Vanity Fair
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 ha'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.
He was rather thinner than when we last saw him, but had gained in
majesty and solemnity of demeanour. He had resumed the mustachios to
which his services at Waterloo entitled him, and swaggered about on
deck in a magnificent velvet cap with a gold band and a profuse
ornamentation of pins and jewellery about his person. He took breakfast
in his cabin and dressed as solemnly to appear on the quarter-deck as
if he were going to turn out for Bond Street, or the Course at
Calcutta. He brought a native servant with him, who was his valet and
pipe-bearer and who wore the Sedley crest in silver on his turban.
That oriental menial had a wretched life under the tyranny of Jos
Sedley. Jos was as vain of his person as a woman, and took as long a
time at his toilette as any fading beauty. The youngsters among the
passengers, Young Chaffers of the 150th, and poor little Ricketts,
coming home after his third fever, used to draw out Sedley at the
cuddy-table and make him tell prodigious stories about himself and his
exploits against tigers and Napoleon. He was great when he visited the
Emperor's tomb at Longwood, when to these gentlemen and the young
officers of the ship, Major Dobbin not being by, he described the whole
battle of Waterloo and all but announced that Napoleon never would have
gone to Saint Helena at all but for him, Jos Sedley.
After leaving St. Helena he became very generous, disposing of a great
quantity of ship stores, claret, preserved meats, and great casks
packed with soda-water, brought out for his private delectation. There
were no ladies on board; the Major gave the pas of precedency to the
civilian, so that he was the first dignitary at table, and treated by
Captain Bragg and the officers of the Ramchunder with the respect which
his rank warranted. He disappeared rather in a panic during a
two-days' gale, in which he had the portholes of his cabin battened
down, and remained in his cot reading the Washerwoman of Finchley
Common, left on board the Ramchunder by the Right Honourable the Lady
Emily Hornblower, wife of the Rev. Silas Hornblower, when on their
passage out to the Cape, where the Reverend gentleman was a missionary;
but, for common reading, he had brought a stock of novels and plays