Vanity Fair - Page 518/573

In her capacity of guardian to Georgy, she, with the consent of the

Major, her fellow-trustee, begged Miss Osborne to live in the Russell

Square house as long as ever she chose to dwell there; but that lady,

with thanks, declared that she never could think of remaining alone in

that melancholy mansion, and departed in deep mourning to Cheltenham,

with a couple of her old domestics. The rest were liberally paid and

dismissed, the faithful old butler, whom Mrs. Osborne proposed to

retain, resigning and preferring to invest his savings in a

public-house, where, let us hope, he was not unprosperous. Miss Osborne

not choosing to live in Russell Square, Mrs. Osborne also, after

consultation, declined to occupy the gloomy old mansion there. The

house was dismantled; the rich furniture and effects, the awful

chandeliers and dreary blank mirrors packed away and hidden, the rich

rosewood drawing-room suite was muffled in straw, the carpets were

rolled up and corded, the small select library of well-bound books was

stowed into two wine-chests, and the whole paraphernalia rolled away in

several enormous vans to the Pantechnicon, where they were to lie until

Georgy's majority. And the great heavy dark plate-chests went off to

Messrs. Stumpy and Rowdy, to lie in the cellars of those eminent

bankers until the same period should arrive.

One day Emmy, with George in her hand and clad in deep sables, went to

visit the deserted mansion which she had not entered since she was a

girl. The place in front was littered with straw where the vans had

been laden and rolled off. They went into the great blank rooms, the

walls of which bore the marks where the pictures and mirrors had hung.

Then they went up the great blank stone staircases into the upper

rooms, into that where grandpapa died, as George said in a whisper, and

then higher still into George's own room. The boy was still clinging

by her side, but she thought of another besides him. She knew that it

had been his father's room as well as his own.

She went up to one of the open windows (one of those at which she used

to gaze with a sick heart when the child was first taken from her), and

thence as she looked out she could see, over the trees of Russell

Square, the old house in which she herself was born, and where she had

passed so many happy days of sacred youth. They all came back to her,

the pleasant holidays, the kind faces, the careless, joyful past times,

and the long pains and trials that had since cast her down. She thought

of these and of the man who had been her constant protector, her good

genius, her sole benefactor, her tender and generous friend.

"Look here, Mother," said Georgy, "here's a G.O. scratched on the glass

with a diamond, I never saw it before, I never did it."