Vanity Fair
him, it is a fact that Georgy, rummaging his mother's desk some time
afterwards, found the gloves neatly folded up and put away in what they
call the secret-drawers of the desk.
Not caring for society, and moping there a great deal, Emmy's chief
pleasure in the summer evenings was to take long walks with Georgy
(during which Rebecca was left to the society of Mr. Joseph), and then
the mother and son used to talk about the Major in a way which even
made the boy smile. She told him that she thought Major William was
the best man in all the world--the gentlest and the kindest, the
bravest and the humblest. Over and over again she told him how they
owed everything which they possessed in the world to that kind friend's
benevolent care of them; how he had befriended them all through their
poverty and misfortunes; watched over them when nobody cared for them;
how all his comrades admired him though he never spoke of his own
gallant actions; how Georgy's father trusted him beyond all other men,
and had been constantly befriended by the good William. "Why, when
your papa was a little boy," she said, "he often told me that it was
William who defended him against a tyrant at the school where they
were; and their friendship never ceased from that day until the last,
when your dear father fell."
"Did Dobbin kill the man who killed Papa?" Georgy said. "I'm sure he
did, or he would if he could have caught him, wouldn't he, Mother? When
I'm in the Army, won't I hate the French?--that's all."
In such colloquies the mother and the child passed a great deal of
their time together. The artless woman had made a confidant of the
boy. He was as much William's friend as everybody else who knew him
well.
By the way, Mrs. Becky, not to be behind hand in sentiment, had got a
miniature too hanging up in her room, to the surprise and amusement of
most people, and the delight of the original, who was no other than our
friend Jos. On her first coming to favour the Sedleys with a visit,
the little woman, who had arrived with a remarkably small shabby kit,
was perhaps ashamed of the meanness of her trunks and bandboxes, and
often spoke with great respect about her baggage left behind at
Leipzig, which she must have from that city. When a traveller talks to
you perpetually about the splendour of his luggage, which he does not
happen to have with him, my son, beware of that traveller! He is, ten
to one, an impostor.
Neither Jos nor Emmy knew this important maxim. It seemed to them of
no consequence whether Becky had a quantity of very fine clothes in
invisible trunks; but as her present supply was exceedingly shabby,
Emmy supplied her out of her own stores, or took her to the best
milliner in the town and there fitted her out. It was no more torn
collars now, I promise you, and faded silks trailing off at the
shoulder. Becky changed her habits with her situation in life--the
rouge-pot was suspended--another excitement to which she had accustomed
herself was also put aside, or at least only indulged in in privacy, as
when she was prevailed on by Jos of a summer evening, Emmy and the boy
being absent on their walks, to take a little spirit-and-water. But if
she did not indulge--the courier did: that rascal Kirsch could not be
kept from the bottle, nor could he tell how much he took when he
applied to it. He was sometimes surprised himself at the way in which
Mr. Sedley's Cognac diminished. Well, well, this is a painful subject.
Becky did not very likely indulge so much as she used before she
entered a decorous family.
At last the much-bragged-about boxes arrived from Leipzig; three of
them not by any means large or splendid; nor did Becky appear to take
out any sort of dresses or ornaments from the boxes when they did
arrive. But out of one, which contained a mass of her papers (it was
that very box which Rawdon Crawley had ransacked in his furious hunt
for Becky's concealed money), she took a picture with great glee, which
she pinned up in her room, and to which she introduced Jos. It was the
portrait of a gentleman in pencil, his face having the advantage of
being painted up in pink. He was riding on an elephant away from some
cocoa-nut trees and a pagoda: it was an Eastern scene.
"God bless my soul, it is my portrait," Jos cried out. It was he
indeed, blooming in youth and beauty, in a nankeen jacket of the cut of
1804. It was the old picture that used to hang up in Russell Square.
"I bought it," said Becky in a voice trembling with emotion; "I went to
see if I could be of any use to my kind friends. I have never parted
with that picture--I never will."
"Won't you?" Jos cried with a look of unutterable rapture and
satisfaction. "Did you really now value it for my sake?"
"You know I did, well enough," said Becky; "but why speak--why
think--why look back! It is too late now!"
That evening's conversation was delicious for Jos. Emmy only came in to
go to bed very tired and unwell. Jos and his fair guest had a charming
tete-a-tete, and his sister could hear, as she lay awake in her
adjoining chamber, Rebecca singing over to Jos the old songs of 1815.
He did not sleep, for a wonder, that night, any more than Amelia.
It was June, and, by consequence, high season in London; Jos, who read
the incomparable Galignani (the exile's best friend) through every day,
used to favour the ladies with extracts from his paper during their
breakfast. Every week in this paper there is a full account of
military movements, in which Jos, as a man who had seen service, was
especially interested. On one occasion he read out--"Arrival of the
--th regiment. Gravesend, June 20.--The Ramchunder, East Indiaman,
came into the river this morning, having on board 14 officers, and 132
rank and file of this gallant corps. They have been absent from
England fourteen years, having been embarked the year after Waterloo,
in which glorious conflict they took an active part, and having
subsequently distinguished themselves in the Burmese war. The veteran
colonel, Sir Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., with his lady and sister, landed
here yesterday, with Captains Posky, Stubble, Macraw, Malony;
Lieutenants Smith, Jones, Thompson, F. Thomson; Ensigns Hicks and
Grady; the band on the pier playing the national anthem, and the crowd
loudly cheering the gallant veterans as they went into Wayte's hotel,
where a sumptuous banquet was provided for the defenders of Old
England. During the repast, which we need not say was served up in
Wayte's best style, the cheering continued so enthusiastically that
Lady O'Dowd and the Colonel came forward to the balcony and drank the
healths of their fellow-countrymen in a bumper of Wayte's best claret."
On a second occasion Jos read a brief announcement--Major Dobbin had
joined the --th regiment at Chatham; and subsequently he promulgated
accounts of the presentations at the Drawing-room of Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., Lady O'Dowd (by Mrs. Malloy Malony of
Ballymalony), and Miss Glorvina O'Dowd (by Lady O'Dowd). Almost
directly after this, Dobbin's name appeared among the Lieutenant-Colonels:
for old Marshal Tiptoff had died during the passage of the
--th from Madras, and the Sovereign was pleased to advance Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd to the rank of Major-General on his return to England,
with an intimation that he should be Colonel of the distinguished
regiment which he had so long commanded.
Amelia had been made aware of some of these movements. The
correspondence between George and his guardian had not ceased by any
means: William had even written once or twice to her since his
departure, but in a manner so unconstrainedly cold that the poor woman
felt now in her turn that she had lost her power over him and that, as
he had said, he was free. He had left her, and she was wretched. The
memory of his almost countless services, and lofty and affectionate
regard, now presented itself to her and rebuked her day and night. She
brooded over those recollections according to her wont, saw the purity
and beauty of the affection with which she had trifled, and reproached
herself for having flung away such a treasure.
It was gone indeed. William had spent it all out. He loved her no
more, he thought, as he had loved her. He never could again. That sort
of regard, which he had proffered to her for so many faithful years,
can't be flung down and shattered and mended so as to show no scars.
The little heedless tyrant had so destroyed it. No, William thought
again and again, "It was myself I deluded and persisted in cajoling;
had she been worthy of the love I gave her, she would have returned it
long ago. It was a fond mistake. Isn't the whole course of life made
up of such? And suppose I had won her, should I not have been
disenchanted the day after my victory? Why pine, or be ashamed of my
defeat?" The more he thought of this long passage of his life, the more
clearly he saw his deception. "I'll go into harness again," he said,
"and do my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Heaven to
place me. I will see that the buttons of the recruits are properly
bright and that the sergeants make no mistakes in their accounts. I
will dine at mess and listen to the Scotch surgeon telling his stories.
When I am old and broken, I will go on half-pay, and my old sisters
shall scold me. I have geliebt und gelebet, as the girl in
'Wallenstein' says. I am done. Pay the bills and get me a cigar:
find out what there is at the play to-night, Francis; to-morrow we
cross by the Batavier." He made the above speech, whereof Francis only
heard the last two lines, pacing up and down the Boompjes at Rotterdam.
The Batavier was lying in the basin. He could see the place on the
quarter-deck where he and Emmy had sat on the happy voyage out. What
had that little Mrs. Crawley to say to him? Psha; to-morrow we will put
to sea, and return to England, home, and duty!
After June all the little Court Society of Pumpernickel used to
separate, according to the German plan, and make for a hundred
watering-places, where they drank at the wells, rode upon donkeys,
gambled at the redoutes if they had money and a mind, rushed with
hundreds of their kind to gourmandise at the tables d'hote, and idled
away the summer. The English diplomatists went off to Teoplitz and
Kissingen, their French rivals shut up their chancellerie and whisked
away to their darling Boulevard de Gand. The Transparent reigning
family took too to the waters, or retired to their hunting lodges.
Everybody went away having any pretensions to politeness, and of
course, with them, Doctor von Glauber, the Court Doctor, and his
Baroness. The seasons for the baths were the most productive periods
of the Doctor's practice--he united business with pleasure, and his
chief place of resort was Ostend, which is much frequented by Germans,
and where the Doctor treated himself and his spouse to what he called a
"dib" in the sea.
His interesting patient, Jos, was a regular milch-cow to the Doctor,
and he easily persuaded the civilian, both for his own health's sake
and that of his charming sister, which was really very much shattered,
to pass the summer at that hideous seaport town. Emmy did not care
where she went much. Georgy jumped at the idea of a move. As for
Becky, she came as a matter of course in the fourth place inside of the
fine barouche Mr. Jos had bought, the two domestics being on the box in
front. She might have some misgivings about the friends whom she should
meet at Ostend, and who might be likely to tell ugly stories--but bah!
she was strong enough to hold her own. She had cast such an anchor in
Jos now as would require a strong storm to shake. That incident of the