Vanity Fair - Page 542/573

She was probably so much occupied in arranging these affairs of

business with her husband's lawyers that she forgot to take any step

whatever about her son, the little Rawdon, and did not even once

propose to go and see him. That young gentleman was consigned to the

entire guardianship of his aunt and uncle, the former of whom had

always possessed a great share of the child's affection. His mamma

wrote him a neat letter from Boulogne, when she quitted England, in

which she requested him to mind his book, and said she was going to

take a Continental tour, during which she would have the pleasure of

writing to him again. But she never did for a year afterwards, and

not, indeed, until Sir Pitt's only boy, always sickly, died of

hooping-cough and measles--then Rawdon's mamma wrote the most

affectionate composition to her darling son, who was made heir of

Queen's Crawley by this accident, and drawn more closely than ever to

the kind lady, whose tender heart had already adopted him. Rawdon

Crawley, then grown a tall, fine lad, blushed when he got the letter.

"Oh, Aunt Jane, you are my mother!" he said; "and not--and not that

one." But he wrote back a kind and respectful letter to Mrs. Rebecca,

then living at a boarding-house at Florence. But we are advancing

matters.

Our darling Becky's first flight was not very far. She perched upon

the French coast at Boulogne, that refuge of so much exiled English

innocence, and there lived in rather a genteel, widowed manner, with a

femme de chambre and a couple of rooms, at an hotel. She dined at the

table d'hote, where people thought her very pleasant, and where she

entertained her neighbours by stories of her brother, Sir Pitt, and her

great London acquaintance, talking that easy, fashionable slip-slop

which has so much effect upon certain folks of small breeding. She

passed with many of them for a person of importance; she gave little

tea-parties in her private room and shared in the innocent amusements

of the place in sea-bathing, and in jaunts in open carriages, in

strolls on the sands, and in visits to the play. Mrs. Burjoice, the

printer's lady, who was boarding with her family at the hotel for the

summer, and to whom her Burjoice came of a Saturday and Sunday, voted

her charming, until that little rogue of a Burjoice began to pay her

too much attention. But there was nothing in the story, only that

Becky was always affable, easy, and good-natured--and with men

especially.

Numbers of people were going abroad as usual at the end of the season,

and Becky had plenty of opportunities of finding out by the behaviour

of her acquaintances of the great London world the opinion of "society"

as regarded her conduct. One day it was Lady Partlet and her daughters

whom Becky confronted as she was walking modestly on Boulogne pier, the

cliffs of Albion shining in the distance across the deep blue sea.

Lady Partlet marshalled all her daughters round her with a sweep of her

parasol and retreated from the pier, darting savage glances at poor

little Becky who stood alone there.