Vanity Fair
"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.
CHAPTER XLII
Which Treats of the Osborne Family
Considerable time has elapsed since we have seen our respectable
friend, old Mr. Osborne of Russell Square. He has not been the
happiest of mortals since last we met him. Events have occurred which
have not improved his temper, and in more instances than one he has
not been allowed to have his own way. To be thwarted in this
reasonable desire was always very injurious to the old gentleman; and
resistance became doubly exasperating when gout, age, loneliness, and
the force of many disappointments combined to weigh him down. His
stiff black hair began to grow quite white soon after his son's death;
his face grew redder; his hands trembled more and more as he poured out
his glass of port wine. He led his clerks a dire life in the City:
his family at home were not much happier. I doubt if Rebecca, whom we
have seen piously praying for Consols, would have exchanged her poverty
and the dare-devil excitement and chances of her life for Osborne's
money and the humdrum gloom which enveloped him. He had proposed for
Miss Swartz, but had been rejected scornfully by the partisans of that
lady, who married her to a young sprig of Scotch nobility. He was a
man to have married a woman out of low life and bullied her dreadfully
afterwards; but no person presented herself suitable to his taste, and,
instead, he tyrannized over his unmarried daughter, at home. She had a
fine carriage and fine horses and sat at the head of a table loaded
with the grandest plate. She had a cheque-book, a prize footman to
follow her when she walked, unlimited credit, and bows and compliments
from all the tradesmen, and all the appurtenances of an heiress; but
she spent a woeful time. The little charity-girls at the Foundling, the
sweeperess at the crossing, the poorest under-kitchen-maid in the
servants' hall, was happy compared to that unfortunate and now
middle-aged young lady.
Frederick Bullock, Esq., of the house of Bullock, Hulker, and Bullock,
had married Maria Osborne, not without a great deal of difficulty and
grumbling on Mr. Bullock's part. George being dead and cut out of his
father's will, Frederick insisted that the half of the old gentleman's
property should be settled upon his Maria, and indeed, for a long time,
refused, "to come to the scratch" (it was Mr. Frederick's own
expression) on any other terms. Osborne said Fred had agreed to take
his daughter with twenty thousand, and he should bind himself to no
more. "Fred might take it, and welcome, or leave it, and go and be
hanged." Fred, whose hopes had been raised when George had been
disinherited, thought himself infamously swindled by the old merchant,
and for some time made as if he would break off the match altogether.
Osborne withdrew his account from Bullock and Hulker's, went on 'Change
with a horsewhip which he swore he would lay across the back of a
certain scoundrel that should be nameless, and demeaned himself in his
usual violent manner. Jane Osborne condoled with her sister Maria
during this family feud. "I always told you, Maria, that it was your
money he loved and not you," she said, soothingly.
"He selected me and my money at any rate; he didn't choose you and
yours," replied Maria, tossing up her head.
The rapture was, however, only temporary. Fred's father and senior
partners counselled him to take Maria, even with the twenty thousand
settled, half down, and half at the death of Mr. Osborne, with the
chances of the further division of the property. So he "knuckled
down," again to use his own phrase, and sent old Hulker with peaceable
overtures to Osborne. It was his father, he said, who would not hear
of the match, and had made the difficulties; he was most anxious to
keep the engagement. The excuse was sulkily accepted by Mr. Osborne.
Hulker and Bullock were a high family of the City aristocracy, and
connected with the "nobs" at the West End. It was something for the old
man to be able to say, "My son, sir, of the house of Hulker, Bullock,
and Co., sir; my daughter's cousin, Lady Mary Mango, sir, daughter of
the Right Hon. The Earl of Castlemouldy." In his imagination he saw
his house peopled by the "nobs." So he forgave young Bullock and
consented that the marriage should take place.
It was a grand affair--the bridegroom's relatives giving the breakfast,
their habitations being near St. George's, Hanover Square, where the
business took place. The "nobs of the West End" were invited, and many
of them signed the book. Mr. Mango and Lady Mary Mango were there,
with the dear young Gwendoline and Guinever Mango as bridesmaids;
Colonel Bludyer of the Dragoon Guards (eldest son of the house of
Bludyer Brothers, Mincing Lane), another cousin of the bridegroom, and
the Honourable Mrs. Bludyer; the Honourable George Boulter, Lord
Levant's son, and his lady, Miss Mango that was; Lord Viscount
Castletoddy; Honourable James McMull and Mrs. McMull (formerly Miss
Swartz); and a host of fashionables, who have all married into Lombard
Street and done a great deal to ennoble Cornhill.
The young couple had a house near Berkeley Square and a small villa at
Roehampton, among the banking colony there. Fred was considered to
have made rather a mesalliance by the ladies of his family, whose
grandfather had been in a Charity School, and who were allied through
the husbands with some of the best blood in England. And Maria was
bound, by superior pride and great care in the composition of her
visiting-book, to make up for the defects of birth, and felt it her
duty to see her father and sister as little as possible.
That she should utterly break with the old man, who had still so many
scores of thousand pounds to give away, is absurd to suppose. Fred
Bullock would never allow her to do that. But she was still young and
incapable of hiding her feelings; and by inviting her papa and sister
to her third-rate parties, and behaving very coldly to them when they
came, and by avoiding Russell Square, and indiscreetly begging her
father to quit that odious vulgar place, she did more harm than all
Frederick's diplomacy could repair, and perilled her chance of her
inheritance like a giddy heedless creature as she was.
"So Russell Square is not good enough for Mrs. Maria, hay?" said the