CHAPTER LVII

Eothen

It was one of the many causes for personal pride with which old Osborne

chose to recreate himself that Sedley, his ancient rival, enemy, and

benefactor, was in his last days so utterly defeated and humiliated as

to be forced to accept pecuniary obligations at the hands of the man

who had most injured and insulted him. The successful man of the world

cursed the old pauper and relieved him from time to time. As he

furnished George with money for his mother, he gave the boy to

understand by hints, delivered in his brutal, coarse way, that George's

maternal grandfather was but a wretched old bankrupt and dependant, and

that John Sedley might thank the man to whom he already owed ever so

much money for the aid which his generosity now chose to administer.

George carried the pompous supplies to his mother and the shattered old

widower whom it was now the main business of her life to tend and

comfort. The little fellow patronized the feeble and disappointed old

man.

It may have shown a want of "proper pride" in Amelia that she chose to

accept these money benefits at the hands of her father's enemy. But

proper pride and this poor lady had never had much acquaintance

together. A disposition naturally simple and demanding protection; a

long course of poverty and humility, of daily privations, and hard

words, of kind offices and no returns, had been her lot ever since

womanhood almost, or since her luckless marriage with George Osborne.

You who see your betters bearing up under this shame every day, meekly

suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied, poor, and

rather despised for their poverty, do you ever step down from your

prosperity and wash the feet of these poor wearied beggars? The very

thought of them is odious and low. "There must be classes--there must

be rich and poor," Dives says, smacking his claret (it is well if he

even sends the broken meat out to Lazarus sitting under the window).

Very true; but think how mysterious and often unaccountable it is--that

lottery of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen and

sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for comforters.

So I must own that, without much repining, on the contrary with

something akin to gratitude, Amelia took the crumbs that her father-in-law

let drop now and then, and with them fed her own parent.

Directly she understood it to be her duty, it was this young woman's

nature (ladies, she is but thirty still, and we choose to call her a

young woman even at that age) it was, I say, her nature to sacrifice

herself and to fling all that she had at the feet of the beloved

object. During what long thankless nights had she worked out her

fingers for little Georgy whilst at home with her; what buffets,

scorns, privations, poverties had she endured for father and mother!

And in the midst of all these solitary resignations and unseen

sacrifices, she did not respect herself any more than the world

respected her, but I believe thought in her heart that she was a

poor-spirited, despicable little creature, whose luck in life was only

too good for her merits. O you poor women! O you poor secret martyrs

and victims, whose life is a torture, who are stretched on racks in

your bedrooms, and who lay your heads down on the block daily at the

drawing-room table; every man who watches your pains, or peers into

those dark places where the torture is administered to you, must pity

you--and--and thank God that he has a beard. I recollect seeing, years

ago, at the prisons for idiots and madmen at Bicetre, near Paris, a

poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his imprisonment and his

personal infirmity, to whom one of our party gave a halfpenny worth of

snuff in a cornet or "screw" of paper. The kindness was too much for

the poor epileptic creature. He cried in an anguish of delight and

gratitude: if anybody gave you and me a thousand a year, or saved our

lives, we could not be so affected. And so, if you properly tyrannize

over a woman, you will find a ha'p'orth of kindness act upon her and

bring tears into her eyes, as though you were an angel benefiting her.

Some such boons as these were the best which Fortune allotted to poor

little Amelia. Her life, begun not unprosperously, had come down to

this--to a mean prison and a long, ignoble bondage. Little George

visited her captivity sometimes and consoled it with feeble gleams of

encouragement. Russell Square was the boundary of her prison: she

might walk thither occasionally, but was always back to sleep in her

cell at night; to perform cheerless duties; to watch by thankless

sick-beds; to suffer the harassment and tyranny of querulous

disappointed old age. How many thousands of people are there, women

for the most part, who are doomed to endure this long slavery?--who are

hospital nurses without wages--sisters of Charity, if you like, without

the romance and the sentiment of sacrifice--who strive, fast, watch,

and suffer, unpitied, and fade away ignobly and unknown.

The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind

is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise,

and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked. Oh, be humble,

my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less

lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be

scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may

be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity

is very likely a satire.

They buried Amelia's mother in the churchyard at Brompton, upon just

such a rainy, dark day as Amelia recollected when first she had been

there to marry George. Her little boy sat by her side in pompous new

sables. She remembered the old pew-woman and clerk. Her thoughts were

away in other times as the parson read. But that she held George's hand

in her own, perhaps she would have liked to change places with....

Then, as usual, she felt ashamed of her selfish thoughts and prayed

inwardly to be strengthened to do her duty.

So she determined with all her might and strength to try and make her

old father happy. She slaved, toiled, patched, and mended, sang and

played backgammon, read out the newspaper, cooked dishes for old

Sedley, walked him out sedulously into Kensington Gardens or the

Brompton Lanes, listened to his stories with untiring smiles and

affectionate hypocrisy, or sat musing by his side and communing with

her own thoughts and reminiscences, as the old man, feeble and

querulous, sunned himself on the garden benches and prattled about his

wrongs or his sorrows. What sad, unsatisfactory thoughts those of the

widow were! The children running up and down the slopes and broad

paths in the gardens reminded her of George, who was taken from her;

the first George was taken from her; her selfish, guilty love, in both

instances, had been rebuked and bitterly chastised. She strove to think

it was right that she should be so punished. She was such a miserable

wicked sinner. She was quite alone in the world.

I know that the account of this kind of solitary imprisonment is

insufferably tedious, unless there is some cheerful or humorous

incident to enliven it--a tender gaoler, for instance, or a waggish

commandant of the fortress, or a mouse to come out and play about

Latude's beard and whiskers, or a subterranean passage under the

castle, dug by Trenck with his nails and a toothpick: the historian

has no such enlivening incident to relate in the narrative of Amelia's

captivity. Fancy her, if you please, during this period, very sad, but

always ready to smile when spoken to; in a very mean, poor, not to say

vulgar position of life; singing songs, making puddings, playing cards,

mending stockings, for her old father's benefit. So, never mind,

whether she be a heroine or no; or you and I, however old, scolding,

and bankrupt--may we have in our last days a kind soft shoulder on

which to lean and a gentle hand to soothe our gouty old pillows.

Old Sedley grew very fond of his daughter after his wife's death, and

Amelia had her consolation in doing her duty by the old man.

But we are not going to leave these two people long in such a low and

ungenteel station of life. Better days, as far as worldly prosperity

went, were in store for both. Perhaps the ingenious reader has guessed

who was the stout gentleman who called upon Georgy at his school in

company with our old friend Major Dobbin. It was another old

acquaintance returned to England, and at a time when his presence was

likely to be of great comfort to his relatives there.

Major Dobbin having easily succeeded in getting leave from his

good-natured commandant to proceed to Madras, and thence probably to

Europe, on urgent private affairs, never ceased travelling night and day

until he reached his journey's end, and had directed his march with such

celerity that he arrived at Madras in a high fever. His servants who

accompanied him brought him to the house of the friend with whom he had

resolved to stay until his departure for Europe in a state of delirium;

and it was thought for many, many days that he would never travel

farther than the burying-ground of the church of St. George's, where

the troops should fire a salvo over his grave, and where many a gallant

officer lies far away from his home.

Here, as the poor fellow lay tossing in his fever, the people who

watched him might have heard him raving about Amelia. The idea that he

should never see her again depressed him in his lucid hours. He

thought his last day was come, and he made his solemn preparations for

departure, setting his affairs in this world in order and leaving the

little property of which he was possessed to those whom he most desired

to benefit. The friend in whose house he was located witnessed his

testament. He desired to be buried with a little brown hair-chain

which he wore round his neck and which, if the truth must be known, he

had got from Amelia's maid at Brussels, when the young widow's hair was

cut off, during the fever which prostrated her after the death of

George Osborne on the plateau at Mount St. John.

He recovered, rallied, relapsed again, having undergone such a process

of blood-letting and calomel as showed the strength of his original

constitution. He was almost a skeleton when they put him on board the

Ramchunder East Indiaman, Captain Bragg, from Calcutta, touching at

Madras, and so weak and prostrate that his friend who had tended him

through his illness prophesied that the honest Major would never

survive the voyage, and that he would pass some morning, shrouded in

flag and hammock, over the ship's side, and carrying down to the sea

with him the relic that he wore at his heart. But whether it was the

sea air, or the hope which sprung up in him afresh, from the day that

the ship spread her canvas and stood out of the roads towards home, our

friend began to amend, and he was quite well (though as gaunt as a

greyhound) before they reached the Cape. "Kirk will be disappointed of

his majority this time," he said with a smile; "he will expect to find

himself gazetted by the time the regiment reaches home." For it must be

premised that while the Major was lying ill at Madras, having made such

prodigious haste to go thither, the gallant --th, which had passed many

years abroad, which after its return from the West Indies had been

baulked of its stay at home by the Waterloo campaign, and had been

ordered from Flanders to India, had received orders home; and the Major

might have accompanied his comrades, had he chosen to wait for their

arrival at Madras.

Perhaps he was not inclined to put himself in his exhausted state again

under the guardianship of Glorvina. "I think Miss O'Dowd would have

done for me," he said laughingly to a fellow-passenger, "if we had had

her on board, and when she had sunk me, she would have fallen upon you,

depend upon it, and carried you in as a prize to Southampton, Jos, my

boy."

For indeed it was no other than our stout friend who was also a

passenger on board the Ramchunder. He had passed ten years in Bengal.

Constant dinners, tiffins, pale ale and claret, the prodigious labour

of cutcherry, and the refreshment of brandy-pawnee which he was forced

to take there, had their effect upon Waterloo Sedley. A voyage to

Europe was pronounced necessary for him--and having served his full

time in India and had fine appointments which had enabled him to lay by

a considerable sum of money, he was free to come home and stay with a

good pension, or to return and resume that rank in the service to which

his seniority and his vast talents entitled him.

He was rather thinner than when we last saw him, but had gained in

majesty and solemnity of demeanour. He had resumed the mustachios to

which his services at Waterloo entitled him, and swaggered about on

deck in a magnificent velvet cap with a gold band and a profuse

ornamentation of pins and jewellery about his person. He took breakfast

in his cabin and dressed as solemnly to appear on the quarter-deck as

if he were going to turn out for Bond Street, or the Course at

Calcutta. He brought a native servant with him, who was his valet and

pipe-bearer and who wore the Sedley crest in silver on his turban.

That oriental menial had a wretched life under the tyranny of Jos

Sedley. Jos was as vain of his person as a woman, and took as long a

time at his toilette as any fading beauty. The youngsters among the

passengers, Young Chaffers of the 150th, and poor little Ricketts,

coming home after his third fever, used to draw out Sedley at the

cuddy-table and make him tell prodigious stories about himself and his

exploits against tigers and Napoleon. He was great when he visited the

Emperor's tomb at Longwood, when to these gentlemen and the young

officers of the ship, Major Dobbin not being by, he described the whole

battle of Waterloo and all but announced that Napoleon never would have

gone to Saint Helena at all but for him, Jos Sedley.

After leaving St. Helena he became very generous, disposing of a great

quantity of ship stores, claret, preserved meats, and great casks

packed with soda-water, brought out for his private delectation. There

were no ladies on board; the Major gave the pas of precedency to the

civilian, so that he was the first dignitary at table, and treated by

Captain Bragg and the officers of the Ramchunder with the respect which

his rank warranted. He disappeared rather in a panic during a

two-days' gale, in which he had the portholes of his cabin battened

down, and remained in his cot reading the Washerwoman of Finchley

Common, left on board the Ramchunder by the Right Honourable the Lady

Emily Hornblower, wife of the Rev. Silas Hornblower, when on their

passage out to the Cape, where the Reverend gentleman was a missionary;

but, for common reading, he had brought a stock of novels and plays

which he lent to the rest of the ship, and rendered himself agreeable

to all by his kindness and condescension.

Many and many a night as the ship was cutting through the roaring dark

sea, the moon and stars shining overhead and the bell singing out the

watch, Mr. Sedley and the Major would sit on the quarter-deck of the

vessel talking about home, as the Major smoked his cheroot and the

civilian puffed at the hookah which his servant prepared for him.

In these conversations it was wonderful with what perseverance and

ingenuity Major Dobbin would manage to bring the talk round to the

subject of Amelia and her little boy. Jos, a little testy about his

father's misfortunes and unceremonious applications to him, was soothed

down by the Major, who pointed out the elder's ill fortunes and old

age. He would not perhaps like to live with the old couple, whose ways

and hours might not agree with those of a younger man, accustomed to

different society (Jos bowed at this compliment); but, the Major

pointed out, how advantageous it would be for Jos Sedley to have a

house of his own in London, and not a mere bachelor's establishment as

before; how his sister Amelia would be the very person to preside over

it; how elegant, how gentle she was, and of what refined good manners.

He recounted stories of the success which Mrs. George Osborne had had

in former days at Brussels, and in London, where she was much admired

by people of very great fashion; and he then hinted how becoming it

would be for Jos to send Georgy to a good school and make a man of him,

for his mother and her parents would be sure to spoil him. In a word,

this artful Major made the civilian promise to take charge of Amelia

and her unprotected child. He did not know as yet what events had

happened in the little Sedley family, and how death had removed the

mother, and riches had carried off George from Amelia. But the fact is

that every day and always, this love-smitten and middle-aged gentleman

was thinking about Mrs. Osborne, and his whole heart was bent upon

doing her good. He coaxed, wheedled, cajoled, and complimented Jos

Sedley with a perseverance and cordiality of which he was not aware

himself, very likely; but some men who have unmarried sisters or

daughters even, may remember how uncommonly agreeable gentlemen are to

the male relations when they are courting the females; and perhaps this

rogue of a Dobbin was urged by a similar hypocrisy.

The truth is, when Major Dobbin came on board the Ramchumder, very

sick, and for the three days she lay in the Madras Roads, he did not

begin to rally, nor did even the appearance and recognition of his old

acquaintance, Mr. Sedley, on board much cheer him, until after a

conversation which they had one day, as the Major was laid languidly on

the deck. He said then he thought he was doomed; he had left a little

something to his godson in his will, and he trusted Mrs. Osborne would

remember him kindly and be happy in the marriage she was about to make.

"Married? not the least," Jos answered; "he had heard from her: she

made no mention of the marriage, and by the way, it was curious, she

wrote to say that Major Dobbin was going to be married, and hoped that

HE would be happy." What were the dates of Sedley's letters from

Europe? The civilian fetched them. They were two months later than the

Major's; and the ship's surgeon congratulated himself upon the

treatment adopted by him towards his new patient, who had been

consigned to shipboard by the Madras practitioner with very small hopes

indeed; for, from that day, the very day that he changed the draught,

Major Dobbin began to mend. And thus it was that deserving officer,

Captain Kirk, was disappointed of his majority.

After they passed St. Helena, Major Dobbin's gaiety and strength was

such as to astonish all his fellow passengers. He larked with the

midshipmen, played single-stick with the mates, ran up the shrouds like

a boy, sang a comic song one night to the amusement of the whole party

assembled over their grog after supper, and rendered himself so gay,

lively, and amiable that even Captain Bragg, who thought there was

nothing in his passenger, and considered he was a poor-spirited feller

at first, was constrained to own that the Major was a reserved but

well-informed and meritorious officer. "He ain't got distangy manners,

dammy," Bragg observed to his first mate; "he wouldn't do at Government

House, Roper, where his Lordship and Lady William was as kind to me,

and shook hands with me before the whole company, and asking me at

dinner to take beer with him, before the Commander-in-Chief himself; he

ain't got manners, but there's something about him--" And thus Captain

Bragg showed that he possessed discrimination as a man, as well as

ability as a commander.

But a calm taking place when the Ramchunder was within ten days' sail

of England, Dobbin became so impatient and ill-humoured as to surprise

those comrades who had before admired his vivacity and good temper. He

did not recover until the breeze sprang up again, and was in a highly

excited state when the pilot came on board. Good God, how his heart

beat as the two friendly spires of Southampton came in sight.