Vanity Fair - Page 85/573

"Two post-boys!--Oh, it would be delightful!" Rebecca owned.

"And what I like next best, is for a poor fellow to run away with a

rich girl. I have set my heart on Rawdon running away with some one."

"A rich some one, or a poor some one?"

"Why, you goose! Rawdon has not a shilling but what I give him. He is

crible de dettes--he must repair his fortunes, and succeed in the

world."

"Is he very clever?" Rebecca asked.

"Clever, my love?--not an idea in the world beyond his horses, and his

regiment, and his hunting, and his play; but he must succeed--he's so

delightfully wicked. Don't you know he has hit a man, and shot an

injured father through the hat only? He's adored in his regiment; and

all the young men at Wattier's and the Cocoa-Tree swear by him."

When Miss Rebecca Sharp wrote to her beloved friend the account of the

little ball at Queen's Crawley, and the manner in which, for the first

time, Captain Crawley had distinguished her, she did not, strange to

relate, give an altogether accurate account of the transaction. The

Captain had distinguished her a great number of times before. The

Captain had met her in a half-score of walks. The Captain had lighted

upon her in a half-hundred of corridors and passages. The Captain had

hung over her piano twenty times of an evening (my Lady was now

upstairs, being ill, and nobody heeded her) as Miss Sharp sang. The

Captain had written her notes (the best that the great blundering

dragoon could devise and spell; but dulness gets on as well as any

other quality with women). But when he put the first of the notes into

the leaves of the song she was singing, the little governess, rising

and looking him steadily in the face, took up the triangular missive

daintily, and waved it about as if it were a cocked hat, and she,

advancing to the enemy, popped the note into the fire, and made him a

very low curtsey, and went back to her place, and began to sing away

again more merrily than ever.

"What's that?" said Miss Crawley, interrupted in her after-dinner doze

by the stoppage of the music.

"It's a false note," Miss Sharp said with a laugh; and Rawdon Crawley

fumed with rage and mortification.

Seeing the evident partiality of Miss Crawley for the new governess,

how good it was of Mrs. Bute Crawley not to be jealous, and to welcome

the young lady to the Rectory, and not only her, but Rawdon Crawley,

her husband's rival in the Old Maid's five per cents! They became very

fond of each other's society, Mrs. Crawley and her nephew. He gave up

hunting; he declined entertainments at Fuddleston: he would not dine

with the mess of the depot at Mudbury: his great pleasure was to stroll

over to Crawley parsonage--whither Miss Crawley came too; and as their

mamma was ill, why not the children with Miss Sharp? So the children

(little dears!) came with Miss Sharp; and of an evening some of the

party would walk back together. Not Miss Crawley--she preferred her

carriage--but the walk over the Rectory fields, and in at the little

park wicket, and through the dark plantation, and up the checkered

avenue to Queen's Crawley, was charming in the moonlight to two such

lovers of the picturesque as the Captain and Miss Rebecca.