Vanity Fair - Page 311/573

I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great

practitioners in Crawlers way?--how many great noblemen rob their petty

tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched

little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble

nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has

an execution in his house--and that one or other owes six or seven

millions, the defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim in

the vastness of his ruin. But who pities a poor barber who can't get

his money for powdering the footmen's heads; or a poor carpenter who

has ruined himself by fixing up ornaments and pavilions for my lady's

dejeuner; or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes,

and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries

ready, which my lord has done him the honour to bespeak? When the great

house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed:

as they say in the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself,

he sends plenty of other souls thither.

Rawdon and his wife generously gave their patronage to all such of Miss

Crawley's tradesmen and purveyors as chose to serve them. Some were

willing enough, especially the poor ones. It was wonderful to see the

pertinacity with which the washerwoman from Tooting brought the cart

every Saturday, and her bills week after week. Mr. Raggles himself had

to supply the greengroceries. The bill for servants' porter at the

Fortune of War public house is a curiosity in the chronicles of beer.

Every servant also was owed the greater part of his wages, and thus

kept up perforce an interest in the house. Nobody in fact was paid.

Not the blacksmith who opened the lock; nor the glazier who mended the

pane; nor the jobber who let the carriage; nor the groom who drove it;

nor the butcher who provided the leg of mutton; nor the coals which

roasted it; nor the cook who basted it; nor the servants who ate it:

and this I am given to understand is not unfrequently the way in which

people live elegantly on nothing a year.

In a little town such things cannot be done without remark. We know

there the quantity of milk our neighbour takes and espy the joint or

the fowls which are going in for his dinner. So, probably, 200 and 202

in Curzon Street might know what was going on in the house between

them, the servants communicating through the area-railings; but Crawley

and his wife and his friends did not know 200 and 202. When you came to

201 there was a hearty welcome, a kind smile, a good dinner, and a

jolly shake of the hand from the host and hostess there, just for all

the world as if they had been undisputed masters of three or four

thousand a year--and so they were, not in money, but in produce and

labour--if they did not pay for the mutton, they had it: if they did

not give bullion in exchange for their wine, how should we know? Never

was better claret at any man's table than at honest Rawdon's; dinners

more gay and neatly served. His drawing-rooms were the prettiest,

little, modest salons conceivable: they were decorated with the

greatest taste, and a thousand knick-knacks from Paris, by Rebecca:

and when she sat at her piano trilling songs with a lightsome heart,

the stranger voted himself in a little paradise of domestic comfort and

agreed that, if the husband was rather stupid, the wife was charming,

and the dinners the pleasantest in the world.