parlour. Becky had never been a favourite of hers. Since the
establishment of the married couple in London they had frequented
their former friends of the house of Raggles, and did not like the
latter's account of the Colonel's menage. "I wouldn't trust him,
Ragg, my boy," Bowls remarked; and his wife, when Mrs. Rawdon issued
from the parlour, only saluted the lady with a very sour curtsey;
and her fingers were like so many sausages, cold and lifeless, when
she held them out in deference to Mrs. Rawdon, who persisted in
shaking hands with the retired lady's maid. She whirled away into
Piccadilly, nodding with the sweetest of smiles towards Miss Briggs,
who hung nodding at the window close under the advertisement-card,
and at the next moment was in the park with a half-dozen of dandies
cantering after her carriage.
When she found how her friend was situated, and how having a snug
legacy from Miss Crawley, salary was no object to our gentlewoman,
Becky instantly formed some benevolent little domestic plans
concerning her. This was just such a companion as would suit her
establishment, and she invited Briggs to come to dinner with her
that very evening, when she should see Becky's dear little darling
Rawdon.
Mrs. Bowls cautioned her lodger against venturing into the lion's
den, "wherein you will rue it, Miss B., mark my words, and as sure
as my name is Bowls." And Briggs promised to be very cautious. The
upshot of which caution was that she went to live with Mrs. Rawdon
the next week, and had lent Rawdon Crawley six hundred pounds upon
annuity before six months were over.
CHAPTER XLI
In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors
So the mourning being ready, and Sir Pitt Crawley warned of their
arrival, Colonel Crawley and his wife took a couple of places in the
same old High-flyer coach by which Rebecca had travelled in the
defunct Baronet's company, on her first journey into the world some
nine years before. How well she remembered the Inn Yard, and the
ostler to whom she refused money, and the insinuating Cambridge lad
who wrapped her in his coat on the journey! Rawdon took his place
outside, and would have liked to drive, but his grief forbade him.
He sat by the coachman and talked about horses and the road the
whole way; and who kept the inns, and who horsed the coach by which
he had travelled so many a time, when he and Pitt were boys going to
Eton. At Mudbury a carriage and a pair of horses received them,
with a coachman in black. "It's the old drag, Rawdon," Rebecca said
as they got in. "The worms have eaten the cloth a good deal -
there's the stain which Sir Pitt - ha! I see Dawson the Ironmonger
has his shutters up - which Sir Pitt made such a noise about. It was
a bottle of cherry brandy he broke which we went to fetch for your
aunt from Southampton. How time flies, to be sure! That can't be
Polly Talboys, that bouncing girl standing by her mother at the
cottage there. I remember her a mangy little urchin picking weeds
in the garden."
"Fine gal," said Rawdon, returning the salute which the cottage gave
him, by two fingers applied to his crape hatband. Becky bowed and
saluted, and recognized people here and there graciously. These
recognitions were inexpressibly pleasant to her. It seemed as if
she was not an imposter any more, and was coming to the home of her
ancestors. Rawdon was rather abashed and cast down, on the other
hand. What recollections of boyhood and innocence might have been
flitting across his brain? What pangs of dim remorse and doubt and
shame?
"Your sisters must be young women now," Rebecca said, thinking of
those girls for the first time perhaps since she had left them.
"Don't know, I'm shaw," replied the Colonel. "Hullo! here's old
Mother Lock. How-dy-do, Mrs. Lock? Remember me, don't you? Master
Rawdon, hey? Dammy how those old women last; she was a hundred when
I was a boy."
They were going through the lodge-gates kept by old Mrs. Lock, whose
hand Rebecca insisted upon shaking, as she flung open the creaking
old iron gate, and the carriage passed between the two moss-grown
pillars surmounted by the dove and serpent.
"The governor has cut into the timber," Rawdon said, looking about,
and then was silent - so was Becky. Both of them were rather
agitated, and thinking of old times. He about Eton, and his mother,
whom he remembered, a frigid demure woman, and a sister who died, of
whom he had been passionately fond; and how he used to thrash Pitt;
and about little Rawdy at home. And Rebecca thought about her own
youth and the dark secrets of those early tainted days; and of her
entrance into life by yonder gates; and of Miss Pinkerton, and Joe,
and Amelia.
The gravel walk and terrace had been scraped quite clean. A grand
painted hatchment was already over the great entrance, and two very
solemn and tall personages in black flung open each a leaf of the
door as the carriage pulled up at the familiar steps. Rawdon turned
red, and Becky somewhat pale, as they passed through the old hall,
arm in arm. She pinched her husband's arm as they entered the oak
parlour, where Sir Pitt and his wife were ready to receive them.
Sir Pitt in black, Lady Jane in black, and my Lady Southdown with a
large black head-piece of bugles and feathers, which waved on her
Ladyship's head like an undertaker's tray.
Sir Pitt had judged correctly, that she would not quit the premises.
She contented herself by preserving a solemn and stony silence, when
in company of Pitt and his rebellious wife, and by frightening the
children in the nursery by the ghastly gloom of her demeanour. Only
a very faint bending of the head-dress and plumes welcomed Rawdon
and his wife, as those prodigals returned to their family.
To say the truth, they were not affected very much one way or other
by this coolness. Her Ladyship was a person only of secondary
consideration in their minds just then - they were intent upon the
reception which the reigning brother and sister would afford them.
Pitt, with rather a heightened colour, went up and shook his brother
by the hand, and saluted Rebecca with a hand-shake and a very low
bow. But Lady Jane took both the hands of her sister-in-law and
kissed her affectionately. The embrace somehow brought tears into
the eyes of the little adventuress - which ornaments, as we know, she
wore very seldom. The artless mark of kindness and confidence
touched and pleased her; and Rawdon, encouraged by this
demonstration on his sister's part, twirled up his mustachios and
took leave to salute Lady Jane with a kiss, which caused her
Ladyship to blush exceedingly.
"Dev'lish nice little woman, Lady Jane," was his verdict, when he
and his wife were together again. "Pitt's got fat, too, and is
doing the thing handsomely." "He can afford it," said Rebecca and
agreed in her husband's farther opinion "that the mother-in-law was
a tremendous old Guy - and that the sisters were rather well-looking
young women."
They, too, had been summoned from school to attend the funeral
ceremonies. It seemed Sir Pitt Crawley, for the dignity of the
house and family, had thought right to have about the place as many
persons in black as could possibly be assembled. All the men and
maids of the house, the old women of the Alms House, whom the elder
Sir Pitt had cheated out of a great portion of their due, the parish
clerk's family, and the special retainers of both Hall and Rectory
were habited in sable; added to these, the undertaker's men, at
least a score, with crapes and hatbands, and who made goodly show
when the great burying show took place - but these are mute
personages in our drama; and having nothing to do or say, need
occupy a very little space here.
With regard to her sisters-in-law Rebecca did not attempt to forget
her former position of Governess towards them, but recalled it
frankly and kindly, and asked them about their studies with great
gravity, and told them that she had thought of them many and many a
day, and longed to know of their welfare. In fact you would have
supposed that ever since she had left them she had not ceased to
keep them uppermost in her thoughts and to take the tenderest
interest in their welfare. So supposed Lady Crawley herself and her
young sisters.
"She's hardly changed since eight years," said Miss Rosalind to Miss
Violet, as they were preparing for dinner.
"Those red-haired women look wonderfully well," replied the other.
"Hers is much darker than it was; I think she must dye it," Miss
Rosalind added. "She is stouter, too, and altogether improved,"
continued Miss Rosalind, who was disposed to be very fat.
"At least she gives herself no airs and remembers that she was our
Governess once," Miss Violet said, intimating that it befitted all
governesses to keep their proper place, and forgetting altogether
that she was granddaughter not only of Sir Walpole Crawley, but of
Mr. Dawson of Mudbury, and so had a coal-scuttle in her scutcheon.
There are other very well-meaning people whom one meets every day in
Vanity Fair who are surely equally oblivious.
"It can't be true what the girls at the Rectory said, that her
mother was an opera-dancer - "
"A person can't help their birth," Rosalind replied with great
liberality. "And I agree with our brother, that as she is in the
family, of course we are bound to notice her. I am sure Aunt Bute
need not talk; she wants to marry Kate to young Hooper, the wine-
merchant, and absolutely asked him to come to the Rectory for
orders."
"I wonder whether Lady Southdown will go away, she looked very glum
upon Mrs. Rawdon," the other said.
"I wish she would. I won't read the Washerwoman of Finchley
Common," vowed Violet; and so saying, and avoiding a passage at the
end of which a certain coffin was placed with a couple of watchers,
and lights perpetually burning in the closed room, these young women
came down to the family dinner, for which the bell rang as usual.
But before this, Lady Jane conducted Rebecca to the apartments
prepared for her, which, with the rest of the house, had assumed a
very much improved appearance of order and comfort during Pitt's
regency, and here beholding that Mrs. Rawdon's modest little trunks
had arrived, and were placed in the bedroom and dressing-room
adjoining, helped her to take off her neat black bonnet and cloak,
and asked her sister-in-law in what more she could be useful.
"What I should like best," said Rebecca, "would be to go to the
nursery and see your dear little children." On which the two ladies
looked very kindly at each other and went to that apartment hand in
hand.
Becky admired little Matilda, who was not quite four years old, as
the most charming little love in the world; and the boy, a little
fellow of two years - pale, heavy-eyed, and large-headed - she
pronounced to be a perfect prodigy in point of size, intelligence,
and beauty.
"I wish Mamma would not insist on giving him so much medicine," Lady
Jane said with a sigh. "I often think we should all be better
without it." And then Lady Jane and her new-found friend had one of
those confidential medical conversations about the children, which
all mothers, and most women, as I am given to understand, delight
in. Fifty years ago, and when the present writer, being an
interesting little boy, was ordered out of the room with the ladies
after dinner, I remember quite well that their talk was chiefly
about their ailments; and putting this question directly to two or
three since, I have always got from them the acknowledgement that
times are not changed. Let my fair readers remark for themselves
this very evening when they quit the dessert-table and assemble to
celebrate the drawing-room mysteries. Well - in half an hour Becky
and Lady Jane were close and intimate friends - and in the course of
the evening her Ladyship informed Sir Pitt that she thought her new
sister-in-law was a kind, frank, unaffected, and affectionate young
woman.
And so having easily won the daughter's good-will, the indefatigable
little woman bent herself to conciliate the august Lady Southdown.
As soon as she found her Ladyship alone, Rebecca attacked her on the
nursery question at once and said that her own little boy was saved,
actually saved, by calomel, freely administered, when all the
physicians in Paris had given the dear child up. And then she
mentioned how often she had heard of Lady Southdown from that
excellent man the Reverend Lawrence Grills, Minister of the chapel
in May Fair, which she frequented; and how her views were very much
changed by circumstances and misfortunes; and how she hoped that a
past life spent in worldliness and error might not incapacitate her
from more serious thought for the future. She described how in
former days she had been indebted to Mr. Crawley for religious
instruction, touched upon the Washerwoman of Finchley Common, which
she had read with the greatest profit, and asked about Lady Emily,
its gifted author, now Lady Emily Hornblower, at Cape Town, where
her husband had strong hopes of becoming Bishop of Caffraria.
But she crowned all, and confirmed herself in Lady Southdown's
favour, by feeling very much agitated and unwell after the funeral
and requesting her Ladyship's medical advice, which the Dowager not
only gave, but, wrapped up in a bed-gown and looking more like Lady
Macbeth than ever, came privately in the night to Becky's room with
a parcel of favourite tracts, and a medicine of her own composition,
which she insisted that Mrs. Rawdon should take.
Becky first accepted the tracts and began to examine them with great
interest, engaging the Dowager in a conversation concerning them and
the welfare of her soul, by which means she hoped that her body
might escape medication. But after the religious topics were
exhausted, Lady Macbeth would not quit Becky's chamber until her cup
of night-drink was emptied too; and poor Mrs. Rawdon was compelled
actually to assume a look of gratitude, and to swallow the medicine
under the unyielding old Dowager's nose, who left her victim finally
with a benediction.
It did not much comfort Mrs. Rawdon; her countenance was very queer
when Rawdon came in and heard what had happened; and. his
explosions of laughter were as loud as usual, when Becky, with a fun
which she could not disguise, even though it was at her own expense,
described the occurrence and how she had been victimized by Lady
Southdown. Lord Steyne, and her son in London, had many a laugh
over the story when Rawdon and his wife returned to their quarters
in May Fair. Becky acted the whole scene for them. She put on a
night-cap and gown. She preached a great sermon in the true serious
manner; she lectured on the virtue of the medicine which she
pretended to administer, with a gravity of imitation so perfect that
you would have thought it was the Countess's own Roman nose through
which she snuffled. "Give us Lady Southdown and the black dose," was
a constant cry amongst the folks in Becky's little drawing-room in
May Fair. And for the first time in her life the Dowager Countess
of Southdown was made amusing.
Sir Pitt remembered the testimonies of respect and veneration which
Rebecca had paid personally to himself in early days, and was
tolerably well disposed towards her. The marriage, ill-advised as
it was, had improved Rawdon very much - that was clear from the
Colonel's altered habits and demeanour - and had it not been a lucky
union as regarded Pitt himself? The cunning diplomatist smiled
inwardly as he owned that he owed his fortune to it, and
acknowledged that he at least ought not to cry out against it. His
satisfaction was not removed by Rebecca's own statements, behaviour,
and conversation.
She doubled the deference which before had charmed him, calling out
his conversational powers in such a manner as quite to surprise Pitt
himself, who, always inclined to respect his own talents, admired
them the more when Rebecca pointed them out to him. With her
sister-in-law, Rebecca was satisfactorily able to prove that it was
Mrs. Bute Crawley who brought about the marriage which she
afterwards so calumniated; that it was Mrs. Bute's avarice - who
hoped to gain all Miss Crawley's fortune and deprive Rawdon of his
aunt's favour - which caused and invented all the wicked reports
against Rebecca. "She succeeded in making us poor," Rebecca said
with an air of angelical patience; "but how can I be angry with a
woman who has given me one of the best husbands in the world? And
has not her own avarice been sufficiently punished by the ruin of
her own hopes and the loss of the property by which she set so much
store? Poor!" she cried. "Dear Lady Jane, what care we for poverty?
I am used to it from childhood, and I am often thankful that Miss
Crawley's money has gone to restore the splendour of the noble old
family of which I am so proud to be a member. I am sure Sir Pitt
will make a much better use of it than Rawdon would."
All these speeches were reported to Sir Pitt by the most faithful of
wives, and increased the favourable impression which Rebecca made;
so much so that when, on the third day after the funeral, the family
party were at dinner, Sir Pitt Crawley, carving fowls at the head of
the table, actually said to Mrs. Rawdon, "Ahem! Rebecca, may I give
you a wing?" - a speech which made the little woman's eyes sparkle
with pleasure.
While Rebecca was prosecuting the above schemes and hopes, and Pitt
Crawley arranging the funeral ceremonial and other matters connected
with his future progress and dignity, and Lady Jane busy with her
nursery, as far as her mother would let her, and the sun rising and
setting, and the clock-tower bell of the Hall ringing to dinner and
to prayers as usual, the body of the late owner of Queen's Crawley
lay in the apartment which he had occupied, watched unceasingly by
the professional attendants who were engaged for that rite. A woman
or two, and three or four undertaker's men, the best whom
Southampton could furnish, dressed in black, and of a proper
stealthy and tragical demeanour, had charge of the remains which
they watched turn about, having the housekeeper's room for their
place of rendezvous when off duty, where they played at cards in
privacy and drank their beer.
The members of the family and servants of the house kept away from
the gloomy spot, where the bones of the descendant of an ancient
line of knights and gentlemen lay, awaiting their final consignment
to the family crypt. No regrets attended them, save those of the
poor woman who had hoped to be Sir Pitt's wife and widow and who had
fled in disgrace from the Hall over which she had so nearly been a
ruler. Beyond her and a favourite old pointer he had, and between
whom and himself an attachment subsisted during the period of his
imbecility, the old man had not a single friend to mourn him, having
indeed, during the whole course of his life, never taken the least
pains to secure one. Could the best and kindest of us who depart
from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or
she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere
whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding
how soon our survivors were consoled. And so Sir Pitt was
forgotten - like the kindest and best of us - only a few weeks sooner.
Those who will may follow his remains to the grave, whither they
were borne on the appointed day, in the most becoming manner, the
family in black coaches, with their handkerchiefs up to their noses,
ready for the tears which did not come; the undertaker and his
gentlemen in deep tribulation; the select tenantry mourning out of
compliment to the new landlord; the neighbouring gentry's carriages
at three miles an hour, empty, and in profound affliction; the
parson speaking out the formula about "our dear brother departed."
As long as we have a man's body, we play our Vanities upon it,
surrounding it with humbug and ceremonies, laying it in state, and
packing it up in gilt nails and velvet; and we finish our duty by
placing over it a stone, written all over with lies. Bute's curate,
a smart young fellow from Oxford, and Sir Pitt Crawley composed
between them an appropriate Latin epitaph for the late lamented
Baronet, and the former preached a classical sermon, exhorting the
survivors not to give way to grief and informing them in the most
respectful terms that they also would be one day called upon to pass
that gloomy and mysterious portal which had just closed upon the
remains of their lamented brother. Then the tenantry mounted on
horseback again, or stayed and refreshed themselves at the Crawley
Arms. Then, after a lunch in the servants' hall at Queen's Crawley,
the gentry's carriages wheeled off to their different destinations:
then the undertaker's men, taking the ropes, palls, velvets, ostrich
feathers, and other mortuary properties, clambered up on the roof of
the hearse and rode off to Southampton. Their faces relapsed into a
natural expression as the horses, clearing the lodge-gates, got into
a brisker trot on the open road; and squads of them might have been
seen, speckling with black the public-house entrances, with pewter-
pots flashing in the sunshine. Sir Pitt's invalid chair was wheeled
away into a tool-house in the garden; the old pointer used to howl
sometimes at first, but these were the only accents of grief which
were heard in the Hall of which Sir Pitt Crawley, Baronet, had been
master for some threescore years.
As the birds were pretty plentiful, and partridge shooting is as it
were the duty of an English gentleman of statesmanlike propensities,
Sir Pitt Crawley, the first shock of grief over, went out a little
and partook of that diversion in a white hat with crape round it.
The sight of those fields of stubble and turnips, now his own, gave
him many secret joys. Sometimes, and with an exquisite humility, he
took no gun, but went out with a peaceful bamboo cane; Rawdon, his
big brother, and the keepers blazing away at his side. Pitt's money
and acres had a great effect upon his brother. The penniless
Colonel became quite obsequious and respectful to the head of his
house, and despised the milksop Pitt no longer. Rawdon listened
with sympathy to his senior's prospects of planting and draining,
gave his advice about the stables and cattle, rode over to Mudbury
to look at a mare, which he thought would carry Lady Jane, and
offered to break her, &c.: the rebellious dragoon was quite humbled
and subdued, and became a most creditable younger brother. He had
constant bulletins from Miss Briggs in London respecting little
Rawdon, who was left behind there, who sent messages of his own. "I
am very well," he wrote. "I hope you are very well. I hope Mamma
is very well. The pony is very well. Grey takes me to ride in the
park. I can canter. I met the little boy who rode before. He cried
when he cantered. I do not cry." Rawdon read these letters to his
brother and Lady Jane, who was delighted with them. The Baronet
promised to take charge of the lad at school, and his kind-hearted
wife gave Rebecca a bank-note, begging her to buy a present with it
for her little nephew.
One day followed another, and the ladies of the house passed their
life in those calm pursuits and amusements which satisfy country
ladies. Bells rang to meals and to prayers. The young ladies took
exercise on the pianoforte every morning after breakfast, Rebecca
giving them the benefit of her instruction. Then they put on thick
shoes and walked in the park or shrubberies, or beyond the palings
into the village, descending upon the cottages, with Lady
Southdown's medicine and tracts for the sick people there. Lady
Southdown drove out in a pony-chaise, when Rebecca would take her
place by the Dowager's side and listen to her solemn talk with the
utmost interest. She sang Handel and Haydn to the family of
evenings, and engaged in a large piece of worsted work, as if she
had been born to the business and as if this kind of life was to
continue with her until she should sink to the grave in a polite old
age, leaving regrets and a great quantity of consols behind her - as
if there were not cares and duns, schemes, shifts, and poverty
waiting outside the park gates, to pounce upon her when she issued
into the world again.
"It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife," Rebecca
thought. "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a
year. I could dawdle about in the nursery and count the apricots on
the wall. I could water plants in a green-house and pick off dead