Frankness and kindness like Amelia's were likely to touch even such a
hardened little reprobate as Becky. She returned Emmy's caresses and
kind speeches with something very like gratitude, and an emotion which,
if it was not lasting, for a moment was almost genuine. That was a
lucky stroke of hers about the child "torn from her arms shrieking." It
was by that harrowing misfortune that Becky had won her friend back,
and it was one of the very first points, we may be certain, upon which
our poor simple little Emmy began to talk to her new-found acquaintance.
"And so they took your darling child from you?" our simpleton cried
out. "Oh, Rebecca, my poor dear suffering friend, I know what it is to
lose a boy, and to feel for those who have lost one. But please Heaven
yours will be restored to you, as a merciful merciful Providence has
brought me back mine."
"The child, my child? Oh, yes, my agonies were frightful," Becky owned,
not perhaps without a twinge of conscience. It jarred upon her to be
obliged to commence instantly to tell lies in reply to so much
confidence and simplicity. But that is the misfortune of beginning
with this kind of forgery. When one fib becomes due as it were, you
must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of
your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of
detection increases every day.
"My agonies," Becky continued, "were terrible (I hope she won't sit
down on the bottle) when they took him away from me; I thought I should
die; but I fortunately had a brain fever, during which my doctor gave
me up, and--and I recovered, and--and here I am, poor and friendless."
"How old is he?" Emmy asked.
"Eleven," said Becky.
"Eleven!" cried the other. "Why, he was born the same year with
Georgy, who is--"
"I know, I know," Becky cried out, who had in fact quite forgotten all
about little Rawdon's age. "Grief has made me forget so many things,
dearest Amelia. I am very much changed: half-wild sometimes. He was
eleven when they took him away from me. Bless his sweet face; I have
never seen it again."
"Was he fair or dark?" went on that absurd little Emmy. "Show me his
hair."
Becky almost laughed at her simplicity. "Not to-day, love--some other
time, when my trunks arrive from Leipzig, whence I came to this
place--and a little drawing of him, which I made in happy days."
"Poor Becky, poor Becky!" said Emmy. "How thankful, how thankful I
ought to be"; (though I doubt whether that practice of piety inculcated
upon us by our womankind in early youth, namely, to be thankful because
we are better off than somebody else, be a very rational religious
exercise) and then she began to think, as usual, how her son was the
handsomest, the best, and the cleverest boy in the whole world.