Vanity Fair
distance to buy a ribbon in Southampton Row, was followed by Black
Sambo with an enormous cane: who was always cared for, dressed, put to
bed, and watched over by ever so many guardian angels, with and without
wages? Bon Dieu, I say, is it not hard that the fateful rush of the
great Imperial struggle can't take place without affecting a poor
little harmless girl of eighteen, who is occupied in billing and
cooing, or working muslin collars in Russell Square? You too, kindly,
homely flower!--is the great roaring war tempest coming to sweep you
down, here, although cowering under the shelter of Holborn? Yes;
Napoleon is flinging his last stake, and poor little Emmy Sedley's
happiness forms, somehow, part of it.
In the first place, her father's fortune was swept down with that fatal
news. All his speculations had of late gone wrong with the luckless
old gentleman. Ventures had failed; merchants had broken; funds had
risen when he calculated they would fall. What need to particularize?
If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin
is. Old Sedley had kept his own sad counsel. Everything seemed to go
on as usual in the quiet, opulent house; the good-natured mistress
pursuing, quite unsuspiciously, her bustling idleness, and daily easy
avocations; the daughter absorbed still in one selfish, tender thought,
and quite regardless of all the world besides, when that final crash
came, under which the worthy family fell.
One night Mrs. Sedley was writing cards for a party; the Osbornes had
given one, and she must not be behindhand; John Sedley, who had come
home very late from the City, sate silent at the chimney side, while
his wife was prattling to him; Emmy had gone up to her room ailing and
low-spirited. "She's not happy," the mother went on. "George Osborne
neglects her. I've no patience with the airs of those people. The
girls have not been in the house these three weeks; and George has been
twice in town without coming. Edward Dale saw him at the Opera.
Edward would marry her I'm sure: and there's Captain Dobbin who, I
think, would--only I hate all army men. Such a dandy as George has
become. With his military airs, indeed! We must show some folks that
we're as good as they. Only give Edward Dale any encouragement, and
you'll see. We must have a party, Mr. S. Why don't you speak, John?
Shall I say Tuesday fortnight? Why don't you answer? Good God, John,
what has happened?"
John Sedley sprang up out of his chair to meet his wife, who ran to
him. He seized her in his arms, and said with a hasty voice, "We're
ruined, Mary. We've got the world to begin over again, dear. It's
best that you should know all, and at once." As he spoke, he trembled
in every limb, and almost fell. He thought the news would have
overpowered his wife--his wife, to whom he had never said a hard word.
But it was he that was the most moved, sudden as the shock was to her.
When he sank back into his seat, it was the wife that took the office
of consoler. She took his trembling hand, and kissed it, and put it
round her neck: she called him her John--her dear John--her old
man--her kind old man; she poured out a hundred words of incoherent
love and tenderness; her faithful voice and simple caresses wrought
this sad heart up to an inexpressible delight and anguish, and cheered
and solaced his over-burdened soul.
Only once in the course of the long night as they sate together, and
poor Sedley opened his pent-up soul, and told the story of his losses
and embarrassments--the treason of some of his oldest friends, the
manly kindness of some, from whom he never could have expected it--in a
general confession--only once did the faithful wife give way to emotion.
"My God, my God, it will break Emmy's heart," she said.
The father had forgotten the poor girl. She was lying, awake and
unhappy, overhead. In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents,
she was alone. To how many people can any one tell all? Who will be
open where there is no sympathy, or has call to speak to those who
never can understand? Our gentle Amelia was thus solitary. She had no
confidante, so to speak, ever since she had anything to confide. She
could not tell the old mother her doubts and cares; the would-be
sisters seemed every day more strange to her. And she had misgivings
and fears which she dared not acknowledge to herself, though she was
always secretly brooding over them.
Her heart tried to persist in asserting that George Osborne was worthy
and faithful to her, though she knew otherwise. How many a thing had
she said, and got no echo from him. How many suspicions of selfishness
and indifference had she to encounter and obstinately overcome. To
whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily struggles and
tortures? Her hero himself only half understood her. She did not dare
to own that the man she loved was her inferior; or to feel that she had
given her heart away too soon. Given once, the pure bashful maiden was
too modest, too tender, too trustful, too weak, too much woman to
recall it. We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have
made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We let their bodies go abroad
liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise
them instead of veils and yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by
only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at
home as our slaves--ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.
So imprisoned and tortured was this gentle little heart, when in the
month of March, Anno Domini 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes, and Louis
XVIII fled, and all Europe was in alarm, and the funds fell, and old
John Sedley was ruined.
We are not going to follow the worthy old stockbroker through those
last pangs and agonies of ruin through which he passed before his
commercial demise befell. They declared him at the Stock Exchange; he
was absent from his house of business: his bills were protested: his
act of bankruptcy formal. The house and furniture of Russell Square
were seized and sold up, and he and his family were thrust away, as we
have seen, to hide their heads where they might.
John Sedley had not the heart to review the domestic establishment who
have appeared now and anon in our pages and of whom he was now forced
by poverty to take leave. The wages of those worthy people were
discharged with that punctuality which men frequently show who only owe
in great sums--they were sorry to leave good places--but they did not
break their hearts at parting from their adored master and mistress.
Amelia's maid was profuse in condolences, but went off quite resigned
to better herself in a genteeler quarter of the town. Black Sambo,
with the infatuation of his profession, determined on setting up a
public-house. Honest old Mrs. Blenkinsop indeed, who had seen the
birth of Jos and Amelia, and the wooing of John Sedley and his wife,
was for staying by them without wages, having amassed a considerable
sum in their service: and she accompanied the fallen people into their
new and humble place of refuge, where she tended them and grumbled
against them for a while.
Of all Sedley's opponents in his debates with his creditors which now
ensued, and harassed the feelings of the humiliated old gentleman so
severely, that in six weeks he oldened more than he had done for
fifteen years before--the most determined and obstinate seemed to be
John Osborne, his old friend and neighbour--John Osborne, whom he had
set up in life--who was under a hundred obligations to him--and whose
son was to marry Sedley's daughter. Any one of these circumstances
would account for the bitterness of Osborne's opposition.
When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another,
with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it
were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger
would be. To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in
such a case, you are bound to prove the other party's crime. It is not
that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a
speculation--no, no--it is that your partner has led you into it by the
basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a mere sense
of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a
villain--otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself.
And as a general rule, which may make all creditors who are inclined to
be severe pretty comfortable in their minds, no men embarrassed are
altogether honest, very likely. They conceal something; they
exaggerate chances of good luck; hide away the real state of affairs;
say that things are flourishing when they are hopeless, keep a smiling
face (a dreary smile it is) upon the verge of bankruptcy--are ready to
lay hold of any pretext for delay or of any money, so as to stave off
the inevitable ruin a few days longer. "Down with such dishonesty,"
says the creditor in triumph, and reviles his sinking enemy. "You
fool, why do you catch at a straw?" calm good sense says to the man
that is drowning. "You villain, why do you shrink from plunging into
the irretrievable Gazette?" says prosperity to the poor devil battling
in that black gulf. Who has not remarked the readiness with which the
closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other
of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it.
Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.
Then Osborne had the intolerable sense of former benefits to goad and
irritate him: these are always a cause of hostility aggravated.
Finally, he had to break off the match between Sedley's daughter and
his son; and as it had gone very far indeed, and as the poor girl's
happiness and perhaps character were compromised, it was necessary to
show the strongest reasons for the rupture, and for John Osborne to
prove John Sedley to be a very bad character indeed.
At the meetings of creditors, then, he comported himself with a
savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in breaking
the heart of that ruined bankrupt man. On George's intercourse with
Amelia he put an instant veto--menacing the youth with maledictions if
he broke his commands, and vilipending the poor innocent girl as the
basest and most artful of vixens. One of the great conditions of anger
and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated
object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.
When the great crash came--the announcement of ruin, and the departure
from Russell Square, and the declaration that all was over between her
and George--all over between her and love, her and happiness, her and
faith in the world--a brutal letter from John Osborne told her in a few
curt lines that her father's conduct had been of such a nature that all
engagements between the families were at an end--when the final award
came, it did not shock her so much as her parents, as her mother rather
expected (for John Sedley himself was entirely prostrate in the ruins
of his own affairs and shattered honour). Amelia took the news very
palely and calmly. It was only the confirmation of the dark presages
which had long gone before. It was the mere reading of the
sentence--of the crime she had long ago been guilty--the crime of
loving wrongly, too violently, against reason. She told no more of her
thoughts now than she had before. She seemed scarcely more unhappy now
when convinced all hope was over, than before when she felt but dared
not confess that it was gone. So she changed from the large house to
the small one without any mark or difference; remained in her little
room for the most part; pined silently; and died away day by day. I do