Vanity Fair - Page 358/573

"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.