Vanity Fair (99 page)

"It's a fat one and a thin one," Mr. Bluck said as a thundering
knock came to the door.

Everybody was interested, from the domestic chaplain himself, who
hoped he saw the fathers of some future pupils, down to Master
Georgy, glad of any pretext for laying his book down.

The boy in the shabby livery with the faded copper buttons, who
always thrust himself into the tight coat to open the door, came
into the study and said, "Two gentlemen want to see Master Osborne."
The professor had had a trifling altercation in the morning with
that young gentleman, owing to a difference about the introduction
of crackers in school-time; but his face resumed its habitual
expression of bland courtesy as he said, "Master Osborne, I give you
full permission to go and see your carriage friends—to whom I beg
you to convey the respectful compliments of myself and Mrs. Veal."

Georgy went into the reception-room and saw two strangers, whom he
looked at with his head up, in his usual haughty manner. One was
fat, with mustachios, and the other was lean and long, in a blue
frock-coat, with a brown face and a grizzled head.

"My God, how like he is!" said the long gentleman with a start.
"Can you guess who we are, George?"

The boy's face flushed up, as it did usually when he was moved, and
his eyes brightened. "I don't know the other," he said, "but I
should think you must be Major Dobbin."

Indeed it was our old friend. His voice trembled with pleasure as
he greeted the boy, and taking both the other's hands in his own,
drew the lad to him.

"Your mother has talked to you about me—has she?" he said.

"That she has," Georgy answered, "hundreds and hundreds of times."

Eothen

It was one of the many causes for personal pride with which old
Osborne chose to recreate himself that Sedley, his ancient rival,
enemy, and benefactor, was in his last days so utterly defeated and
humiliated as to be forced to accept pecuniary obligations at the
hands of the man who had most injured and insulted him. The
successful man of the world cursed the old pauper and relieved him
from time to time. As he furnished George with money for his
mother, he gave the boy to understand by hints, delivered in his
brutal, coarse way, that George's maternal grandfather was but a
wretched old bankrupt and dependant, and that John Sedley might
thank the man to whom he already owed ever so much money for the aid
which his generosity now chose to administer. George carried the
pompous supplies to his mother and the shattered old widower whom it
was now the main business of her life to tend and comfort. The
little fellow patronized the feeble and disappointed old man.

It may have shown a want of "proper pride" in Amelia that she chose
to accept these money benefits at the hands of her father's enemy.
But proper pride and this poor lady had never had much acquaintance
together. A disposition naturally simple and demanding protection; a
long course of poverty and humility, of daily privations, and hard
words, of kind offices and no returns, had been her lot ever since
womanhood almost, or since her luckless marriage with George
Osborne. You who see your betters bearing up under this shame every
day, meekly suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and
unpitied, poor, and rather despised for their poverty, do you ever
step down from your prosperity and wash the feet of these poor
wearied beggars? The very thought of them is odious and low. "There
must be classes—there must be rich and poor," Dives says, smacking
his claret (it is well if he even sends the broken meat out to
Lazarus sitting under the window). Very true; but think how
mysterious and often unaccountable it is—that lottery of life which
gives to this man the purple and fine linen and sends to the other
rags for garments and dogs for comforters.

So I must own that, without much repining, on the contrary with
something akin to gratitude, Amelia took the crumbs that her father-
in-law let drop now and then, and with them fed her own parent.
Directly she understood it to be her duty, it was this young woman's
nature (ladies, she is but thirty still, and we choose to call her a
young woman even at that age) it was, I say, her nature to sacrifice
herself and to fling all that she had at the feet of the beloved
object. During what long thankless nights had she worked out her
fingers for little Georgy whilst at home with her; what buffets,
scorns, privations, poverties had she endured for father and mother!
And in the midst of all these solitary resignations and unseen
sacrifices, she did not respect herself any more than the world
respected her, but I believe thought in her heart that she was a
poor-spirited, despicable little creature, whose luck in life was
only too good for her merits. O you poor women! O you poor secret
martyrs and victims, whose life is a torture, who are stretched on
racks in your bedrooms, and who lay your heads down on the block
daily at the drawing-room table; every man who watches your pains,
or peers into those dark places where the torture is administered to
you, must pity you—and—and thank God that he has a beard. I
recollect seeing, years ago, at the prisons for idiots and madmen at
Bicetre, near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under the bondage of
his imprisonment and his personal infirmity, to whom one of our
party gave a halfpenny worth of snuff in a cornet or "screw" of
paper. The kindness was too much for the poor epileptic creature.
He cried in an anguish of delight and gratitude: if anybody gave
you and me a thousand a year, or saved our lives, we could not be so
affected. And so, if you properly tyrannize over a woman, you will
find a h'p'orth of kindness act upon her and bring tears into her
eyes, as though you were an angel benefiting her.

Some such boons as these were the best which Fortune allotted to
poor little Amelia. Her life, begun not unprosperously, had come
down to this—to a mean prison and a long, ignoble bondage. Little
George visited her captivity sometimes and consoled it with feeble
gleams of encouragement. Russell Square was the boundary of her
prison: she might walk thither occasionally, but was always back to
sleep in her cell at night; to perform cheerless duties; to watch by
thankless sick-beds; to suffer the harassment and tyranny of
querulous disappointed old age. How many thousands of people are
there, women for the most part, who are doomed to endure this long
slavery?—who are hospital nurses without wages—sisters of Charity,
if you like, without the romance and the sentiment of sacrifice—who
strive, fast, watch, and suffer, unpitied, and fade away ignobly and
unknown.

The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of
mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good,
and wise, and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked.
Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those
who are less lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have
you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation,
whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's
accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.

They buried Amelia's mother in the churchyard at Brompton, upon just
such a rainy, dark day as Amelia recollected when first she had been
there to marry George. Her little boy sat by her side in pompous new
sables. She remembered the old pew-woman and clerk. Her thoughts
were away in other times as the parson read. But that she held
George's hand in her own, perhaps she would have liked to change
places with.... Then, as usual, she felt ashamed of her selfish
thoughts and prayed inwardly to be strengthened to do her duty.

So she determined with all her might and strength to try and make
her old father happy. She slaved, toiled, patched, and mended, sang
and played backgammon, read out the newspaper, cooked dishes, for
old Sedley, walked him out sedulously into Kensington Gardens or the
Brompton Lanes, listened to his stories with untiring smiles and
affectionate hypocrisy, or sat musing by his side and communing with
her own thoughts and reminiscences, as the old man, feeble and
querulous, sunned himself on the garden benches and prattled about
his wrongs or his sorrows. What sad, unsatisfactory thoughts those
of the widow were! The children running up and down the slopes and
broad paths in the gardens reminded her of George, who was taken
from her; the first George was taken from her; her selfish, guilty
love, in both instances, had been rebuked and bitterly chastised.
She strove to think it was right that she should be so punished.
She was such a miserable wicked sinner. She was quite alone in the
world.

I know that the account of this kind of solitary imprisonment is
insufferably tedious, unless there is some cheerful or humorous
incident to enliven it—a tender gaoler, for instance, or a waggish
commandant of the fortress, or a mouse to come out and play about
Latude's beard and whiskers, or a subterranean passage under the
castle, dug by Trenck with his nails and a toothpick: the historian
has no such enlivening incident to relate in the narrative of
Amelia's captivity. Fancy her, if you please, during this period,
very sad, but always ready to smile when spoken to; in a very mean,
poor, not to say vulgar position of life; singing songs, making
puddings, playing cards, mending stockings, for her old father's
benefit. So, never mind, whether she be a heroine or no; or you and
I, however old, scolding, and bankrupt—may we have in our last days
a kind soft shoulder on which to lean and a gentle hand to soothe
our gouty old pillows.

Old Sedley grew very fond of his daughter after his wife's death,
and Amelia had her consolation in doing her duty by the old man.

But we are not going to leave these two people long in such a low
and ungenteel station of life. Better days, as far as worldly
prosperity went, were in store for both. Perhaps the ingenious
reader has guessed who was the stout gentleman who called upon
Georgy at his school in company with our old friend Major Dobbin.
It was another old acquaintance returned to England, and at a time
when his presence was likely to be of great comfort to his relatives
there.

Major Dobbin having easily succeeded in getting leave from his good-
natured commandant to proceed to Madras, and thence probably to
Europe, on urgent private affairs, never ceased travelling night and
day until he reached his journey's end, and had directed his march
with such celerity that he arrived at Madras in a high fever. His
servants who accompanied him brought him to the house of the friend
with whom he had resolved to stay until his departure for Europe in
a state of delirium; and it was thought for many, many days that he
would never travel farther than the burying-ground of the church of
St. George's, where the troops should fire a salvo over his grave,
and where many a gallant officer lies far away from his home.

Here, as the poor fellow lay tossing in his fever, the people who
watched him might have heard him raving about Amelia. The idea that
he should never see her again depressed him in his lucid hours. He
thought his last day was come, and he made his solemn preparations
for departure, setting his affairs in this world in order and
leaving the little property of which he was possessed to those whom
he most desired to benefit. The friend in whose house he was
located witnessed his testament. He desired to be buried with a
little brown hair-chain which he wore round his neck and which, if
the truth must be known, he had got from Amelia's maid at Brussels,
when the young widow's hair was cut off, during the fever which
prostrated her after the death of George Osborne on the plateau at
Mount St. John.

He recovered, rallied, relapsed again, having undergone such a
process of blood-letting and calomel as showed the strength of his
original constitution. He was almost a skeleton when they put him
on board the Ramchunder East Indiaman, Captain Bragg, from Calcutta,
touching at Madras, and so weak and prostrate that his friend who
had tended him through his illness prophesied that the honest Major
would never survive the voyage, and that he would pass some morning,
shrouded in flag and hammock, over the ship's side, and carrying
down to the sea with him the relic that he wore at his heart. But
whether it was the sea air, or the hope which sprung up in him
afresh, from the day that the ship spread her canvas and stood out
of the roads towards home, our friend began to amend, and he was
quite well (though as gaunt as a greyhound) before they reached the
Cape. "Kirk will be disappointed of his majority this time," he
said with a smile; "he will expect to find himself gazetted by the
time the regiment reaches home." For it must be premised that while
the Major was lying ill at Madras, having made such prodigious haste
to go thither, the gallant —th, which had passed many years abroad,
which after its return from the West Indies had been baulked of its
stay at home by the Waterloo campaign, and had been ordered from
Flanders to India, had received orders home; and the Major might
have accompanied his comrades, had he chosen to wait for their
arrival at Madras.

Perhaps he was not inclined to put himself in his exhausted state
again under the guardianship of Glorvina. "I think Miss O'Dowd would
have done for me," he said laughingly to a fellow-passenger, "if we
had had her on board, and when she had sunk me, she would have
fallen upon you, depend upon it, and carried you in as a prize to
Southampton, Jos, my boy."

For indeed it was no other than our stout friend who was also a
passenger on board the Ramchunder. He had passed ten years in
Bengal. Constant dinners, tiffins, pale ale and claret, the
prodigious labour of cutcherry, and the refreshment of brandy-pawnee
which he was forced to take there, had their effect upon Waterloo
Sedley. A voyage to Europe was pronounced necessary for him—and
having served his full time in India and had fine appointments which
had enabled him to lay by a considerable sum of money, he was free
to come home and stay with a good pension, or to return and resume
that rank in the service to which his seniority and his vast talents
entitled him.