Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (best thriller novels to read TXT) 📕

for a few weeks’ space in a fine handsome lodging, whereof the expenses were borne by Jos and Osborne, who was flush of money and full of kind attentions to his wife⁠—for about a fortnight, I say, during which her honeymoon ended, Mrs. Amelia was as pleased and happy as any little bride out of England.

Every day during this happy time there was novelty and amusement for all parties. There was a church to see, or a picture-gallery⁠—there was a ride, or an opera. The bands of the regiments were making music at all hours. The greatest folks of England walked in the Park⁠—there was a perpetual military festival. George, taking out his wife to a new jaunt or junket every night, was quite pleased with himself as usual, and swore he was becoming quite a domestic character. And a jaunt or a junket with him! Was it not enough to set this little heart beating with joy? Her letters home to her mother were filled with delight and gratitude at this season. Her husband bade her buy laces, millinery, jewels, and gimcracks of all sorts. Oh, he was the kindest, best, and most generous of men!

The sight of the very great company of lords and ladies and fashionable persons who thronged the town, and appeared in every public place, filled George’s truly British soul with intense delight. They flung off that happy frigidity and insolence of demeanour which occasionally characterises the great at home, and appearing in numberless public places, condescended to mingle with the rest of the company whom they met there. One night at a party given by the general of the division to which George’s regiment belonged, he had the honour of dancing with Lady Blanche Thistlewood, Lord Bareacres’ daughter; he bustled for ices and refreshments for the two noble ladies; he pushed and squeezed for Lady Bareacres’ carriage; he bragged about the Countess when he got home, in a way which his own father could not have surpassed. He called upon the ladies the next day; he rode by their side in the Park; he asked their party to a great dinner at a restaurateur’s, and was quite wild with exultation when they agreed to come. Old Bareacres, who had not much pride and a large appetite, would go for a dinner anywhere.

“I hope there will be no women besides our own party,” Lady Bareacres said, after reflecting upon the invitation which had been made, and accepted with too much precipitancy.

“Gracious Heaven, Mamma⁠—you don’t suppose the man would bring his wife,” shrieked Lady Blanche, who had been languishing in George’s arms in the newly imported waltz for hours the night before. “The men are bearable, but their women⁠—”

“Wife, just married, dev’lish pretty woman, I hear,” the old Earl said.

“Well, my dear Blanche,” said the mother, “I suppose, as Papa wants to go, we must go; but we needn’t know them in England, you know.” And so, determined to cut their new acquaintance in Bond Street, these great folks went to eat his dinner at Brussels, and condescending to make him pay for their pleasure, showed their dignity by making his wife uncomfortable, and carefully excluding her from the conversation. This is a species of dignity in which the high-bred British female reigns supreme. To watch the behaviour of a fine lady to other and humbler women, is a very good sport for a philosophical frequenter of Vanity Fair.

This festival, on which honest George spent a great deal of money, was the very dismallest of all the entertainments which Amelia had in her honeymoon. She wrote the most piteous accounts of the feast home to her mamma: how the Countess of Bareacres would not answer when spoken to; how Lady Blanche stared at her with her eyeglass; and what a rage Captain Dobbin was in at their behaviour; and how my lord, as they came away from the feast, asked to see the bill, and pronounced it a d⁠⸺ bad dinner, and d⁠⸺ dear. But though Amelia told all these stories, and wrote home regarding her guests’ rudeness, and her own discomfiture, old Mrs. Sedley was mightily pleased nevertheless, and talked about Emmy’s friend, the Countess of Bareacres, with such assiduity that the news how his son was entertaining peers and peeresses actually came to Osborne’s ears in the City.

Those who know the present Lieutenant-General Sir George Tufto, K.C.B., and have seen him, as they may on most days in the season, padded and in stays, strutting down Pall Mall with a rickety swagger on his high-heeled lacquered boots, leering under the bonnets of passersby, or riding a showy chestnut, and ogling broughams in the Parks⁠—those who know the present Sir George Tufto would hardly recognise the daring Peninsular and Waterloo officer. He has thick curling brown hair and black eyebrows now, and his whiskers are of the deepest purple. He was light-haired and bald in 1815, and stouter in the person and in the limbs, which especially have shrunk very much of late. When he was about seventy years of age (he is now nearly eighty), his hair, which was very scarce and quite white, suddenly grew thick, and brown, and curly, and his whiskers and eyebrows took their present colour. Ill-natured people say that his chest is all wool, and that his hair, because it never grows, is a wig. Tom Tufto, with whose father he quarrelled ever so many years ago, declares that Mademoiselle de Jaisey, of the French theatre, pulled his grandpapa’s hair off in the greenroom; but Tom is notoriously spiteful and jealous; and the General’s wig has nothing to do with our story.

One day, as some of our friends of the —th were sauntering in the flower-market of Brussels, having been to see the Hotel de Ville, which Mrs. Major O’Dowd declared was not near so large or handsome as her fawther’s mansion of Glenmalony, an officer of rank, with an orderly behind him, rode up to the market, and descending from