which dullness takes the lead in the world?
As after the drive to Waterloo, Mr. Osborne's carriage
was nearing the gates of the city at sunset, they met
another open barouche, in which were a couple of ladies
and a gentleman, and by the side of which an officer was
riding. Osborne gave a start back, and the Sergeant,
seated with him, cast a look of surprise at his neighbour,
as he touched his cap to the officer, who mechanically
returned his salute. It was Amelia, with the lame young
Ensign by her side, and opposite to her her faithful
friend Mrs. O'Dowd. It was Amelia, but how changed
from the fresh and comely girl Osborne knew. Her face
was white and thin. Her pretty brown hair was parted
under a widow's cap--the poor child. Her eyes were
fixed, and looking nowhere. They stared blank in the
face of Osborne, as the carriages crossed each other, but
she did not know him; nor did he recognise her, until
looking up, he saw Dobbin riding by her: and then he
knew who it was. He hated her. He did not know how
much until he saw her there. When her carriage had
passed on, he turned and stared at the Sergeant, with a
curse and defiance in his eye cast at his companion, who
could not help looking at him--as much as to say "How
dare you look at me? Damn you! I do hate her. It is she
who has tumbled my hopes and all my pride down."
"Tell the scoundrel to drive on quick," he shouted with
an oath, to the lackey on the box. A minute afterwards, a
horse came clattering over the pavement behind
Osborne's carriage, and Dobbin rode up. His thoughts
had been elsewhere as the carriages passed each other,
and it was not until he had ridden some paces forward,
that he remembered it was Osborne who had just passed
him. Then he turned to examine if the sight of her father-
in-law had made any impression on Amelia, but the poor
girl did not know who had passed. Then William, who
daily used to accompany her in his drives, taking out his
watch, made some excuse about an engagement which he
suddenly recollected, and so rode off. She did not
remark that either: but sate looking before her, over the
homely landscape towards the woods in the distance, by
which George marched away.
Mr. Osborne, Mr. Osborne!" cried Dobbin, as he rode
up and held out his hand. Osborne made no motion to
take it, but shouted out once more and with another curse
to his servant to drive on.
Dobbin laid his hand on the carriage side. "I will see
you, sir," he said. "I have a message for you."
"From that woman?" said Osborne, fiercely.
"No," replied the other, "from your son"; at which
Osborne fell back into the corner of his carriage, and
Dobbin allowing it to pass on, rode close behind it, and
so through the town until they reached Mr. Osborne's
hotel, and without a word. There he followed Osborne
up to his apartments. George had often been in the
rooms; they were the lodgings which the Crawleys had
occupied during their stay in Brussels.
"Pray, have you any commands for me, Captain
Dobbin, or, I beg your pardon, I should say MAJOR Dobbin,
since better men than you are dead, and you step into
their SHOES?" said Mr. Osborne, in that sarcastic tone
which he sometimes was pleased to assume.
"Better men ARE dead," Dobbin replied. "I want to
speak to you about one."
"Make it short, sir," said the other with an oath,
scowling at his visitor.
"I am here as his closest friend," the Major resumed,
"and the executor of his will. He made it before he went
into action. Are you aware how small his means are,
and of the straitened circumstances of his widow?"
"I don't know his widow, sir," Osborne said. "Let her
go back to her father." But the gentleman whom he
addressed was determined to remain in good temper, and
went on without heeding the interruption.
"Do you know, sir, Mrs. Osborne's condition? Her life
and her reason almost have been shaken by the blow
which has fallen on her. It is very doubtful whether she
will rally. There is a chance left for her, however, and it
is about this I came to speak to you. She will be a mother
soon. Will you visit the parent's offence upon the child's
head? or will you forgive the child for poor George's
sake?"
Osborne broke out into a rhapsody of self-praise and
imprecations;--by the first, excusing himself to his own
conscience for his conduct; by the second, exaggerating
the undutifulness of George. No father in all England
could have behaved more generously to a son, who had
rebelled against him wickedly. He had died without even
so much as confessing he was wrong. Let him take
the consequences of his undutifulness and folly. As for
himself, Mr. Osborne, he was a man of his word. He
had sworn never to speak to that woman, or to recognize
her as his son's wife. "And that's what you may tell
her," he concluded with an oath; "and that's what I will
stick to to the last day of my life."
There was no hope from that quarter then. The widow
must live on her slender pittance, or on such aid as Jos
could give her. "I might tell her, and she would not heed
it," thought Dobbin, sadly: for the poor girl's thoughts
were not here at all since her catastrophe, and, stupefied
under the pressure of her sorrow, good and evil were
alike indifferent to her.
So, indeed, were even friendship and kindness. She
received them both uncomplainingly, and having accepted
them, relapsed into her grief.
Suppose some twelve months after the above conversation
took place to have passed in the life of our poor
Amelia. She has spent the first portion of that time in a
sorrow so profound and pitiable, that we who have been
watching and describing some of the emotions of that
weak and tender heart, must draw back in the presence
of the cruel grief under which it is bleeding. Tread silently
round the hapless couch of the poor prostrate soul.
Shut gently the door of the dark chamber wherein she
suffers, as those kind people did who nursed her through
the first months of her pain, and never left her until
heaven had sent her consolation. A day came--of
almost terrified delight and wonder--when the poor
widowed girl pressed a child upon her breast--a child, with
the eyes of George who was gone--a little boy, as beautiful
as a cherub. What a miracle it was to hear its first
cry! How she laughed and wept over it--how love, and
hope, and prayer woke again in her bosom as the baby
nestled there. She was safe. The doctors who attended
her, and had feared for her life or for her brain, had
waited anxiously for this crisis before they could
pronounce that either was secure. It was worth the long
months of doubt and dread which the persons who had
constantly been with her had passed, to see her eyes once
more beaming tenderly upon them.
Our friend Dobbin was one of them. It was he who
brought her back to England and to her mother's house;
when Mrs. O'Dowd, receiving a peremptory summons
from her Colonel, had been forced to quit her patient.
To see Dobbin holding the infant, and to hear Amelia's
laugh of triumph as she watched him, would have done
any man good who had a sense of humour. William was
the godfather of the child, and exerted his ingenuity in
the purchase of cups, spoons, pap-boats, and corals for
this little Christian.
How his mother nursed him, and dressed him, and
lived upon him; how she drove away all nurses, and
would scarce allow any hand but her own to touch him;
how she considered that the greatest favour she could
confer upon his godfather, Major Dobbin, was to allow
the Major occasionally to dandle him, need not be told
here. This child was her being. Her existence was a
maternal caress. She enveloped the feeble and unconscious
creature with love and worship. It was her life
which the baby drank in from her bosom. Of nights, and
when alone, she had stealthy and intense raptures of
motherly love, such as God's marvellous care has awarded
to the female instinct--joys how far higher and lower
than reason--blind beautiful devotions which only women's
hearts know. It was William Dobbin's task to muse
upon these movements of Amelia's, and to watch her
heart; and if his love made him divine almost all the feelings
which agitated it, alas! he could see with a fatal
perspicuity that there was no place there for him. And
so, gently, he bore his fate, knowing it, and content to
bear it.
I suppose Amelia's father and mother saw through the
intentions of the Major, and were not ill-disposed to
encourage him; for Dobbin visited their house daily, and
stayed for hours with them, or with Amelia, or with the
honest landlord, Mr. Clapp, and his family. He brought,
on one pretext or another, presents to everybody, and
almost every day; and went, with the landlord's little girl,
who was rather a favourite with Amelia, by the name of
Major Sugarplums. It was this little child who commonly
acted as mistress of the ceremonies to introduce him
to Mrs. Osborne. She laughed one day when Major Sugarplums'
cab drove up to Fulham, and he descended from
it, bringing out a wooden horse, a drum, a trumpet, and
other warlike toys, for little Georgy, who was scarcely
six months old, and for whom the articles in question were
entirely premature.
The child was asleep. "Hush," said Amelia, annoyed,
perhaps, at the creaking of the Major's boots; and she
held out her hand; smiling because William could not
take it until he had rid himself of his cargo of toys. "Go
downstairs, little Mary," said he presently to the child,
"I want to speak to Mrs. Osborne." She looked up rather
astonished, and laid down the infant on its bed.
"I am come to say good-bye, Amelia," said he, taking
her slender little white hand gently.
"Good-bye? and where are you going?" she said, with
a smile.
"Send the letters to the agents," he said; "they will
forward them; for you will write to me, won't you? I
shall be away a long time."
"I'll write to you about Georgy," she said. "Dear' William,
how good you have been to him and to me. Look at
him. Isn't he like an angel?"
The little pink hands of the child closed mechanically
round the honest soldier's finger, and Amelia looked up
in his face with bright maternal pleasure. The cruellest
looks could not have wounded him more than that glance
of hopeless kindness. He bent over the child and mother.
He could not speak for a moment. And it was only with
all his strength that he could force himself to say a God
bless you. "God bless you," said Amelia, and held up her
face and kissed him.
"Hush! Don't wake Georgy!" she added, as William
Dobbin went to the door with heavy steps. She did not
hear the noise of his cab-wheels as he drove away: she
was looking at the child, who was laughing in his sleep.
CHAPTER XXXVI
How to Live Well on Nothing a Year
I suppose there is no man in this Vanity Fair of ours so
little observant as not to think sometimes about the
worldly affairs of his acquaintances, or so extremely
charitable as not to wonder how his neighbour Jones,
or his neighbour Smith, can make both ends meet at the
end of the year. With the utmost regard for the family,
for instance (for I dine with them twice or thrice in the
season), I cannot but own that the appearance of the
Jenkinses in the park, in the large barouche with the
grenadier-footmen, will surprise and mystify me to my
dying day: for though I know the equipage is only
jobbed, and all the Jenkins people are on board wages,
yet those three men and the carriage must represent an
expense of six hundred a year at the very least--and then
there are the splendid dinners, the two boys at Eton, the
prize governess and masters for the girls, the trip
abroad, or to Eastbourne or Worthing, in the autumn,
the annual ball with a supper from Gunter's (who, by the
way, supplies most of the first-rate dinners which J. gives,
as I know very well, having been invited to one of them to
fill a vacant place, when I saw at once that these repasts are
very superior to the common run of entertainments for which the
humbler sort of J.'s acquaintances get cards)--who, I say, with the
most good-natured feelings in the world, can help wondering how
the Jenkinses make out matters? What is Jenkins? We all know
--Commissioner of the Tape and Sealing Wax Office, with
1200 pounds a year for a salary. Had his wife a private
fortune? Pooh!--Miss Flint--one of eleven children of a
small squire in Buckinghamshire. All she ever gets from
her family is a turkey at Christmas, in exchange for which
she has to board two or three of her sisters in the off
season, and lodge and feed her brothers when they
come to town. How does Jenkins balance his income? I
say, as every friend of his must say, How is it that he
has not been outlawed long since, and that he ever came
back (as he did to the surprise of everybody) last year
from Boulogne?
"I" is here introduced to personify the world in
general--the Mrs. Grundy of each respected reader's private
circle--every one of whom can point to some families
of his acquaintance who live nobody knows how. Many
a glass of wine have we all of us drunk, I have very
little doubt, hob-and-nobbing with the hospitable giver
and wondering how the deuce he paid for it.
Some three or four years after his stay in Paris, when
Rawdon Crawley and his wife were established in a very
small comfortable house in Curzon Street, May Fair, there
was scarcely one of the numerous friends whom they
