smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride,
asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the
laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail
above water? No! Those who like may peep down under
waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and
twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst
bones, or curling round corpses; but above the waterline,
I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable,
and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist
in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? When, however, the Siren
disappears and dives below, down among the dead men,
the water of course grows turbid over her, and it is labour
lost to look into it ever so curiously. They look pretty
enough when they sit upon a rock, twanging their harps
and combing their hair, and sing, and beckon to you to
come and hold the looking-glass; but when they sink
into their native element, depend on it, those mermaids
are about no good, and we had best not examine the
fiendish marine cannibals, revelling and feasting on their
wretched pickled victims. And so, when Becky is out of
the way, be sure that she is not particularly well
employed, and that the less that is said about her doings
is in fact the better.
If we were to give a full account of her proceedings
during a couple of years that followed after the Curzon
Street catastrophe, there might be some reason for
people to say this book was improper. The actions of very
vain, heartless, pleasure-seeking people are very often
improper (as are many of yours, my friend with the
grave face and spotless reputation--but that is merely
by the way); and what are those of a woman without
faith--or love--or character? And I am inclined to think
that there was a period in Mrs Becky's life when
she was seized, not by remorse, but by a kind of despair,
and absolutely neglected her person and did not even
care for her reputation.
This abattement and degradation did not take place
all at once; it was brought about by degrees, after her
calamity, and after many struggles to keep up--as a
man who goes overboard hangs on to a spar whilst any
hope is left, and then flings it away and goes down, when
he finds that struggling is in vain.
She lingered about London whilst her husband was
making preparations for his departure to his seat of
government, and it is believed made more than one
attempt to see her brother-in-law, Sir Pitt Crawley, and to
work upon his feelings, which she had almost
enlisted in her favour. As Sir Pitt and Mr. Wenham were
walking down to the House of Commons, the latter spied
Mrs. Rawdon in a black veil, and lurking near the palace
of the legislature. She sneaked away when her eyes met
those of Wenham, and indeed never succeeded in her
designs upon the Baronet.
Probably Lady Jane interposed. I have heard that she
quite astonished her husband by the spirit which she
exhibited in this quarrel, and her determination to disown
Mrs. Becky. Of her own movement, she invited Rawdon
to come and stop in Gaunt Street until his departure for
Coventry Island, knowing that with him for a guard Mrs.
Becky would not try to force her door; and she looked
curiously at the superscriptions of all the letters which
arrived for Sir Pitt, lest he and his sister-in-law should
be corresponding. Not but that Rebecca could have
written had she a mind, but she did not try to see or to write
to Pitt at his own house, and after one or two attempts
consented to his demand that the correspondence
regarding her conjugal differences should be carried on by
lawyers only.
The fact was that Pitt's mind had been poisoned against
her. A short time after Lord Steyne's accident Wenham
had been with the Baronet and given him such a biography
of Mrs. Becky as had astonished the member for
Queen's Crawley. He knew everything regarding her:
who her father was; in what year her mother danced at
the opera; what had been her previous history; and what
her conduct during her married life--as I have no doubt
that the greater part of the story was false and
dictated by interested malevolence, it shall not be repeated
here. But Becky was left with a sad sad reputation in the
esteem of a country gentleman and relative who had
been once rather partial to her.
The revenues of the Governor of Coventry Island are
not large. A part of them were set aside by his Excellency
for the payment of certain outstanding debts and
liabilities, the charges incident on his high situation
required considerable expense; finally, it was found that
he could not spare to his wife more than three hundred
pounds a year, which he proposed to pay to her on
an undertaking that she would never trouble him.
Otherwise, scandal, separation, Doctors' Commons would
ensue. But it was Mr. Wenham's business, Lord Steyne's
business, Rawdon's, everybody's--to get her out of the
country, and hush up a most disagreeable affair.
She was probably so much occupied in arranging these
affairs of business with her husband's lawyers that she
forgot to take any step whatever about her son, the little
Rawdon, and did not even once propose to go and see
him. That young gentleman was consigned to the entire
guardianship of his aunt and uncle, the former of whom
had always possessed a great share of the child's
affection. His mamma wrote him a neat letter from Boulogne,
when she quitted England, in which she requested him to
mind his book, and said she was going to take a
Continental tour, during which she would have the pleasure
of writing to him again. But she never did for a year
afterwards, and not, indeed, until Sir Pitt's only boy,
always sickly, died of hooping-cough and measles--then
Rawdon's mamma wrote the most affectionate composition
to her darling son, who was made heir of Queen's
Crawley by this accident, and drawn more closely than
ever to the kind lady, whose tender heart had already
adopted him. Rawdon Crawley, then grown a tall, fine
lad, blushed when he got the letter. "Oh, Aunt Jane, you
are my mother!" he said; "and not--and not that one."
But he wrote back a kind and respectful letter to Mrs.
Rebecca, then living at a boarding-house at Florence.
But we are advancing matters.
Our darling Becky's first flight was not very far. She
perched upon the French coast at Boulogne, that refuge
of so much exiled English innocence, and there lived in
rather a genteel, widowed manner, with a femme de
chambre and a couple of rooms, at an hotel. She dined
at the table d'hote, where people thought her very pleasant,
and where she entertained her neighbours by stories
of her brother, Sir Pitt, and her great London acquaintance,
talking that easy, fashionable slip-slop which has
so much effect upon certain folks of small breeding. She
passed with many of them for a person of importance;
she gave little tea-parties in her private room and shared
in the innocent amusements of the place in sea-bathing,
and in jaunts in open carriages, in strolls on the sands,
and in visits to the play. Mrs. Burjoice, the printer's
lady, who was boarding with her family at the hotel for
the summer, and to whom her Burjoice came of a
Saturday and Sunday, voted her charming, until that little
rogue of a Burjoice began to pay her too much
attention. But there was nothing in the story, only that
Becky was always affable, easy, and good-natured--and
with men especially.
Numbers of people were going abroad as usual at the
end of the season, and Becky had plenty of opportunities
of finding out by the behaviour of her acquaintances of
the great London world the opinion of "society" as
regarded her conduct. One day it was Lady Partlet and her
daughters whom Becky confronted as she was walking
modestly on Boulogne pier, the cliffs of Albion shining
in the distance across the deep blue sea. Lady Partlet
marshalled all her daughters round her with a sweep of
her parasol and retreated from the pier, darting savage
glances at poor little Becky who stood alone there.
On another day the packet came in. It had been
blowing fresh, and it always suited Becky's humour to
see the droll woe-begone faces of the people as they
emerged from the boat. Lady Slingstone happened to be
on board this day. Her ladyship had been exceedingly ill
in her carriage, and was greatly exhausted and scarcely
fit to walk up the plank from the ship to the pier. But
all her energies rallied the instant she saw Becky smiling
roguishly under a pink bonnet, and giving her a
glance of scorn such as would have shrivelled up most
women, she walked into the Custom House quite
unsupported. Becky only laughed: but I don't think she liked
it. She felt she was alone, quite alone, and the far-off
shining cliffs of England were impassable to her.
The behaviour of the men had undergone too I don't
know what change. Grinstone showed his teeth and
laughed in her face with a familiarity that was not pleasant.
Little Bob Suckling, who was cap in hand to her
three months before, and would walk a mile in the rain
to see for her carriage in the line at Gaunt House, was
talking to Fitzoof of the Guards (Lord Heehaw's son)
one day upon the jetty, as Becky took her walk there.
Little Bobby nodded to her over his shoulder, without
moving his hat, and continued his conversation with the
heir of Heehaw. Tom Raikes tried to walk into her
sitting-room at the inn with a cigar in his mouth, but she
closed the door upon him, and would have locked it,
only that his fingers were inside. She began to feel that
she was very lonely indeed. "If HE'D been here," she said,
"those cowards would never have dared to insult me."
She thought about "him" with great sadness and
perhaps longing--about his honest, stupid, constant kindness
and fidelity; his never-ceasing obedience; his good
humour; his bravery and courage. Very likely she cried,
for she was particularly lively, and had put on a little
extra rouge, when she came down to dinner.
She rouged regularly now; and--and her maid got
Cognac for her besides that which was charged in the
hotel bill.
Perhaps the insults of the men were not, however, so
intolerable to her as the sympathy of certain women.
Mrs. Crackenbury and Mrs. Washington White passed
through Boulogne on their way to Switzerland. ~The party
were protected by Colonel Horner, young Beaumoris, and
of course old Crackenbury, and Mrs. White's little girl.)
THEY did not avoid her. They giggled, cackled, tattled,
condoled, consoled, and patronized her until they drove
her almost wild with rage. To be patronized by THEM!
she thought, as they went away simpering after kissing
her. And she heard Beaumoris's laugh ringing on the
stair and knew quite well how to interpret his hilarity.
It was after this visit that Becky, who had paid her
weekly bills, Becky who had made herself agreeable to
everybody in the house, who smiled at the landlady,
called the waiters "monsieur," and paid the chambermaids
in politeness and apologies, what far more than
compensated for a little niggardliness in point of money
(of which Becky never was free), that Becky, we say,
received a notice to quit from the landlord, who had
been told by some one that she was quite an unfit
person to have at his hotel, where English ladies would not
sit down with her. And she was forced to fly into lodgings
of which the dulness and solitude were most wearisome
to her.
Still she held up, in spite of these rebuffs, and tried to
make a character for herself and conquer scandal. She
went to church very regularly and sang louder than
anybody there. She took up the cause of the widows of the
shipwrecked fishermen, and gave work and drawings for
the Quashyboo Mission; she subscribed to the Assembly
and WOULDN'T waltz. In a word, she did everything that
was respectable, and that is why we dwell upon this
part of her career with more fondness than upon
subsequent parts of her history, which are not so pleasant.
She saw people avoiding her, and still laboriously smiled
upon them; you never could suppose from her
countenance what pangs of humiliation she might be
enduring inwardly.
Her history was after all a mystery. Parties were
divided about her. Some people who took the trouble to
busy themselves in the matter said that she was the
criminal, whilst others vowed that she was as innocent
as a lamb and that her odious husband was in fault.
She won over a good many by bursting into tears
about her boy and exhibiting the most frantic grief
when his name was mentioned, or she saw anybody like
him. She gained good Mrs. Alderney's heart in that way,
who was rather the Queen of British Boulogne and gave
the most dinners and balls of all the residents there, by
weeping when Master Alderney came from Dr. Swishtail's
academy to pass his holidays with his mother. "He and
her Rawdon were of the same age, and so like," Becky
said in a voice choking with agony; whereas there was
five years' difference between the boys' ages, and no
more likeness between them than between my respected
reader and his humble servant. Wenham, when he was
going abroad, on his way to Kissingen to join Lord
Steyne, enlightened Mrs. Alderney on this point and told
her how he was much more able to describe little
Rawdon than his mamma, who notoriously hated him and
never saw him; how he was thirteen years old, while
little Alderney was but nine, fair, while the other darling
was dark--in a word, caused the lady in question to
repent of her good humour.
Whenever Becky made a little circle for herself with
incredible toils and labour, somebody came and swept it
down rudely, and she had all her work to begin over
