Pitt stooped and picked them up, amazed at so much wealth. "Not that,"
Rawdon said. "I hope to put a bullet into the man whom that belongs
to." He had thought to himself, it would be a fine revenge to wrap a
ball in the note and kill Steyne with it.
After this colloquy the brothers once more shook hands and parted. Lady
Jane had heard of the Colonel's arrival, and was waiting for her
husband in the adjoining dining-room, with female instinct, auguring
evil. The door of the dining-room happened to be left open, and the
lady of course was issuing from it as the two brothers passed out of
the study. She held out her hand to Rawdon and said she was glad he
was come to breakfast, though she could perceive, by his haggard
unshorn face and the dark looks of her husband, that there was very
little question of breakfast between them. Rawdon muttered some
excuses about an engagement, squeezing hard the timid little hand which
his sister-in-law reached out to him. Her imploring eyes could read
nothing but calamity in his face, but he went away without another
word. Nor did Sir Pitt vouchsafe her any explanation. The children
came up to salute him, and he kissed them in his usual frigid manner.
The mother took both of them close to herself, and held a hand of each
of them as they knelt down to prayers, which Sir Pitt read to them, and
to the servants in their Sunday suits or liveries, ranged upon chairs
on the other side of the hissing tea-urn. Breakfast was so late that
day, in consequence of the delays which had occurred, that the
church-bells began to ring whilst they were sitting over their meal;
and Lady Jane was too ill, she said, to go to church, though her
thoughts had been entirely astray during the period of family devotion.
Rawdon Crawley meanwhile hurried on from Great Gaunt Street, and
knocking at the great bronze Medusa's head which stands on the portal
of Gaunt House, brought out the purple Silenus in a red and silver
waistcoat who acts as porter of that palace. The man was scared also
by the Colonel's dishevelled appearance, and barred the way as if
afraid that the other was going to force it. But Colonel Crawley only
took out a card and enjoined him particularly to send it in to Lord
Steyne, and to mark the address written on it, and say that Colonel
Crawley would be all day after one o'clock at the Regent Club in St.
James's Street--not at home. The fat red-faced man looked after him
with astonishment as he strode away; so did the people in their Sunday
clothes who were out so early; the charity-boys with shining faces,
the greengrocer lolling at his door, and the publican shutting his
shutters in the sunshine, against service commenced. The people joked
at the cab-stand about his appearance, as he took a carriage there, and
told the driver to drive him to Knightsbridge Barracks.