Mrs. Bowls, late Firkin, came and listened grimly
in the passage to the hysterical sniffling and giggling
which went on in the front parlour. Becky had
never been a favourite of hers. Since the establishment
of the married couple in London they had frequented
their former friends of the house of Raggles, and did
not like the latter’s account of the Colonel’s
menage. “I wouldn’t trust him, Ragg,
my boy,” Bowls remarked; and his wife, when Mrs.
Rawdon issued from the parlour, only saluted the lady
with a very sour curtsey; and her fingers were like
so many sausages, cold and lifeless, when she held
them out in deference to Mrs. Rawdon, who persisted
in shaking hands with the retired lady’s maid.
She whirled away into Piccadilly, nodding with the
sweetest of smiles towards Miss Briggs, who hung nodding
at the window close under the advertisement-card,
and at the next moment was in the park with a half-dozen
of dandies cantering after her carriage.
When she found how her friend was situated, and how
having a snug legacy from Miss Crawley, salary was
no object to our gentlewoman, Becky instantly formed
some benevolent little domestic plans concerning her.
This was just such a companion as would suit her
establishment, and she invited Briggs to come to dinner
with her that very evening, when she should see Becky’s
dear little darling Rawdon.
Mrs. Bowls cautioned her lodger against venturing
into the lion’s den, “wherein you will
rue it, Miss B., mark my words, and as sure as my
name is Bowls.” And Briggs promised to be
very cautious. The upshot of which caution was
that she went to live with Mrs. Rawdon the next week,
and had lent Rawdon Crawley six hundred pounds upon
annuity before six months were over.
CHAPTER XLI
In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors
So the mourning being ready, and Sir Pitt Crawley
warned of their arrival, Colonel Crawley and his wife
took a couple of places in the same old High-flyer
coach by which Rebecca had travelled in the defunct
Baronet’s company, on her first journey into
the world some nine years before. How well she
remembered the Inn Yard, and the ostler to whom she
refused money, and the insinuating Cambridge lad who
wrapped her in his coat on the journey! Rawdon
took his place outside, and would have liked to drive,
but his grief forbade him. He sat by the coachman
and talked about horses and the road the whole way;
and who kept the inns, and who horsed the coach by
which he had travelled so many a time, when he and
Pitt were boys going to Eton. At Mudbury a carriage
and a pair of horses received them, with a coachman
in black. “It’s the old drag, Rawdon,”
Rebecca said as they got in. “The worms
have eaten the cloth a good deal— there’s
the stain which Sir Pitt—ha! I see
Dawson the Ironmonger has his shutters up—which
Sir Pitt made such a noise about. It was a bottle
of cherry brandy he broke which we went to fetch for
your aunt from Southampton. How time flies,
to be sure! That can’t be Polly Talboys,
that bouncing girl standing by her mother at the cottage
there. I remember her a mangy little urchin picking
weeds in the garden.”
