Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray (portable ebook reader .txt) 📖

“You see everything,” she replied.

“A few things, but not that, my pretty lady,” he said good-naturedly. “You silly little fibster! I heard you in the room overhead, where I have no doubt you were putting a little rouge on⁠—you must give some of yours to my Lady Gaunt, whose complexion is quite preposterous⁠—and I heard the bedroom door open, and then you came downstairs.”

“Is it a crime to try and look my best when you come here?” answered Mrs. Rawdon plaintively, and she rubbed her cheek with her handkerchief as if to show there was no rouge at all, only genuine blushes and modesty in her case. About this who can tell? I know there is some rouge that won’t come off on a pocket-handkerchief, and some so good that even tears will not disturb it.

“Well,” said the old gentleman, twiddling round his wife’s card, “you are bent on becoming a fine lady. You pester my poor old life out to get you into the world. You won’t be able to hold your own there, you silly little fool. You’ve got no money.”

“You will get us a place,” interposed Becky, “as quick as possible.”

“You’ve got no money, and you want to compete with those who have. You poor little earthenware pipkin, you want to swim down the stream along with the great copper kettles. All women are alike. Everybody is striving for what is not worth the having! Gad! I dined with the King yesterday, and we had neck of mutton and turnips. A dinner of herbs is better than a stalled ox very often. You will go to Gaunt House. You give an old fellow no rest until you get there. It’s not half so nice as here. You’ll be bored there. I am. My wife is as gay as Lady Macbeth, and my daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril. I daren’t sleep in what they call my bedroom. The bed is like the baldaquin of St. Peter’s, and the pictures frighten me. I have a little brass bed in a dressing-room, and a little hair mattress like an anchorite. I am an anchorite. Ho! ho! You’ll be asked to dinner next week. And gare aux femmes, look out and hold your own! How the women will bully you!” This was a very long speech for a man of few words like my Lord Steyne; nor was it the first which he uttered for Becky’s benefit on that day.

Briggs looked up from the worktable at which she was seated in the farther room and gave a deep sigh as she heard the great Marquis speak so lightly of her sex.

“If you don’t turn off that abominable sheepdog,” said Lord Steyne, with a savage look over his shoulder at her, “I will have her poisoned.”

“I always give my dog dinner from my own plate,” said Rebecca, laughing mischievously; and having enjoyed for some time the discomfiture of my lord, who hated poor Briggs for interrupting his tête-à-tête with the fair Colonel’s wife, Mrs. Rawdon at length had pity upon her admirer, and calling to Briggs, praised the fineness of the weather to her and bade her to take out the child for a walk.

“I can’t send her away,” Becky said presently, after a pause, and in a very sad voice. Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke, and she turned away her head.

“You owe her her wages, I suppose?” said the Peer.

“Worse than that,” said Becky, still casting down her eyes; “I have ruined her.”

“Ruined her? Then why don’t you turn her out?” the gentleman asked.

“Men do that,” Becky answered bitterly. “Women are not so bad as you. Last year, when we were reduced to our last guinea, she gave us everything. She shall never leave me, until we are ruined utterly ourselves, which does not seem far off, or until I can pay her the utmost farthing.”

“⁠⸻ it, how much is it?” said the Peer with an oath. And Becky, reflecting on the largeness of his means, mentioned not only the sum which she had borrowed from Miss Briggs, but one of nearly double the amount.

This caused the Lord Steyne to break out in another brief and energetic expression of anger, at which Rebecca held down her head the more and cried bitterly. “I could not help it. It was my only chance. I dare not tell my husband. He would kill me if I told him what I have done. I have kept it a secret from everybody but you⁠—and you forced it from me. Ah, what shall I do, Lord Steyne? for I am very, very unhappy!”

Lord Steyne made no reply except by beating the devil’s tattoo and biting his nails. At last he clapped his hat on his head and flung out of the room. Rebecca did not rise from her attitude of misery until the door slammed upon him and his carriage whirled away. Then she rose up with the queerest expression of victorious mischief glittering in her green eyes. She burst out laughing once or twice to herself, as she sat at work, and sitting down to the piano, she rattled away a triumphant voluntary on the keys, which made the people pause under her window to listen to her brilliant music.

That night, there came two notes from Gaunt House for the little woman, the one containing a card of invitation from Lord and Lady Steyne to a dinner at Gaunt House next Friday, while the other enclosed a slip of gray paper bearing Lord Steyne’s signature and the address of Messrs. Jones, Brown, and Robinson, Lombard Street.

Rawdon heard Becky laughing in the night once or twice. It was only her delight at going to Gaunt House and facing the ladies there, she said, which amused her so. But the truth was that she was occupied with a great number of other thoughts. Should she pay off old Briggs and give her her congé? Should she astonish Raggles by