Bareacres Castle was theirs, too, with all its costly pictures, furniture, and articles of vertu--the magnificent Vandykes; the noble Reynolds pictures; the Lawrence portraits, tawdry and beautiful, and, thirty years ago, deemed as precious as works of real genius; the matchless Dancing Nymph of Canova, for which Lady Bareacres had sat in her youth--Lady Bareacres splendid then, and radiant in wealth, rank, and beauty--a toothless, bald, old woman now--a mere rag of a former robe of state.Her lord, painted at the same time by Lawrence, as waving his sabre in front of Bareacres Castle, and clothed in his uniform as Colonel of the Thistlewood Yeomanry, was a withered, old, lean man in a greatcoat and a Brutus wig, slinking about Gray's Inn of mornings chiefly and dining alone at clubs.He did not like to dine with Steyne now.They had run races of pleasure together in youth when Bareacres was the winner.But Steyne had more bottom than he and had lasted him out.The Marquis was ten times a greater man now than the young Lord Gaunt of '85, and Bareacres nowhere in the race--old, beaten, bankrupt, and broken down.He had borrowed too much money of Steyne to find it pleasant to meet his old comrade often.The latter, whenever he wished to be merry, used jeeringly to ask Lady Gaunt why her father had not come to see her.
"He has not been here for four months," Lord Steyne would say."I can always tell by my cheque-book afterwards, when I get a visit from Bareacres.What a comfort it is, my ladies, I bank with one of my sons'
fathers-in-law, and the other banks with me!"Of the other illustrious persons whom Becky had the honour to encounter on this her first presentation to the grand world, it does not become the present historian to say much.There was his Excellency the Prince of Peterwaradin, with his Princess--a nobleman tightly girthed, with a large military chest, on which the plaque of his order shone magnificently, and wearing the red collar of the Golden Fleece round his neck.He was the owner of countless flocks."Look at his face.I think he must be descended from a sheep," Becky whispered to Lord Steyne.Indeed, his Excellency's countenance, long, solemn, and white, with the ornament round his neck,.
bore some resemblance to that of a venerable bell-wether.
There was Mr.John Paul Jefferson Jones, titularly attached to the American Embassy and correspondent of the New York Demagogue, who, by way of making himself agreeable to the company, asked Lady Steyne, during a pause in the conversation at dinner, how his dear friend, George Gaunt, liked the Brazils? He and George had been most intimate at Naples and had gone up Vesuvius together.Mr.Jones wrote a full and particular account of the dinner, which appeared duly in the Demagogue.He mentioned the names and titles of all the guests, giving biographical sketches of the principal people.He described the persons of the ladies with great eloquence; the service of the table; the size and costume of the servants; enumerated the dishes and wines served; the ornaments of the sideboard; and the probable value of the plate.Such a dinner he calculated could not be dished up under fifteen or eighteen dollars per head.
And he was in the habit, until very lately, of sending over proteges, with letters of recommendation to the present Marquis of Steyne, encouraged to do so by the intimate terms on which he had lived with his dear friend, the late lord.He was most indignant that a young and insignificant aristocrat, the Earl of Southdown, should have taken the pas of him in their procession to the dining-room."Just as I was stepping up to offer my hand to a very pleasing and witty fashionable, the brilliant and exclusive Mrs.Rawdon Crawley,"--he wrote --"the young patrician interposed between me and the lady and whisked my Helen off without a word of apology.
I was fain to bring up the rear with the Colonel, the lady's husband, a stout red-faced warrior who distinguished himself at Waterloo, where he had better luck than befell some of his brother redcoats at New Orleans."The Colonel's countenance on coming into this polite society wore as many blushes as the face of a boy of sixteen assumes when he is confronted with his sister's schoolfellows.It has been told before that honest Rawdon had not been much used at any period of his life to ladies' company.With the men at the Club or the mess room, he was well enough; and could ride, bet, smoke, or play at billiards with the boldest of them.He had had his time for female friendships too, but that was twenty years ago, and the ladies were of the rank of those with whom Young Marlow in the comedy is represented as having been familiar before he became abashed in the presence of Miss Hardcastle.The times are such that one scarcely dares to allude to that kind of company which thousands of our young men in Vanity Fair are frequenting every day, which nightly fills casinos and dancing-rooms, which is known to exist as well as the Ring in Hyde Park or the Congregation at St.James's --but which the most squeamish if not the most moral of societies is determined to ignore.In a word, although Colonel Crawley was now five-and-forty years of age, it had not been his lot in life to meet with a half dozen good women, besides his paragon of a wife.All except her and his kind sister Lady Jane, whose gentle nature had tamed and won him, scared the worthy Colonel, and on occasion of his first dinner at Gaunt House he was not heard to make a single remark except to state that the weather was very hot.Indeed Becky would have left him at home, but that virtue ordained that her husband should be by her side to protect the timid and fluttering little creature on her first appearance in polite society.