arded the selling of tooth-brushes and perfumery, as unworthy of a
gentleman of an ancient lineage: then he shut up the shop altogether,
and only had a little surgery attended by a genteel young man: then he
had a gig with a man to drive him; and, before her exit from this world,
his poor old mother had the happiness of seeing from her bedroom window
to which her chair was rolled, her beloved John step into a close
carriage of his own, a one-horse carriage it is true, but with the arms
of the family of Pendennis handsomely emblazoned on the panels.
"What would Arthur say now?" she asked, speaking of a younger son of
hers--"who never so much as once came to see my dearest Johnny through
all the time of his poverty and struggles!"

"Captain Pendennis is with his regiment in India, mother," Mr. Pendennis
remarked, "and, if you please, I wish you would not call me Johnny
before the young man--before Mr. Parkins."

Presently the day came when she ceased to call her son by the name of
Johnny, or by any other title of endearment or affection; and his house
was very lonely without that kind though querulous voice. He had his
night-bell altered and placed in the room in which the good old lady
had grumbled for many a long year, and he slept in the great large
bed there. He was upwards of forty years old when these events befell;
before the war was over; before George the Magnificent came to the
throne; before this history indeed: but what is a gentleman without his
pedigree? Pendennis, by this time, had his handsomely framed and glazed,
and hanging up in his drawing-room between the pictures of Codlingbury
House in Somersetshire, and St. Boniface's College, Cambridge, where
he had passed the brief and happy days of his early manhood. As for the
pedigree he had taken it out of a trunk, as Sterne's officer called for
his sword, now that he was a gentleman and could show it.

About the time of Mrs. Pendennis's demise, another of her son's patients
likewise died at Bath; that virtuous woman, old Lady Pontypool,
daughter of Reginald twelfth Earl of Bareacres, and by consequence
great-grand-aunt to the present Earl, and widow of John second Lord
Pontypool, and likewise of the Reverend Jonas Wales, of the Armageddon
Chapel, Clifton. For the last five years of her life her ladyship had
been attended by Miss Helen Thistlewood, a very distant relative of the
noble house of Bareacres, before mentioned, and daughter of Lieutenant
R. Thist