvina of the curl-papers, putting out her
head too, from her window.

"What is it, Dob, me boy?" said the Colonel, expecting there was a fire
in the station, or that the route had come from headquarters.

"I--I must have leave of absence.  I must go to England--on the most
urgent private affairs," Dobbin said.

"Good heavens, what has happened!" thought Glorvina, trembling with all
the papillotes.

"I want to be off--now--to-night," Dobbin continued; and the Colonel
getting up, came out to parley with him.

In the postscript of Miss Dobbin's cross-letter, the Major had just
come upon a paragraph, to the following effect:--"I drove yesterday to
see your old ACQUAINTANCE, Mrs. Osborne.  The wretched place they live
at, since they were bankrupts, you know--Mr. S., to judge from a BRASS
PLATE on the door of his hut (it is little better) is a coal-merchant.
The little boy, your godson, is certainly a fine child, though forward,
and inclined to be saucy and self-willed. But we have taken notice of
him as you wish it, and have introduced him to his aunt, Miss O., who
was rather pleased with him.  Perhaps his grandpapa, not the bankrupt
one, who is almost doting, but Mr. Osborne, of Russell Square, may be
induced to relent towards the child of your friend, HIS ERRING AND
SELF-WILLED SON.  And Amelia will not be ill-disposed to give him up.
The widow is CONSOLED, and is about to marry a reverend gentleman, the
Rev. Mr. Binny, one of the curates of Brompton.  A poor match.  But
Mrs. O. is getting old, and I saw a great deal of grey in her hair--she
was in very good spirits:  and your little godson overate himself at
our house. Mamma sends her love with that of your affectionate, Ann
Dobbin."



A Round-about Chapter between London and Hampshire

Our old friends the Crawleys' family house, in Great Gaunt Street,
still bore over its front the hatchment which had been placed there as
a token of mourning for Sir Pitt Crawley's demise, yet this heraldic
emblem was in itself a very splendid and gaudy piece of furniture, and
all the rest of the mansion became more brilliant than it had ever been
during the late baronet's reign.  The black outer-coating of the bricks
was removed, and they appeared with a cheerful, blushing face streaked
with white: the old bronze lions of the knocker were gilt handsomely,
the railings painted, and the dismallest house in Great Gaunt Street
became the smartest in the whole quarter, before the green leaves in
Hampshire had replaced those yellowing ones which were on the trees in
Queen's Crawley Avenue when old Sir Pitt Crawley passed under them for
the last time.

A little woman, with a carriage to correspond, was perpetually seen
about this mansion; an elderly spinster, accompanied by a little boy,
also might be remarked coming thither daily.  It was Miss Briggs and
little Rawdon, whose business it was to see to the inward renovation of
Sir Pitt's house, to superintend the female band engaged in stitching
the blinds and hangings, to poke and rummage in the drawers and
cupboards crammed with the dirty relics and congregated trumperies of a
couple of generations of Lady Crawleys, and to take inventories of the
china, the glass, and other properties in the closets and store-rooms.

Mrs. Rawdon Crawley was general-in-chief over these arrangements, with
full orders from Sir Pitt to sell, barter, confiscate, or purchase
furniture, and she enjoyed herself not a little in an occupation which
gave full scope to her taste and ingenuity.  The renovation of the
house was determined upon when Sir Pitt came to town in November to see
his lawyers, and when he passed nearly a week in Curzon Street, under
the roof of his affectionate brother and sister.

He had put up at an hotel at first, but, Becky, as soon as she heard of
the Baronet's arrival, went off alone to greet him, and returned in an
hour to Curzon Street with Sir Pitt in the carriage by her side.  It
was impossible sometimes to resist this artless little creature's
hospitalities, so kindly were they pressed, so frankly and amiably
offered.  Becky seized Pitt's hand in a transport of gratitude when he
agreed to come.  "Thank you," she said, squeezing it and looking into
the Baronet's eyes, who blushed a good deal; "how happy this will make
Rawdon!" She bustled up to Pitt's bedroom, leading on the servants, who
were carrying his trunks thither.  She came in herself laughing, with a
coal-scuttle out of her own room.

A fire was blazing already in Sir Pitt's apartment (it was Miss
Briggs's room, by the way, who was sent upstairs to sleep with the
maid).  "I knew I should bring you," she said with pleasure beaming in
her glance.  Indeed, she was really sincerely happy at having him for a
guest.

Becky made Rawdon dine out once or twice on business, while Pitt stayed
with them, and the Baronet passed the happy evening alone with her and
Briggs.  She went downstairs to the kitchen and actually cooked little
dishes for him.  "Isn't it a good salmi?" she said; "I made it for you.
I can make you better dishes than that, and will when you come to see
me."

"Everything you do, you do well," said the Baronet gallantly.  "The
salmi is excellent indeed."

"A poor man's wife," Rebecca replied gaily, "must make herself useful,
you know"; on which her brother-in-law vowed that "she was fit to be
the wife of an Emperor, and that to be skilful in domestic duties was
surely one of the most charming of woman's qualities." And Sir Pitt
thought, with something like mortification, of Lady Jane at home, and
of a certain pie which she had insisted on making, and serving to him
at dinner--a most abominable pie.

Besides the salmi, which was made of Lord Steyne's pheasants from his
lordship's cottage of Stillbrook, Becky gave her brother-in-law a
bottle of white wine, some that Rawdon had brought with him from
France, and had picked up for nothing, the little story-teller said;
whereas the liquor was, in truth, some White Hermitage from the Marquis
of Steyne's famous cellars, which brought fire into the Baronet's
pallid cheeks and a glow into his feeble frame.

Then when he had drunk up the bottle of petit vin blanc, she gave him
her hand, and took him up to the drawing-room, and made him snug on the
sofa by the fire, and let him talk as she listened with the tenderest
kindly interest, sitting by him, and hemming a shirt for her dear
little boy.  Whenever Mrs. Rawdon wished to be particularly humble and
virtuous, this little shirt used to come out of her work-box.  It had
got to be too small for Rawdon long before it was finished.

Well, Rebecca listened to Pitt, she talked to him, she sang to him, she
coaxed him, and cuddled him, so that he found himself more and more
glad every day to get back from the lawyer's at Gray's Inn, to the
blazing fire in Curzon Street--a gladness in which the men of law
likewise participated, for Pitt's harangues were of the longest--and so
that when he went away he felt quite a pang at departing. How pretty
she looked kissing her hand to him from the carriage and waving her
handkerchief when he had taken his place in the mail! She put the
handkerchief to her eyes once.  He pulled his sealskin cap over his, as
the coach drove away, and, sinking back, he thought to himself how she
respected him and how he deserved it, and how Rawdon was a foolish dull
fellow who didn't half appreciate his wife; and how mum and stupid his
own wife was compared to that brilliant little Becky.  Becky had hinted
every one of these things herself, perhaps, but so delicately and
gently that you hardly knew when or where.  And, before they parted, it
was agreed that the house in London should be redecorated for the next
season, and that the brothers' families should meet again in the
country at Christmas.

"I wish you could have got a little money out of him," Rawdon said to
his wife moodily when the Baronet was gone.  "I should like to give
something to old Raggles, hanged if I shouldn't.  It ain't right, you
know, that the old fellow should be kept out of all his money.  It may
be inconvenient, and he might let to somebody else besides us, you
know."

"Tell him," said Becky, "that as soon as Sir Pitt's affairs are
settled, everybody will be paid, and give him a little something on
account.  Here's a cheque that Pitt left for the boy," and she took
from her bag and gave her husband a paper which his brother had handed
over to her, on behalf of the little son and heir of the younger branch
of the Crawleys.

The truth is, she had tried personally the ground on which her husband
expressed a wish that she should venture--tried it ever so delicately,
and found it unsafe. Even at a hint about embarrassments, Sir Pitt
Crawley was off and alarmed.  And he began a long speech, explaining
how straitened he himself was in money matters; how the tenants would
not pay; how his father's affairs, and the expenses attendant upon the
demise of the old gentleman, had involved him; how he wanted to pay off
incumbrances; and how the bankers and agents were overdrawn; and Pitt
Crawley ended by making a compromise with his sister-in-law and giving
her a very small sum for the benefit of her little boy.

Pitt knew how poor his brother and his brother's family must be.  It
could not have escaped the notice of such a cool and experienced old
diplomatist that Rawdon's family had nothing to live upon, and that
houses and carriages are not to be kept for nothing.  He knew very well
that he was the proprietor or appropriator of the money, which,
according to all proper calculation, ought to have fallen to his
younger brother, and he had, we may be sure, some secret pangs of
remorse within him, which warned him that he ought to perform some act
of justice, or, let us say, compensation, towards these disappointed
relations.  A just, decent man, not without brains, who said his
prayers, and knew his catechism, and did his duty outwardly through
life, he could not be otherwise than aware that something was due to
his brother at his hands, and that morally he was Rawdon's debtor.

But, as one reads in the columns of the Times newspaper every now and
then, queer announcements from the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
acknowledging the receipt of 50 pounds from A. B., or 10 pounds from
W. T., as conscience-money, on account of taxes due by the said A. B.
or W. T., which payments the penitents beg the Right Honourable
gentleman to acknowledge through the medium of the public press--so is
the Chancellor no doubt, and the reader likewise, always perfectly sure
that the above-named A. B.  and W. T. are only paying a very small
instalment of what they really owe, and that the man who sends up a
twenty-pound note has very likely hundreds or thousands more for which
he ought to account.  Such, at least, are my feelings, when I see
A. B. or W. T.'s insufficient acts of repentance.  And I have no doubt
that Pitt Crawley's contrition, or kindness if you will, towards his
younger brother, by whom he had so much profited, was only a very small
dividend upon the capital sum in which he was indebted to Rawdon. Not
everybody is willing to pay even so much.  To part with money is a
sacrifice beyond almost all men endowed with a sense of order.  There
is scarcely any man alive who does not think himself meritorious for
giving his neighbour five pounds.  Thriftless gives, not from a
beneficent pleasure in giving, but from a lazy delight in spending. He
would not deny himself one enjoyment; not his opera-stall, not his
horse, not his dinner, not even the pleasure of giving Lazarus the five
pounds.  Thrifty, who is good, wise, just, and owes no man a penny,
turns from a beggar, haggles with a hackney-coachman, or denies a poor
relation, and I doubt which is the most selfish of the two.  Money has
only a different value in the eyes of each.

So, in a word, Pitt Crawley thought he would do something for his
brother, and then thought that he would think about it some other time.

And with regard to Becky, she was not a woman who expected too much
from the generosity of her neighbours, and so was quite content with
all that Pitt Crawley had done for her.  She was acknowledged by the
head of the family.  If Pitt would not give her anything, he would get
something for her some day.  If she got no money from her
brother-in-law, she got what was as good as money--credit.  Raggles was
made rather easy in his mind by the spectacle of the union between the
brothers, by a small payment on the spot, and by the promise of a much
larger sum speedily to be assigned to him.  And Rebecca told Miss
Briggs, whose Christmas dividend upon the little sum lent by her Becky
paid with an air of candid joy, and as if her exchequer was brimming
over with gold--Rebecca, we say, told Miss Briggs, in strict confidence
that she had conferred with Sir Pitt, who was famous as a financier, on
Briggs's special behalf, as to the most profitable investment of Miss
B.'s remaining capital; that Sir Pitt, after much consideration, had
thought of a most safe and advantageous way in which Briggs could lay
out her money; that, being especially interested in her as an attached
friend of the late Miss Crawley, and of the whole family, and that long
before he left town, he had recommended that she should be ready with
the money at a moment's notice, so as to purchase at the most
favourable opportunity the shares which Sir Pitt had in his eye.  Poor
Miss Briggs was very grateful for this mark of Sir Pitt's attention--it
came so unsolicited, she said, for she never should have thought of
removing the money from the funds--and the delicacy enhanced the
kindness of the office; and she promised to see her man of business
immediately and be ready with her little cash at the proper hour.

And this worthy woman was so grateful for the kindness of Rebecca in
the matter, and for that of her generous benefactor, the Colonel, that
she went out and spent a great part of her half-year's dividend in the
purchase of a black velvet coat for little Rawdon, who, by the way, was
grown almost too big for black velvet now, and was of a size and age
befitting him for the assumption of the virile jacket and pantaloons.

He was a fine open-faced boy, with blue eyes and waving flaxen hair,
sturdy in limb, but generous and soft in heart, fondly attaching
himself to all who were good to him--to the pony--to Lord Southdown,
who gave him the horse (he used to blush and glow all over when he saw
that kind young nobleman)--to the groom who had charge of the pony--to
Molly, the cook, who crammed him with ghost stories at night, and with
good things from the dinner--to Briggs, whom he plagued and laughed
at--and to his father especially, whose attachment towards the lad was
curious too to witness.  Here, as he grew to be about eight years old,
his attachments may be said to have ended.  The beautiful mother-vision
had faded away after a while.  During near two years she had scarcely
spoken to the child. She disliked him.  He had the measles and the
hooping-cough.  He bored her.  One day when he was standing at the
landing-place, having crept down from the upper regions, attracted by
the sound of his mother's voice, who was singing to Lord Steyne, the
drawing room door opening suddenly, discovered the little spy, who but
a moment before had been rapt in delight, and listening to the music.

His mother came out and struck him violently a couple of boxes on the
ear.  He heard a laugh from the Marquis in the inner room (who was
amused by this free and artless exhibition of Becky's temper) and fled
down below to his friends of the kitchen, bursting in an agony of grief.

"It is not because it hurts me," little Rawdon gasped
out--"only--only"--sobs and tears wound up the sentence in a storm.  It
was the little boy's heart that was bleeding.  "Why mayn't I hear her
singing?  Why don't she ever sing to me--as she does to that baldheaded
man with the large teeth?" He gasped out at various intervals these
exclamations of rage and grief.  The cook looked at the housemaid, the
housemaid looked knowingly at the footman--the awful kitchen inquisition
which sits in judgement in every house and knows everything--sat on
Rebecca at that moment.

After this incident, the mother's dislike increased to hatred; the
consciousness that the child was in the house was a reproach and a pain
to her.  His very sight annoyed her.  Fear, doubt, and resistance
sprang up, too, in the boy's own bosom.  They were separated from that
day of the boxes on the ear.

Lord Steyne also heartily disliked the boy.  When they met by
mischance, he made sarcastic bows or remarks to the child, or glared at
him with savage-looking eyes. Rawdon used to stare him in the face and
double his little fists in return.  He knew his enemy, and this
gentleman, of all who came to the house, was the one who angered him
most.  One day the footman found him squaring his fists at Lord
Steyne's hat in the hall.  The footman told the circumstance as a good
joke to Lord Steyne's coachman; that officer imparted it to Lord
Steyne's gentleman, and to the servants' hall in general. And very soon
afterwards, when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley made her appearance at Gaunt
House, the porter who unbarred the gates, the servants of all uniforms
in the hall, the functionaries in white waistcoats, who bawled out from
landing to landing the names of Colonel and Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, knew
about her, or fancied they did. The man who brought her refreshment and
stood behind her chair, had talked her character over with the large
gentleman in motley-coloured clothes at his side.  Bon Dieu! it is
awful, that servants' inquisition!  You see a woman in a great party in
a splendid saloon, surrounded by faithful admirers, distributing
sparkling glances, dressed to perfection, curled, rouged, smiling and
happy--Discovery walks respectfully up to her, in the shape of a huge
powdered man with large calves and a tray of ices--with Calumny (which
is as fatal as truth) behind him, in the shape of the hulking fellow
carrying the wafer-biscuits.  Madam, your secret will be talked over by
those men at their club at the public-house to-night.  Jeames will tell
Chawles his notions about you over their pipes and pewter beer-pots.
Some people ought to have mutes for servants in Vanity Fair--mutes who
could not write. If you are guilty, tremble.  That fellow behind your
chair may be a Janissary with a bow-string in his plush breeches
pocket.  If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are
as ruinous as guilt.

"Was Rebecca guilty or not?" the Vehmgericht of the servants' hall had
pronounced against her.

And, I shame to say, she would not have got credit had they not
believed her to be guilty.  It was the sight of the Marquis of Steyne's
carriage-lamps at her door, contemplated by Raggles, burning in the
blackness of midnight, "that kep him up," as he afterwards said, that
even more than Rebecca's arts and coaxings.

And so--guiltless very likely--she was writhing and pushing onward
towards what they call "a position in society," and the servants were
pointing at her as lost and ruined.  So you see Molly, the housemaid,
of a morning, watching a spider in the doorpost lay his thread and
laboriously crawl up it, until, tired of the sport, she raises her
broom and sweeps away the thread and the artificer.

A day or two before Christmas, Becky, her husband and her son made
ready and went to pass the holidays at the seat of their ancestors at
Queen's Crawley.  Becky would have liked to leave the little brat
behind, and would have done so but for Lady Jane's urgent invitations
to the youngster, and the symptoms of revolt and discontent which
Rawdon manifested at her neglect of her son.  "He's the finest boy in
England," the father said in a tone of reproach to her, "and you don't
seem to care for him, Becky, as much as you do for your spaniel.  He
shan't bother you much; at home he will be away from you in the
nursery, and he shall go outside on the coach with me."

"Where you go yourself because you want to smoke those filthy cigars,"
replied Mrs. Rawdon.

"I remember when you liked 'em though," answered the husband.

Becky laughed; she was almost always good-humoured. "That was when I
was on my promotion, Goosey," she said.  "Take Rawdon outside with you
and give him a cigar too if you like."

Rawdon did not warm his little son for the winter's journey in this
way, but he and Briggs wrapped up the child in shawls and comforters,
and he was hoisted respectfully onto the roof of the coach in the dark
morning, under the lamps of the White Horse Cellar; and with no small
delight he watched the dawn rise and made his first journey to the
place which his father still called home. It was a journey of infinite
pleasure to the boy, to whom the incidents of the road afforded endless
interest, his father answering to him all questions connected with it
and telling him who lived in the great white house to the right, and
whom the park belonged to.  His mother, inside the vehicle, with her
maid and her furs, her wrappers, and her scent bottles, made such a
to-do that you would have thought she never had been in a stage-coach
before--much less, that she had been turned out of this very one to
make room for a paying passenger on a certain journey performed some
half-score years ago.

It was dark again when little Rawdon was wakened up to enter his
uncle's carriage at Mudbury, and he sat and looked out of it wondering
as the great iron gates flew open, and at the white trunks of the limes
as they swept by, until they stopped, at length, before the light
windows of the Hall, which were blazing and comfortable with Christmas
welcome.  The hall-door was flung open--a big fire was burning in the
great old fire-place--a carpet was down over the chequered black
flags--"It's the old Turkey one that used to be in the Ladies'
Gallery," thought Rebecca, and the next instant was kissing Lady Jane.

She and Sir Pitt performed the same salute with great gravity; but
Rawdon, having been smoking, hung back rather from his sister-in-law,
whose two children came up to their cousin; and, while Matilda held out
her hand and kissed him, Pitt Binkie Southdown, the son and heir, stood
aloof rather and examined him as a little dog does a big dog.

Then the kind hostess conducted her guests to the snug apartments
blazing with cheerful fires.  Then the young ladies came and knocked at
Mrs. Rawdon's door, under the pretence that they were desirous to be
useful, but in reality to have the pleasure of inspecting the contents
of her band and bonnet-boxes, and her dresses which, though black, were
of the newest London fashion.  And they told her how much the Hall was
changed for the better, and how old Lady Southdown was gone, and how
Pitt was taking his station in the county, as became a Crawley in fact.
Then the great dinner-bell having rung, the family assembled at dinner,
at which meal Rawdon Junior was placed by his aunt, the good-natured
lady of the house, Sir Pitt being uncommonly attentive to his
sister-in-law at his own right hand.

Little Rawdon exhibited a fine appetite and showed a gentlemanlike
behaviour.

"I like to dine here," he said to his aunt when he had completed his
meal, at the conclusion of which, and after a decent grace by Sir Pitt,
the younger son and heir was introduced, and was perched on a high
chair by the Baronet's side, while the daughter took possession of the
place and the little wine-glass prepared for her near her mother.  "I
like to dine here," said Rawdon Minor, looking up at his relation's
kind face.

"Why?" said the good Lady Jane.

"I dine in the kitchen when I am at home," replied Rawdon Minor, "or
else with Briggs." But Becky was so engaged with the Baronet, her host,
pouring out a flood of compliments and delights and raptures, and
admiring young Pitt Binkie, whom she declared to be the most beautiful,
intelligent, noble-looking little creature, and so like his father,
that she did not hear the remarks of her own flesh and blood at the
other end of the broad shining table.

As a guest, and it being the first night of his arrival, Rawdon the
Second was allowed to sit up until the hour when tea being over, and a
great gilt book being laid on the table before Sir Pitt, all the
domestics of the family streamed in, and Sir Pitt read prayers.  It was
the first time the poor little boy had ever witnessed or heard of such
a ceremonial.

The house had been much improved even since the Baronet's brief reign,
and was pronounced by Becky to be perfect, charming, delightful, when
she surveyed it in his company.  As for little Rawdon, who examined it
with the children for his guides, it seemed to him a perfect palace of
enchantment and wonder.  There were long galleries, and ancient state
bedrooms, there were pictures and old China, and armour.  There were
the rooms in which Grandpapa died, and by which the children walked
with terrified looks.  "Who was Grandpapa?" he asked; and they told him
how he used to be very old, and used to be wheeled about in a
garden-chair, and they showed him the garden-chair one day rotting in
the out-house in which it had lain since the old gentleman had been
wheeled away yonder to the church, of which the spire was glittering
over the park elms.

The brothers had good occupation for several mornings in examining the
improvements which had been effected by Sir Pitt's genius and economy.
And as they walked or rode, and looked at them, they could talk without
too much boring each other.  And Pitt took care to tell Rawdon what a
heavy outlay of money these improvements had occasioned, and that a man
of landed and funded property was often very hard pressed for twenty
pounds. "There is that new lodge-gate," said Pitt, pointing to it
humbly with the bamboo cane, "I can no more pay for it before the
dividends in January than I can fly."

"I can lend you, Pitt, till then," Rawdon answered rather ruefully; and
they went in and looked at the restored lodge, where the family arms
were just new scraped in stone, and where old Mrs. Lock, for the first
time these many long years, had tight doors, sound roofs, and whole
windows.



Between Hampshire and London

Sir Pitt Crawley had done more than repair fences and restore
dilapidated lodges on the Queen's Crawley estate. Like a wise man he
had set to work to rebuild the injured popularity of his house and stop
up the gaps and ruins in which his name had been left by his
disreputable and thriftless old predecessor.  He was elected for the
borough speedily after his father's demise; a magistrate, a member of
parliament, a county magnate and representative of an ancient family,
he made it his duty to show himself before the Hampshire public,
subscribed handsomely to the county charities, called assiduously upon
all the county folk, and laid himself out in a word to take that
position in Hampshire, and in the Empire afterwards, to which he
thought his prodigious talents justly entitled him.  Lady Jane was
instructed to be friendly with the Fuddlestones, and the Wapshots, and
the other famous baronets, their neighbours.  Their carriages might
frequently be seen in the Queen's Crawley avenue now; they dined pretty
frequently at the Hall (where the cookery was so good that it was clear
Lady Jane very seldom had a hand in it), and in return Pitt and his
wife most energetically dined out in all sorts of weather and at all
sorts of distances.  For though Pitt did not care for joviality, being
a frigid man of poor hearth and appetite, yet he considered that to be
hospitable and condescending was quite incumbent on his station, and
every time that he got a headache from too long an after-dinner
sitting, he felt that he was a martyr to duty.  He talked about crops,
corn-laws, politics, with the best country gentlemen. He (who had been
formerly inclined to be a sad free-thinker on these points) entered
into poaching and game preserving with ardour.  He didn't hunt; he
wasn't a hunting man; he was a man of books and peaceful habits; but he
thought that the breed of horses must be kept up in the country, and
that the breed of foxes must therefore be looked to, and for his part,
if his friend, Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone, liked to draw his country
and meet as of old the F.  hounds used to do at Queen's Crawley, he
should be happy to see him there, and the gentlemen of the Fuddlestone
hunt.  And to Lady Southdown's dismay too he became more orthodox in
his tendencies every day; gave up preaching in public and attending
meeting-houses; went stoutly to church; called on the Bishop and all
the Clergy at Winchester; and made no objection when the Venerable
Archdeacon Trumper asked for a game of whist.  What pangs must have
been those of Lady Southdown, and what an utter castaway she must have
thought her son-in-law for permitting such a godless diversion!  And
when, on the return of the family from an oratorio at Winchester, the
Baronet announced to the young ladies that he should next year very
probably take them to the "county balls," they worshipped him for his
kindness.  Lady Jane was only too obedient, and perhaps glad herself to
go.  The Dowager wrote off the direst descriptions of her daughter's
worldly behaviour to the authoress of the Washerwoman of Finchley
Common at the Cape; and her house in Brighton being about this time
unoccupied, returned to that watering-place, her absence being not very
much deplored by her children. We may suppose, too, that Rebecca, on
paying a second visit to Queen's Crawley, did not feel particularly
grieved at the absence of the lady of the medicine chest; though she
wrote a Christmas letter to her Ladyship, in which she respectfully
recalled herself to Lady Southdown's recollection, spoke with gratitude
of the delight which her Ladyship's conversation had given her on the
former visit, dilated on the kindness with which her Ladyship had
treated her in sickness, and declared that everything at Queen's
Crawley reminded her of her absent friend.

A great part of the altered demeanour and popularity of Sir Pitt
Crawley might have been traced to the counsels of that astute little
lady of Curzon Street.  "You remain a Baronet--you consent to be a mere
country gentleman," she said to him, while he had been her guest in
London. "No, Sir Pitt Crawley, I know you better.  I know your talents
and your ambition.  You fancy you hide them both, but you can conceal
neither from me.  I showed Lord Steyne your pamphlet on malt.  He was
familiar with it, and said it was in the opinion of the whole Cabinet
the most masterly thing that had appeared on the subject. The Ministry
has its eye upon you, and I know what you want.  You want to
distinguish yourself in Parliament; every one says you are the finest
speaker in England (for your speeches at Oxford are still remembered).
You want to be Member for the County, where, with your own vote and
your borough at your back, you can command anything.  And you want to
be Baron Crawley of Queen's Crawley, and will be before you die.  I saw
it all.  I could read your heart, Sir Pitt.  If I had a husband who
possessed your intellect as he does your name, I sometimes think I
should not be unworthy of him--but--but I am your kinswoman now," she
added with a laugh.  "Poor little penniless, I have got a little
interest--and who knows, perhaps the mouse may be able to aid the
lion." Pitt Crawley was amazed and enraptured with her speech.  "How
that woman comprehends me!" he said. "I never could get Jane to read
three pages of the malt pamphlet.  She has no idea that I have
commanding talents or secret ambition.  So they remember my speaking at
Oxford, do they? The rascals!  Now that I represent my borough and may
sit for the county, they begin to recollect me!  Why, Lord Steyne cut
me at the levee last year; they are beginning to find out that Pitt
Crawley is some one at last.  Yes, the man was always the same whom
these people neglected:  it was only the opportunity that was wanting,
and I will show them now that I can speak and act as well as write.
Achilles did not declare himself until they gave him the sword.  I hold
it now, and the world shall yet hear of Pitt Crawley."

Therefore it was that this roguish diplomatist has grown so hospitable;
that he was so civil to oratorios and hospitals; so kind to Deans and
Chapters; so generous in giving and accepting dinners; so uncommonly
gracious to farmers on market-days; and so much interested about county
business; and that the Christmas at the Hall was the gayest which had
been known there for many a long day.

On Christmas Day a great family gathering took place. All the Crawleys
from the Rectory came to dine.  Rebecca was as frank and fond of Mrs.
Bute as if the other had never been her enemy; she was affectionately
interested in the dear girls, and surprised at the progress which they
had made in music since her time, and insisted upon encoring one of the
duets out of the great song-books which Jim, grumbling, had been forced
to bring under his arm from the Rectory.  Mrs. Bute, perforce, was
obliged to adopt a decent demeanour towards the little adventuress--of
course being free to discourse with her daughters afterwards about the
absurd respect with which Sir Pitt treated his sister-in-law.  But Jim,
who had sat next to her at dinner, declared she was a trump, and one
and all of the Rector's family agreed that the little Rawdon was a fine
boy. They respected a possible baronet in the boy, between whom and the
title there was only the little sickly pale Pitt Binkie.

The children were very good friends.  Pitt Binkie was too little a dog
for such a big dog as Rawdon to play with; and Matilda being only a
girl, of course not fit companion for a young gentleman who was near
eight years old, and going into jackets very soon.  He took the command
of this small party at once--the little girl and the little boy
following him about with great reverence at such times as he
condescended to sport with them.  His happiness and pleasure in the
country were extreme.  The kitchen garden pleased him hugely, the
flowers moderately, but the pigeons and the poultry, and the stables
when he was allowed to visit them, were delightful objects to him.  He
resisted being kissed by the Misses Crawley, but he allowed Lady Jane
sometimes to embrace him, and it was by her side that he liked to sit
when, the signal to retire to the drawing-room being given, the ladies
left the gentlemen to their claret--by her side rather than by his
mother.  For Rebecca, seeing that tenderness was the fashion, called
Rawdon to her one evening and stooped down and kissed him in the
presence of all the ladies.

He looked her full in the face after the operation, trembling and
turning very red, as his wont was when moved.  "You never kiss me at
home, Mamma," he said, at which there was a general silence and
consternation and a by no means pleasant look in Becky's eyes.

Rawdon was fond of his sister-in-law, for her regard for his son. Lady
Jane and Becky did not get on quite so well at this visit as on
occasion of the former one, when the Colonel's wife was bent upon
pleasing.  Those two speeches of the child struck rather a chill.
Perhaps Sir Pitt was rather too attentive to her.

But Rawdon, as became his age and size, was fonder of the society of
the men than of the women, and never wearied of accompanying his sire
to the stables, whither the Colonel retired to smoke his cigar--Jim,
the Rector's son, sometimes joining his cousin in that and other
amusements. He and the Baronet's keeper were very close friends, their
mutual taste for "dawgs" bringing them much together. On one day, Mr.
James, the Colonel, and Horn, the keeper, went and shot pheasants,
taking little Rawdon with them.  On another most blissful morning,
these four gentlemen partook of the amusement of rat-hunting in a barn,
than which sport Rawdon as yet had never seen anything more noble.
They stopped up the ends of certain drains in the barn, into the other
openings of which ferrets were inserted, and then stood silently aloof,
with uplifted stakes in their hands, and an anxious little terrier (Mr.
James's celebrated "dawg" Forceps, indeed) scarcely breathing from
excitement, listening motionless on three legs, to the faint squeaking
of the rats below. Desperately bold at last, the persecuted animals
bolted above-ground--the terrier accounted for one, the keeper for
another; Rawdon, from flurry and excitement, missed his rat, but on the
other hand he half-murdered a ferret.

But the greatest day of all was that on which Sir Huddlestone
Fuddlestone's hounds met upon the lawn at Queen's Crawley.

That was a famous sight for little Rawdon.  At half-past ten, Tom
Moody, Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone's huntsman, was seen trotting up the
avenue, followed by the noble pack of hounds in a compact body--the
rear being brought up by the two whips clad in stained scarlet
frocks--light hard-featured lads on well-bred lean horses, possessing
marvellous dexterity in casting the points of their long heavy whips at
the thinnest part of any dog's skin who dares to straggle from the main
body, or to take the slightest notice, or even so much as wink, at the
hares and rabbits starting under their noses.

Next comes boy Jack, Tom Moody's son, who weighs five stone, measures
eight-and-forty inches, and will never be any bigger.  He is perched on
a large raw-boned hunter, half-covered by a capacious saddle.  This
animal is Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone's favourite horse the Nob. Other
horses, ridden by other small boys, arrive from time to time, awaiting
their masters, who will come cantering on anon.

Tom Moody rides up to the door of the Hall, where he is welcomed by the
butler, who offers him drink, which he declines.  He and his pack then
draw off into a sheltered corner of the lawn, where the dogs roll on
the grass, and play or growl angrily at one another, ever and anon
breaking out into furious fight speedily to be quelled by Tom's voice,
unmatched at rating, or the snaky thongs of the whips.

Many young gentlemen canter up on thoroughbred hacks, spatter-dashed to
the knee, and enter the house to drink cherry-brandy and pay their
respects to the ladies, or, more modest and sportsmanlike, divest
themselves of their mud-boots, exchange their hacks for their hunters,
and warm their blood by a preliminary gallop round the lawn.  Then they
collect round the pack in the corner and talk with Tom Moody of past
sport, and the merits of Sniveller and Diamond, and of the state of the
country and of the wretched breed of foxes.

Sir Huddlestone presently appears mounted on a clever cob and rides up
to the Hall, where he enters and does the civil thing by the ladies,
after which, being a man of few words, he proceeds to business.  The
hounds are drawn up to the hall-door, and little Rawdon descends
amongst them, excited yet half-alarmed by the caresses which they
bestow upon him, at the thumps he receives from their waving tails, and
at their canine bickerings, scarcely restrained by Tom Moody's tongue
and lash.

Meanwhile, Sir Huddlestone has hoisted himself unwieldily on the Nob:
"Let's try Sowster's Spinney, Tom," says the Baronet, "Farmer Mangle
tells me there are two foxes in it." Tom blows his horn and trots off,
followed by the pack, by the whips, by the young gents from Winchester,
by the farmers of the neighbourhood, by the labourers of the parish on
foot, with whom the day is a great holiday, Sir Huddlestone bringing up
the rear with Colonel Crawley, and the whole cortege disappears down
the avenue.

The Reverend Bute Crawley (who has been too modest to appear at the
public meet before his nephew's windows), whom Tom Moody remembers
forty years back a slender divine riding the wildest horses, jumping
the widest brooks, and larking over the newest gates in the country--his
Reverence, we say, happens to trot out from the Rectory Lane on his
powerful black horse just as Sir Huddlestone passes; he joins the
worthy Baronet.  Hounds and horsemen disappear, and little Rawdon
remains on the doorsteps, wondering and happy.

During the progress of this memorable holiday, little Rawdon, if he had
got no special liking for his uncle, always awful and cold and locked
up in his study, plunged in justice-business and surrounded by bailiffs
and farmers--has gained the good graces of his married and maiden
aunts, of the two little folks of the Hall, and of Jim of the Rectory,
whom Sir Pitt is encouraging to pay his addresses to one of the young
ladies, with an understanding doubtless that he shall be presented to
the living when it shall be vacated by his fox-hunting old sire.  Jim
has given up that sport himself and confines himself to a little
harmless duck- or snipe-shooting, or a little quiet trifling with the
rats during the Christmas holidays, after which he will return to the
University and try and not be plucked, once more.  He has already
eschewed green coats, red neckcloths, and other worldly ornaments, and
is preparing himself for a change in his condition.  In this cheap and
thrifty way Sir Pitt tries to pay off his debt to his family.

Also before this merry Christmas was over, the Baronet had screwed up
courage enough to give his brother another draft on his bankers, and
for no less a sum than a hundred pounds, an act which caused Sir Pitt
cruel pangs at first, but which made him glow afterwards to think
himself one of the most generous of men.  Rawdon and his son went away
with the utmost heaviness of heart.  Becky and the ladies parted with
some alacrity, however, and our friend returned to London to commence
those avocations with which we find her occupied when this chapter
begins. Under her care the Crawley House in Great Gaunt Street was
quite rejuvenescent and ready for the reception of Sir Pitt and his
family, when the Baronet came to London to attend his duties in
Parliament and to assume that position in the country for which his
vast genius fitted him.

For the first session, this profound dissembler hid his projects and
never opened his lips but to present a petition from Mudbury.  But he
attended assiduously in his place and learned thoroughly the routine
and business of the House.  At home he gave himself up to the perusal
of Blue Books, to the alarm and wonder of Lady Jane, who thought he was
killing himself by late hours and intense application.  And he made
acquaintance with the ministers, and the chiefs of his party,
determining to rank as one of them before many years were over.

Lady Jane's sweetness and kindness had inspired Rebecca with such a
contempt for her ladyship as the little woman found no small difficulty
in concealing.  That sort of goodness and simplicity which Lady Jane
possessed annoyed our friend Becky, and it was impossible for her at
times not to show, or to let the other divine, her scorn. Her presence,
too, rendered Lady Jane uneasy.  Her husband talked constantly with
Becky.  Signs of intelligence seemed to pass between them, and Pitt
spoke with her on subjects on which he never thought of discoursing
with Lady Jane.  The latter did not understand them, to be sure, but it
was mortifying to remain silent; still more mortifying to know that you
had nothing to say, and hear that little audacious Mrs. Rawdon dashing
on from subject to subject, with a word for every man, and a joke
always pat; and to sit in one's own house alone, by the fireside, and
watching all the men round your rival.

In the country, when Lady Jane was telling stories to the children, who
clustered about her knees (little Rawdon into the bargain, who was very
fond of her), and Becky came into the room, sneering with green
scornful eyes, poor Lady Jane grew silent under those baleful glances.
Her simple little fancies shrank away tremulously, as fairies in the
story-books, before a superior bad angel.  She could not go on,
although Rebecca, with the smallest inflection of sarcasm in her voice,
besought her to continue that charming story.  And on her side gentle
thoughts and simple pleasures were odious to Mrs. Becky; they discorded
with her; she hated people for liking them; she spurned children and
children-lovers.  "I have no taste for bread and butter," she would
say, when caricaturing Lady Jane and her ways to my Lord Steyne.

"No more has a certain person for holy water," his lordship replied
with a bow and a grin and a great jarring laugh afterwards.

So these two ladies did not see much of each other except upon those
occasions when the younger brother's wife, having an object to gain
from the other, frequented her.  They my-loved and my-deared each other
assiduously, but kept apart generally, whereas Sir Pitt, in the midst
of his multiplied avocations, found daily time to see his sister-in-law.

On the occasion of his first Speaker's dinner, Sir Pitt took the
opportunity of appearing before his sister-in-law in his uniform--that
old diplomatic suit which he had worn when attache to the Pumpernickel
legation.

Becky complimented him upon that dress and admired him almost as much
as his own wife and children, to whom he displayed himself before he
set out.  She said that it was only the thoroughbred gentleman who
could wear the Court suit with advantage:  it was only your men of
ancient race whom the culotte courte became.  Pitt looked down with
complacency at his legs, which had not, in truth, much more symmetry or
swell than the lean Court sword which dangled by his side--looked down
at his legs, and thought in his heart that he was killing.

When he was gone, Mrs. Becky made a caricature of his figure, which she
showed to Lord Steyne when he arrived.  His lordship carried off the
sketch, delighted with the accuracy of the resemblance.  He had done
Sir Pitt Crawley the honour to meet him at Mrs. Becky's house and had
been most gracious to the new Baronet and member.  Pitt was struck too
by the deference with which the great Peer treated his sister-in-law,
by her ease and sprightliness in the conversation, and by the delight
with which the other men of the party listened to her talk. Lord Steyne
made no doubt but that the Baronet had only commenced his career in
public life, and expected rather anxiously to hear him as an orator; as
they were neighbours (for Great Gaunt Street leads into Gaunt Square,
whereof Gaunt House, as everybody knows, forms one side) my lord hoped
that as soon as Lady Steyne arrived in London she would have the honour
of making the acquaintance of Lady Crawley.  He left a card upon his
neighbour in the course of a day or two, having never thought fit to
notice his predecessor, though they had lived near each other for near
a century past.

In the midst of these intrigues and fine parties and wise and brilliant
personages Rawdon felt himself more and more isolated every day.  He
was allowed to go to the club more; to dine abroad with bachelor
friends; to come and go when he liked, without any questions being
asked.  And he and Rawdon the younger many a time would walk to Gaunt
Street and sit with the lady and the children there while Sir Pitt was
closeted with Rebecca, on his way to the House, or on  his return from
it.

The ex-Colonel would sit for hours in his brother's house very silent,
and thinking and doing as little as possible.  He was glad to be
employed of an errand; to go and make inquiries about a horse or a
servant, or to carve the roast mutton for the dinner of the children.
He was beat and cowed into laziness and submission. Delilah had
imprisoned him and cut his hair off, too.  The bold and reckless young
blood of ten-years back was subjugated and was turned into a torpid,
submissive, middle-aged, stout gentleman.

And poor Lady Jane was aware that Rebecca had captivated her husband,
although she and Mrs. Rawdon my-deared and my-loved each other every
day they met.

 Nine, Forty, Forty One, Forty Two, Forty Three, Forty Four and Forty Five In Chapter Thirty Nine, Sir Pitt is seen to be closer than ever to Miss Horrocks and she now rules the house. When Sir Pitt falls dangerously ill, Mrs Bute Crawley takes over and dismisses Mr and Miss Horrocks after she is seen attempting to unlock desks. Sir Pitt survives for many months, but is too ill to govern the estate. Pitt takes over in Chapter Forty and after his father's death he becomes Sir Pitt and instructs his wife to let Rawdon and Becky know of the funeral. Becky is pleased with the letter as she sees it as a form of acceptance and an entry into society. She and her companion prepare for the funeral and explanation is given as to how Briggs came to be in her employment. After the death of Miss Crawley, she advertised herself as a companion, which Becky has been seen to require. Before six months is over, Briggs lends Rawdon PS600. Chapter Forty One tells of Becky and Rawdon's return to Queen's Crawley and it is now nine years since she first went there as a governess. Although Lady Southdown is cold towards her, Jane kisses 'the little adventuress' affectionately. Becky manages to ingratiate herself with everyone eventually and thinks how, with money, she would have been a different person. Chapter Forty Two returns to the Osborne family. Maria has married Fred Bullock, even though he tried and failed to negotiate more money for the match. After the marriage, she rarely visits her sister, Jane, and father. Jane is still unmarried and leads an 'awful existence'. In 1818, she had an attachment with Mr Smee, her art teacher, but her father threw him out of the house and said she would have none of his money if she married without his agreement. As he wants a woman to keep house for him, he does not wish her to marry anyway. She has to resign herself to being an 'old maid' whilst he lives. She sees Georgy for the first time when he is at the home of the Dobbin sisters and she gives him a gold chain. When Amelia realizes this, she becomes fearful of her son's future. In Chapter Forty Three, in Madras, Mrs O'Dowd is described as keen for Glorvina to marry Dobbin. He is 'besieged' but unmoved by Glorvina's attentions as he still only cares for Amelia. He is hurt when he receives a letter from her congratulating him on his forthcoming marriage, as she evidently does not love him as he loves her, and is determined to return to England when his sister's letter informs him that Amelia is to marry Reverend Binns. Chapter Forty Four returns to Queen's Crawley, as Becky charms the new Sir Pitt. He begins to think of his own wife as 'mum and stupid' in comparison. Although Sir Pitt will only give them a small amount of money, for little Rawdon, Becky sees that their good relationship means they will able to get credit. This includes not paying Raggles or Briggs. At home, Becky shows no concern for her son and boxes his ear when she finds him listening to her singing to Lord Steyne. From this point, she moves from disliking him to hating him. At Christmas, Becky and her family visit Queen's Crawley and on their first night little Rawdon tells his aunt Jane that he usually has to eat in the kitchen or with Briggs. The chapter ends ironically with Rawdon lending his brother money after he has heard a description of the outlay needed to maintain the estate. In Chapter Forty Five, the new Sir Pitt is now a magistrate, a Member of Parliament and a county magnate. His push for popularity in the neighborhood has been partly inspired by Becky's flattery. Little Rawdon enjoys his stay and is treated affectionately by others. When Becky joins in and kisses him, he says how she never kisses him at home. There is some rivalry between Jane and Becky as Jane is envious of her husband's discussions with her and Becky is similarly envious of Jane's easy affection for little Rawdon. In London, Rawdon is feeling side-lined and often walks to Gaunt Street, to Sir Pitt's house which is being renovated, and sits with Jane and the children whilst Sir Pitt is 'closeted' with Rebecca. Rawdon is once more compared to Samson: 'Delilah had imprisoned him, and cut his hair off.'

