His wife and family returned to this country and took up their abode at Gaunt House.Lord George gave up his post on the European continent, and was gazetted to Brazil.But people knew better; he never returned from that Brazil expedition--never died there--never lived there--never was there at all.He was nowhere; he was gone out altogether."Brazil," said one gossip to another, with a grin--"Brazil is St.John's Wood.Rio de Janeiro is a cottage surrounded by four walls, and George Gaunt is accredited to a keeper, who has invested him with the order of the Strait-Waistcoat." These are the kinds of epitaphs which men pass over one another in Vanity Fair.
Twice or thrice in a week, in the earliest morning, the poor mother went for her sins and saw the poor invalid.
Sometimes he laughed at her (and his laughter was more pitiful than to hear him cry); sometimes she found the brilliant dandy diplomatist of the Congress of Vienna dragging about a child's toy, or nursing the keeper's baby's doll.Sometimes he knew her and Father Mole, her director and companion; oftener he forgot her, as he had done wife, children, love, ambition, vanity.But he remembered his dinner-hour, and used to cry if his wine-and-water was not strong enough.
It was the mysterious taint of the blood; the poor mother had brought it from her own ancient race.The evil had broken out once or twice in the father's family, long before Lady Steyne's sins had begun, or her fasts and tears and penances had been offered in their expiation.The pride of the race was struck down as the first-born of Pharaoh.The dark mark of fate and doom was on the threshold--the tall old threshold surmounted by coronets and caned heraldry.
The absent lord's children meanwhile prattled and grew on quite unconscious that the doom was over them too.First they talked of their father and devised plans 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 to-morrow, 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 a 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 attaches 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.