Chapter: The Subject Continued

In the first place, and as a matter of the greatest necessity, we are
bound to describe how a house may be got for nothing a year. These
mansions are to be had either unfurnished, where, if you have credit
with Messrs.  Gillows or Bantings, you can get them splendidly montees
and decorated entirely according to your own fancy; or they are to be
let furnished, a less troublesome and complicated arrangement to most
parties.  It was so that Crawley and his wife preferred to hire their
house.

Before Mr. Bowls came to preside over Miss Crawley's house and cellar
in Park Lane, that lady had had for a butler a Mr. Raggles, who was
born on the family estate of Queen's Crawley, and indeed was a younger
son of a gardener there.  By good conduct, a handsome person and
calves, and a grave demeanour, Raggles rose from the knife-board to the
footboard of the carriage; from the footboard to the butler's pantry.
When he had been a certain number of years at the head of Miss
Crawley's establishment, where he had had good wages, fat perquisites,
and plenty of opportunities of saving, he announced that he was about
to contract a matrimonial alliance with a late cook of Miss Crawley's,
who had subsisted in an honourable manner by the exercise of a mangle,
and the keeping of a small greengrocer's shop in the neighbourhood.
The truth is, that the ceremony had been clandestinely performed some
years back; although the news of Mr. Raggles' marriage was first
brought to Miss Crawley by a little boy and girl of seven and eight
years of age, whose continual presence in the kitchen had attracted the
attention of Miss Briggs.

Mr. Raggles then retired and personally undertook the superintendence
of the small shop and the greens.  He added milk and cream, eggs and
country-fed pork to his stores, contenting himself whilst other retired
butlers were vending spirits in public houses, by dealing in the
simplest country produce.  And having a good connection amongst the
butlers in the neighbourhood, and a snug back parlour where he and Mrs.
Raggles received them, his milk, cream, and eggs got to be adopted by
many of the fraternity, and his profits increased every year.  Year
after year he quietly and modestly amassed money, and when at length
that snug and complete bachelor's residence at No. 201, Curzon Street,
May Fair, lately the residence of the Honourable Frederick Deuceace,
gone abroad, with its rich and appropriate furniture by the first
makers, was brought to the hammer, who should go in and purchase the
lease and furniture of the house but Charles Raggles? A part of the
money he borrowed, it is true, and at rather a high interest, from a
brother butler, but the chief part he paid down, and it was with no
small pride that Mrs. Raggles found herself sleeping in a bed of carved
mahogany, with silk curtains, with a prodigious cheval glass opposite
to her, and a wardrobe which would contain her, and Raggles, and all
the family.

Of course, they did not intend to occupy permanently an apartment so
splendid.  It was in order to let the house again that Raggles
purchased it.  As soon as a tenant was found, he subsided into the
greengrocer's shop once more; but a happy thing it was for him to walk
out of that tenement and into Curzon Street, and there survey his
house--his own house--with geraniums in the window and a carved bronze
knocker.  The footman occasionally lounging at the area railing,
treated him with respect; the cook took her green stuff at his house
and called him Mr. Landlord, and there was not one thing the tenants
did, or one dish which they had for dinner, that Raggles might not know
of, if he liked.

He was a good man; good and happy.  The house brought him in so
handsome a yearly income that he was determined to send his children to
good schools, and accordingly, regardless of expense, Charles was sent
to boarding at Dr. Swishtail's, Sugar-cane Lodge, and little Matilda to
Miss Peckover's, Laurentinum House, Clapham.

Raggles loved and adored the Crawley family as the author of all his
prosperity in life.  He had a silhouette of his mistress in his back
shop, and a drawing of the Porter's Lodge at Queen's Crawley, done by
that spinster herself in India ink--and the only addition he made to
the decorations of the Curzon Street House was a print of Queen's
Crawley in Hampshire, the seat of Sir Walpole Crawley, Baronet, who was
represented in a gilded car drawn by six white horses, and passing by a
lake covered with swans, and barges containing ladies in hoops, and
musicians with flags and periwigs.  Indeed Raggles thought there was no
such palace in all the world, and no such august family.

As luck would have it, Raggles' house in Curzon Street was to let when
Rawdon and his wife returned to London. The Colonel knew it and its
owner quite well; the latter's connection with the Crawley family had
been kept up constantly, for Raggles helped Mr. Bowls whenever Miss
Crawley received friends.  And the old man not only let his house to
the Colonel but officiated as his butler whenever he had company; Mrs.
Raggles operating in the kitchen below and sending up dinners of which
old Miss Crawley herself might have approved.  This was the way, then,
Crawley got his house for nothing; for though Raggles had to pay taxes
and rates, and the interest of the mortgage to the brother butler; and
the insurance of his life; and the charges for his children at school;
and the value of the meat and drink which his own family--and for a
time that of Colonel Crawley too--consumed; and though the poor wretch
was utterly ruined by the transaction, his children being flung on the
streets, and himself driven into the Fleet Prison:  yet somebody must
pay even for gentlemen who live for nothing a year--and so it was this
unlucky Raggles was made the representative of Colonel Crawley's
defective capital.

I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great
practitioners in Crawley's way?--how many great noblemen rob their petty
tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched
little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble
nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has
an execution in his house--and that one or other owes six or seven
millions, the defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim in
the vastness of his ruin.  But who pities a poor barber who can't get
his money for powdering the footmen's heads; or a poor carpenter who
has ruined himself by fixing up ornaments and pavilions for my lady's
dejeuner; or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes,
and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries
ready, which my lord has done him the honour to bespeak? When the great
house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed:
as they say in the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself,
he sends plenty of other souls thither.

Rawdon and his wife generously gave their patronage to all such of Miss
Crawley's tradesmen and purveyors as chose to serve them.  Some were
willing enough, especially the poor ones.  It was wonderful to see the
pertinacity with which the washerwoman from Tooting brought the cart
every Saturday, and her bills week after week. Mr. Raggles himself had
to supply the greengroceries.  The bill for servants' porter at the
Fortune of War public house is a curiosity in the chronicles of beer.
Every servant also was owed the greater part of his wages, and thus
kept up perforce an interest in the house. Nobody in fact was paid.
Not the blacksmith who opened the lock; nor the glazier who mended the
pane; nor the jobber who let the carriage; nor the groom who drove it;
nor the butcher who provided the leg of mutton; nor the coals which
roasted it; nor the cook who basted it; nor the servants who ate it:
and this I am given to understand is not unfrequently the way in which
people live elegantly on nothing a year.

In a little town such things cannot be done without remark.  We know
there the quantity of milk our neighbour takes and espy the joint or
the fowls which are going in for his dinner.  So, probably, 200 and 202
in Curzon Street might know what was going on in the house between
them, the servants communicating through the area-railings; but Crawley
and his wife and his friends did not know 200 and 202. When you came to
201 there was a hearty welcome, a kind smile, a good dinner, and a
jolly shake of the hand from the host and hostess there, just for all
the world as if they had been undisputed masters of three or four
thousand a year--and so they were, not in money, but in produce and
labour--if they did not pay for the mutton, they had it:  if they did
not give bullion in exchange for their wine, how should we know? Never
was better claret at any man's table than at honest Rawdon's; dinners
more gay and neatly served.   His drawing-rooms were the prettiest,
little, modest salons conceivable: they were decorated with the
greatest taste, and a thousand knick-knacks from Paris, by Rebecca:
and when she sat at her piano trilling songs with a lightsome heart,
the stranger voted himself in a little paradise of domestic comfort and
agreed that, if the husband was rather stupid, the wife was charming,
and the dinners the pleasantest in the world.

Rebecca's wit, cleverness, and flippancy made her speedily the vogue in
London among a certain class.  You saw demure chariots at her door, out
of which stepped very great people.  You beheld her carriage in the
park, surrounded by dandies of note.  The little box in the third tier
of the opera was crowded with heads constantly changing; but it must be
confessed that the ladies held aloof from her, and that their doors
were shut to our little adventurer.

With regard to the world of female fashion and its customs, the present
writer of course can only speak at second hand.  A man can no more
penetrate or understand those mysteries than he can know what the
ladies talk about when they go upstairs after dinner.  It is only by
inquiry and perseverance that one sometimes gets hints of those
secrets; and by a similar diligence every person who treads the Pall
Mall pavement and frequents the clubs of this metropolis knows, either
through his own experience or through some acquaintance with whom he
plays at billiards or shares the joint, something about the genteel
world of London, and how, as there are men (such as Rawdon Crawley,
whose position we mentioned before) who cut a good figure to the eyes
of the ignorant world and to the apprentices in the park, who behold
them consorting with the most notorious dandies there, so there are
ladies, who may be called men's women, being welcomed entirely by all
the gentlemen and cut or slighted by all their wives.  Mrs. Firebrace
is of this sort; the lady with the beautiful fair ringlets whom you see
every day in Hyde Park, surrounded by the greatest and most famous
dandies of this empire.  Mrs. Rockwood is another, whose parties are
announced laboriously in the fashionable newspapers and with whom you
see that all sorts of ambassadors and great noblemen dine; and many
more might be mentioned had they to do with the history at present in
hand.  But while simple folks who are out of the world, or country
people with a taste for the genteel, behold these ladies in their
seeming glory in public places, or envy them from afar off, persons who
are better instructed could inform them that these envied ladies have
no more chance of establishing themselves in "society," than the
benighted squire's wife in Somersetshire who reads of their doings in
the Morning Post. Men living about London are aware of these awful
truths. You hear how pitilessly many ladies of seeming rank and wealth
are excluded from this "society." The frantic efforts which they make
to enter this circle, the meannesses to which they submit, the insults
which they undergo, are matters of wonder to those who take human or
womankind for a study; and the pursuit of fashion under difficulties
would be a fine theme for any very great person who had the wit, the
leisure, and the knowledge of the English language necessary for the
compiling of such a history.

Now the few female acquaintances whom Mrs. Crawley had known abroad not
only declined to visit her when she came to this side of the Channel,
but cut her severely when they met in public places.  It was curious to
see how the great ladies forgot her, and no doubt not altogether a
pleasant study to Rebecca.  When Lady Bareacres met her in the
waiting-room at the opera, she gathered her daughters about her as if
they would be contaminated by a touch of Becky, and retreating a step
or two, placed herself in front of them, and stared at her little
enemy. To stare Becky out of countenance required a severer glance than
even the frigid old Bareacres could shoot out of her dismal eyes.  When
Lady de la Mole, who had ridden a score of times by Becky's side at
Brussels, met Mrs. Crawley's open carriage in Hyde Park, her Ladyship
was quite blind, and could not in the least recognize her former
friend.  Even Mrs. Blenkinsop, the banker's wife, cut her at church.
Becky went regularly to church now; it was edifying to see her enter
there with Rawdon by her side, carrying a couple of large gilt
prayer-books, and afterwards going through the ceremony with the
gravest resignation.

Rawdon at first felt very acutely the slights which were passed upon
his wife, and was inclined to be gloomy and savage.  He talked of
calling out the husbands or brothers of every one of the insolent women
who did not pay a proper respect to his wife; and it was only by the
strongest commands and entreaties on her part that he was brought into
keeping a decent behaviour.  "You can't shoot me into society," she
said good-naturedly.  "Remember, my dear, that I was but a governess,
and you, you poor silly old man, have the worst reputation for debt,
and dice, and all sorts of wickedness.  We shall get quite as many
friends as we want by and by, and in the meanwhile you must be a good
boy and obey your schoolmistress in everything she tells you to do.
When we heard that your aunt had left almost everything to Pitt and his
wife, do you remember what a rage you were in? You would have told all
Paris, if I had not made you keep your temper, and where would you have
been now?--in prison at Ste.  Pelagie for debt, and not established in
London in a handsome house, with every comfort about you--you were in
such a fury you were ready to murder your brother, you wicked Cain you,
and what good would have come of remaining angry? All the rage in the
world won't get us your aunt's money; and it is much better that we
should be friends with your brother's family than enemies, as those
foolish Butes are.  When your father dies, Queen's Crawley will be a
pleasant house for you and me to pass the winter in.  If we are ruined,
you can carve and take charge of the stable, and I can be a governess
to Lady Jane's children.  Ruined! fiddlede-dee!  I will get you a good
place before that; or Pitt and his little boy will die, and we will be
Sir Rawdon and my lady.  While there is life, there is hope, my dear,
and I intend to make a man of you yet.  Who sold your horses for you?
Who paid your debts for you?" Rawdon was obliged to confess that he
owed all these benefits to his wife, and to trust himself to her
guidance for the future.

Indeed, when Miss Crawley quitted the world, and that money for which
all her relatives had been fighting so eagerly was finally left to
Pitt, Bute Crawley, who found that only five thousand pounds had been
left to him instead of the twenty upon which he calculated, was in such
a fury at his disappointment that he vented it in savage abuse upon his
nephew; and the quarrel always rankling between them ended in an utter
breach of intercourse.  Rawdon Crawley's conduct, on the other hand,
who got but a hundred pounds, was such as to astonish his brother and
delight his sister-in-law, who was disposed to look kindly upon all the
members of her husband's family.  He wrote to his brother a very frank,
manly, good-humoured letter from Paris.  He was aware, he said, that by
his own marriage he had forfeited his aunt's favour; and though he did
not disguise his disappointment that she should have been so entirely
relentless towards him, he was glad that the money was still kept in
their branch of the family, and heartily congratulated his brother on
his good fortune.  He sent his affectionate remembrances to his sister,
and hoped to have her good-will for Mrs. Rawdon; and the letter
concluded with a postscript to Pitt in the latter lady's own
handwriting.  She, too, begged to join in her husband's
congratulations.  She should ever remember Mr. Crawley's kindness to
her in early days when she was a friendless orphan, the instructress of
his little sisters, in whose welfare she still took the tenderest
interest.  She wished him every happiness in his married life, and,
asking his permission to offer her remembrances to Lady Jane (of whose
goodness all the world informed her), she hoped that one day she might
be allowed to present her little boy to his uncle and aunt, and begged
to bespeak for him their good-will and protection.

Pitt Crawley received this communication very graciously--more
graciously than Miss Crawley had received some of Rebecca's previous
compositions in Rawdon's handwriting; and as for Lady Jane, she was so
charmed with the letter that she expected her husband would instantly
divide his aunt's legacy into two equal portions and send off one-half
to his brother at Paris.

To her Ladyship's surprise, however, Pitt declined to accommodate his
brother with a cheque for thirty thousand pounds.  But he made Rawdon a
handsome offer of his hand whenever the latter should come to England
and choose to take it; and, thanking Mrs. Crawley for her good opinion
of himself and Lady Jane, he graciously pronounced his willingness to
take any opportunity to serve her little boy.

Thus an almost reconciliation was brought about between the brothers.
When Rebecca came to town Pitt and his wife were not in London.  Many a
time she drove by the old door in Park Lane to see whether they had
taken possession of Miss Crawley's house there. But the new family did
not make its appearance; it was only through Raggles that she heard of
their movements--how Miss Crawley's domestics had been dismissed with
decent gratuities, and how Mr. Pitt had only once made his appearance
in London, when he stopped for a few days at the house, did business
with his lawyers there, and sold off all Miss Crawley's French novels
to a bookseller out of Bond Street.  Becky had reasons of her own which
caused her to long for the arrival of her new relation. "When Lady Jane
comes," thought she, "she shall be my sponsor in London society; and as
for the women! bah! the women will ask me when they find the men want
to see me."

An article as necessary to a lady in this position as her brougham or
her bouquet is her companion.  I have always admired the way in which
the tender creatures, who cannot exist without sympathy, hire an
exceedingly plain friend of their own sex from whom they are almost
inseparable.  The sight of that inevitable woman in her faded gown
seated behind her dear friend in the opera-box, or occupying the back
seat of the barouche, is always a wholesome and moral one to me, as
jolly a reminder as that of the Death's-head which figured in the
repasts of Egyptian bon-vivants, a strange sardonic memorial of Vanity
Fair.  What? even battered, brazen, beautiful, conscienceless,
heartless, Mrs. Firebrace, whose father died of her shame:  even
lovely, daring Mrs. Mantrap, who will ride at any fence which any man
in England will take, and who drives her greys in the park, while her
mother keeps a huckster's stall in Bath still--even those who are so
bold, one might fancy they could face anything, dare not face the world
without a female friend.  They must have somebody to cling to, the
affectionate creatures!  And you will hardly see them in any public
place without a shabby companion in a dyed silk, sitting somewhere in
the shade close behind them.

"Rawdon," said Becky, very late one night, as a party of gentlemen were
seated round her crackling drawing-room fire (for the men came to her
house to finish the night; and she had ice and coffee for them, the
best in London):  "I must have a sheep-dog."

"A what?" said Rawdon, looking up from an ecarte table.

"A sheep-dog!" said young Lord Southdown.  "My dear Mrs. Crawley, what
a fancy!  Why not have a Danish dog? I know of one as big as a
camel-leopard, by Jove. It would almost pull your brougham.  Or a
Persian greyhound, eh? (I propose, if you please); or a little pug that
would go into one of Lord Steyne's snuff-boxes? There's a man at
Bayswater got one with such a nose that you might--I mark the king and
play--that you might hang your hat on it."

"I mark the trick," Rawdon gravely said.  He attended to his game
commonly and didn't much meddle with the conversation, except when it
was about horses and betting.

"What CAN you want with a shepherd's dog?" the lively little Southdown
continued.

"I mean a MORAL shepherd's dog," said Becky, laughing and looking up at
Lord Steyne.

"What the devil's that?" said his Lordship.

"A dog to keep the wolves off me," Rebecca continued. "A companion."

"Dear little innocent lamb, you want one," said the marquis; and his
jaw thrust out, and he began to grin hideously, his little eyes leering
towards Rebecca.

The great Lord of Steyne was standing by the fire sipping coffee. The
fire crackled and blazed pleasantly. There was a score of candles
sparkling round the mantel piece, in all sorts of quaint sconces, of
gilt and bronze and porcelain.  They lighted up Rebecca's figure to
admiration, as she sat on a sofa covered with a pattern of gaudy
flowers.  She was in a pink dress that looked as fresh as a rose; her
dazzling white arms and shoulders were half-covered with a thin hazy
scarf through which they sparkled; her hair hung in curls round her
neck; one of her little feet peeped out from the fresh crisp folds of
the silk:  the prettiest little foot in the prettiest little sandal in
the finest silk stocking in the world.

The candles lighted up Lord Steyne's shining bald head, which was
fringed with red hair.  He had thick bushy eyebrows, with little
twinkling bloodshot eyes, surrounded by a thousand wrinkles.  His jaw
was underhung, and when he laughed, two white buck-teeth protruded
themselves and glistened savagely in the midst of the grin. He had been
dining with royal personages, and wore his garter and ribbon.  A short
man was his Lordship, broad-chested and bow-legged, but proud of the
fineness of his foot and ankle, and always caressing his garter-knee.

"And so the shepherd is not enough," said he, "to defend his lambkin?"

"The shepherd is too fond of playing at cards and going to his clubs,"
answered Becky, laughing.

"'Gad, what a debauched Corydon!" said my lord--"what a mouth for a
pipe!"

"I take your three to two," here said Rawdon, at the card-table.

"Hark at Meliboeus," snarled the noble marquis; "he's pastorally
occupied too:  he's shearing a Southdown. What an innocent mutton, hey?
Damme, what a snowy fleece!"

Rebecca's eyes shot out gleams of scornful humour. "My lord," she said,
"you are a knight of the Order." He had the collar round his neck,
indeed--a gift of the restored princes of Spain.

Lord Steyne in early life had been notorious for his daring and his
success at play.  He had sat up two days and two nights with Mr. Fox at
hazard.  He had won money of the most august personages of the realm:
he had won his marquisate, it was said, at the gaming-table; but he did
not like an allusion to those bygone fredaines.  Rebecca saw the scowl
gathering over his heavy brow.

She rose up from her sofa and went and took his coffee cup out of his
hand with a little curtsey.  "Yes," she said, "I must get a watchdog.
But he won't bark at YOU." And, going into the other drawing-room, she
sat down to the piano and began to sing little French songs in such a
charming, thrilling voice that the mollified nobleman speedily followed
her into that chamber, and might be seen nodding his head and bowing
time over her.

Rawdon and his friend meanwhile played ecarte until they had enough.
The Colonel won; but, say that he won ever so much and often, nights
like these, which occurred many times in the week--his wife having all
the talk and all the admiration, and he sitting silent without the
circle, not comprehending a word of the jokes, the allusions, the
mystical language within--must have been rather wearisome to the
ex-dragoon.

"How is Mrs. Crawley's husband?" Lord Steyne used to say to him by way
of a good day when they met; and indeed that was now his avocation in
life.  He was Colonel Crawley no more.  He was Mrs. Crawley's husband.

About the little Rawdon, if nothing has been said all this while, it is
because he is hidden upstairs in a garret somewhere, or has crawled
below into the kitchen for companionship.  His mother scarcely ever
took notice of him.  He passed the days with his French bonne as long
as that domestic remained in Mr. Crawley's family, and when the
Frenchwoman went away, the little fellow, howling in the loneliness of
the night, had compassion taken on him by a housemaid, who took him out
of his solitary nursery into her bed in the garret hard by and
comforted him.

Rebecca, my Lord Steyne, and one or two more were in the drawing-room
taking tea after the opera, when this shouting was heard overhead.
"It's my cherub crying for his nurse," she said.  She did not offer to
move to go and see the child.  "Don't agitate your feelings by going to
look for him," said Lord Steyne sardonically. "Bah!" replied the other,
with a sort of blush, "he'll cry himself to sleep"; and they fell to
talking about the opera.

Rawdon had stolen off though, to look after his son and heir; and came
back to the company when he found that honest Dolly was consoling the
child.  The Colonel's dressing-room was in those upper regions.  He
used to see the boy there in private.  They had interviews together
every morning when he shaved; Rawdon minor sitting on a box by his
father's side and watching the operation with never-ceasing pleasure.
He and the sire were great friends. The father would bring him
sweetmeats from the dessert and hide them in a certain old epaulet box,
where the child went to seek them, and laughed with joy on discovering
the treasure; laughed, but not too loud:  for mamma was below asleep
and must not be disturbed.  She did not go to rest till very late and
seldom rose till after noon.

Rawdon bought the boy plenty of picture-books and crammed his nursery
with toys.  Its walls were covered with pictures pasted up by the
father's own hand and purchased by him for ready money.  When he was
off duty with Mrs. Rawdon in the park, he would sit up here, passing
hours with the boy; who rode on his chest, who pulled his great
mustachios as if they were driving-reins, and spent days with him in
indefatigable gambols.  The room was a low room, and once, when the
child was not five years old, his father, who was tossing him wildly up
in his arms, hit the poor little chap's skull so violently against the
ceiling that he almost dropped the child, so terrified was he at the
disaster.

Rawdon minor had made up his face for a tremendous howl--the severity
of the blow indeed authorized that indulgence; but just as he was going
to begin, the father interposed.

"For God's sake, Rawdy, don't wake Mamma," he cried.  And the child,
looking in a very hard and piteous way at his father, bit his lips,
clenched his hands, and didn't cry a bit.  Rawdon told that story at
the clubs, at the mess, to everybody in town.  "By Gad, sir," he
explained to the public in general, "what a good plucked one that boy
of mine is--what a trump he is!  I half-sent his head through the
ceiling, by Gad, and he wouldn't cry for fear of disturbing his mother."

Sometimes--once or twice in a week--that lady visited the upper regions
in which the child lived.  She came like a vivified figure out of the
Magasin des Modes--blandly smiling in the most beautiful new clothes
and little gloves and boots.  Wonderful scarfs, laces, and jewels
glittered about her.  She had always a new bonnet on, and flowers
bloomed perpetually in it, or else magnificent curling ostrich
feathers, soft and snowy as camellias.  She nodded twice or thrice
patronizingly to the little boy, who looked up from his dinner or from
the pictures of soldiers he was painting.  When she left the room, an
odour of rose, or some other magical fragrance, lingered about the
nursery. She was an unearthly being in his eyes, superior to his
father--to all the world:  to be worshipped and admired at a distance.
To drive with that lady in the carriage was an awful rite:  he sat up
in the back seat and did not dare to speak:  he gazed with all his eyes
at the beautifully dressed Princess opposite to him.  Gentlemen on
splendid prancing horses came up and smiled and talked with her. How
her eyes beamed upon all of them!  Her hand used to quiver and wave
gracefully as they passed.  When he went out with her he had his new
red dress on.  His old brown holland was good enough when he stayed at
home. Sometimes, when she was away, and Dolly his maid was making his
bed, he came into his mother's room.  It was as the abode of a fairy to
him--a mystic chamber of splendour and delights.  There in the wardrobe
hung those wonderful robes--pink and blue and many-tinted.  There was
the jewel-case, silver-clasped, and the wondrous bronze hand on the
dressing-table, glistening all over with a hundred rings.  There was
the cheval-glass, that miracle of art, in which he could just see his
own wondering head and the reflection of Dolly (queerly distorted, and
as if up in the ceiling), plumping and patting the pillows of the bed.
Oh, thou poor lonely little benighted boy! Mother is the name for God
in the lips and hearts of little children; and here was one who was
worshipping a stone!

Now Rawdon Crawley, rascal as the Colonel was, had certain manly
tendencies of affection in his heart and could love a child and a woman
still.  For Rawdon minor he had a great secret tenderness then, which
did not escape Rebecca, though she did not talk about it to her
husband.  It did not annoy her:  she was too good-natured. It only
increased her scorn for him.  He felt somehow ashamed of this paternal
softness and hid it from his wife--only indulging in it when alone with
the boy.

He used to take him out of mornings when they would go to the stables
together and to the park.  Little Lord Southdown, the best-natured of
men, who would make you a present of the hat from his head, and whose
main occupation in life was to buy knick-knacks that he might give them
away afterwards, bought the little chap a pony not much bigger than a
large rat, the donor said, and on this little black Shetland pygmy
young Rawdon's great father was pleased to mount the boy, and to walk
by his side in the park.  It pleased him to see his old quarters, and
his old fellow-guardsmen at Knightsbridge: he had begun to think of his
bachelorhood with something like regret.  The old troopers were glad to
recognize their ancient officer and dandle the little colonel. Colonel
Crawley found dining at mess and with his brother-officers very
pleasant. "Hang it, I ain't clever enough for her--I know it.  She
won't miss me," he used to say:  and he was right, his wife did not
miss him.

Rebecca was fond of her husband.  She was always perfectly good-humoured
and kind to him.  She did not even show her scorn much for
him; perhaps she liked him the better for being a fool.  He was her
upper servant and maitre d'hotel.  He went on her errands; obeyed her
orders without question; drove in the carriage in the ring with her
without repining; took her to the opera-box, solaced himself at his
club during the performance, and came punctually back to fetch her when
due.  He would have liked her to be a little fonder of the boy, but
even to that he reconciled himself.  "Hang it, you know she's so
clever," he said, "and I'm not literary and that, you know." For, as we
have said before, it requires no great wisdom to be able to win at
cards and billiards, and Rawdon made no pretensions to any other sort
of skill.

When the companion came, his domestic duties became very light.  His
wife encouraged him to dine abroad:  she would let him off duty at the
opera.  "Don't stay and stupefy yourself at home to-night, my dear,"
she would say.  "Some men are coming who will only bore you. I would
not ask them, but you know it's for your good, and now I have a
sheep-dog, I need not be afraid to be alone."

"A sheep-dog--a companion!  Becky Sharp with a companion!  Isn't it
good fun?" thought Mrs. Crawley to herself.  The notion tickled hugely
her sense of humour.

One Sunday morning, as Rawdon Crawley, his little son, and the pony
were taking their accustomed walk in the park, they passed by an old
acquaintance of the Colonel's, Corporal Clink, of the regiment, who was
in conversation with a friend, an old gentleman, who held a boy in his
arms about the age of little Rawdon.  This other youngster had seized
hold of the Waterloo medal which the Corporal wore, and was examining
it with delight.

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

"His father was a Waterloo man, too," said the old gentleman, who
carried the boy.  "Wasn't he, Georgy?"

"Yes," said Georgy.  He and the little chap on the pony were looking at
each other with all their might--solemnly scanning each other as
children do.

"In a line regiment," Clink said with a patronizing air.

"He was a Captain in the --th regiment," said the old gentleman rather
pompously.  "Captain George Osborne, sir--perhaps you knew him.  He
died the death of a hero, sir, fighting against the Corsican tyrant."
Colonel Crawley blushed quite red.  "I knew him very well, sir," he
said, "and his wife, his dear little wife, sir--how is she?"

"She is my daughter, sir," said the old gentleman, putting down the boy
and taking out a card with great solemnity, which he handed to the
Colonel.  On it written--

"Mr. Sedley, Sole Agent for the Black Diamond and Anti-Cinder Coal
Association, Bunker's Wharf, Thames Street, and Anna-Maria Cottages,
Fulham Road West."

Little Georgy went up and looked at the Shetland pony.

"Should you like to have a ride?" said Rawdon minor from the saddle.

"Yes," said Georgy.  The Colonel, who had been looking at him with some
interest, took up the child and put him on the pony behind Rawdon minor.

"Take hold of him, Georgy," he said--"take my little boy round the
waist--his name is Rawdon." And both the children began to laugh.

"You won't see a prettier pair I think, THIS summer's day, sir," said
the good-natured Corporal; and the Colonel, the Corporal, and old Mr.
Sedley with his umbrella, walked by the side of the children.



A Family in a Very Small Way

We must suppose little George Osborne has ridden from Knightsbridge
towards Fulham, and will stop and make inquiries at that village
regarding some friends whom we have left there.  How is Mrs. Amelia
after the storm of Waterloo? Is she living and thriving? What has come
of Major Dobbin, whose cab was always hankering about her premises? And
is there any news of the Collector of Boggley Wollah? The facts
concerning the latter are briefly these:

Our worthy fat friend Joseph Sedley returned to India not long after
his escape from Brussels.  Either his furlough was up, or he dreaded to
meet any witnesses of his Waterloo flight.  However it might be, he
went back to his duties in Bengal very soon after Napoleon had taken up
his residence at St.  Helena, where Jos saw the ex-Emperor. To hear Mr.
Sedley talk on board ship you would have supposed that it was not the
first time he and the Corsican had met, and that the civilian had
bearded the French General at Mount St.  John.  He had a thousand
anecdotes about the famous battles; he knew the position of every
regiment and the loss which each had incurred.  He did not deny that he
had been concerned in those victories--that he had been with the army
and carried despatches for the Duke of Wellington. And he described
what the Duke did and said on every conceivable moment of the day of
Waterloo, with such an accurate knowledge of his Grace's sentiments and
proceedings that it was clear he must have been by the conqueror's side
throughout the day; though, as a non-combatant, his name was not
mentioned in the public documents relative to the battle.  Perhaps he
actually worked himself up to believe that he had been engaged with the
army; certain it is that he made a prodigious sensation for some time
at Calcutta, and was called Waterloo Sedley during the whole of his
subsequent stay in Bengal.

The bills which Jos had given for the purchase of those unlucky horses
were paid without question by him and his agents.  He never was heard
to allude to the bargain, and nobody knows for a certainty what became
of the horses, or how he got rid of them, or of Isidor, his Belgian
servant, who sold a grey horse, very like the one which Jos rode, at
Valenciennes sometime during the autumn of 1815.

Jos's London agents had orders to pay one hundred and twenty pounds
yearly to his parents at Fulham.  It was the chief support of the old
couple; for Mr. Sedley's speculations in life subsequent to his
bankruptcy did not by any means retrieve the broken old gentleman's
fortune.  He tried to be a wine-merchant, a coal-merchant, a commission
lottery agent, &c., &c.  He sent round prospectuses to his friends
whenever he took a new trade, and ordered a new brass plate for the
door, and talked pompously about making his fortune still.  But Fortune
never came back to the feeble and stricken old man.  One by one his
friends dropped off, and were weary of buying dear coals and bad wine
from him; and there was only his wife in all the world who fancied,
when he tottered off to the City of a morning, that he was still doing
any business there.  At evening he crawled slowly back; and he used to
go of nights to a little club at a tavern, where he disposed of the
finances of the nation. It was wonderful to hear him talk about
millions, and agios, and discounts, and what Rothschild was doing, and
Baring Brothers.  He talked of such vast sums that the gentlemen of the
club (the apothecary, the undertaker, the great carpenter and builder,
the parish clerk, who was allowed to come stealthily, and Mr. Clapp,
our old acquaintance,) respected the old gentleman.  "I was better off
once, sir," he did not fail to tell everybody who "used the room." "My
son, sir, is at this minute chief magistrate of Ramgunge in the
Presidency of Bengal, and touching his four thousand rupees per mensem.
My daughter might be a Colonel's lady if she liked.  I might draw upon
my son, the first magistrate, sir, for two thousand pounds to-morrow,
and Alexander would cash my bill, down sir, down on the counter, sir.
But the Sedleys were always a proud family." You and I, my dear reader,
may drop into this condition one day: for have not many of our friends
attained it? Our luck may fail: our powers forsake us:  our place on
the boards be taken by better and younger mimes--the chance of life
roll away and leave us shattered and stranded.  Then men will walk
across the road when they meet you--or, worse still, hold you out a
couple of fingers and patronize you in a pitying way--then you will
know, as soon as your back is turned, that your friend begins with a
"Poor devil, what imprudences he has committed, what chances that chap
has thrown away!" Well, well--a carriage and three thousand a year is
not the summit of the reward nor the end of God's judgment of men.  If
quacks prosper as often as they go to the wall--if zanies succeed and
knaves arrive at fortune, and, vice versa, sharing ill luck and
prosperity for all the world like the ablest and most honest amongst
us--I say, brother, the gifts and pleasures of Vanity Fair cannot be
held of any great account, and that it is probable . . . but we are
wandering out of the domain of the story.

Had Mrs. Sedley been a woman of energy, she would have exerted it after
her husband's ruin and, occupying a large house, would have taken in
boarders.  The broken Sedley would have acted well as the
boarding-house landlady's husband; the Munoz of private life; the
titular lord and master:  the carver, house-steward, and humble husband
of the occupier of the dingy throne.  I have seen men of good brains
and breeding, and of good hopes and vigour once, who feasted squires
and kept hunters in their youth, meekly cutting up legs of mutton for
rancorous old harridans and pretending to preside over their dreary
tables--but Mrs. Sedley, we say, had not spirit enough to bustle about
for "a few select inmates to join a cheerful musical family," such as
one reads of in the Times.  She was content to lie on the shore where
fortune had stranded her--and you could see that the career of this old
couple was over.

I don't think they were unhappy.  Perhaps they were a little prouder in
their downfall than in their prosperity. Mrs. Sedley was always a great
person for her landlady, Mrs. Clapp, when she descended and passed many
hours with her in the basement or ornamented kitchen. The Irish maid
Betty Flanagan's bonnets and ribbons, her sauciness, her idleness, her
reckless prodigality of kitchen candles, her consumption of tea and
sugar, and so forth occupied and amused the old lady almost as much as
the doings of her former household, when she had Sambo and the
coachman, and a groom, and a footboy, and a housekeeper with a regiment
of female domestics--her former household, about which the good lady
talked a hundred times a day. And besides Betty Flanagan, Mrs. Sedley
had all the maids-of-all-work in the street to superintend. She knew
how each tenant of the cottages paid or owed his little rent.  She
stepped aside when Mrs. Rougemont the actress passed with her dubious
family.  She flung up her head when Mrs. Pestler, the apothecary's
lady, drove by in her husband's professional one-horse chaise.  She had
colloquies with the greengrocer about the pennorth of turnips which Mr.
Sedley loved; she kept an eye upon the milkman and the baker's boy; and
made visitations to the butcher, who sold hundreds of oxen very likely
with less ado than was made about Mrs. Sedley's loin of mutton:  and
she counted the potatoes under the joint on Sundays, on which days,
dressed in her best, she went to church twice and read Blair's Sermons
in the evening.

On that day, for "business" prevented him on weekdays from taking such
a pleasure, it was old Sedley's delight to take out his little grandson
Georgy to the neighbouring parks or Kensington Gardens, to see the
soldiers or to feed the ducks.  Georgy loved the redcoats, and his
grandpapa told him how his father had been a famous soldier, and
introduced him to many sergeants and others with Waterloo medals on
their breasts, to whom the old grandfather pompously presented the
child as the son of Captain Osborne of the --th, who died gloriously on
the glorious eighteenth.  He has been known to treat some of these
non-commissioned gentlemen to a glass of porter, and, indeed, in their
first Sunday walks was disposed to spoil little Georgy, sadly gorging
the boy with apples and parliament, to the detriment of his
health--until Amelia declared that George should never go out with his
grandpapa unless the latter promised solemnly, and on his honour, not
to give the child any cakes, lollipops, or stall produce whatever.

Between Mrs. Sedley and her daughter there was a sort of coolness about
this boy, and a secret jealousy--for one evening in George's very early
days, Amelia, who had been seated at work in their little parlour
scarcely remarking that the old lady had quitted the room, ran upstairs
instinctively to the nursery at the cries of the child, who had been
asleep until that moment--and there found Mrs. Sedley in the act of
surreptitiously administering Daffy's Elixir to the infant.  Amelia,
the gentlest and sweetest of everyday mortals, when she found this
meddling with her maternal authority, thrilled and trembled all over
with anger.  Her cheeks, ordinarily pale, now flushed up, until they
were as red as they used to be when she was a child of twelve years
old.  She seized the baby out of her mother's arms and then grasped at
the bottle, leaving the old lady gaping at her, furious, and holding
the guilty tea-spoon.

Amelia flung the bottle crashing into the fire-place. "I will NOT have
baby poisoned, Mamma," cried Emmy, rocking the infant about violently
with both her arms round him and turning with flashing eyes at her
mother.

"Poisoned, Amelia!" said the old lady; "this language to me?"

"He shall not have any medicine but that which Mr. Pestler sends for
him.  He told me that Daffy's Elixir was poison."

"Very good:  you think I'm a murderess then," replied Mrs. Sedley.
"This is the language you use to your mother. I have met with
misfortunes:  I have sunk low in life:  I have kept my carriage, and
now walk on foot:  but I did not know I was a murderess before, and
thank you for the NEWS."

"Mamma," said the poor girl, who was always ready for tears--"you
shouldn't be hard upon me.  I--I didn't mean--I mean, I did not wish to
say you would do any wrong to this dear child, only--"

"Oh, no, my love,--only that I was a murderess; in which case I had
better go to the Old Bailey.  Though I didn't poison YOU, when you were
a child, but gave you the best of education and the most expensive
masters money could procure.  Yes; I've nursed five children and buried
three; and the one I loved the best of all, and tended through croup,
and teething, and measles, and hooping-cough, and brought up with
foreign masters, regardless of expense, and with accomplishments at
Minerva House--which I never had when I was a girl--when I was too glad
to honour my father and mother, that I might live long in the land, and
to be useful, and not to mope all day in my room and act the fine
lady--says I'm a murderess.  Ah, Mrs. Osborne! may YOU never nourish a
viper in your bosom, that's MY prayer."

"Mamma, Mamma!" cried the bewildered girl; and the child in her arms
set up a frantic chorus of shouts. "A murderess, indeed!  Go down on
your knees and pray to God to cleanse your wicked ungrateful heart,
Amelia, and may He forgive you as I do." And Mrs. Sedley tossed out of
the room, hissing out the word poison once more, and so ending her
charitable benediction.

Till the termination of her natural life, this breach between Mrs.
Sedley and her daughter was never thoroughly mended.  The quarrel gave
the elder lady numberless advantages which she did not fail to turn to
account with female ingenuity and perseverance.  For instance, she
scarcely spoke to Amelia for many weeks afterwards. She warned the
domestics not to touch the child, as Mrs. Osborne might be offended.
She asked her daughter to see and satisfy herself that there was no
poison prepared in the little daily messes that were concocted for
Georgy. When neighbours asked after the boy's health, she referred them
pointedly to Mrs. Osborne.  SHE never ventured to ask whether the baby
was well or not.  SHE would not touch the child although he was her
grandson, and own precious darling, for she was not USED to children,
and might kill it.  And whenever Mr. Pestler came upon his healing
inquisition, she received the doctor with such a sarcastic and scornful
demeanour, as made the surgeon declare that not Lady Thistlewood
herself, whom he had the honour of attending professionally, could give
herself greater airs than old Mrs. Sedley, from whom he never took a
fee.  And very likely Emmy was jealous too, upon her own part, as what
mother is not, of those who would manage her children for her, or
become candidates for the first place in their affections.  It is
certain that when anybody nursed the child, she was uneasy, and that
she would no more allow Mrs. Clapp or the domestic to dress or tend him
than she would have let them wash her husband's miniature which hung up
over her little bed--the same little bed from which the poor girl had
gone to his; and to which she retired now for many long, silent,
tearful, but happy years.

In this room was all Amelia's heart and treasure.  Here it was that she
tended her boy and watched him through the many ills of childhood, with
a constant passion of love.  The elder George returned in him somehow,
only improved, and as if come back from heaven.  In a hundred little
tones, looks, and movements, the child was so like his father that the
widow's heart thrilled as she held him to it; and he would often ask
the cause of her tears.  It was because of his likeness to his father,
she did not scruple to tell him.  She talked constantly to him about
this dead father, and spoke of her love for George to the innocent and
wondering child; much more than she ever had done to George himself, or
to any confidante of her youth.  To her parents she never talked about
this matter, shrinking from baring her heart to them.  Little George
very likely could understand no better than they, but into his ears she
poured her sentimental secrets unreservedly, and into his only.  The
very joy of this woman was a sort of grief, or so tender, at least,
that its expression was tears.  Her sensibilities were so weak and
tremulous that perhaps they ought not to be talked about in a book. I
was told by Dr. Pestler (now a most flourishing lady's physician, with
a sumptuous dark green carriage, a prospect of speedy knighthood, and a
house in Manchester Square) that her grief at weaning the child was a
sight that would have unmanned a Herod.  He was very soft-hearted many
years ago, and his wife was mortally jealous of Mrs. Amelia, then and
long afterwards.

Perhaps the doctor's lady had good reason for her jealousy:  most women
shared it, of those who formed the small circle of Amelia's
acquaintance, and were quite angry at the enthusiasm with which the
other sex regarded her.  For almost all men who came near her loved
her; though no doubt they would be at a loss to tell you why.  She was
not brilliant, nor witty, nor wise over much, nor extraordinarily
handsome.  But wherever she went she touched and charmed every one of
the male sex, as invariably as she awakened the scorn and incredulity
of her own sisterhood.  I think it was her weakness which was her
principal charm--a kind of sweet submission and softness, which seemed
to appeal to each man she met for his sympathy and protection.  We have
seen how in the regiment, though she spoke but to few of George's
comrades there, all the swords of the young fellows at the mess-table
would have leapt from their scabbards to fight round her; and so it was
in the little narrow lodging-house and circle at Fulham, she interested
and pleased everybody.  If she had been Mrs. Mango herself, of the
great house of Mango, Plantain, and Co., Crutched Friars, and the
magnificent proprietress of the Pineries, Fulham, who gave summer
dejeuners frequented by Dukes and Earls, and drove about the parish
with magnificent yellow liveries and bay horses, such as the royal
stables at Kensington themselves could not turn out--I say had she been
Mrs. Mango herself, or her son's wife, Lady Mary Mango (daughter of the
Earl of Castlemouldy, who condescended to marry the head of the firm),
the tradesmen of the neighbourhood could not pay her more honour than
they invariably showed to the gentle young widow, when she passed by
their doors, or made her humble purchases at their shops.

Thus it was not only Mr. Pestler, the medical man, but Mr. Linton the
young assistant, who doctored the servant maids and small tradesmen,
and might be seen any day reading the Times in the surgery, who openly
declared himself the slave of Mrs. Osborne.  He was a personable young
gentleman, more welcome at Mrs. Sedley's lodgings than his principal;
and if anything went wrong with Georgy, he would drop in twice or
thrice in the day to see the little chap, and without so much as the
thought of a fee.  He would abstract lozenges, tamarinds, and other
produce from the surgery-drawers for little Georgy's benefit, and
compounded draughts and mixtures for him of miraculous sweetness, so
that it was quite a pleasure to the child to be ailing.  He and
Pestler, his chief, sat up two whole nights by the boy in that
momentous and awful week when Georgy had the measles; and when you
would have thought, from the mother's terror, that there had never been
measles in the world before. Would they have done as much for other
people? Did they sit up for the folks at the Pineries, when Ralph
Plantagenet, and Gwendoline, and Guinever Mango had the same juvenile
complaint? Did they sit up for little Mary Clapp, the landlord's
daughter, who actually caught the disease of little Georgy? Truth
compels one to say, no. They slept quite undisturbed, at least as far
as she was concerned--pronounced hers to be a slight case, which would
almost cure itself, sent her in a draught or two, and threw in bark
when the child rallied, with perfect indifference, and just for form's
sake.

Again, there was the little French chevalier opposite, who gave lessons
in his native tongue at various schools in the neighbourhood, and who
might be heard in his apartment of nights playing tremulous old
gavottes and minuets on a wheezy old fiddle. Whenever this powdered and
courteous old man, who never missed a Sunday at the convent chapel at
Hammersmith, and who was in all respects, thoughts, conduct, and
bearing utterly unlike the bearded savages of his nation, who curse
perfidious Albion, and scowl at you from over their cigars, in the
Quadrant arcades at the present day--whenever the old Chevalier de
Talonrouge spoke of Mistress Osborne, he would first finish his pinch
of snuff, flick away the remaining particles of dust with a graceful
wave of his hand, gather up his fingers again into a bunch, and,
bringing them up to his mouth, blow them open with a kiss, exclaiming,
Ah! la divine creature!  He vowed and protested that when Amelia walked
in the Brompton Lanes flowers grew in profusion under her feet.  He
called little Georgy Cupid, and asked him news of Venus, his mamma; and
told the astonished Betty Flanagan that she was one of the Graces, and
the favourite attendant of the Reine des Amours.

Instances might be multiplied of this easily gained and unconscious
popularity.  Did not Mr. Binny, the mild and genteel curate of the
district chapel, which the family attended, call assiduously upon the
widow, dandle the little boy on his knee, and offer to teach him Latin,
to the anger of the elderly virgin, his sister, who kept house for him?
"There is nothing in her, Beilby," the latter lady would say.  "When
she comes to tea here she does not speak a word during the whole
evening.  She is but a poor lackadaisical creature, and it is my belief
has no heart at all.  It is only her pretty face which all you
gentlemen admire so.  Miss Grits, who has five thousand pounds, and
expectations besides, has twice as much character, and is a thousand
times more agreeable to my taste; and if she were good-looking I know
that you would think her perfection."

Very likely Miss Binny was right to a great extent.  It IS the pretty
face which creates sympathy in the hearts of men, those wicked rogues.
A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no
heed to her, if she has a plain face.  What folly will not a pair of
bright eyes make pardonable? What dulness may not red lips and sweet
accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice,
ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool.
O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor
wise.

These are but trivial incidents to recount in the life of our heroine.
Her tale does not deal in wonders, as the gentle reader has already no
doubt perceived; and if a journal had been kept of her proceedings
during the seven years after the birth of her son, there would be found
few incidents more remarkable in it than that of the measles, recorded
in the foregoing page.  Yes, one day, and greatly to her wonder, the
Reverend Mr. Binny, just mentioned, asked her to change her name of
Osborne for his own; when, with deep blushes and tears in her eyes and
voice, she thanked him for his regard for her, expressed gratitude for
his attentions to her and to her poor little boy, but said that she
never, never could think of any but--but the husband whom she had lost.

On the twenty-fifth of April, and the eighteenth of June, the days of
marriage and widowhood, she kept her room entirely, consecrating them
(and we do not know how many hours of solitary night-thought, her
little boy sleeping in his crib by her bedside) to the memory of that
departed friend.  During the day she was more active. She had to teach
George to read and to write and a little to draw.  She read books, in
order that she might tell him stories from them.  As his eyes opened
and his mind expanded under the influence of the outward nature round
about him, she taught the child, to the best of her humble power, to
acknowledge the Maker of all, and every night and every morning he and
she--(in that awful and touching communion which I think must bring a
thrill to the heart of every man who witnesses or who remembers
it)--the mother and the little boy--prayed to Our Father together, the
mother pleading with all her gentle heart, the child lisping after her
as she spoke.  And each time they prayed to God to bless dear Papa, as
if he were alive and in the room with them.  To wash and dress this
young gentleman--to take him for a run of the mornings, before
breakfast, and the retreat of grandpapa for "business"--to make for him
the most wonderful and ingenious dresses, for which end the thrifty
widow cut up and altered every available little bit of finery which she
possessed out of her wardrobe during her marriage--for Mrs. Osborne
herself (greatly to her mother's vexation, who preferred fine clothes,
especially since her misfortunes) always wore a black gown and a straw
bonnet with a black ribbon--occupied her many hours of the day.  Others
she had to spare, at the service of her mother and her old father.  She
had taken the pains to learn, and used to play cribbage with this
gentleman on the nights when he did not go to his club.  She sang for
him when he was so minded, and it was a good sign, for he invariably
fell into a comfortable sleep during the music.  She wrote out his
numerous memorials, letters, prospectuses, and projects.  It was in her
handwriting that most of the old gentleman's former acquaintances were
informed that he had become an agent for the Black Diamond and
Anti-Cinder Coal Company and could supply his friends and the public
with the best coals at --s. per chaldron.  All he did was to sign the
circulars with his flourish and signature, and direct them in a shaky,
clerklike hand.  One of these papers was sent to Major Dobbin,--Regt.,
care of Messrs.  Cox and Greenwood; but the Major being in Madras at
the time, had no particular call for coals.  He knew, though, the hand
which had written the prospectus.  Good God! what would he not have
given to hold it in his own!  A second prospectus came out, informing
the Major that J.  Sedley and Company, having established agencies at
Oporto, Bordeaux, and St.  Mary's, were enabled to offer to their
friends and the public generally the finest and most celebrated growths
of ports, sherries, and claret wines at reasonable prices and under
extraordinary advantages. Acting upon this hint, Dobbin furiously
canvassed the governor, the commander-in-chief, the judges, the
regiments, and everybody whom he knew in the Presidency, and sent home
to Sedley and Co.  orders for wine which perfectly astonished Mr.
Sedley and Mr. Clapp, who was the Co.  in the business.  But no more
orders came after that first burst of good fortune, on which poor old
Sedley was about to build a house in the City, a regiment of clerks, a
dock to himself, and correspondents all over the world.  The old
gentleman's former taste in wine had gone:  the curses of the mess-room
assailed Major Dobbin for the vile drinks he had been the means of
introducing there; and he bought back a great quantity of the wine and
sold it at public outcry, at an enormous loss to himself. As for Jos,
who was by this time promoted to a seat at the Revenue Board at
Calcutta, he was wild with rage when the post brought him out a bundle
of these Bacchanalian prospectuses, with a private note from his
father, telling Jos that his senior counted upon him in this
enterprise, and had consigned a quantity of select wines to him, as per
invoice, drawing bills upon him for the amount of the same.  Jos, who
would no more have it supposed that his father, Jos Sedley's father, of
the Board of Revenue, was a wine merchant asking for orders, than that
he was Jack Ketch, refused the bills with scorn, wrote back
contumeliously to the old gentleman, bidding him to mind his own
affairs; and the protested paper coming back, Sedley and Co.  had to
take it up, with the profits which they had made out of the Madras
venture, and with a little portion of Emmy's savings.

Besides her pension of fifty pounds a year, there had been five hundred
pounds, as her husband's executor stated, left in the agent's hands at
the time of Osborne's demise, which sum, as George's guardian, Dobbin
proposed to put out at 8 per cent in an Indian house of agency.  Mr.
Sedley, who thought the Major had some roguish intentions of his own
about the money, was strongly against this plan; and he went to the
agents to protest personally against the employment of the money in
question, when he learned, to his surprise, that there had been no such
sum in their hands, that all the late Captain's assets did not amount
to a hundred pounds, and that the five hundred pounds in question must
be a separate sum, of which Major Dobbin knew the particulars. More
than ever convinced that there was some roguery, old Sedley pursued the
Major.  As his daughter's nearest friend, he demanded with a high hand
a statement of the late Captain's accounts.  Dobbin's stammering,
blushing, and awkwardness added to the other's convictions that he had
a rogue to deal with, and in a majestic tone he told that officer a
piece of his mind, as he called it, simply stating his belief that the
Major was unlawfully detaining his late son-in-law's money.

Dobbin at this lost all patience, and if his accuser had not been so
old and so broken, a quarrel might have ensued between them at the
Slaughters' Coffee-house, in a box of which place of entertainment the
gentlemen had their colloquy.  "Come upstairs, sir," lisped out the
Major.  "I insist on your coming up the stairs, and I will show which
is the injured party, poor George or I"; and, dragging the old
gentleman up to his bedroom, he produced from his desk Osborne's
accounts, and a bundle of IOU's which the latter had given, who, to do
him justice, was always ready to give an IOU.  "He paid his bills in
England," Dobbin added, "but he had not a hundred pounds in the world
when he fell.  I and one or two of his brother officers made up the
little sum, which was all that we could spare, and you dare tell us
that we are trying to cheat the widow and the orphan." Sedley was very
contrite and humbled, though the fact is that William Dobbin had told a
great falsehood to the old gentleman; having himself given every
shilling of the money, having buried his friend, and paid all the fees
and charges incident upon the calamity and removal of poor Amelia.

About these expenses old Osborne had never given himself any trouble to
think, nor any other relative of Amelia, nor Amelia herself, indeed.
She trusted to Major Dobbin as an accountant, took his somewhat
confused calculations for granted, and never once suspected how much
she was in his debt.

Twice or thrice in the year, according to her promise, she wrote him
letters to Madras, letters all about little Georgy.  How he treasured
these papers!  Whenever Amelia wrote he answered, and not until then.
But he sent over endless remembrances of himself to his godson and to
her.  He ordered and sent a box of scarfs and a grand ivory set of
chess-men from China.  The pawns were little green and white men, with
real swords and shields; the knights were on horseback, the castles
were on the backs of elephants.  "Mrs. Mango's own set at the Pineries
was not so fine," Mr. Pestler remarked.  These chess-men were the
delight of Georgy's life, who printed his first letter in
acknowledgement of this gift of his godpapa.  He sent over preserves
and pickles, which latter the young gentleman tried surreptitiously in
the sideboard and half-killed himself with eating.  He thought it was a
judgement upon him for stealing, they were so hot.  Emmy wrote a
comical little account of this mishap to the Major:  it pleased him to
think that her spirits were rallying and that she could be merry
sometimes now.  He sent over a pair of shawls, a white one for her and
a black one with palm-leaves for her mother, and a pair of red scarfs,
as winter wrappers, for old Mr. Sedley and George. The shawls were
worth fifty guineas apiece at the very least, as Mrs. Sedley knew.  She
wore hers in state at church at Brompton, and was congratulated by her
female friends upon the splendid acquisition.  Emmy's, too, became
prettily her modest black gown.  "What a pity it is she won't think of
him!" Mrs. Sedley remarked to Mrs. Clapp and to all her friends of
Brompton.  "Jos never sent us such presents, I am sure, and grudges us
everything.  It is evident that the Major is over head and ears in love
with her; and yet, whenever I so much as hint it, she turns red and
begins to cry and goes and sits upstairs with her miniature.  I'm sick
of that miniature.  I wish we had never seen those odious purse-proud
Osbornes."

Amidst such humble scenes and associates George's early youth was
passed, and the boy grew up delicate, sensitive, imperious,
woman-bred--domineering the gentle mother whom he loved with passionate
affection.  He ruled all the rest of the little world round about him.
As he grew, the elders were amazed at his haughty manner and his
constant likeness to his father.  He asked questions about everything,
as inquiring youth will do.  The profundity of his remarks and
interrogatories astonished his old grandfather, who perfectly bored the
club at the tavern with stories about the little lad's learning and
genius.  He suffered his grandmother with a good-humoured
indifference.  The small circle round about him believed that the equal
of the boy did not exist upon the earth.  Georgy inherited his father's
pride, and perhaps thought they were not wrong.

When he grew to be about six years old, Dobbin began to write to him
very much.  The Major wanted to hear that Georgy was going to a school
and hoped he would acquit himself with credit there:  or would he have
a good tutor at home? It was time that he should begin to learn; and
his godfather and guardian hinted that he hoped to be allowed to defray
the charges of the boy's education, which would fall heavily upon his
mother's straitened income.  The Major, in a word, was always thinking
about Amelia and her little boy, and by orders to his agents kept the
latter provided with picture-books, paint-boxes, desks, and all
conceivable implements of amusement and instruction.  Three days before
George's sixth birthday a gentleman in a gig, accompanied by a servant,
drove up to Mr. Sedley's house and asked to see Master George Osborne:
it was Mr. Woolsey, military tailor, of Conduit Street, who came at the
Major's order to measure the young gentleman for a suit of clothes.  He
had had the honour of making for the Captain, the young gentleman's
father. Sometimes, too, and by the Major's desire no doubt, his
sisters, the Misses Dobbin, would call in the family carriage to take
Amelia and the little boy to drive if they were so inclined.  The
patronage and kindness of these ladies was very uncomfortable to
Amelia, but she bore it meekly enough, for her nature was to yield;
and, besides, the carriage and its splendours gave little Georgy
immense pleasure. The ladies begged occasionally that the child might
pass a day with them, and he was always glad to go to that fine
garden-house at Denmark Hill, where they lived, and where there were
such fine grapes in the hot-houses and peaches on the walls.

One day they kindly came over to Amelia with news which they were SURE
would delight her--something VERY interesting about their dear William.

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

"Oh, no--not the least--but they had very good reason to believe that
dear William was about to be married--and to a relation of a very dear
friend of Amelia's--to Miss Glorvina O'Dowd, Sir Michael O'Dowd's
sister, who had gone out to join Lady O'Dowd at Madras--a very
beautiful and accomplished girl, everybody said."

Amelia said "Oh!" Amelia was very VERY happy indeed. But she supposed
Glorvina could not be like her old acquaintance, who was most
kind--but--but she was very happy indeed.  And by some impulse of which
I cannot explain the meaning, she took George in her arms and kissed
him with an extraordinary tenderness.  Her eyes were quite moist when
she put the child down; and she scarcely spoke a word during the whole
of the drive--though she was so very happy indeed.



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.

 Rawdon and Rebecca live in a mansion that belonged to the Crawleys' former butler, Mr. Raggles, who they extort and eventually drive to financial ruin. Becky again works her way up in society. She becomes quite popular with many of the noblemen, including Lord Styne. Aunt Matilda finally dies. She leaves 5000 pounds to the Bute Crawleys, only 100 pounds to Rawdon, and the rest to Young Pitt. Becky encourages her husband to make amends with her brother, and she is convinced that Lady Jane will be her ticket into society. Lady Jane does in fact encourage Young Pitt to give half of the inheritance to his brother, but he refuses. While Rawdon and little Rawdon are walking in the park, they notice a man with a child about little Rawdon's age. They discover that this is in fact John Sedley and his grandson, Georgy. The two boys become fast friends. The story turns back to Jos, Amelia, the Sedleys and Dobbin. Jos decides not to return to London, perhaps because he is ashamed of his flight from Waterloo. He returns to India instead, where he spins numerous tales about his adventures in the Battle of Waterloo. He sends 120 pounds to his family every year, which is their only means of support. John Sedley is not working, but he is doing everything he can to get back his job in the stock market. Dobbin helps Mr. Sedley promote his wine business but ends up buying most of the wine. Amelia is so obsessed with her son that she is totally oblivious to all the men who are falling in love with her. She receives many proposals, but she refuses them all, still mourning her beloved George. All this time, Dobbin has been taking care of her. He paid for her living accommodations in Belgium and now in London, and he sends gifts constantly. He arranged George's funeral and burial, and he even fabricated a 500 pounds inheritance from George. John Sedley, suspicious, questions Dobbin about this, and Dobbin confesses that George died debt-ridden, but he maintains that the money is not from him but in fact pooled by a group of George's close friends. Amelia's family tries to convince her that Dobbin is in love with her, but she refuses to discuss the matter. The Osborne daughters visit her at one point to tell her that Dobbin is getting married to Glorvina O'Dowd. She claims to be happy about this news, but to her surprise, she finds that she is tearing up. This chapter returns to the story of the Crawleys. Sir Pitt has fallen into complete ruin. He has let his mistress, Ms. Horrocks, take over the estate. She has made new appointments, and he dresses her up in his dead wife's clothing. He will not allow her to take the jewelry, however. Mrs. Bute, meanwhile, is panicked about the meager portion of the inheritance that she received. She has four daughters she has to marry off, and she was hoping for the entire 30,000 pounds. She visits Sir Pitt one day only to find Ms. Horrocks rummaging through his things, trying to steal the jewelry he denies her. Mrs. Bute runs her off, threatening to have her arrested. By this time, Sir Pitt has become ill from his excessive drinking, and Mrs. Bute and Young Pitt decide to stay with him. He never recovers, and passes away, leaving Young Pitt in control of the estate. Rebecca and Rawdon receive the news of Sir Pitt's death, and the new Sir Pitt invites them to the funeral. Lady Southdown is opposed to this maneuver, since Becky is involved, but since she has nowhere else to live, she is forced to deal with the arrangement. Rawdon is not excited about the visit, since it will cost them money to go back and forth, but Becky is excited about the prospects such a visit might offer. She fantasizes about getting Sir Pitt's seat in Parliament for Rawdon and about the advancement in society it might earn her. Meanwhile, the author notes that Ms. Briggs, Aunt Matilda's former servant, has come to live with Rawdon and Rebecca. She has given them much of her life savings, and they have promised to invest it. She remains at home with little Rawdon while they go off to the funeral. Lady Jane and Becky get along, and Lady Southdown is predictably cool towards the couple. Becky tries to warm up Lady Southdown by telling her that she is ill so that the Lady will share with her some of her medicines. Becky and Lady Jane were earlier speaking about her obsession with medications, and Lady Jane confessed that she feels they all might be better off without them. Becky agrees to take one of Lady Southdown's concoctions. Before Becky and Rawdon leave, Lady Jane offers them many gifts for little Rawdon. Pitt notices that Rawdon's marriage has made him a better person, so he offers to pay for little Rawdon's education. Becky begins, for the first time, to regret her lifestyle, wishing she had the means to pay back all the people that she owes. Mr. Osborne has become more and more bitter over time. He treats his daughters extremely poorly. He negotiates aggressively the marriage between his daughter Maria and Mr. Bullocks. Mr. Bullocks originally says he won't marry Maria unless she receives half of her father's fortune. Maria ends up despising her father for this and does not want him in her home. His daughter Jane has secretly been seeing her art tutor, Mr. Smee. Mr. Osborne finds out about the affair, and he is enraged. He fires the artist and tells Jane that she is never to see the man again. Further, she is not allowed to have any relationships at all, and she must grow up alone, watching over the house with her father. Dobbin tries desperately to restore the relationship between Mr. Osborne and his grandson and daughter-in-law. So he sends his sisters to visit with the Osborne women. He encourages Amelia to send Georgy out with them, and reluctantly she listens to his advice. She grows more jealous over his impending marriage. Jane, charmed by Georgy, remarks to her father that he looks just like George. Mr. Osborne is extremely shaken by the comment.

