Vanity Fair (72 page)

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.