Vanity Fair (64 page)

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 penwigs. 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 Crawlers 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 under-stand 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.