Vanity Fair (62 page)

"Pray, have you any commands for me, Captain Dobbin, or, I beg your
pardon, I should say MAJOR Dobbin, since better men than you are
dead, and you step into their SHOES?" said Mr. Osborne, in that
sarcastic tone which he sometimes was pleased to assume.

"Better men ARE dead," Dobbin replied. "I want to speak to you
about one."

"Make it short, sir," said the other with an oath, scowling at his
visitor.

"I am here as his closest friend," the Major resumed, "and the
executor of his will. He made it before he went into action. Are
you aware how small his means are, and of the straitened
circumstances of his widow?"

"I don't know his widow, sir," Osborne said. "Let her go back to
her father." But the gentleman whom he addressed was determined to
remain in good temper, and went on without heeding the interruption.

"Do you know, sir, Mrs. Osborne's condition? Her life and her reason
almost have been shaken by the blow which has fallen on her. It is
very doubtful whether she will rally. There is a chance left for
her, however, and it is about this I came to speak to you. She will
be a mother soon. Will you visit the parent's offence upon the
child's head? or will you forgive the child for poor George's sake?"

Osborne broke out into a rhapsody of self-praise and imprecations;—
by the first, excusing himself to his own conscience for his
conduct; by the second, exaggerating the undutifulness of George.
No father in all England could have behaved more generously to a
son, who had rebelled against him wickedly. He had died without
even so much as confessing he was wrong. Let him take the
consequences of his undutifulness and folly. As for himself, Mr.
Osborne, he was a man of his word. He had sworn never to speak to
that woman, or to recognize her as his son's wife. "And that's what
you may tell her," he concluded with an oath; "and that's what I
will stick to to the last day of my life."

There was no hope from that quarter then. The widow must live on
her slender pittance, or on such aid as Jos could give her. "I
might tell her, and she would not heed it," thought Dobbin, sadly:
for the poor girl's thoughts were not here at all since her
catastrophe, and, stupefied under the pressure of her sorrow, good
and evil were alike indifferent to her.

So, indeed, were even friendship and kindness. She received them
both uncomplainingly, and having accepted them, relapsed into her
grief.

Suppose some twelve months after the above conversation took place
to have passed in the life of our poor Amelia. She has spent the
first portion of that time in a sorrow so profound and pitiable,
that we who have been watching and describing some of the emotions
of that weak and tender heart, must draw back in the presence of the
cruel grief under which it is bleeding. Tread silently round the
hapless couch of the poor prostrate soul. Shut gently the door of
the dark chamber wherein she suffers, as those kind people did who
nursed her through the first months of her pain, and never left her
until heaven had sent her consolation. A day came—of almost
terrified delight and wonder—when the poor widowed girl pressed a
child upon her breast—a child, with the eyes of George who was
gone—a little boy, as beautiful as a cherub. What a miracle it was
to hear its first cry! How she laughed and wept over it—how love,
and hope, and prayer woke again in her bosom as the baby nestled
there. She was safe. The doctors who attended her, and had feared
for her life or for her brain, had waited anxiously for this crisis
before they could pronounce that either was secure. It was worth
the long months of doubt and dread which the persons who had
constantly been with her had passed, to see her eyes once more
beaming tenderly upon them.

Our friend Dobbin was one of them. It was he who brought her back
to England and to her mother's house; when Mrs. O'Dowd, receiving a
peremptory summons from her Colonel, had been forced to quit her
patient. To see Dobbin holding the infant, and to hear Amelia's
laugh of triumph as she watched him, would have done any man good
who had a sense of humour. William was the godfather of the child,
and exerted his ingenuity in the purchase of cups, spoons, pap-
boats, and corals for this little Christian.

How his mother nursed him, and dressed him, and lived upon him; how
she drove away all nurses, and would scarce allow any hand but her
own to touch him; how she considered that the greatest favour she
could confer upon his godfather, Major Dobbin, was to allow the
Major occasionally to dandle him, need not be told here. This child
was her being. Her existence was a maternal caress. She enveloped
the feeble and unconscious creature with love and worship. It was
her life which the baby drank in from her bosom. Of nights, and
when alone, she had stealthy and intense raptures of motherly love,
such as God's marvellous care has awarded to the female instinct—
joys how far higher and lower than reason—blind beautiful devotions
which only women's hearts know. It was William Dobbin's task to
muse upon these movements of Amelia's, and to watch her heart; and
if his love made him divine almost all the feelings which agitated
it, alas! he could see with a fatal perspicuity that there was no
place there for him. And so, gently, he bore his fate, knowing it,
and content to bear it.

I suppose Amelia's father and mother saw through the intentions of
the Major, and were not ill-disposed to encourage him; for Dobbin
visited their house daily, and stayed for hours with them, or with
Amelia, or with the honest landlord, Mr. Clapp, and his family. He
brought, on one pretext or another, presents to everybody, and
almost every day; and went, with the landlord's little girl, who was
rather a favourite with Amelia, by the name of Major Sugarplums. It
was this little child who commonly acted as mistress of the
ceremonies to introduce him to Mrs. Osborne. She laughed one day
when Major Sugarplums' cab drove up to Fulham, and he descended from
it, bringing out a wooden horse, a drum, a trumpet, and other
warlike toys, for little Georgy, who was scarcely six months old,
and for whom the articles in question were entirely premature.

The child was asleep. "Hush," said Amelia, annoyed, perhaps, at the
creaking of the Major's boots; and she held out her hand; smiling
because William could not take it until he had rid himself of his
cargo of toys. "Go downstairs, little Mary," said he presently to
the child, "I want to speak to Mrs. Osborne." She looked up rather
astonished, and laid down the infant on its bed.

"I am come to say good-bye, Amelia," said he, taking her slender
little white hand gently.

"Good-bye? and where are you going?" she said, with a smile.

"Send the letters to the agents," he said; "they will forward them;
for you will write to me, won't you? I shall be away a long time."

"I'll write to you about Georgy," she said. "Dear' William, how
good you have been to him and to me. Look at him. Isn't he like an
angel?"

The little pink hands of the child closed mechanically round the
honest soldier's finger, and Amelia looked up in his face with
bright maternal pleasure. The cruellest looks could not have
wounded him more than that glance of hopeless kindness. He bent
over the child and mother. He could not speak for a moment. And it
was only with all his strength that he could force himself to say a
God bless you. "God bless you," said Amelia, and held up her face
and kissed him.

"Hush! Don't wake Georgy!" she added, as William Dobbin went to the
door with heavy steps. She did not hear the noise of his cab-wheels
as he drove away: she was looking at the child, who was laughing in
his sleep.

How to Live Well on Nothing a Year

I suppose there is no man in this Vanity Fair of ours so little
observant as not to think sometimes about the worldly affairs of his
acquaintances, or so extremely charitable as not to wonder how his
neighbour Jones, or his neighbour Smith, can make both ends meet at
the end of the year. With the utmost regard for the family, for
instance (for I dine with them twice or thrice in the season), I
cannot but own that the appearance of the Jenkinses in the park, in
the large barouche with the grenadier-footmen, will surprise and
mystify me to my dying day: for though I know the equipage is only
jobbed, and all the Jenkins people are on board wages, yet those
three men and the carriage must represent an expense of six hundred
a year at the very least—and then there are the splendid dinners,
the two boys at Eton, the prize governess and masters for the girls,
the trip abroad, or to Eastbourne or Worthing, in the autumn, the
annual ball with a supper from Gunter's (who, by the way, supplies
most of the first-rate dinners which J. gives, as I know very well,
having been invited to one of them to fill a vacant place, when I
saw at once that these repasts are very superior to the common run
of entertainments for which the humbler sort of J.'s acquaintances
get cards)—who, I say, with the most good-natured feelings in the
world, can help wondering how the Jenkinses make out matters? What
is Jenkins? We all know—Commissioner of the Tape and Sealing Wax
Office, with 1200 pounds a year for a salary. Had his wife a
private fortune? Pooh!—Miss Flint—one of eleven children of a
small squire in Buckinghamshire. All she ever gets from her family
is a turkey at Christmas, in exchange for which she has to board two
or three of her sisters in the off season, and lodge and feed her
brothers when they come to town. How does Jenkins balance his
income? I say, as every friend of his must say, How is it that he
has not been outlawed long since, and that he ever came back (as he
did to the surprise of everybody) last year from Boulogne?

"I" is here introduced to personify the world in general—the Mrs.
Grundy of each respected reader's private circle—every one of whom
can point to some families of his acquaintance who live nobody knows
how. Many a glass of wine have we all of us drunk, I have very
little doubt, hob-and-nobbing with the hospitable giver and
wondering how the deuce he paid for it.

Some three or four years after his stay in Paris, when Rawdon
Crawley and his wife were established in a very small comfortable
house in Curzon Street, May Fair, there was scarcely one of the
numerous friends whom they entertained at dinner that did not ask
the above question regarding them. The novelist, it has been said
before, knows everything, and as I am in a situation to be able to
tell the public how Crawley and his wife lived without any income,
may I entreat the public newspapers which are in the habit of
extracting portions of the various periodical works now published
not to reprint the following exact narrative and calculations—of
which I ought, as the discoverer (and at some expense, too), to have
the benefit? My son, I would say, were I blessed with a child—you
may by deep inquiry and constant intercourse with him learn how a
man lives comfortably on nothing a year. But it is best not to be
intimate with gentlemen of this profession and to take the
calculations at second hand, as you do logarithms, for to work them
yourself, depend upon it, will cost you something considerable.

On nothing per annum then, and during a course of some two or three
years, of which we can afford to give but a very brief history,
Crawley and his wife lived very happily and comfortably at Paris.
It was in this period that he quitted the Guards and sold out of the
army. When we find him again, his mustachios and the title of
Colonel on his card are the only relics of his military profession.

It has been mentioned that Rebecca, soon after her arrival in Paris,
took a very smart and leading position in the society of that
capital, and was welcomed at some of the most distinguished houses
of the restored French nobility. The English men of fashion in
Paris courted her, too, to the disgust of the ladies their wives,
who could not bear the parvenue. For some months the salons of the
Faubourg St. Germain, in which her place was secured, and the
splendours of the new Court, where she was received with much
distinction, delighted and perhaps a little intoxicated Mrs.
Crawley, who may have been disposed during this period of elation to
slight the people—honest young military men mostly—who formed her
husband's chief society.

But the Colonel yawned sadly among the Duchesses and great ladies of
the Court. The old women who played ecarte made such a noise about
a five-franc piece that it was not worth Colonel Crawley's while to
sit down at a card-table. The wit of their conversation he could
not appreciate, being ignorant of their language. And what good
could his wife get, he urged, by making curtsies every night to a
whole circle of Princesses? He left Rebecca presently to frequent
these parties alone, resuming his own simple pursuits and amusements
amongst the amiable friends of his own choice.

The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he lives elegantly on
nothing a year, we use the word "nothing" to signify something
unknown; meaning, simply, that we don't know how the gentleman in
question defrays the expenses of his establishment. Now, our friend
the Colonel had a great aptitude for all games of chance: and
exercising himself, as he continually did, with the cards, the dice-
box, or the cue, it is natural to suppose that he attained a much
greater skill in the use of these articles than men can possess who
only occasionally handle them. To use a cue at billiards well is
like using a pencil, or a German flute, or a small-sword—you cannot
master any one of these implements at first, and it is only by
repeated study and perseverance, joined to a natural taste, that a
man can excel in the handling of either. Now Crawley, from being
only a brilliant amateur, had grown to be a consummate master of
billiards. Like a great General, his genius used to rise with the
danger, and when the luck had been unfavourable to him for a whole
game, and the bets were consequently against him, he would, with
consummate skill and boldness, make some prodigious hits which would
restore the battle, and come in a victor at the end, to the
astonishment of everybody—of everybody, that is, who was a stranger
to his play. Those who were accustomed to see it were cautious how
they staked their money against a man of such sudden resources and
brilliant and overpowering skill.