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 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
