“Ah yes: the cup and merry jest went round. We chanted and I remember I wanted to fight a postboy. Did I thrash him, Stoopid?”
“No, sir. Fight didn’t come off, sir,” said Stoopid, still with perfect gravity. He was arranging Mr. Foker’s dressing-case—a trunk, the gift of a fond mother, without which the young fellow never travelled. It contained a prodigious apparatus in plate; a silver dish, a silver mug, silver boxes and bottles for all sorts of essences, and a choice of razors ready against the time when Mr. Foker’s beard should come.
“Do it some other day,” said the young fellow, yawning and throwing up his little lean arms over his head. “No, there was no fight; but there was chanting. Bingley chanted, I chanted, the General chanted—Costigan I mean.—Did you ever hear him sing ‘The Little Pig under the Bed,’ Pen?”
“The man we met yesterday,” said Pen, all in a tremor, “the father of—-”
“Of the Fotheringay,—the very man. Ain’t she a Venus, Pen?”
“Please sir, Mr. Costigan’s in the sittin-room, sir, and says, sir, you asked him to breakfast, sir. Called five times, sir; but wouldn’t wake you on no account; and has been here since eleven o’clock, sir—-”
“How much is it now?”
“One, sir.”
“What would the best of mothers say,” cried the little sluggard, “if she saw me in bed at this hour? She sent me down here with a grinder. She wants me to cultivate my neglected genus—He, be! I say, Pen, this isn’t quite like seven o’clock school,—is it, old boy?”—and the young fellow burst out into a boyish laugh of enjoyment. Then he added—“Go in and talk to the General whilst I dress. And I say, Pendennis, ask him to sing you ‘The Little Pig under the Bed;’ it’s capital.” Pen went off in great perturbation, to meet Mr. Costigan, and Mr. Foker commenced his toilet.
Of Mr. Foker’s two grandfathers, the one from whom he inherited a fortune was a brewer; the other was an earl, who endowed him with the most doting mother in the world. The Fokers had been at the Cistercian school from father to son; at which place, our friend, whose name could be seen over the playground wall, on a public-house sign, under which ‘Foker’s Entire’ was painted, had been dreadfully bullied on account of his trade, his uncomely countenance, his inaptitude for learning and cleanliness, his gluttony and other weak points. But those who know how a susceptible youth, under the tyranny of his schoolfellows, becomes silent and a sneak, may understand how in a very few months after his liberation from bondage, he developed himself as he had done; and became the humorous, the sarcastic, the brilliant Foker, with whom we have made acquaintance. A dunce he always was, it is true; for learning cannot be acquired by leaving school and entering at college as a fellow-commoner; but he was now (in his own peculiar manner) as great a dandy as he before had been a slattern, and when he entered his sitting-room to join his two guests, arrived scented and arrayed in fine linen, and perfectly splendid in appearance.