friend's departure in a hysterical condition, was placed
under the medical treatment of the young fellow from
the surgery, under whose care she rallied after a short
period. Emmy, when she went away from Brompton,
endowed Mary with every article of furniture that the house
contained, only taking away her pictures (the two
pictures over the bed) and her piano--that little old piano
which had now passed into a plaintive jingling old age,
but which she loved for reasons of her own. She was a
child when first she played on it, and her parents gave it
her. It had been given to her again since, as the reader
may remember, when her father's house was gone to ruin
and the instrument was recovered out of the wreck.
Major Dobbin was exceedingly pleased when, as he
was superintending the arrangements of Jos's new house
--which the Major insisted should be very handsome and
comfortable--the cart arrived from Brompton, bringing
the trunks and bandboxes of the emigrants from that
village, and with them the old piano. Amelia would have it
up in her sitting-room, a neat little apartment on the
second floor, adjoining her father's chamber, and where
the old gentleman sat commonly of evenings.
When the men appeared then bearing this old music-
box, and Amelia gave orders that it should be placed
in the chamber aforesaid, Dobbin was quite elated. "I'm
glad you've kept it," he said in a very sentimental
manner. "I was afraid you didn't care about it."
"I value it more than anything I have in the world,"
said Amelia.
"Do you, Amelia?" cried the Major. The fact was,
as he had bought it himself, though he never said
anything about it, it never entered into his head to suppose
that Emmy should think anybody else was the purchaser,
and as a matter of course he fancied that she knew the
gift came from him. "Do you, Amelia?" he said; and
the question, the great question of all, was trembling
on his lips, when Emmy replied--
"Can I do otherwise?--did not he give it me?"
"I did not know," said poor old Dob, and his
countenance fell.
Emmy did not note the circumstance at the time, nor
take immediate heed of the very dismal expression which
honest Dobbin's countenance assumed, but she thought
of it afterwards. And then it struck her, with inexpressible
pain and mortification too, that it was William who
was the giver of the piano, and not George, as she had
fancied. It was not George's gift; the only one which she
had received from her lover, as she thought--the thing
she had cherished beyond all others--her dearest relic
and prize. She had spoken to it about George; played
his favourite airs upon it; sat for long evening hours,
touching, to the best of her simple art, melancholy
harmonies on the keys, and weeping over them in silence.
It was not George's relic. It was valueless now. The next
time that old Sedley asked her to play, she said it was
shockingly out of tune, that she had a headache, that
she couldn't play.
Then, according to her custom, she rebuked herself
for her pettishness and ingratitude and determined to
make a reparation to honest William for the slight she
had not expressed to him, but had felt for his piano.
A few days afterwards, as they were seated in the
drawing-room, where Jos had fallen asleep with great comfort
after dinner, Amelia said with rather a faltering voice
to Major Dobbin--
"I have to beg your pardon for something."
"About what?" said he.
"About--about that little square piano. I never thanked
you for it when you gave it me, many, many years ago,
before I was married. I thought somebody else had given
it. Thank you, William." She held out her hand, but the
poor little woman's heart was bleeding; and as for her
eyes, of course they were at their work.
But William could hold no more. "Amelia, Amelia,"
he said, "I did buy it for you. I loved you then as I
do now. I must tell you. I think I loved you from the
first minute that I saw you, when George brought me to
your house, to show me the Amelia whom he was
engaged to. You were but a girl, in white, with large
ringlets; you came down singing--do you remember?--
and we went to Vauxhall. Since then I have thought of
but one woman in the world, and that was you. I
think there is no hour in the day has passed for twelve
years that I haven't thought of you. I came to tell you
this before I went to India, but you did not care, and
I hadn't the heart to speak. You did not care whether
I stayed or went."
"I was very ungrateful," Amelia said.
"No, only indifferent," Dobbin continued desperately.
"I have nothing to make a woman to be otherwise. I
know what you are feeling now. You are hurt in your
heart at the discovery about the piano, and that it came
from me and not from George. I forgot, or I should
never have spoken of it so. It is for me to ask your
pardon for being a fool for a moment, and thinking
that years of constancy and devotion might have pleaded
with you."
"It is you who are cruel now," Amelia said with some
spirit. "George is my husband, here and in heaven. How
could I love any other but him? I am his now as when
you first saw me, dear William. It was he who told me
how good and generous you were, and who taught me
to love you as a brother. Have you not been everything
to me and my boy? Our dearest, truest, kindest friend
and protector? Had you come a few months sooner
perhaps you might have spared me that--that dreadful
parting. Oh, it nearly killed me, William--but you didn't
come, though I wished and prayed for you to come,
and they took him too away from me. Isn't he a noble
boy, William? Be his friend still and mine"--and here her
voice broke, and she hid her face on his shoulder.
The Major folded his arms round her, holding her to
him as if she was a child, and kissed her head. "I will
not change, dear Amelia," he said. "I ask for no more
than your love. I think I would not have it otherwise.
Only let me stay near you and see you often."
"Yes, often," Amelia said. And so William was at
liberty to look and long--as the poor boy at school
who has no money may sigh after the contents of the
tart-woman's tray.
CHAPTER LX
Returns to the Genteel World
Good fortune now begins to smile upon Amelia. We are
glad to get her out of that low sphere in which she has
been creeping hitherto and introduce her into a polite
circle--not so grand and refined as that in which our
other female friend, Mrs. Becky, has appeared, but still
having no small pretensions to gentility and fashion. Jos's
friends were all from the three presidencies, and his new
house was in the comfortable Anglo-Indian district of
which Moira Place is the centre. Minto Square, Great
Clive Street, Warren Street, Hastings Street, Ochterlony
Place, Plassy Square, Assaye Terrace ("gardens" was
a felicitous word not applied to stucco houses with
asphalt terraces in front, so early as 1827)--who does not
know these respectable abodes of the retired Indian
aristocracy, and the quarter which Mr. Wenham calls the
Black Hole, in a word? Jos's position in life was not grand
enough to entitle him to a house in Moira Place, where
none can live but retired Members of Council, and
partners of Indian firms (who break, after having settled a
hundred thousand pounds on their wives, and retire into
comparative penury to a country place and four thousand
a year); he engaged a comfortable house of a
second- or third-rate order in Gillespie Street, purchasing the
carpets, costly mirrors, and handsome and appropriate
planned furniture by Seddons from the assignees of Mr.
Scape, lately admitted partner into the great Calcutta
House of Fogle, Fake, and Cracksman, in which poor
Scape had embarked seventy thousand pounds, the
earnings of a long and honourable life, taking Fake's place,
who retired to a princely park in Sussex (the Fogles have
been long out of the firm, and Sir Horace Fogle is about
to be raised to the peerage as Baron Bandanna)--admitted,
I say, partner into the great agency house of Fogle
and Fake two years before it failed for a million and
plunged half the Indian public into misery and ruin.
Scape, ruined, honest, and broken-hearted at sixty-five
years of age, went out to Calcutta to wind up the affairs
of the house. Walter Scape was withdrawn from Eton
and put into a merchant's house. Florence Scape, Fanny
Scape, and their mother faded away to Boulogne, and
will be heard of no more. To be brief, Jos stepped in and
bought their carpets and sideboards and admired
himself in the mirrors which had reflected their kind
handsome faces. The Scape tradesmen, all honourably paid,
left their cards, and were eager to supply the new
household. The large men in white waistcoats who waited at
Scape's dinners, greengrocers, bank-porters, and
milkmen in their private capacity, left their addresses and
ingratiated themselves with the butler. Mr. Chummy, the
chimney-purifier, who had swept the last three families,
tried to coax the butler and the boy under him, whose
duty it was to go out covered with buttons and with
stripes down his trousers, for the protection of Mrs.
Amelia whenever she chose to walk abroad.
It was a modest establishment. The butler was Jos's
valet also, and never was more drunk than a butler in a
small family should be who has a proper regard for his
master's wine. Emmy was supplied with a maid, grown on
Sir William Dobbin's suburban estate; a good girl, whose
kindness and humility disarmed Mrs. Osborne, who was
at first terrified at the idea of having a servant to wait
upon herself, who did not in the least know how to use
one, and who always spoke to domestics with the most
reverential politeness. But this maid was very useful in
the family, in dexterously tending old Mr. Sedley, who
kept almost entirely to his own quarter of the house
and never mixed in any of the gay doings which took
place there.
Numbers of people came to see Mrs. Osborne. Lady
Dobbin and daughters were delighted at her change of
fortune, and waited upon her. Miss Osborne from Russell
Square came in her grand chariot with the flaming
hammer-cloth emblazoned with the Leeds arms. Jos was
reported to be immensely rich. Old Osborne had no
objection that Georgy should inherit his uncle's property as
well as his own. "Damn it, we will make a man of the
feller," he said; "and I'll see him in Parliament before I
die. You may go and see his mother, Miss O., though I'll
never set eyes on her": and Miss Osborne came. Emmy,
you may be sure, was very glad to see her, and so be
brought nearer to George. That young fellow was
allowed to come much more frequently than before to visit
his mother. He dined once or twice a week in Gillespie
Street and bullied the servants and his relations there, just
as he did in Russell Square.
He was always respectful to Major Dobbin, however,
and more modest in his demeanour when that gentleman
was present. He was a clever lad and afraid of the
Major. George could not help admiring his friend's
simplicity, his good humour, his various learning quietly
imparted, his general love of truth and justice. He had met
no such man as yet in the course of his experience, and
he had an instinctive liking for a gentleman. He hung
fondly by his godfather's side, and it was his delight to
walk in the parks and hear Dobbin talk. William told
George about his father, about India and Waterloo, about
everything but himself. When George was more than
usually pert and conceited, the Major made jokes at him,
which Mrs. Osborne thought very cruel. One day, taking
him to the play, and the boy declining to go into the pit
because it was vulgar, the Major took him to the boxes,
left him there, and went down himself to the pit. He
had not been seated there very long before he felt an arm
thrust under his and a dandy little hand in a kid glove
squeezing his arm. George had seen the absurdity of his
ways and come down from the upper region. A tender
laugh of benevolence lighted up old Dobbin's face and
eyes as he looked at the repentant little prodigal. He
loved the boy, as he did everything that belonged to
Amelia. How charmed she was when she heard of this
instance of George's goodness! Her eyes looked more
kindly on Dobbin than they ever had done. She blushed,
he thought, after looking at him so.
Georgy never tired of his praises of the Major to his
mother. "I like him, Mamma, because he knows such lots
of things; and he ain't like old Veal, who is always
bragging and using such long words, don't you know? The
chaps call him 'Longtail' at school. I gave him the name;
ain't it capital? But Dob reads Latin like English, and
French and that; and when we go out together he tells me
stories about my Papa, and never about himself; though I
heard Colonel Buckler, at Grandpapa's, say that he was
one of the bravest officers in the army, and had
distinguished himself ever so much. Grandpapa was quite
surprised, and said, 'THAT feller! Why, I didn't think he could
say Bo to a goose'--but l know he could, couldn't he,
Mamma?"
Emmy laughed: she thought it was very likely the
Major could do thus much.
If there was a sincere liking between George and the
Major, it must be confessed that between the boy and his
uncle no great love existed. George had got a way of
blowing out his cheeks, and putting his hands in his
waistcoat pockets, and saying, "God bless my soul, you don't
