Vanity Fair (118 page)

Emmy was not very happy after her heroic sacrifice. She was very
distraite, nervous, silent, and ill to please. The family had never
known her so peevish. She grew pale and ill. She used to try to
sing certain songs ("Einsam bin ich nicht alleine," was one of them,
that tender love-song of Weber's which in old-fashioned days, young
ladies, and when you were scarcely born, showed that those who lived
before you knew too how to love and to sing) certain songs, I say,
to which the Major was partial; and as she warbled them in the
twilight in the drawing-room, she would break off in the midst of
the song, and walk into her neighbouring apartment, and there, no
doubt, take refuge in the miniature of her husband.

Some books still subsisted, after Dobbin's departure, with his name
written in them; a German dictionary, for instance, with "William
Dobbin, —th Reg.," in the fly-leaf; a guide-book with his initials;
and one or two other volumes which belonged to the Major. Emmy
cleared these away and put them on the drawers, where she placed her
work-box, her desk, her Bible, and prayer-book, under the pictures
of the two Georges. And the Major, on going away, having left his
gloves behind him, it is a fact that Georgy, rummaging his mother's
desk some time afterwards, found the gloves neatly folded up and put
away in what they call the secret-drawers of the desk.

Not caring for society, and moping there a great deal, Emmy's chief
pleasure in the summer evenings was to take long walks with Georgy
(during which Rebecca was left to the society of Mr. Joseph), and
then the mother and son used to talk about the Major in a way which
even made the boy smile. She told him that she thought Major
William was the best man in all the world—the gentlest and the
kindest, the bravest and the humblest. Over and over again she told
him how they owed everything which they possessed in the world to
that kind friend's benevolent care of them; how he had befriended
them all through their poverty and misfortunes; watched over them
when nobody cared for them; how all his comrades admired him though
he never spoke of his own gallant actions; how Georgy's father
trusted him beyond all other men, and had been constantly befriended
by the good William. "Why, when your papa was a little boy," she
said, "he often told me that it was William who defended him against
a tyrant at the school where they were; and their friendship never
ceased from that day until the last, when your dear father fell."

"Did Dobbin kill the man who killed Papa?" Georgy said. "I'm sure
he did, or he would if he could have caught him, wouldn't he,
Mother? When I'm in the Army, won't I hate the French?—that's all."

In such colloquies the mother and the child passed a great deal of
their time together. The artless woman had made a confidant of the
boy. He was as much William's friend as everybody else who knew him
well.

By the way, Mrs. Becky, not to be behind hand in sentiment, had got
a miniature too hanging up in her room, to the surprise and
amusement of most people, and the delight of the original, who was
no other than our friend Jos. On her first coming to favour the
Sedleys with a visit, the little woman, who had arrived with a
remarkably small shabby kit, was perhaps ashamed of the meanness of
her trunks and bandboxes, and often spoke with great respect about
her baggage left behind at Leipzig, which she must have from that
city. When a traveller talks to you perpetually about the splendour
of his luggage, which he does not happen to have with him, my son,
beware of that traveller! He is, ten to one, an impostor.

Neither Jos nor Emmy knew this important maxim. It seemed to them
of no consequence whether Becky had a quantity of very fine clothes
in invisible trunks; but as her present supply was exceedingly
shabby, Emmy supplied her out of her own stores, or took her to the
best milliner in the town and there fitted her out. It was no more
torn collars now, I promise you, and faded silks trailing off at the
shoulder. Becky changed her habits with her situation in life—the
rouge-pot was suspended—another excitement to which she had
accustomed herself was also put aside, or at least only indulged in
in privacy, as when she was prevailed on by Jos of a summer evening,
Emmy and the boy being absent on their walks, to take a little
spirit-and-water. But if she did not indulge—the courier did:
that rascal Kirsch could not be kept from the bottle, nor could he
tell how much he took when he applied to it. He was sometimes
surprised himself at the way in which Mr. Sedley's Cognac
diminished. Well, well, this is a painful subject. Becky did not
very likely indulge so much as she used before she entered a
decorous family.

At last the much-bragged-about boxes arrived from Leipzig; three of
them not by any means large or splendid; nor did Becky appear to
take out any sort of dresses or ornaments from the boxes when they
did arrive. But out of one, which contained a mass of her papers
(it was that very box which Rawdon Crawley had ransacked in his
furious hunt for Becky's concealed money), she took a picture with
great glee, which she pinned up in her room, and to which she
introduced Jos. It was the portrait of a gentleman in pencil, his
face having the advantage of being painted up in pink. He was
riding on an elephant away from some cocoa-nut trees and a pagoda:
it was an Eastern scene.

"God bless my soul, it is my portrait," Jos cried out. It was he
indeed, blooming in youth and beauty, in a nankeen jacket of the cut
of 1804. It was the old picture that used to hang up in Russell
Square.

"I bought it," said Becky in a voice trembling with emotion; "I went
to see if I could be of any use to my kind friends. I have never
parted with that picture—I never will."

"Won't you?" Jos cried with a look of unutterable rapture and
satisfaction. "Did you really now value it for my sake?"

"You know I did, well enough," said Becky; "but why speak—why
think—why look back! It is too late now!"

That evening's conversation was delicious for Jos. Emmy only came in
to go to bed very tired and unwell. Jos and his fair guest had a
charming tete-a-tete, and his sister could hear, as she lay awake in
her adjoining chamber, Rebecca singing over to Jos the old songs of
1815. He did not sleep, for a wonder, that night, any more than
Amelia.

It was June, and, by consequence, high season in London; Jos, who
read the incomparable Galignani (the exile's best friend) through
every day, used to favour the ladies with extracts from his paper
during their breakfast. Every week in this paper there is a full
account of military movements, in which Jos, as a man who had seen
service, was especially interested. On one occasion he read out—
"Arrival of the —th regiment. Gravesend, June 20.—The Ramchunder,
East Indiaman, came into the river this morning, having on board 14
officers, and 132 rank and file of this gallant corps. They have
been absent from England fourteen years, having been embarked the
year after Waterloo, in which glorious conflict they took an active
part, and having subsequently distinguished themselves in the
Burmese war. The veteran colonel, Sir Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., with
his lady and sister, landed here yesterday, with Captains Posky,
Stubble, Macraw, Malony; Lieutenants Smith, Jones, Thompson, F.
Thomson; Ensigns Hicks and Grady; the band on the pier playing the
national anthem, and the crowd loudly cheering the gallant veterans
as they went into Wayte's hotel, where a sumptuous banquet was
provided for the defenders of Old England. During the repast, which
we need not say was served up in Wayte's best style, the cheering
continued so enthusiastically that Lady O'Dowd and the Colonel came
forward to the balcony and drank the healths of their fellow-
countrymen in a bumper of Wayte's best claret."

On a second occasion Jos read a brief announcement—Major Dobbin had
joined the —th regiment at Chatham; and subsequently he promulgated
accounts of the presentations at the Drawing-room of Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., Lady O'Dowd (by Mrs. Malloy Malony of
Ballymalony), and Miss Glorvina O'Dowd (by Lady O'Dowd). Almost
directly after this, Dobbin's name appeared among the Lieutenant-
Colonels: for old Marshal Tiptoff had died during the passage of
the —th from Madras, and the Sovereign was pleased to advance
Colonel Sir Michael O'Dowd to the rank of Major-General on his
return to England, with an intimation that he should be Colonel of
the distinguished regiment which he had so long commanded.

Amelia had been made aware of some of these movements. The
correspondence between George and his guardian had not ceased by any
means: William had even written once or twice to her since his
departure, but in a manner so unconstrainedly cold that the poor
woman felt now in her turn that she had lost her power over him and
that, as he had said, he was free. He had left her, and she was
wretched. The memory of his almost countless services, and lofty
and affectionate regard, now presented itself to her and rebuked her
day and night. She brooded over those recollections according to
her wont, saw the purity and beauty of the affection with which she
had trifled, and reproached herself for having flung away such a
treasure.

It was gone indeed. William had spent it all out. He loved her no
more, he thought, as he had loved her. He never could again. That
sort of regard, which he had proffered to her for so many faithful
years, can't be flung down and shattered and mended so as to show no
scars. The little heedless tyrant had so destroyed it. No, William
thought again and again, "It was myself I deluded and persisted in
cajoling; had she been worthy of the love I gave her, she would have
returned it long ago. It was a fond mistake. Isn't the whole
course of life made up of such? And suppose I had won her, should I
not have been disenchanted the day after my victory? Why pine, or be
ashamed of my defeat?" The more he thought of this long passage of
his life, the more clearly he saw his deception. "I'll go into
harness again," he said, "and do my duty in that state of life in
which it has pleased Heaven to place me. I will see that the
buttons of the recruits are properly bright and that the sergeants
make no mistakes in their accounts. I will dine at mess and listen
to the Scotch surgeon telling his stories. When I am old and
broken, I will go on half-pay, and my old sisters shall scold me. I
have geliebt und gelebet, as the girl in 'Wallenstein' says. I am
done. Pay the bills and get me a cigar: find out what there is at
the play to-night, Francis; to-morrow we cross by the Batavier." He
made the above speech, whereof Francis only heard the last two
lines, pacing up and down the Boompjes at Rotterdam. The Batavier
was lying in the basin. He could see the place on the quarter-deck
where he and Emmy had sat on the happy voyage out. What had that
little Mrs. Crawley to say to him? Psha; to-morrow we will put to
sea, and return to England, home, and duty!

After June all the little Court Society of Pumpernickel used to
separate, according to the German plan, and make for a hundred
watering-places, where they drank at the wells, rode upon donkeys,
gambled at the redoutes if they had money and a mind, rushed with
hundreds of their kind to gourmandise at the tables d'hote, and
idled away the summer. The English diplomatists went off to
Teoplitz and Kissingen, their French rivals shut up their
chancellerie and whisked away to their darling Boulevard de Gand.
The Transparent reigning family took too to the waters, or retired
to their hunting lodges. Everybody went away having any pretensions
to politeness, and of course, with them, Doctor von Glauber, the
Court Doctor, and his Baroness. The seasons for the baths were the
most productive periods of the Doctor's practice—he united business
with pleasure, and his chief place of resort was Ostend, which is
much frequented by Germans, and where the Doctor treated himself and
his spouse to what he called a "dib" in the sea.

His interesting patient, Jos, was a regular milch-cow to the Doctor,
and he easily persuaded the civilian, both for his own health's sake
and that of his charming sister, which was really very much
shattered, to pass the summer at that hideous seaport town. Emmy
did not care where she went much. Georgy jumped at the idea of a
move. As for Becky, she came as a matter of course in the fourth
place inside of the fine barouche Mr. Jos had bought, the two
domestics being on the box in front. She might have some misgivings
about the friends whom she should meet at Ostend, and who might be
likely to tell ugly stories—but bah! she was strong enough to hold
her own. She had cast such an anchor in Jos now as would require a
strong storm to shake. That incident of the picture had finished
him. Becky took down her elephant and put it into the little box
which she had had from Amelia ever so many years ago. Emmy also
came off with her Lares—her two pictures—and the party, finally,
were, lodged in an exceedingly dear and uncomfortable house at
Ostend.

There Amelia began to take baths and get what good she could from
them, and though scores of people of Becky's acquaintance passed her
and cut her, yet Mrs. Osborne, who walked about with her, and who
knew nobody, was not aware of the treatment experienced by the
friend whom she had chosen so judiciously as a companion; indeed,
Becky never thought fit to tell her what was passing under her
innocent eyes.

Some of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acquaintances, however, acknowledged
her readily enough,—perhaps more readily than she would have
desired. Among those were Major Loder (unattached), and Captain
Rook (late of the Rifles), who might be seen any day on the Dike,
smoking and staring at the women, and who speedily got an
introduction to the hospitable board and select circle of Mr. Joseph
Sedley. In fact they would take no denial; they burst into the
house whether Becky was at home or not, walked into Mrs. Osborne's
drawing-room, which they perfumed with their coats and mustachios,
called Jos "Old buck," and invaded his dinner-table, and laughed and
drank for long hours there.