The Muse, whoever she be, who presides over this Comic History must now descend from the genteel heights in which she has been soaring and have the goodness to drop down upon the lowly roof of John Sedley at Brompton, and describe what events are taking place there. Here, too, in this humble tenement, live care, and distrust, and dismay. Mrs. Clapp in the kitchen is grumbling in secret to her husband about the rent, and urging the good fellow to rebel against his old friend and patron and his present lodger. Mrs. Sedley has ceased to visit her landlady in the lower regions now, and indeed is in a position to patronize Mrs. Clapp no longer. How can one be condescending to a lady to whom one owes a matter of forty pounds, and who is perpetually throwing out hints for the money? The Irish maidservant has not altered in the least in her kind and respectful behaviour; but Mrs. Sedley fancies that she is growing insolent and ungrateful, and, as the guilty thief who fears each bush an officer, sees threatening innuendoes and hints of capture in all the girl's speeches and answers. Miss Clapp, grown quite a young woman now, is declared by the soured old lady to be an unbearable and impudent little minx. Why Amelia can be so fond of her, or have her in her room so much, or walk out with her so constantly, Mrs. Sedley cannot conceive. The bitterness of poverty has poisoned the life of the once cheerful and kindly woman. She is thankless for Amelia's constant and gentle bearing towards her; carps at her for her efforts at kindness or service; rails at her for her silly pride in her child and her neglect of her parents. Georgy's house is not a very lively one since Uncle Jos's annuity has been withdrawn and the little family are almost upon famine diet.
Amelia thinks, and thinks, and racks her brain, to find some means of increasing the small pittance upon which the household is starving. Can she give lessons in anything? paint card-racks? do fine work? She finds that women are working hard, and better than she can, for twopence a day. She buys a couple of begilt Bristol boards at the Fancy Stationer's and paints her very best upon them--a shepherd with a red waistcoat on one, and a pink face smiling in the midst of a pencil landscape--a shepherdess on the other, crossing a little bridge, with a little dog, nicely shaded. The man of the Fancy Repository and Brompton Emporium of Fine Arts (of whom she bought the screens, vainly hoping that he would repurchase them when ornamented by her hand) can hardly hide the sneer with which he examines these feeble works of art. He looks askance at the lady who waits in the shop, and ties up the cards again in their envelope of whitey-brown paper, and hands them to the poor widow and Miss Clapp, who had never seen such beautiful things in her life, and had been quite confident that the man must give at least two guineas for the screens. They try at other shops in the interior of London, with faint sickening hopes. "Don't want 'em," says one. "Be off," says another fiercely. Three-and-sixpence has been spent in vain--the screens retire to Miss Clapp's bedroom, who persists in thinking them lovely.
She writes out a little card in her neatest hand, and after long thought and labour of composition, in which the public is informed that "A Lady who has some time at her disposal, wishes to undertake the education of some little girls, whom she would instruct in English, in French, in Geography, in History, and in Music--address A. O., at Mr. Brown's"; and she confides the card to the gentleman of the Fine Art Repository, who consents to allow it to lie upon the counter, where it grows dingy and fly-blown. Amelia passes the door wistfully many a time, in hopes that Mr. Brown will have some news to give her, but he never beckons her in. When she goes to make little purchases, there is no news for her. Poor simple lady, tender and weak--how are you to battle with the struggling violent world?
She grows daily more care-worn and sad, fixing upon her child alarmed eyes, whereof the little boy cannot interpret the expression. She starts up of a night and peeps into his room stealthily, to see that he is sleeping and not stolen away. She sleeps but little now. A constant thought and terror is haunting her. How she weeps and prays in the long silent nights--how she tries to hide from herself the thought which will return to her, that she ought to part with the boy, that she is the only barrier between him and prosperity. She can't, she can't. Not now, at least. Some other day. Oh! it is too hard to think of and to bear.
A thought comes over her which makes her blush and turn from herself--her parents might keep the annuity--the curate would marry her and give a home to her and the boy. But George's picture and dearest memory are there to rebuke her. Shame and love say no to the sacrifice. She shrinks from it as from something unholy, and such thoughts never found a resting-place in that pure and gentle bosom.
The combat, which we describe in a sentence or two, lasted for many weeks in poor Amelia's heart, during which she had no confidante; indeed, she could never have one, as she would not allow to herself the possibility of yielding, though she was giving way daily before the enemy with whom she had to battle. One truth after another was marshalling itself silently against her and keeping its ground. Poverty and misery for all, want and degradation for her parents, injustice to the boy--one by one the outworks of the little citadel were taken, in which the poor soul passionately guarded her only love and treasure.
At the beginning of the struggle, she had written off a letter of tender supplication to her brother at Calcutta, imploring him not to withdraw the support which he had granted to their parents and painting in terms of artless pathos their lonely and hapless condition. She did not know the truth of the matter. The payment of Jos's annuity was still regular, but it was a money-lender in the City who was receiving it: old Sedley had sold it for a sum of money wherewith to prosecute his bootless schemes. Emmy was calculating eagerly the time that would elapse before the letter would arrive and be answered. She had written down the date in her pocket-book of the day when she dispatched it. To her son's guardian, the good Major at Madras, she had not communicated any of her griefs and perplexities. She had not written to him since she wrote to congratulate him on his approaching marriage. She thought with sickening despondency, that that friend--the only one, the one who had felt such a regard for her--was fallen away.
One day, when things had come to a very bad pass--when the creditors were pressing, the mother in hysteric grief, the father in more than usual gloom, the inmates of the family avoiding each other, each secretly oppressed with his private unhappiness and notion of wrong--the father and daughter happened to be left alone together, and Amelia thought to comfort her father by telling him what she had done. She had written to Joseph--an answer must come in three or four months. He was always generous, though careless. He could not refuse, when he knew how straitened were the circumstances of his parents.
Then the poor old gentleman revealed the whole truth to her--that his son was still paying the annuity, which his own imprudence had flung away. He had not dared to tell it sooner. He thought Amelia's ghastly and terrified look, when, with a trembling, miserable voice he made the confession, conveyed reproaches to him for his concealment. "Ah!" said he with quivering lips and turning away, "you despise your old father now!"
"Oh, papa! it is not that," Amelia cried out, falling on his neck and kissing him many times. "You are always good and kind. You did it for the best. It is not for the money--it is--my God! my God! have mercy upon me, and give me strength to bear this trial"; and she kissed him again wildly and went away.
Still the father did not know what that explanation meant, and the burst of anguish with which the poor girl left him. It was that she was conquered. The sentence was passed. The child must go from her--to others--to forget her. Her heart and her treasure--her joy, hope, love, worship--her God, almost! She must give him up, and then--and then she would go to George, and they would watch over the child and wait for him until he came to them in Heaven.
She put on her bonnet, scarcely knowing what she did, and went out to walk in the lanes by which George used to come back from school, and where she was in the habit of going on his return to meet the boy. It was May, a half-holiday. The leaves were all coming out, the weather was brilliant; the boy came running to her flushed with health, singing, his bundle of school-books hanging by a thong. There he was. Both her arms were round him. No, it was impossible. They could not be going to part. "What is the matter, Mother?" said he; "you look very pale."
"Nothing, my child," she said and stooped down and kissed him.
That night Amelia made the boy read the story of Samuel to her, and how Hannah, his mother, having weaned him, brought him to Eli the High Priest to minister before the Lord. And he read the song of gratitude which Hannah sang, and which says, who it is who maketh poor and maketh rich, and bringeth low and exalteth--how the poor shall be raised up out of the dust, and how, in his own might, no man shall be strong. Then he read how Samuel's mother made him a little coat and brought it to him from year to year when she came up to offer the yearly sacrifice. And then, in her sweet simple way, George's mother made commentaries to the boy upon this affecting story. How Hannah, though she loved her son so much, yet gave him up because of her vow. And how she must always have thought of him as she sat at home, far away, making the little coat; and Samuel, she was sure, never forgot his mother; and how happy she must have been as the time came (and the years pass away very quick) when she should see her boy and how good and wise he had grown. This little sermon she spoke with a gentle solemn voice, and dry eyes, until she came to the account of their meeting--then the discourse broke off suddenly, the tender heart overflowed, and taking the boy to her breast, she rocked him in her arms and wept silently over him in a sainted agony of tears.
Her mind being made up, the widow began to take such measures as seemed right to her for advancing the end which she proposed. One day, Miss Osborne, in Russell Square (Amelia had not written the name or number of the house for ten years--her youth, her early story came back to her as she wrote the superscription) one day Miss Osborne got a letter from Amelia which made her blush very much and look towards her father, sitting glooming in his place at the other end of the table.
In simple terms, Amelia told her the reasons which had induced her to change her mind respecting her boy. Her father had met with fresh misfortunes which had entirely ruined him. Her own pittance was so small that it would barely enable her to support her parents and would not suffice to give George the advantages which were his due. Great as her sufferings would be at parting with him she would, by God's help, endure them for the boy's sake. She knew that those to whom he was going would do all in their power to make him happy. She described his disposition, such as she fancied it--quick and impatient of control or harshness, easily to be moved by love and kindness. In a postscript, she stipulated that she should have a written agreement, that she should see the child as often as she wished--she could not part with him under any other terms.
"What? Mrs. Pride has come down, has she?" old Osborne said, when with a tremulous eager voice Miss Osborne read him the letter. "Reg'lar starved out, hey? Ha, ha! I knew she would." He tried to keep his dignity and to read his paper as usual--but he could not follow it. He chuckled and swore to himself behind the sheet.
At last he flung it down and, scowling at his daughter, as his wont was, went out of the room into his study adjoining, from whence he presently returned with a key. He flung it to Miss Osborne.
"Get the room over mine--his room that was--ready," he said. "Yes, sir," his daughter replied in a tremble. It was George's room. It had not been opened for more than ten years. Some of his clothes, papers, handkerchiefs, whips and caps, fishing-rods and sporting gear, were still there. An Army list of 1814, with his name written on the cover; a little dictionary he was wont to use in writing; and the Bible his mother had given him, were on the mantelpiece, with a pair of spurs and a dried inkstand covered with the dust of ten years. Ah! since that ink was wet, what days and people had passed away! The writing-book, still on the table, was blotted with his hand.
Miss Osborne was much affected when she first entered this room with the servants under her. She sank quite pale on the little bed. "This is blessed news, m'am--indeed, m'am," the housekeeper said; "and the good old times is returning, m'am. The dear little feller, to be sure, m'am; how happy he will be! But some folks in May Fair, m'am, will owe him a grudge, m'am"; and she clicked back the bolt which held the window-sash and let the air into the chamber.
"You had better send that woman some money," Mr. Osborne said, before he went out. "She shan't want for nothing. Send her a hundred pound."
"And I'll go and see her to-morrow?" Miss Osborne asked.
"That's your look out. She don't come in here, mind. No, by ------, not for all the money in London. But she mustn't want now. So look out, and get things right." With which brief speeches Mr. Osborne took leave of his daughter and went on his accustomed way into the City.
"Here, Papa, is some money," Amelia said that night, kissing the old man, her father, and putting a bill for a hundred pounds into his hands. "And--and, Mamma, don't be harsh with Georgy. He--he is not going to stop with us long." She could say nothing more, and walked away silently to her room. Let us close it upon her prayers and her sorrow. I think we had best speak little about so much love and grief.
Miss Osborne came the next day, according to the promise contained in her note, and saw Amelia. The meeting between them was friendly. A look and a few words from Miss Osborne showed the poor widow that, with regard to this woman at least, there need be no fear lest she should take the first place in her son's affection. She was cold, sensible, not unkind. The mother had not been so well pleased, perhaps, had the rival been better looking, younger, more affectionate, warmer-hearted. Miss Osborne, on the other hand, thought of old times and memories and could not but be touched with the poor mother's pitiful situation. She was conquered, and laying down her arms, as it were, she humbly submitted. That day they arranged together the preliminaries of the treaty of capitulation.
George was kept from school the next day, and saw his aunt. Amelia left them alone together and went to her room. She was trying the separation--as that poor gentle Lady Jane Grey felt the edge of the axe that was to come down and sever her slender life. Days were passed in parleys, visits, preparations. The widow broke the matter to Georgy with great caution; she looked to see him very much affected by the intelligence. He was rather elated than otherwise, and the poor woman turned sadly away. He bragged about the news that day to the boys at school; told them how he was going to live with his grandpapa, his father's father, not the one who comes here sometimes; and that he would be very rich, and have a carriage, and a pony, and go to a much finer school, and when he was rich he would buy Leader's pencil-case and pay the tart-woman. The boy was the image of his father, as his fond mother thought.
Indeed I have no heart, on account of our dear Amelia's sake, to go through the story of George's last days at home.
At last the day came, the carriage drove up, the little humble packets containing tokens of love and remembrance were ready and disposed in the hall long since--George was in his new suit, for which the tailor had come previously to measure him. He had sprung up with the sun and put on the new clothes, his mother hearing him from the room close by, in which she had been lying, in speechless grief and watching. Days before she had been making preparations for the end, purchasing little stores for the boy's use, marking his books and linen, talking with him and preparing him for the change--fondly fancying that he needed preparation.
So that he had change, what cared he? He was longing for it. By a thousand eager declarations as to what he would do, when he went to live with his grandfather, he had shown the poor widow how little the idea of parting had cast him down. "He would come and see his mamma often on the pony," he said. "He would come and fetch her in the carriage; they would drive in the park, and she should have everything she wanted." The poor mother was fain to content herself with these selfish demonstrations of attachment, and tried to convince herself how sincerely her son loved her. He must love her. All children were so: a little anxious for novelty, and--no, not selfish, but self-willed. Her child must have his enjoyments and ambition in the world. She herself, by her own selfishness and imprudent love for him had denied him his just rights and pleasures hitherto.
I know few things more affecting than that timorous debasement and self-humiliation of a woman. How she owns that it is she and not the man who is guilty; how she takes all the faults on her side; how she courts in a manner punishment for the wrongs which she has not committed and persists in shielding the real culprit! It is those who injure women who get the most kindness from them--they are born timid and tyrants and maltreat those who are humblest before them.
So poor Amelia had been getting ready in silent misery for her son's departure, and had passed many and many a long solitary hour in making preparations for the end. George stood by his mother, watching her arrangements without the least concern. Tears had fallen into his boxes; passages had been scored in his favourite books; old toys, relics, treasures had been hoarded away for him, and packed with strange neatness and care--and of all these things the boy took no note. The child goes away smiling as the mother breaks her heart. By heavens it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair.
A few days are past, and the great event of Amelia's life is consummated. No angel has intervened. The child is sacrificed and offered up to fate, and the widow is quite alone.
The boy comes to see her often, to be sure. He rides on a pony with a coachman behind him, to the delight of his old grandfather, Sedley, who walks proudly down the lane by his side. She sees him, but he is not her boy any more. Why, he rides to see the boys at the little school, too, and to show off before them his new wealth and splendour. In two days he has adopted a slightly imperious air and patronizing manner. He was born to command, his mother thinks, as his father was before him.
It is fine weather now. Of evenings on the days when he does not come, she takes a long walk into London--yes, as far as Russell Square, and rests on the stone by the railing of the garden opposite Mr. Osborne's house. It is so pleasant and cool. She can look up and see the drawing-room windows illuminated, and, at about nine o'clock, the chamber in the upper story where Georgy sleeps. She knows--he has told her. She prays there as the light goes out, prays with an humble heart, and walks home shrinking and silent. She is very tired when she comes home. Perhaps she will sleep the better for that long weary walk, and she may dream about Georgy.
One Sunday she happened to be walking in Russell Square, at some distance from Mr. Osborne's house (she could see it from a distance though) when all the bells of Sabbath were ringing, and George and his aunt came out to go to church; a little sweep asked for charity, and the footman, who carried the books, tried to drive him away; but Georgy stopped and gave him money. May God's blessing be on the boy! Emmy ran round the square and, coming up to the sweep, gave him her mite too. All the bells of Sabbath were ringing, and she followed them until she came to the Foundling Church, into which she went. There she sat in a place whence she could see the head of the boy under his father's tombstone. Many hundred fresh children's voices rose up there and sang hymns to the Father Beneficent, and little George's soul thrilled with delight at the burst of glorious psalmody. His mother could not see him for awhile, through the mist that dimmed her eyes.

Let us leave these genteel heights and drop down upon the lowly house of John Sedley at Brompton. Here, too, in this humble tenement, live care, distrust and dismay. Mrs. Clapp in the kitchen is grumbling to her husband about the rent, and urging him to rebel against his old friend and lodger. Mrs. Sedley has ceased to visit her landlady in the lower regions, being able to patronize Mrs. Clapp no longer. How can one be condescending to a lady to whom one owes forty pounds, and who is perpetually throwing out hints for the money?
The Irish maidservant has not altered her kind and respectful behaviour; but Mrs. Sedley fancies that she is growing insolent, and sees threatening innuendoes in all the girl's speeches. Miss Clapp, grown quite a young woman now, is declared by the soured old lady to be an impudent little minx. Why Amelia is so fond of her, Mrs. Sedley cannot conceive.
The bitterness of poverty has poisoned the life of the once cheerful woman. She is thankless for Amelia's constant gentleness towards her; carps at her for her efforts at kindness; rails at her for her neglect of her parents. Georgy's house is not a very lively one since Jos's annuity has been withdrawn.
Amelia racks her brain to find some means of increasing the small pittance upon which the household is starving. Can she give lessons in anything? paint card-racks? do fine work? She finds that women are working hard, and better than she can, for twopence a day.
She buys a couple of Bristol boards and paints her very best upon them - a shepherd with a red waistcoat on one, and a shepherdess on the other, crossing a little bridge with a dog, nicely shaded. The man at the Brompton Emporium of Fine Arts can hardly hide the sneer with which he examines these feeble works of art. He looks askance at the lady, wraps up the screens again in their paper, and hands them back to the poor widow and Miss Clapp, who has never seen such beautiful things in her life, and was quite confident that he must give at least two guineas for them.
They try at other shops. "Don't want 'em," says one. "Be off," says another fiercely. Three-and-sixpence has been spent in vain. The screens go to Miss Clapp, who persists in thinking them lovely.
After long thought, Amelia writes out a little card in her neatest hand, informing the public that A Lady wishes to undertake the education of some little girls, whom she would instruct in English, French, Geography, History, and Music - address A.O., at Mr. Brown's. She takes the card to the gentleman of the Fine Art Repository, who consents to let it lie upon the counter, where it grows dingy and fly-blown. Amelia passes the door wistfully many a time, in hopes that Mr. Brown will have some news, but he never beckons her in. Poor simple lady, tender and weak - how are you to battle with the violent world?
She grows daily more care-worn and sad, fixing upon her child alarmed eyes. She starts up at night and peeps into his room stealthily, to see that he is sleeping and not stolen away. She sleeps little now. A constant terror is haunting her. How she weeps and prays in the long silent nights - how she tries to hide from herself the thought which will return to her, that she ought to part with the boy, that she is the only barrier between him and prosperity. She can't, she can't. Not now. Some other day. Oh! it is too hard to think of.
Then, blushing, she thinks that the curate would willingly marry her and give a home to her and the boy. But George's picture and dearest memory are there to rebuke her. Shame and love say no. She shrinks from the idea as from something unholy.
This combat lasted for many weeks in poor Amelia's heart. Although she would not admit to herself the possibility of yielding, she was giving way. One truth after another was marshalling itself silently against her. Poverty and misery, want and degradation for her parents, injustice to the boy - one by one the outworks of the little citadel were taken.
She had earlier written a letter of tender supplication to her brother at Calcutta, imploring him not to withdraw his support from their parents. She did not know the truth of the matter. Jos was still paying his regular annuity, but it was a money-lender in the City who was receiving it: old Sedley had sold it to pay for his useless schemes. Emmy calculated eagerly the time that would elapse before the letter would be answered. To her son's guardian, the good Major at Madras, she had not communicated any of her griefs. She had not written to him since congratulating him on his approaching marriage. She thought with despondency that her only friend was fallen away.
One day, when things had come to a very bad pass - when the creditors were pressing, the mother in hysterical grief, the father in more than usual gloom - the father and daughter were alone together, and Amelia thought to comfort him by telling him that she had written to Joseph. He was always generous, and could not refuse money to his parents.
Then the poor old gentleman revealed the truth - that his son was still paying the annuity, which his own imprudence had flung away. He had not dared to tell it sooner. He thought Amelia's ghastly and terrified look reproached him.
"Ah!" said he with quivering lips, turning away, "you despise your old father now!"
"Oh, papa! it is not that," Amelia cried out, kissing him. "You are always good and kind. You did it for the best. It is not the money - it is - my God! have mercy upon me, and give me strength to bear this trial!" She kissed him again wildly and went away.
The father did not know what that explanation meant. It was that she was conquered: the child must go from her. Her heart and her treasure - her joy, her hope, love, worship - her God, almost! She must give him up, and then - and then she would go to her husband George, and they would watch over their child from Heaven.
She put on her bonnet, scarcely knowing what she did, and went out to walk in the lanes by which Georgy used to come back from school. It was May; the leaves were all coming out, the weather was brilliant; the boy came running to her flushed with health, singing, with his bundle of school-books. Both her arms were round him. No, it was impossible. They could not part.
"What is the matter, Mother?" said he; "you look very pale."
"Nothing, my child," she said, and stooped down and kissed him.
That night Amelia made the boy read the story of Samuel to her from the Bible, and how Hannah, his mother, brought him to Eli the High Priest to minister before the Lord. And he read the song of gratitude which Hannah sang, and how she made Samuel a little coat and brought it to him from year to year when she came up to offer the annual sacrifice.
And then, in her sweet simple way, George's mother explained this affecting story. How Hannah, though she loved her son so much, yet gave him up because of her vow. And how she must always have thought of him as she sat at home, far away, making the little coat; and Samuel, she was sure, never forgot his mother; and how happy she must have been as the time came to see her boy and how good and wise he had grown.
She spoke this little sermon with a gentle solemn voice, and dry eyes, until she came to the account of their meeting. Then the tender heart overflowed, and taking the boy to her breast, she rocked him in her arms and wept silently over him in a sainted agony of tears.
Her mind being made up, the widow began to arrange matters. One day Miss Osborne in Russell Square got a letter from Amelia which made her blush and look towards her father, sitting glooming at the other end of the table.
Amelia told simply the reasons which had led her to change her mind about her boy. Her father had met with fresh misfortunes. Her own small pittance would barely enable her to support her parents, and could not give George the advantages which were his due. Great as her sufferings would be at parting with him, she would, by God's help, endure them for the boy's sake. She knew that those to whom he was going would do all in their power to make him happy. He was easily moved by love and kindness. Finally she asked that she might see the child as often as she wished - she could not part with him under any other terms.
"What? Mrs. Pride has come down, has she?" old Osborne said, when with a tremulous eager voice Miss Osborne read him the letter. "Starved out, hey? Ha, ha! I knew she would." He tried to read his paper as usual, but he chuckled and swore to himself behind the sheet.
At last he flung it down and, scowling at his daughter as usual, went into his study. Returning with a key, he flung it to Miss Osborne.
"Get the room over mine - the room that was - ready," he said.
"Yes, sir," his daughter replied in a tremble. It was George's room. It had not been opened for more than ten years. Some of his clothes and gear were still there. The Bible his mother had given him was on the mantelpiece, with a pair of spurs and a dried inkstand covered with the dust of ten years. The writing-book, still on the table, was blotted with his hand.
Miss Osborne was much affected when she first entered this room with the servants. She sank quite pale on the little bed.
"This is blessed news, indeed, mam," the housekeeper said. "The dear little feller, to be sure, mam; how happy he will be!"
"You had better send that woman some money," Mr. Osborne said, before he went out. "She shan't want for nothing. Send her a hundred pound."
"And I'll go and see her tomorrow?" Miss Osborne asked.
"That's your look out. She don't come in here, mind, not for all the money in London. But she mustn't want." With this, Mr. Osborne left his daughter and went into the City.
"Here, Papa, is some money," Amelia said that night, kissing her father, and putting a bill for a hundred pounds into his hands. "And - and, Mamma, don't be harsh with Georgy. He is not going to stop with us long." She could say nothing more, and walked away silently to her room. Let us close it upon her prayers and her sorrow.
Miss Osborne came the next day, and saw Amelia. The meeting was friendly. A few words from Miss Osborne showed the poor widow that, with regard to this woman at least, there need be no fear lest she should take first place in her son's affection. She was cold, sensible, not unkind.
Miss Osborne, on the other hand, thought of old times and memories and was touched. That day they arranged together the preliminaries of the treaty.
George was kept from school the next day, and saw his aunt. Amelia left them alone together. She was trying the separation - as poor gentle Lady Jane Grey felt the edge of the axe that was to sever her slender life. Days were passed in preparations. The widow broke the matter to Georgy with great caution; but he was rather elated than otherwise, and the poor woman turned sadly away. He bragged about the news to the boys at school; told them how he was going to live with his rich grandpapa, and have a carriage and a pony, and go to a much finer school. The boy was the image of his father, as his fond mother thought.
At last the day came; the carriage drove up. George was in his new suit, for which the tailor had come previously to measure him. He had sprung up early and put on the new clothes, while his mother was lying in speechless grief. She had purchased little stores for the boy's use, marking his books and linen, talking with him and preparing him for the change.
So that he had change, what cared he? He was longing for it.
"He would come and see his mamma often on the pony," he said. "He would come and fetch her in the carriage; they would drive in the park, and she should have everything she wanted." The poor mother had to content herself with these selfish demonstrations of attachment, and tried to convince herself how sincerely her son loved her. He must love her. All children were anxious for novelty. Her child must have his enjoyments in the world. By her own selfishness, she had denied him his rights and pleasures until now.
I know few things more affecting than that timorous self-debasement of a woman. How she confesses that it is she and not the man who is guilty; how she takes all the faults on her side. It is those who injure women who get the most kindness from them; they are born timid and tyrants and maltreat those who are humblest before them.
So poor Amelia had been getting ready in silent misery for her son's departure, while George stood by watching her arrangements without the least concern. Tears had fallen into his boxes; old toys, relics, treasures had been hoarded away for him, and packed with care - and of all these things the boy took no note. The child goes away smiling as the mother breaks her heart. By heavens it is pitiful, the futile love of women for children in Vanity Fair.
The great event of Amelia's life is consummated. No angel has intervened. The child is sacrificed, and the widow is quite alone.
The boy comes to see her often, to be sure. He rides on a pony with a coachman behind him, to the delight of his old grandfather, Sedley, who walks proudly by his side. She sees him, but he is not her boy any more. He rides to see the boys at the little school, to show off his new wealth and splendour. In two days he has adopted a slightly imperious and patronizing air. He was born to command, his mother thinks, as his father was.
It is fine weather now. On evenings of the days when he does not come, she takes a long walk into London - yes, to Russell Square; and rests by the railings opposite Mr. Osborne's house. It is pleasant and cool. She can look up and see the drawing-room windows illuminated. She knows where Georgy sleeps - he has told her. She prays as the light goes out, and walks home silent. She is very tired when she comes home. Perhaps she will sleep the better for that long weary walk, and she may dream about Georgy.
One Sunday she was walking in Russell Square, some distance from Mr. Osborne's house, when all the bells of Sabbath were ringing, and George and his aunt came out to go to church. A little sweep asked for charity, and the footman tried to drive him away; but Georgy stopped and gave him money.
May God's blessing be on the boy! Emmy ran round the square and, coming up to the sweep, gave him her mite too. Then she followed the bells until she came to the Foundling Church, into which she went. There she sat where she could see the head of the boy under his father's tombstone. Many fresh children's voices rose up and sang, and little George's soul thrilled with delight at the glorious hymns. His mother could not see him for a while, through the mist that dimmed her eyes.


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 leaves from the geraniums. I could ask old women about their rheumatisms and order half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor. I shouldn't miss it much, out of five thousand a year. I could even drive out ten miles to dine at a neighbour's, and dress in the fashions of the year before last. I could go to church and keep awake in the great family pew, or go to sleep behind the curtains, with my veil down, if I only had practice. I could pay everybody, if I had but the money. This is what the conjurors here pride themselves upon doing. They look down with pity upon us miserable sinners who have none. They think themselves generous if they give our children a five-pound note, and us contemptible if we are without one." And who knows but Rebecca was right in her speculations--and that it was only a question of money and fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman? If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbour? A comfortable career of prosperity, if it does not make people honest, at least keeps them so. An alderman coming from a turtle feast will not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton; but put him to starve, and see if he will not purloin a loaf. Becky consoled herself by so balancing the chances and equalizing the distribution of good and evil in the world.
The old haunts, the old fields and woods, the copses, ponds, and gardens, the rooms of the old house where she had spent a couple of years seven years ago, were all carefully revisited by her. She had been young there, or comparatively so, for she forgot the time when she ever WAS young--but she remembered her thoughts and feelings seven years back and contrasted them with those which she had at present, now that she had seen the world, and lived with great people, and raised herself far beyond her original humble station.
"I have passed beyond it, because I have brains," Becky thought, "and almost all the rest of the world are fools. I could not go back and consort with those people now, whom I used to meet in my father's studio. Lords come up to my door with stars and garters, instead of poor artists with screws of tobacco in their pockets. I have a gentleman for my husband, and an Earl's daughter for my sister, in the very house where I was little better than a servant a few years ago. But am I much better to do now in the world than I was when I was the poor painter's daughter and wheedled the grocer round the corner for sugar and tea? Suppose I had married Francis who was so fond of me--I couldn't have been much poorer than I am now. Heigho! I wish I could exchange my position in society, and all my relations for a snug sum in the Three Per Cent. Consols"; for so it was that Becky felt the Vanity of human affairs, and it was in those securities that she would have liked to cast anchor.
It may, perhaps, have struck her that to have been honest and humble, to have done her duty, and to have marched straightforward on her way, would have brought her as near happiness as that path by which she was striving to attain it. But--just as the children at Queen's Crawley went round the room where the body of their father lay--if ever Becky had these thoughts, she was accustomed to walk round them and not look in. She eluded them and despised them--or at least she was committed to the other path from which retreat was now impossible. And for my part I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses--the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all. We grieve at being found out and at the idea of shame or punishment, but the mere sense of wrong makes very few people unhappy in Vanity Fair.
So Rebecca, during her stay at Queen's Crawley, made as many friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness as she could possibly bring under control. Lady Jane and her husband bade her farewell with the warmest demonstrations of good-will. They looked forward with pleasure to the time when, the family house in Gaunt Street being repaired and beautified, they were to meet again in London. Lady Southdown made her up a packet of medicine and sent a letter by her to the Rev. Lawrence Grills, exhorting that gentleman to save the brand who "honoured" the letter from the burning. Pitt accompanied them with four horses in the carriage to Mudbury, having sent on their baggage in a cart previously, accompanied with loads of game.
"How happy you will be to see your darling little boy again!" Lady Crawley said, taking leave of her kinswoman.
"Oh so happy!" said Rebecca, throwing up the green eyes. She was immensely happy to be free of the place, and yet loath to go. Queen's Crawley was abominably stupid, and yet the air there was somehow purer than that which she had been accustomed to breathe. Everybody had been dull, but had been kind in their way. "It is all the influence of a long course of Three Per Cents," Becky said to herself, and was right very likely.
However, the London lamps flashed joyfully as the stage rolled into Piccadilly, and Briggs had made a beautiful fire in Curzon Street, and little Rawdon was up to welcome back his papa and mamma.

So Colonel Crawley and his wife took a couple of places in the same High-flyer coach by which Rebecca had travelled with the old Baronet, on her first journey into the world some nine years before. Rawdon sat by the coachman and talked about horses the whole way. At Mudbury a carriage and pair were waiting for them, with a coachman in black.
"Ha! I see Dawson the Ironmonger has his shutters up," said Rebecca as they drove. "Surely that can't be Polly Talboys, that bouncing girl at the cottage there. I remember her as a mangy little urchin picking weeds in the garden."
"Fine gal," said Rawdon, returning the cottager's salute. Becky bowed and waved graciously to people she recognized, as if she was coming to the home of her ancestors. Rawdon was rather cast down, on the other hand. What recollections of boyhood might have been flitting across his brain? What pangs of dim remorse and doubt?
"Your sisters must be young women now," Rebecca said, thinking of those girls for the first time since she had left them.
"Don't know," replied the Colonel. "Hullo! here's old Mother Lock. How-dy-do, Mrs. Lock? Remember me, don't you?"
The carriage went through the lodge-gates kept by old Mrs. Lock, and passed between the moss-grown pillars.
"The governor has cut 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, 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 these gates; and of Joe, and Amelia.
The gravel walk and terrace had been scraped clean. Two very solemn personages in black flung open a door each 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. Sir Pitt and his wife received them in the oak parlour, along with Lady Southdown wearing a large black head-piece of bugles and feathers.
Sir Pitt had judged correctly, that she would not quit the house. She contented herself by keeping a stony silence, and by frightening the children with the ghastly gloom of her manner. A very faint bending of the head-dress and plumes welcomed Rawdon and his wife. But her Ladyship was not important to them. They were intent upon the reception which the reigning brother and sister would give them.
Pitt shook his brother's hand, and saluted Rebecca with a hand-shake and a low bow. But Lady Jane took her sister-in-law's hands and kissed her affectionately. The embrace somehow brought tears into the eyes of the little adventuress. Jane's artless kindness touched her; and Rawdon was encouraged to twirl up his mustachios and salute Lady Jane with a kiss, which caused her to blush exceedingly.
"Dev'lish nice little woman, Lady Jane," was his verdict, when he and his wife were alone together. "Pitt's got fat." Rebecca agreed with her husband's further opinion that "the mother-in-law was a tremendous old Guy - and the sisters were rather good-looking young women."
They had been summoned from school to attend the funeral. Rebecca did not attempt to forget her former position as their Governess, but recalled it frankly and kindly, and asked them about their studies, and told them that she had thought of them many a time.
"She's hardly changed in eight years," said Miss Rosalind to Miss Violet, as they were preparing for dinner.
"Red-haired women look wonderfully well," replied the other.
"Hers is darker than it was; I think she must dye it."
"At least she gives herself no airs, and remembers that she was our Governess once," Miss Violet said, meaning that it befitted governesses to keep their proper place, and forgetting that she was granddaughter not only of Sir Walpole Crawley, but of Mr. Dawson of Mudbury, and so had a coal-scuttle in her coat of arms. "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 Aunt Bute need not talk; she wants to marry Kate to young Hooper, the wine-merchant."
The bell rang for dinner, and these young women went down.
But before this, Lady Jane conducted Rebecca to the rooms prepared for her, which had been much improved recently. Seeing that Mrs. Rawdon's modest little trunks were placed in the bedroom, she helped her sister-in-law take off her neat black bonnet and cloak, and asked her how 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 there hand in hand.
Becky admired little Matilda, who was not quite four, 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.
"I wish Mamma would not insist on giving him so much medicine," Lady Jane said with a sigh. And then they had one of those confidential medical conversations about the children, which all mothers delight in. Within half an hour Becky and Lady Jane were intimate friends. Jane thought her new sister-in-law was a kind, frank, unaffected young woman.
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 told her that her own little boy was actually saved by calomel, when all the physicians in Paris had given him up.
And then she mentioned how often she had heard of Lady Southdown from the excellent Reverend Lawrence Grills, Minister of the chapel in May Fair; and how misfortunes had changed her views, and she hoped that a life spent in worldliness and error might not prevent more serious thought in the future. She described how she had formerly been indebted to Mr. Crawley for religious instruction, touched upon 'The Washerwoman of Finchley Common', and asked about Lady Emily, its gifted author.
But she crowned all by feeling very unwell after the funeral and requesting her Ladyship's medical advice. The Dowager not only gave it, but 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 began to examine the tracts with great interest, hoping to escape medication. But Lady Southdown would not leave until the cup was emptied.
Becky looked and felt very uneasy when Rawdon came in. He exploded with laughter when Becky, with a fun which she could not disguise, described the occurrence. Lord Steyne, and her son in London, had many a laugh over the story when Rawdon and his wife returned to May Fair, and Becky acted the scene for them. "Give us Lady Southdown and the black dose," was a constant cry amongst the folks in Becky's little drawing-room.
Sir Pitt remembered the respect which Rebecca had paid him in early days, and was 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 had it not been a lucky union as regarded Pitt himself? He owed his fortune to it.
His satisfaction was increased by Rebecca's behaviour towards him. She doubled the deference which before had charmed him, calling out his conversational powers in a way that surprised Pitt himself. Rebecca was able to convince Lady Jane that it was Mrs. Bute Crawley who brought about the marriage; that it was Mrs. Bute's avarice which 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? 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 such a noble old family. 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 his faithful wife, and increased the favourable impression which Rebecca made.
While she was pursuing these schemes, and Pitt was arranging the funeral and other matters, and Lady Jane was busy with her nursery, as far as her mother would let her, the body of the late owner of Queen's Crawley lay in his apartment watched unceasingly by a woman or two, and three or four undertaker's men, dressed in black, and of a proper stealthy and tragical demeanour. They watched the remains in turn, having the housekeeper's room when off duty, where they played cards and drank their beer.
The family and servants kept away from the gloomy spot. No-one regretted Sir Pitt's death except the poor woman who had hoped to be his wife and who had fled in disgrace from the Hall. Beyond her and a favourite old dog, the old man had not a single friend to mourn him, having never taken the least pains to secure one.
At last his remains were borne to the grave in a becoming manner, the family in black coaches, with their handkerchiefs up to their noses, ready for the tears which did not come; the neighbouring gentry's carriages at three miles an hour, empty, and in profound affliction; the parson speaking the formula about "our dear brother departed." Bute's curate, a smart young fellow from Oxford, and Sir Pitt Crawley composed between them an appropriate Latin epitaph, and the former preached a classical sermon, exhorting the survivors not to give way to grief. Then after a lunch in the servants' hall at Queen's Crawley, the gentry's carriages wheeled off. The old dog used to howl sometimes at first, but this was the only voice of grief for Sir Pitt Crawley, Baronet.
The new Sir Pitt Crawley went out to do a little partridge shooting. The sight of those fields of stubble and turnips, now his own, gave him secret joy. Sometimes he took no gun, but went out with a peaceful bamboo cane, Rawdon his brother blazing away at his side.
Pitt's money and acres had a great effect upon his brother. The penniless Colonel became quite obsequious, and despised the milksop Pitt no longer. Rawdon gave advice about the stables and cattle, rode over to Mudbury to look at a mare for Lady Jane, and became a most creditable younger brother. He had constant bulletins from Miss Briggs in London about little Rawdon, 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.
One day followed another in calm pursuits. Bells rang to meals and to prayers. The young ladies practised the pianoforte every morning, Rebecca giving them the benefit of her instruction. Then they walked in the park or shrubberies, or into the village, descending upon the cottages with Lady Southdown's medicine and tracts. Lady Southdown drove out in a pony-chaise, with Rebecca by her side and listening to her with the utmost interest. Rebecca sang Handel and Haydn to the family in the evenings, and began sewing a large tapestry, as if she had been born to this life - as if there were not cares and debts and poverty waiting outside the park gates to pounce upon her when she went into the world again.
"It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife," Rebecca thought. "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 greenhouse and pick off dead leaves from the geraniums. I could ask old women about their rheumatism and order half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor. I could even drive out ten miles to dine at a neighbour's, and dress in the fashions of the year before last. I could pay everybody, if I only had the money." And maybe Rebecca was right - and it was only money which made the difference between her and an honest woman.
She revisited the old haunts, the fields and woods, the ponds and gardens, the rooms of the old house where she had lived years ago. She remembered her thoughts and feelings then and contrasted them with the present, now that she had seen the world, and raised herself far beyond her original humble station.
"I have passed beyond it, because I have brains," Becky thought, "and almost all the rest of the world are fools. I have a gentleman for my husband, and an Earl's daughter for my sister, in the very house where I was little better than a servant a few years ago. But am I much better off than when I was the poor painter's daughter and wheedled the grocer for sugar and tea? I wish I could exchange my position in society, and all my relations, for a snug sum in the Three Per Cent Consols."
It may, perhaps, have struck her that to have been honest and humble, and to have done her duty, would have brought her equal happiness. But if ever Becky had these thoughts, she was accustomed to walk round them and not look in.
During her stay at Queen's Crawley, she made as many friends as she possibly could. Lady Jane and her husband bade her farewell with the warmest good-will.
"How happy you will be to see your darling little boy again!" Lady Crawley said.
"Oh so happy!" said Rebecca. She was immensely glad to be free of the place, and yet loath to go. Queen's Crawley was abominably stupid, and yet the air there was somehow purer than that which she had been accustomed to breathe. Everybody had been dull, but kind in their way. "It is all the influence of a long course of Three Per Cents," Becky said to herself, and was very likely right.
However, the London lamps flashed joyfully as the stage-coach rolled into Piccadilly, and Briggs had made a beautiful fire in Curzon Street; and little Rawdon was up to welcome back his papa and mamma.

Chapter 41: In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors