you," she said with pleasure beaming in her glance. Indeed,
she was really sincerely happy at having him for a guest.
Becky made Rawdon dine out once or twice on business,
while Pitt stayed with them, and the Baronet passed
the happy evening alone with her and Briggs. She went
downstairs to the kitchen and actually cooked little
dishes for him. "Isn't it a good salmi?" she said; "I
made it for you. I can make you better dishes than that,
and will when you come to see me."
"Everything you do, you do well," said the Baronet
gallantly. "The salmi is excellent indeed."
"A poor man's wife," Rebecca replied gaily, "must
make herself useful, you know"; on which her brother-
in-law vowed that "she was fit to be the wife of an
Emperor, and that to be skilful in domestic duties was
surely one of the most charming of woman's qualities."
And Sir Pitt thought, with something like mortification,
of Lady Jane at home, and of a certain pie which she had
insisted on making, and serving to him at dinner--a
most abominable pie.
Besides the salmi, which was made of Lord Steyne's
pheasants from his lordship's cottage of Stillbrook, Becky
gave her brother-in-law a bottle of white wine, some
that Rawdon had brought with him from France, and had
picked up for nothing, the little story-teller said; whereas
the liquor was, in truth, some White Hermitage from
the Marquis of Steyne's famous cellars, which brought fire
into the Baronet's pallid cheeks and a glow into his feeble
frame.
Then when he had drunk up the bottle of petit vin
blanc, she gave him her hand, and took him up to the
drawing-room, and made him snug on the sofa by the
fire, and let him talk as she listened with the tenderest
kindly interest, sitting by him, and hemming a shirt
for her dear little boy. Whenever Mrs. Rawdon wished
to be particularly humble and virtuous, this little shirt
used to come out of her work-box. It had got to be too
small for Rawdon long before it was finished.
Well, Rebecca listened to Pitt, she talked to him, she
sang to him, she coaxed him, and cuddled him, so that
he found himself more and more glad every day to get
back from the lawyer's at Gray's Inn, to the blazing fire
in Curzon Street--a gladness in which the men of law
likewise participated, for Pitt's harangues were of the
longest--and so that when he went away he felt quite a
pang at departing. How pretty she looked kissing her
hand to him from the carriage and waving her handkerchief
when he had taken his place in the mail! She put
the handkerchief to her eyes once. He pulled his
sealskin cap over his, as the coach drove away, and,
sinking back, he thought to himself how she respected
him and how he deserved it, and how Rawdon was a foolish
dull fellow who didn't half-appreciate his wife; and
how mum and stupid his own wife was compared to that
brilliant little Becky. Becky had hinted every one of these
things herself, perhaps, but so delicately and gently that
you hardly knew when or where. And, before they
parted, it was agreed that the house in London should be
redecorated for the next season, and that the brothers'
families should meet again in the country at Christmas.
"I wish you could have got a little money out of
him," Rawdon said to his wife moodily when the Baronet
was gone. "I should like to give something to old Raggles,
hanged if I shouldn't. It ain't right, you know, that the
old fellow should be kept out of all his money. It may be
inconvenient, and he might let to somebody else besides
us, you know."
"Tell him," said Becky, "that as soon as Sir Pitt's
affairs are settled, everybody will be paid, and give him a
little something on account. Here's a cheque that Pitt
left for the boy," and she took from her bag and gave
her husband a paper which his brother had handed over
to her, on behalf of the little son and heir of the younger
branch of the Crawleys.
The truth is, she had tried personally the ground on
which her husband expressed a wish that she should
venture--tried it ever so delicately, and found it unsafe.
Even at a hint about embarrassments, Sir Pitt Crawley was
off and alarmed. And he began a long speech, explaining
how straitened he himself was in money matters; how
the tenants would not pay; how his father's affairs, and
the expenses attendant upon the demise of the old
gentleman, had involved him; how he wanted to pay off
incumbrances; and how the bankers and agents were
overdrawn; and Pitt Crawley ended by making a
compromise with his sister-in-law and giving her a very
small sum for the benefit of her little boy.
Pitt knew how poor his brother and his brother's family
must be. It could not have escaped the notice of such a
cool and experienced old diplomatist that Rawdon's family
had nothing to live upon, and that houses and carriages
are not to be kept for nothing. He knew very well that
he was the proprietor or appropriator of the money,
which, according to all proper calculation, ought to have
fallen to his younger brother, and he had, we may be sure,
somesecret pangs of remorse within him, which warned
him that he ought to perform some act of justice,
or, let us say, compensation, towards these disappointed
relations. A just, decent man, not without brains,
who said his prayers, and knew his catechism, and
did his duty outwardly through life, he could not be
otherwise than aware that something was due to his
brother at his hands, and that morally he was Rawdon's
debtor.
But, as one reads in the columns of the Times newspaper
every now and then, queer announcements from
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, acknowledging the receipt
of 50 pounds from A. B., or 10 pounds from W. T., as
conscience-money, on account of taxes due by the said
A. B. or W. T., which payments the penitents beg the
Right Honourable gentleman to acknowledge through the
medium of the public press--so is the Chancellor no
doubt, and the reader likewise, always perfectly sure that
the above-named A. B. and W. T. are only paying a
very small instalment of what they really owe, and that
the man who sends up a twenty-pound note has very
likely hundreds or thousands more for which he ought
to account. Such, at least, are my feelings, when I see
A. B. or W. T.'s insufficient acts of repentance. And I
have no doubt that Pitt Crawley's contrition, or kindness
if you will, towards his younger brother, by whom
he had so much profited, was only a very small dividend
upon the capital sum in which he was indebted to Rawdon.
Not everybody is willing to pay even so much. To part
with money is a sacrifice beyond almost all men endowed
with a sense of order. There is scarcely any man alive
who does not think himself meritorious for giving
his neighbour five pounds. Thriftless gives, not from a
beneficent pleasure in giving, but from a lazy delight in
spending. He would not deny himself one enjoyment; not
his opera-stall, not his horse, not his dinner, not even
the pleasure of giving Lazarus the five pounds. Thrifty,
who is good, wise, just, and owes no man a penny, turns
from a beggar, haggles with a hackney-coachman, or
denies a poor relation, and I doubt which is the most
selfish of the two. Money has only a different value in
the eyes of each.
So, in a word, Pitt Crawley thought he would do something
for his brother, and then thought that he would think
about it some other time.
And with regard to Becky, she was not a woman who
expected too much from the generosity of her
neighbours, and so was quite content with all that Pitt Crawley
had done for her. She was acknowledged by the head
of the family. If Pitt would not give her anything, he
would get something for her some day. If she got no
money from her brother-in-law, she got what was as good
as money--credit. Raggles was made rather easy in his
mind by the spectacle of the union between the brothers,
by a small payment on the spot, and by the promise of a
much larger sum speedily to be assigned to him. And
Rebecca told Miss Briggs, whose Christmas dividend
upon the little sum lent by her Becky paid with an air of
candid joy, and as if her exchequer was brimming over
with gold--Rebecca, we say, told Miss Briggs, in strict
confidence that she had conferred with Sir Pitt, who was
famous as a financier, on Briggs's special behalf, as to
the most profitable investment of Miss B.'s remaining
capital; that Sir Pitt, after much consideration, had
thought of a most safe and advantageous way in which
Briggs could lay out her money; that, being especially
interested in her as an attached friend of the late Miss
Crawley, and of the whole family, and that long before
he left town, he had recommended that she should be
ready with the money at a moment's notice, so as to
purchase at the most favourable opportunity the shares
which Sir Pitt had in his eye. Poor Miss Briggs was very
grateful for this mark of Sir Pitt's attention--it came so
unsolicited, she said, for she never should have thought of
removing the money from the funds--and the delicacy
enhanced the kindness of the office; and she promised to
see her man of business immediately and be ready with
her little cash at the proper hour.
And this worthy woman was so grateful for the
kindness of Rebecca in the matter, and for that of her
generous benefactor, the Colonel, that she went out and
spent a great part of her half-year's dividend in the
purchase of a black velvet coat for little Rawdon, who, by
the way, was grown almost too big for black velvet now,
and was of a size and age befitting him for the assumption
of the virile jacket and pantaloons.
He was a fine open-faced boy, with blue eyes and
waving flaxen hair, sturdy in limb, but generous and soft in
heart, fondly attaching himself to all who were good to
him--to the pony--to Lord Southdown, who gave him
the horse (he used to blush and glow all over when he
saw that kind young nobleman)--to the groom who had
charge of the pony--to Molly, the cook, who crammed
him with ghost stories at night, and with good things from
the dinner--to Briggs, whom he plagued and laughed at
--and to his father especially, whose attachment
towards the lad was curious too to witness. Here, as he
grew to be about eight years old, his attachments may
be said to have ended. The beautiful mother-vision had
faded away after a while. During near two years she had
scarcely spoken to the child. She disliked him. He had
the measles and the hooping-cough. He bored her. One
day when he was standing at the landing-place, having
crept down from the upper regions, attracted by the sound
of his mother's voice, who was singing to Lord Steyne,
the drawing room door opening suddenly, discovered the
little spy, who but a moment before had been rapt in
delight, and listening to the music.
His mother came out and struck him violently a couple
of boxes on the ear. He heard a laugh from the Marquis
in the inner room (who was amused by this free and
artless exhibition of Becky's temper) and fled down below
to his friends of the kitchen, bursting in an agony of
grief.
"It is not because it hurts me," little Rawdon gasped
out--"only--only"--sobs and tears wound up the
sentence in a storm. It was the little boy's heart that was
bleeding. "Why mayn't I hear her singing? Why don't
she ever sing to me--as she does to that baldheaded
man with the large teeth?" He gasped out at various
intervals these exclamations of rage and grief. The cook
looked at the housemaid, the housemaid looked
knowingly at the footman--the awful kitchen inquisition which
sits in judgement in every house and knows everything--
sat on Rebecca at that moment.
After this incident, the mother's dislike increased to
hatred; the consciousness that the child was in the house
was a reproach and a pain to her. His very sight
annoyed her. Fear, doubt, and resistance sprang up, too,
in the boy's own bosom. They were separated from that
day of the boxes on the ear.
Lord Steyne also heartily disliked the boy. When they
met by mischance, he made sarcastic bows or remarks
to the child, or glared at him with savage-looking eyes.
Rawdon used to stare him in the face and double his
little fists in return. He knew his enemy, and this gentleman,
of all who came to the house, was the one who
angered him most. One day the footman found him
squaring his fists at Lord Steyne's hat in the hall. The
footman told the circumstance as a good joke to Lord
Steyne's coachman; that officer imparted it to Lord
Steyne's gentleman, and to the servants' hall in general.
And very soon afterwards, when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley
made her appearance at Gaunt House, the porter who
unbarred the gates, the servants of all uniforms in the hall,
the functionaries in white waistcoats, who bawled out
from landing to landing the names of Colonel and Mrs.
Rawdon Crawley, knew about her, or fancied they did.
The man who brought her refreshment and stood behind
her chair, had talked her character over with the large
gentleman in motley-coloured clothes at his side. Bon
Dieu! it is awful, that servants' inquisition! You see a
woman in a great party in a splendid saloon, surrounded
by faithful admirers, distributing sparkling glances,
dressed to perfection, curled, rouged, smiling and happy
--Discovery walks respectfully up to her, in the shape of
a huge powdered man with large calves and a tray of ices
--with Calumny (which is as fatal as truth) behind
him, in the shape of the hulking fellow carrying the wafer-
biscuits. Madam, your secret will be talked over by those
