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 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.
CHAPTER XLII
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
