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 little Rawdon,
whose business it was to see to the inward renovation
of Sir Pitt's house, to superintend the female band
engaged in stitching the blinds and hangings, to poke
and rummage in the drawers and cupboards crammed
with the dirty relics and congregated trumperies of a
couple of generations of Lady Crawleys, and to take
inventories of the china, the glass, and other properties
in the closets and store-rooms.
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley was general-in-chief over these
arrangements, with full orders from Sir Pitt to sell, barter,
confiscate, or purchase furniture, and she enjoyed herself
not a little in an occupation which gave full scope to her
taste and ingenuity. The renovation of the house was
determined upon when Sir Pitt came to town in November
to see his lawyers, and when he passed nearly a week in
Curzon Street, under the roof of his affectionate brother
and sister.
He had put up at an hotel at first, but, Becky, as soon
as she heard of the Baronet's arrival, went off alone to
greet him, and returned in an hour to Curzon Street
with Sir Pitt in the carriage by her side. It was impossible
sometimes to resist this artless little creature's hospitalities,
so kindly were they pressed, so frankly and amiably
offered. Becky seized Pitt's hand in a transport of
gratitude when he agreed to come. "Thank you," she
said, squeezing it and looking into the Baronet's eyes,
who blushed a good deal; "how happy this will make
Rawdon!" She bustled up to Pitt's bedroom, leading
on the servants, who were carrying his trunks thither. She
came in herself laughing, with a coal-scuttle out of
her own room.
A fire was blazing already in Sir Pitt's apartment (it
was Miss Briggs's room, by the way, who was sent
upstairs to sleep with the maid). "I knew I should bring
