Vanity Fair
that she advertised one at Leipzig, and the Burschen took many tickets.
But she went off without singing. She said in the coach yesterday that
her pianist had fallen ill at Dresden. She cannot sing, it is my
belief: her voice is as cracked as thine, O thou beer-soaking Renowner!"
"It is cracked; I hear her trying out of her window a schrecklich
English ballad, called 'De Rose upon de Balgony.'"
"Saufen and singen go not together," observed Fritz with the red nose,
who evidently preferred the former amusement. "No, thou shalt take
none of her tickets. She won money at the trente and quarante last
night. I saw her: she made a little English boy play for her. We will
spend thy money there or at the theatre, or we will treat her to French
wine or Cognac in the Aurelius Garden, but the tickets we will not buy.
What sayest thou? Yet, another mug of beer?" and one and another
successively having buried their blond whiskers in the mawkish draught,
curled them and swaggered off into the fair.
The Major, who had seen the key of No. 90 put up on its hook and had
heard the conversation of the two young University bloods, was not at a
loss to understand that their talk related to Becky. "The little devil
is at her old tricks," he thought, and he smiled as he recalled old
days, when he had witnessed the desperate flirtation with Jos and the
ludicrous end of that adventure. He and George had often laughed over
it subsequently, and until a few weeks after George's marriage, when he
also was caught in the little Circe's toils, and had an understanding
with her which his comrade certainly suspected, but preferred to
ignore. William was too much hurt or ashamed to ask to fathom that
disgraceful mystery, although once, and evidently with remorse on his
mind, George had alluded to it. It was on the morning of Waterloo, as
the young men stood together in front of their line, surveying the
black masses of Frenchmen who crowned the opposite heights, and as the
rain was coming down, "I have been mixing in a foolish intrigue with a
woman," George said. "I am glad we were marched away. If I drop, I
hope Emmy will never know of that business. I wish to God it had never
been begun!" And William was pleased to think, and had more than once
soothed poor George's widow with the narrative, that Osborne, after
quitting his wife, and after the action of Quatre Bras, on the first
day, spoke gravely and affectionately to his comrade of his father and
his wife. On these facts, too, William had insisted very strongly in
his conversations with the elder Osborne, and had thus been the means
of reconciling the old gentleman to his son's memory, just at the close
of the elder man's life.
"And so this devil is still going on with her intrigues," thought
William. "I wish she were a hundred miles from here. She brings
mischief wherever she goes." And he was pursuing these forebodings and
this uncomfortable train of thought, with his head between his hands,
and the Pumpernickel Gazette of last week unread under his nose, when
somebody tapped his shoulder with a parasol, and he looked up and saw
Mrs. Amelia.
This woman had a way of tyrannizing over Major Dobbin (for the weakest
of all people will domineer over somebody), and she ordered him about,
and patted him, and made him fetch and carry just as if he was a great
Newfoundland dog. He liked, so to speak, to jump into the water if she
said "High, Dobbin!" and to trot behind her with her reticule in his
mouth. This history has been written to very little purpose if the
reader has not perceived that the Major was a spooney.
"Why did you not wait for me, sir, to escort me downstairs?" she said,
giving a little toss of her head and a most sarcastic curtsey.
"I couldn't stand up in the passage," he answered with a comical
deprecatory look; and, delighted to give her his arm and to take her
out of the horrid smoky place, he would have walked off without even so
much as remembering the waiter, had not the young fellow run after him
and stopped him on the threshold of the Elephant to make him pay for
the beer which he had not consumed. Emmy laughed: she called him a
naughty man, who wanted to run away in debt, and, in fact, made some
jokes suitable to the occasion and the small-beer. She was in high
spirits and good humour, and tripped across the market-place very
briskly. She wanted to see Jos that instant. The Major laughed at the
impetuous affection Mrs. Amelia exhibited; for, in truth, it was not
very often that she wanted her brother "that instant." They found the
civilian in his saloon on the first-floor; he had been pacing the room,
and biting his nails, and looking over the market-place towards the
Elephant a hundred times at least during the past hour whilst Emmy was
closeted with her friend in the garret and the Major was beating the
tattoo on the sloppy tables of the public room below, and he was, on
his side too, very anxious to see Mrs. Osborne.
"Well?" said he.
"The poor dear creature, how she has suffered!" Emmy said.
"God bless my soul, yes," Jos said, wagging his head, so that his
cheeks quivered like jellies.
"She may have Payne's room, who can go upstairs," Emmy continued. Payne
was a staid English maid and personal attendant upon Mrs. Osborne, to
whom the courier, as in duty bound, paid court, and whom Georgy used to
"lark" dreadfully with accounts of German robbers and ghosts. She
passed her time chiefly in grumbling, in ordering about her mistress,
and in stating her intention to return the next morning to her native
village of Clapham. "She may have Payne's room," Emmy said.
"Why, you don't mean to say you are going to have that woman into the
house?" bounced out the Major, jumping up.
"Of course we are," said Amelia in the most innocent way in the world.
"Don't be angry and break the furniture, Major Dobbin. Of course we
are going to have her here."
"Of course, my dear," Jos said.
"The poor creature, after all her sufferings," Emmy continued; "her
horrid banker broken and run away; her husband--wicked wretch--having
deserted her and taken her child away from her" (here she doubled her
two little fists and held them in a most menacing attitude before her,
so that the Major was charmed to see such a dauntless virago) "the poor
dear thing! quite alone and absolutely forced to give lessons in
singing to get her bread--and not have her here!"
"Take lessons, my dear Mrs. George," cried the Major, "but don't have
her in the house. I implore you don't."
"Pooh," said Jos.
"You who are always good and kind--always used to be at any rate--I'm
astonished at you, Major William," Amelia cried. "Why, what is the
moment to help her but when she is so miserable? Now is the time to be
of service to her. The oldest friend I ever had, and not--"
"She was not always your friend, Amelia," the Major said, for he was
quite angry. This allusion was too much for Emmy, who, looking the
Major almost fiercely in the face, said, "For shame, Major Dobbin!" and
after having fired this shot, she walked out of the room with a most
majestic air and shut her own door briskly on herself and her outraged
dignity.
"To allude to THAT!" she said, when the door was closed. "Oh, it was
cruel of him to remind me of it," and she looked up at George's
picture, which hung there as usual, with the portrait of the boy
underneath. "It was cruel of him. If I had forgiven it, ought he to
have spoken? No. And it is from his own lips that I know how wicked
and groundless my jealousy was; and that you were pure--oh, yes, you
were pure, my saint in heaven!"
She paced the room, trembling and indignant. She went and leaned on
the chest of drawers over which the picture hung, and gazed and gazed
at it. Its eyes seemed to look down on her with a reproach that
deepened as she looked. The early dear, dear memories of that brief
prime of love rushed back upon her. The wound which years had scarcely
cicatrized bled afresh, and oh, how bitterly! She could not bear the
reproaches of the husband there before her. It couldn't be. Never,
never.
Poor Dobbin; poor old William! That unlucky word had undone the work
of many a year--the long laborious edifice of a life of love and
constancy--raised too upon what secret and hidden foundations, wherein
lay buried passions, uncounted struggles, unknown sacrifices--a little
word was spoken, and down fell the fair palace of hope--one word, and
away flew the bird which he had been trying all his life to lure!
William, though he saw by Amelia's looks that a great crisis had come,
nevertheless continued to implore Sedley, in the most energetic terms,
to beware of Rebecca; and he eagerly, almost frantically, adjured Jos
not to receive her. He besought Mr. Sedley to inquire at least
regarding her; told him how he had heard that she was in the company of
gamblers and people of ill repute; pointed out what evil she had done
in former days, how she and Crawley had misled poor George into ruin,
how she was now parted from her husband, by her own confession, and,
perhaps, for good reason. What a dangerous companion she would be for
his sister, who knew nothing of the affairs of the world! William
implored Jos, with all the eloquence which he could bring to bear, and
a great deal more energy than this quiet gentleman was ordinarily in
the habit of showing, to keep Rebecca out of his household.
Had he been less violent, or more dexterous, he might have succeeded in
his supplications to Jos; but the civilian was not a little jealous of
the airs of superiority which the Major constantly exhibited towards
him, as he fancied (indeed, he had imparted his opinions to Mr. Kirsch,
the courier, whose bills Major Dobbin checked on this journey, and who
sided with his master), and he began a blustering speech about his
competency to defend his own honour, his desire not to have his affairs
meddled with, his intention, in fine, to rebel against the Major, when
the colloquy--rather a long and stormy one--was put an end to in the
simplest way possible, namely, by the arrival of Mrs. Becky, with a
porter from the Elephant Hotel in charge of her very meagre baggage.
She greeted her host with affectionate respect and made a shrinking,
but amicable salutation to Major Dobbin, who, as her instinct assured
her at once, was her enemy, and had been speaking against her; and the
bustle and clatter consequent upon her arrival brought Amelia out of
her room. Emmy went up and embraced her guest with the greatest
warmth, and took no notice of the Major, except to fling him an angry
look--the most unjust and scornful glance that had perhaps ever
appeared in that poor little woman's face since she was born. But she
had private reasons of her own, and was bent upon being angry with him.
And Dobbin, indignant at the injustice, not at the defeat, went off,
making her a bow quite as haughty as the killing curtsey with which the
little woman chose to bid him farewell.
He being gone, Emmy was particularly lively and affectionate to
Rebecca, and bustled about the apartments and installed her guest in
her room with an eagerness and activity seldom exhibited by our placid
little friend. But when an act of injustice is to be done, especially
by weak people, it is best that it should be done quickly, and Emmy
thought she was displaying a great deal of firmness and proper feeling
and veneration for the late Captain Osborne in her present behaviour.
Georgy came in from the fetes for dinner-time and found four covers
laid as usual; but one of the places was occupied by a lady, instead of
by Major Dobbin. "Hullo! where's Dob?" the young gentleman asked with
his usual simplicity of language. "Major Dobbin is dining out, I