"Miss Briggs and I are plunged in grief and despondency for the death of our Papa," Rebecca said.
"Sir Pitt Crawley is dead, my lord.
We have been tearing our hair all the morning, and now we are tearing up our old clothes."
"Oh, Rebecca, how can you--" was all that Briggs could say as she turned up her eyes.
"Oh, Rebecca, how can you--" echoed my Lord.
"So that old scoundrel's dead, is he?
He might have been a Peer if he had played his cards better.
Mr. Pitt had very nearly made him; but he ratted always at the wrong time.
What an old Silenus it was!"
"I might have been Silenus's widow," said Rebecca.
"Don't you remember, Miss Briggs, how you peeped in at the door and saw old Sir Pitt on his knees to me?"
Miss Briggs, our old friend, blushed very much at this reminiscence, and was glad when Lord Steyne ordered her to go downstairs and make him a cup of tea.
Briggs was the house-dog whom Rebecca had provided as guardian of her innocence and reputation.
Miss Crawley had left her a little annuity.
She would have been content to remain in the Crawley family with Lady Jane, who was good to her and to everybody; but Lady Southdown dismissed poor Briggs as quickly as decency permitted; and Mr. Pitt (who thought himself much injured by the uncalled-for generosity of his deceased relative towards a lady who had only been Miss Crawley's faithful retainer a score of years) made no objection to that exercise of the dowager's authority.
Bowls and Firkin likewise received their legacies and their dismissals, and married and set up a lodging-house, according to the custom of their kind.
Briggs tried to live with her relations in the country, but found that attempt was vain after the better society to which she had been accustomed.
Briggs's friends, small tradesmen, in a country town, quarrelled over Miss Briggs's forty pounds a year as eagerly and more openly than Miss Crawley's kinsfolk had for that lady's inheritance.
Briggs's brother, a radical hatter and grocer, called his sister a purse-proud aristocrat, because she would not advance a part of her capital to stock his shop; and she would have done so most likely, but that their sister, a dissenting shoemaker's lady, at variance with the hatter and grocer, who went to another chapel, showed how their brother was on the verge of bankruptcy, and took possession of Briggs for a while.
The dissenting shoemaker wanted Miss Briggs to send his son to college and make a gentleman of him.
Between them the two families got a great portion of her private savings out of her, and finally she fled to London followed by the anathemas of both, and determined to seek for servitude again as infinitely less onerous than liberty.
And advertising in the papers that a
"Gentlewoman of agreeable manners, and accustomed to the best society, was anxious to," &c., she took up her residence with Mr. Bowls in Half Moon Street, and waited the result of the advertisement.
So it was that she fell in with Rebecca.
Mrs. Rawdon's dashing little carriage and ponies was whirling down the street one day, just as Miss Briggs, fatigued, had reached Mr. Bowls's door, after a weary walk to the Times Office in the City to insert her advertisement for the sixth time.
Rebecca was driving, and at once recognized the gentlewoman with agreeable manners, and being a perfectly good-humoured woman, as we have seen, and having a regard for Briggs, she pulled up the ponies at the doorsteps, gave the reins to the groom, and jumping out, had hold of both Briggs's hands, before she of the agreeable manners had recovered from the shock of seeing an old friend.
Briggs cried, and Becky laughed a great deal and kissed the gentlewoman as soon as they got into the passage; and thence into Mrs. Bowls's front parlour, with the red moreen curtains, and the round looking-glass, with the chained eagle above, gazing upon the back of the ticket in the window which announced
"Apartments to Let."
Briggs told all her history amidst those perfectly uncalled-for sobs and ejaculations of wonder with which women of her soft nature salute an old acquaintance, or regard a rencontre in the street; for though people meet other people every day, yet some there are who insist upon discovering miracles; and women, even though they have disliked each other, begin to cry when they meet, deploring and remembering the time when they last quarrelled.
So, in a word, Briggs told all her history, and Becky gave a narrative of her own life, with her usual artlessness and candour.
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.