Chapter: A Vagabond Chapter

We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that
lightness and delicacy which the world demands--the moral world, that
has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable
repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name. There are things
we do and know perfectly well in Vanity Fair, though we never speak of
them:  as the Ahrimanians worship the devil, but don't mention him:
and a polite public will no more bear to read an authentic description
of vice than a truly refined English or American female will permit the
word breeches to be pronounced in her chaste hearing.  And yet, madam,
both are walking the world before our faces every day, without much
shocking us.  If you were to blush every time they went by, what
complexions you would have!  It is only when their naughty names are
called out that your modesty has any occasion to show alarm or sense of
outrage, and it has been the wish of the present writer, all through
this story, deferentially to submit to the fashion at present
prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light,
easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be
offended.  I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has certainly some
vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and
inoffensive manner.  In describing this Siren, singing and 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 again.  It was very hard; very hard; lonely and
disheartening.

There was Mrs. Newbright, who took her up for some time, attracted by
the sweetness of her singing at church and by her proper views upon
serious subjects, concerning which in former days, at Queen's Crawley,
Mrs. Becky had had a good deal of instruction.  Well, she not only took
tracts, but she read them.  She worked flannel petticoats for the
Quashyboos--cotton night-caps for the Cocoanut Indians--painted
handscreens for the conversion of the Pope and the Jews--sat under Mr.
Rowls on Wednesdays, Mr. Huggleton on Thursdays, attended two Sunday
services at church, besides Mr. Bawler, the Darbyite, in the evening,
and all in vain.  Mrs. Newbright had occasion to correspond with the
Countess of Southdown about the Warmingpan Fund for the Fiji Islanders
(for the management of which admirable charity both these ladies formed
part of a female committee), and having mentioned her "sweet friend,"
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, the Dowager Countess wrote back such a letter
regarding Becky, with such particulars, hints, facts, falsehoods, and
general comminations, that intimacy between Mrs. Newbright and Mrs.
Crawley ceased forthwith, and all the serious world of Tours, where
this misfortune took place, immediately parted company with the
reprobate.  Those who know the English Colonies abroad know that we
carry with us us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces,
cayenne-peppers, and other Lares, making a little Britain wherever we
settle down.

From one colony to another Becky fled uneasily.  From Boulogne to
Dieppe, from Dieppe to Caen, from Caen to Tours--trying with all her
might to be respectable, and alas!  always found out some day or other
and pecked out of the cage by the real daws.

Mrs. Hook Eagles took her up at one of these places--a woman without a
blemish in her character and a house in Portman Square.  She was
staying at the hotel at Dieppe, whither Becky fled, and they made each
other's acquaintance first at sea, where they were swimming together,
and subsequently at the table d'hote of the hotel.  Mrs Eagles had
heard--who indeed had not?--some of the scandal of the Steyne affair;
but after a conversation with Becky, she pronounced that Mrs. Crawley
was an angel, her husband a ruffian, Lord Steyne an unprincipled
wretch, as everybody knew, and the whole case against Mrs. Crawley an
infamous and wicked conspiracy of that rascal Wenham.  "If you were a
man of any spirit, Mr. Eagles, you would box the wretch's ears the next
time you see him at the Club," she said to her husband.  But Eagles was
only a quiet old gentleman, husband to Mrs. Eagles, with a taste for
geology, and not tall enough to reach anybody's ears.

The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to live with her at
her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the ambassador's wife because
she would not receive her protegee, and did all that lay in woman's
power to keep Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.

Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the life of
humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before long.  It was the
same routine every day, the same dulness and comfort, the same drive
over the same stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an evening,
the same Blair's Sermon of a Sunday night--the same opera always being
acted over and over again; Becky was dying of weariness, when, luckily
for her, young Mr. Eagles came from Cambridge, and his mother, seeing
the impression which her little friend made upon him, straightway gave
Becky warning.

Then she tried keeping house with a female friend; then the double
menage began to quarrel and get into debt.  Then she determined upon a
boarding-house existence and lived for some time at that famous mansion
kept by Madame de Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at Paris, where she
began exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dandies
and fly-blown beauties who frequented her landlady's salons.  Becky
loved society and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an
opium-eater without his dram, and she was happy enough at the period of
her boarding-house life.  "The women here are as amusing as those in
May Fair," she told an old London friend who met her, "only, their
dresses are not quite so fresh.  The men wear cleaned gloves, and are
sad rogues, certainly, but they are not worse than Jack This and Tom
That.  The mistress of the house is a little vulgar, but I don't think
she is so vulgar as Lady ------" and here she named the name of a great
leader of fashion that I would die rather than reveal.  In fact, when
you saw Madame de Saint Amour's rooms lighted up of a night, men with
plaques and cordons at the ecarte tables, and the women at a little
distance, you might fancy yourself for a while in good society, and
that Madame was a real Countess.  Many people did so fancy, and Becky
was for a while one of the most dashing ladies of the Countess's salons.

But it is probable that her old creditors of 1815 found her out and
caused her to leave Paris, for the poor little woman was forced to fly
from the city rather suddenly, and went thence to Brussels.

How well she remembered the place!  She grinned as she looked up at the
little entresol which she had occupied, and thought of the Bareacres
family, bawling for horses and flight, as their carriage stood in the
porte-cochere of the hotel.  She went to Waterloo and to Laeken, where
George Osborne's monument much struck her.  She made a little sketch of
it.  "That poor Cupid!" she said; "how dreadfully he was in love with
me, and what a fool he was!  I wonder whether little Emmy is alive.  It
was a good little creature; and that fat brother of hers.  I have his
funny fat picture still among my papers.  They were kind simple people."

At Brussels Becky arrived, recommended by Madame de Saint Amour to her
friend, Madame la Comtesse de Borodino, widow of Napoleon's General,
the famous Count de Borodino, who was left with no resource by the
deceased hero but that of a table d'hote and an ecarte table.
Second-rate dandies and roues, widow-ladies who always have a lawsuit,
and very simple English folks, who fancy they see "Continental society"
at these houses, put down their money, or ate their meals, at Madame de
Borodino's tables.  The gallant young fellows treated the company round
to champagne at the table d'hote, rode out with the women, or hired
horses on country excursions, clubbed money to take boxes at the play
or the opera, betted over the fair shoulders of the ladies at the
ecarte tables, and wrote home to their parents in Devonshire about
their felicitous introduction to foreign society.

Here, as at Paris, Becky was a boarding-house queen, and ruled in
select pensions.  She never refused the champagne, or the bouquets, or
the drives into the country, or the private boxes; but what she
preferred was the ecarte at night,--and she played audaciously. First
she played only for a little, then for five-franc pieces, then for
Napoleons, then for notes:  then she would not be able to pay her
month's pension:  then she borrowed from the young gentlemen: then she
got into cash again and bullied Madame de Borodino, whom she had coaxed
and wheedled before:  then she was playing for ten sous at a time, and
in a dire state of poverty:  then her quarter's allowance would come
in, and she would pay off Madame de Borodino's score and would once
more take the cards against Monsieur de Rossignol, or the Chevalier de
Raff.

When Becky left Brussels, the sad truth is that she owed three months'
pension to Madame de Borodino, of which fact, and of the gambling, and
of the drinking, and of the going down on her knees to the Reverend Mr.
Muff, Ministre Anglican, and borrowing money of him, and of her coaxing
and flirting with Milor Noodle, son of Sir Noodle, pupil of the Rev.
Mr. Muff, whom she used to take into her private room, and of whom she
won large sums at ecarte--of which fact, I say, and of a hundred of her
other knaveries, the Countess de Borodino informs every English person
who stops at her establishment, and announces that Madame Rawdon was no
better than a vipere.

So our little wanderer went about setting up her tent in various cities
of Europe, as restless as Ulysses or Bampfylde Moore Carew. Her taste
for disrespectability grew more and more remarkable.  She became a
perfect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would make your
hair stand on end to meet.

There is no town of any mark in Europe but it has its little colony of
English raffs--men whose names Mr. Hemp the officer reads out
periodically at the Sheriffs' Court--young gentlemen of very good
family often, only that the latter disowns them; frequenters of
billiard-rooms and estaminets, patrons of foreign races and
gaming-tables.  They people the debtors' prisons--they drink and
swagger--they fight and brawl--they run away without paying--they have
duels with French and German officers--they cheat Mr. Spooney at
ecarte--they get the money and drive off to Baden in magnificent
britzkas--they try their infallible martingale and lurk about the tables
with empty pockets, shabby bullies, penniless bucks, until they can
swindle a Jew banker with a sham bill of exchange, or find another Mr.
Spooney to rob. The alternations of splendour and misery which these
people undergo are very queer to view.  Their life must be one of great
excitement.  Becky--must it be owned?--took to this life, and took to
it not unkindly.  She went about from town to town among these
Bohemians.  The lucky Mrs. Rawdon was known at every play-table in
Germany.  She and Madame de Cruchecassee kept house at Florence
together.  It is said she was ordered out of Munich, and my friend Mr.
Frederick Pigeon avers that it was at her house at Lausanne that he was
hocussed at supper and lost eight hundred pounds to Major Loder and the
Honourable Mr. Deuceace.  We are bound, you see, to give some account
of Becky's biography, but of this part, the less, perhaps, that is said
the better.

They say that, when Mrs. Crawley was particularly down on her luck, she
gave concerts and lessons in music here and there.  There was a Madame
de Raudon, who certainly had a matinee musicale at Wildbad, accompanied
by Herr Spoff, premier pianist to the Hospodar of Wallachia, and my
little friend Mr. Eaves, who knew everybody and had travelled
everywhere, always used to declare that he was at Strasburg in the year
1830, when a certain Madame Rebecque made her appearance in the opera
of the Dame Blanche, giving occasion to a furious row in the theatre
there.  She was hissed off the stage by the audience, partly from her
own incompetency, but chiefly from the ill-advised sympathy of some
persons in the parquet, (where the officers of the garrison had their
admissions); and Eaves was certain that the unfortunate debutante in
question was no other than Mrs. Rawdon Crawley.

She was, in fact, no better than a vagabond upon this earth.  When she
got her money she gambled; when she had gambled it she was put to
shifts to live; who knows how or by what means she succeeded? It is
said that she was once seen at St.  Petersburg, but was summarily
dismissed from that capital by the police, so that there cannot be any
possibility of truth in the report that she was a Russian spy at
Toplitz and Vienna afterwards.  I have even been informed that at Paris
she discovered a relation of her own, no less a person than her
maternal grandmother, who was not by any means a Montmorenci, but a
hideous old box-opener at a theatre on the Boulevards.  The meeting
between them, of which other persons, as it is hinted elsewhere, seem
to have been acquainted, must have been a very affecting interview.
The present historian can give no certain details regarding the event.

It happened at Rome once that Mrs. de Rawdon's half-year's salary had
just been paid into the principal banker's there, and, as everybody who
had a balance of above five hundred scudi was invited to the balls
which this prince of merchants gave during the winter, Becky had the
honour of a card, and appeared at one of the Prince and Princess
Polonia's splendid evening entertainments. The Princess was of the
family of Pompili, lineally descended from the second king of Rome, and
Egeria of the house of Olympus, while the Prince's grandfather,
Alessandro Polonia, sold wash-balls, essences, tobacco, and
pocket-handkerchiefs, ran errands for gentlemen, and lent money in a
small way.  All the great company in Rome thronged to his
saloons--Princes, Dukes, Ambassadors, artists, fiddlers, monsignori,
young bears with their leaders--every rank and condition of man. His
halls blazed with light and magnificence; were resplendent with gilt
frames (containing pictures), and dubious antiques; and the enormous
gilt crown and arms of the princely owner, a gold mushroom on a crimson
field (the colour of the pocket-handkerchiefs which he sold), and the
silver fountain of the Pompili family shone all over the roof, doors,
and panels of the house, and over the grand velvet baldaquins prepared
to receive Popes and Emperors.

So Becky, who had arrived in the diligence from Florence, and was
lodged at an inn in a very modest way, got a card for Prince Polonia's
entertainment, and her maid dressed her with unusual care, and she went
to this fine ball leaning on the arm of Major Loder, with whom she
happened to be travelling at the time--(the same man who shot Prince
Ravoli at Naples the next year, and was caned by Sir John Buckskin for
carrying four kings in his hat besides those which he used in playing
at ecarte )--and this pair went into the rooms together, and Becky saw
a number of old faces which she remembered in happier days, when she
was not innocent, but not found out. Major Loder knew a great number of
foreigners, keen-looking whiskered men with dirty striped ribbons in
their buttonholes, and a very small display of linen; but his own
countrymen, it might be remarked, eschewed the Major.  Becky, too, knew
some ladies here and there--French widows, dubious Italian countesses,
whose husbands had treated them ill--faugh--what shall we say, we who
have moved among some of the finest company of Vanity Fair, of this
refuse and sediment of rascals? If we play, let it be with clean cards,
and not with this dirty pack.  But every man who has formed one of the
innumerable army of travellers has seen these marauding irregulars
hanging on, like Nym and Pistol, to the main force, wearing the king's
colours and boasting of his commission, but pillaging for themselves,
and occasionally gibbeted by the roadside.

Well, she was hanging on the arm of Major Loder, and they went through
the rooms together, and drank a great quantity of champagne at the
buffet, where the people, and especially the Major's irregular corps,
struggled furiously for refreshments, of which when the pair had had
enough, they pushed on until they reached the Duchess's own pink velvet
saloon, at the end of the suite of apartments (where the statue of the
Venus is, and the great Venice looking-glasses, framed in silver), and
where the princely family were entertaining their most distinguished
guests at a round table at supper.  It was just such a little select
banquet as that of which Becky recollected that she had partaken at
Lord Steyne's--and there he sat at Polonia's table, and she saw him.
The scar cut by the diamond on his white, bald, shining forehead made a
burning red mark; his red whiskers were dyed of a purple hue, which
made his pale face look still paler.  He wore his collar and orders,
his blue ribbon and garter.  He was a greater Prince than any there,
though there was a reigning Duke and a Royal Highness, with their
princesses, and near his Lordship was seated the beautiful Countess of
Belladonna, nee de Glandier, whose husband (the Count Paolo della
Belladonna), so well known for his brilliant entomological collections,
had been long absent on a mission to the Emperor of Morocco.

When Becky beheld that familiar and illustrious face, how vulgar all of
a sudden did Major Loder appear to her, and how that odious Captain
Rook did smell of tobacco!  In one instant she reassumed her
fine-ladyship and tried to look and feel as if she were in May Fair
once more.  "That woman looks stupid and ill-humoured," she thought; "I
am sure she can't amuse him.  No, he must be bored by her--he never was
by me." A hundred such touching hopes, fears, and memories palpitated
in her little heart, as she looked with her brightest eyes (the rouge
which she wore up to her eyelids made them twinkle) towards the great
nobleman.  Of a Star and Garter night Lord Steyne used also to put on
his grandest manner and to look and speak like a great prince, as he
was. Becky admired him smiling sumptuously, easy, lofty, and stately.
Ah, bon Dieu, what a pleasant companion he was, what a brilliant wit,
what a rich fund of talk, what a grand manner!--and she had exchanged
this for Major Loder, reeking of cigars and brandy-and-water, and
Captain Rook with his horsejockey jokes and prize-ring slang, and their
like.  "I wonder whether he will know me," she thought.  Lord Steyne
was talking and laughing with a great and illustrious lady at his side,
when he looked up and saw Becky.

She was all over in a flutter as their eyes met, and she put on the
very best smile she could muster, and dropped him a little, timid,
imploring curtsey.  He stared aghast at her for a minute, as Macbeth
might on beholding Banquo's sudden appearance at his ball-supper, and
remained looking at her with open mouth, when that horrid Major Loder
pulled her away.

"Come away into the supper-room, Mrs. R.," was that gentleman's remark:
"seeing these nobs grubbing away has made me peckish too. Let's go and
try the old governor's champagne." Becky thought the Major had had a
great deal too much already.

The day after she went to walk on the Pincian Hill--the Hyde Park of
the Roman idlers--possibly in hopes to have another sight of Lord
Steyne.  But she met another acquaintance there:  it was Mr. Fiche, his
lordship's confidential man, who came up nodding to her rather
familiarly and putting a finger to his hat.  "I knew that Madame was
here," he said; "I followed her from her hotel.  I have some advice to
give Madame."

"From the Marquis of Steyne?" Becky asked, resuming as much of her
dignity as she could muster, and not a little agitated by hope and
expectation.

"No," said the valet; "it is from me.  Rome is very unwholesome."

"Not at this season, Monsieur Fiche--not till after Easter."

"I tell Madame it is unwholesome now.  There is always malaria for some
people.  That cursed marsh wind kills many at all seasons. Look, Madame
Crawley, you were always bon enfant, and I have an interest in you,
parole d'honneur.  Be warned.  Go away from Rome, I tell you--or you
will be ill and die."

Becky laughed, though in rage and fury.  "What! assassinate poor little
me?" she said.  "How romantic!  Does my lord carry bravos for couriers,
and stilettos in the fourgons? Bah!  I will stay, if but to plague him.
I have those who will defend me whilst I am here."

It was Monsieur Fiche's turn to laugh now.  "Defend you," he said, "and
who? The Major, the Captain, any one of those gambling men whom Madame
sees would take her life for a hundred louis.  We know things about
Major Loder (he is no more a Major than I am my Lord the Marquis) which
would send him to the galleys or worse.  We know everything and have
friends everywhere. We know whom you saw at Paris, and what relations
you found there.  Yes, Madame may stare, but we do.  How was it that no
minister on the Continent would receive Madame? She has offended
somebody:  who never forgives--whose rage redoubled when he saw you.
He was like a madman last night when he came home.  Madame de
Belladonna made him a scene about you and fired off in one of her
furies."

"Oh, it was Madame de Belladonna, was it?" Becky said, relieved a
little, for the information she had just got had scared her.

"No--she does not matter--she is always jealous.  I tell you it was
Monseigneur.  You did wrong to show yourself to him.  And if you stay
here you will repent it.  Mark my words.  Go.  Here is my lord's
carriage"--and seizing Becky's arm, he rushed down an alley of the
garden as Lord Steyne's barouche, blazing with heraldic devices, came
whirling along the avenue, borne by the almost priceless horses, and
bearing Madame de Belladonna lolling on the cushions, dark, sulky, and
blooming, a King Charles in her lap, a white parasol swaying over her
head, and old Steyne stretched at her side with a livid face and
ghastly eyes.  Hate, or anger, or desire caused them to brighten now
and then still, but ordinarily, they gave no light, and seemed tired of
looking out on a world of which almost all the pleasure and all the
best beauty had palled upon the worn-out wicked old man.

"Monseigneur has never recovered the shock of that night, never,"
Monsieur Fiche whispered to Mrs. Crawley as the carriage flashed by,
and she peeped out at it from behind the shrubs that hid her.  "That
was a consolation at any rate," Becky thought.

Whether my lord really had murderous intentions towards Mrs. Becky as
Monsieur Fiche said (since Monseigneur's death he has returned to his
native country, where he lives much respected, and has purchased from
his Prince the title of Baron Ficci), and the factotum objected to have
to do with assassination; or whether he simply had a commission to
frighten Mrs. Crawley out of a city where his Lordship proposed to pass
the winter, and the sight of her would be eminently disagreeable to the
great nobleman, is a point which has never been ascertained:  but the
threat had its effect upon the little woman, and she sought no more to
intrude herself upon the presence of her old patron.

Everybody knows the melancholy end of that nobleman, which befell at
Naples two months after the French Revolution of 1830; when the Most
Honourable George Gustavus, Marquis of Steyne, Earl of Gaunt and of
Gaunt Castle, in the Peerage of Ireland, Viscount Hellborough, Baron
Pitchley and Grillsby, a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter,
of the Golden Fleece of Spain, of the Russian Order of Saint Nicholas
of the First Class, of the Turkish Order of the Crescent, First Lord of
the Powder Closet and Groom of the Back Stairs, Colonel of the Gaunt or
Regent's Own Regiment of Militia, a Trustee of the British Museum, an
Elder Brother of the Trinity House, a Governor of the White Friars, and
D.C.L.--died after a series of fits brought on, as the papers said, by
the shock occasioned to his lordship's sensibilities by the downfall of
the ancient French monarchy.

An eloquent catalogue appeared in a weekly print, describing his
virtues, his magnificence, his talents, and his good actions.  His
sensibility, his attachment to the illustrious House of Bourbon, with
which he claimed an alliance, were such that he could not survive the
misfortunes of his august kinsmen.  His body was buried at Naples, and
his heart--that heart which always beat with every generous and noble
emotion was brought back to Castle Gaunt in a silver urn.  "In him,"
Mr. Wagg said, "the poor and the Fine Arts have lost a beneficent
patron, society one of its most brilliant ornaments, and England one of
her loftiest patriots and statesmen," &c., &c.

His will was a good deal disputed, and an attempt was made to force
from Madame de Belladonna the celebrated jewel called the "Jew's-eye"
diamond, which his lordship always wore on his forefinger, and which it
was said that she removed from it after his lamented demise. But his
confidential friend and attendant, Monsieur Fiche proved that the ring
had been presented to the said Madame de Belladonna two days before the
Marquis's death, as were the bank-notes, jewels, Neapolitan and French
bonds, &c., found in his lordship's secretaire and claimed by his heirs
from that injured woman.



Full of Business and Pleasure

The day after the meeting at the play-table, Jos had himself arrayed
with unusual care and splendour, and without thinking it necessary to
say a word to any member of his family regarding the occurrences of the
previous night, or asking for their company in his walk, he sallied
forth at an early hour, and was presently seen making inquiries at the
door of the Elephant Hotel.  In consequence of the fetes the house was
full of company, the tables in the street were already surrounded by
persons smoking and drinking the national small-beer, the public rooms
were in a cloud of smoke, and Mr. Jos having, in his pompous way, and
with his clumsy German, made inquiries for the person of whom he was in
search, was directed to the very top of the house, above the
first-floor rooms where some travelling pedlars had lived, and were
exhibiting their jewellery and brocades; above the second-floor
apartments occupied by the etat major of the gambling firm; above the
third-floor rooms, tenanted by the band of renowned Bohemian vaulters
and tumblers; and so on to the little cabins of the roof, where, among
students, bagmen, small tradesmen, and country-folks come in for the
festival, Becky had found a little nest--as dirty a little refuge as
ever beauty lay hid in.

Becky liked the life.  She was at home with everybody in the place,
pedlars, punters, tumblers, students and all. She was of a wild, roving
nature, inherited from father and mother, who were both Bohemians, by
taste and circumstance; if a lord was not by, she would talk to his
courier with the greatest pleasure; the din, the stir, the drink, the
smoke, the tattle of the Hebrew pedlars, the solemn, braggart ways of
the poor tumblers, the sournois talk of the gambling-table officials,
the songs and swagger of the students, and the general buzz and hum of
the place had pleased and tickled the little woman, even when her luck
was down and she had not wherewithal to pay her bill.  How pleasant was
all the bustle to her now that her purse was full of the money which
little Georgy had won for her the night before!

As Jos came creaking and puffing up the final stairs, and was
speechless when he got to the landing, and began to wipe his face and
then to look for No. 92, the room where he was directed to seek for the
person he wanted, the door of the opposite chamber, No. 90, was open,
and a student, in jack-boots and a dirty schlafrock, was lying on the
bed smoking a long pipe; whilst another student in long yellow hair and
a braided coat, exceeding smart and dirty too, was actually on his
knees at No. 92, bawling through the keyhole supplications to the
person within.

"Go away," said a well-known voice, which made Jos thrill, "I expect
somebody; I expect my grandpapa.  He mustn't see you there."

"Angel Englanderinn!" bellowed the kneeling student with the whity-brown
ringlets and the large finger-ring, "do take compassion upon us.
Make an appointment. Dine with me and Fritz at the inn in the park.  We
will have roast pheasants and porter, plum-pudding and French wine.  We
shall die if you don't."

"That we will," said the young nobleman on the bed; and this colloquy
Jos overheard, though he did not comprehend it, for the reason that he
had never studied the language in which it was carried on.

"Newmero kattervang dooze, si vous plait," Jos said in his grandest
manner, when he was able to speak.

"Quater fang tooce!" said the student, starting up, and he bounced into
his own room, where he locked the door, and where Jos heard him
laughing with his comrade on the bed.

The gentleman from Bengal was standing, disconcerted by this incident,
when the door of the 92 opened of itself and Becky's little head peeped
out full of archness and mischief.  She lighted on Jos.  "It's you,"
she said, coming out.  "How I have been waiting for you!  Stop! not
yet--in one minute you shall come in." In that instant she put a
rouge-pot, a brandy bottle, and a plate of broken meat into the bed,
gave one smooth to her hair, and finally let in her visitor.

She had, by way of morning robe, a pink domino, a trifle faded and
soiled, and marked here and there with pomaturn; but her arms shone out
from the loose sleeves of the dress very white and fair, and it was
tied round her little waist so as not ill to set off the trim little
figure of the wearer.  She led Jos by the hand into her garret. "Come
in," she said.  "Come and talk to me.  Sit yonder on the chair"; and
she gave the civilian's hand a little squeeze and laughingly placed him
upon it.  As for herself, she placed herself on the bed--not on the
bottle and plate, you may be sure--on which Jos might have reposed, had
he chosen that seat; and so there she sat and talked with her old
admirer.   "How little years have changed you," she said with a look of
tender interest.  "I should have known you anywhere.  What a comfort it
is amongst strangers to see once more the frank honest face of an old
friend!"

The frank honest face, to tell the truth, at this moment bore any
expression but one of openness and honesty:  it was, on the contrary,
much perturbed and puzzled in look.  Jos was surveying the queer little
apartment in which he found his old flame.  One of her gowns hung over
the bed, another depending from a hook of the door; her bonnet obscured
half the looking-glass, on which, too, lay the prettiest little pair of
bronze boots; a French novel was on the table by the bedside, with a
candle, not of wax.  Becky thought of popping that into the bed too,
but she only put in the little paper night-cap with which she had put
the candle out on going to sleep.

"I should have known you anywhere," she continued; "a woman never
forgets some things.  And you were the first man I ever--I ever saw."

"Was I really?" said Jos.  "God bless my soul, you--you don't say so."

"When I came with your sister from Chiswick, I was scarcely more than a
child," Becky said.  "How is that, dear love? Oh, her husband was a sad
wicked man, and of course it was of me that the poor dear was jealous.
As if I cared about him, heigho!  when there was somebody--but
no--don't let us talk of old times"; and she passed her handkerchief
with the tattered lace across her eyelids.

"Is not this a strange place," she continued, "for a woman, who has
lived in a very different world too, to be found in? I have had so many
griefs and wrongs, Joseph Sedley; I have been made to suffer so cruelly
that I am almost made mad sometimes.  I can't stay still in any place,
but wander about always restless and unhappy. All my friends have been
false to me--all.  There is no such thing as an honest man in the
world.  I was the truest wife that ever lived, though I married my
husband out of pique, because somebody else--but never mind that.  I
was true, and he trampled upon me and deserted me.  I was the fondest
mother.  I had but one child, one darling, one hope, one joy, which I
held to my heart with a mother's affection, which was my life, my
prayer, my--my blessing; and they--they tore it from me--tore it from
me"; and she put her hand to her heart with a passionate gesture of
despair, burying her face for a moment on the bed.

The brandy-bottle inside clinked up against the plate which held the
cold sausage.  Both were moved, no doubt, by the exhibition of so much
grief.  Max and Fritz were at the door, listening with wonder to Mrs.
Becky's sobs and cries.  Jos, too, was a good deal frightened and
affected at seeing his old flame in this condition. And she began,
forthwith, to tell her story--a tale so neat, simple, and artless that
it was quite evident from hearing her that if ever there was a
white-robed angel escaped from heaven to be subject to the infernal
machinations and villainy of fiends here below, that spotless
being--that miserable unsullied martyr, was present on the bed before
Jos--on the bed, sitting on the brandy-bottle.

They had a very long, amicable, and confidential talk there, in the
course of which Jos Sedley was somehow made aware (but in a manner that
did not in the least scare or offend him) that Becky's heart had first
learned to beat at his enchanting presence; that George Osborne had
certainly paid an unjustifiable court to HER, which might account for
Amelia's jealousy and their little rupture; but that Becky never gave
the least encouragement to the unfortunate officer, and that she had
never ceased to think about Jos from the very first day she had seen
him, though, of course, her duties as a married woman were
paramount--duties which she had always preserved, and would, to her
dying day, or until the proverbially bad climate in which Colonel
Crawley was living should release her from a yoke which his cruelty had
rendered odious to her.

Jos went away, convinced that she was the most virtuous, as she was one
of the most fascinating of women, and revolving in his mind all sorts
of benevolent schemes for her welfare.  Her persecutions ought to be
ended: she ought to return to the society of which she was an ornament.
He would see what ought to be done.  She must quit that place and take
a quiet lodging.  Amelia must come and see her and befriend her.  He
would go and settle about it, and consult with the Major.  She wept
tears of heart-felt gratitude as she parted from him, and pressed his
hand as the gallant stout gentleman stooped down to kiss hers.

So Becky bowed Jos out of her little garret with as much grace as if it
was a palace of which she did the honours; and that heavy gentleman
having disappeared down the stairs, Max and Fritz came out of their
hole, pipe in mouth, and she amused herself by mimicking Jos to them as
she munched her cold bread and sausage and took draughts of her
favourite brandy-and-water.

Jos walked over to Dobbin's lodgings with great solemnity and there
imparted to him the affecting history with which he had just been made
acquainted, without, however, mentioning the play business of the night
before. And the two gentlemen were laying their heads together and
consulting as to the best means of being useful to Mrs. Becky, while
she was finishing her interrupted dejeuner a la fourchette.

How was it that she had come to that little town? How was it that she
had no friends and was wandering about alone? Little boys at school are
taught in their earliest Latin book that the path of Avernus is very
easy of descent.  Let us skip over the interval in the history of her
downward progress.  She was not worse now than she had been in the days
of her prosperity--only a little down on her luck.

As for Mrs. Amelia, she was a woman of such a soft and foolish
disposition that when she heard of anybody unhappy, her heart
straightway melted towards the sufferer; and as she had never thought
or done anything mortally guilty herself, she had not that abhorrence
for wickedness which distinguishes moralists much more knowing.  If she
spoiled everybody who came near her with kindness and compliments--if
she begged pardon of all her servants for troubling them to answer the
bell--if she apologized to a shopboy who showed her a piece of silk, or
made a curtsey to a street-sweeper with a complimentary remark upon
the elegant state of his crossing--and she was almost capable of every
one of these follies--the notion that an old acquaintance was
miserable was sure to soften her heart; nor would she hear of anybody's
being deservedly unhappy. A world under such legislation as hers would
not be a very orderly place of abode; but there are not many women, at
least not of the rulers, who are of her sort.  This lady, I believe,
would have abolished all gaols, punishments, handcuffs, whippings,
poverty, sickness, hunger, in the world, and was such a mean-spirited
creature that--we are obliged to confess it--she could even forget a
mortal injury.

When the Major heard from Jos of the sentimental adventure which had
just befallen the latter, he was not, it must be owned, nearly as much
interested as the gentleman from Bengal.  On the contrary, his
excitement was quite the reverse from a pleasurable one; he made use of
a brief but improper expression regarding a poor woman in distress,
saying, in fact, "The little minx, has she come to light again?" He
never had had the slightest liking for her, but had heartily mistrusted
her from the very first moment when her green eyes had looked at, and
turned away from, his own.

"That little devil brings mischief wherever she goes," the Major said
disrespectfully.  "Who knows what sort of life she has been leading?
And what business has she here abroad and alone? Don't tell me about
persecutors and enemies; an honest woman always has friends and never
is separated from her family.  Why has she left her husband? He may
have been disreputable and wicked, as you say.  He always was.  I
remember the confounded blackleg and the way in which he used to cheat
and hoodwink poor George.  Wasn't there a scandal about their
separation? I think I heard something," cried out Major Dobbin, who did
not care much about gossip, and whom Jos tried in vain to convince that
Mrs. Becky was in all respects a most injured and virtuous female.

"Well, well; let's ask Mrs. George," said that arch-diplomatist of a
Major.  "Only let us go and consult her. I suppose you will allow that
she is a good judge at any rate, and knows what is right in such
matters."

"Hm!  Emmy is very well," said Jos, who did not happen to be in love
with his sister.

"Very well? By Gad, sir, she's the finest lady I ever met in my life,"
bounced out the Major.  "I say at once, let us go and ask her if this
woman ought to be visited or not--I will be content with her verdict."
Now this odious, artful rogue of a Major was thinking in his own mind
that he was sure of his case.  Emmy, he remembered, was at one time
cruelly and deservedly jealous of Rebecca, never mentioned her name but
with a shrinking and terror--a jealous woman never forgives, thought
Dobbin:  and so the pair went across the street to Mrs. George's house,
where she was contentedly warbling at a music lesson with Madame
Strumpff.

When that lady took her leave, Jos opened the business with his usual
pomp of words.  "Amelia, my dear," said he, "I have just had the most
extraordinary--yes--God bless my soul!  the most extraordinary
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?



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 not perceived that the Major was a spooney.

"Why did you not wait for me, sir, to escort me downstairs?" she said,
giving a little toss of her head and a most sarcastic curtsey.

"I couldn't stand up in the passage," he answered with a comical
deprecatory look; and, delighted to give her his arm and to take her
out of the horrid smoky place, he would have walked off without even so
much as remembering the waiter, had not the young fellow run after him
and stopped him on the threshold of the Elephant to make him pay for
the beer which he had not consumed.  Emmy laughed:  she called him a
naughty man, who wanted to run away in debt, and, in fact, made some
jokes suitable to the occasion and the small-beer. She was in high
spirits and good humour, and tripped across the market-place very
briskly.  She wanted to see Jos that instant.  The Major laughed at the
impetuous affection Mrs. Amelia exhibited; for, in truth, it was not
very often that she wanted her brother "that instant."  They found the
civilian in his saloon on the first-floor; he had been pacing the room,
and biting his nails, and looking over the market-place towards the
Elephant a hundred times at least during the past hour whilst Emmy was
closeted with her friend in the garret and the Major was beating the
tattoo on the sloppy tables of the public room below, and he was, on
his side too, very anxious to see Mrs. Osborne.

"Well?" said he.

"The poor dear creature, how she has suffered!" Emmy said.

"God bless my soul, yes," Jos said, wagging his head, so that his
cheeks quivered like jellies.

"She may have Payne's room, who can go upstairs," Emmy continued. Payne
was a staid English maid and personal attendant upon Mrs. Osborne, to
whom the courier, as in duty bound, paid court, and whom Georgy used to
"lark" dreadfully with accounts of German robbers and ghosts.  She
passed her time chiefly in grumbling, in ordering about her mistress,
and in stating her intention to return the next morning to her native
village of Clapham.  "She may have Payne's room," Emmy said.

"Why, you don't mean to say you are going to have that woman into the
house?" bounced out the Major, jumping up.

"Of course we are," said Amelia in the most innocent way in the world.
"Don't be angry and break the furniture, Major Dobbin.  Of course we
are going to have her here."

"Of course, my dear," Jos said.

"The poor creature, after all her sufferings," Emmy continued; "her
horrid banker broken and run away; her husband--wicked wretch--having
deserted her and taken her child away from her" (here she doubled her
two little fists and held them in a most menacing attitude before her,
so that the Major was charmed to see such a dauntless virago) "the poor
dear thing!  quite alone and absolutely forced to give lessons in
singing to get her bread--and not have her here!"

"Take lessons, my dear Mrs. George," cried the Major, "but don't have
her in the house.  I implore you don't."

"Pooh," said Jos.

"You who are always good and kind--always used to be at any rate--I'm
astonished at you, Major William," Amelia cried.  "Why, what is the
moment to help her but when she is so miserable? Now is the time to be
of service to her.  The oldest friend I ever had, and not--"

"She was not always your friend, Amelia," the Major said, for he was
quite angry.  This allusion was too much for Emmy, who, looking the
Major almost fiercely in the face, said, "For shame, Major Dobbin!" and
after having fired this shot, she walked out of the room with a most
majestic air and shut her own door briskly on herself and her outraged
dignity.

"To allude to THAT!" she said, when the door was closed.  "Oh, it was
cruel of him to remind me of it," and she looked up at George's
picture, which hung there as usual, with the portrait of the boy
underneath.  "It was cruel of him.  If I had forgiven it, ought he to
have spoken? No.  And it is from his own lips that I know how wicked
and groundless my jealousy was; and that you were pure--oh, yes, you
were pure, my saint in heaven!"

She paced the room, trembling and indignant.  She went and leaned on
the chest of drawers over which the picture hung, and gazed and gazed
at it.  Its eyes seemed to look down on her with a reproach that
deepened as she looked. The early dear, dear memories of that brief
prime of love rushed back upon her.  The wound which years had scarcely
cicatrized bled afresh, and oh, how bitterly!  She could not bear the
reproaches of the husband there before her.  It couldn't be.  Never,
never.

Poor Dobbin; poor old William!  That unlucky word had undone the work
of many a year--the long laborious edifice of a life of love and
constancy--raised too upon what secret and hidden foundations, wherein
lay buried passions, uncounted struggles, unknown sacrifices--a little
word was spoken, and down fell the fair palace of hope--one word, and
away flew the bird which he had been trying all his life to lure!

William, though he saw by Amelia's looks that a great crisis had come,
nevertheless continued to implore Sedley, in the most energetic terms,
to beware of Rebecca; and he eagerly, almost frantically, adjured Jos
not to receive her.  He besought Mr. Sedley to inquire at least
regarding her; told him how he had heard that she was in the company of
gamblers and people of ill repute; pointed out what evil she had done
in former days, how she and Crawley had misled poor George into ruin,
how she was now parted from her husband, by her own confession, and,
perhaps, for good reason.  What a dangerous companion she would be for
his sister, who knew nothing of the affairs of the world!  William
implored Jos, with all the eloquence which he could bring to bear, and
a great deal more energy than this quiet gentleman was ordinarily in
the habit of showing, to keep Rebecca out of his household.

Had he been less violent, or more dexterous, he might have succeeded in
his supplications to Jos; but the civilian was not a little jealous of
the airs of superiority which the Major constantly exhibited towards
him, as he fancied (indeed, he had imparted his opinions to Mr. Kirsch,
the courier, whose bills Major Dobbin checked on this journey, and who
sided with his master), and he began a blustering speech about his
competency to defend his own honour, his desire not to have his affairs
meddled with, his intention, in fine, to rebel against the Major, when
the colloquy--rather a long and stormy one--was put an end to in the
simplest way possible, namely, by the arrival of Mrs. Becky, with a
porter from the Elephant Hotel in charge of her very meagre baggage.

She greeted her host with affectionate respect and made a shrinking,
but amicable salutation to Major Dobbin, who, as her instinct assured
her at once, was her enemy, and had been speaking against her; and the
bustle and clatter consequent upon her arrival brought Amelia out of
her room.  Emmy went up and embraced her guest with the greatest
warmth, and took no notice of the Major, except to fling him an angry
look--the most unjust and scornful glance that had perhaps ever
appeared in that poor little woman's face since she was born.  But she
had private reasons of her own, and was bent upon being angry with him.
And Dobbin, indignant at the injustice, not at the defeat, went off,
making her a bow quite as haughty as the killing curtsey with which the
little woman chose to bid him farewell.

He being gone, Emmy was particularly lively and affectionate to
Rebecca, and bustled about the apartments and installed her guest in
her room with an eagerness and activity seldom exhibited by our placid
little friend.  But when an act of injustice is to be done, especially
by weak people, it is best that it should be done quickly, and Emmy
thought she was displaying a great deal of firmness and proper feeling
and veneration for the late Captain Osborne in her present behaviour.

Georgy came in from the fetes for dinner-time and found four covers
laid as usual; but one of the places was occupied by a lady, instead of
by Major Dobbin. "Hullo!  where's Dob?" the young gentleman asked with
his usual simplicity of language.  "Major Dobbin is dining out, I
suppose," his mother said, and, drawing the boy to her, kissed him a
great deal, and put his hair off his forehead, and introduced him to
Mrs. Crawley.  "This is my boy, Rebecca," Mrs. Osborne said--as much as
to say--can the world produce anything like that? Becky looked at him
with rapture and pressed his hand fondly. "Dear boy!" she said--"he is
just like my--" Emotion choked her further utterance, but Amelia
understood, as well as if she had spoken, that Becky was thinking of
her own blessed child.  However, the company of her friend consoled
Mrs. Crawley, and she ate a very good dinner.

During the repast, she had occasion to speak several times, when Georgy
eyed her and listened to her.  At the desert Emmy was gone out to
superintend further domestic arrangements; Jos was in his great chair
dozing over Galignani; Georgy and the new arrival sat close to each
other--he had continued to look at her knowingly more than once, and at
last he laid down the nutcrackers.

"I say," said Georgy.

"What do you say?" Becky said, laughing.

"You're the lady I saw in the mask at the Rouge et Noir."

"Hush!  you little sly creature," Becky said, taking up his hand and
kissing it.  "Your uncle was there too, and Mamma mustn't know."

"Oh, no--not by no means," answered the little fellow.

"You see we are quite good friends already," Becky said to Emmy, who
now re-entered; and it must be owned that Mrs. Osborne had introduced a
most judicious and amiable companion into her house.

William, in a state of great indignation, though still unaware of all
the treason that was in store for him, walked about the town wildly
until he fell upon the Secretary of Legation, Tapeworm, who invited him
to dinner.  As they were discussing that meal, he took occasion to ask
the Secretary whether he knew anything about a certain Mrs. Rawdon
Crawley, who had, he believed, made some noise in London; and then
Tapeworm, who of course knew all the London gossip, and was besides a
relative of Lady Gaunt, poured out into the astonished Major's ears
such a history about Becky and her husband as astonished the querist,
and supplied all the points of this narrative, for it was at that very
table years ago that the present writer had the pleasure of hearing the
tale.  Tufto, Steyne, the Crawleys, and their history--everything
connected with Becky and her previous life passed under the record of
the bitter diplomatist. He knew everything and a great deal besides,
about all the world--in a word, he made the most astounding revelations
to the simple-hearted Major.  When Dobbin said that Mrs. Osborne and
Mr. Sedley had taken her into their house, Tapeworm burst into a peal
of laughter which shocked the Major, and asked if they had not better
send into the prison and take in one or two of the gentlemen in shaved
heads and yellow jackets who swept the streets of Pumpernickel, chained
in pairs, to board and lodge, and act as tutor to that little
scapegrace Georgy.

This information astonished and horrified the Major not a little. It
had been agreed in the morning (before meeting with Rebecca) that
Amelia should go to the Court ball that night.  There would be the
place where he should tell her.  The Major went home, and dressed
himself in his uniform, and repaired to Court, in hopes to see Mrs.
Osborne.  She never came.  When he returned to his lodgings all the
lights in the Sedley tenement were put out.  He could not see her till
the morning.  I don't know what sort of a night's rest he had with this
frightful secret in bed with him.

At the earliest convenient hour in the morning he sent his servant
across the way with a note, saying that he wished very particularly to
speak with her.  A message came back to say that Mrs. Osborne was
exceedingly unwell and was keeping her room.

She, too, had been awake all that night.  She had been thinking of a
thing which had agitated her mind a hundred times before.  A hundred
times on the point of yielding, she had shrunk back from a sacrifice
which she felt was too much for her.  She couldn't, in spite of his
love and constancy and her own acknowledged regard, respect, and
gratitude.  What are benefits, what is constancy, or merit? One curl of
a girl's ringlet, one hair of a whisker, will turn the scale against
them all in a minute. They did not weigh with Emmy more than with other
women.  She had tried them; wanted to make them pass; could not; and
the pitiless little woman had found a pretext, and determined to be
free.

When at length, in the afternoon, the Major gained admission to Amelia,
instead of the cordial and affectionate greeting, to which he had been
accustomed now for many a long day, he received the salutation of a
curtsey, and of a little gloved hand, retracted the moment after it was
accorded to him.

Rebecca, too, was in the room, and advanced to meet him with a smile
and an extended hand.  Dobbin drew back rather confusedly, "I--I beg
your pardon, m'am," he said; "but I am bound to tell you that it is not
as your friend that I am come here now."

"Pooh!  damn; don't let us have this sort of thing!" Jos cried out,
alarmed, and anxious to get rid of a scene.

"I wonder what Major Dobbin has to say against Rebecca?" Amelia said in
a low, clear voice with a slight quiver in it, and a very determined
look about the eyes.

"I will not have this sort of thing in my house," Jos again interposed.
"I say I will not have it; and Dobbin, I beg, sir, you'll stop it." And
he looked round, trembling and turning very red, and gave a great puff,
and made for his door.

"Dear friend!" Rebecca said with angelic sweetness, "do hear what Major
Dobbin has to say against me."

"I will not hear it, I say," squeaked out Jos at the top of his voice,
and, gathering up his dressing-gown, he was gone.

"We are only two women," Amelia said.  "You can speak now, sir."

"This manner towards me is one which scarcely becomes you, Amelia," the
Major answered haughtily; "nor I believe am I guilty of habitual
harshness to women.  It is not a pleasure to me to do the duty which I
am come to do."

"Pray proceed with it quickly, if you please, Major Dobbin," said
Amelia, who was more and more in a pet.  The expression of Dobbin's
face, as she spoke in this imperious manner, was not pleasant.

"I came to say--and as you stay, Mrs. Crawley, I must say it in your
presence--that I think you--you ought not to form a member of the
family of my friends.  A lady who is separated from her husband, who
travels not under her own name, who frequents public gaming-tables--"

"It was to the ball I went," cried out Becky.

"--is not a fit companion for Mrs. Osborne and her son," Dobbin went
on:  "and I may add that there are people here who know you, and who
profess to know that regarding your conduct about which I don't even
wish to speak before--before Mrs. Osborne."

"Yours is a very modest and convenient sort of calumny, Major Dobbin,"
Rebecca said.  "You leave me under the weight of an accusation which,
after all, is unsaid. What is it? Is it unfaithfulness to my husband? I
scorn it and defy anybody to prove it--I defy you, I say.  My honour is
as untouched as that of the bitterest enemy who ever maligned me.  Is
it of being poor, forsaken, wretched, that you accuse me? Yes, I am
guilty of those faults, and punished for them every day.  Let me go,
Emmy.  It is only to suppose that I have not met you, and I am no worse
to-day than I was yesterday.  It is only to suppose that the night is
over and the poor wanderer is on her way.  Don't you remember the song
we used to sing in old, dear old days? I have been wandering ever since
then--a poor castaway, scorned for being miserable, and insulted
because I am alone.  Let me go:  my stay here interferes with the plans
of this gentleman."

"Indeed it does, madam," said the Major.  "If I have any authority in
this house--"

"Authority, none!" broke out Amelia "Rebecca, you stay with me.  I
won't desert you because you have been persecuted, or insult you
because--because Major Dobbin chooses to do so.  Come away, dear." And
the two women made towards the door.

William opened it.  As they were going out, however, he took Amelia's
hand and said--"Will you stay a moment and speak to me?"

"He wishes to speak to you away from me," said Becky, looking like a
martyr.  Amelia gripped her hand in reply.

"Upon my honour it is not about you that I am going to speak," Dobbin
said.  "Come back, Amelia," and she came.  Dobbin bowed to Mrs.
Crawley, as he shut the door upon her.  Amelia looked at him, leaning
against the glass:  her face and her lips were quite white.

"I was confused when I spoke just now," the Major said after a pause,
"and I misused the word authority."

"You did," said Amelia with her teeth chattering.

"At least I have claims to be heard," Dobbin continued.

"It is generous to remind me of our obligations to you," the woman
answered.

"The claims I mean are those left me by George's father," William said.

"Yes, and you insulted his memory.  You did yesterday. You know you
did.  And I will never forgive you.  Never!" said Amelia.  She shot out
each little sentence in a tremor of anger and emotion.

"You don't mean that, Amelia?" William said sadly. "You don't mean that
these words, uttered in a hurried moment, are to weigh against a whole
life's devotion? I think that George's memory has not been injured by
the way in which I have dealt with it, and if we are come to bandying
reproaches, I at least merit none from his widow and the mother of his
son.  Reflect, afterwards when--when you are at leisure, and your
conscience will withdraw this accusation.  It does even now." Amelia
held down her head.

"It is not that speech of yesterday," he continued, "which moves you.
That is but the pretext, Amelia, or I have loved you and watched you
for fifteen years in vain. Have I not learned in that time to read all
your feelings and look into your thoughts? I know what your heart is
capable of:  it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a
fancy, but it can't feel such an attachment as mine deserves to mate
with, and such as I would have won from a woman more generous than you.
No, you are not worthy of the love which I have devoted to you. I knew
all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the
winning; that I was a fool, with fond fancies, too, bartering away my
all of truth and ardour against your little feeble remnant of love.  I
will bargain no more:  I withdraw.  I find no fault with you.  You are
very good-natured, and have done your best, but you couldn't--you
couldn't reach up to the height of the attachment which I bore you, and
which a loftier soul than yours might have been proud to share.
Good-bye, Amelia! I have watched your struggle.  Let it end.  We are
both weary of it."

Amelia stood scared and silent as William thus suddenly broke the chain
by which she held him and declared his independence and superiority.
He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman
had been accustomed to trample upon him.  She didn't wish to marry him,
but she wished to keep him.  She wished to give him nothing, but that
he should give her all.  It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in
love.

William's sally had quite broken and cast her down. HER assault was
long since over and beaten back.

"Am I to understand then, that you are going--away, William?" she said.

He gave a sad laugh.  "I went once before," he said, "and came back
after twelve years.  We were young then, Amelia.  Good-bye.  I have
spent enough of my life at this play."

Whilst they had been talking, the door into Mrs. Osborne's room had
opened ever so little; indeed, Becky had kept a hold of the handle and
had turned it on the instant when Dobbin quitted it, and she heard
every word of the conversation that had passed between these two. "What
a noble heart that man has," she thought, "and how shamefully that
woman plays with it!" She admired Dobbin; she bore him no rancour for
the part he had taken against her.  It was an open move in the game,
and played fairly.  "Ah!" she thought, "if I could have had such a
husband as that--a man with a heart and brains too!  I would not have
minded his large feet"; and running into her room, she absolutely
bethought herself of something, and wrote him a note, beseeching him to
stop for a few days--not to think of going--and that she could serve
him with A.

The parting was over.  Once more poor William walked to the door and
was gone; and the little widow, the author of all this work, had her
will, and had won her victory, and was left to enjoy it as she best
might.  Let the ladies envy her triumph.

At the romantic hour of dinner, Mr. Georgy made his appearance and
again remarked the absence of "Old Dob." The meal was eaten in silence
by the party.  Jos's appetite not being diminished, but Emmy taking
nothing at all.

After the meal, Georgy was lolling in the cushions of the old window, a
large window, with three sides of glass abutting from the gable, and
commanding on one side the market-place, where the Elephant is, his
mother being busy hard by, when he remarked symptoms of movement at the
Major's house on the other side of the street.

"Hullo!" said he, "there's Dob's trap--they are bringing it out of the
court-yard." The "trap" in question was a carriage which the Major had
bought for six pounds sterling, and about which they used to rally him
a good deal.

Emmy gave a little start, but said nothing.

"Hullo!" Georgy continued, "there's Francis coming out with the
portmanteaus, and Kunz, the one-eyed postilion, coming down the market
with three schimmels. Look at his boots and yellow jacket--ain't he a
rum one? Why--they're putting the horses to Dob's carriage. Is he going
anywhere?"

"Yes," said Emmy, "he is going on a journey."

"Going on a journey; and when is he coming back?"

"He is--not coming back," answered Emmy.

"Not coming back!" cried out Georgy, jumping up. "Stay here, sir,"
roared out Jos.  "Stay, Georgy," said his mother with a very sad face.
The boy stopped, kicked about the room, jumped up and down from the
window-seat with his knees, and showed every symptom of uneasiness and
curiosity.

The horses were put to.  The baggage was strapped on.  Francis came out
with his master's sword, cane, and umbrella tied up together, and laid
them in the well, and his desk and old tin cocked-hat case, which he
placed under the seat.  Francis brought out the stained old blue cloak
lined with red camlet, which had wrapped the owner up any time these
fifteen years, and had manchen Sturm erlebt, as a favourite song of
those days said.  It had been new for the campaign of Waterloo and had
covered George and William after the night of Quatre Bras.

Old Burcke, the landlord of the lodgings, came out, then Francis, with
more packages--final packages--then Major William--Burcke wanted to
kiss him.  The Major was adored by all people with whom he had to do.
It was with difficulty he could escape from this demonstration of
attachment.

"By Jove, I will go!" screamed out George.  "Give him this," said
Becky, quite interested, and put a paper into the boy's hand.  He had
rushed down the stairs and flung across the street in a minute--the
yellow postilion was cracking his whip gently.

William had got into the carriage, released from the embraces of his
landlord.  George bounded in afterwards, and flung his arms round the
Major's neck (as they saw from the window), and began asking him
multiplied questions.  Then he felt in his waistcoat pocket and gave
him a note.  William seized at it rather eagerly, he opened it
trembling, but instantly his countenance changed, and he tore the paper
in two and dropped it out of the carriage.  He kissed Georgy on the
head, and the boy got out, doubling his fists into his eyes, and with
the aid of Francis.  He lingered with his hand on the panel.  Fort,
Schwager!  The yellow postilion cracked his whip prodigiously, up
sprang Francis to the box, away went the schimmels, and Dobbin with his
head on his breast.  He never looked up as they passed under Amelia's
window, and Georgy, left alone in the street, burst out crying in the
face of all the crowd.

Emmy's maid heard him howling again during the night and brought him
some preserved apricots to console him.  She mingled her lamentations
with his.  All the poor, all the humble, all honest folks, all good men
who knew him, loved that kind-hearted and simple gentleman.

As for Emmy, had she not done her duty? She had her picture of George
for a consolation.


Which Contains Births, Marriages, and Deaths

Whatever Becky's private plan might be by which Dobbin's true love was
to be crowned with success, the little woman thought that the secret
might keep, and indeed, being by no means so much interested about
anybody's welfare as about her own, she had a great number of things
pertaining to herself to consider, and which concerned her a great deal
more than Major Dobbin's happiness in this life.

She found herself suddenly and unexpectedly in snug comfortable
quarters, surrounded by friends, kindness, and good-natured simple
people such as she had not met with for many a long day; and, wanderer
as she was by force and inclination, there were moments when rest was
pleasant to her.  As the most hardened Arab that ever careered across
the desert over the hump of a dromedary likes to repose sometimes under
the date-trees by the water, or to come into the cities, walk into the
bazaars, refresh himself in the baths, and say his prayers in the
mosques, before he goes out again marauding, so Jos's tents and pilau
were pleasant to this little Ishmaelite. She picketed her steed, hung
up her weapons, and warmed herself comfortably by his fire.  The halt
in that roving, restless life was inexpressibly soothing and pleasant
to her.

So, pleased herself, she tried with all her might to please everybody;
and we know that she was eminent and successful as a practitioner in
the art of giving pleasure.  As for Jos, even in that little interview
in the garret at the Elephant Inn, she had found means to win back a
great deal of his good-will.  In the course of a week, the civilian was
her sworn slave and frantic admirer.  He didn't go to sleep after
dinner, as his custom was in the much less lively society of Amelia.
He drove out with Becky in his open carriage.  He asked little parties
and invented festivities to do her honour.

Tapeworm, the Charge d'Affaires, who had abused her so cruelly, came to
dine with Jos, and then came every day to pay his respects to Becky.
Poor Emmy, who was never very talkative, and more glum and silent than
ever after Dobbin's departure, was quite forgotten when this superior
genius made her appearance.  The French Minister was as much charmed
with her as his English rival. The German ladies, never particularly
squeamish as regards morals, especially in English people, were
delighted with the cleverness and wit of Mrs. Osborne's charming
friend, and though she did not ask to go to Court, yet the most august
and Transparent Personages there heard of her fascinations and were
quite curious to know her.  When it became known that she was noble, of
an ancient English family, that her husband was a Colonel of the Guard,
Excellenz and Governor of an island, only separated from his lady by
one of those trifling differences which are of little account in a
country where Werther is still read and the Wahlverwandtschaften of
Goethe is considered an edifying moral book, nobody thought of refusing
to receive her in the very highest society of the little Duchy; and the
ladies were even more ready to call her du and to swear eternal
friendship for her than they had been to bestow the same inestimable
benefits upon Amelia.  Love and Liberty are interpreted by those simple
Germans in a way which honest folks in Yorkshire and Somersetshire
little understand, and a lady might, in some philosophic and civilized
towns, be divorced ever so many times from her respective husbands and
keep her character in society.  Jos's house never was so pleasant since
he had a house of his own as Rebecca caused it to be. She sang, she
played, she laughed, she talked in two or three languages, she brought
everybody to the house, and she made Jos believe that it was his own
great social talents and wit which gathered the society of the place
round about him.

As for Emmy, who found herself not in the least mistress of her own
house, except when the bills were to be paid, Becky soon discovered the
way to soothe and please her.  She talked to her perpetually about
Major Dobbin sent about his business, and made no scruple of declaring
her admiration for that excellent, high-minded gentleman, and of
telling Emmy that she had behaved most cruelly regarding him. Emmy
defended her conduct and showed that it was dictated only by the purest
religious principles; that a woman once, &c., and to such an angel as
him whom she had had the good fortune to marry, was married forever;
but she had no objection to hear the Major praised as much as ever
Becky chose to praise him, and indeed, brought the conversation round
to the Dobbin subject a score of times every day.

Means were easily found to win the favour of Georgy and the servants.
Amelia's maid, it has been said, was heart and soul in favour of the
generous Major.  Having at first disliked Becky for being the means of
dismissing him from the presence of her mistress, she was reconciled to
Mrs. Crawley subsequently, because the latter became William's most
ardent admirer and champion.  And in those nightly conclaves in which
the two ladies indulged after their parties, and while Miss Payne was
"brushing their 'airs," as she called the yellow locks of the one and
the soft brown tresses of the other, this girl always put in her word
for that dear good gentleman Major Dobbin.  Her advocacy did not make
Amelia angry any more than Rebecca's admiration of him.  She made
George write to him constantly and persisted in sending Mamma's kind
love in a postscript.  And as she looked at her husband's portrait of
nights, it no longer reproached her--perhaps she reproached it, now
William was gone.

Emmy was not very happy after her heroic sacrifice. She was very
distraite, nervous, silent, and ill to please. The family had never
known her so peevish.  She grew pale and ill.  She used to try to sing
certain songs ("Einsam bin ich nicht alleine," was one of them, that
tender love-song of Weber's which in old-fashioned days, young ladies,
and when you were scarcely born, showed that those who lived before you
knew too how to love and to sing) certain songs, I say, to which the
Major was partial; and as she warbled them in the twilight in the
drawing-room, she would break off in the midst of the song, and walk
into her neighbouring apartment, and there, no doubt, take refuge in
the miniature of her husband.

Some books still subsisted, after Dobbin's departure, with his name
written in them; a German dictionary, for instance, with "William
Dobbin, --th Reg.," in the fly-leaf; a guide-book with his initials;
and one or two other volumes which belonged to the Major.  Emmy cleared
these away and put them on the drawers, where she placed her work-box,
her desk, her Bible, and prayer-book, under the pictures of the two
Georges.  And the Major, on going away, having left his gloves behind
him, it is a fact that Georgy, rummaging his mother's desk some time
afterwards, found the gloves neatly folded up and put away in what they
call the secret-drawers of the desk.

Not caring for society, and moping there a great deal, Emmy's chief
pleasure in the summer evenings was to take long walks with Georgy
(during which Rebecca was left to the society of Mr. Joseph), and then
the mother and son used to talk about the Major in a way which even
made the boy smile.  She told him that she thought Major William was
the best man in all the world--the gentlest and the kindest, the
bravest and the humblest.  Over and over again she told him how they
owed everything which they possessed in the world to that kind friend's
benevolent care of them; how he had befriended them all through their
poverty and misfortunes; watched over them when nobody cared for them;
how all his comrades admired him though he never spoke of his own
gallant actions; how Georgy's father trusted him beyond all other men,
and had been constantly befriended by the good William.  "Why, when
your papa was a little boy," she said, "he often told me that it was
William who defended him against a tyrant at the school where they
were; and their friendship never ceased from that day until the last,
when your dear father fell."

"Did Dobbin kill the man who killed Papa?" Georgy said.  "I'm sure he
did, or he would if he could have caught him, wouldn't he, Mother? When
I'm in the Army, won't I hate the French?--that's all."

In such colloquies the mother and the child passed a great deal of
their time together.  The artless woman had made a confidant of the
boy.  He was as much William's friend as everybody else who knew him
well.

By the way, Mrs. Becky, not to be behind hand in sentiment, had got a
miniature too hanging up in her room, to the surprise and amusement of
most people, and the delight of the original, who was no other than our
friend Jos.  On her first coming to favour the Sedleys with a visit,
the little woman, who had arrived with a remarkably small shabby kit,
was perhaps ashamed of the meanness of her trunks and bandboxes, and
often spoke with great respect about her baggage left behind at
Leipzig, which she must have from that city.  When a traveller talks to
you perpetually about the splendour of his luggage, which he does not
happen to have with him, my son, beware of that traveller!  He is, ten
to one, an impostor.

Neither Jos nor Emmy knew this important maxim.  It seemed to them of
no consequence whether Becky had a quantity of very fine clothes in
invisible trunks; but as her present supply was exceedingly shabby,
Emmy supplied her out of her own stores, or took her to the best
milliner in the town and there fitted her out.  It was no more torn
collars now, I promise you, and faded silks trailing off at the
shoulder.  Becky changed her habits with her situation in life--the
rouge-pot was suspended--another excitement to which she had accustomed
herself was also put aside, or at least only indulged in in privacy, as
when she was prevailed on by Jos of a summer evening, Emmy and the boy
being absent on their walks, to take a little spirit-and-water.  But if
she did not indulge--the courier did: that rascal Kirsch could not be
kept from the bottle, nor could he tell how much he took when he
applied to it.  He was sometimes surprised himself at the way in which
Mr. Sedley's Cognac diminished.  Well, well, this is a painful subject.
Becky did not very likely indulge so much as she used before she
entered a decorous family.

At last the much-bragged-about boxes arrived from Leipzig; three of
them not by any means large or splendid; nor did Becky appear to take
out any sort of dresses or ornaments from the boxes when they did
arrive.  But out of one, which contained a mass of her papers (it was
that very box which Rawdon Crawley had ransacked in his furious hunt
for Becky's concealed money), she took a picture with great glee, which
she pinned up in her room, and to which she introduced Jos.  It was the
portrait of a gentleman in pencil, his face having the advantage of
being painted up in pink.  He was riding on an elephant away from some
cocoa-nut trees and a pagoda: it was an Eastern scene.

"God bless my soul, it is my portrait," Jos cried out. It was he
indeed, blooming in youth and beauty, in a nankeen jacket of the cut of
1804.  It was the old picture that used to hang up in Russell Square.

"I bought it," said Becky in a voice trembling with emotion; "I went to
see if I could be of any use to my kind friends.  I have never parted
with that picture--I never will."

"Won't you?" Jos cried with a look of unutterable rapture and
satisfaction.  "Did you really now value it for my sake?"

"You know I did, well enough," said Becky; "but why speak--why
think--why look back!  It is too late now!"

That evening's conversation was delicious for Jos. Emmy only came in to
go to bed very tired and unwell. Jos and his fair guest had a charming
tete-a-tete, and his sister could hear, as she lay awake in her
adjoining chamber, Rebecca singing over to Jos the old songs of 1815.
He did not sleep, for a wonder, that night, any more than Amelia.

It was June, and, by consequence, high season in London; Jos, who read
the incomparable Galignani (the exile's best friend) through every day,
used to favour the ladies with extracts from his paper during their
breakfast.  Every week in this paper there is a full account of
military movements, in which Jos, as a man who had seen service, was
especially interested.  On one occasion he read out--"Arrival of the
--th regiment.  Gravesend, June 20.--The Ramchunder, East Indiaman,
came into the river this morning, having on board 14 officers, and 132
rank and file of this gallant corps.  They have been absent from
England fourteen years, having been embarked the year after Waterloo,
in which glorious conflict they took an active part, and having
subsequently distinguished themselves in the Burmese war.  The veteran
colonel, Sir Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., with his lady and sister, landed
here yesterday, with Captains Posky, Stubble, Macraw, Malony;
Lieutenants Smith, Jones, Thompson, F. Thomson; Ensigns Hicks and
Grady; the band on the pier playing the national anthem, and the crowd
loudly cheering the gallant veterans as they went into Wayte's hotel,
where a sumptuous banquet was provided for the defenders of Old
England.  During the repast, which we need not say was served up in
Wayte's best style, the cheering continued so enthusiastically that
Lady O'Dowd and the Colonel came forward to the balcony and drank the
healths of their fellow-countrymen in a bumper of Wayte's best claret."

On a second occasion Jos read a brief announcement--Major Dobbin had
joined the --th regiment at Chatham; and subsequently he promulgated
accounts of the presentations at the Drawing-room of Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., Lady O'Dowd (by Mrs. Malloy Malony of
Ballymalony), and Miss Glorvina O'Dowd (by Lady O'Dowd).  Almost
directly after this, Dobbin's name appeared among the Lieutenant-Colonels:
for old Marshal Tiptoff had died during the passage of the
--th from Madras, and the Sovereign was pleased to advance Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd to the rank of Major-General on his return to England,
with an intimation that he should be Colonel of the distinguished
regiment which he had so long commanded.

Amelia had been made aware of some of these movements.  The
correspondence between George and his guardian had not ceased by any
means:  William had even written once or twice to her since his
departure, but in a manner so unconstrainedly cold that the poor woman
felt now in her turn that she had lost her power over him and that, as
he had said, he was free.  He had left her, and she was wretched.  The
memory of his almost countless services, and lofty and affectionate
regard, now presented itself to her and rebuked her day and night.  She
brooded over those recollections according to her wont, saw the purity
and beauty of the affection with which she had trifled, and reproached
herself for having flung away such a treasure.

It was gone indeed.  William had spent it all out.  He loved her no
more, he thought, as he had loved her. He never could again.  That sort
of regard, which he had proffered to her for so many faithful years,
can't be flung down and shattered and mended so as to show no scars.
The little heedless tyrant had so destroyed it.  No, William thought
again and again, "It was myself I deluded and persisted in cajoling;
had she been worthy of the love I gave her, she would have returned it
long ago.  It was a fond mistake.  Isn't the whole course of life made
up of such? And suppose I had won her, should I not have been
disenchanted the day after my victory? Why pine, or be ashamed of my
defeat?" The more he thought of this long passage of his life, the more
clearly he saw his deception.  "I'll go into harness again," he said,
"and do my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Heaven to
place me.  I will see that the buttons of the recruits are properly
bright and that the sergeants make no mistakes in their accounts.  I
will dine at mess and listen to the Scotch surgeon telling his stories.
When I am old and broken, I will go on half-pay, and my old sisters
shall scold me.  I have geliebt und gelebet, as the girl in
'Wallenstein' says.  I am done.  Pay the bills and get me a cigar:
find out what there is at the play to-night, Francis; to-morrow we
cross by the Batavier." He made the above speech, whereof Francis only
heard the last two lines, pacing up and down the Boompjes at Rotterdam.
The Batavier was lying in the basin.  He could see the place on the
quarter-deck where he and Emmy had sat on the happy voyage out.  What
had that little Mrs. Crawley to say to him? Psha; to-morrow we will put
to sea, and return to England, home, and duty!

After June all the little Court Society of Pumpernickel used to
separate, according to the German plan, and make for a hundred
watering-places, where they drank at the wells, rode upon donkeys,
gambled at the redoutes if they had money and a mind, rushed with
hundreds of their kind to gourmandise at the tables d'hote, and idled
away the summer.  The English diplomatists went off to Teoplitz and
Kissingen, their French rivals shut up their chancellerie and whisked
away to their darling Boulevard de Gand. The Transparent reigning
family took too to the waters, or retired to their hunting lodges.
Everybody went away having any pretensions to politeness, and of
course, with them, Doctor von Glauber, the Court Doctor, and his
Baroness.  The seasons for the baths were the most productive periods
of the Doctor's practice--he united business with pleasure, and his
chief place of resort was Ostend, which is much frequented by Germans,
and where the Doctor treated himself and his spouse to what he called a
"dib" in the sea.

His interesting patient, Jos, was a regular milch-cow to the Doctor,
and he easily persuaded the civilian, both for his own health's sake
and that of his charming sister, which was really very much shattered,
to pass the summer at that hideous seaport town.  Emmy did not care
where she went much.  Georgy jumped at the idea of a move.  As for
Becky, she came as a matter of course in the fourth place inside of the
fine barouche Mr. Jos had bought, the two domestics being on the box in
front. She might have some misgivings about the friends whom she should
meet at Ostend, and who might be likely to tell ugly stories--but bah!
she was strong enough to hold her own.  She had cast such an anchor in
Jos now as would require a strong storm to shake.  That incident of the
picture had finished him.  Becky took down her elephant and put it into
the little box which she had had from Amelia ever so many years ago.
Emmy also came off with her Lares--her two pictures--and the party,
finally, were, lodged in an exceedingly dear and uncomfortable house at
Ostend.

There Amelia began to take baths and get what good she could from them,
and though scores of people of Becky's acquaintance passed her and cut
her, yet Mrs. Osborne, who walked about with her, and who knew nobody,
was not aware of the treatment experienced by the friend whom she had
chosen so judiciously as a companion; indeed, Becky never thought fit
to tell her what was passing under her innocent eyes.

Some of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acquaintances, however, acknowledged her
readily enough,--perhaps more readily than she would have desired.
Among those were Major Loder (unattached), and Captain Rook (late of
the Rifles), who might be seen any day on the Dike, smoking and staring
at the women, and who speedily got an introduction to the hospitable
board and select circle of Mr. Joseph Sedley.  In fact they would take
no denial; they burst into the house whether Becky was at home or not,
walked into Mrs. Osborne's drawing-room, which they perfumed with their
coats and mustachios, called Jos "Old buck," and invaded his
dinner-table, and laughed and drank for long hours there.

"What can they mean?" asked Georgy, who did not like these gentlemen.
"I heard the Major say to Mrs. Crawley yesterday, 'No, no, Becky, you
shan't keep the old buck to yourself.  We must have the bones in, or,
dammy, I'll split.' What could the Major mean, Mamma?"

"Major!  don't call him Major!" Emmy said.  "I'm sure I can't tell what
he meant." His presence and that of his friend inspired the little lady
with intolerable terror and aversion.  They paid her tipsy compliments;
they leered at her over the dinner-table.  And the Captain made her
advances that filled her with sickening dismay, nor would she ever see
him unless she had George by her side.

Rebecca, to do her justice, never would let either of these men remain
alone with Amelia; the Major was disengaged too, and swore he would be
the winner of her. A couple of ruffians were fighting for this innocent
creature, gambling for her at her own table, and though she was not
aware of the rascals' designs upon her, yet she felt a horror and
uneasiness in their presence and longed to fly.

She besought, she entreated Jos to go.  Not he.  He was slow of
movement, tied to his Doctor, and perhaps to some other leading-strings.
At least Becky was not anxious to go to England.

At last she took a great resolution--made the great plunge.  She wrote
off a letter to a friend whom she had on the other side of the water, a
letter about which she did not speak a word to anybody, which she
carried herself to the post under her shawl; nor was any remark made
about it, only that she looked very much flushed and agitated when
Georgy met her, and she kissed him, and hung over him a great deal that
night.  She did not come out of her room after her return from her
walk. Becky thought it was Major Loder and the Captain who frightened
her.

"She mustn't stop here," Becky reasoned with herself. "She must go
away, the silly little fool.  She is still whimpering after that gaby
of a husband--dead (and served right!) these fifteen years. She shan't
marry either of these men.  It's too bad of Loder.  No; she shall marry
the bamboo cane, I'll settle it this very night."

So Becky took a cup of tea to Amelia in her private apartment and found
that lady in the company of her miniatures, and in a most melancholy
and nervous condition.  She laid down the cup of tea.

"Thank you," said Amelia.

"Listen to me, Amelia," said Becky, marching up and down the room
before the other and surveying her with a sort of contemptuous
kindness.  "I want to talk to you. You must go away from here and from
the impertinences of these men.  I won't have you harassed by them:
and they will insult you if you stay.  I tell you they are rascals: men
fit to send to the hulks.  Never mind how I know them. I know
everybody.  Jos can't protect you; he is too weak and wants a protector
himself.  You are no more fit to live in the world than a baby in arms.
You must marry, or you and your precious boy will go to ruin.  You must
have a husband, you fool; and one of the best gentlemen I ever saw has
offered you a hundred times, and you have rejected him, you silly,
heartless, ungrateful little creature!"

"I tried--I tried my best, indeed I did, Rebecca," said Amelia
deprecatingly, "but I couldn't forget--"; and she finished the sentence
by looking up at the portrait.

"Couldn't forget HIM!" cried out Becky, "that selfish humbug, that
low-bred cockney dandy, that padded booby, who had neither wit, nor
manners, nor heart, and was no more to be compared to your friend with
the bamboo cane than you are to Queen Elizabeth.  Why, the man was
weary of you, and would have jilted you, but that Dobbin forced him to
keep his word.  He owned it to me.  He never cared for you. He used to
sneer about you to me, time after time, and made love to me the week
after he married you."

"It's false!  It's false!  Rebecca," cried out Amelia, starting up.

"Look there, you fool," Becky said, still with provoking good humour,
and taking a little paper out of her belt, she opened it and flung it
into Emmy's lap.  "You know his handwriting.  He wrote that to
me--wanted me to run away with him--gave it me under your nose, the day
before he was shot--and served him right!" Becky repeated.

Emmy did not hear her; she was looking at the letter. It was that which
George had put into the bouquet and given to Becky on the night of the
Duchess of Richmond's ball.  It was as she said:  the foolish young man
had asked her to fly.

Emmy's head sank down, and for almost the last time in which she shall
be called upon to weep in this history, she commenced that work.  Her
head fell to her bosom, and her hands went up to her eyes; and there
for a while, she gave way to her emotions, as Becky stood on and
regarded her.  Who shall analyse those tears and say whether they were
sweet or bitter? Was she most grieved because the idol of her life was
tumbled down and shivered at her feet, or indignant that her love had
been so despised, or glad because the barrier was removed which modesty
had placed between her and a new, a real affection? "There is nothing
to forbid me now," she thought. "I may love him with all my heart now.
Oh, I will, I will, if he will but let me and forgive me." I believe it
was this feeling rushed over all the others which agitated that gentle
little bosom.

Indeed, she did not cry so much as Becky expected--the other soothed
and kissed her--a rare mark of sympathy with Mrs. Becky.  She treated
Emmy like a child and patted her head.  "And now let us get pen and ink
and write to him to come this minute," she said.

"I--I wrote to him this morning," Emmy said, blushing exceedingly.
Becky screamed with laughter--"Un biglietto," she sang out with Rosina,
"eccolo qua!"--the whole house echoed with her shrill singing.

Two mornings after this little scene, although the day was rainy and
gusty, and Amelia had had an exceedingly wakeful night, listening to
the wind roaring, and pitying all travellers by land and by water, yet
she got up early and insisted upon taking a walk on the Dike with
Georgy; and there she paced as the rain beat into her face, and she
looked out westward across the dark sea line and over the swollen
billows which came tumbling and frothing to the shore. Neither spoke
much, except now and then, when the boy said a few words to his timid
companion, indicative of sympathy and protection.

"I hope he won't cross in such weather," Emmy said.

"I bet ten to one he does," the boy answered.  "Look, Mother, there's
the smoke of the steamer." It was that signal, sure enough.

But though the steamer was under way, he might not be on board; he
might not have got the letter; he might not choose to come.  A hundred
fears poured one over the other into the little heart, as fast as the
waves on to the Dike.

The boat followed the smoke into sight.  Georgy had a dandy telescope
and got the vessel under view in the most skilful manner. And he made
appropriate nautical comments upon the manner of the approach of the
steamer as she came nearer and nearer, dipping and rising in the water.
The signal of an English steamer in sight went fluttering up to the
mast on the pier.  I daresay Mrs. Amelia's heart was in a similar
flutter.

Emmy tried to look through the telescope over George's shoulder, but
she could make nothing of it. She only saw a black eclipse bobbing up
and down before her eyes.

George took the glass again and raked the vessel. "How she does pitch!"
he said.  "There goes a wave slap over her bows.  There's only two
people on deck besides the steersman.  There's a man lying down, and
a--chap in a--cloak with a--Hooray!--it's Dob, by Jingo!" He clapped to
the telescope and flung his arms round his mother.  As for that lady,
let us say what she did in the words of a favourite poet--"Dakruoen
gelasasa." She was sure it was William.  It could be no other.  What
she had said about hoping that he would not come was all hypocrisy.  Of
course he would come; what could he do else but come? She knew he would
come.

The ship came swiftly nearer and nearer.  As they went in to meet her
at the landing-place at the quay, Emmy's knees trembled so that she
scarcely could run.  She would have liked to kneel down and say her
prayers of thanks there.  Oh, she thought, she would be all her life
saying them!

It was such a bad day that as the vessel came alongside of the quay
there were no idlers abroad, scarcely even a commissioner on the look
out for the few passengers in the steamer.  That young scapegrace
George had fled too, and as the gentleman in the old cloak lined with
red stuff stepped on to the shore, there was scarcely any one present
to see what took place, which was briefly this:

A lady in a dripping white bonnet and shawl, with her two little hands
out before her, went up to him, and in the next minute she had
altogether disappeared under the folds of the old cloak, and was
kissing one of his hands with all her might; whilst the other, I
suppose, was engaged in holding her to his heart (which her head just
about reached) and in preventing her from tumbling down.  She was
murmuring something about--forgive--dear William--dear, dear, dearest
friend--kiss, kiss, kiss, and so forth--and in fact went on under the
cloak in an absurd manner.

When Emmy emerged from it, she still kept tight hold of one of
William's hands, and looked up in his face.  It was full of sadness and
tender love and pity.  She understood its reproach and hung down her
head.

"It was time you sent for me, dear Amelia," he said.

"You will never go again, William?"

"No, never," he answered, and pressed the dear little soul once more to
his heart.

As they issued out of the custom-house precincts, Georgy broke out on
them, with his telescope up to his eye, and a loud laugh of welcome; he
danced round the couple and performed many facetious antics as he led
them up to the house.  Jos wasn't up yet; Becky not visible (though she
looked at them through the blinds). Georgy ran off to see about
breakfast.  Emmy, whose shawl and bonnet were off in the passage in the
hands of Mrs. Payne, now went to undo the clasp of William's cloak,
and--we will, if you please, go with George, and look after breakfast
for the Colonel.  The vessel is in port. He has got the prize he has
been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last.  There it
is with its head on his shoulder, billing and cooing close up to his
heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings.  This is what he has
asked for every day and hour for eighteen years.  This is what he pined
after.  Here it is--the summit, the end--the last page of the third
volume. Good-bye, Colonel--God bless you, honest William!--Farewell,
dear Amelia--Grow green again, tender little parasite, round the rugged
old oak to which you cling!

Perhaps it was compunction towards the kind and simple creature, who
had been the first in life to defend her, perhaps it was a dislike to
all such sentimental scenes--but Rebecca, satisfied with her part in
the transaction, never presented herself before Colonel Dobbin and the
lady whom he married.  "Particular business," she said, took her to
Bruges, whither she went, and only Georgy and his uncle were present at
the marriage ceremony. When it was over, and Georgy had rejoined his
parents, Mrs. Becky returned (just for a few days) to comfort the
solitary bachelor, Joseph Sedley.  He preferred a continental life, he
said, and declined to join in housekeeping with his sister and her
husband.

Emmy was very glad in her heart to think that she had written to her
husband before she read or knew of that letter of George's.  "I knew it
all along," William said; "but could I use that weapon against the poor
fellow's memory? It was that which made me suffer so when you--"

"Never speak of that day again," Emmy cried out, so contrite and humble
that William turned off the conversation by his account of Glorvina and
dear old Peggy O'Dowd, with whom he was sitting when the letter of
recall reached him.  "If you hadn't sent for me," he added with a
laugh, "who knows what Glorvina's name might be now?"

At present it is Glorvina Posky (now Mrs. Major Posky); she took him on
the death of his first wife, having resolved never to marry out of the
regiment.  Lady O'Dowd is also so attached to it that, she says, if
anything were to happen to Mick, bedad she'd come back and marry some
of 'em.  But the Major-General is quite well and lives in great
splendour at O'Dowdstown, with a pack of beagles, and (with the
exception of perhaps their neighbour, Hoggarty of Castle Hoggarty) he
is the first man of his county.  Her Ladyship still dances jigs, and
insisted on standing up with the Master of the Horse at the Lord
Lieutenant's last ball.  Both she and Glorvina declared that Dobbin had
used the latter SHEAMFULLY, but Posky falling in, Glorvina was
consoled, and a beautiful turban from Paris appeased the wrath of Lady
O'Dowd.

When Colonel Dobbin quitted the service, which he did immediately after
his marriage, he rented a pretty little country place in Hampshire, not
far from Queen's Crawley, where, after the passing of the Reform Bill,
Sir Pitt and his family constantly resided now. All idea of a Peerage
was out of the question, the Baronet's two seats in Parliament being
lost.  He was both out of pocket and out of spirits by that
catastrophe, failed in his health, and prophesied the speedy ruin of
the Empire.

Lady Jane and Mrs. Dobbin became great friends--there was a perpetual
crossing of pony-chaises between the Hall and the Evergreens, the
Colonel's place (rented of his friend Major Ponto, who was abroad with
his family).  Her Ladyship was godmother to Mrs. Dobbin's child, which
bore her name, and was christened by the Rev. James Crawley, who
succeeded his father in the living: and a pretty close friendship
subsisted between the two lads, George and Rawdon, who hunted and shot
together in the vacations, were both entered of the same college at
Cambridge, and quarrelled with each other about Lady Jane's daughter,
with whom they were both, of course, in love. A match between George
and that young lady was long a favourite scheme of both the matrons,
though I have heard that Miss Crawley herself inclined towards her
cousin.

Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's name was never mentioned by either family. There
were reasons why all should be silent regarding her.  For wherever Mr.
Joseph Sedley went, she travelled likewise, and that infatuated man
seemed to be entirely her slave.  The Colonel's lawyers informed him
that his brother-in-law had effected a heavy insurance upon his life,
whence it was probable that he had been raising money to discharge
debts.  He procured prolonged leave of absence from the East India
House, and indeed, his infirmities were daily increasing.

On hearing the news about the insurance, Amelia, in a good deal of
alarm, entreated her husband to go to Brussels, where Jos then was, and
inquire into the state of his affairs.  The Colonel quitted home with
reluctance (for he was deeply immersed in his History of the Punjaub
which still occupies him, and much alarmed about his little daughter,
whom he idolizes, and who was just recovering from the chicken-pox) and
went to Brussels and found Jos living at one of the enormous hotels in
that city.  Mrs. Crawley, who had her carriage, gave entertainments,
and lived in a very genteel manner, occupied another suite of
apartments in the same hotel.

The Colonel, of course, did not desire to see that lady, or even think
proper to notify his arrival at Brussels, except privately to Jos by a
message through his valet.  Jos begged the Colonel to come and see him
that night, when Mrs. Crawley would be at a soiree, and when they could
meet alone.  He found his brother-in-law in a condition of pitiable
infirmity--and dreadfully afraid of Rebecca, though eager in his
praises of her.  She tended him through a series of unheard-of
illnesses with a fidelity most admirable.  She had been a daughter to
him.  "But--but--oh, for God's sake, do come and live near me,
and--and--see me sometimes," whimpered out the unfortunate man.

The Colonel's brow darkened at this.  "We can't, Jos," he said.
"Considering the circumstances, Amelia can't visit you."

"I swear to you--I swear to you on the Bible," gasped out Joseph,
wanting to kiss the book, "that she is as innocent as a child, as
spotless as your own wife."

"It may be so," said the Colonel gloomily, "but Emmy can't come to you.
Be a man, Jos:  break off this disreputable connection.  Come home to
your family.  We hear your affairs are involved."

"Involved!" cried Jos.  "Who has told such calumnies? All my money is
placed out most advantageously.  Mrs. Crawley--that is--I mean--it is
laid out to the best interest."

"You are not in debt, then? Why did you insure your life?"

"I thought--a little present to her--in case anything happened; and you
know my health is so delicate--common gratitude you know--and I intend
to leave all my money to you--and I can spare it out of my income,
indeed I can," cried out William's weak brother-in-law.

The Colonel besought Jos to fly at once--to go back to India, whither
Mrs. Crawley could not follow him; to do anything to break off a
connection which might have the most fatal consequences to him.

Jos clasped his hands and cried, "He would go back to India.  He would
do anything, only he must have time: they mustn't say anything to Mrs.
Crawley--she'd--she'd kill me if she knew it.  You don't know what a
terrible woman she is," the poor wretch said.

"Then, why not come away with me?" said Dobbin in reply; but Jos had
not the courage.  "He would see Dobbin again in the morning; he must on
no account say that he had been there.  He must go now.  Becky might
come in." And Dobbin quitted him, full of forebodings.

He never saw Jos more.  Three months afterwards Joseph Sedley died at
Aix-la-Chapelle.  It was found that all his property had been muddled
away in speculations, and was represented by valueless shares in
different bubble companies.  All his available assets were the two
thousand pounds for which his life was insured, and which were left
equally between his beloved "sister Amelia, wife of, &c., and his
friend and invaluable attendant during sickness, Rebecca, wife of
Lieutenant-Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B.," who was appointed
administratrix.

The solicitor of the insurance company swore it was the blackest case
that ever had come before him, talked of sending a commission to Aix to
examine into the death, and the Company refused payment of the policy.
But Mrs., or Lady Crawley, as she styled herself, came to town at once
(attended with her solicitors, Messrs.  Burke, Thurtell, and Hayes, of
Thavies Inn) and dared the Company to refuse the payment.  They invited
examination, they declared that she was the object of an infamous
conspiracy, which had been pursuing her all through life, and triumphed
finally.  The money was paid, and her character established, but
Colonel Dobbin sent back his share of the legacy to the insurance
office and rigidly declined to hold any communication with Rebecca.

She never was Lady Crawley, though she continued so to call herself.
His Excellency Colonel Rawdon Crawley died of yellow fever at Coventry
Island, most deeply beloved and deplored, and six weeks before the
demise of his brother, Sir Pitt.  The estate consequently devolved upon
the present Sir Rawdon Crawley, Bart.

He, too, has declined to see his mother, to whom he makes a liberal
allowance, and who, besides, appears to be very wealthy.  The Baronet
lives entirely at Queen's Crawley, with Lady Jane and her daughter,
whilst Rebecca, Lady Crawley, chiefly hangs about Bath and Cheltenham,
where a very strong party of excellent people consider her to be a most
injured woman.  She has her enemies.  Who has not? Her life is her
answer to them. She busies herself in works of piety.  She goes to
church, and never without a footman.  Her name is in all the Charity
Lists.  The destitute orange-girl, the neglected washerwoman, the
distressed muffin-man find in her a fast and generous friend.  She is
always having stalls at Fancy Fairs for the benefit of these hapless
beings.  Emmy, her children, and the Colonel, coming to London some
time back, found themselves suddenly before her at one of these fairs.
She cast down her eyes demurely and smiled as they started away from
her; Emmy scurrying off on the arm of George (now grown a dashing young
gentleman) and the Colonel seizing up his little Janey, of whom he is
fonder than of anything in the world--fonder even than of his History
of the Punjaub.

"Fonder than he is of me," Emmy thinks with a sigh. But he never said a
word to Amelia that was not kind and gentle, or thought of a want of
hers that he did not try to gratify.

Ah!  Vanitas Vanitatum!  which of us is happy in this world? Which of
us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?--come, children, let us
shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

 Becky's life, after Rawdon leaves her, consists at first in trying to stay respectable, but just when she has built up a new circle of friends, someone informs about her and she is left alone. She tries at first to get Sir Pitt to listen to her, but Wenham, Lord Steyne's man, has told Pitt too much about her. Becky wanders about the Continent, fleeing creditors, gambling, and acting as boarding house queen. Vagabond blood flows in her veins. She writes her son once, when, on the death of Sir Pitt's only son, little Rawdon becomes the heir of Queen's Crawley. Little Rawdon is not impressed with his mother's attention; it comes too falsely and too late. In Rome Becky sees Lord Steyne and hopes to regain his favor, remembering how her wit has amused him and what good fun they have had, but Steyne sends his man to threaten her with death. Steyne has been offended and he never forgets. He dies in 1830, much praised and lamented. In the course of her travels Becky arrives at Brussels and remembers George, Amelia, and Joseph, and thinks, "they were kind simple people." And then, as the reader has seen, Becky meets Joseph and the others in Pumpernickel. Joseph, as Becky has requested, goes to her hotel, a dirty refuge which suits Rebecca. She is on good terms with all there; they are her kind of people. Becky convinces Jos that she has been wronged, that Rawdon and his family have torn her child from her, and that Jos was and is her first and only real love. Joseph goes home and convinces Amelia of Becky's innocence and need. Dobbin objects, never having been taken in by Becky. He says Amelia wasn't always fond of Becky referring to her jealousy over George. Angered, Amelia says she will never forgive him. Triumphant, Becky moves in. Dobbin, after a last protest about letting Becky stay, reproves Amelia as not being worthy of his love and devotion. Much to Georgy's sorrow and Amelia's regret, Dobbin departs to join his regiment. Becky takes over Joseph's house, winning Amelia by praise of Major Dobbin. A couple of Becky's disreputable friends move in and connive to exploit Amelia. Although she has no idea of what they are planning, Amelia abhors them and writes to ask William Dobbin to come back. That same day Becky decides she should protect Amelia and tells her that Joseph is too weak, that she should send for William. When Amelia starts the old line about her only being able to love George, Becky shows her the note George has written on the eve of Waterloo asking Becky to run away with him. Amelia cries -- for many reasons -- but she now feels free to love William. In two days William returns to marry Amelia. Becky departs during the wedding days, returns and fastens herself on Joseph, and gets all his money. The last time William sees him, Joseph is both fascinated and terrified by Becky, but he won't leave her. Three months later he dies, the implication being that Becky has hastened his ruin as she did Rawdon's. Rawdon dies of yellow fever. Sir Pitt dies. Rawdon, Becky's son, inherits Queen's Crawley. The Dobbins, happy in marriage and their two children, George and Janey, live nearby and are friends of the family at Queen's Crawley. None of them has anything to do with Rebecca, although her son makes her an allowance. She seems to have plenty of money, lives a respectable life, goes to church, and engages in all sorts of charities.

