“Humph!” said Captain Macmurdo. Be hanged to these civilians, he thought to himself, they are always for arranging and speechifying. Mr. Wenham took a chair which was not offered to him--took a paper from his pocket, and resumed--
“You have seen this gratifying announcement in the papers this morning, Colonel? Government has secured a most valuable servant, and you, if you accept office, as I presume you will, an excellent appointment. Three thousand a year, delightful climate, excellent government-house, all your own way in the Colony, and a certain promotion. I congratulate you with all my heart. I presume you know, gentlemen, to whom my friend is indebted for this piece of patronage?”
“Hanged if I know,” the Captain said; his principal turned very red.
“To one of the most generous and kindest men in the world, as he is one of the greatest--to my excellent friend, the Marquis of Steyne.”
“I’ll see him d--- before I take his place,” growled out Rawdon.
“You are irritated against my noble friend,” Mr. Wenham calmly resumed; “and now, in the name of common sense and justice, tell me why?”
“Why?” cried Rawdon in surprise.
“Why? Dammy!” said the Captain, ringing his stick on the ground.
“Dammy, indeed,” said Mr. Wenham with the most agreeable smile; “still, look at the matter as a man of the world--as an honest man-- and see if you have not been in the wrong. You come home from a journey, and find--what?--my Lord Steyne supping at your house in Curzon Street with Mrs. Crawley. Is the circumstance strange or novel? Has he not been a hundred times before in the same position? Upon my honour and word as a gentleman"--Mr. Wenham here put his hand on his waistcoat with a parliamentary air--"I declare I think that your suspicions are monstrous and utterly unfounded, and that they injure an honourable gentleman who has proved his good-will towards you by a thousand benefactions--and a most spotless and innocent lady.”
“You don’t mean to say that--that Crawley’s mistaken?” said Mr. Macmurdo.
“I believe that Mrs. Crawley is as innocent as my wife, Mrs. Wenham,” Mr. Wenham said with great energy. “I believe that, misled by an infernal jealousy, my friend here strikes a blow against not only an infirm and old man of high station, his constant friend and benefactor, but against his wife, his own dearest honour, his son’s future reputation, and his own prospects in life.”
“I will tell you what happened,” Mr. Wenham continued with great solemnity; “I was sent for this morning by my Lord Steyne, and found him in a pitiable state, as, I need hardly inform Colonel Crawley, any man of age and infirmity would be after a personal conflict with a man of your strength. I say to your face; it was a cruel advantage you took of that strength, Colonel Crawley. It was not only the body of my noble and excellent friend which was wounded-- his heart, sir, was bleeding. A man whom he had loaded with benefits and regarded with affection had subjected him to the foulest indignity. What was this very appointment, which appears in the journals of to-day, but a proof of his kindness to you? When I saw his Lordship this morning I found him in a state pitiable indeed to see, and as anxious as you are to revenge the outrage committed upon him, by blood. You know he has given his proofs, I presume, Colonel Crawley?”
“He has plenty of pluck,” said the Colonel. “Nobody ever said he hadn’t.”
“His first order to me was to write a letter of challenge, and to carry it to Colonel Crawley. One or other of us,” he said, “must not survive the outrage of last night.”
Crawley nodded. “You’re coming to the point, Wenham,” he said.
“I tried my utmost to calm Lord Steyne. Good God! sir,” I said, “how I regret that Mrs. Wenham and myself had not accepted Mrs. Crawley’s invitation to sup with her!”
“She asked you to sup with her?” Captain Macmurdo said.
“After the opera. Here’s the note of invitation--stop--no, this is another paper--I thought I had h, but it’s of no consequence, and I pledge you my word to the fact. If we had come--and it was only one of Mrs. Wenham’s headaches which prevented us--she suffers under them a good deal, especially in the spring--if we had come, and you had returned home, there would have been no quarrel, no insult, no suspicion--and so it is positively because my poor wife has a headache that you are to bring death down upon two men of honour and plunge two of the most excellent and ancient families in the kingdom into disgrace and sorrow.”
Mr. Macmurdo looked at his principal with the air of a man profoundly puzzled, and Rawdon felt with a kind of rage that his prey was escaping him. He did not believe a word of the story, and yet, how discredit or disprove it?
Mr. Wenham continued with the same fluent oratory, which in his place in Parliament he had so often practised--"I sat for an hour or more by Lord Steyne’s bedside, beseeching, imploring Lord Steyne to forego his intention of demanding a meeting. I pointed out to him that the circumstances were after all suspicious--they were suspicious. I acknowledge it--any man in your position might have been taken in--I said that a man furious with jealousy is to all intents and purposes a madman, and should be as such regarded--that a duel between you must lead to the disgrace of all parties concerned--that a man of his Lordship’s exalted station had no right in these days, when the most atrocious revolutionary principles, and the most dangerous levelling doctrines are preached among the vulgar, to create a public scandal; and that, however innocent, the common people would insist that he was guilty. In fine, I implored him not to send the challenge.”
“I don’t believe one word of the whole story,” said Rawdon, grinding his teeth. “I believe it a d--- lie, and that you’re in it, Mr. Wenham. If the challenge don’t come from him, by Jove it shall come from me.”
Mr. Wenham turned deadly pale at this savage interruption of the Colonel and looked towards the door.
But he found a champion in Captain Macmurdo. That gentleman rose up with an oath and rebuked Rawdon for his language. “You put the affair into my hands, and you shall act as I think fit, by Jove, and not as you do. You have no right to insult Mr. Wenham with this sort of language; and dammy, Mr. Wenham, you deserve an apology. And as for a challenge to Lord Steyne, you may get somebody else to carry it, I won’t. If my lord, after being thrashed, chooses to sit still, dammy let him. And as for the affair with--with Mrs. Crawley, my belief is, there’s nothing proved at all: that your wife’s innocent, as innocent as Mr. Wenham says she is; and at any rate that you would be a d--fool not to take the place and hold your tongue.”
“Captain Macmurdo, you speak like a man of sense,” Mr. Wenham cried out, immensely relieved--"I forget any words that Colonel Crawley has used in the irritation of the moment.”
“I thought you would,” Rawdon said with a sneer.
“Shut your mouth, you old stoopid,” the Captain said good-naturedly. “Mr. Wenham ain’t a fighting man; and quite right, too.”
“This matter, in my belief,” the Steyne emissary cried, “ought to be buried in the most profound oblivion. A word concerning it should never pass these doors. I speak in the interest of my friend, as well as of Colonel Crawley, who persists in considering me his enemy.”
“I suppose Lord Steyne won’t talk about it very much,” said Captain Macmurdo; “and I don’t see why our side should. The affair ain’t a very pretty one, any way you take it, and the less said about it the better. It’s you are thrashed, and not us; and if you are satisfied, why, I think, we should be.”
Mr. Wenham took his hat, upon this, and Captain Macmurdo following him to the door, shut it upon himself and Lord Steyne’s agent, leaving Rawdon chafing within. When the two were on the other side, Macmurdo looked hard at the other ambassador and with an expression of anything but respect on his round jolly face.
“You don’t stick at a trifle, Mr. Wenham,” he said.
“You flatter me, Captain Macmurdo,” answered the other with a smile. “Upon my honour and conscience now, Mrs. Crawley did ask us to sup after the opera.”
“Of course
; and Mrs. Wenham had one of her head-aches. I say, I’ve got a thousand-pound note here, which I will give you if you will give me a receipt, please; and I will put the note up in an envelope for Lord Steyne. My man shan’t fight him. But we had rather not take his money.”
“It was all a mistake--all a mistake, my dear sir,” the other said with the utmost innocence of manner; and was bowed down the Club steps by Captain Macmurdo, just as Sir Pitt Crawley ascended them. There was a slight acquaintance between these two gentlemen, and the Captain, going back with the Baronet to the room where the latter’s brother was, told Sir Pitt, in confidence, that he had made the affair all right between Lord Steyne and the Colonel.
Sir Pitt was well pleased, of course, at this intelligence, and congratulated his brother warmly upon the peaceful issue of the affair, making appropriate moral remarks upon the evils of duelling and the unsatisfactory nature of that sort of settlement of disputes.
And after this preface, he tried with all his eloquence to effect a reconciliation between Rawdon and his wife. He recapitulated the statements which Becky had made, pointed out the probabilities of their truth, and asserted his own firm belief in her innocence.
But Rawdon would not hear of it. “She has kep money concealed from me these ten years,” he said “She swore, last night only, she had none from Steyne. She knew it was all up, directly I found it. If she’s not guilty, Pitt, she’s as bad as guilty, and I’ll never see her again--never.” His head sank down on his chest as he spoke the words, and he looked quite broken and sad.
“Poor old boy,” Macmurdo said, shaking his head.
Rawdon Crawley resisted for some time the idea of taking the place which had been procured for him by so odious a patron, and was also for removing the boy from the school where Lord Steyne’s interest had placed him. He was induced, however, to acquiesce in these benefits by the entreaties of his brother and Macmurdo, but mainly by the latter, pointing out to him what a fury Steyne would be in to think that his enemy’s fortune was made through his means.
When the Marquis of Steyne came abroad after his accident, the Colonial Secretary bowed up to him and congratulated himself and the Service upon having made so excellent an appointment. These congratulations were received with a degree of gratitude which may be imagined on the part of Lord Steyne.
The secret of the rencontre between him and Colonel Crawley was buried in the profoundest oblivion, as Wenham said; that is, by the seconds and the principals. But before that evening was over it was talked of at fifty dinner-tables in Vanity Fair. Little Cackleby himself went to seven evening parties and told the story with comments and emendations at each place. How Mrs. Washington White revelled in it! The Bishopess of Ealing was shocked beyond expression; the Bishop went and wrote his name down in the visiting-book at Gaunt House that very day. Little Southdown was sorry; so you may be sure was his sister Lady Jane, very sorry. Lady Southdown wrote it off to her other daughter at the Cape of Good Hope. It was town-talk for at least three days, and was only kept out of the newspapers by the exertions of Mr. Wagg, acting upon a hint from Mr. Wenham.
The bailiffs and brokers seized upon poor Raggles in Curzon Street, and the late fair tenant of that poor little mansion was in the meanwhile--where? Who cared! Who asked after a day or two? Was she guilty or not? We all know how charitable the world is, and how the verdict of Vanity Fair goes when there is a doubt. Some people said she had gone to Naples in pursuit of Lord Steyne, whilst others averred that his Lordship quitted that city and fled to Palermo on hearing of Becky’s arrival; some said she was living in Bierstadt, and had become a dame d’honneur to the Queen of Bulgaria; some that she was at Boulogne; and others, at a boarding-house at Cheltenham.
Rawdon made her a tolerable annuity, and we may be sure that she was a woman who could make a little money go a great way, as the saying is. He would have paid his debts on leaving England, could he have got any Insurance Office to take his life, but the climate of Coventry Island was so bad that he could borrow no money on the strength of his salary. He remitted, however, to his brother punctually, and wrote to his little boy regularly every mail. He kept Macmurdo in cigars and sent over quantities of shells, cayenne pepper, hot pickles, guava jelly, and colonial produce to Lady Jane. He sent his brother home the Swamp Town Gazette, in which the new Governor was praised with immense enthusiasm; whereas the Swamp Town Sentinel, whose wife was not asked to Government House, declared that his Excellency was a tyrant, compared to whom Nero was an enlightened philanthropist. Little Rawdon used to like to get the papers and read about his Excellency.
His mother never made any movement to see the child. He went home to his aunt for Sundays and holidays; he soon knew every bird’s nest about Queen’s Crawley, and rode out with Sir Huddlestone’s hounds, which he admired so on his first well-remembered visit to Hampshire.
Chapter LVI
Georgy is Made a Gentleman
Georgy Osborne was now fairly established in his grandfather’s mansion in Russell Square, occupant of his father’s room in the house and heir apparent of all the splendours there. The good looks, gallant bearing, and gentlemanlike appearance of the boy won the grandsire’s heart for him. Mr. Osborne was as proud of him as ever he had been of the elder George.
The child had many more luxuries and indulgences than had been awarded his father. Osborne’s commerce had prospered greatly of late years. His wealth and importance in the City had very much increased. He had been glad enough in former days to put the elder George to a good private school; and a commission in the army for his son had been a source of no small pride to him; for little George and his future prospects the old man looked much higher. He would make a gentleman of the little chap, was Mr. Osborne’s constant saying regarding little Georgy. He saw him in his mind’s eye, a collegian, a Parliament man, a Baronet, perhaps. The old man thought he would die contented if he could see his grandson in a fair way to such honours. He would have none but a tip-top college man to educate him--none of your quacks and pretenders--no, no. A few years before, he used to be savage, and inveigh against all parsons, scholars, and the like declaring that they were a pack of humbugs, and quacks that weren’t fit to get their living but by grinding Latin and Greek, and a set of supercilious dogs that pretended to look down upon British merchants and gentlemen, who could buy up half a hundred of ’em. He would mourn now, in a very solemn manner, that his own education had been neglected, and repeatedly point out, in pompous orations to Georgy, the necessity and excellence of classical acquirements.
When they met at dinner the grandsire used to ask the lad what he had been reading during the day, and was greatly interested at the report the boy gave of his own studies, pretending to understand little George when he spoke regarding them. He made a hundred blunders and showed his ignorance many a time. It did not increase the respect which the child had for his senior. A quick brain and a better education elsewhere showed the boy very soon that his grandsire was a dullard, and he began accordingly to command him and to look down upon him; for his previous education, humble and contracted as it had been, had made a much better gentleman of Georgy than any plans of his grandfather could make him. He had been brought up by a kind, weak, and tender woman, who had no pride about anything but about him, and whose heart was so pure and whose bearing was so meek and humble that she could not but needs be a true lady. She busied herself in gentle offices and quiet duties; if she never said brilliant things, she never spoke or thought unkind ones; guileless and artless, loving and pure, indeed how could our poor little Amelia be other than a real gentlewoman!
Young Georgy lorded over this soft and yielding nature; and the contrast of its simplicity and delicacy with the coarse pomposity of the dull old man with whom he next came in contact made him lord over the latter too. If he had been a Prince Royal he could not have been better brought up to think well of himself.
Whilst his mother was yearning after him at home, and I do believe every hour of the day, and during m
ost hours of the sad lonely nights, thinking of him, this young gentleman had a number of pleasures and consolations administered to him, which made him for his part bear the separation from Amelia very easily. Little boys who cry when they are going to school cry because they are going to a very uncomfortable place. It is only a few who weep from sheer affection. When you think that the eyes of your childhood dried at the sight of a piece of gingerbread, and that a plum cake was a compensation for the agony of parting with your mamma and sisters, oh my friend and brother, you need not be too confident of your own fine feelings.
Well, then, Master George Osborne had every comfort and luxury that a wealthy and lavish old grandfather thought fit to provide. The coachman was instructed to purchase for him the handsomest pony which could be bought for money, and on this George was taught to ride, first at a riding-school, whence, after having performed satisfactorily without stirrups, and over the leaping-bar, he was conducted through the New Road to Regent’s Park, and then to Hyde Park, where he rode in state with Martin the coachman behind him. Old Osborne, who took matters more easily in the City now, where he left his affairs to his junior partners, would often ride out with Miss O. in the same fashionable direction. As little Georgy came cantering up with his dandified air and his heels down, his grandfather would nudge the lad’s aunt and say, “Look, Miss O.” And he would laugh, and his face would grow red with pleasure, as he nodded out of the window to the boy, as the groom saluted the carriage, and the footman saluted Master George. Here too his aunt, Mrs. Frederick Bullock (whose chariot might daily be seen in the Ring, with bullocks or emblazoned on the panels and harness, and three pasty-faced little Bullocks, covered with cockades and feathers, staring from the windows) Mrs. Frederick Bullock, I say, flung glances of the bitterest hatred at the little upstart as he rode by with his hand on his side and his hat on one ear, as proud as a lord.
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