Vanity Fair
adventure--an old friend--yes, a most interesting old friend of yours,
and I may say in old times, has just arrived here, and I should like
you to see her."
"Her!" said Amelia, "who is it? Major Dobbin, if you please not to
break my scissors." The Major was twirling them round by the little
chain from which they sometimes hung to their lady's waist, and was
thereby endangering his own eye.
"It is a woman whom I dislike very much," said the Major, doggedly, "and
whom you have no cause to love."
"It is Rebecca, I'm sure it is Rebecca," Amelia said, blushing and
being very much agitated.
"You are right; you always are," Dobbin answered. Brussels, Waterloo,
old, old times, griefs, pangs, remembrances, rushed back into Amelia's
gentle heart and caused a cruel agitation there.
"Don't let me see her," Emmy continued. "I couldn't see her."
"I told you so," Dobbin said to Jos.
"She is very unhappy, and--and that sort of thing," Jos urged. "She is
very poor and unprotected, and has been ill--exceedingly ill--and that
scoundrel of a husband has deserted her."
"Ah!" said Amelia.
"She hasn't a friend in the world," Jos went on, not undexterously,
"and she said she thought she might trust in you. She's so miserable,
Emmy. She has been almost mad with grief. Her story quite affected
me--'pon my word and honour, it did--never was such a cruel persecution
borne so angelically, I may say. Her family has been most cruel to
her."
"Poor creature!" Amelia said.
"And if she can get no friend, she says she thinks she'll die," Jos
proceeded in a low tremulous voice. "God bless my soul! do you know
that she tried to kill herself? She carries laudanum with her--I saw
the bottle in her room--such a miserable little room--at a third-rate
house, the Elephant, up in the roof at the top of all. I went there."
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?
CHAPTER LXVI
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