e had never yet
invited him to stay under her roof, and here was a young
whipper-snapper, who at first sight was made welcome
there.

"I beg your pardon, sir," says Bowls, advancing with a
profound bow; "what otel, sir, shall Thomas fetch the
luggage from?"

"O, dam," said young James, starting up, as if in some
alarm, "I'll go."

"What!" said Miss Crawley.

"The Tom Cribb's Arms," said James, blushing deeply.

Miss Crawley burst out laughing at this title.  Mr.
Bowls gave one abrupt guffaw, as a confidential servant
of the family, but choked the rest of the volley; the
diplomatist only smiled.

"I--I didn't know any better," said James, looking down.
"I've never been here before; it was the coachman told
me." The young story-teller!  The fact is, that on the
Southampton coach, the day previous, James Crawley had
met the Tutbury Pet, who was coming to Brighton to
make a match with the Rottingdean Fibber; and enchanted
by the Pet's conversation, had passed the evening in
company with that scientific man and his friends, at the inn
in question.

"I--I'd best go and settle the score," James continued.
"Couldn't think of asking you, Ma'am," he added,
generously.

This delicacy made his aunt laugh the more.

"Go and settle the bill, Bowls," she said, with a wave of
her hand, "and bring it to me."

Poor lady, she did not know what she had done!  "There
--there's a little dawg," said James, looking frightfully
guilty.  "I'd best go for him.  He bites footmen's calves."

All the party cried out with laughing at this description;
even Briggs and Lady Jane, who was sitting mute
during the interview between Miss Crawley and her
nephew:  and Bowls, without a word, quitted the room.

Still, by way of punishing her elder nephew, Miss
Crawley persisted in being gracious to the young Oxonian.
There were no limits to her kindness or her compliments
when they once began.  She told Pitt he might come to
dinner, and insisted that James should accompany her
in her drive, and paraded him solemnly up and down the
cliff, on the back seat of the barouche.  During all this
excursion, she condescended to say civil things to him:
she quoted Italian and French poetry to the poor
bewildered lad, and persisted that he was a fine scholar,
and was perfectly sure he would gain a gold medal, and
be a Senior Wrangler.

"Haw, haw," laughed James, encouraged by these
compliments; "Senior Wrangler, indeed; that's at the other
shop."

"What is the other shop, my dear child?" said the lady.

"Senior Wranglers at Cambridge, not Oxford," said the
scholar, with a knowing air; and would probably have
been more confidential, but that suddenly there
appeared on the cliff in a tax-cart, drawn by a bang-up
pony, dressed in white flannel coats, with mother-of-pearl
buttons, his friends the Tutbury Pet and the Rottingdean
Fibber, with three other gentlemen of their acquaintance,
who all saluted poor James there in the carriage as he
sate.  This incident damped the ingenuous youth's spirits,
and no word of yea or nay could he be induced to utter
during the rest of the drive.

On his return he found his room prepared, and his
portmanteau ready, and might have remarked that Mr.
Bowls's countenance, when the latter conducted him to
his apartments, wore a look of gravity, wonder, and
compassion.  But the thought of Mr. Bowls did not enter
his head.  He was deploring the dreadful predicament
in which he found himself, in a house full of old women,
jabbering French and Italian, and talking poetry to him.
"Reglarly up a tree, by jingo!" exclaimed the modest
boy, who could not face the gentlest of her sex--not
even Briggs--when she began to talk to him; whereas,
put him at Iffley Lock, and he could out-slang the
boldest bargeman.

At dinner, James appeared choking in a white
neckcloth, and had the honour of handing my Lady Jane
downstairs, while Briggs and Mr. Crawley followed
afterwards, conducting the old lady, with her apparatus of
bundles, and shawls, and cushions.  Half of Briggs's time
at dinner was spent in superintending the invalid's
comfort, and in cutting up chicken for her fat spaniel.  James
did not talk much, but he made a point of asking all
the ladies to drink wine, and accepted Mr. Crawley's
challenge, and consumed the greater part of a bottle of
champagne which Mr. Bowls was ordered to produce in
his honour.  The ladies having withdrawn, and the two
cousins being left together, Pitt, the ex-diplomatist, be
came very communicative and friendly.  He asked after
James's career at college--what his prospects in life
were--hoped heartily he would get on; and, in a word,
was frank and amiable.  James's tongue unloosed with
the port, and he told his cousin his life, his prospects,
his debts, his troubles at the little-go, and his rows with
the proctors, filling rapidly from the bottles before him,
and flying from Port to Madeira with joyous activity.

"The chief pleasure which my aunt has," said Mr.
Crawley, filling his glass, "is that people should do as they
like in her house.  This is Liberty Hall, James, and you
can't do Miss Crawley a greater kindness than to do
as you please, and ask for what you will.  I know you
have all sneered at me in the country for being a Tory.
Miss Crawley is liberal enough to suit any fancy.  She
is a Republican in principle, and despises everything like
rank or title."

"Why are you going to marry an Earl's daughter?"
said James.

"My dear friend, remember it is not poor Lady Jane's
fault that she is well born," Pitt replied, with a courtly
air.  "She cannot help being a lady.  Besides, I am a
Tory, you know."

"Oh, as for that," said Jim, "there's nothing like old
blood; no, dammy, nothing like it.  I'm none of your
radicals.  I know what it is to be a gentleman, dammy.
See the chaps in a boat-race; look at the fellers in a
fight; aye, look at a dawg killing rats--which is it wins?
the good-blooded ones.  Get some more port, Bowls, old
boy, whilst I buzz this bottle-here.  What was I asaying?"

"I think you were speaking of dogs killing rats," Pitt
remarked mildly, handing his cousin the decanter to
"buzz.~

"Killing rats was I? Well, Pitt, are you a sporting
man? Do you want to see a dawg as CAN kill a rat?
If you do, come down with me to Tom Corduroy's, in
Castle Street Mews, and I'll show you such a bull-terrier
as--Pooh! gammon," cried James, bursting out laughing
at his own absurdity--"YOU don't care about a dawg
or rat; it's all nonsense.  I'm blest if I think you know
the difference between a dog and a duck."

"No; by the way," Pitt continued with increased blandness,
"it was about blood you were talking, and the
personal advantages which people derive from patrician
birth.  Here's the fresh bottle."

"Blood's the word," said James, gulping the ruby fluid
down.  "Nothing like blood, sir, in hosses, dawgs, AND
men.  Why, only last term, just before I was rusticated,
that is, I mean just before I had the measles, ha, ha--there
was me and Ringwood of Christchurch, Bob Ringwood,
Lord Cinqbars' son, having our beer at the Bell at
Blenheim, when the Banbury bargeman offered to fight either
of us for a bowl of punch.  I couldn't.  My arm was in a
sling; couldn't even take the drag down--a brute of a
mare of mine had fell with me only two days before,
out with the Abingdon, and I thought my arm was broke.
Well, sir, I couldn't finish him, but Bob had his coat
off at once--he stood up to the Banbury man for three
minutes, and polished him off in four rounds easy.  Gad,
how he did drop, sir, and what was it? Blood, sir, all
blood."

"You don't drink, James," the ex-attache continued.
"In my time at Oxford, the men passed round the bottle
a little quicker than you young fellows seem to do."

"Come, come," said James, putting his hand to his
nose and winking at his cousin with a pair of vinous
eyes, "no jokes, old boy; no trying it on on me.  You
want to trot me out, but it's no go.  In vino veritas, old
boy.  Mars, Bacchus, Apollo virorum, hey? I wish my
aunt would send down some of this to the governor; it's
a precious good tap."

"You had better ask her," Machiavel continued, "or
make the best of your time now.  What says the bard?
'Nunc vino pellite curas, Cras ingens iterabimus aequor,' "
and the Bacchanalian, quoting the above with a House
of Commons air, tossed off nearly a thimbleful of wine
with an immense flourish of his glass.

At the Rectory, when the bottle of port wine was
opened after dinner, the young ladies had each a glass
from a bottle of currant wine.  Mrs. Bute took one glass
of port, honest James had a couple commonly, but as
his father grew very sulky if he made further inroads
on the bottle, the good lad generally refrained from
trying for more, and subsided either into the currant wine,
or to some private gin-and-water in the stables, which
he enjoyed in the company of the coachman and his
pipe.  At Oxford, the quantity of wine was unlimited,
but the quality was inferior:  but when quantity and
quality united as at his aunt's house, James showed that
he could appreciate them indeed; and hardly needed any
of his cousin's encouragement in draining off the
second bottle supplied by Mr. Bowls.

When the time for coffee came, however, and for a
return to the ladies, of whom he stood in awe, the young
gentleman's agreeable frankness left him, and he relapsed
into his usual surly timidity; contenting himself by
saying yes and no, by scowling at Lady Jane, and by
upsetting one cup of coffee during the evening.

If he did not speak he yawned in a pitiable manner,
and his presence threw a damp upon the modest
proceedings of the evening, for Miss Crawley and Lady Jane
at their piquet, and Miss Briggs at her work, felt that
his eyes were wildly fixed on them, and were uneasy
under that maudlin look.

"He seems a very silent, awkward, bashful lad," said
Miss Crawley to Mr. Pitt.

"He is more communicative in men's society than with
ladies," Machiavel dryly replied:  perhaps rather
disappointed that the port wine had not made Jim
speak more.

He had spent the early part of the next morning in
writing home to his mother a most flourishing account
of his reception by Miss Crawley.  But ah! he little knew
what evils the day was bringing for him, and how short his
reign of favour was destined to be.  A circumstance
which Jim had forgotten--a trivial but fatal circumstance
--had taken place at the Cribb's Arms on the night
before he had come to his aunt's house.  It was no other
than this--Jim, who was always of a generous disposition,
and when in his cups especially hospitable, had in the
course of the night treated the Tutbury champion and
the Rottingdean man, and their friends, twice or thrice
to the refreshment of gin-and-water--so that no less than
eighteen glasses of that fluid at eightpence per glass were
charged in Mr. James Crawley's bill.  It was not the
amount of eightpences, but the quantity of gin which
told fatally against poor James's character, when his
aunt's butler, Mr. Bowls, went down at his mistress's
request to pay the young gentleman's bill.  The landlord,
fearing lest the account should be refused altogether,
swore solemnly that the young gent had consumed
personally every farthing's worth of the liquor:  and Bowls
paid the bill finally, and showed it on his return home
to Mrs. Firkin, who was shocked at the frightful
prodigality of gin; and took the bill to Miss Briggs as
accountant-general; who thought it her duty to mention
the circumstance to her principal, Miss Crawley.

Had he drunk a dozen bottles of claret, the old
spinster could have pardoned him.  Mr. Fox and Mr.
Sheridan drank claret.  Gentlemen drank claret.  But eighteen
glasses of gin consumed among boxers in an ignoble
pot-house--it was an odious crime and not to be
pardoned readily.  Everything went against the lad:  he came
home perfumed from the stables, whither he had been
to pay his dog Towzer a visit--and whence he was
going to take his friend out for an airing, when he met
Miss Crawley and her wheezy Blenheim spaniel, which
Towzer would have eaten up had not the Blenheim fled
squealing to the protection of Miss Briggs, while the
atrocious master of the bull-dog stood laughing at the
horrible persecution.

This day too the unlucky boy's modesty had likewise
forsaken him.  He was lively and facetious at dinner.
During the repast he levelled one or two jokes against Pitt
Crawley:  he drank as much wine as upon the previous
day; and going quite unsuspiciously to the drawing-room,
began to entertain the ladies there with some choice
Oxford stories.  He described the different pugilistic qualities
of Molyneux and Dutch Sam, offered playfully to give
Lady Jane the odds upon the Tutbury Pet against the
Rottingdean man, or take them, as her Ladyship chose:
and crowned the pleasantry by proposing to back
himself against his cousin Pitt Crawley, either with or without
the gloves.  "And that's a fair offer, my buck," he said,
with a loud laugh, slapping Pitt on the shoulder, "and
my father told me to make it too, and he'll go halves
in the bet, ha, ha!" So saying, the engaging youth nodded
knowingly at poor Miss Briggs, and pointed his thumb
over his shoulder at Pitt Crawley in a jocular and
exulting manner.

Pitt was not pleased altogether perhaps, but still not
unhappy in the main.  Poor Jim had his laugh out:  and
staggered across the room with his aunt's candle, when
the old lady moved to retire, and offered to salute her
with the blandest tipsy smile:  and he took his own leave
and went upstairs to his bedroom perfectly satisfied with
himself, and with a pleased notion that his aunt's money
would be left to him in preference to his father and all
the rest of the family.

Once up in the bedroom, one would have thought he
could not make matters worse; and yet this unlucky boy
did.  The moon was shining very pleasantly out on the
sea, and Jim, attracted to the window by the romantic
appearance of the ocean and the heavens, thought he
would further enjoy them while smoking.  Nobody would
smell the tobacco, he thought, if he cunningly opened
the window and kept his head and pipe in the fresh air.
This he did:  but being in an excited state, poor Jim
had forgotten that his door was open all this time, so
that the breeze blowing inwards and a fine thorough
draught being established, the clouds of tobacco were
carried downstairs, and arrived with quite undiminished
fragrance to Miss Crawley and Miss Briggs.

The pipe of tobacco finished the business:  and the
Bute-Crawleys never knew how many thousand pounds
it cost them.  Firkin rushed downstairs to Bowls who
was reading out the "Fire and the Frying Pan" to his
aide-de-camp in a loud and ghostly voice.  The dreadful
secret was told to him by Firkin with so frightened a look,
that for the first moment Mr. Bowls and his young man
thought that robbers were in the house, the legs of whom
had probably been discovered by the woman under Miss
Crawley's bed.  When made aware of the fact, however
--to rush upstairs at three steps at a time to enter
the unconscious James's apartment, calling out, "Mr.
James," in a voice stifled with alarm, and to cry, "For
Gawd's sake, sir, stop that 'ere pipe," was the work of
a minute with Mr. Bowls.  "O, Mr. James, what 'AVE you
done!" he said in a voice of the deepest pathos, as he
threw the implement out of the window.  "What 'ave you
done, sir!  Missis can't abide 'em."

"Missis needn't smoke," said James with a frantic
misplaced laugh, and thought the whole matter an excellent
joke.  But his feelings were very different in the morning,
when Mr. Bowls's young man, who operated upon Mr.
James's boots, and brought him his hot water to shave
that beard which he was so anxiously expecting, handed
a note in to Mr. James in bed, in the handwriting of
Miss Briggs.

"Dear sir," it said, "Miss Crawley has passed an
exceedingly disturbed night, owing to the shocking manner
in which the house has been polluted by tobacco; Miss
Crawley bids me say she regrets that she is too unwell
to see you before you go--and above all that she ever
induced you to remove from the ale-house, where she is
sure you will be much more comfortable during the rest
of your stay at Brighton."

And herewith honest James's career as a candidate for
his aunt's favour ended.  He had in fact, and without
knowing it, done what he menaced to do.  He had fought
his cousin Pitt with the gloves.

Where meanwhile was he who had been once first
favourite for this race for money? Becky and Rawdon,
as we have seen, were come together after Waterloo,
and were passing the winter of 1815 at Paris in great
splendour and gaiety.  Rebecca was a good economist,
and the price poor Jos Sedley had paid for her two
horses was in itself sufficient to keep their little
establishment afloat for a year, at the least; there was no
occasion to turn into money "my pistols, the same which
I shot Captain Marker," or the gold dressing-case, or
the cloak lined with sable.  Becky had it made into a
pelisse for herself, in which she rode in the Bois de
Boulogne to the admiration of all:  and you should have
seen the scene between her and her delighted husband,
whom she rejoined after the army had entered Cambray,
and when she unsewed herself, and let out of her dress
all those watches, knick-knacks, bank-notes, cheques, and
valuables, which she had secreted in the wadding, previous
to her meditated flight from Brussels!  Tufto was charmed,
and Rawdon roared with delighted laughter, and swore
that she was better than any play he ever saw, by Jove.
And the way in which she jockeyed Jos, and which
she described with infinite fun, carried up his delight to
a pitch of quite insane enthusiasm.  He believed in his
wife as much as the French soldiers in Napoleon.

Her success in Paris was remarkable.  All the French
ladies voted her charming.  She spoke their language
admirably.  She adopted at once their grace, their liveliness,
their manner.  Her husband was stupid certainly--all
English are stupid--and, besides, a dull husband at Paris is
always a point in a lady's favour.  He was the heir of the
rich and spirituelle Miss Crawley, whose house had been
open to so many of the French noblesse during the
emigration.  They received the colonel's wife in their own
hotels--"Why," wrote a great lady to Miss Crawley, who
had bought her lace and trinkets at the Duchess's own
price, and given her many a dinner during the pinching
times after the Revolution--"Why does not our dear Miss
come to her nephew and niece, and her attached friends
in Paris? All the world raffoles of the charming Mistress
and her espiegle beauty.  Yes, we see in her the grace,
the charm, the wit of our dear friend Miss Crawley!
The King took notice of her yesterday at the Tuileries,
and we are all jealous of the attention which Monsieur
pays her.  If you could have seen the spite of a certain
stupid Miladi Bareacres (whose eagle-beak and toque
and feat,hers may be seen peering over the heads of all
assemblies) when Madame, the Duchess of Angouleme,
the august daughter and companion of kings, desired
especially to be presented to Mrs. Crawley, as your dear
daughter and protegee, and thanked her in the name
of France, for all your benevolence towards our
unfortunates during their exile!  She is of all the societies,
of all the balls--of the balls--yes--of the dances, no;
and yet how interesting and pretty this fair creature looks
surrounded by the homage of the men, and so soon to
be a mother!  To hear her speak of you, her protectress,
her mother, would bring tears to the eyes of ogres.  How
she loves you! how we all love our admirable, our
respectable Miss Crawley!"

It is to be feared that this letter of the Parisian great
lady did not by any means advance Mrs. Becky's interest
with her admirable, her respectable, relative.  On the
contrary, the fury of the old spinster was beyond bounds,
when she found what was Rebecca's situation, and how
audaciously she had made use of Miss Crawley's name,
to get an entree into Parisian society.  Too much shaken
in mind and body to compose a letter in the French
language in reply to that of her correspondent, she
dictated to Briggs a furious answer in her own native tongue,
repudiating Mrs. Rawdon Crawley altogether, and warning
the public to beware of her as a most artful and
dangerous person.  But as Madame the Duchess of X--
had only been twenty years in England, she did not
understand a single word of the language, and contented
herself by informing Mrs. Rawdon Crawley at their next
meeting, that she had received a charming letter from
that chere Mees, and that it was full of benevolent
things for Mrs. Crawley, who began seriously to have
hopes that the spinster would relent.

Meanwhile, she was the gayest and most admired of
Englishwomen:  and had a little European congress on her
reception-night.  Prussians and Cossacks, Spanish and
English--all the world was at Paris during this famous
winter:  to have seen the stars and cordons in Rebecca's
humble saloon would have made all Baker Street pale
with envy.  Famous warriors rode by her carriage in
the Bois, or crowded her modest little box at the Opera.
Rawdon was in the highest spirits.  There were no duns
in Paris as yet:  there were parties every day at Very's
or Beauvilliers'; play was plentiful and his luck good.
Tufto perhaps was sulky.  Mrs. Tufto had come over to
Paris at her own invitation, and besides this
contretemps, there were a score of generals now round
Becky's chair, and she might take her choice of a dozen
bouquets when she went to the play.  Lady Bareacres
and the chiefs of the English society, stupid and
irreproachable females, writhed with anguish at the
success of the little upstart Becky, whose poisoned jokes
quivered and rankled in their chaste breasts.  But she
had all the men on her side.  She fought the women
with indomitable courage, and they could not talk
scandal in any tongue but their own.

So in fetes, pleasures, and prosperity, the winter of
1815-16 passed away with Mrs. Rawdon Crawley,
who accommodated herself to polite life as if her
ancestors had been people of fashion for centuries past--
and who from her wit, talent, and energy, indeed merited
a place of honour in Vanity Fair.  In the early spring of
1816, Galignani's Journal contained the following
announcement in an interesting corner of the paper:  "On
the 26th of March--the Lady of Lieutenant-Colonel
Crawley, of the Life Guards Green--of a son and heir."

This event was copied into the London papers, out of
which Miss Briggs read the statement to Miss Crawley,
at breakfast, at Brighton.  The intelligence, expected as
it might have been, caused a crisis in the affairs of
the Crawley family.  The spinster's rage rose to its height,
and sending instantly for Pitt, her nephew, and for the
Lady Southdown, from Brunswick Square, she requested
an immediate celebration of the marriage which had been
so long pending between the two families.  And she
announced that it was her intention to allow the young
couple a thousand a year during her lifetime, at the
expiration of which the bulk of her property would be
settled upon her nephew and her dear niece, Lady Jane
Crawley.  Waxy came down to ratify the deeds--Lord
Southdown gave away his sister--she was married by a
Bishop, and not by the Rev.  Bartholomew Irons--to the
disappointment of the irregular prelate.

When they were married, Pitt would have liked to
take a hymeneal tour with his bride, as became people
of their condition.  But the affection of the old lady
towards Lady Jane had grown so strong, that she fairly
owned she could not part with her favourite.  Pitt and
his wife came therefore and lived with Miss Crawley:
and (greatly to the annoyance of poor Pitt, who
conceived himself a most injured character--being subject
to the humours of his aunt on one side, and of his
mother-in-law on the other) Lady Southdown, from her
neighbouring house, reigned over the whole family--
Pitt, Lady Jane, Miss Crawley, Briggs, Bowls, Firkin, and
all.  She pitilessly dosed them with her tracts and her
medicine, she dismissed Creamer, she installed Rodgers,
and soon stripped Miss Crawley of even the semblance
of authority.  The poor soul grew so timid that she
actually left off bullying Briggs any more, and clung to
her niece, more fond and terrified every day.  Peace to
thee, kind and selfish, vain and generous old heathen!--
We shall see thee no more.  Let us hope that Lady Jane
supported her kindly, and led her with gentle hand out
of the busy struggle of Vanity Fair.




CHAPTER XXXV


Widow and Mother

The news of the great fights of Quatre Bras and Waterloo
reached England at the same time.  The Gazette first
published the result of the two battles; at which glorious
intelligence all England thrilled with triumph and fear.
Particulars then followed; and after the announcement of
the victories came the list of the wounded and the slain.
Who can tell the dread with which that catalogue was
opened and read!  Fancy, at every village and homestead
almost through the three kingdoms, the great news
coming of the battles in Flanders, and the feelings of
exultation and gratitude, bereavement and sickening dismay,
when the lists of the regimental losses were gone through,
and it became known whether the dear friend and relative
had escaped or fallen.  Anybody who will take the trouble
of looking back to a file of the newspapers of the
time, must, even now, feel at second-hand this breathless
pause of expectation.  The lists of casualties are carried
on from day to day:  you stop in the midst as in a story
which is to be continued in our next.  Think what the
feelings must have been as those papers followed each
other fresh from the press; and if such an interest could
be felt in our country, and about a battle where but
twenty thousand of our people were engaged, think of
the condition of Europe for twenty years before, where
people were fighting, not by thousands, but by millions;
each one of whom as he struck his enemy wounded
horribly some other innocent heart far away.

The news which that famous Gazette brought to the
Osbornes gave a dreadful shock to the family and its chief.
The girls indulged unrestrained in their grief.  The
gloom-stricken old father was still more borne down by his fate
and sorrow.  He strove to think that a judgment was on
the boy for his disobedience.  He dared not own that the
severity of the sentence frightened him, and that its
fulfilment had come too soon upon his curses.  Sometimes a
shuddering terror struck him, as if he had been the author
of the doom which he had called down on his son.  There
was a chance before of reconciliation.  The boy's wife
might have died; or he might have come back and said,
Father I have sinned.  But there was no hope now.  He
stood on the other side of the gulf impassable, haunting
his parent with sad eyes.  He remembered them once
before so in a fever, when every one thought the lad was
dying, and he lay on his bed speechless, and gazing with a
dreadful gloom.  Good God! how the father clung to the
doctor then, and with what a sickening anxiety he
followed him:  what a weight of grief was off his mind when,
after the crisis of the fever, the lad recovered, and looked
at his father once more with eyes that recognised him.
But now there was no help or cure, or chance of
reconcilement:  above all, there were no humble words to
soothe vanity outraged and furious, or bring to its natural
flow the poisoned, angry blood.  And it is hard to say
which pang it was that tore the proud father's heart most
keenly--that his son should have gone out of the reach
of his forgiveness, or that the apology which his own
pride expected should have escaped him.

Whatever his sensations might have been, however, the
stem old man would have no confidant.  He never
mentioned his son's name to his daughters; but ordered the
elder to place all the females of the establishment in
mourning; and desired that the male servants should be
similarly attired in deep black.  All parties and entertainments,
of course, were to be put off.  No communications
were made to his future son-in-law, whose marriage-day
had been fixed:  but there was enough in Mr. Osborne's
appearance to prevent Mr. Bullock from making any
inquiries, or in any way pressing forward that ceremony.
He and the ladies whispered about it under their voices
in the drawing-room sometimes, whither the father never
came.  He remained constantly in his own study; the
whole front part of the house being closed until some
time after the completion of the general mourning.

About three weeks after the 18th of June, Mr.
Osborne's acquaintance, Sir William Dobbin, called at Mr.
Osborne's house in Russell Square, with a very pale and
agitated face, and insisted upon seeing that gentleman.
Ushered into his room, and after a few words, which
neither the speaker nor the host understood, the former
produced from an inclosure a letter sealed with a large
red seal.  "My son, Major Dobbin," the Alderman said,
with some hesitation, "despatched me a letter by an
officer of the --th, who arrived in town to-day.  My son's
letter contains one for you, Osborne." The Alderman
placed the letter on the table, and Osborne stared at him
for a moment or two in silence.  His looks frightened the
ambassador, who after looking guiltily for a little time at
the grief-stricken man, hurried away without another
word.

The letter was in George's well-known bold handwriting.
It was that one which he had written before daybreak
on the 16th of June, and just before he took leave
of Amelia.  The great red seal was emblazoned with the
sham coat of arms which Osborne had assumed from
the Peerage, with "Pax in bello" for a motto; that of the
ducal house with which the vain old man tried to fancy
himself connected.  The hand that signed it would never
hold pen or sword more.  The very seal that sealed it
had been robbed from George's dead body as it lay on the
field of battle.  The father knew nothing of this, but sat and
looked at the letter in terrified vacancy.  He almost fell
when he went to open it.

Have you ever had a difference with a dear friend?
How his letters, written in the period of love and
confidence, sicken and rebuke you!  What a dreary mourning
it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of dead
affection!  What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of
love!  What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities!
Most of us have got or written drawers full of them.
They are closet-skeletons which we keep and shun.
Osborne trembled long before the letter from his dead
son.

The poor boy's letter did not say much.  He had been
too proud to acknowledge the tenderness which his heart
felt.  He only said, that on the eve of a great battle, he
wished to bid his father farewell, and solemnly to implore
his good offices for the wife--it might be for the child--
whom he left behind him.  He owned with contrition that
his irregularities and his extravagance had already wasted
a large part of his mother's little fortune.  He thanked his
father for his former generous conduct; and he promised
him that if he fell on the field or survived it, he would
act in a manner worthy of the name of George Osborne.

His English habit, pride, awkwardness perhaps, had
prevented him from saying more.  His father could not
see the kiss George had placed on the superscription of
his letter.  Mr. Osborne dropped it with the bitterest,
deadliest pang of balked affection and revenge.  His son
was still beloved and unforgiven.

About two months afterwards, however, as the young
ladies of the family went to church with their father, they
remarked how he took a different seat from that which
he usually occupied when he chose to attend divine
worship; and that from his cushion opposite, he looked up at
the wall over their heads.  This caused the young women
likewise to gaze in the direction towards which their
father's gloomy eyes pointed:  and they saw an elaborate
monument upon the wall, where Britannia was represented
weeping over an urn, and a broken sword and a
couchant lion indicated that the piece of sculpture had
been erected in honour of a deceased warrior.  The
sculptors of those days had stocks of such funereal
emblems in hand; as you may see still on the walls of St.
Paul's, which are covered with hundreds of these
braggart heathen allegories.  There was a constant demand
for them during the first fifteen years of the present
century.

Under the memorial in question were emblazoned the
well-known and pompous Osborne arms; and the
inscription said, that the monument was "Sacred to the
memory of George Osborne, Junior, Esq., late a Captain
in his Majesty's --th regiment of foot, who fell on the
18th of June, 1815, aged 28 years, while fighting for his
king and country in the glorious victory of Waterloo.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

The sight of that stone agitated the nerves of the
sisters so much, that Miss Maria was compelled to leave
the church.  The congregation made way respectfully for
those sobbing girls clothed in deep black, and pitied the
stern old father seated opposite the memorial of the dead
soldier.  "Will he forgive Mrs. George?" the girls said to
themselves as soon as their ebullition of grief was over.
Much conversation passed too among the acquaintances
of the Osborne family, who knew of the rupture between
the son and father caused by the former's marriage, as
to the chance of a reconciliation with the young widow.
There were bets among the gentlemen both about Russell
Square and in the City.

If the sisters had any anxiety regarding the possible
recognition of Amelia as a daughter of the family, it
was increased presently, and towards the end of the
autumn, by their father's announcement that he was going
abroad.  He did not say whither, but they knew at once
that his steps would be turned towards Belgium, and were
aware that George's widow was still in Brussels.  They
had pretty accurate news indeed of poor Amelia from
Lady Dobbin and her daughters.  Our honest Captain had
been promoted in consequence of the death of the second
Major of the regiment on the field; and the brave O'Dowd,
who had distinguished himself greatly here as upon all
occasions where he had a chance to show his coolness
and valour, was a Colonel and Companion of the Bath.

Very many of the brave --th, who had suffered
severely upon both days of action, were still at Brussels
in the autumn, recovering of their wounds.  The city was
a vast military hospital for months after the great battles;
and as men and officers began to rally from their hurts,
the gardens and places of public resort swarmed with
maimed warriors, old and young, who, just rescued out of
death, fell to gambling, and gaiety, and love-making, as
people of Vanity Fair will do.  Mr. Osborne found out
some of the --th easily.  He knew their uniform quite
well, and had been used to follow all the promotions and
exchanges in the regiment, and loved to talk about it and
its officers as if he had been one of the number.  On the
day after his arrival at Brussels, and as he issued from
his hotel, which faced the park, he saw a soldier in the
well-known facings, reposing on a stone bench in the
garden, and went and sate down trembling by the
wounded convalescent man.

"Were you in Captain Osborne's company?" he said,
and added, after a pause, "he was my son, sir."

The man was not of the Captain's company, but he
lifted up his unwounded arm and touched-his cap sadly
and respectfully to the haggard broken-spirited gentleman
who questioned him.  "The whole army didn't contain
a finer or a better officer," the soldier said.  "The Sergeant
of the Captain's company (Captain Raymond had it
now), was in town, though, and was just well of a shot
in the shoulder.  His honour might see him if he liked,
who could tell him anything he wanted to know about--
about the --th's actions.  But his honour had seen
Major Dobbin, no doubt, the brave Captain's great
friend; and Mrs. Osborne, who was here too, and had
been very bad, he heard everybody say.  They say she
was out of her mind like for six weeks or more.  But your
honour knows all about that--and asking your pardon"
--the man added.

Osborne put a guinea into the soldier's hand, and told
him he should have another if he would bring the Sergeant
to the Hotel du Parc; a promise which very soon
brought the desired officer to Mr. Osborne's presence.
And the first soldier went away; and after telling a
comrade or two how Captain Osborne's father was arrived,
and what a free-handed generous gentleman he was, they
went and made good cheer with drink and feasting, as
long as the guineas lasted which had come from the
proud purse of the mourning old father.

In the Sergeant's company, who was also just convalescent,
Osborne made the journey of Waterloo and
Quatre Bras, a journey which thousands of his countrymen
were then taking.  He took the Sergeant with him in
his carriage, and went through both fields under his
guidance.  He saw the point of the road where the regiment
marched into action on the 16th, and the slope down
which they drove the French cavalry who were pressing
on the retreating Belgians.  There was the spot where the
noble Captain cut down the French officer who was
grappling with the young Ensign for the colours, the
Colour-Sergeants having been shot down.  Along this road
they retreated on the next day, and here was the bank
at which the regiment bivouacked under the rain of the
night of the seventeenth.  Further on was the position
which they took and held during the day, forming time
after time to receive the charge of the enemy's horsemen
and lying down under the shelter of the bank from the
furious French cannonade.  And it was at this declivity
when at evening the whole English line received the order
to advance, as the enemy fell back after his last charge,
that the Captain, hurraying and rushing down the hill
waving his sword, received a shot and fell dead.  "It was
Major Dobbin who took back the Captain's body to
Brussels," the Sergeant said, in a low voice, "and had him
buried, as your honour knows." The peasants and relic-
hunters about the place were screaming round the pair,
as the soldier told his story, offering for sale all sorts of
mementoes of the fight, crosses, and epaulets, and
shattered cuirasses, and eagles.

Osborne gave a sumptuous reward to the Sergeant
when he parted with him, after having visited the scenes
of his son's last exploits.  His burial-place he had already
seen.  Indeed, he had driven thither immediately after his
arrival at Brussels.  George's body lay in the pretty burial-
ground of Laeken, near the city; in which place, having
once visited it on a party of pleasure, he had lightly
expressed a wish to have his grave made.  And there the
young officer was laid by his friend, in the unconsecrated
corner of the garden, separated by a little hedge from
the temples and towers and plantations of flowers and
shrubs, under which the Roman Catholic dead repose.  It
seemed a humiliation to old Osborne to think that his
son, an English gentleman, a captain in the famous British
army, should not be found worthy to lie in ground where
mere foreigners were buried.  Which of us is there can
tell how much vanity lurks in our warmest regard for
others, and how selfish our love is? Old Osborne did
not speculate much upon the mingled nature of his feelings,
and how his instinct and selfishness were combating
together.  He firmly believed that everything he did was
right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way
--and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred
rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like
opposition.  He was proud of his hatred as of everything
else.  Always to be right, always to trample forward, and
never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with
which dullness takes the lead in the world?

As after the drive to Waterloo, Mr. Osborne's carriage
was nearing the gates of the city at sunset, they met
another open barouche, in which were a couple of ladies
and a gentleman, and by the side of which an officer was
riding.  Osborne gave a start back, and the Sergeant,
seated with him, cast a look of surprise at his neighbour,
as he touched his cap to the officer, who mechanically
returned his salute.  It was Amelia, with the lame young
Ensign by her side, and opposite to her her faithful
friend Mrs. O'Dowd.  It was Amelia, but how changed
from the fresh and comely girl Osborne knew.  Her face
was white and thin.  Her pretty brown hair was parted
under a widow's cap--the poor child.  Her eyes were
fixed, and looking nowhere.  They stared blank in the
face of Osborne, as the carriages crossed each other, but
she did not know him; nor did he recognise her, until
looking up, he saw Dobbin riding by her:  and then he
knew who it was.  He hated her.  He did not know how
much until he saw her there.  When her carriage had
passed on, he turned and stared at the Sergeant, with a
curse and defiance in his eye cast at his companion, who
could not help looking at him--as much as to say "How
dare you look at me? Damn you!  I do hate her.  It is she
who has tumbled my hopes and all my pride down."
"Tell the scoundrel to drive on quick," he shouted with
an oath, to the lackey on the box.  A minute afterwards, a
horse came clattering over the pavement behind
Osborne's carriage, and Dobbin rode up.  His thoughts
had been elsewhere as the carriages passed each other,
and it was not until he had ridden some paces forward,
that he remembered it was Osborne who had just passed
him.  Then he turned to examine if the sight of her father-
in-law had made any impression on Amelia, but the poor
girl did not know who had passed.  Then William, who
daily used to accompany her in his drives, taking out his
watch, made some excuse about an engagement which he
suddenly recollected, and so rode off.  She did not
remark that either:  but sate looking before her, over the
homely landscape towards the woods in the distance, by
which George marched away.

Mr. Osborne, Mr. Osborne!" cried Dobbin, as he rode
up and held out his hand.  Osborne made no motion to
take it, but shouted out once more and with another curse
to his servant to drive on.

Dobbin laid his hand on the carriage side.  "I will see
you, sir," he said.  "I have a message for you."

"From that woman?" said Osborne, fiercely.

"No," replied the other, "from your son"; at which
Osborne fell back into the corner of his carriage, and
Dobbin allowing it to pass on, rode close behind it, and
so through the town until they reached Mr. Osborne's
hotel, and without a word.  There he followed Osborne
up to his apartments.  George had often been in the
rooms; they were the lodgings which the Crawleys had
occupied during their stay in Brussels.

"Pray, have you any commands for me, Captain
Dobbin, or, I beg your pardon, I should say MAJOR Dobbin,
since better men than you are dead, and you step into
their SHOES?" said Mr. Osborne, in that sarcastic tone
which he sometimes was pleased to assume.

"Better men ARE dead," Dobbin replied.  "I want to
speak to you about one."

"Make it short, sir," said the other with an oath,
scowling at his visitor.

"I am here as his closest friend," the Major resumed,
"and the executor of his will.  He made it before he went
into action.  Are you aware how small his means are,
and of the straitened circumstances of his widow?"

"I don't know his widow, sir," Osborne said.  "Let her
go back to her father." But the gentleman whom he
addressed was determined to remain in good temper, and
went on without heeding the interruption.

"Do you know, sir, Mrs. Osborne's condition? Her life
and her reason almost have been shaken by the blow
which has fallen on her.  It is very doubtful whether she
will rally.  There is a chance left for her, however, and it
is about this I came to speak to you.  She will be a mother
soon.  Will you visit the parent's offence upon the child's
head? or will you forgive the child for poor George's
sake?"

Osborne broke out into a rhapsody of self-praise and
imprecations;--by the first, excusing himself to his own
conscience for his conduct; by the second, exaggerating
the undutifulness of George.  No father in all England
could have behaved more generously to a son, who had
rebelled against him wickedly.  He had died without even
so much as confessing he was wrong.  Let him take
the consequences of his undutifulness and folly.  As for
himself, Mr. Osborne, he was a man of his word.  He
had sworn never to speak to that woman, or to recognize
her as his son's wife.  "And that's what you may tell
her," he concluded with an oath; "and that's what I will
stick to to the last day of my life."

There was no hope from that quarter then.  The widow
must live on her slender pittance, or on such aid as Jos
could give her.  "I might tell her, and she would not heed
it," thought Dobbin, sadly:  for the poor girl's thoughts
were not here at all since her catastrophe, and, stupefied
under the pressure of her sorrow, good and evil were
alike indifferent to her.

So, indeed, were even friendship and kindness.  She
received them both uncomplainingly, and having accepted
them, relapsed into her grief.

Suppose some twelve months after the above conversation
took place to have passed in the life of our poor
Amelia.  She has spent the first portion of that time in a
sorrow so profound and pitiable, that we who have been
watching and describing some of the emotions of that
weak and tender heart, must draw back in the presence
of the cruel grief under which it is bleeding.  Tread silently
round the hapless couch of the poor prostrate soul.
Shut gently the door of the dark chamber wherein she
suffers, as those kind people did who nursed her through
the first months of her pain, and never left her until
heaven had sent her consolation.  A day came--of
almost terrified delight and wonder--when the poor
widowed girl pressed a child upon her breast--a child, with
the eyes of George who was gone--a little boy, as beautiful
as a cherub.  What a miracle it was to hear its first
cry!  How she laughed and wept over it--how love, and
hope, and prayer woke again in her bosom as the baby
nestled there.  She was safe.  The doctors who attended
her, and had feared for her life or for her brain, had
waited anxiously for this crisis before they could
pronounce that either was secure.  It was worth the long
months of doubt and dread which the persons who had
constantly been with her had passed, to see her eyes once
more beaming tenderly upon them.

Our friend Dobbin was one of them.  It was he who
brought her back to England and to her mother's house;
when Mrs. O'Dowd, receiving a peremptory summons
from her Colonel, had been forced to quit her patient.
To see Dobbin holding the infant, and to hear Amelia's
laugh of triumph as she watched him, would have done
any man good who had a sense of humour.  William was
the godfather of the child, and exerted his ingenuity in
the purchase of cups, spoons, pap-boats, and corals for
this little Christian.

How his mother nursed him, and dressed him, and
lived upon him; how she drove away all nurses, and
would scarce allow any hand but her own to touch him;
how she considered that the greatest favour she could
confer upon his godfather, Major Dobbin, was to allow
the Major occasionally to dandle him, need not be told
here.  This child was her being.  Her existence was a
maternal caress.  She enveloped the feeble and unconscious
creature with love and worship.  It was her life
which the baby drank in from her bosom.  Of nights, and
when alone, she had stealthy and intense raptures of
motherly love, such as God's marvellous care has awarded
to the female instinct--joys how far higher and lower
than reason--blind beautiful devotions which only women's
hearts know.  It was William Dobbin's task to muse
upon these movements of Amelia's, and to watch her
heart; and if his love made him divine almost all the feelings
which agitated it, alas! he could see with a fatal
perspicuity that there was no place there for him.  And
so, gently, he bore his fate, knowing it, and content to
bear it.

I suppose Amelia's father and mother saw through the
intentions of the Major, and were not ill-disposed to
encourage him; for Dobbin visited their house daily, and
stayed for hours with them, or with Amelia, or with the
honest landlord, Mr. Clapp, and his family.  He brought,
on one pretext or another, presents to everybody, and
almost every day; and went, with the landlord's little girl,
who was rather a favourite with Amelia, by the name of
Major Sugarplums.  It was this little child who commonly
acted as mistress of the ceremonies to introduce him
to Mrs. Osborne.  She laughed one day when Major Sugarplums'
cab drove up to Fulham, and he descended from
it, bringing out a wooden horse, a drum, a trumpet, and
other warlike toys, for little Georgy, who was scarcely
six months old, and for whom the articles in question were
entirely premature.

The child was asleep.  "Hush," said Amelia, annoyed,
perhaps, at the creaking of the Major's boots; and she
held out her hand; smiling because William could not
take it until he had rid himself of his cargo of toys.  "Go
downstairs, little Mary," said he presently to the child,
"I want to speak to Mrs. Osborne." She looked up rather
astonished, and laid down the infant on its bed.

"I am come to say good-bye, Amelia," said he, taking
her slender little white hand gently.

"Good-bye? and where are you going?" she said, with
a smile.

"Send the letters to the agents," he said; "they will
forward them; for you will write to me, won't you? I
shall be away a long time."

"I'll write to you about Georgy," she said.  "Dear' William,
how good you have been to him and to me.  Look at
him.  Isn't he like an angel?"

The little pink hands of the child closed mechanically
round the honest soldier's finger, and Amelia looked up
in his face with bright maternal pleasure.  The cruellest
looks could not have wounded him more than that glance
of hopeless kindness.  He bent over the child and mother.
He could not speak for a moment.  And it was only with
all his strength that he could force himself to say a God
bless you.  "God bless you," said Amelia, and held up her
face and kissed him.

"Hush!  Don't wake Georgy!" she added, as William
Dobbin went to the door with heavy steps.  She did not
hear the noise of his cab-wheels as he drove away:  she
was looking at the child, who was laughing in his sleep.




CHAPTER XXXVI


How to Live Well on Nothing a Year

I suppose there is no man in this Vanity Fair of ours so
little observant as not to think sometimes about the
worldly affairs of his acquaintances, or so extremely
charitable as not to wonder how his neighbour Jones,
or his neighbour Smith, can make both ends meet at the
end of the year.  With the utmost regard for the family,
for instance (for I dine with them twice or thrice in the
season), I cannot but own that the appearance of the
Jenkinses in the park, in the large barouche with the
grenadier-footmen, will surprise and mystify me to my
dying day:  for though I know the equipage is only
jobbed, and all the Jenkins people are on board wages,
yet those three men and the carriage must represent an
expense of six hundred a year at the very least--and then
there are the splendid dinners, the two boys at Eton, the
prize governess and masters for the girls, the trip
abroad, or to Eastbourne or Worthing, in the autumn,
the annual ball with a supper from Gunter's (who, by the
way, supplies most of the first-rate dinners which J.  gives,
as I know very well, having been invited to one of them to
fill a vacant place, when I saw at once that these repasts are
very superior to the common run of entertainments for which the
humbler sort of J.'s acquaintances get cards)--who, I say, with the
most good-natured feelings in the world, can help wondering how
the Jenkinses make out matters? What is Jenkins? We all know
--Commissioner of the Tape and Sealing Wax Office, with
1200 pounds a year for a salary.  Had his wife a private
fortune? Pooh!--Miss Flint--one of eleven children of a
small squire in Buckinghamshire.  All she ever gets from
her family is a turkey at Christmas, in exchange for which
she has to board two or three of her sisters in the off
season, and lodge and feed her brothers when they
come to town.  How does Jenkins balance his income? I
say, as every friend of his must say, How is it that he
has not been outlawed long since, and that he ever came
back (as he did to the surprise of everybody) last year
from Boulogne?

"I" is here introduced to personify the world in
general--the Mrs. Grundy of each respected reader's private
circle--every one of whom can point to some families
of his acquaintance who live nobody knows how.  Many
a glass of wine have we all of us drunk, I have very
little doubt, hob-and-nobbing with the hospitable giver
and wondering how the deuce he paid for it.

Some three or four years after his stay in Paris, when
Rawdon Crawley and his wife were established in a very
small comfortable house in Curzon Street, May Fair, there
was scarcely one of the numerous friends whom they
entertained at dinner that did not ask the above question
regarding them.  The novelist, it has been said before,
knows everything, and as I am in a situation to be
able to tell the public how Crawley and his wife lived
without any income, may I entreat the public newspapers
which are in the habit of extracting portions of the
various periodical works now published not to reprint
the following exact narrative and calculations--of which
I ought, as the discoverer (and at some expense, too),
to have the benefit? My son, I would say, were I blessed
with a child--you may by deep inquiry and constant
intercourse with him learn how a man lives comfortably
on nothing a year.  But it is best not to be intimate with
gentlemen of this profession and to take the calculations
at second hand, as you do logarithms, for to work
them yourself, depend upon it, will cost you something
considerable.

On nothing per annum then, and during a course of
some two or three years, of which we can afford to
give but a very brief history, Crawley and his wife lived
very happily and comfortably at Paris.  It was in this
period that he quitted the Guards and sold out of the
army.  When we find him again, his mustachios and the
title of Colonel on his card are the only relics of his
military profession.

It has been mentioned that Rebecca, soon after her
arrival in Paris, took a very smart and leading position in
the society of that capital, and was welcomed at some
of the most distinguished houses of the restored French
nobility.  The English men of fashion in Paris courted her,
too, to the disgust of the ladies their wives, who could
not bear the parvenue.  For some months the salons
of the Faubourg St.  Germain, in which her place was
secured, and the splendours of the new Court, where she
was received with much distinction, delighted and
perhaps a little intoxicated Mrs. Crawley, who may have
been disposed during this period of elation to slight the
people--honest young military men mostly--who formed
her husband's chief society.

But the Colonel yawned sadly among the Duchesses
and great ladies of the Court.  The old women who
played ecarte made such a noise about a five-franc
piece that it was not worth Colonel Crawley's while to
sit down at a card-table.  The wit of their conversation he
could not appreciate, being ignorant of their language.
And what good could his wife get, he urged, by making
curtsies every night to a whole circle of Princesses? He
left Rebecca presently to frequent these parties alone,
resuming his own simple pursuits and amusements
amongst the amiable friends of his own choice.

The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he
lives elegantly on nothing a year, we use the word
"nothing" to signify something unknown; meaning, simply,
that we don't know how the gentleman in question defrays
the expenses of his establishment.  Now, our friend the
Colonel had a great aptitude for all games of chance:
and exercising himself, as he continually did, with the
cards, the dice-box, or the cue, it is natural to suppose
that he attained a much greater skill in the use of these
articles than men can possess who only occasionally
handle them.  To use a cue at billiards well is like using a
pencil, or a German flute, or a small-sword--you cannot
master any one of these implements at first, and it is only
by repeated study and perseverance, joined to a natural
taste, that a man can excel in the handling of either.
Now Crawley, from being only a brilliant amateur, had
grown to be a consummate master of billiards.  Like a
great General, his genius used to rise with the danger,
and when the luck had been unfavourable to him for a
whole game, and the bets were consequently against him,
he would, with consummate skill and boldness, make
some prodigious hits which would restore the battle, and
come in a victor at the end, to the astonishment of
everybody--of everybody, that is, who was a stranger to his
play.  Those who were accustomed to see it were cautious
how they staked their money against a man of such
sudden resources and brilliant and overpowering skill.

At games of cards he was equally skilful; for though
he would constantly lose money at the commencement
of an evening, playing so carelessly and making such
blunders, that newcomers were often inclined to think
meanly of his talent; yet when roused to action and
awakened to caution by repeated small losses, it was
remarked that Crawley's play became quite different, and
that he was pretty sure of beating his enemy thoroughly
before the night was over.  Indeed, very few men could
say that they ever had the better of him.
His successes were so repeated that no wonder the
envious and the vanquished spoke sometimes with
bitterness regarding them.  And as the French say of the
Duke of Wellington, who never suffered a defeat, that
only an astonishing series of lucky accidents enabled him
to be an invariable winner; yet even they allow that he
cheated at Waterloo, and was enabled to win the last
great trick:  so it was hinted at headquarters in England
that some foul play must have taken place in order to
account for the continuous successes of Colonel Crawley.

Though Frascati's and the Salon were open at that time
in Paris, the mania for play was so widely spread that
the public gambling-rooms did not suffice for the general
ardour, and gambling went on in private houses as
much as if there had been no public means for gratifying
the passion.  At Crawley's charming little reunions of an
evening this fatal amusement commonly was practised--
much to good-natured little Mrs. Crawley's annoyance.
She spoke about her husband's passion for dice with the
deepest grief; she bewailed it to everybody who came to
her house.  She besought the young fellows never, never
to touch a box; and when young Green, of the Rifles,
lost a very considerable sum of money, Rebecca passed a
whole night in tears, as the servant told the unfortunate
young gentleman, and actually went on her knees to her
husband to beseech him to remit the debt, and burn the
acknowledgement.  How could he? He had lost just as
much himself to Blackstone of the Hussars, and Count
Punter of the Hanoverian Cavalry.  Green might have any
decent time; but pay?--of course he must pay; to talk
of burning IOU's was child's play.

Other officers, chiefly young--for the young fellows
gathered round Mrs. Crawley--came from her parties
with long faces, having dropped more or less money at
her fatal card-tables.  Her house began to have an
unfortunate reputation.  The old hands warned the less
experienced of their danger.  Colonel O'Dowd, of the --th
regiment, one of those occupying in Paris, warned
Lieutenant Spooney of that corps.  A loud and violent fracas
took place between the infantry Colonel and his lady,
who were dining at the Cafe de Paris, and Colonel and
Mrs. Crawley; who were also taking their meal there.
The ladies engaged on both sides.  Mrs. O'Dowd snapped
her fingers in Mrs. Crawley's face and called her
husband "no betther than a black-leg." Colonel Crawley
challenged Colonel O'Dowd, C.B.  The Commander-in-Chief
hearing of the dispute sent for Colonel Crawley, who was
getting ready the same pistols "which he shot Captain
Marker," and had such a conversation with him that no
duel took place.  If Rebecca had not gone on her knees
to General Tufto, Crawley would have been sent back
to England; and he did not play, except with civilians,
for some weeks after.

But, in spite of Rawdon's undoubted skill and constant
successes, it became evident to Rebecca, considering
these things, that their position was but a precarious
one, and that, even although they paid scarcely anybody,
their little capital would end one day by dwindling into
zero.  "Gambling," she would say, "dear, is good to help
your income, but not as an income itself.  Some day
people may be tired of play, and then where are we?"
Rawdon acquiesced in the justice of her opinion; and in
truth he had remarked that after a few nights of his
little suppers, &c., gentlemen were tired of play with him,
and, in spite of Rebecca's charms, did not present
themselves very eagerly.

Easy and pleasant as their life at Paris was, it was
after all only an idle dalliance and amiable trifling; and
Rebecca saw that she must push Rawdon's fortune in
their own country.  She must get him a place or appointment
at home or in the colonies, and she determined to
make a move upon England as soon as the way could be
cleared for her.  As a first step she had made Crawley
sell out of the Guards and go on half-pay.  His function
as aide-de-camp to General Tufto had ceased previously.
Rebecca laughed in all companies at that officer, at his
toupee (which he mounted on coming to Paris), at his
waistband, at his false teeth, at his pretensions to be a
lady-killer above all, and his absurd vanity in fancying
every woman whom he came near was in love with
him.  It was to Mrs. Brent, the beetle-browed wife of
Mr. Commissary Brent, to whom the general transferred
his attentions now--his bouquets, his dinners at the
restaurateurs', his opera-boxes, and his knick-knacks.  Poor
Mrs. Tufto was no more happy than before, and had still
to pass long evenings alone with her daughters, knowing
that her General was gone off scented and curled to
stand behind Mrs. Brent's chair at the play.  Becky had a
dozen admirers in his place, to be sure, and could cut
her rival to pieces with her wit.  But, as we have said, she.
was growing tired of this idle social life:  opera-boxes and
restaurateur dinners palled upon her:  nosegays could not
be laid by as a provision for future years:  and she could
not live upon knick-knacks, laced handkerchiefs, and kid
gloves.  She felt the frivolity of pleasure and longed for
more substantial benefits.

At this juncture news arrived which was spread among
the many creditors of the Colonel at Paris, and which
caused them great satisfaction.  Miss Crawley, the rich
aunt from whom he expected his immense inheritance,
was dying; the Colonel must haste to her bedside.  Mrs.
Crawley and her child would remain behind until he
came to reclaim them.  He departed for Calais, and having
reached that place in safety, it might have been
supposed that he went to Dover; but instead he took the
diligence to Dunkirk, and thence travelled to Brussels,
for which place he had a former predilection.  The fact
is, he owed more money at London than at Paris; and he
preferred the quiet little Belgian city to either of the more
noisy capitals.

Her aunt was dead.  Mrs. Crawley ordered the most
intense mourning for herself and little Rawdon.  The Colonel
was busy arranging the affairs of the inheritance.  They
could take the premier now, instead of the little entresol
of the hotel which they occupied.  Mrs. Crawley and the
landlord had a consultation about the new hangings,
an amicable wrangle about the carpets, and a final adjustment
of everything except the bill.  She went off in one
of his carriages; her French bonne with her; the child
by her side; the admirable landlord and landlady smiling
farewell to her from the gate.  General Tufto was furious
when he heard she was gone, and Mrs. Brent furious
with him for being furious; Lieutenant Spooney was cut
to the heart; and the landlord got ready his best apartments
previous to the return of the fascinating little
woman and her husband.  He serred the trunks which
she left in his charge with the greatest care.  They had been
especially recommended to him by Madame Crawley.  They
were not, however, found to be particularly valuable
when opened some time after.

But before she went to join her husband in the Belgic
capital, Mrs. Crawley made an expedition into England,
leaving behind her her little son upon the continent,
under the care of her French maid.

The parting between Rebecca and the little Rawdon did
not cause either party much pain.  She had not, to say
truth, seen much of the young gentleman since his birth.
After the amiable fashion of French mothers, she had
placed him out at nurse in a village in the neighbourhood
of Paris, where little Rawdon passed the first months of
his life, not unhappily, with a numerous family of
foster-brothers in wooden shoes.  His father would ride over
many a time to see him here, and the elder Rawdon's
paternal heart glowed to see him rosy and dirty,
shouting lustily, and happy in the making of mud-pies
under the superintendence of the gardener's wife, his
nurse.

Rebecca did not care much to go and see the son
and heir.  Once he spoiled a new dove-coloured pelisse
of hers.  He preferred his nurse's caresses to his mamma's,
and when finally he quitted that jolly nurse and almost
parent, he cried loudly for hours.  He was only consoled
by his mother's promise that he should return to his nurse
the next day; indeed the nurse herself, who probably
would have been pained at the parting too, was told that
the child would immediately be restored to her, and for
some time awaited quite anxiously his return.

In fact, our friends may be said to have been among
the first of that brood of hardy English adventurers who
have subsequently invaded the Continent and swindled
in all the capitals of Europe.  The respect in those happy
days of 1817-18 was very great for the wealth and
honour of Britons.  They had not then learned, as I am
told, to haggle for bargains with the pertinacity which
now distinguishes them.  The great cities of Europe had
not been as yet open to the enterprise of our rascals.
And whereas there is now hardly a town of France or
Italy in which you shall not see some noble countryman
of our own, with that happy swagger and insolence
of demeanour which we carry everywhere, swindling
inn-landlords, passing fictitious cheques upon credulous
bankers, robbing coach-makers of their carriages, goldsmiths
of their trinkets, easy travellers of their money at cards,
even public libraries of their books--thirty years ago you
needed but to be a Milor Anglais, travelling in a private
carriage, and credit was at your hand wherever you chose
to seek it, and gentlemen, instead of cheating, were
cheated.  It was not for some weeks after the Crawleys'
departure that the landlord of the hotel which they
occupied during their residence at Paris found out the losses
which he had sustained:  not until Madame Marabou, the
milliner, made repeated visits with her little bill for
articles supplied to Madame Crawley; not until Monsieur
Didelot from Boule d'Or in the Palais Royal had asked
half a dozen times whether cette charmante Miladi who
had bought watches and bracelets of him was de retour.
It is a fact that even the poor gardener's wife, who
had nursed madame's child, was never paid after the
first six months for that supply of the milk of human
kindness with which she had furnished the lusty and
healthy little Rawdon.  No, not even the nurse was paid
--the Crawleys were in too great a hurry to remember
their trifling debt to her.  As for the landlord of the hotel,
his curses against the English nation were violent for the
rest of his natural life.  He asked all travellers whether
they knew a certain Colonel Lor Crawley--avec sa
femme une petite dame, tres spirituelle.  "Ah,
Monsieur!" he would add--"ils m'ont affreusement vole." It
was melancholy to hear his accents as he spoke of that
catastrophe.

Rebecca's object in her journey to London was to
effect a kind of compromise with her husband's numerous
creditors, and by offering them a dividend of ninepence
or a shilling in the pound, to secure a return for him into
his own country.  It does not become us to trace the steps
which she took in the conduct of this most difficult
negotiation; but, having shown them to their satisfaction
that the sum which she was empowered to offer was all
her husband's available capital, and having convinced
them that Colonel Crawley would prefer a perpetual
retirement on the Continent to a residence in this country
with his debts unsettled; having proved to them that there
was no possibility of money accruing to him from other
quarters, and no earthly chance of their getting a larger
dividend than that which she was empowered to offer,
she brought the Colonel's creditors unanimously to
accept her proposals, and purchased with fifteen hundred
pounds of ready money more than ten times that amount
of debts.

Mrs. Crawley employed no lawyer in the transaction.
The matter was so simple, to have or to leave, as she
justly observed, that she made the lawyers of the
creditors themselves do the business.  And Mr. Lewis
representing Mr. Davids, of Red Lion Square, and Mr. Moss
acting for Mr. Manasseh of Cursitor Street (chief
creditors of the Colonel's), complimented his lady upon the
brilliant way in which she did business, and declared
that there was no professional man who could beat her.

Rebecca received their congratulations with perfect
modesty; ordered a bottle of sherry and a bread cake
to the little dingy lodgings where she dwelt, while
conducting the business, to treat the enemy's lawyers:
shook hands with them at parting, in excellent good
humour, and returned straightway to the Continent, to
rejoin her husband and son and acquaint the former
with the glad news of his entire liberation.  As for the
latter, he had been considerably neglected during his
mother's absence by Mademoiselle Genevieve, her French
maid; for that young woman, contracting an attachment
for a soldier in the garrison of Calais, forgot her charge
in the society of this militaire, and little Rawdon very
narrowly escaped drowning on Calais sands at this
period, where the absent Genevieve had left and lost
him.

And so, Colonel and Mrs. Crawley came to London:
and it is at their house in Curzon Street, May Fair, that
they really showed the skill which must be possessed by
those who would live on the resources above named.




CHAPTER XXXVII


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 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.

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 ma