“Lord Steyne,” said her Ladyship, as her
wan cheeks glowed with a blush, “says you sing
and play very beautifully, Mrs. Crawley—I
wish you would do me the kindness to sing to me.”
“I will do anything that may give pleasure to
my Lord Steyne or to you,” said Rebecca, sincerely
grateful, and seating herself at the piano, began
to sing.
She sang religious songs of Mozart, which had been
early favourites of Lady Steyne, and with such sweetness
and tenderness that the lady, lingering round the
piano, sat down by its side and listened until the
tears rolled down her eyes. It is true that the
opposition ladies at the other end of the room kept
up a loud and ceaseless buzzing and talking, but the
Lady Steyne did not hear those rumours. She
was a child again—and had wandered back
through a forty years’ wilderness to her convent
garden. The chapel organ had pealed the same
tones, the organist, the sister whom she loved best
of the community, had taught them to her in those early
happy days. She was a girl once more, and the
brief period of her happiness bloomed out again for
an hour—she started when the jarring doors
were flung open, and with a loud laugh from Lord Steyne,
the men of the party entered full of gaiety.
He saw at a glance what had happened in his absence,
and was grateful to his wife for once. He went
and spoke to her, and called her by her Christian
name, so as again to bring blushes to her pale face—“My
wife says you have been singing like an angel,”
he said to Becky. Now there are angels of two
kinds, and both sorts, it is said, are charming in
their way.
Whatever the previous portion of the evening had been,
the rest of that night was a great triumph for Becky.
She sang her very best, and it was so good that every
one of the men came and crowded round the piano.
The women, her enemies, were left quite alone.
And Mr. Paul Jefferson Jones thought he had made a
conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her Ladyship
and praising her delightful friend’s first-rate
singing.
Contains a Vulgar Incident
The Muse, whoever she be, who presides over this Comic
History must now descend from the genteel heights
in which she has been soaring and have the goodness
to drop down upon the lowly roof of John Sedley at
Brompton, and describe what events are taking place
there. Here, too, in this humble tenement, live
care, and distrust, and dismay. Mrs. Clapp in
the kitchen is grumbling in secret to her husband
about the rent, and urging the good fellow to rebel
against his old friend and patron and his present
lodger. Mrs. Sedley has ceased to visit her
landlady in the lower regions now, and indeed is in
a position to patronize Mrs. Clapp no longer.
How can one be condescending to a lady to whom one
owes a matter of forty pounds, and who is perpetually
throwing out hints for the money? The Irish maidservant
