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

against his return. Then the name of the living dead man was less frequently in their mouth⁠—then not mentioned at all. But the stricken old grandmother trembled to think that these too were the inheritors of their father’s shame as well as of his honours, and watched sickening for the day when the awful ancestral curse should come down on them.

This dark presentiment also haunted Lord Steyne. He tried to lay the horrid bedside ghost in Red Seas of wine and jollity, and lost sight of it sometimes in the crowd and rout of his pleasures. But it always came back to him when alone, and seemed to grow more threatening with years. “I have taken your son,” it said, “why not you? I may shut you up in a prison some day like your son George. I may tap you on the head tomorrow, and away go pleasure and honours, feasts and beauty, friends, flatterers, French cooks, fine horses and houses⁠—in exchange for a prison, a keeper, and a straw mattress like George Gaunt’s.” And then my lord would defy the ghost which threatened him, for he knew of a remedy by which he could baulk his enemy.

So there was splendour and wealth, but no great happiness perchance, behind the tall caned portals of Gaunt House with its smoky coronets and ciphers. The feasts there were of the grandest in London, but there was not overmuch content therewith, except among the guests who sat at my lord’s table. Had he not been so great a Prince very few possibly would have visited him; but in Vanity Fair the sins of very great personages are looked at indulgently. “Nous regardons à deux fois” (as the French lady said) before we condemn a person of my lord’s undoubted quality. Some notorious carpers and squeamish moralists might be sulky with Lord Steyne, but they were glad enough to come when he asked them.

“Lord Steyne is really too bad,” Lady Slingstone said, “but everybody goes, and of course I shall see that my girls come to no harm.”

“His lordship is a man to whom I owe much, everything in life,” said the Right Reverend Doctor Trail, thinking that the Archbishop was rather shaky, and Mrs. Trail and the young ladies would as soon have missed going to church as to one of his lordship’s parties.

“His morals are bad,” said little Lord Southdown to his sister, who meekly expostulated, having heard terrific legends from her mamma with respect to the doings at Gaunt House; “but hang it, he’s got the best dry Sillery in Europe!” And as for Sir Pitt Crawley, Bart.⁠—Sir Pitt that pattern of decorum, Sir Pitt who had led off at missionary meetings⁠—he never for one moment thought of not going too.

“Where you see such persons as the Bishop of Ealing and the Countess of Slingstone, you may be pretty sure, Jane,” the Baronet would say, “that we cannot be wrong. The great rank and station of Lord Steyne put him in a position to command people in our station in life. The Lord Lieutenant of a County, my dear, is a respectable man. Besides, George Gaunt and I were intimate in early life; he was my junior when we were attachés at Pumpernickel together.”

In a word everybody went to wait upon this great man⁠—everybody who was asked, as you the reader (do not say nay) or I the writer hereof would go if we had an invitation.

XLVIII In Which the Reader Is Introduced to the Very Best of Company

At last Becky’s kindness and attention to the chief of her husband’s family were destined to meet with an exceeding great reward, a reward which, though certainly somewhat unsubstantial, the little woman coveted with greater eagerness than more positive benefits. If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers and has been presented to her Sovereign at Court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them a certificate of virtue. And as dubious goods or letters are passed through an oven at quarantine, sprinkled with aromatic vinegar, and then pronounced clean, many a lady, whose reputation would be doubtful otherwise and liable to give infection, passes through the wholesome ordeal of the Royal presence and issues from it free from all taint.

It might be very well for my Lady Bareacres, my Lady Tufto, Mrs. Bute Crawley in the country, and other ladies who had come into contact with Mrs. Rawdon Crawley to cry fie at the idea of the odious little adventuress making her curtsey before the Sovereign, and to declare that, if dear good Queen Charlotte had been alive, she never would have admitted such an extremely ill-regulated personage into her chaste drawing-room. But when we consider that it was the First Gentleman in Europe in whose high presence Mrs. Rawdon passed her examination, and as it were, took her degree in reputation, it surely must be flat disloyalty to doubt any more about her virtue. I, for my part, look back with love and awe to that Great Character in history. Ah, what a high and noble appreciation of Gentlewomanhood there must have been in Vanity Fair, when that revered and august being was invested, by the universal acclaim of the refined and educated portion of this empire, with the title of Premier Gentilhomme of his Kingdom. Do you remember, dear M⁠⸺, oh friend of my youth, how one blissful night five-and-twenty years since, the “Hypocrite” being acted, Elliston being manager, Dowton and Liston performers, two boys had leave from their loyal masters to go out from Slaughter-House School where they were educated and to appear on Drury Lane stage, amongst a crowd which assembled there to greet the king. The king? There he