Vanity Fair (71 page)

He put the tray with the breakfast and the letter on the dressing-
table, before which Becky sat combing her yellow hair. She took up
the black-edged missive, and having read it, she jumped up from the
chair, crying "Hurray!" and waving the note round her head.

"Hurray?" said Rawdon, wondering at the little figure capering about
in a streaming flannel dressing-gown, with tawny locks dishevelled.
"He's not left us anything, Becky. I had my share when I came of
age."

"You'll never be of age, you silly old man," Becky replied. "Run
out now to Madam Brunoy's, for I must have some mourning: and get a
crape on your hat, and a black waistcoat—I don't think you've got
one; order it to be brought home to-morrow, so that we may be able
to start on Thursday."

"You don't mean to go?" Rawdon interposed.

"Of course I mean to go. I mean that Lady Jane shall present me at
Court next year. I mean that your brother shall give you a seat in
Parliament, you stupid old creature. I mean that Lord Steyne shall
have your vote and his, my dear, old silly man; and that you shall
be an Irish Secretary, or a West Indian Governor: or a Treasurer,
or a Consul, or some such thing."

"Posting will cost a dooce of a lot of money," grumbled Rawdon.

"We might take Southdown's carriage, which ought to be present at
the funeral, as he is a relation of the family: but, no—I intend
that we shall go by the coach. They'll like it better. It seems
more humble—"

"Rawdy goes, of course?" the Colonel asked.

"No such thing; why pay an extra place? He's too big to travel
bodkin between you and me. Let him stay here in the nursery, and
Briggs can make him a black frock. Go you, and do as I bid you.
And you had best tell Sparks, your man, that old Sir Pitt is dead
and that you will come in for something considerable when the
affairs are arranged. He'll tell this to Raggles, who has been
pressing for money, and it will console poor Raggles." And so Becky
began sipping her chocolate.

When the faithful Lord Steyne arrived in the evening, he found Becky
and her companion, who was no other than our friend Briggs, busy
cutting, ripping, snipping, and tearing all sorts of black stuffs
available for the melancholy occasion.

"Miss Briggs and I are plunged in grief and despondency for the
death of our Papa," Rebecca said. "Sir Pitt Crawley is dead, my
lord. We have been tearing our hair all the morning, and now we are
tearing up our old clothes."

"Oh, Rebecca, how can you—" was all that Briggs could say as she
turned up her eyes.

"Oh, Rebecca, how can you—" echoed my Lord. "So that old
scoundrel's dead, is he? He might have been a Peer if he had played
his cards better. Mr. Pitt had very nearly made him; but he ratted
always at the wrong time. What an old Silenus it was!"

"I might have been Silenus's widow," said Rebecca. "Don't you
remember, Miss Briggs, how you peeped in at the door and saw old Sir
Pitt on his knees to me?" Miss Briggs, our old friend, blushed very
much at this reminiscence, and was glad when Lord Steyne ordered her
to go downstairs and make him a cup of tea.

Briggs was the house-dog whom Rebecca had provided as guardian of
her innocence and reputation. Miss Crawley had left her a little
annuity. She would have been content to remain in the Crawley
family with Lady Jane, who was good to her and to everybody; but
Lady Southdown dismissed poor Briggs as quickly as decency
permitted; and Mr. Pitt (who thought himself much injured by the
uncalled-for generosity of his deceased relative towards a lady who
had only been Miss Crawley's faithful retainer a score of years)
made no objection to that exercise of the dowager's authority.
Bowls and Firkin likewise received their legacies and their
dismissals, and married and set up a lodging-house, according to the
custom of their kind.

Briggs tried to live with her relations in the country, but found
that attempt was vain after the better society to which she had been
accustomed. Briggs's friends, small tradesmen, in a country town,
quarrelled over Miss Briggs's forty pounds a year as eagerly and
more openly than Miss Crawley's kinsfolk had for that lady's
inheritance. Briggs's brother, a radical hatter and grocer, called
his sister a purse-proud aristocrat, because she would not advance a
part of her capital to stock his shop; and she would have done so
most likely, but that their sister, a dissenting shoemaker's lady,
at variance with the hatter and grocer, who went to another chapel,
showed how their brother was on the verge of bankruptcy, and took
possession of Briggs for a while. The dissenting shoemaker wanted
Miss Briggs to send his son to college and make a gentleman of him.
Between them the two families got a great portion of her private
savings out of her, and finally she fled to London followed by the
anathemas of both, and determined to seek for servitude again as
infinitely less onerous than liberty. And advertising in the papers
that a "Gentlewoman of agreeable manners, and accustomed to the best
society, was anxious to," &c., she took up her residence with Mr.
Bowls in Half Moon Street, and waited the result of the
advertisement.

So it was that she fell in with Rebecca. Mrs. Rawdon's dashing
little carriage and ponies was whirling down the street one day,
just as Miss Briggs, fatigued, had reached Mr. Bowls's door, after a
weary walk to the Times Office in the City to insert her
advertisement for the sixth time. Rebecca was driving, and at once
recognized the gentlewoman with agreeable manners, and being a
perfectly good-humoured woman, as we have seen, and having a regard
for Briggs, she pulled up the ponies at the doorsteps, gave the
reins to the groom, and jumping out, had hold of both Briggs's
hands, before she of the agreeable manners had recovered from the
shock of seeing an old friend.

Briggs cried, and Becky laughed a great deal and kissed the
gentlewoman as soon as they got into the passage; and thence into
Mrs. Bowls's front parlour, with the red moreen curtains, and the
round looking-glass, with the chained eagle above, gazing upon the
back of the ticket in the window which announced "Apartments to
Let."

Briggs told all her history amidst those perfectly uncalled-for sobs
and ejaculations of wonder with which women of her soft nature
salute an old acquaintance, or regard a rencontre in the street; for
though people meet other people every day, yet some there are who
insist upon discovering miracles; and women, even though they have
disliked each other, begin to cry when they meet, deploring and
remembering the time when they last quarrelled. So, in a word,
Briggs told all her history, and Becky gave a narrative of her own
life, with her usual artlessness and candour.

Mrs. Bowls, late Firkin, came and listened grimly in the passage to
the hysterical sniffling and giggling which went on in the front
parlour. Becky had never been a favourite of hers. Since the
establishment of the married couple in London they had frequented
their former friends of the house of Raggles, and did not like the
latter's account of the Colonel's menage. "I wouldn't trust him,
Ragg, my boy," Bowls remarked; and his wife, when Mrs. Rawdon issued
from the parlour, only saluted the lady with a very sour curtsey;
and her fingers were like so many sausages, cold and lifeless, when
she held them out in deference to Mrs. Rawdon, who persisted in
shaking hands with the retired lady's maid. She whirled away into
Piccadilly, nodding with the sweetest of smiles towards Miss Briggs,
who hung nodding at the window close under the advertisement-card,
and at the next moment was in the park with a half-dozen of dandies
cantering after her carriage.

When she found how her friend was situated, and how having a snug
legacy from Miss Crawley, salary was no object to our gentlewoman,
Becky instantly formed some benevolent little domestic plans
concerning her. This was just such a companion as would suit her
establishment, and she invited Briggs to come to dinner with her
that very evening, when she should see Becky's dear little darling
Rawdon.

Mrs. Bowls cautioned her lodger against venturing into the lion's
den, "wherein you will rue it, Miss B., mark my words, and as sure
as my name is Bowls." And Briggs promised to be very cautious. The
upshot of which caution was that she went to live with Mrs. Rawdon
the next week, and had lent Rawdon Crawley six hundred pounds upon
annuity before six months were over.

In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors

So the mourning being ready, and Sir Pitt Crawley warned of their
arrival, Colonel Crawley and his wife took a couple of places in the
same old High-flyer coach by which Rebecca had travelled in the
defunct Baronet's company, on her first journey into the world some
nine years before. How well she remembered the Inn Yard, and the
ostler to whom she refused money, and the insinuating Cambridge lad
who wrapped her in his coat on the journey! Rawdon took his place
outside, and would have liked to drive, but his grief forbade him.
He sat by the coachman and talked about horses and the road the
whole way; and who kept the inns, and who horsed the coach by which
he had travelled so many a time, when he and Pitt were boys going to
Eton. At Mudbury a carriage and a pair of horses received them,
with a coachman in black. "It's the old drag, Rawdon," Rebecca said
as they got in. "The worms have eaten the cloth a good deal—
there's the stain which Sir Pitt—ha! I see Dawson the Ironmonger
has his shutters up—which Sir Pitt made such a noise about. It was
a bottle of cherry brandy he broke which we went to fetch for your
aunt from Southampton. How time flies, to be sure! That can't be
Polly Talboys, that bouncing girl standing by her mother at the
cottage there. I remember her a mangy little urchin picking weeds
in the garden."

"Fine gal," said Rawdon, returning the salute which the cottage gave
him, by two fingers applied to his crape hatband. Becky bowed and
saluted, and recognized people here and there graciously. These
recognitions were inexpressibly pleasant to her. It seemed as if
she was not an imposter any more, and was coming to the home of her
ancestors. Rawdon was rather abashed and cast down, on the other
hand. What recollections of boyhood and innocence might have been
flitting across his brain? What pangs of dim remorse and doubt and
shame?

"Your sisters must be young women now," Rebecca said, thinking of
those girls for the first time perhaps since she had left them.

"Don't know, I'm shaw," replied the Colonel. "Hullo! here's old
Mother Lock. How-dy-do, Mrs. Lock? Remember me, don't you? Master
Rawdon, hey? Dammy how those old women last; she was a hundred when
I was a boy."

They were going through the lodge-gates kept by old Mrs. Lock, whose
hand Rebecca insisted upon shaking, as she flung open the creaking
old iron gate, and the carriage passed between the two moss-grown
pillars surmounted by the dove and serpent.

"The governor has cut into the timber," Rawdon said, looking about,
and then was silent—so was Becky. Both of them were rather
agitated, and thinking of old times. He about Eton, and his mother,
whom he remembered, a frigid demure woman, and a sister who died, of
whom he had been passionately fond; and how he used to thrash Pitt;
and about little Rawdy at home. And Rebecca thought about her own
youth and the dark secrets of those early tainted days; and of her
entrance into life by yonder gates; and of Miss Pinkerton, and Joe,
and Amelia.

The gravel walk and terrace had been scraped quite clean. A grand
painted hatchment was already over the great entrance, and two very
solemn and tall personages in black flung open each a leaf of the
door as the carriage pulled up at the familiar steps. Rawdon turned
red, and Becky somewhat pale, as they passed through the old hall,
arm in arm. She pinched her husband's arm as they entered the oak
parlour, where Sir Pitt and his wife were ready to receive them.
Sir Pitt in black, Lady Jane in black, and my Lady Southdown with a
large black head-piece of bugles and feathers, which waved on her
Ladyship's head like an undertaker's tray.

Sir Pitt had judged correctly, that she would not quit the premises.
She contented herself by preserving a solemn and stony silence, when
in company of Pitt and his rebellious wife, and by frightening the
children in the nursery by the ghastly gloom of her demeanour. Only
a very faint bending of the head-dress and plumes welcomed Rawdon
and his wife, as those prodigals returned to their family.

To say the truth, they were not affected very much one way or other
by this coolness. Her Ladyship was a person only of secondary
consideration in their minds just then—they were intent upon the
reception which the reigning brother and sister would afford them.

Pitt, with rather a heightened colour, went up and shook his brother
by the hand, and saluted Rebecca with a hand-shake and a very low
bow. But Lady Jane took both the hands of her sister-in-law and
kissed her affectionately. The embrace somehow brought tears into
the eyes of the little adventuress—which ornaments, as we know, she
wore very seldom. The artless mark of kindness and confidence
touched and pleased her; and Rawdon, encouraged by this
demonstration on his sister's part, twirled up his mustachios and
took leave to salute Lady Jane with a kiss, which caused her
Ladyship to blush exceedingly.

"Dev'lish nice little woman, Lady Jane," was his verdict, when he
and his wife were together again. "Pitt's got fat, too, and is
doing the thing handsomely." "He can afford it," said Rebecca and
agreed in her husband's farther opinion "that the mother-in-law was
a tremendous old Guy—and that the sisters were rather well-looking
young women."