Vanity Fair (73 page)

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 carnage 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 in stances 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.