Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray (portable ebook reader .txt) 📖

Fear, doubt, and resistance sprang up, too, in the boy’s own bosom. They were separated from that day of the boxes on the ear.

Lord Steyne also heartily disliked the boy. When they met by mischance, he made sarcastic bows or remarks to the child, or glared at him with savage-looking eyes. Rawdon used to stare him in the face and double his little fists in return. He knew his enemy, and this gentleman, of all who came to the house, was the one who angered him most. One day the footman found him squaring his fists at Lord Steyne’s hat in the hall. The footman told the circumstance as a good joke to Lord Steyne’s coachman; that officer imparted it to Lord Steyne’s gentleman, and to the servants’ hall in general. And very soon afterwards, when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley made her appearance at Gaunt House, the porter who unbarred the gates, the servants of all uniforms in the hall, the functionaries in white waistcoats, who bawled out from landing to landing the names of Colonel and Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, knew about her, or fancied they did. The man who brought her refreshment and stood behind her chair, had talked her character over with the large gentleman in motley-coloured clothes at his side. Bon Dieu! it is awful, that servants’ inquisition! You see a woman in a great party in a splendid saloon, surrounded by faithful admirers, distributing sparkling glances, dressed to perfection, curled, rouged, smiling and happy⁠—Discovery walks respectfully up to her, in the shape of a huge powdered man with large calves and a tray of ices⁠—with Calumny (which is as fatal as truth) behind him, in the shape of the hulking fellow carrying the wafer-biscuits. Madam, your secret will be talked over by those men at their club at the public-house tonight. Jeames will tell Chawles his notions about you over their pipes and pewter beer-pots. Some people ought to have mutes for servants in Vanity Fair⁠—mutes who could not write. If you are guilty, tremble. That fellow behind your chair may be a Janissary with a bowstring in his plush breeches pocket. If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are as ruinous as guilt.

“Was Rebecca guilty or not?” the Vehmgericht of the servants’ hall had pronounced against her.

And, I shame to say, she would not have got credit had they not believed her to be guilty. It was the sight of the Marquis of Steyne’s carriage-lamps at her door, contemplated by Raggles, burning in the blackness of midnight, “that kep him up,” as he afterwards said, that even more than Rebecca’s arts and coaxings.

And so⁠—guiltless very likely⁠—she was writhing and pushing onward towards what they call “a position in society,” and the servants were pointing at her as lost and ruined. So you see Molly, the housemaid, of a morning, watching a spider in the doorpost lay his thread and laboriously crawl up it, until, tired of the sport, she raises her broom and sweeps away the thread and the artificer.

A day or two before Christmas, Becky, her husband and her son made ready and went to pass the holidays at the seat of their ancestors at Queen’s Crawley. Becky would have liked to leave the little brat behind, and would have done so but for Lady Jane’s urgent invitations to the youngster, and the symptoms of revolt and discontent which Rawdon manifested at her neglect of her son. “He’s the finest boy in England,” the father said in a tone of reproach to her, “and you don’t seem to care for him, Becky, as much as you do for your spaniel. He shan’t bother you much; at home he will be away from you in the nursery, and he shall go outside on the coach with me.”

“Where you go yourself because you want to smoke those filthy cigars,” replied Mrs. Rawdon.

“I remember when you liked ’em though,” answered the husband.

Becky laughed; she was almost always good-humoured. “That was when I was on my promotion, Goosey,” she said. “Take Rawdon outside with you and give him a cigar too if you like.”

Rawdon did not warm his little son for the winter’s journey in this way, but he and Briggs wrapped up the child in shawls and comforters, and he was hoisted respectfully onto the roof of the coach in the dark morning, under the lamps of the White Horse Cellar; and with no small delight he watched the dawn rise and made his first journey to the place which his father still called home. It was a journey of infinite pleasure to the boy, to whom the incidents of the road afforded endless interest, his father answering to him all questions connected with it and telling him who lived in the great white house to the right, and whom the park belonged to. His mother, inside the vehicle, with her maid and her furs, her wrappers, and her scent bottles, made such a to-do that you would have thought she never had been in a stagecoach before⁠—much less, that she had been turned out of this very one to make room for a paying passenger on a certain journey performed some half-score years ago.

It was dark again when little Rawdon was wakened up to enter his uncle’s carriage at Mudbury, and he sat and looked out of it wondering as the great iron gates flew open, and at the white trunks of the limes as they swept by, until they stopped, at length, before the light windows of the Hall, which were blazing and comfortable with Christmas welcome. The hall-door was flung open⁠—a big fire was burning in the great old fireplace⁠—a carpet was down over the chequered black flags⁠—“It’s the old Turkey one that used to be in the Ladies’ Gallery,” thought Rebecca, and the next instant was kissing Lady Jane.

She and Sir Pitt performed the same salute with great gravity; but Rawdon, having been smoking, hung back rather from his sister-in-law, whose