Vanity Fair - Page 370/573

Becky made Rawdon dine out once or twice on business, while Pitt stayed

with them, and the Baronet passed the happy evening alone with her and

Briggs. She went downstairs to the kitchen and actually cooked little

dishes for him. "Isn't it a good salmi?" she said; "I made it for you.

I can make you better dishes than that, and will when you come to see

me."

"Everything you do, you do well," said the Baronet gallantly. "The

salmi is excellent indeed."

"A poor man's wife," Rebecca replied gaily, "must make herself useful,

you know"; on which her brother-in-law vowed that "she was fit to be

the wife of an Emperor, and that to be skilful in domestic duties was

surely one of the most charming of woman's qualities." And Sir Pitt

thought, with something like mortification, of Lady Jane at home, and

of a certain pie which she had insisted on making, and serving to him

at dinner--a most abominable pie.

Besides the salmi, which was made of Lord Steyne's pheasants from his

lordship's cottage of Stillbrook, Becky gave her brother-in-law a

bottle of white wine, some that Rawdon had brought with him from

France, and had picked up for nothing, the little story-teller said;

whereas the liquor was, in truth, some White Hermitage from the Marquis

of Steyne's famous cellars, which brought fire into the Baronet's

pallid cheeks and a glow into his feeble frame.

Then when he had drunk up the bottle of petit vin blanc, she gave him

her hand, and took him up to the drawing-room, and made him snug on the

sofa by the fire, and let him talk as she listened with the tenderest

kindly interest, sitting by him, and hemming a shirt for her dear

little boy. Whenever Mrs. Rawdon wished to be particularly humble and

virtuous, this little shirt used to come out of her work-box. It had

got to be too small for Rawdon long before it was finished.

Well, Rebecca listened to Pitt, she talked to him, she sang to him, she

coaxed him, and cuddled him, so that he found himself more and more

glad every day to get back from the lawyer's at Gray's Inn, to the

blazing fire in Curzon Street--a gladness in which the men of law

likewise participated, for Pitt's harangues were of the longest--and so

that when he went away he felt quite a pang at departing. How pretty

she looked kissing her hand to him from the carriage and waving her

handkerchief when he had taken his place in the mail! She put the

handkerchief to her eyes once. He pulled his sealskin cap over his, as

the coach drove away, and, sinking back, he thought to himself how she

respected him and how he deserved it, and how Rawdon was a foolish dull

fellow who didn't half-appreciate his wife; and how mum and stupid his

own wife was compared to that brilliant little Becky. Becky had hinted

every one of these things herself, perhaps, but so delicately and

gently that you hardly knew when or where. And, before they parted, it

was agreed that the house in London should be redecorated for the next

season, and that the brothers' families should meet again in the

country at Christmas.