Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray [free ebook reader for iphone TXT] 📗

I don’t like kissing, please”; and he retreated from the obedient caresses of his cousin.

“Take me to your dear mamma, you droll child,” Mrs. Frederick said, and those ladies accordingly met, after an absence of more than fifteen years. During Emmy’s cares and poverty the other had never once thought about coming to see her, but now that she was decently prosperous in the world, her sister-in-law came to her as a matter of course.

So did numbers more. Our old friend, Miss Swartz, and her husband came thundering over from Hampton Court, with flaming yellow liveries, and was as impetuously fond of Amelia as ever. Miss Swartz would have liked her always if she could have seen her. One must do her that justice. But, que voulez vous?⁠—in this vast town one has not the time to go and seek one’s friends; if they drop out of the rank they disappear, and we march on without them. Who is ever missed in Vanity Fair?

But so, in a word, and before the period of grief for Mr. Osborne’s death had subsided, Emmy found herself in the centre of a very genteel circle indeed, the members of which could not conceive that anybody belonging to it was not very lucky. There was scarce one of the ladies that hadn’t a relation a Peer, though the husband might be a drysalter in the City. Some of the ladies were very blue and well informed, reading Mrs. Somerville and frequenting the Royal Institution; others were severe and Evangelical, and held by Exeter Hall. Emmy, it must be owned, found herself entirely at a loss in the midst of their clavers, and suffered woefully on the one or two occasions on which she was compelled to accept Mrs. Frederick Bullock’s hospitalities. That lady persisted in patronizing her and determined most graciously to form her. She found Amelia’s milliners for her and regulated her household and her manners. She drove over constantly from Roehampton and entertained her friend with faint fashionable fiddle-faddle and feeble Court slip-slop. Jos liked to hear it, but the Major used to go off growling at the appearance of this woman, with her twopenny gentility. He went to sleep under Frederick Bullock’s bald head, after dinner, at one of the banker’s best parties (Fred was still anxious that the balance of the Osborne property should be transferred from Stumpy and Rowdy’s to them), and whilst Amelia, who did not know Latin, or who wrote the last crack article in the Edinburgh, and did not in the least deplore, or otherwise, Mr. Peel’s late extraordinary tergiversation on the fatal Catholic Relief Bill, sat dumb amongst the ladies in the grand drawing-room, looking out upon velvet lawns, trim gravel walks, and glistening hothouses.

“She seems good-natured but insipid,” said Mrs. Rowdy; “that Major seems to be particularly épris.”

“She wants ton sadly,” said Mrs. Hollyock. “My dear creature, you never will be able to form her.”

“She is dreadfully ignorant or indifferent,” said Mrs. Glowry with a voice as if from the grave, and a sad shake of the head and turban. “I asked her if she thought that it was in 1836, according to Mr. Jowls, or in 1839, according to Mr. Wapshot, that the Pope was to fall: and she said⁠—‘Poor Pope! I hope not⁠—What has he done?’ ”

“She is my brother’s widow, my dear friends,” Mrs. Frederick replied, “and as such I think we’re all bound to give her every attention and instruction on entering into the world. You may fancy there can be no mercenary motives in those whose disappointments are well known.”

“That poor dear Mrs. Bullock,” said Rowdy to Hollyock, as they drove away together⁠—“she is always scheming and managing. She wants Mrs. Osborne’s account to be taken from our house to hers⁠—and the way in which she coaxes that boy and makes him sit by that blear-eyed little Rosa is perfectly ridiculous.”

“I wish Glowry was choked with her Man of Sin and her Battle of Armageddon,” cried the other, and the carriage rolled away over Putney Bridge.

But this sort of society was too cruelly genteel for Emmy, and all jumped for joy when a foreign tour was proposed.

LXII Am Rhein

The above everyday events had occurred, and a few weeks had passed, when on one fine morning, Parliament being over, the summer advanced, and all the good company in London about to quit that city for their annual tour in search of pleasure or health, the Batavier steamboat left the Tower-stairs laden with a goodly company of English fugitives. The quarterdeck awnings were up, and the benches and gangways crowded with scores of rosy children, bustling nursemaids; ladies in the prettiest pink bonnets and summer dresses; gentlemen in travelling caps and linen-jackets, whose mustachios had just begun to sprout for the ensuing tour; and stout trim old veterans with starched neckcloths and neat-brushed hats, such as have invaded Europe any time since the conclusion of the war, and carry the national Goddem into every city of the Continent. The congregation of hatboxes, and Bramah desks, and dressing-cases was prodigious. There were jaunty young Cambridge-men travelling with their tutor, and going for a reading excursion to Nonnenwerth or Konigswinter; there were Irish gentlemen, with the most dashing whiskers and jewellery, talking about horses incessantly, and prodigiously polite to the young ladies on board, whom, on the contrary, the Cambridge lads and their pale-faced tutor avoided with maiden coyness; there were old Pall Mall loungers bound for Ems and Wiesbaden and a course of waters to clear off the dinners of the season, and a little roulette and trente-et-quarante to keep the excitement going; there was old Methuselah, who had married his young wife, with Captain Papillon of the Guards holding her parasol and guidebooks; there was young May who was carrying off his bride on a pleasure tour (Mrs. Winter that was, and who had been at school with May’s grandmother); there was Sir John and my Lady with a dozen children,