Vanity Fair (115 page)

This did not seem to affect Emmy. She even smiled a little.
Perhaps she figured Jos to herself panting up the stair.

"She's beside herself with grief," he resumed. "The agonies that
woman has endured are quite frightful to hear of. She had a little
boy, of the same age as Georgy."

"Yes, yes, I think I remember," Emmy remarked. "Well?"

"The most beautiful child ever seen," Jos said, who was very fat,
and easily moved, and had been touched by the story Becky told; "a
perfect angel, who adored his mother. The ruffians tore him
shrieking out of her arms, and have never allowed him to see her."

"Dear Joseph," Emmy cried out, starting up at once, "let us go and
see her this minute." And she ran into her adjoining bedchamber,
tied on her bonnet in a flutter, came out with her shawl on her arm,
and ordered Dobbin to follow.

He went and put her shawl—it was a white cashmere, consigned to her
by the Major himself from India—over her shoulders. He saw there
was nothing for it but to obey, and she put her hand into his arm,
and they went away.

"It is number 92, up four pair of stairs," Jos said, perhaps not
very willing to ascend the steps again; but he placed himself in the
window of his drawing-room, which commands the place on which the
Elephant stands, and saw the pair marching through the market.

It was as well that Becky saw them too from her garret, for she and
the two students were chattering and laughing there; they had been
joking about the appearance of Becky's grandpapa—whose arrival and
departure they had witnessed—but she had time to dismiss them, and
have her little room clear before the landlord of the Elephant, who
knew that Mrs. Osborne was a great favourite at the Serene Court,
and respected her accordingly, led the way up the stairs to the roof
story, encouraging Miladi and the Herr Major as they achieved the
ascent.

"Gracious lady, gracious lady!" said the landlord, knocking at
Becky's door; he had called her Madame the day before, and was by no
means courteous to her.

"Who is it?" Becky said, putting out her head, and she gave a little
scream. There stood Emmy in a tremble, and Dobbin, the tall Major,
with his cane.

He stood still watching, and very much interested at the scene; but
Emmy sprang forward with open arms towards Rebecca, and forgave her
at that moment, and embraced her and kissed her with all her heart.
Ah, poor wretch, when was your lip pressed before by such pure
kisses?

Amantium Irae

Frankness and kindness like Amelia's were likely to touch even such
a hardened little reprobate as Becky. She returned Emmy's caresses
and kind speeches with something very like gratitude, and an emotion
which, if it was not lasting, for a moment was almost genuine. That
was a lucky stroke of hers about the child "torn from her arms
shrieking." It was by that harrowing misfortune that Becky had won
her friend back, and it was one of the very first points, we may be
certain, upon which our poor simple little Emmy began to talk to her
new-found acquaintance.

"And so they took your darling child from you?" our simpleton cried
out. "Oh, Rebecca, my poor dear suffering friend, I know what it is
to lose a boy, and to feel for those who have lost one. But please
Heaven yours will be restored to you, as a merciful merciful
Providence has brought me back mine."

"The child, my child? Oh, yes, my agonies were frightful," Becky
owned, not perhaps without a twinge of conscience. It jarred upon
her to be obliged to commence instantly to tell lies in reply to so
much confidence and simplicity. But that is the misfortune of
beginning with this kind of forgery. When one fib becomes due as it
were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so
the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the
danger of detection increases every day.

"My agonies," Becky continued, "were terrible (I hope she won't sit
down on the bottle) when they took him away from me; I thought I
should die; but I fortunately had a brain fever, during which my
doctor gave me up, and—and I recovered, and—and here I am, poor
and friendless."

"How old is he?" Emmy asked.

"Eleven," said Becky.

"Eleven!" cried the other. "Why, he was born the same year with
Georgy, who is—"

"I know, I know," Becky cried out, who had in fact quite forgotten
all about little Rawdon's age. "Grief has made me forget so many
things, dearest Amelia. I am very much changed: half-wild
sometimes. He was eleven when they took him away from me. Bless
his sweet face; I have never seen it again."

"Was he fair or dark?" went on that absurd little Emmy. "Show me
his hair."

Becky almost laughed at her simplicity. "Not to-day, love—some
other time, when my trunks arrive from Leipzig, whence I came to
this place—and a little drawing of him, which I made in happy
days."

"Poor Becky, poor Becky!" said Emmy. "How thankful, how thankful I
ought to be"; (though I doubt whether that practice of piety
inculcated upon us by our womankind in early youth, namely, to be
thankful because we are better off than somebody else, be a very
rational religious exercise) and then she began to think, as usual,
how her son was the handsomest, the best, and the cleverest boy in
the whole world.

"You will see my Georgy," was the best thing Emmy could think of to
console Becky. If anything could make her comfortable that would.

And so the two women continued talking for an hour or more, during
which Becky had the opportunity of giving her new friend a full and
complete version of her private history. She showed how her
marriage with Rawdon Crawley had always been viewed by the family
with feelings of the utmost hostility; how her sister-in-law (an
artful woman) had poisoned her husband's mind against her; how he
had formed odious connections, which had estranged his affections
from her: how she had borne everything—poverty, neglect, coldness
from the being whom she most loved—and all for the sake of her
child; how, finally, and by the most flagrant outrage, she had been
driven into demanding a separation from her husband, when the wretch
did not scruple to ask that she should sacrifice her own fair fame
so that he might procure advancement through the means of a very
great and powerful but unprincipled man—the Marquis of Steyne,
indeed. The atrocious monster!

This part of her eventful history Becky gave with the utmost
feminine delicacy and the most indignant virtue. Forced to fly her
husband's roof by this insult, the coward had pursued his revenge by
taking her child from her. And thus Becky said she was a wanderer,
poor, unprotected, friendless, and wretched.

Emmy received this story, which was told at some length, as those
persons who are acquainted with her character may imagine that she
would. She quivered with indignation at the account of the conduct
of the miserable Rawdon and the unprincipled Steyne. Her eyes made
notes of admiration for every one of the sentences in which Becky
described the persecutions of her aristocratic relatives and the
falling away of her husband. (Becky did not abuse him. She spoke
rather in sorrow than in anger. She had loved him only too fondly:
and was he not the father of her boy?) And as for the separation
scene from the child, while Becky was reciting it, Emmy retired
altogether behind her pocket-handkerchief, so that the consummate
little tragedian must have been charmed to see the effect which her
performance produced on her audience.

Whilst the ladies were carrying on their conversation, Amelia's
constant escort, the Major (who, of course, did not wish to
interrupt their conference, and found himself rather tired of
creaking about the narrow stair passage of which the roof brushed
the nap from his hat) descended to the ground-floor of the house and
into the great room common to all the frequenters of the Elephant,
out of which the stair led. This apartment is always in a fume of
smoke and liberally sprinkled with beer. On a dirty table stand
scores of corresponding brass candlesticks with tallow candles for
the lodgers, whose keys hang up in rows over the candles. Emmy had
passed blushing through the room anon, where all sorts of people
were collected; Tyrolese glove-sellers and Danubian linen-merchants,
with their packs; students recruiting themselves with butterbrods
and meat; idlers, playing cards or dominoes on the sloppy, beery
tables; tumblers refreshing during the cessation of their
performances—in a word, all the fumum and strepitus of a German inn
in fair time. The waiter brought the Major a mug of beer, as a
matter of course, and he took out a cigar and amused himself with
that pernicious vegetable and a newspaper until his charge should
come down to claim him.

Max and Fritz came presently downstairs, their caps on one side,
their spurs jingling, their pipes splendid with coats of arms and
full-blown tassels, and they hung up the key of No. 90 on the board
and called for the ration of butterbrod and beer. The pair sat down
by the Major and fell into a conversation of which he could not help
hearing somewhat. It was mainly about "Fuchs" and "Philister," and
duels and drinking-bouts at the neighbouring University of
Schoppenhausen, from which renowned seat of learning they had just
come in the Eilwagen, with Becky, as it appeared, by their side, and
in order to be present at the bridal fetes at Pumpernickel.

"The title Englanderinn seems to be en bays de gonnoisance," said
Max, who knew the French language, to Fritz, his comrade. "After
the fat grandfather went away, there came a pretty little
compatriot. I heard them chattering and whimpering together in the
little woman's chamber."

"We must take the tickets for her concert," Fritz said. "Hast thou
any money, Max?"

"Bah," said the other, "the concert is a concert in nubibus. Hans
said that she advertised one at Leipzig, and the Burschen took many
tickets. But she went off without singing. She said in the coach
yesterday that her pianist had fallen ill at Dresden. She cannot
sing, it is my belief: her voice is as cracked as thine, O thou
beer-soaking Renowner!"

"It is cracked; I hear her trying out of her window a schrecklich.
English ballad, called 'De Rose upon de Balgony.'"

"Saufen and singen go not together," observed Fritz with the red
nose, who evidently preferred the former amusement. "No, thou shalt
take none of her tickets. She won money at the trente and quarante
last night. I saw her: she made a little English boy play for her.
We will spend thy money there or at the theatre, or we will treat
her to French wine or Cognac in the Aurelius Garden, but the tickets
we will not buy. What sayest thou? Yet, another mug of beer?" and
one and another successively having buried their blond whiskers in
the mawkish draught, curled them and swaggered off into the fair.

The Major, who had seen the key of No. 90 put up on its hook and had
heard the conversation of the two young University bloods, was not
at a loss to understand that their talk related to Becky. "The
little devil is at her old tricks," he thought, and he smiled as he
recalled old days, when he had witnessed the desperate flirtation
with Jos and the ludicrous end of that adventure. He and George had
often laughed over it subsequently, and until a few weeks after
George's marriage, when he also was caught in the little Circe's
toils, and had an understanding with her which his comrade certainly
suspected, but preferred to ignore. William was too much hurt or
ashamed to ask to fathom that disgraceful mystery, although once,
and evidently with remorse on his mind, George had alluded to it.
It was on the morning of Waterloo, as the young men stood together
in front of their line, surveying the black masses of Frenchmen who
crowned the opposite heights, and as the rain was coming down, "I
have been mixing in a foolish intrigue with a woman," George said.
"I am glad we were marched away. If I drop, I hope Emmy will never
know of that business. I wish to God it had never been begun!" And
William was pleased to think, and had more than once soothed poor
George's widow with the narrative, that Osborne, after quitting his
wife, and after the action of Quatre Bras, on the first day, spoke
gravely and affectionately to his comrade of his father and his
wife. On these facts, too, William had insisted very strongly in
his conversations with the elder Osborne, and had thus been the
means of reconciling the old gentleman to his son's memory, just at
the close of the elder man's life.

"And so this devil is still going on with her intrigues," thought
William. "I wish she were a hundred miles from here. She brings
mischief wherever she goes." And he was pursuing these forebodings
and this uncomfortable train of thought, with his head between his
hands, and the Pumpernickel Gazette of last week unread under his
nose, when somebody tapped his shoulder with a parasol, and he
looked up and saw Mrs. Amelia.

This woman had a way of tyrannizing over Major Dobbin (for the
weakest of all people will domineer over somebody), and she ordered
him about, and patted him, and made him fetch and carry just as if
he was a great Newfoundland dog. He liked, so to speak, to jump
into the water if she said "High, Dobbin!" and to trot behind her
with her reticule in his mouth. This history has been written to
very little purpose if the reader has not perceived that the Major
was a spooney.

"Why did you not wait for me, sir, to escort me downstairs?" she
said, giving a little toss of her head and a most sarcastic curtsey.

"I couldn't stand up in the passage," he answered with a comical
deprecatory look; and, delighted to give her his arm and to take her
out of the horrid smoky place, he would have walked off without even
so much as remembering the waiter, had not the young fellow run
after him and stopped him on the threshold of the Elephant to make
him pay for the beer which he had not consumed. Emmy laughed: she
called him a naughty man, who wanted to run away in debt, and, in
fact, made some jokes suitable to the occasion and the small-beer.
She was in high spirits and good humour, and tripped across the
market-place very briskly. She wanted to see Jos that instant. The
Major laughed at the impetuous affection Mrs. Amelia exhibited; for,
in truth, it was not very often that she wanted her brother "that
instant." They found the civilian in his saloon on the first-floor;
he had been pacing the room, and biting his nails, and looking over
the market-place towards the Elephant a hundred times at least
during the past hour whilst Emmy was closeted with her friend in the
garret and the Major was beating the tattoo on the sloppy tables of
the public room below, and he was, on his side too, very anxious to
see Mrs. Osborne.