Sick-bed homilies and pious reflections are, to be sure, out of place
in mere story-books, and we are not going (after the fashion of some
novelists of the present day) to cajole the public into a sermon, when
it is only a comedy that the reader pays his money to witness. But,
without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the
bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair
exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private
life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal
repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained
banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most
becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to
console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of
existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant
divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very
small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view,
about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother
wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of
grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear
friends and companions, is my amiable object--to walk with you through
the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should
all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be
perfectly miserable in private.
"If that poor man of mine had a head on his shoulders," Mrs. Bute
Crawley thought to herself, "how useful he might be, under present
circumstances, to this unhappy old lady! He might make her repent of
her shocking free-thinking ways; he might urge her to do her duty, and
cast off that odious reprobate who has disgraced himself and his
family; and he might induce her to do justice to my dear girls and the
two boys, who require and deserve, I am sure, every assistance which
their relatives can give them."
And, as the hatred of vice is always a progress towards virtue, Mrs.
Bute Crawley endeavoured to instil her sister-in-law a proper
abhorrence for all Rawdon Crawley's manifold sins: of which his uncle's
wife brought forward such a catalogue as indeed would have served to
condemn a whole regiment of young officers. If a man has committed
wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his
errors out to the world than his own relations; so Mrs. Bute showed a
perfect family interest and knowledge of Rawdon's history. She had all
the particulars of that ugly quarrel with Captain Marker, in which
Rawdon, wrong from the beginning, ended in shooting the Captain. She
knew how the unhappy Lord Dovedale, whose mamma had taken a house at
Oxford, so that he might be educated there, and who had never touched a
card in his life till he came to London, was perverted by Rawdon at the
Cocoa-Tree, made helplessly tipsy by this abominable seducer and
perverter of youth, and fleeced of four thousand pounds. She described
with the most vivid minuteness the agonies of the country families whom
he had ruined--the sons whom he had plunged into dishonour and
poverty--the daughters whom he had inveigled into perdition. She knew
the poor tradesmen who were bankrupt by his extravagance--the mean
shifts and rogueries with which he had ministered to it--the astounding
falsehoods by which he had imposed upon the most generous of aunts, and
the ingratitude and ridicule by which he had repaid her sacrifices.
She imparted these stories gradually to Miss Crawley; gave her the
whole benefit of them; felt it to be her bounden duty as a Christian
woman and mother of a family to do so; had not the smallest remorse or
compunction for the victim whom her tongue was immolating; nay, very
likely thought her act was quite meritorious, and plumed herself upon
her resolute manner of performing it. Yes, if a man's character is to
be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relation to do the
business. And one is bound to own, regarding this unfortunate wretch
of a Rawdon Crawley, that the mere truth was enough to condemn him, and
that all inventions of scandal were quite superfluous pains on his
friends' parts.