Vanity Fair (43 page)

This interview ended, it became full time for Rebecca to return to
her inn, where all the party of the previous day were assembled at a
farewell breakfast. Rebecca took such a tender leave of Amelia as
became two women who loved each other as sisters; and having used
her handkerchief plentifully, and hung on her friend's neck as if
they were parting for ever, and waved the handkerchief (which was
quite dry, by the way) out of window, as the carriage drove off, she
came back to the breakfast table, and ate some prawns with a good
deal of appetite, considering her emotion; and while she was
munching these delicacies, explained to Rawdon what had occurred in
her morning walk between herself and Briggs. Her hopes were very
high: she made her husband share them. She generally succeeded in
making her husband share all her opinions, whether melancholy or
cheerful.

"You will now, if you please, my dear, sit down at the writing-table
and pen me a pretty little letter to Miss Crawley, in which you'll
say that you are a good boy, and that sort of thing." So Rawdon
sate down, and wrote off, "Brighton, Thursday," and "My dear Aunt,"
with great rapidity: but there the gallant officer's imagination
failed him. He mumbled the end of his pen, and looked up in his
wife's face. She could not help laughing at his rueful countenance,
and marching up and down the room with her hands behind her, the
little woman began to dictate a letter, which he took down.

"Before quitting the country and commencing a campaign, which very
possibly may be fatal."

"What?" said Rawdon, rather surprised, but took the humour of the
phrase, and presently wrote it down with a grin.

"Which very possibly may be fatal, I have come hither—"

"Why not say come here, Becky? Come here's grammar," the dragoon
interposed.

"I have come hither," Rebecca insisted, with a stamp of her foot,
"to say farewell to my dearest and earliest friend. I beseech you
before I go, not perhaps to return, once more to let me press the
hand from which I have received nothing but kindnesses all my life."

"Kindnesses all my life," echoed Rawdon, scratching down the words,
and quite amazed at his own facility of composition.

"I ask nothing from you but that we should part not in anger. I
have the pride of my family on some points, though not on all. I
married a painter's daughter, and am not ashamed of the union."

"No, run me through the body if I am!" Rawdon ejaculated.

"You old booby," Rebecca said, pinching his ear and looking over to
see that he made no mistakes in spelling—"beseech is not spelt with
an a, and earliest is." So he altered these words, bowing to the
superior knowledge of his little Missis.

"I thought that you were aware of the progress of my attachment,"
Rebecca continued: "I knew that Mrs. Bute Crawley confirmed and
encouraged it. But I make no reproaches. I married a poor woman,
and am content to abide by what I have done. Leave your property,
dear Aunt, as you will. I shall never complain of the way in which
you dispose of it. I would have you believe that I love you for
yourself, and not for money's sake. I want to be reconciled to you
ere I leave England. Let me, let me see you before I go. A few
weeks or months hence it may be too late, and I cannot bear the
notion of quitting the country without a kind word of farewell from
you."

"She won't recognise my style in that," said Becky. "I made the
sentences short and brisk on purpose." And this authentic missive
was despatched under cover to Miss Briggs.

Old Miss Crawley laughed when Briggs, with great mystery, handed her
over this candid and simple statement. "We may read it now Mrs.
Bute is away," she said. "Read it to me, Briggs."

When Briggs had read the epistle out, her patroness laughed more.
"Don't you see, you goose," she said to Briggs, who professed to be
much touched by the honest affection which pervaded the composition,
"don't you see that Rawdon never wrote a word of it. He never wrote
to me without asking for money in his life, and all his letters are
full of bad spelling, and dashes, and bad grammar. It is that
little serpent of a governess who rules him." They are all alike,
Miss Crawley thought in her heart. They all want me dead, and are
hankering for my money.

"I don't mind seeing Rawdon," she added, after a pause, and in a
tone of perfect indifference. "I had just as soon shake hands with
him as not. Provided there is no scene, why shouldn't we meet? I
don't mind. But human patience has its limits; and mind, my dear, I
respectfully decline to receive Mrs. Rawdon—I can't support that
quite"—and Miss Briggs was fain to be content with this half-
message of conciliation; and thought that the best method of
bringing the old lady and her nephew together, was to warn Rawdon to
be in waiting on the Cliff, when Miss Crawley went out for her air
in her chair. There they met. I don't know whether Miss Crawley
had any private feeling of regard or emotion upon seeing her old
favourite; but she held out a couple of fingers to him with as
smiling and good-humoured an air, as if they had met only the day
before. And as for Rawdon, he turned as red as scarlet, and wrung
off Briggs's hand, so great was his rapture and his confusion at the
meeting. Perhaps it was interest that moved him: or perhaps
affection: perhaps he was touched by the change which the illness
of the last weeks had wrought in his aunt.

"The old girl has always acted like a trump to me," he said to his
wife, as he narrated the interview, "and I felt, you know, rather
queer, and that sort of thing. I walked by the side of the what-
dy'e-call-'em, you know, and to her own door, where Bowls came to
help her in. And I wanted to go in very much, only—"

"YOU DIDN'T GO IN, Rawdon!" screamed his wife.

"No, my dear; I'm hanged if I wasn't afraid when it came to the
point."

"You fool! you ought to have gone in, and never come out again,"
Rebecca said.

"Don't call me names," said the big Guardsman, sulkily. "Perhaps I
WAS a fool, Becky, but you shouldn't say so"; and he gave his wife a
look, such as his countenance could wear when angered, and such as
was not pleasant to face.

"Well, dearest, to-morrow you must be on the look-out, and go and
see her, mind, whether she asks you or no," Rebecca said, trying to
soothe her angry yoke-mate. On which he replied, that he would do
exactly as he liked, and would just thank her to keep a civil tongue
in her head—and the wounded husband went away, and passed the
forenoon at the billiard-room, sulky, silent, and suspicious.

But before the night was over he was compelled to give in, and own,
as usual, to his wife's superior prudence and foresight, by the most
melancholy confirmation of the presentiments which she had regarding
the consequences of the mistake which he had made. Miss Crawley
must have had some emotion upon seeing him and shaking hands with
him after so long a rupture. She mused upon the meeting a
considerable time. "Rawdon is getting very fat and old, Briggs,"
she said to her companion. "His nose has become red, and he is
exceedingly coarse in appearance. His marriage to that woman has
hopelessly vulgarised him. Mrs. Bute always said they drank
together; and I have no doubt they do. Yes: he smelt of gin
abominably. I remarked it. Didn't you?"

In vain Briggs interposed that Mrs. Bute spoke ill of everybody:
and, as far as a person in her humble position could judge, was an—

"An artful designing woman? Yes, so she is, and she does speak ill
of every one—but I am certain that woman has made Rawdon drink.
All those low people do—"

"He was very much affected at seeing you, ma'am," the companion
said; "and I am sure, when you remember that he is going to the
field of danger—"

"How much money has he promised you, Briggs?" the old spinster cried
out, working herself into a nervous rage—"there now, of course you
begin to cry. I hate scenes. Why am I always to be worried? Go
and cry up in your own room, and send Firkin to me—no, stop, sit
down and blow your nose, and leave off crying, and write a letter to
Captain Crawley." Poor Briggs went and placed herself obediently at
the writing-book. Its leaves were blotted all over with relics of
the firm, strong, rapid handwriting of the spinster's late
amanuensis, Mrs. Bute Crawley.

"Begin 'My dear sir,' or 'Dear sir,' that will be better, and say
you are desired by Miss Crawley—no, by Miss Crawley's medical man,
by Mr. Creamer, to state that my health is such that all strong
emotions would be dangerous in my present delicate condition—and
that I must decline any family discussions or interviews whatever.
And thank him for coming to Brighton, and so forth, and beg him not
to stay any longer on my account. And, Miss Briggs, you may add
that I wish him a bon voyage, and that if he will take the trouble
to call upon my lawyer's in Gray's Inn Square, he will find there a
communication for him. Yes, that will do; and that will make him
leave Brighton." The benevolent Briggs penned this sentence with the
utmost satisfaction.

"To seize upon me the very day after Mrs. Bute was gone," the old
lady prattled on; "it was too indecent. Briggs, my dear, write to
Mrs. Crawley, and say SHE needn't come back. No—she needn't—and
she shan't—and I won't be a slave in my own house—and I won't be
starved and choked with poison. They all want to kill me—all—
all"—and with this the lonely old woman burst into a scream of
hysterical tears.

The last scene of her dismal Vanity Fair comedy was fast
approaching; the tawdry lamps were going out one by one; and the
dark curtain was almost ready to descend.

That final paragraph, which referred Rawdon to Miss Crawley's
solicitor in London, and which Briggs had written so good-naturedly,
consoled the dragoon and his wife somewhat, after their first blank
disappointment, on reading the spinster's refusal of a
reconciliation. And it effected the purpose for which the old lady
had caused it to be written, by making Rawdon very eager to get to
London.

Out of Jos's losings and George Osborne's bank-notes, he paid his
bill at the inn, the landlord whereof does not probably know to this
day how doubtfully his account once stood. For, as a general sends
his baggage to the rear before an action, Rebecca had wisely packed
up all their chief valuables and sent them off under care of
George's servant, who went in charge of the trunks on the coach back
to London. Rawdon and his wife returned by the same conveyance next
day.

"I should have liked to see the old girl before we went," Rawdon
said. "She looks so cut up and altered that I'm sure she can't last
long. I wonder what sort of a cheque I shall have at Waxy's. Two
hundred—it can't be less than two hundred—hey, Becky?"

In consequence of the repeated visits of the aides-de-camp of the
Sheriff of Middlesex, Rawdon and his wife did not go back to their
lodgings at Brompton, but put up at an inn. Early the next morning,
Rebecca had an opportunity of seeing them as she skirted that suburb
on her road to old Mrs. Sedley's house at Fulham, whither she went
to look for her dear Amelia and her Brighton friends. They were all
off to Chatham, thence to Harwich, to take shipping for Belgium with
the regiment—kind old Mrs. Sedley very much depressed and tearful,
solitary. Returning from this visit, Rebecca found her husband, who
had been off to Gray's Inn, and learnt his fate. He came back
furious.

"By Jove, Becky," says he, "she's only given me twenty pound!"

Though it told against themselves, the joke was too good, and Becky
burst out laughing at Rawdon's discomfiture.

Between London and Chatham

On quitting Brighton, our friend George, as became a person of rank
and fashion travelling in a barouche with four horses, drove in
state to a fine hotel in Cavendish Square, where a suite of splendid
rooms, and a table magnificently furnished with plate and surrounded
by a half-dozen of black and silent waiters, was ready to receive
the young gentleman and his bride. George did the honours of the
place with a princely air to Jos and Dobbin; and Amelia, for the
first time, and with exceeding shyness and timidity, presided at
what George called her own table.

George pooh-poohed the wine and bullied the waiters royally, and Jos
gobbled the turtle with immense satisfaction. Dobbin helped him to
it; for the lady of the house, before whom the tureen was placed,
was so ignorant of the contents, that she was going to help Mr.
Sedley without bestowing upon him either calipash or calipee.

The splendour of the entertainment, and the apartments in which it
was given, alarmed Mr. Dobbin, who remonstrated after dinner, when
Jos was asleep in the great chair. But in vain he cried out against
the enormity of turtle and champagne that was fit for an archbishop.
"I've always been accustomed to travel like a gentleman," George
said, "and, damme, my wife shall travel like a lady. As long as
there's a shot in the locker, she shall want for nothing," said the
generous fellow, quite pleased with himself for his magnificence of
spirit. Nor did Dobbin try and convince him that Amelia's happiness
was not centred in turtle-soup.

A while after dinner, Amelia timidly expressed a wish to go and see
her mamma, at Fulham: which permission George granted her with some
grumbling. And she tripped away to her enormous bedroom, in the
centre of which stood the enormous funereal bed, "that the Emperor
Halixander's sister slep in when the allied sufferings was here,"
and put on her little bonnet and shawl with the utmost eagerness and
pleasure. George was still drinking claret when she returned to the
dining-room, and made no signs of moving. "Ar'n't you coming with
me, dearest?" she asked him. No; the "dearest" had "business" that
night. His man should get her a coach and go with her. And the
coach being at the door of the hotel, Amelia made George a little
disappointed curtsey after looking vainly into his face once or
twice, and went sadly down the great staircase, Captain Dobbin
after, who handed her into the vehicle, and saw it drive away to its
destination. The very valet was ashamed of mentioning the address to
the hackney-coachman before the hotel waiters, and promised to
instruct him when they got further on.