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 carnage to steal a leg of
mutton; but put him to starve, and see if he will not
purloin a loaf.  Becky consoled herself by so balancing the
chances and equalizing the distribution of good and evil
in the world.

The old haunts, the old fields and woods, the copses,
ponds, and gardens, the rooms of the old house where
she had spent a couple of years seven years ago, were all
carefully revisited by her.  She had been young there, or
comparatively so, for she forgot the time when she ever
WAS young--but she remembered her thoughts and
feelings seven years back and contrasted them with those
which she had at present, now that she had seen the
world, and lived with great people, and raised herself far
beyond her original humble station.

"I have passed beyond it, because I have brains," Becky
thought, "and almost all the rest of the world are fools.
I could not go back and consort with those people now,
whom I used to meet in my father's studio.  Lords come up
to my door with stars and garters, instead of poor
artists with screws of tobacco in their pockets.  I have a
gentleman for my husband, and an Earl's daughter for my
sister, in the very house where I was little better than a
servant a few years ago.  But am I much better to do now
in the world than I was when I was the poor painter's
daughter and wheedled the grocer round the corner for
sugar and tea? Suppose I had married Francis who was
so fond of me--I couldn't have been much poorer than
I am now.  Heigho!  I wish I could exchange my position
in society, and all my relations for a snug sum in the
Three Per Cent.  Consols"; for so it was that Becky felt
the Vanity of human affairs, and it was in those securities
that she would have liked to cast anchor.

It may, perhaps, have struck her that to have been
honest and humble, to have done her duty, and to have
marched straightforward on her way, would have brought
her as near happiness as that path by which she was
striving to attain it.  But--just as the children at Queen's
Crawley went round the room where the body of their
father lay--if ever Becky had these thoughts, she was
accustomed to walk round them and not look in.  She
eluded them and despised them--or at least she was
committed to the other path from which retreat was now
impossible.  And for my part I believe that remorse is the
least active of all a man's moral senses--the very easiest to
be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened
at all.  We grieve at being found out and at the idea of
shame or punishment, but the mere sense of wrong makes
very few people unhappy in Vanity Fair.

So Rebecca, during her stay at Queen's Crawley, made as
many friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness as she
could possibly bring under control.  Lady Jane and her
husband bade her farewell with the warmest
demonstrations of good-will.  They looked forward with
pleasure to the time when, the family house in Gaunt
Street being repaired and beautified, they were to meet
again in London.  Lady Southdown made her up a packet of
medicine and sent a letter by her to the Rev.  Lawrence
Grills, exhorting that gentleman to save the brand who
"honoured" the letter from the burning.  Pitt accompanied
them with four horses in the carriage to Mudbury, having
sent on their baggage in a cart previously, accompanied
with loads of game.

"How happy you will be to see your darling little boy
again!" Lady Crawley said, taking leave of her kinswoman.

"Oh so happy!" said Rebecca, throwing up the green eyes.
She was immensely happy to be free of the place, and yet
loath to go.  Queen's Crawley was abominably stupid, and
yet the air there was somehow purer than that which she
had been accustomed to breathe.  Everybody had been dull,
but had been kind in their way.  "It is all the influence of a
long course of Three Per Cents," Becky said to herself, and
was right very likely.

However, the London lamps flashed joyfully as the stage
rolled into Piccadilly, and Briggs had made a beautiful fire
in Curzon Street, and little Rawdon was up to welcome
back his papa and mamma.




CHAPTER XLII


Which Treats of the Osborne Family

Considerable time has elapsed since we have seen our
respectable friend, old Mr. Osborne of Russell Square.  He
has not been the happiest of mortals since last we met him.
Events have occurred which have not improved his
temper, and in more in stances than one he has not been
allowed to have his own way.  To be thwarted in this
reasonable desire was always very injurious to the old
gentleman; and resistance became doubly exasperating
when gout, age, loneliness, and the force of many
disappointments combined to weigh him down.  His stiff
black hair began to grow quite white soon after his son's
death; his-face grew redder; his hands trembled more and
more as he poured out his glass of port wine.  He led his
clerks a dire life in the City:  his family at home were not
much happier.  I doubt if Rebecca, whom we have seen
piously praying for Consols, would have exchanged her
poverty and the dare-devil excitement and chances of her
life for Osborne's money and the humdrum gloom which
enveloped him.  He had proposed for Miss Swartz, but had
been rejected scornfully by the partisans of that lady, who
married her to a young sprig of Scotch nobility.  He was a
man to have married a woman out of low life and bullied
her dreadfully afterwards; but no person presented herself
suitable to his taste, and, instead, he tyrannized over his
unmarried daughter, at home.  She had a fine carriage and
fine horses and sat at the head of a table loaded with the
grandest plate.  She had a cheque-book, a prize footman to
follow her when she walked, unlimited credit, and bows
and compliments from all the tradesmen, and all the
appurtenances of an heiress; but she spent a woeful time.
The little charity-girls at the Foundling, the sweeperess at
the crossing, the poorest under-kitchen-maid in the
servants' hall, was happy compared to that unfortunate
and now middle-aged young lady.

Frederick Bullock, Esq., of the house of Bullock, Hulker, and
Bullock, had married Maria Osborne, not without a great
deal of difficulty and grumbling on Mr. Bullock's part.
George being dead and cut out of his father's will,
Frederick insisted that the half of the old gentleman's
property should be settled upon his Maria, and indeed, for
a long time, refused, "to come to the scratch" (it was Mr.
Frederick's own expression) on any other terms.  Osborne
said Fred had agreed to take his daughter with twenty
thousand, and he should bind himself to no more.  "Fred
might take it, and welcome, or leave it, and go and be
hanged." Fred, whose hopes had been raised when George
had been disinherited, thought himself infamously
swindled by the old merchant, and for some time made as
if he would break off the match altogether.  Osborne
withdrew his account from Bullock and Hulker's, went on
'Change with a horsewhip which he swore he would lay
across the back of a certain scoundrel that should be
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 old gentleman, rattling up the carriage windows as
he and his daughter drove away one night from Mrs.
Frederick Bullock's, after dinner.  "So she invites her father
and sister to a second day's dinner (if those sides, or
ontrys, as she calls 'em, weren't served yesterday, I'm
d--d), and to meet City folks and littery men, and keeps
the Earls and the Ladies, and the Honourables to herself.
Honourables? Damn Honourables.  I am a plain British
merchant I am, and could buy the beggarly hounds over
and over.  Lords, indeed!--why, at one of her swarreys I
saw one of 'em speak to a dam fiddler--a fellar I despise.
And they won't come to Russell Square, won't they? Why,
I'll lay my life I've got a better glass of wine, and pay a
better figure for it, and can show a handsomer service of
silver, and can lay a better dinner on my mahogany, than
ever they see on theirs--the cringing, sneaking, stuck-up
fools.  Drive on quick, James:  I want to get back to Russell
Square--ha, ha!" and he sank back into the corner with a
furious laugh.  With such reflections on his own superior
merit, it was the custom of the old gentleman not
unfrequently to console himself.

Jane Osborne could not but concur in these opinions
respecting her sister's conduct; and when Mrs. Frederick's
first-born, Frederick Augustus Howard Stanley Devereux
Bullock, was born, old Osborne, who was invited to the
christening and to be godfather, contented himself with
sending the child a gold cup, with twenty guineas inside it
for the nurse.  "That's more than any of your Lords will
give, I'LL warrant," he said and refused to attend at the
ceremony.

The splendour of the gift, however, caused great
satisfaction to the house of Bullock.  Maria thought that her
father was very much pleased with her, and Frederick
augured the best for his little son and heir.

One can fancy the pangs with which Miss Osborne in her
solitude in Russell Square read the Morning Post, where
her sister's name occurred every now and then, in the
articles headed "Fashionable Reunions," and where she had
an opportunity of reading a description of Mrs. F.  Bullock's
costume, when presented at the drawing room by Lady
Frederica Bullock.  Jane's own life, as we have said,
admitted of no such grandeur.  It was an awful existence.
She had to get up of black winter's mornings to make
breakfast for her scowling old father, who would have
turned the whole house out of doors if his tea had not been
ready at half-past eight.  She remained silent opposite to
him, listening to the urn hissing, and sitting in tremor
while the parent read his paper and consumed his
accustomed portion of muffins and tea.  At half-past nine
he rose and went to the City, and she was almost free till
dinner-time, to make visitations in the kitchen and to scold
the servants; to drive abroad and descend upon the
tradesmen, who were prodigiously respectful; to leave her
cards and her papa's at the great glum respectable houses
of their City friends; or to sit alone in the large drawing-
room, expecting visitors; and working at a huge piece of
worsted by the fire, on the sofa, hard by the great
Iphigenia clock, which ticked and tolled with mournful
loudness in the dreary room.  The great glass over the
mantelpiece, faced by the other great console glass at the
opposite end of the room, increased and multiplied
between them the brown Holland bag in which the
chandelier hung, until you saw these brown Holland bags
fading away in endless perspectives, and this apartment of
Miss Osborne's seemed the centre of a system of
drawing-rooms.  When she removed the cordovan leather
from the grand piano and ventured to play a few notes on
it, it sounded with a mournful sadness, startling the dismal
echoes of the house.  George's picture was gone, and laid
upstairs in a lumber-room in the garret; and though there
was a consciousness of him, and father and daughter often
instinctively knew that they were thinking of him, no
mention was ever made of the brave and once darling son.

At five o'clock Mr. Osborne came back to his dinner, which
he and his daughter took in silence (seldom broken, except
when he swore and was savage, if the cooking was not to
his liking), or which they shared twice in a month with a
party of dismal friends of Osborne's rank and age.  Old Dr.
Gulp and his lady from Bloomsbury Square; old Mr.
Frowser, the attorney, from Bedford Row, a very great
man, and from his business, hand-in-glove with the "nobs
at the West End"; old Colonel Livermore, of the Bombay
Army, and Mrs. Livermore, from Upper Bedford Place; old
Sergeant Toffy and Mrs. Toffy; and sometimes old Sir
Thomas Coffin and Lady Coffin, from Bedford Square.  Sir
Thomas was celebrated as a hanging judge, and the
particular tawny port was produced when he dined with
Mr. Osborne.

These people and their like gave the pompous Russell
Square merchant pompous dinners back again.  They had
solemn rubbers of whist, when they went upstairs after
drinking, and their carriages were called at half past ten.
Many rich people, whom we poor devils are in the habit of
envying, lead contentedly an existence like that above
described.  Jane Osborne scarcely ever met a man under
sixty, and almost the only bachelor who appeared in their
society was Mr. Smirk, the celebrated ladies' doctor.

I can't say that nothing had occurred to disturb the
monotony of this awful existence:  the fact is, there had
been a secret in poor Jane's life which had made her father
more savage and morose than even nature, pride, and
over-feeding had made him.  This secret was connected
with Miss Wirt, who had a cousin an artist, Mr. Smee, very
celebrated since as a portrait-painter and R.A., but who
once was glad enough to give drawing lessons to ladies of
fashion.  Mr. Smee has forgotten where Russell Square is
now, but he was glad enough to visit it in the year 1818,
when Miss Osborne had instruction from him.

Smee (formerly a pupil of Sharpe of Frith Street, a
dissolute, irregular, and unsuccessful man, but a man with
great knowledge of his art) being the cousin of Miss Wirt,
we say, and introduced by her to Miss Osborne, whose
hand and heart were still free after various incomplete
love affairs, felt a great attachment for this lady, and it is
believed inspired one in her bosom.  Miss Wirt was the
confidante of this intrigue.  I know not whether she used to
leave the room where the master and his pupil were
painting, in order to give them an opportunity for
exchanging those vows and sentiments which cannot be
uttered advantageously in the presenc