Vanity Fair (29 page)

"Look at them with their hooked beaks," Becky said, getting into the
buggy, her picture under her arm, in great glee. "They're like
vultures after a battle."

"Don't know. Never was in action, my dear. Ask Martingale; he was
in Spain, aide-de-camp to General Blazes."

"He was a very kind old man, Mr. Sedley," Rebecca said; "I'm really
sorry he's gone wrong."

"O stockbrokers—bankrupts—used to it, you know," Rawdon replied,
cutting a fly off the horse's ear.

"I wish we could have afforded some of the plate, Rawdon," the wife
continued sentimentally. "Five-and-twenty guineas was monstrously
dear for that little piano. We chose it at Broadwood's for Amelia,
when she came from school. It only cost five-and-thirty then."

"What-d'-ye-call'em—'Osborne,' will cry off now, I suppose, since
the family is smashed. How cut up your pretty little friend will
be; hey, Becky?"

"I daresay she'll recover it," Becky said with a smile—and they
drove on and talked about something else.

Who Played on the Piano Captain Dobbin Bought

Our surprised story now finds itself for a moment among very famous
events and personages, and hanging on to the skirts of history.
When the eagles of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart, were
flying from Provence, where they had perched after a brief sojourn
in Elba, and from steeple to steeple until they reached the towers
of Notre Dame, I wonder whether the Imperial birds had any eye for a
little corner of the parish of Bloomsbury, London, which you might
have thought so quiet, that even the whirring and flapping of those
mighty wings would pass unobserved there?

"Napoleon has landed at Cannes." Such news might create a panic at
Vienna, and cause Russia to drop his cards, and take Prussia into a
corner, and Talleyrand and Metternich to wag their heads together,
while Prince Hardenberg, and even the present Marquis of
Londonderry, were puzzled; but how was this intelligence to affect a
young lady in Russell Square, before whose door the watchman sang
the hours when she was asleep: who, if she strolled in the square,
was guarded there by the railings and the beadle: who, if she
walked ever so short a distance to buy a ribbon in Southampton Row,
was followed by Black Sambo with an enormous cane: who was always
cared for, dressed, put to bed, and watched over by ever so many
guardian angels, with and without wages? Bon Dieu, I say, is it not
hard that the fateful rush of the great Imperial struggle can't take
place without affecting a poor little harmless girl of eighteen, who
is occupied in billing and cooing, or working muslin collars in
Russell Square? You too, kindly, homely flower!—is the great
roaring war tempest coming to sweep you down, here, although
cowering under the shelter of Holborn? Yes; Napoleon is flinging
his last stake, and poor little Emmy Sedley's happiness forms,
somehow, part of it.

In the first place, her father's fortune was swept down with that
fatal news. All his speculations had of late gone wrong with the
luckless old gentleman. Ventures had failed; merchants had broken;
funds had risen when he calculated they would fall. What need to
particularize? If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how
quick and easy ruin is. Old Sedley had kept his own sad counsel.
Everything seemed to go on as usual in the quiet, opulent house; the
good-natured mistress pursuing, quite unsuspiciously, her bustling
idleness, and daily easy avocations; the daughter absorbed still in
one selfish, tender thought, and quite regardless of all the world
besides, when that final crash came, under which the worthy family
fell.

One night Mrs. Sedley was writing cards for a party; the Osbornes
had given one, and she must not be behindhand; John Sedley, who had
come home very late from the City, sate silent at the chimney side,
while his wife was prattling to him; Emmy had gone up to her room
ailing and low-spirited. "She's not happy," the mother went on.
"George Osborne neglects her. I've no patience with the airs of
those people. The girls have not been in the house these three
weeks; and George has been twice in town without coming. Edward
Dale saw him at the Opera. Edward would marry her I'm sure: and
there's Captain Dobbin who, I think, would—only I hate all army
men. Such a dandy as George has become. With his military airs,
indeed! We must show some folks that we're as good as they. Only
give Edward Dale any encouragement, and you'll see. We must have a
party, Mr. S. Why don't you speak, John? Shall I say Tuesday
fortnight? Why don't you answer? Good God, John, what has happened?"

John Sedley sprang up out of his chair to meet his wife, who ran to
him. He seized her in his arms, and said with a hasty voice, "We're
ruined, Mary. We've got the world to begin over again, dear. It's
best that you should know all, and at once." As he spoke, he
trembled in every limb, and almost fell. He thought the news would
have overpowered his wife—his wife, to whom he had never said a
hard word. But it was he that was the most moved, sudden as the
shock was to her. When he sank back into his seat, it was the wife
that took the office of consoler. She took his trembling hand, and
kissed it, and put it round her neck: she called him her John—her
dear John—her old man—her kind old man; she poured out a hundred
words of incoherent love and tenderness; her faithful voice and
simple caresses wrought this sad heart up to an inexpressible
delight and anguish, and cheered and solaced his over-burdened soul.

Only once in the course of the long night as they sate together, and
poor Sedley opened his pent-up soul, and told the story of his
losses and embarrassments—the treason of some of his oldest
friends, the manly kindness of some, from whom he never could have
expected it—in a general confession—only once did the faithful
wife give way to emotion.

"My God, my God, it will break Emmy's heart," she said.

The father had forgotten the poor girl. She was lying, awake and
unhappy, overhead. In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents,
she was alone. To how many people can any one tell all? Who will
be open where there is no sympathy, or has call to speak to those
who never can understand? Our gentle Amelia was thus solitary. She
had no confidante, so to speak, ever since she had anything to
confide. She could not tell the old mother her doubts and cares;
the would-be sisters seemed every day more strange to her. And she
had misgivings and fears which she dared not acknowledge to herself,
though she was always secretly brooding over them.

Her heart tried to persist in asserting that George Osborne was
worthy and faithful to her, though she knew otherwise. How many a
thing had she said, and got no echo from him. How many suspicions
of selfishness and indifference had she to encounter and obstinately
overcome. To whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily
struggles and tortures? Her hero himself only half understood her.
She did not dare to own that the man she loved was her inferior; or
to feel that she had given her heart away too soon. Given once, the
pure bashful maiden was too modest, too tender, too trustful, too
weak, too much woman to recall it. We are Turks with the affections
of our women; and have made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We
let their bodies go abroad liberally enough, with smiles and
ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise them instead of veils and
yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by only one man, and they
obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at home as our slaves—
ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.

So imprisoned and tortured was this gentle little heart, when in the
month of March, Anno Domini 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes, and
Louis XVIII fled, and all Europe was in alarm, and the funds fell,
and old John Sedley was ruined.

We are not going to follow the worthy old stockbroker through those
last pangs and agonies of ruin through which he passed before his
commercial demise befell. They declared him at the Stock Exchange;
he was absent from his house of business: his bills were protested:
his act of bankruptcy formal. The house and furniture of Russell
Square were seized and sold up, and he and his family were thrust
away, as we have seen, to hide their heads where they might.

John Sedley had not the heart to review the domestic establishment
who have appeared now and anon in our pages and of whom he was now
forced by poverty to take leave. The wages of those worthy people
were discharged with that punctuality which men frequently show who
only owe in great sums—they were sorry to leave good places—but
they did not break their hearts at parting from their adored master
and mistress. Amelia's maid was profuse in condolences, but went
off quite resigned to better herself in a genteeler quarter of the
town. Black Sambo, with the infatuation of his profession,
determined on setting up a public-house. Honest old Mrs. Blenkinsop
indeed, who had seen the birth of Jos and Amelia, and the wooing of
John Sedley and his wife, was for staying by them without wages,
having amassed a considerable sum in their service: and she
accompanied the fallen people into their new and humble place of
refuge, where she tended them and grumbled against them for a while.

Of all Sedley's opponents in his debates with his creditors which
now ensued, and harassed the feelings of the humiliated old
gentleman so severely, that in six weeks he oldened more than he had
done for fifteen years before—the most determined and obstinate
seemed to be John Osborne, his old friend and neighbour—John
Osborne, whom he had set up in life—who was under a hundred
obligations to him—and whose son was to marry Sedley's daughter.
Any one of these circumstances would account for the bitterness of
Osborne's opposition.

When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another,
with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it
were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger
would be. To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude
in such a case, you are bound to prove the other party's crime. It
is not that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a
speculation—no, no—it is that your partner has led you into it by
the basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a
mere sense of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the
fallen man is a villain—otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch
himself.

And as a general rule, which may make all creditors who are inclined
to be severe pretty comfortable in their minds, no men embarrassed
are altogether honest, very likely. They conceal something; they
exaggerate chances of good luck; hide away the real state of
affairs; say that things are flourishing when they are hopeless,
keep a smiling face (a dreary smile it is) upon the verge of
bankruptcy—are ready to lay hold of any pretext for delay or of any
money, so as to stave off the inevitable ruin a few days longer.
"Down with such dishonesty," says the creditor in triumph, and
reviles his sinking enemy. "You fool, why do you catch at a straw?"
calm good sense says to the man that is drowning. "You villain, why
do you shrink from plunging into the irretrievable Gazette?" says
prosperity to the poor devil battling in that black gulf. Who has
not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and
honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they
fall out on money matters? Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I
suppose, and the world is a rogue.

Then Osborne had the intolerable sense of former benefits to goad
and irritate him: these are always a cause of hostility aggravated.
Finally, he had to break off the match between Sedley's daughter and
his son; and as it had gone very far indeed, and as the poor girl's
happiness and perhaps character were compromised, it was necessary
to show the strongest reasons for the rupture, and for John Osborne
to prove John Sedley to be a very bad character indeed.

At the meetings of creditors, then, he comported himself with a
savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in
breaking the heart of that ruined bankrupt man. On George's
intercourse with Amelia he put an instant veto—menacing the youth
with maledictions if he broke his commands, and vilipending the poor
innocent girl as the basest and most artful of vixens. One of the
great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and
believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be
consistent.

When the great crash came—the announcement of ruin, and the
departure from Russell Square, and the declaration that all was over
between her and George—all over between her and love, her and
happiness, her and faith in the world—a brutal letter from John
Osborne told her in a few curt lines that her father's conduct had
been of such a nature that all engagements between the families were
at an end—when the final award came, it did not shock her so much
as her parents, as her mother rather expected (for John Sedley
himself was entirely prostrate in the ruins of his own affairs and
shattered honour). Amelia took the news very palely and calmly. It
was only the confirmation of the dark presages which had long gone
before. It was the mere reading of the sentence—of the crime she
had long ago been guilty—the crime of loving wrongly, too
violently, against reason. She told no more of her thoughts now than
she had before. She seemed scarcely more unhappy now when convinced
all hope was over, than before when she felt but dared not confess
that it was gone. So she changed from the large house to the small
one without any mark or difference; remained in her little room for
the most part; pined silently; and died away day by day. I do not
mean to say that all females are so. My dear Miss Bullock, I do not
think your heart would break in this way. You are a strong-minded
young woman with proper principles. I do not venture to say that
mine would; it has suffered, and, it must be confessed, survived.
But there are some souls thus gently constituted, thus frail, and
delicate, and tender.