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 work-table 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 sheep-dog," 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 tete-a-tete 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 conge? Should she astonish Raggles by settling his account? She turned over all these thoughts on her pillow, and on the next day, when Rawdon went out to pay his morning visit to the Club, Mrs.Crawley (in a modest dress with a veil on) whipped off in a hackney-coach to the City: and being landed at Messrs.
Jones and Robinson's bank, presented a document there to the authority at the desk, who, in reply, asked her "How she would take it?"She gently said "she would take a hundred and fifty pounds in small notes and the remainder in one note":
and passing through St.Paul's Churchyard stopped there and bought the handsomest black silk gown for Briggs which money could buy; and which, with a kiss and the kindest speeches, she presented to the simple old spinster.
Then she walked to Mr.Raggles, inquired about his children affectionately, and gave him fifty pounds on account.Then she went to the livery-man from whom she jobbed her carriages and gratified him with a similar sum."And I hope this will be a lesson to you, Spavin,"she said, "and that on the next drawing-room day my brother, Sir Pitt, will not be inconvenienced by being obliged to take four of us in his carriage to wait upon His Majesty, because my own carriage is not forthcoming."It appears there had been a difference on the last drawing-room day.Hence the degradation which the Colonel had almost suffered, of being obliged to enter the presence of his Sovereign in a hack cab.
These arrangements concluded, Becky paid a visit upstairs to the before-mentioned desk, which Amelia Sedley had given her years and years ago, and which contained a number of useful and valuable little things--in which private museum she placed the one note which Messrs.Jones and Robinson's cashier had given her.