Vanity Fair
INTERESTING EVENT, upon which I beg to offer my MOST SINCERE
CONGRATULATIONS. I hope the young lady to whom I hear you are to be
UNITED will in every respect prove worthy of one who is himself all
kindness and goodness. The poor widow has only her prayers to offer
and her cordial cordial wishes for YOUR PROSPERITY! Georgy sends his
love to HIS DEAR GODPAPA and hopes that you will not forget him. I tell
him that you are about to form OTHER TIES, with one who I am sure
merits ALL YOUR AFFECTION, but that, although such ties must of course
be the strongest and most sacred, and supersede ALL OTHERS, yet that I
am sure the widow and the child whom you have ever protected and loved
will always HAVE A CORNER IN YOUR HEART." The letter, which has been
before alluded to, went on in this strain, protesting throughout as to
the extreme satisfaction of the writer.
This letter, which arrived by the very same ship which brought out
Lady O'Dowd's box of millinery from London (and which you may be sure
Dobbin opened before any one of the other packets which the mail
brought him), put the receiver into such a state of mind that Glorvina,
and her pink satin, and everything belonging to her became perfectly
odious to him. The Major cursed the talk of women, and the sex in
general. Everything annoyed him that day--the parade was insufferably
hot and wearisome. Good heavens! was a man of intellect to waste his
life, day after day, inspecting cross-belts and putting fools through
their manoeuvres? The senseless chatter of the young men at mess was
more than ever jarring. What cared he, a man on the high road to forty,
to know how many snipes Lieutenant Smith had shot, or what were the
performances of Ensign Brown's mare? The jokes about the table filled
him with shame. He was too old to listen to the banter of the
assistant surgeon and the slang of the youngsters, at which old O'Dowd,
with his bald head and red face, laughed quite easily. The old man had
listened to those jokes any time these thirty years--Dobbin himself had
been fifteen years hearing them. And after the boisterous dulness of
the mess-table, the quarrels and scandal of the ladies of the regiment!
It was unbearable, shameful. "O Amelia, Amelia," he thought, "you to
whom I have been so faithful--you reproach me! It is because you
cannot feel for me that I drag on this wearisome life. And you reward
me after years of devotion by giving me your blessing upon my marriage,
forsooth, with this flaunting Irish girl!" Sick and sorry felt poor
William; more than ever wretched and lonely. He would like to have
done with life and its vanity altogether--so bootless and
unsatisfactory the struggle, so cheerless and dreary the prospect
seemed to him. He lay all that night sleepless, and yearning to go
home. Amelia's letter had fallen as a blank upon him. No fidelity, no
constant truth and passion, could move her into warmth. She would not
see that he loved her. Tossing in his bed, he spoke out to her. "Good
God, Amelia!" he said, "don't you know that I only love you in the
world--you, who are a stone to me--you, whom I tended through months
and months of illness and grief, and who bade me farewell with a smile
on your face, and forgot me before the door shut between us!" The
native servants lying outside his verandas beheld with wonder the
Major, so cold and quiet ordinarily, at present so passionately moved
and cast down. Would she have pitied him had she seen him? He read
over and over all the letters which he ever had from her--letters of
business relative to the little property which he had made her believe
her husband had left to her--brief notes of invitation--every scrap of
writing that she had ever sent to him--how cold, how kind, how
hopeless, how selfish they were!
Had there been some kind gentle soul near at hand who could read and
appreciate this silent generous heart, who knows but that the reign of
Amelia might have been over, and that friend William's love might have
flowed into a kinder channel? But there was only Glorvina of the jetty
ringlets with whom his intercourse was familiar, and this dashing young
woman was not bent upon loving the Major, but rather on making the
Major admire HER--a most vain and hopeless task, too, at least
considering the means that the poor girl possessed to carry it out.
She curled her hair and showed her shoulders at him, as much as to say,
did ye ever see such jet ringlets and such a complexion? She grinned at
him so that he might see that every tooth in her head was sound--and he
never heeded all these charms. Very soon after the arrival of the box
of millinery, and perhaps indeed in honour of it, Lady O'Dowd and the
ladies of the King's Regiment gave a ball to the Company's Regiments
and the civilians at the station. Glorvina sported the killing pink
frock, and the Major, who attended the party and walked very ruefully
up and down the rooms, never so much as perceived the pink garment.
Glorvina danced past him in a fury with all the young subalterns of the
station, and the Major was not in the least jealous of her performance,
or angry because Captain Bangles of the Cavalry handed her to supper.
It was not jealousy, or frocks, or shoulders that could move him, and
Glorvina had nothing more.
So these two were each exemplifying the Vanity of this life, and each
longing for what he or she could not get. Glorvina cried with rage at
the failure. She had set her mind on the Major "more than on any of
the others," she owned, sobbing. "He'll break my heart, he will,
Peggy," she would whimper to her sister-in-law when they were good
friends; "sure every one of me frocks must be taken in--it's such a
skeleton I'm growing." Fat or thin, laughing or melancholy, on
horseback or the music-stool, it was all the same to the Major. And
the Colonel, puffing his pipe and listening to these complaints, would
suggest that Glory should have some black frocks out in the next box
from London, and told a mysterious story of a lady in Ireland who died
of grief for the loss of her husband before she got ere a one.
While the Major was going on in this tantalizing way, not proposing,
and declining to fall in love, there came another ship from Europe
bringing letters on board, and amongst them some more for the heartless
man. These were home letters bearing an earlier postmark than that of
the former packets, and as Major Dobbin recognized among his the
handwriting of his sister, who always crossed and recrossed her letters
to her brother--gathered together all the possible bad news which she
could collect, abused him and read him lectures with sisterly
frankness, and always left him miserable for the day after "dearest
William" had achieved the perusal of one of her epistles--the truth
must be told that dearest William did not hurry himself to break the
seal of Miss Dobbin's letter, but waited for a particularly favourable
day and mood for doing so. A fortnight before, moreover, he had
written to scold her for telling those absurd stories to Mrs. Osborne,
and had despatched a letter in reply to that lady, undeceiving her with
respect to the reports concerning him and assuring her that "he had no
sort of present intention of altering his condition."
Two or three nights after the arrival of the second package of letters,
the Major had passed the evening pretty cheerfully at Lady O'Dowd's
house, where Glorvina thought that he listened with rather more
attention than usual to the Meeting of the Wathers, the Minsthrel Boy,
and one or two other specimens of song with which she favoured him (the
truth is, he was no more listening to Glorvina than to the howling of
the jackals in the moonlight outside, and the delusion was hers as
usual), and having played his game at chess with her (cribbage with the
surgeon was Lady O'Dowd's favourite evening pastime), Major Dobbin took
leave of the Colonel's family at his usual hour and retired to his own
house.
There on his table, his sister's letter lay reproaching him. He took
it up, ashamed rather of his negligence regarding it, and prepared
himself for a disagreeable hour's communing with that crabbed-handed
absent relative. . . . It may have been an hour after the Major's
departure from the Colonel's house--Sir Michael was sleeping the sleep
of the just; Glorvina had arranged her black ringlets in the
innumerable little bits of paper, in which it was her habit to confine
them; Lady O'Dowd, too, had gone to her bed in the nuptial chamber, on
the ground-floor, and had tucked her musquito curtains round her fair
form, when the guard at the gates of the Commanding-Officer's compound
beheld Major Dobbin, in the moonlight, rushing towards the house with a
swift step and a very agitated countenance, and he passed the sentinel
and went up to the windows of the Colonel's bedchamber.
"O'Dowd--Colonel!" said Dobbin and kept up a great shouting.
"Heavens, Meejor!" said Glorvina of the curl-papers, putting out her
head too, from her window.
"What is it, Dob, me boy?" said the Colonel, expecting there was a fire
in the station, or that the route had come from headquarters.
"I--I must have leave of absence. I must go to England--on the most
urgent private affairs," Dobbin said.
"Good heavens, what has happened!" thought Glorvina, trembling with all
the papillotes.
"I want to be off--now--to-night," Dobbin continued; and the Colonel
getting up, came out to parley with him.
In the postscript of Miss Dobbin's cross-letter, the Major had just
come upon a paragraph, to the following effect:--"I drove yesterday to
see your old ACQUAINTANCE, Mrs. Osborne. The wretched place they live
at, since they were bankrupts, you know--Mr. S., to judge from a BRASS
PLATE on the door of his hut (it is little better) is a coal-merchant.
The little boy, your godson, is certainly a fine child, though forward,
and inclined to be saucy and self-willed. But we have taken notice of
him as you wish it, and have introduced him to his aunt, Miss O., who
was rather pleased with him. Perhaps his grandpapa, not the bankrupt
one, who is almost doting, but Mr. Osborne, of Russell Square, may be
induced to relent towards the child of your friend, HIS ERRING AND
SELF-WILLED SON. And Amelia will not be ill-disposed to give him up.
The widow is CONSOLED, and is about to marry a reverend gentleman, the
Rev. Mr. Binny, one of the curates of Brompton. A poor match. But
Mrs. O. is getting old, and I saw a great deal of grey in her hair--she
was in very good spirits: and your little godson overate himself at
our house. Mamma sends her love with that of your affectionate, Ann
Dobbin."
CHAPTER XLIV
A Round-about Chapter between London and Hampshire
Our old friends the Crawleys' family house, in Great Gaunt Street,
still bore over its front the hatchment which had been placed there as
a token of mourning for Sir Pitt Crawley's demise, yet this heraldic
emblem was in itself a very splendid and gaudy piece of furniture, and
all the rest of the mansion became more brilliant than it had ever been
during the late baronet's reign. The black outer-coating of the bricks
was removed, and they appeared with a cheerful, blushing face streaked
with white: the old bronze lions of the knocker were gilt handsomely,
the railings painted, and the dismallest house in Great Gaunt Street
became the smartest in the whole quarter, before the green leaves in
Hampshire had replaced those yellowing ones which were on the trees in
Queen's Crawley Avenue when old Sir Pitt Crawley passed under them for
the last time.
A little woman, with a carriage to correspond, was perpetually seen
about this mansion; an elderly spinster, accompanied by a little boy,
also might be remarked coming thither daily. It was Miss Briggs and