Vanity Fair - Page 350/573

Becky admired little Matilda, who was not quite four years old, as the

most charming little love in the world; and the boy, a little fellow of

two years--pale, heavy-eyed, and large-headed--she pronounced to be a

perfect prodigy in point of size, intelligence, and beauty.

"I wish Mamma would not insist on giving him so much medicine," Lady

Jane said with a sigh. "I often think we should all be better without

it." And then Lady Jane and her new-found friend had one of those

confidential medical conversations about the children, which all

mothers, and most women, as I am given to understand, delight in. Fifty

years ago, and when the present writer, being an interesting little

boy, was ordered out of the room with the ladies after dinner, I

remember quite well that their talk was chiefly about their ailments;

and putting this question directly to two or three since, I have always

got from them the acknowledgement that times are not changed. Let my

fair readers remark for themselves this very evening when they quit the

dessert-table and assemble to celebrate the drawing-room mysteries.

Well--in half an hour Becky and Lady Jane were close and intimate

friends--and in the course of the evening her Ladyship informed Sir

Pitt that she thought her new sister-in-law was a kind, frank,

unaffected, and affectionate young woman.

And so having easily won the daughter's good-will, the indefatigable

little woman bent herself to conciliate the august Lady Southdown. As

soon as she found her Ladyship alone, Rebecca attacked her on the

nursery question at once and said that her own little boy was saved,

actually saved, by calomel, freely administered, when all the

physicians in Paris had given the dear child up. And then she

mentioned how often she had heard of Lady Southdown from that excellent

man the Reverend Lawrence Grills, Minister of the chapel in May Fair,

which she frequented; and how her views were very much changed by

circumstances and misfortunes; and how she hoped that a past life spent

in worldliness and error might not incapacitate her from more serious

thought for the future. She described how in former days she had been

indebted to Mr. Crawley for religious instruction, touched upon the

Washerwoman of Finchley Common, which she had read with the greatest

profit, and asked about Lady Emily, its gifted author, now Lady Emily

Hornblower, at Cape Town, where her husband had strong hopes of

becoming Bishop of Caffraria.

But she crowned all, and confirmed herself in Lady Southdown's favour,

by feeling very much agitated and unwell after the funeral and

requesting her Ladyship's medical advice, which the Dowager not only

gave, but, wrapped up in a bed-gown and looking more like Lady Macbeth

than ever, came privately in the night to Becky's room with a parcel of

favourite tracts, and a medicine of her own composition, which she

insisted that Mrs. Rawdon should take.