prompt:
Chapter: In Which Two Lights are Put Out

There came a day when the round of decorous pleasures and solemn
gaieties in which Mr. Jos Sedley's family indulged was interrupted by
an event which happens in most houses.  As you ascend the staircase of
your house from the drawing towards the bedroom floors, you may have
remarked a little arch in the wall right before you, which at once
gives light to the stair which leads from the second story to the third
(where the nursery and servants' chambers commonly are) and serves for
another purpose of utility, of which the undertaker's men can give you
a notion.  They rest the coffins upon that arch, or pass them through
it so as not to disturb in any unseemly manner the cold tenant
slumbering within the black ark.

That second-floor arch in a London house, looking up and down the well
of the staircase and commanding the main thoroughfare by which the
inhabitants are passing; by which cook lurks down before daylight to
scour her pots and pans in the kitchen; by which young master
stealthily ascends, having left his boots in the hall, and let himself
in after dawn from a jolly night at the Club; down which miss comes
rustling in fresh ribbons and spreading muslins, brilliant and
beautiful, and prepared for conquest and the ball; or Master Tommy
slides, preferring the banisters for a mode of conveyance, and
disdaining danger and the stair; down which the mother is fondly
carried smiling in her strong husband's arms, as he steps steadily step
by step, and followed by the monthly nurse, on the day when the medical
man has pronounced that the charming patient may go downstairs; up
which John lurks to bed, yawning, with a sputtering tallow candle, and
to gather up before sunrise the boots which are awaiting him in the
passages--that stair, up or down which babies are carried, old people
are helped, guests are marshalled to the ball, the parson walks to the
christening, the doctor to the sick-room, and the undertaker's men to
the upper floor--what a memento of Life, Death, and Vanity it is--that
arch and stair--if you choose to consider it, and sit on the landing,
looking up and down the well!  The doctor will come up to us too for
the last time there, my friend in motley.  The nurse will look in at
the curtains, and you take no notice--and then she will fling open the
windows for a little and let in the air.  Then they will pull down all
the front blinds of the house and live in the back rooms--then they
will send for the lawyer and other men in black, &c.  Your comedy and
mine will have been played then, and we shall be removed, oh, how far,
from the trumpets, and the shouting, and the posture-making.  If we
are gentlefolks they will put hatchments over our late domicile, with
gilt cherubim, and mottoes stating that there is "Quiet in Heaven."
Your son will new furnish the house, or perhaps let it, and go into a
more modern quarter; your name will be among the "Members Deceased" in
the lists of your clubs next year. However much you may be mourned,
your widow will like to have her weeds neatly made--the cook will send
or come up to ask about dinner--the survivor will soon bear to look at
your picture over the mantelpiece, which will presently be deposed from
the place of honour, to make way for the portrait of the son who reigns.

Which of the dead are most tenderly and passionately deplored? Those
who love the survivors the least, I believe.  The death of a child
occasions a passion of grief and frantic tears, such as your end,
brother reader, will never inspire.  The death of an infant which
scarce knew you, which a week's absence from you would have caused to
forget you, will strike you down more than the loss of your closest
friend, or your first-born son--a man grown like yourself, with
children of his own.  We may be harsh and stern with Judah and
Simeon--our love and pity gush out for Benjamin, the little one. And if
you are old, as some reader of this may be or shall be old and rich, or
old and poor--you may one day be thinking for yourself--"These people
are very good round about me, but they won't grieve too much when I am
gone.  I am very rich, and they want my inheritance--or very poor, and
they are tired of supporting me."

The period of mourning for Mrs. Sedley's death was only just concluded,
and Jos scarcely had had time to cast off his black and appear in the
splendid waistcoats which he loved, when it became evident to those
about Mr. Sedley that another event was at hand, and that the old man
was about to go seek for his wife in the dark land whither she had
preceded him.  "The state of my father's health," Jos Sedley solemnly
remarked at the Club, "prevents me from giving any LARGE parties this
season:  but if you will come in quietly at half-past six, Chutney, my
boy, and fake a homely dinner with one or two of the old set--I shall
be always glad to see you." So Jos and his acquaintances dined and
drank their claret among themselves in silence, whilst the sands of
life were running out in the old man's glass upstairs.  The
velvet-footed butler brought them their wine, and they composed
themselves to a rubber after dinner, at which Major Dobbin would
sometimes come and take a hand; and Mrs. Osborne would occasionally
descend, when her patient above was settled for the night, and had
commenced one of those lightly troubled slumbers which visit the pillow
of old age.

The old man clung to his daughter during this sickness.  He would take
his broths and medicines from scarcely any other hand.  To tend him
became almost the sole business of her life.  Her bed was placed close
by the door which opened into his chamber, and she was alive at the
slightest noise or disturbance from the couch of the querulous invalid.
Though, to do him justice, he lay awake many an hour, silent and
without stirring, unwilling to awaken his kind and vigilant nurse.

He loved his daughter with more fondness now, perhaps, than ever he had
done since the days of her childhood.  In the discharge of gentle
offices and kind filial duties, this simple creature shone most
especially.  "She walks into the room as silently as a sunbeam," Mr.
Dobbin thought as he saw her passing in and out from her father's room,
a cheerful sweetness lighting up her face as she moved to and fro,
graceful and noiseless.  When women are brooding over their children,
or busied in a sick-room, who has not seen in their faces those sweet
angelic beams of love and pity?

A secret feud of some years' standing was thus healed, and with a tacit
reconciliation.  In these last hours, and touched by her love and
goodness, the old man forgot all his grief against her, and wrongs
which he and his wife had many a long night debated:  how she had given
up everything for her boy; how she was careless of her parents in their
old age and misfortune, and only thought of the child; how absurdly and
foolishly, impiously indeed, she took on when George was removed from
her.  Old Sedley forgot these charges as he was making up his last
account, and did justice to the gentle and uncomplaining little martyr.
One night when she stole into his room, she found him awake, when the
broken old man made his confession.  "Oh, Emmy, I've been thinking we
were very unkind and unjust to you," he said and put out his cold and
feeble hand to her. She knelt down and prayed by his bedside, as he did
too, having still hold of her hand.  When our turn comes, friend, may
we have such company in our prayers!

Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before
him--his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity,
his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless
condition--no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the
better of him--neither name nor money to bequeath--a spent-out,
bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I
wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and
famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield;
or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a
strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, "To-morrow,
success or failure won't matter much, and the sun will rise, and all
the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but
I shall be out of the turmoil."

So there came one morning and sunrise when all the world got up and set
about its various works and pleasures, with the exception of old John
Sedley, who was not to fight with fortune, or to hope or scheme any
more, but to go and take up a quiet and utterly unknown residence in a
churchyard at Brompton by the side of his old wife.

Major Dobbin, Jos, and Georgy followed his remains to the grave, in a
black cloth coach.  Jos came on purpose from the Star and Garter at
Richmond, whither he retreated after the deplorable event.  He did not
care to remain in the house, with the--under the circumstances, you
understand.  But Emmy stayed and did her duty as usual.  She was bowed
down by no especial grief, and rather solemn than sorrowful.  She
prayed that her own end might be as calm and painless, and thought with
trust and reverence of the words which she had heard from her father
during his illness, indicative of his faith, his resignation, and his
future hope.

Yes, I think that will be the better ending of the two, after all.
Suppose you are particularly rich and well-to-do and say on that last
day, "I am very rich; I am tolerably well known; I have lived all my
life in the best society, and thank Heaven, come of a most respectable
family.  I have served my King and country with honour. I was in
Parliament for several years, where, I may say, my speeches were
listened to and pretty well received. I don't owe any man a shilling:
on the contrary, I lent my old college friend, Jack Lazarus, fifty
pounds, for which my executors will not press him.  I leave my
daughters with ten thousand pounds apiece--very good portions for
girls; I bequeath my plate and furniture, my house in Baker Street,
with a handsome jointure, to my widow for her life; and my landed
property, besides money in the funds, and my cellar of well-selected
wine in Baker Street, to my son.  I leave twenty pound a year to my
valet; and I defy any man after I have gone to find anything against my
character." Or suppose, on the other hand, your swan sings quite a
different sort of dirge and you say, "I am a poor blighted,
disappointed old fellow, and have made an utter failure through life.
I was not endowed either with brains or with good fortune, and confess
that I have committed a hundred mistakes and blunders. I own to having
forgotten my duty many a time.  I can't pay what I owe.  On my last bed
I lie utterly helpless and humble, and I pray forgiveness for my
weakness and throw myself, with a contrite heart, at the feet of the
Divine Mercy." Which of these two speeches, think you, would be the
best oration for your own funeral? Old Sedley made the last; and in
that humble frame of mind, and holding by the hand of his daughter,
life and disappointment and vanity sank away from under him.

"You see," said old Osborne to George, "what comes of merit, and
industry, and judicious speculations, and that.  Look at me and my
banker's account.  Look at your poor Grandfather Sedley and his
failure.  And yet he was a better man than I was, this day twenty
years--a better man, I should say, by ten thousand pound."

Beyond these people and Mr. Clapp's family, who came over from Brompton
to pay a visit of condolence, not a single soul alive ever cared a
penny piece about old John Sedley, or remembered the existence of such
a person.

When old Osborne first heard from his friend Colonel Buckler (as little
Georgy had already informed us) how distinguished an officer Major
Dobbin was, he exhibited a great deal of scornful incredulity and
expressed his surprise how ever such a feller as that should possess
either brains or reputation.  But he heard of the Major's fame from
various members of his society.  Sir William Dobbin had a great opinion
of his son and narrated many stories illustrative of the Major's
learning, valour, and estimation in the world's opinion. Finally, his
name appeared in the lists of one or two great parties of the nobility,
and this circumstance had a prodigious effect upon the old aristocrat
of Russell Square.

The Major's position, as guardian to Georgy, whose possession had been
ceded to his grandfather, rendered some meetings between the two
gentlemen inevitable; and it was in one of these that old Osborne, a
keen man of business, looking into the Major's accounts with his ward
and the boy's mother, got a hint, which staggered him very much, and at
once pained and pleased him, that it was out of William Dobbin's own
pocket that a part of the fund had been supplied upon which the poor
widow and the child had subsisted.

When pressed upon the point, Dobbin, who could not tell lies, blushed
and stammered a good deal and finally confessed.  "The marriage," he
said (at which his interlocutor's face grew dark) "was very much my
doing.  I thought my poor friend had gone so far that retreat from his
engagement would have been dishonour to him and death to Mrs. Osborne,
and I could do no less, when she was left without resources, than give
what money I could spare to maintain her."

"Major D.," Mr. Osborne said, looking hard at him and turning very red
too--"you did me a great injury; but give me leave to tell you, sir,
you are an honest feller. There's my hand, sir, though I little thought
that my flesh and blood was living on you--" and the pair shook hands,
with great confusion on Major Dobbin's part, thus found out in his act
of charitable hypocrisy.

He strove to soften the old man and reconcile him towards his son's
memory.  "He was such a noble fellow," he said, "that all of us loved
him, and would have done anything for him.  I, as a young man in those
days, was flattered beyond measure by his preference for me, and was
more pleased to be seen in his company than in that of the
Commander-in-Chief.  I never saw his equal for pluck and daring and all
the qualities of a soldier"; and Dobbin told the old father as many
stories as he could remember regarding the gallantry and achievements
of his son.  "And Georgy is so like him," the Major added.

"He's so like him that he makes me tremble sometimes," the grandfather
said.

On one or two evenings the Major came to dine with Mr. Osborne (it was
during the time of the sickness of Mr. Sedley), and as the two sat
together in the evening after dinner, all their talk was about the
departed hero. The father boasted about him according to his wont,
glorifying himself in recounting his son's feats and gallantry, but his
mood was at any rate better and more charitable than that in which he
had been disposed until now to regard the poor fellow; and the
Christian heart of the kind Major was pleased at these symptoms of
returning peace and good-will.  On the second evening old Osborne
called Dobbin William, just as he used to do at the time when Dobbin
and George were boys together, and the honest gentleman was pleased by
that mark of reconciliation.

On the next day at breakfast, when Miss Osborne, with the asperity of
her age and character, ventured to make some remark reflecting
slightingly upon the Major's appearance or behaviour--the master of the
house interrupted her.  "You'd have been glad enough to git him for
yourself, Miss O.  But them grapes are sour.  Ha!  ha! Major William is
a fine feller."

"That he is, Grandpapa," said Georgy approvingly; and going up close to
the old gentleman, he took a hold of his large grey whiskers, and
laughed in his face good-humouredly, and kissed him.  And he told the
story at night to his mother, who fully agreed with the boy. "Indeed he
is," she said.  "Your dear father always said so. He is one of the best
and most upright of men." Dobbin happened to drop in very soon after
this conversation, which made Amelia blush perhaps, and the young
scapegrace increased the confusion by telling Dobbin the other part of
the story.  "I say, Dob," he said, "there's such an uncommon nice girl
wants to marry you.  She's plenty of tin; she wears a front; and she
scolds the servants from morning till night." "Who is it?" asked
Dobbin.   "It's Aunt O.," the boy answered. "Grandpapa said so.  And I
say, Dob, how prime it would be to have you for my uncle." Old Sedley's
quavering voice from the next room at this moment weakly called for
Amelia, and the laughing ended.

That old Osborne's mind was changing was pretty clear. He asked George
about his uncle sometimes, and laughed at the boy's imitation of the
way in which Jos said "God-bless-my-soul" and gobbled his soup.  Then
he said, "It's not respectful, sir, of you younkers to be imitating of
your relations.  Miss O., when you go out adriving to-day, leave my
card upon Mr. Sedley, do you hear? There's no quarrel betwigst me and
him anyhow."

The card was returned, and Jos and the Major were asked to dinner--to
a dinner the most splendid and stupid that perhaps ever Mr. Osborne
gave; every inch of the family plate was exhibited, and the best
company was asked.  Mr. Sedley took down Miss O.  to dinner, and she
was very gracious to him; whereas she hardly spoke to the Major, who
sat apart from her, and by the side of Mr. Osborne, very timid.  Jos
said, with great solemnity, it was the best turtle soup he had ever
tasted in his life, and asked Mr. Osborne where he got his Madeira.

"It is some of Sedley's wine," whispered the butler to his master.
"I've had it a long time, and paid a good figure for it, too," Mr.
Osborne said aloud to his guest, and then whispered to his right-hand
neighbour how he had got it "at the old chap's sale."

More than once he asked the Major about--about Mrs. George Osborne--a
theme on which the Major could be very eloquent when he chose.  He told
Mr. Osborne of her sufferings--of her passionate attachment to her
husband, whose memory she worshipped still--of the tender and dutiful
manner in which she had supported her parents, and given up her boy,
when it seemed to her her duty to do so.  "You don't know what she
endured, sir," said honest Dobbin with a tremor in his voice, "and I
hope and trust you will be reconciled to her.  If she took your son
away from you, she gave hers to you; and however much you loved your
George, depend on it, she loved hers ten times more."

"By God, you are a good feller, sir," was all Mr. Osborne said.  It had
never struck him that the widow would feel any pain at parting from the
boy, or that his having a fine fortune could grieve her.  A
reconciliation was announced as speedy and inevitable, and Amelia's
heart already began to beat at the notion of the awful meeting with
George's father.

It was never, however, destined to take place.  Old Sedley's lingering
illness and death supervened, after which a meeting was for some time
impossible.  That catastrophe and other events may have worked upon Mr.
Osborne.  He was much shaken of late, and aged, and his mind was
working inwardly.  He had sent for his lawyers, and probably changed
something in his will.  The medical man who looked in pronounced him
shaky, agitated, and talked of a little blood and the seaside; but he
took neither of these remedies.

One day when he should have come down to breakfast, his servant missing
him, went into his dressing-room and found him lying at the foot of the
dressing-table in a fit.  Miss Osborne was apprised; the doctors were
sent for; Georgy stopped away from school; the bleeders and cuppers
came.  Osborne partially regained cognizance, but never could speak
again, though he tried dreadfully once or twice, and in four days he
died.  The doctors went down, and the undertaker's men went up the
stairs, and all the shutters were shut towards the garden in Russell
Square.  Bullock rushed from the City in a hurry. "How much money had
he left to that boy? Not half, surely? Surely share and share alike
between the three?" It was an agitating moment.

What was it that poor old man tried once or twice in vain to say? I
hope it was that he wanted to see Amelia and be reconciled before he
left the world to one dear and faithful wife of his son:  it was most
likely that, for his will showed that the hatred which he had so long
cherished had gone out of his heart.

They found in the pocket of his dressing-gown the letter with the great
red seal which George had written him from Waterloo.  He had looked at
the other papers too, relative to his son, for the key of the box in
which he kept them was also in his pocket, and it was found the seals
and envelopes had been broken--very likely on the night before the
seizure--when the butler had taken him tea into his study, and found
him reading in the great red family Bible.

When the will was opened, it was found that half the property was left
to George, and the remainder between the two sisters.  Mr. Bullock to
continue, for their joint benefit, the affairs of the commercial house,
or to go out, as he thought fit.  An annuity of five hundred pounds,
chargeable on George's property, was left to his mother, "the widow of
my beloved son, George Osborne," who was to resume the guardianship of
the boy.

"Major William Dobbin, my beloved son's friend," was appointed
executor; "and as out of his kindness and bounty, and with his own
private funds, he maintained my grandson and my son's widow, when they
were otherwise without means of support" (the testator went on to say)
"I hereby thank him heartily for his love and regard for them, and
beseech him to accept such a sum as may be sufficient to purchase his
commission as a Lieutenant-Colonel, or to be disposed of in any way he
may think fit."

When Amelia heard that her father-in-law was reconciled to her, her
heart melted, and she was grateful for the fortune left to her.  But
when she heard how Georgy was restored to her, and knew how and by
whom, and how it was William's bounty that supported her in poverty,
how it was William who gave her her husband and her son--oh, then she
sank on her knees, and prayed for blessings on that constant and kind
heart; she bowed down and humbled herself, and kissed the feet, as it
were, of that beautiful and generous affection.

And gratitude was all that she had to pay back for such admirable
devotion and benefits--only gratitude!  If she thought of any other
return, the image of George stood up out of the grave and said, "You
are mine, and mine only, now and forever."

William knew her feelings:  had he not passed his whole life in
divining them?

When the nature of Mr. Osborne's will became known to the world, it was
edifying to remark how Mrs. George Osborne rose in the estimation of
the people forming her circle of acquaintance.  The servants of Jos's
establishment, who used to question her humble orders and say they
would "ask Master" whether or not they could obey, never thought now of
that sort of appeal.  The cook forgot to sneer at her shabby old gowns
(which, indeed, were quite eclipsed by that lady's finery when she was
dressed to go to church of a Sunday evening), the others no longer
grumbled at the sound of her bell, or delayed to answer that summons.
The coachman, who grumbled that his 'osses should be brought out and
his carriage made into an hospital for that old feller and Mrs. O.,
drove her with the utmost alacrity now, and trembling lest he should be
superseded by Mr. Osborne's coachman, asked "what them there Russell
Square coachmen knew about town, and whether they was fit to sit on a
box before a lady?" Jos's friends, male and female, suddenly became
interested about Emmy, and cards of condolence multiplied on her hall
table.  Jos himself, who had looked on her as a good-natured harmless
pauper, to whom it was his duty to give victuals and shelter, paid her
and the rich little boy, his nephew, the greatest respect--was anxious
that she should have change and amusement after her troubles and
trials, "poor dear girl"--and began to appear at the breakfast-table,
and most particularly to ask how she would like to dispose of the day.

In her capacity of guardian to Georgy, she, with the consent of the
Major, her fellow-trustee, begged Miss Osborne to live in the Russell
Square house as long as ever she chose to dwell there; but that lady,
with thanks, declared that she never could think of remaining alone in
that melancholy mansion, and departed in deep mourning to Cheltenham,
with a couple of her old domestics. The rest were liberally paid and
dismissed, the faithful old butler, whom Mrs. Osborne proposed to
retain, resigning and preferring to invest his savings in a
public-house, where, let us hope, he was not unprosperous. Miss Osborne
not choosing to live in Russell Square, Mrs. Osborne also, after
consultation, declined to occupy the gloomy old mansion there.  The
house was dismantled; the rich furniture and effects, the awful
chandeliers and dreary blank mirrors packed away and hidden, the rich
rosewood drawing-room suite was muffled in straw, the carpets were
rolled up and corded, the small select library of well-bound books was
stowed into two wine-chests, and the whole paraphernalia rolled away in
several enormous vans to the Pantechnicon, where they were to lie until
Georgy's majority.  And the great heavy dark plate-chests went off to
Messrs.  Stumpy and Rowdy, to lie in the cellars of those eminent
bankers until the same period should arrive.

One day Emmy, with George in her hand and clad in deep sables, went to
visit the deserted mansion which she had not entered since she was a
girl.  The place in front was littered with straw where the vans had
been laden and rolled off.  They went into the great blank rooms, the
walls of which bore the marks where the pictures and mirrors had hung.
Then they went up the great blank stone staircases into the upper
rooms, into that where grandpapa died, as George said in a whisper, and
then higher still into George's own room.  The boy was still clinging
by her side, but she thought of another besides him.  She knew that it
had been his father's room as well as his own.

She went up to one of the open windows (one of those at which she used
to gaze with a sick heart when the child was first taken from her), and
thence as she looked out she could see, over the trees of Russell
Square, the old house in which she herself was born, and where she had
passed so many happy days of sacred youth. They all came back to her,
the pleasant holidays, the kind faces, the careless, joyful past times,
and the long pains and trials that had since cast her down. She thought
of these and of the man who had been her constant protector, her good
genius, her sole benefactor, her tender and generous friend.

"Look here, Mother," said Georgy, "here's a G.O. scratched on the glass
with a diamond, I never saw it before, I never did it."

"It was your father's room long before you were born, George," she
said, and she blushed as she kissed the boy.

She was very silent as they drove back to Richmond, where they had
taken a temporary house:  where the smiling lawyers used to come
bustling over to see her (and we may be sure noted the visit in the
bill):  and where of course there was a room for Major Dobbin too, who
rode over frequently, having much business to transact on behalf of his
little ward.

Georgy at this time was removed from Mr. Veal's on an unlimited
holiday, and that gentleman was engaged to prepare an inscription for a
fine marble slab, to be placed up in the Foundling under the monument
of Captain George Osborne.

The female Bullock, aunt of Georgy, although despoiled by that little
monster of one-half of the sum which she expected from her father,
nevertheless showed her charitableness of spirit by being reconciled to
the mother and the boy.  Roehampton is not far from Richmond, and one
day the chariot, with the golden bullocks emblazoned on the panels, and
the flaccid children within, drove to Amelia's house at Richmond; and
the Bullock family made an irruption into the garden, where Amelia was
reading a book, Jos was in an arbour placidly dipping strawberries into
wine, and the Major in one of his Indian jackets was giving a back to
Georgy, who chose to jump over him.  He went over his head and bounded
into the little advance of Bullocks, with immense black bows in their
hats, and huge black sashes, accompanying their mourning mamma.

"He is just of the age for Rosa," the fond parent thought, and glanced
towards that dear child, an unwholesome little miss of seven years of
age.

"Rosa, go and kiss your dear cousin," Mrs. Frederick said.  "Don't you
know me, George? I am your aunt."

"I know you well enough," George said; "but I don't like kissing,
please"; and he retreated from the obedient caresses of his cousin.

"Take me to your dear mamma, you droll child," Mrs. Frederick said, and
those ladies accordingly met, after an absence of more than fifteen
years.  During Emmy's cares and poverty the other had never once
thought about coming to see her, but now that she was decently
prosperous in the world, her sister-in-law came to her as a matter of
course.

So did numbers more.  Our old friend, Miss Swartz, and her husband came
thundering over from Hampton Court, with flaming yellow liveries, and
was as impetuously fond of Amelia as ever.  Miss Swartz would have
liked her always if she could have seen her.  One must do her that
justice.  But, que voulez vous?--in this vast town one has not the time
to go and seek one's friends; if they drop out of the rank they
disappear, and we march on without them.  Who is ever missed in Vanity
Fair?

But so, in a word, and before the period of grief for Mr. Osborne's
death had subsided, Emmy found herself in the centre of a very genteel
circle indeed, the members of which could not conceive that anybody
belonging to it was not very lucky.  There was scarce one of the ladies
that hadn't a relation a Peer, though the husband might be a drysalter
in the City.  Some of the ladies were very blue and well informed,
reading Mrs. Somerville and frequenting the Royal Institution; others
were severe and Evangelical, and held by Exeter Hall. Emmy, it must be
owned, found herself entirely at a loss in the midst of their clavers,
and suffered woefully on the one or two occasions on which she was
compelled to accept Mrs. Frederick Bullock's hospitalities.  That lady
persisted in patronizing her and determined most graciously to form
her.  She found Amelia's milliners for her and regulated her household
and her manners.  She drove over constantly from Roehampton and
entertained her friend with faint fashionable fiddle-faddle and feeble
Court slip-slop. Jos liked to hear it, but the Major used to go off
growling at the appearance of this woman, with her twopenny gentility.
He went to sleep under Frederick Bullock's bald head, after dinner, at
one of the banker's best parties (Fred was still anxious that the
balance of the Osborne property should be transferred from Stumpy and
Rowdy's to them), and whilst Amelia, who did not know Latin, or who
wrote the last crack article in the Edinburgh, and did not in the least
deplore, or otherwise, Mr. Peel's late extraordinary tergiversation on
the fatal Catholic Relief Bill, sat dumb amongst the ladies in the
grand drawing-room, looking out upon velvet lawns, trim gravel walks,
and glistening hot-houses.

"She seems good-natured but insipid," said Mrs. Rowdy; "that Major
seems to be particularly epris."

"She wants ton sadly," said Mrs. Hollyock.  "My dear creature, you
never will be able to form her."

"She is dreadfully ignorant or indifferent," said Mrs. Glowry with a
voice as if from the grave, and a sad shake of the head and turban. "I
asked her if she thought that it was in 1836, according to Mr. Jowls,
or in 1839, according to Mr. Wapshot, that the Pope was to fall: and
she said--'Poor Pope!  I hope not--What has he done?'"

"She is my brother's widow, my dear friends," Mrs. Frederick replied,
"and as such I think we're all bound to give her every attention and
instruction on entering into the world.  You may fancy there can be no
MERCENARY motives in those whose DISAPPOINTMENTS are well known."

"That poor dear Mrs. Bullock," said Rowdy to Hollyock, as they drove
away together--"she is always scheming and managing.  She wants Mrs.
Osborne's account to be taken from our house to hers--and the way in
which she coaxes that boy and makes him sit by that blear-eyed little
Rosa is perfectly ridiculous."

"I wish Glowry was choked with her Man of Sin and her Battle of
Armageddon," cried the other, and the carriage rolled away over Putney
Bridge.

But this sort of society was too cruelly genteel for Emmy, and all
jumped for joy when a foreign tour was proposed.

Am Rhein

The above everyday events had occurred, and a few weeks had passed,
when on one fine morning, Parliament being over, the summer advanced,
and all the good company in London about to quit that city for their
annual tour in search of pleasure or health, the Batavier steamboat
left the Tower-stairs laden with a goodly company of English fugitives.
The quarter-deck awnings were up, and the benches and gangways crowded
with scores of rosy children, bustling nursemaids; ladies in the
prettiest pink bonnets and summer dresses; gentlemen in travelling caps
and linen-jackets, whose mustachios had just begun to sprout for the
ensuing tour; and stout trim old veterans with starched neckcloths and
neat-brushed hats, such as have invaded Europe any time since the
conclusion of the war, and carry the national Goddem into every city of
the Continent.  The congregation of hat-boxes, and Bramah desks, and
dressing-cases was prodigious.  There were jaunty young Cambridge-men
travelling with their tutor, and going for a reading excursion to
Nonnenwerth or Konigswinter; there were Irish gentlemen, with the most
dashing whiskers and jewellery, talking about horses incessantly, and
prodigiously polite to the young ladies on board, whom, on the
contrary, the Cambridge lads and their pale-faced tutor avoided with
maiden coyness; there were old Pall Mall loungers bound for Ems and
Wiesbaden and a course of waters to clear off the dinners of the
season, and a little roulette and trente-et-quarante to keep the
excitement going; there was old Methuselah, who had married his young
wife, with Captain Papillon of the Guards holding her parasol and
guide-books; there was young May who was carrying off his bride on a
pleasure tour (Mrs. Winter that was, and who had been at school with
May's grandmother); there was Sir John and my Lady with a dozen
children, and corresponding nursemaids; and the great grandee Bareacres
family that sat by themselves near the wheel, stared at everybody, and
spoke to no one.  Their carriages, emblazoned with coronets and heaped
with shining imperials, were on the foredeck, locked in with a dozen
more such vehicles:  it was difficult to pass in and out amongst them;
and the poor inmates of the fore-cabin had scarcely any space for
locomotion.  These consisted of a few magnificently attired gentlemen
from Houndsditch, who brought their own provisions, and could have
bought half the gay people in the grand saloon; a few honest fellows
with mustachios and portfolios, who set to sketching before they had
been half an hour on board; one or two French femmes de chambre who
began to be dreadfully ill by the time the boat had passed Greenwich; a
groom or two who lounged in the neighbourhood of the horse-boxes under
their charge, or leaned over the side by the paddle-wheels, and talked
about who was good for the Leger, and what they stood to win or lose
for the Goodwood cup.

All the couriers, when they had done plunging about the ship and had
settled their various masters in the cabins or on the deck, congregated
together and began to chatter and smoke; the Hebrew gentlemen joining
them and looking at the carriages.  There was Sir John's great carriage
that would hold thirteen people; my Lord Methuselah's carriage, my Lord
Bareacres' chariot, britzska, and fourgon, that anybody might pay for
who liked. It was a wonder how my Lord got the ready money to pay for
the expenses of the journey. The Hebrew gentlemen knew how he got it.
They knew what money his Lordship had in his pocket at that instant,
and what interest he paid for it, and who gave it him.  Finally there
was a very neat, handsome travelling carriage, about which the
gentlemen speculated.

"A qui cette voiture la?" said one gentleman-courier with a large
morocco money-bag and ear-rings to another with ear-rings and a large
morocco money-bag.

"C'est a Kirsch je bense--je l'ai vu toute a l'heure--qui brenoit des
sangviches dans la voiture," said the courier in a fine German French.

Kirsch emerging presently from the neighbourhood of the hold, where he
had been bellowing instructions intermingled with polyglot oaths to the
ship's men engaged in secreting the passengers' luggage, came to give
an account of himself to his brother interpreters.  He informed them
that the carriage belonged to a Nabob from Calcutta and Jamaica
enormously rich, and with whom he was engaged to travel; and at this
moment a young gentleman who had been warned off the bridge between the
paddle-boxes, and who had dropped thence on to the roof of Lord
Methuselah's carriage, from which he made his way over other carriages
and imperials until he had clambered on to his own, descended thence
and through the window into the body of the carriage, to the applause
of the couriers looking on.

"Nous allons avoir une belle traversee, Monsieur George," said the
courier with a grin, as he lifted his gold-laced cap.

"D---- your French," said the young gentleman, "where's the biscuits,
ay?" Whereupon Kirsch answered him in the English language or in such
an imitation of it as he could command--for though he was familiar with
all languages, Mr. Kirsch was not acquainted with a single one, and
spoke all with indifferent volubility and incorrectness.

The imperious young gentleman who gobbled the biscuits (and indeed it
was time to refresh himself, for he had breakfasted at Richmond full
three hours before) was our young friend George Osborne.  Uncle Jos and
his mamma were on the quarter-deck with a gentleman of whom they used
to see a good deal, and the four were about to make a summer tour.

Jos was seated at that moment on deck under the awning, and pretty
nearly opposite to the Earl of Bareacres and his family, whose
proceedings absorbed the Bengalee almost entirely.  Both the noble
couple looked rather younger than in the eventful year '15, when Jos
remembered to have seen them at Brussels (indeed, he always gave out in
India that he was intimately acquainted with them).  Lady Bareacres'
hair, which was then dark, was now a beautiful golden auburn, whereas
Lord Bareacres' whiskers, formerly red, were at present of a rich black
with purple and green reflections in the light.  But changed as they
were, the movements of the noble pair occupied Jos's mind entirely.
The presence of a Lord fascinated him, and he could look at nothing
else.

"Those people seem to interest you a good deal," said Dobbin, laughing
and watching him.  Amelia too laughed. She was in a straw bonnet with
black ribbons, and otherwise dressed in mourning, but the little bustle
and holiday of the journey pleased and excited her, and she looked
particularly happy.

"What a heavenly day!" Emmy said and added, with great originality, "I
hope we shall have a calm passage."

Jos waved his hand, scornfully glancing at the same time under his
eyelids at the great folks opposite.  "If you had made the voyages we
have," he said, "you wouldn't much care about the weather." But
nevertheless, traveller as he was, he passed the night direfully sick
in his carriage, where his courier tended him with brandy-and-water
and every luxury.

In due time this happy party landed at the quays of Rotterdam, whence
they were transported by another steamer to the city of Cologne.  Here
the carriage and the family took to the shore, and Jos was not a little
gratified to see his arrival announced in the Cologne newspapers as
"Herr Graf Lord von Sedley nebst Begleitung aus London." He had his
court dress with him; he had insisted that Dobbin should bring his
regimental paraphernalia; he announced that it was his intention to be
presented at some foreign courts, and pay his respects to the
Sovereigns of the countries which he honoured with a visit.

Wherever the party stopped, and an opportunity was offered, Mr. Jos
left his own card and the Major's upon "Our Minister." It was with
great difficulty that he could be restrained from putting on his cocked
hat and tights to wait upon the English consul at the Free City of
Judenstadt, when that hospitable functionary asked our travellers to
dinner.  He kept a journal of his voyage and noted elaborately the
defects or excellences of the various inns at which he put up, and of
the wines and dishes of which he partook.

As for Emmy, she was very happy and pleased.  Dobbin used to carry
about for her her stool and sketch-book, and admired the drawings of
the good-natured little artist as they never had been admired before.
She sat upon steamers' decks and drew crags and castles, or she mounted
upon donkeys and ascended to ancient robber-towers, attended by her two
aides-de-camp, Georgy and Dobbin.  She laughed, and the Major did too,
at his droll figure on donkey-back, with his long legs touching the
ground.  He was the interpreter for the party; having a good military
knowledge of the German language, and he and the delighted George
fought the campaigns of the Rhine and the Palatinate.  In the course of
a few weeks, and by assiduously conversing with Herr Kirsch on the box
of the carriage, Georgy made prodigious advance in the knowledge of
High Dutch, and could talk to hotel waiters and postilions in a way
that charmed his mother and amused his guardian.

Mr. Jos did not much engage in the afternoon excursions of his
fellow-travellers.  He slept a good deal after dinner, or basked in the
arbours of the pleasant inn-gardens.  Pleasant Rhine gardens! Fair
scenes of peace and sunshine--noble purple mountains, whose crests are
reflected in the magnificent stream--who has ever seen you that has not
a grateful memory of those scenes of friendly repose and beauty? To lay
down the pen and even to think of that beautiful Rhineland makes one
happy.  At this time of summer evening, the cows are trooping down from
the hills, lowing and with their bells tinkling, to the old town, with
its old moats, and gates, and spires, and chestnut-trees, with long
blue shadows stretching over the grass; the sky and the river below
flame in crimson and gold; and the moon is already out, looking pale
towards the sunset.  The sun sinks behind the great castle-crested
mountains, the night falls suddenly, the river grows darker and darker,
lights quiver in it from the windows in the old ramparts, and twinkle
peacefully in the villages under the hills on the opposite shore.

So Jos used to go to sleep a good deal with his bandanna over his face
and be very comfortable, and read all the English news, and every word
of Galignani's admirable newspaper (may the blessings of all Englishmen
who have ever been abroad rest on the founders and proprietors of that
piratical print!  ) and whether he woke or slept, his friends did not
very much miss him.  Yes, they were very happy.  They went to the opera
often of evenings--to those snug, unassuming, dear old operas in the
German towns, where the noblesse sits and cries, and knits stockings on
the one side, over against the bourgeoisie on the other; and His
Transparency the Duke and his Transparent family, all very fat and
good-natured, come and occupy the great box in the middle; and the pit
is full of the most elegant slim-waisted officers with straw-coloured
mustachios, and twopence a day on full pay. Here it was that Emmy found
her delight, and was introduced for the first time to the wonders of
Mozart and Cimarosa. The Major's musical taste has been before alluded
to, and his performances on the flute commended. But perhaps the chief
pleasure he had in these operas was in watching Emmy's rapture while
listening to them. A new world of love and beauty broke upon her when
she was introduced to those divine compositions; this lady had the
keenest and finest sensibility, and how could she be indifferent when
she heard Mozart? The tender parts of "Don Juan" awakened in her
raptures so exquisite that she would ask herself when she went to say
her prayers of a night whether it was not wicked to feel so much
delight as that with which "Vedrai Carino" and "Batti Batti" filled her
gentle little bosom? But the Major, whom she consulted upon this head,
as her theological adviser (and who himself had a pious and reverent
soul), said that for his part, every beauty of art or nature made him
thankful as well as happy, and that the pleasure to be had in listening
to fine music, as in looking at the stars in the sky, or at a beautiful
landscape or picture, was a benefit for which we might thank Heaven as
sincerely as for any other worldly blessing.  And in reply to some
faint objections of Mrs. Amelia's (taken from certain theological works
like the Washerwoman of Finchley Common and others of that school, with
which Mrs. Osborne had been furnished during her life at Brompton) he
told her an Eastern fable of the Owl who thought that the sunshine was
unbearable for the eyes and that the Nightingale was a most overrated
bird.  "It is one's nature to sing and the other's to hoot," he said,
laughing, "and with such a sweet voice as you have yourself, you must
belong to the Bulbul faction."

I like to dwell upon this period of her life and to think that she was
cheerful and happy.  You see, she has not had too much of that sort of
existence as yet, and has not fallen in the way of means to educate her
tastes or her intelligence.  She has been domineered over hitherto by
vulgar intellects.  It is the lot of many a woman. And as every one of
the dear sex is the rival of the rest of her kind, timidity passes for
folly in their charitable judgments; and gentleness for dulness; and
silence--which is but timid denial of the unwelcome assertion of ruling
folks, and tacit protestantism--above all, finds no mercy at the hands
of the female Inquisition. Thus, my dear and civilized reader, if you
and I were to find ourselves this evening in a society of greengrocers,
let us say, it is probable that our conversation would not be
brilliant; if, on the other hand, a greengrocer should find himself at
your refined and polite tea-table, where everybody was saying witty
things, and everybody of fashion and repute tearing her friends to
pieces in the most delightful manner, it is possible that the stranger
would not be very talkative and by no means interesting or interested.

And it must be remembered that this poor lady had never met a gentleman
in her life until this present moment.  Perhaps these are rarer
personages than some of us think for.  Which of us can point out many
such in his circle--men whose aims are generous, whose truth is
constant, and not only constant in its kind but elevated in its degree;
whose want of meanness makes them simple; who can look the world
honestly in the face with an equal manly sympathy for the great and the
small? We all know a hundred whose coats are very well made, and a
score who have excellent manners, and one or two happy beings who are
what they call in the inner circles, and have shot into the very centre
and bull's-eye of the fashion; but of gentlemen how many? Let us take a
little scrap of paper and each make out his list.

My friend the Major I write, without any doubt, in mine.  He had very
long legs, a yellow face, and a slight lisp, which at first was rather
ridiculous.  But his thoughts were just, his brains were fairly good,
his life was honest and pure, and his heart warm and humble.  He
certainly had very large hands and feet, which the two George Osbornes
used to caricature and laugh at; and their jeers and laughter perhaps
led poor little Emmy astray as to his worth.  But have we not all been
misled about our heroes and changed our opinions a hundred times? Emmy,
in this happy time, found that hers underwent a very great change in
respect of the merits of the Major.

Perhaps it was the happiest time of both their lives, indeed, if they
did but know it--and who does? Which of us can point out and say that
was the culmination--that was the summit of human joy? But at all
events, this couple were very decently contented, and enjoyed as
pleasant a summer tour as any pair that left England that year. Georgy
was always present at the play, but it was the Major who put Emmy's
shawl on after the entertainment; and in the walks and excursions the
young lad would be on ahead, and up a tower-stair or a tree, whilst the
soberer couple were below, the Major smoking his cigar with great
placidity and constancy, whilst Emmy sketched the site or the ruin.  It
was on this very tour that I, the present writer of a history of which
every word is true, had the pleasure to see them first and to make
their acquaintance.

It was at the little comfortable Ducal town of Pumpernickel (that very
place where Sir Pitt Crawley had been so distinguished as an attache;
but that was in early early days, and before the news of the Battle of
Austerlitz sent all the English diplomatists in Germany to the right
about) that I first saw Colonel Dobbin and his party.  They had arrived
with the carriage and courier at the Erbprinz Hotel, the best of the
town, and the whole party dined at the table d'hote.  Everybody
remarked the majesty of Jos and the knowing way in which he sipped, or
rather sucked, the Johannisberger, which he ordered for dinner.  The
little boy, too, we observed, had a famous appetite, and consumed
schinken, and braten, and kartoffeln, and cranberry jam, and salad, and
pudding, and roast fowls, and sweetmeats, with a gallantry that did
honour to his nation.  After about fifteen dishes, he concluded the
repast with dessert, some of which he even carried out of doors, for
some young gentlemen at table, amused with his coolness and gallant
free-and-easy manner, induced him to pocket a handful of macaroons,
which he discussed on his way to the theatre, whither everybody went in
the cheery social little German place. The lady in black, the boy's
mamma, laughed and blushed, and looked exceedingly pleased and shy as
the dinner went on, and at the various feats and instances of
espieglerie on the part of her son.  The Colonel--for so he became very
soon afterwards--I remember joked the boy with a great deal of grave
fun, pointing out dishes which he hadn't tried, and entreating him not
to baulk his appetite, but to have a second supply of this or that.

It was what they call a gast-rolle night at the Royal Grand Ducal
Pumpernickelisch Hof--or Court theatre--and Madame Schroeder Devrient,
then in the bloom of her beauty and genius, performed the part of the
heroine in the wonderful opera of Fidelio.  From our places in the
stalls we could see our four friends of the table d'hote in the loge
which Schwendler of the Erbprinz kept for his best guests, and I could
not help remarking the effect which the magnificent actress and music
produced upon Mrs. Osborne, for so we heard the stout gentleman in the
mustachios call her.  During the astonishing Chorus of the Prisoners,
over which the delightful voice of the actress rose and soared in the
most ravishing harmony, the English lady's face wore such an expression
of wonder and delight that it struck even little Fipps, the blase
attache, who drawled out, as he fixed his glass upon her, "Gayd, it
really does one good to see a woman caypable of that stayt of
excaytement." And in the Prison Scene, where Fidelio, rushing to her
husband, cries, "Nichts, nichts, mein Florestan," she fairly lost
herself and covered her face with her handkerchief.  Every woman in the
house was snivelling at the time, but I suppose it was because it was
predestined that I was to write this particular lady's memoirs that I
remarked her.

The next day they gave another piece of Beethoven, Die Schlacht bei
Vittoria.  Malbrook is introduced at the beginning of the performance,
as indicative of the brisk advance of the French army. Then come drums,
trumpets, thunders of artillery, and groans of the dying, and at last,
in a grand triumphal swell, "God Save the King" is performed.

There may have been a score of Englishmen in the house, but at the
burst of that beloved and well-known music, every one of them, we young
fellows in the stalls, Sir John and Lady Bullminster (who had taken a
house at Pumpernickel for the education of their nine children), the
fat gentleman with the mustachios, the long Major in white duck
trousers, and the lady with the little boy upon whom he was so sweet,
even Kirsch, the courier in the gallery, stood bolt upright in their
places and proclaimed themselves to be members of the dear old British
nation.  As for Tapeworm, the Charge d'Affaires, he rose up in his box
and bowed and simpered, as if he would represent the whole empire.
Tapeworm was nephew and heir of old Marshal Tiptoff, who has been
introduced in this story as General Tiptoff, just before Waterloo, who
was Colonel of the --th regiment in which Major Dobbin served, and who
died in this year full of honours, and of an aspic of plovers' eggs;
when the regiment was graciously given by his Majesty to Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B.  who had commanded it in many glorious fields.

Tapeworm must have met with Colonel Dobbin at the house of the
Colonel's Colonel, the Marshal, for he recognized him on this night at
the theatre, and with the utmost condescension, his Majesty's minister
came over from his own box and publicly shook hands with his new-found
friend.

"Look at that infernal sly-boots of a Tapeworm," Fipps whispered,
examining his chief from the stalls. "Wherever there's a pretty woman
he always twists himself in." And I wonder what were diplomatists made
for but for that?

"Have I the honour of addressing myself to Mrs. Dobbin?" asked the
Secretary with a most insinuating grin.

Georgy burst out laughing and said, "By Jove, that was a good 'un."
Emmy and the Major blushed:  we saw them from the stalls.

"This lady is Mrs. George Osborne," said the Major, "and this is her
brother, Mr. Sedley, a distinguished officer of the Bengal Civil
Service:  permit me to introduce him to your lordship."

My lord nearly sent Jos off his legs with the most fascinating smile.
"Are you going to stop in Pumpernickel?" he said.  "It is a dull place,
but we want some nice people, and we would try and make it SO agreeable
to you.  Mr.--Ahum--Mrs.--Oho.  I shall do myself the honour of calling
upon you to-morrow at your inn." And he went away with a Parthian grin
and glance which he thought must finish Mrs. Osborne completely.

The performance over, the young fellows lounged about the lobbies, and
we saw the society take its departure. The Duchess Dowager went off in
her jingling old coach, attended by two faithful and withered old maids
of honour, and a little snuffy spindle-shanked gentleman in waiting, in
a brown jasey and a green coat covered with orders--of which the star
and the grand yellow cordon of the order of St. Michael of Pumpernickel
were most conspicuous.  The drums rolled, the guards saluted, and the
old carriage drove away.

Then came his Transparency the Duke and Transparent family, with his
great officers of state and household.  He bowed serenely to everybody.
And amid the saluting of the guards and the flaring of the torches of
the running footmen, clad in scarlet, the Transparent carriages drove
away to the old Ducal schloss, with its towers and pinacles standing on
the schlossberg.  Everybody in Pumpernickel knew everybody.  No sooner
was a foreigner seen there than the Minister of Foreign Affairs, or
some other great or small officer of state, went round to the Erbprinz
and found out the name of the new arrival.

We watched them, too, out of the theatre.  Tapeworm had just walked
off, enveloped in his cloak, with which his gigantic chasseur was
always in attendance, and looking as much as possible like Don Juan.
The Prime Minister's lady had just squeezed herself into her sedan, and
her daughter, the charming Ida, had put on her calash and clogs; when
the English party came out, the boy yawning drearily, the Major taking
great pains in keeping the shawl over Mrs. Osborne's head, and Mr.
Sedley looking grand, with a crush opera-hat on one side of his head
and his hand in the stomach of a voluminous white waistcoat.  We took
off our hats to our acquaintances of the table d'hote, and the lady, in
return, presented us with a little smile and a curtsey, for which
everybody might be thankful.

The carriage from the inn, under the superintendence of the bustling
Mr. Kirsch, was in waiting to convey the party; but the fat man said he
would walk and smoke his cigar on his way homewards, so the other
three, with nods and smiles to us, went without Mr. Sedley, Kirsch,
with the cigar case, following in his master's wake.

We all walked together and talked to the stout gentleman about the
agremens of the place.  It was very agreeable for the English. There
were shooting-parties and battues; there was a plenty of balls and
entertainments at the hospitable Court; the society was generally good;
the theatre excellent; and the living cheap.

"And our Minister seems a most delightful and affable person," our new
friend said.  "With such a representative, and--and a good medical man,
I can fancy the place to be most eligible.  Good-night, gentlemen." And
Jos creaked up the stairs to bedward, followed by Kirsch with a
flambeau.  We rather hoped that nice-looking woman would be induced to
stay some time in the town.

In Which We Meet an Old Acquaintance

Such polite behaviour as that of Lord Tapeworm did not fail to have the
most favourable effect upon Mr. Sedley's mind, and the very next
morning, at breakfast, he pronounced his opinion that Pumpernickel was
the pleasantest little place of any which he had visited on their tour.
Jos's motives and artifices were not very difficult of comprehension,
and Dobbin laughed in his sleeve, like a hypocrite as he was, when he
found, by the knowing air of the civilian and the offhand manner in
which the latter talked about Tapeworm Castle and the other members of
the family, that Jos had been up already in the morning, consulting his
travelling Peerage.  Yes, he had seen the Right Honourable the Earl of
Bagwig, his lordship's father; he was sure he had, he had met him
at--at the Levee--didn't Dob remember? and when the Diplomatist called
on the party, faithful to his promise, Jos received him with such a
salute and honours as were seldom accorded to the little Envoy.  He
winked at Kirsch on his Excellency's arrival, and that emissary,
instructed before-hand, went out and superintended an entertainment of
cold meats, jellies, and other delicacies, brought in upon trays, and
of which Mr. Jos absolutely insisted that his noble guest should
partake.

Tapeworm, so long as he could have an opportunity of admiring the
bright eyes of Mrs. Osborne (whose freshness of complexion bore
daylight remarkably well) was not ill pleased to accept any invitation
to stay in Mr. Sedley's lodgings; he put one or two dexterous questions
to him about India and the dancing-girls there; asked Amelia about that
beautiful boy who had been with her; and complimented the astonished
little woman upon the prodigious sensation which she had made in the
house; and tried to fascinate Dobbin by talking of the late war and the
exploits of the Pumpernickel contingent under the command of the
Hereditary Prince, now Duke of Pumpernickel.

Lord Tapeworm inherited no little portion of the family gallantry, and
it was his happy belief that almost every woman upon whom he himself
cast friendly eyes was in love with him.  He left Emmy under the
persuasion that she was slain by his wit and attractions and went home
to his lodgings to write a pretty little note to her.  She was not
fascinated, only puzzled, by his grinning, his simpering, his scented
cambric handkerchief, and his high-heeled lacquered boots.  She did not
understand one-half the compliments which he paid; she had never, in
her small experience of mankind, met a professional ladies' man as yet,
and looked upon my lord as something curious rather than pleasant; and
if she did not admire, certainly wondered at him.  Jos, on the
contrary, was delighted. "How very affable his Lordship is," he said;
"How very kind of his Lordship to say he would send his medical man!
Kirsch, you will carry our cards to the Count de Schlusselback
directly; the Major and I will have the greatest pleasure in paying our
respects at Court as soon as possible.  Put out my uniform,
Kirsch--both our uniforms.  It is a mark of politeness which every
English gentleman ought to show to the countries which he visits to pay
his respects to the sovereigns of those countries as to the
representatives of his own."

When Tapeworm's doctor came, Doctor von Glauber, Body Physician to
H.S.H.  the Duke, he speedily convinced Jos that the Pumpernickel
mineral springs and the Doctor's particular treatment would infallibly
restore the Bengalee to youth and slimness.  "Dere came here last
year," he said, "Sheneral Bulkeley, an English Sheneral, tvice so pic
as you, sir.  I sent him back qvite tin after tree months, and he
danced vid Baroness Glauber at the end of two."

Jos's mind was made up; the springs, the Doctor, the Court, and the
Charge d'Affaires convinced him, and he proposed to spend the autumn in
these delightful quarters.  And punctual to his word, on the next day
the Charge d'Affaires presented Jos and the Major to Victor Aurelius
XVII, being conducted to their audience with that sovereign by the
Count de Schlusselback, Marshal of the Court.

They were straightway invited to dinner at Court, and their intention
of staying in the town being announced, the politest ladies of the
whole town instantly called upon Mrs. Osborne; and as not one of these,
however poor they might be, was under the rank of a Baroness, Jos's
delight was beyond expression.  He wrote off to Chutney at the Club to
say that the Service was highly appreciated in Germany, that he was
going to show his friend, the Count de Schlusselback, how to stick a
pig in the Indian fashion, and that his august friends, the Duke and
Duchess, were everything that was kind and civil.

Emmy, too, was presented to the august family, and as mourning is not
admitted in Court on certain days, she appeared in a pink crape dress
with a diamond ornament in the corsage, presented to her by her
brother, and she looked so pretty in this costume that the Duke and
Court (putting out of the question the Major, who had scarcely ever
seen her before in an evening dress, and vowed that she did not look
five-and-twenty) all admired her excessively.

In this dress she walked a Polonaise with Major Dobbin at a Court ball,
in which easy dance Mr. Jos had the honour of leading out the Countess
of Schlusselback, an old lady with a hump back, but with sixteen good
quarters of nobility and related to half the royal houses of Germany.

Pumpernickel stands in the midst of a happy valley through which
sparkles--to mingle with the Rhine somewhere, but I have not the map at
hand to say exactly at what point--the fertilizing stream of the Pump.
In some places the river is big enough to support a ferry-boat, in
others to turn a mill; in Pumpernickel itself, the last Transparency
but three, the great and renowned Victor Aurelius XIV built a
magnificent bridge, on which his own statue rises, surrounded by
water-nymphs and emblems of victory, peace, and plenty; he has his foot
on the neck of a prostrate Turk--history says he engaged and ran a
Janissary through the body at the relief of Vienna by Sobieski--but,
quite undisturbed by the agonies of that prostrate Mahometan, who
writhes at his feet in the most ghastly manner, the Prince smiles
blandly and points with his truncheon in the direction of the Aurelius
Platz, where he began to erect a new palace that would have been the
wonder of his age had the great-souled Prince but had funds to
complete it.  But the completion of Monplaisir (Monblaisir the honest
German folks call it) was stopped for lack of ready money, and it and
its park and garden are now in rather a faded condition, and not more
than ten times big enough to accommodate the Court of the reigning
Sovereign.

The gardens were arranged to emulate those of Versailles, and amidst
the terraces and groves there are some huge allegorical waterworks
still, which spout and froth stupendously upon fete-days, and frighten
one with their enormous aquatic insurrections.  There is the
Trophonius' cave in which, by some artifice, the leaden Tritons are
made not only to spout water, but to play the most dreadful groans out
of their lead conchs--there is the nymphbath and the Niagara cataract,
which the people of the neighbourhood admire beyond expression, when
they come to the yearly fair at the opening of the Chamber, or to the
fetes with which the happy little nation still celebrates the birthdays
and marriage-days of its princely governors.

Then from all the towns of the Duchy, which stretches for nearly ten
mile--from Bolkum, which lies on its western frontier bidding defiance
to Prussia, from Grogwitz, where the Prince has a hunting-lodge, and
where his dominions are separated by the Pump River from those of the
neighbouring Prince of Potzenthal; from all the little villages, which
besides these three great cities, dot over the happy principality--from
the farms and the mills along the Pump come troops of people in red
petticoats and velvet head-dresses, or with three-cornered hats and
pipes in their mouths, who flock to the Residenz and share in the
pleasures of the fair and the festivities there.  Then the theatre is
open for nothing, then the waters of Monblaisir begin to play (it is
lucky that there is company to behold them, for one would be afraid to
see them alone)--then there come mountebanks and riding troops (the way
in which his Transparency was fascinated by one of the horse-riders is
well known, and it is believed that La Petite Vivandiere, as she was
called, was a spy in the French interest), and the delighted people are
permitted to march through room after room of the Grand Ducal palace
and admire the slippery floor, the rich hangings, and the spittoons at
the doors of all the innumerable chambers.  There is one Pavilion at
Monblaisir which Aurelius Victor XV had arranged--a great Prince but
too fond of pleasure--and which I am told is a perfect wonder of
licentious elegance. It is painted with the story of Bacchus and
Ariadne, and the table works in and out of the room by means of a
windlass, so that the company was served without any intervention of
domestics.  But the place was shut up by Barbara, Aurelius XV's widow,
a severe and devout Princess of the House of Bolkum and Regent of the
Duchy during her son's glorious minority, and after the death of her
husband, cut off in the pride of his pleasures.

The theatre of Pumpernickel is known and famous in that quarter of
Germany.  It languished a little when the present Duke in his youth
insisted upon having his own operas played there, and it is said one
day, in a fury, from his place in the orchestra, when he attended a
rehearsal, broke a bassoon on the head of the Chapel Master, who was
conducting, and led too slow; and during which time the Duchess Sophia
wrote domestic comedies, which must have been very dreary to witness.
But the Prince executes his music in private now, and the Duchess only
gives away her plays to the foreigners of distinction who visit her
kind little Court.

It is conducted with no small comfort and splendour. When there are
balls, though there may be four hundred people at supper, there is a
servant in scarlet and lace to attend upon every four, and every one is
served on silver.  There are festivals and entertainments going
continually on, and the Duke has his chamberlains and equerries, and
the Duchess her mistress of the wardrobe and ladies of honour, just
like any other and more potent potentates.

The Constitution is or was a moderate despotism, tempered by a Chamber
that might or might not be elected.  I never certainly could hear of
its sitting in my time at Pumpernickel.  The Prime Minister had
lodgings in a second floor, and the Foreign Secretary occupied the
comfortable lodgings over Zwieback's Conditorey.  The army consisted of
a magnificent band that also did duty on the stage, where it was quite
pleasant to see the worthy fellows marching in Turkish dresses with
rouge on and wooden scimitars, or as Roman warriors with ophicleides
and trombones--to see them again, I say, at night, after one had
listened to them all the morning in the Aurelius Platz, where they
performed opposite the cafe where we breakfasted.  Besides the band,
there was a rich and numerous staff of officers, and, I believe, a few
men.  Besides the regular sentries, three or four men, habited as
hussars, used to do duty at the Palace, but I never saw them on
horseback, and au fait, what was the use of cavalry in a time of
profound peace?--and whither the deuce should the hussars ride?

Everybody--everybody that was noble of course, for as for the bourgeois
we could not quite be expected to take notice of THEM--visited his
neighbour.  H. E. Madame de Burst received once a week, H. E. Madame de
Schnurrbart had her night--the theatre was open twice a week, the Court
graciously received once, so that a man's life might in fact be a
perfect round of pleasure in the unpretending Pumpernickel way.

That there were feuds in the place, no one can deny. Politics ran very
high at Pumpernickel, and parties were very bitter.  There was the
Strumpff faction and the Lederlung party, the one supported by our
envoy and the other by the French Charge d'Affaires, M. de Macabau.
Indeed it sufficed for our Minister to stand up for Madame Strumpff,
who was clearly the greater singer of the two, and had three more notes
in her voice than Madame Lederlung her rival--it sufficed, I say, for
our Minister to advance any opinion to have it instantly contradicted
by the French diplomatist.

Everybody in the town was ranged in one or other of these factions. The
Lederlung was a prettyish little creature certainly, and her voice
(what there was of it) was very sweet, and there is no doubt that the
Strumpff was not in her first youth and beauty, and certainly too
stout; when she came on in the last scene of the Sonnambula, for
instance, in her night-chemise with a lamp in her hand, and had to go
out of the window, and pass over the plank of the mill, it was all she
could do to squeeze out of the window, and the plank used to bend and
creak again under her weight--but how she poured out the finale of the
opera!  and with what a burst of feeling she rushed into Elvino's
arms--almost fit to smother him! Whereas the little Lederlung--but a
truce to this gossip--the fact is that these two women were the two
flags of the French and the English party at Pumpernickel, and the
society was divided in its allegiance to those two great nations.

We had on our side the Home Minister, the Master of the Horse, the
Duke's Private Secretary, and the Prince's Tutor; whereas of the French
party were the Foreign Minister, the Commander-in-Chief's Lady, who had
served under Napoleon, and the Hof-Marschall and his wife, who was glad
enough to get the fashions from Paris, and always had them and her caps
by M. de Macabau's courier.  The Secretary of his Chancery was little
Grignac, a young fellow, as malicious as Satan, and who made
caricatures of Tapeworm in all the albums of the place.

Their headquarters and table d'hote were established at the Pariser
Hof, the other inn of the town; and though, of course, these gentlemen
were obliged to be civil in public, yet they cut at each other with
epigrams that were as sharp as razors, as I have seen a couple of
wrestlers in Devonshire, lashing at each other's shins and never
showing their agony upon a muscle of their faces.  Neither Tapeworm nor
Macabau ever sent home a dispatch to his government without a most
savage series of attacks upon his rival.  For instance, on our side we
would write, "The interests of Great Britain in this place, and
throughout the whole of Germany, are perilled by the continuance in
office of the present French envoy; this man is of a character so
infamous that he will stick at no falsehood, or hesitate at no crime,
to attain his ends.  He poisons the mind of the Court against the
English minister, represents the conduct of Great Britain in the most
odious and atrocious light, and is unhappily backed by a minister whose
ignorance and necessities are as notorious as his influence is fatal."
On their side they would say, "M. de Tapeworm continues his system of
stupid insular arrogance and vulgar falsehood against the greatest
nation in the world.  Yesterday he was heard to speak lightly of Her
Royal Highness Madame the Duchess of Berri; on a former occasion he
insulted the heroic Duke of Angouleme and dared to insinuate that
H.R.H.  the Duke of Orleans was conspiring against the august throne of
the lilies.  His gold is prodigated in every direction which his stupid
menaces fail to frighten. By one and the other, he has won over
creatures of the Court here--and, in fine, Pumpernickel will not be
quiet, Germany tranquil, France respected, or Europe content until this
poisonous viper be crushed under heel":  and so on.  When one side or
the other had written any particularly spicy dispatch, news of it was
sure to slip out.

Before the winter was far advanced, it is actually on record that Emmy
took a night and received company with great propriety and modesty.
She had a French master, who complimented her upon the purity of her
accent and her facility of learning; the fact is she had learned long
ago and grounded herself subsequently in the grammar so as to be able
to teach it to George; and Madam Strumpff came to give her lessons in
singing, which she performed so well and with such a true voice that
the Major's windows, who had lodgings opposite under the Prime
Minister, were always open to hear the lesson. Some of the German
ladies, who are very sentimental and simple in their tastes, fell in
love with her and began to call her du at once.  These are trivial
details, but they relate to happy times.  The Major made himself
George's tutor and read Caesar and mathematics with him, and they had a
German master and rode out of evenings by the side of Emmy's
carriage--she was always too timid, and made a dreadful outcry at the
slightest disturbance on horse-back.  So she drove about with one of
her dear German friends, and Jos asleep on the back-seat of the
barouche.

He was becoming very sweet upon the Grafinn Fanny de Butterbrod, a very
gentle tender-hearted and unassuming young creature, a Canoness and
Countess in her own right, but with scarcely ten pounds per year to her
fortune, and Fanny for her part declared that to be Amelia's sister was
the greatest delight that Heaven could bestow on her, and Jos might
have put a Countess's shield and coronet by the side of his own arms on
his carriage and forks; when--when events occurred, and those grand
fetes given upon the marriage of the Hereditary Prince of Pumpernickel
with the lovely Princess Amelia of Humbourg-Schlippenschloppen took
place.

At this festival the magnificence displayed was such as had not been
known in the little German place since the days of the prodigal Victor
XIV.  All the neighbouring Princes, Princesses, and Grandees were
invited to the feast.  Beds rose to half a crown per night in
Pumpernickel, and the Army was exhausted in providing guards of honour
for the Highnesses, Serenities, and Excellencies who arrived from all
quarters.  The Princess was married by proxy, at her father's
residence, by the Count de Schlusselback.  Snuff-boxes were given away
in profusion (as we learned from the Court jeweller, who sold and
afterwards bought them again), and bushels of the Order of Saint
Michael of Pumpernickel were sent to the nobles of the Court, while
hampers of the cordons and decorations of the Wheel of St. Catherine of
Schlippenschloppen were brought to ours.  The French envoy got both.
"He is covered with ribbons like a prize cart-horse," Tapeworm said,
who was not allowed by the rules of his service to take any
decorations:  "Let him have the cordons; but with whom is the victory?"
The fact is, it was a triumph of British diplomacy, the French party
having proposed and tried their utmost to carry a marriage with a
Princess of the House of Potztausend-Donnerwetter, whom, as a matter
of course, we opposed.

Everybody was asked to the fetes of the marriage. Garlands and
triumphal arches were hung across the road to welcome the young bride.
The great Saint Michael's Fountain ran with uncommonly sour wine, while
that in the Artillery Place frothed with beer.  The great waters
played; and poles were put up in the park and gardens for the happy
peasantry, which they might climb at their leisure, carrying off
watches, silver forks, prize sausages hung with pink ribbon, &c., at
the top.  Georgy got one, wrenching it off, having swarmed up the pole
to the delight of the spectators, and sliding down with the rapidity of
a fall of water.  But it was for the glory's sake merely.  The boy gave
the sausage to a peasant, who had very nearly seized it, and stood at
the foot of the mast, blubbering, because he was unsuccessful.

At the French Chancellerie they had six more lampions in their
illumination than ours had; but our transparency, which represented the
young Couple advancing and Discord flying away, with the most ludicrous
likeness to the French Ambassador, beat the French picture hollow; and
I have no doubt got Tapeworm the advancement and the Cross of the Bath
which he subsequently attained.

Crowds of foreigners arrived for the fetes, and of English, of course.
Besides the Court balls, public balls were given at the Town Hall and
the Redoute, and in the former place there was a room for
trente-et-quarante and roulette established, for the week of the
festivities only, and by one of the great German companies from Ems or
Aix-la-Chapelle.  The officers or inhabitants of the town were not
allowed to play at these games, but strangers, peasants, ladies were
admitted, and any one who chose to lose or win money.

That little scapegrace Georgy Osborne amongst others, whose pockets
were always full of dollars and whose relations were away at the grand
festival of the Court, came to the Stadthaus Ball in company of his
uncle's courier, Mr. Kirsch, and having only peeped into a play-room at
Baden-Baden when he hung on Dobbin's arm, and where, of course, he was
not permitted to gamble, came eagerly to this part of the entertainment
and hankered round the tables where the croupiers and the punters were
at work.  Women were playing; they were masked, some of them; this
license was allowed in these wild times of carnival.

A woman with light hair, in a low dress by no means so fresh as it had
been, and with a black mask on, through the eyelets of which her eyes
twinkled strangely, was seated at one of the roulette-tables with a
card and a pin and a couple of florins before her.  As the croupier
called out the colour and number, she pricked on the card with great
care and regularity, and only ventured her money on the colours after
the red or black had come up a certain number of times.  It was strange
to look at her.

But in spite of her care and assiduity she guessed wrong and the last
two florins followed each other under the croupier's rake, as he cried
out with his inexorable voice the winning colour and number.  She gave
a sigh, a shrug with her shoulders, which were already too much out of
her gown, and dashing the pin through the card on to the table, sat
thrumming it for a while.  Then she looked round her and saw Georgy's
honest face staring at the scene.  The little scamp!  What business had
he to be there?

When she saw the boy, at whose face she looked hard through her shining
eyes and mask, she said, "Monsieur n'est pas joueur?"

"Non, Madame," said the boy; but she must have known, from his accent,
of what country he was, for she answered him with a slight foreign
tone.  "You have nevare played--will you do me a littl' favor?"

"What is it?" said Georgy, blushing again.  Mr. Kirsch was at work for
his part at the rouge et noir and did not see his young master.

"Play this for me, if you please; put it on any number, any number."
And she took from her bosom a purse, and out of it a gold piece, the
only coin there, and she put it into George's hand.  The boy laughed
and did as he was bid.

The number came up sure enough.  There is a power that arranges that,
they say, for beginners.

"Thank you," said she, pulling the money towards her, "thank you. What
is your name?"

"My name's Osborne," said Georgy, and was fingering in his own pockets
for dollars, and just about to make a trial, when the Major, in his
uniform, and Jos, en Marquis, from the Court ball, made their
appearance.  Other people, finding the entertainment stupid and
preferring the fun at the Stadthaus, had quitted the Palace ball
earlier; but it is probable the Major and Jos had gone home and found
the boy's absence, for the former instantly went up to him and, taking
him by the shoulder, pulled him briskly back from the place of
temptation.  Then, looking round the room, he saw Kirsch employed as we
have said, and going up to him, asked how he dared to bring Mr. George
to such a place.

"Laissez-moi tranquille," said Mr. Kirsch, very much excited by play
and wine.  "Il faut s'amuser, parbleu. Je ne suis pas au service de
Monsieur."

Seeing his condition the Major did not choose to argue with the man,
but contented himself with drawing away George and asking Jos if he
would come away.  He was standing close by the lady in the mask, who
was playing with pretty good luck now, and looking on much interested
at the game.

"Hadn't you better come, Jos," the Major said, "with George and me?"

"I'll stop and go home with that rascal, Kirsch," Jos said; and for the
same reason of modesty, which he thought ought to be preserved before
the boy, Dobbin did not care to remonstrate with Jos, but left him and
walked home with Georgy.

"Did you play?" asked the Major when they were out and on their way
home.

The boy said "No."

"Give me your word of honour as a gentleman that you never will."

"Why?" said the boy; "it seems very good fun." And, in a very eloquent
and impressive manner, the Major showed him why he shouldn't, and would
have enforced his precepts by the example of Georgy's own father, had
he liked to say anything that should reflect on the other's memory.
When he had housed him, he went to bed and saw his light, in the little
room outside of Amelia's, presently disappear.  Amelia's followed half
an hour afterwards.  I don't know what made the Major note it so
accurately.

Jos, however, remained behind over the play-table; he was no gambler,
but not averse to the little excitement of the sport now and then, and
he had some Napoleons chinking in the embroidered pockets of his court
waistcoat.  He put down one over the fair shoulder of the little
gambler before him, and they won.  She made a little movement to make
room for him by her side, and just took the skirt of her gown from a
vacant chair there.

"Come and give me good luck," she said, still in a foreign accent,
quite different from that frank and perfectly English "Thank you," with
which she had saluted Georgy's coup in her favour.  The portly
gentleman, looking round to see that nobody of rank observed him, sat
down; he muttered--"Ah, really, well now, God bless my soul. I'm very
fortunate; I'm sure to give you good fortune," and other words of
compliment and confusion. "Do you play much?" the foreign mask said.

"I put a Nap or two down," said Jos with a superb air, flinging down a
gold piece.

"Yes; ay nap after dinner," said the mask archly.  But Jos looking
frightened, she continued, in her pretty French accent, "You do not
play to win.  No more do I. I play to forget, but I cannot.  I cannot
forget old times, monsieur.  Your little nephew is the image of his
father; and you--you are not changed--but yes, you are. Everybody
changes, everybody forgets; nobody has any heart."

"Good God, who is it?" asked Jos in a flutter.

"Can't you guess, Joseph Sedley?" said the little woman in a sad voice,
and undoing her mask, she looked at him.  "You have forgotten me."

"Good heavens!  Mrs. Crawley!" gasped out Jos.

"Rebecca," said the other, putting her hand on his; but she followed
the game still, all the time she was looking at him.

"I am stopping at the Elephant," she continued.  "Ask for Madame de
Raudon.  I saw my dear Amelia to-day; how pretty she looked, and how
happy!  So do you! Everybody but me, who am wretched, Joseph Sedley."
And she put her money over from the red to the black, as if by a chance
movement of her hand, and while she was wiping her eyes with a
pocket-handkerchief fringed with torn lace.

The red came up again, and she lost the whole of that stake. "Come
away," she said.  "Come with me a little--we are old friends, are we
not, dear Mr. Sedley?"

And Mr. Kirsch having lost all his money by this time, followed his
master out into the moonlight, where the illuminations were winking out
and the transparency over our mission was scarcely visible.

A Vagabond Chapter

We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that
lightness and delicacy which the world demands--the moral world, that
has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable
repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name. There are things
we do and know perfectly well in Vanity Fair, though we never speak of
them:  as the Ahrimanians worship the devil, but don't mention him:
and a polite public will no more bear to read an authentic description
of vice than a truly refined English or American female will permit the
word breeches to be pronounced in her chaste hearing.  And yet, madam,
both are walking the world before our faces every day, without much
shocking us.  If you were to blush every time they went by, what
complexions you would have!  It is only when their naughty names are
called out that your modesty has any occasion to show alarm or sense of
outrage, and it has been the wish of the present writer, all through
this story, deferentially to submit to the fashion at present
prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light,
easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be
offended.  I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has certainly some
vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and
inoffensive manner.  In describing this Siren, singing and smiling,
coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers
all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the
monster's hideous tail above water? No!  Those who like may peep down
under waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and
twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or
curling round corpses; but above the waterline, I ask, has not
everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most
squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? When, however,
the Siren disappears and dives below, down among the dead men, the
water of course grows turbid over her, and it is labour lost to look
into it ever so curiously.  They look pretty enough when they sit upon
a rock, twanging their harps and combing their hair, and sing, and
beckon to you to come and hold the looking-glass; but when they sink
into their native element, depend on it, those mermaids are about no
good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals,
revelling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims.  And so, when
Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well
employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact
the better.

If we were to give a full account of her proceedings during a couple of
years that followed after the Curzon Street catastrophe, there might be
some reason for people to say this book was improper.  The actions of
very vain, heartless, pleasure-seeking people are very often improper
(as are many of yours, my friend with the grave face and spotless
reputation--but that is merely by the way); and what are those of a
woman without faith--or love--or character? And I am inclined to think
that there was a period in Mrs Becky's life when she was seized, not by
remorse, but by a kind of despair, and absolutely neglected her person
and did not even care for her reputation.

This abattement and degradation did not take place all at once; it was
brought about by degrees, after her calamity, and after many struggles
to keep up--as a man who goes overboard hangs on to a spar whilst any
hope is left, and then flings it away and goes down, when he finds that
struggling is in vain.

She lingered about London whilst her husband was making preparations
for his departure to his seat of government, and it is believed made
more than one attempt to see her brother-in-law, Sir Pitt Crawley, and
to work upon his feelings, which she had almost enlisted in her favour.
As Sir Pitt and Mr. Wenham were walking down to the House of Commons,
the latter spied Mrs. Rawdon in a black veil, and lurking near the
palace of the legislature.  She sneaked away when her eyes met those of
Wenham, and indeed never succeeded in her designs upon the Baronet.

Probably Lady Jane interposed.  I have heard that she quite astonished
her husband by the spirit which she exhibited in this quarrel, and her
determination to disown Mrs. Becky.  Of her own movement, she invited
Rawdon to come and stop in Gaunt Street until his departure for
Coventry Island, knowing that with him for a guard Mrs. Becky would not
try to force her door; and she looked curiously at the superscriptions
of all the letters which arrived for Sir Pitt, lest he and his
sister-in-law should be corresponding.  Not but that Rebecca could have
written had she a mind, but she did not try to see or to write to Pitt
at his own house, and after one or two attempts consented to his demand
that the correspondence regarding her conjugal differences should be
carried on by lawyers only.

The fact was that Pitt's mind had been poisoned against her.  A short
time after Lord Steyne's accident Wenham had been with the Baronet and
given him such a biography of Mrs. Becky as had astonished the member
for Queen's Crawley.  He knew everything regarding her: who her father
was; in what year her mother danced at the opera; what had been her
previous history; and what her conduct during her married life--as I
have no doubt that the greater part of the story was false and dictated
by interested malevolence, it shall not be repeated here.  But Becky
was left with a sad sad reputation in the esteem of a country gentleman
and relative who had been once rather partial to her.

The revenues of the Governor of Coventry Island are not large.  A part
of them were set aside by his Excellency for the payment of certain
outstanding debts and liabilities, the charges incident on his high
situation required considerable expense; finally, it was found that he
could not spare to his wife more than three hundred pounds a year,
which he proposed to pay to her on an undertaking that she would never
trouble him. Otherwise, scandal, separation, Doctors' Commons would
ensue.  But it was Mr. Wenham's business, Lord Steyne's business,
Rawdon's, everybody's--to get her out of the country, and hush up a
most disagreeable affair.

She was probably so much occupied in arranging these affairs of
business with her husband's lawyers that she forgot to take any step
whatever about her son, the little Rawdon, and did not even once
propose to go and see him.  That young gentleman was consigned to the
entire guardianship of his aunt and uncle, the former of whom had
always possessed a great share of the child's affection.  His mamma
wrote him a neat letter from Boulogne, when she quitted England, in
which she requested him to mind his book, and said she was going to
take a Continental tour, during which she would have the pleasure of
writing to him again.  But she never did for a year afterwards, and
not, indeed, until Sir Pitt's only boy, always sickly, died of
hooping-cough and measles--then Rawdon's mamma wrote the most
affectionate composition to her darling son, who was made heir of
Queen's Crawley by this accident, and drawn more closely than ever to
the kind lady, whose tender heart had already adopted him.  Rawdon
Crawley, then grown a tall, fine lad, blushed when he got the letter.
"Oh, Aunt Jane, you are my mother!" he said; "and not--and not that
one." But he wrote back a kind and respectful letter to Mrs. Rebecca,
then living at a boarding-house at Florence. But we are advancing
matters.

Our darling Becky's first flight was not very far.  She perched upon
the French coast at Boulogne, that refuge of so much exiled English
innocence, and there lived in rather a genteel, widowed manner, with a
femme de chambre and a couple of rooms, at an hotel.  She dined at the
table d'hote, where people thought her very pleasant, and where she
entertained her neighbours by stories of her brother, Sir Pitt, and her
great London acquaintance, talking that easy, fashionable slip-slop
which has so much effect upon certain folks of small breeding.  She
passed with many of them for a person of importance; she gave little
tea-parties in her private room and shared in the innocent amusements
of the place in sea-bathing, and in jaunts in open carriages, in
strolls on the sands, and in visits to the play. Mrs. Burjoice, the
printer's lady, who was boarding with her family at the hotel for the
summer, and to whom her Burjoice came of a Saturday and Sunday, voted
her charming, until that little rogue of a Burjoice began to pay her
too much attention.  But there was nothing in the story, only that
Becky was always affable, easy, and good-natured--and with men
especially.

Numbers of people were going abroad as usual at the end of the season,
and Becky had plenty of opportunities of finding out by the behaviour
of her acquaintances of the great London world the opinion of "society"
as regarded her conduct.  One day it was Lady Partlet and her daughters
whom Becky confronted as she was walking modestly on Boulogne pier, the
cliffs of Albion shining in the distance across the deep blue sea.
Lady Partlet marshalled all her daughters round her with a sweep of her
parasol and retreated from the pier, darting savage glances at poor
little Becky who stood alone there.

On another day the packet came in.  It had been blowing fresh, and it
always suited Becky's humour to see the droll woe-begone faces of the
people as they emerged from the boat.  Lady Slingstone happened to be
on board this day.  Her ladyship had been exceedingly ill in her
carriage, and was greatly exhausted and scarcely fit to walk up the
plank from the ship to the pier.  But all her energies rallied the
instant she saw Becky smiling roguishly under a pink bonnet, and giving
her a glance of scorn such as would have shrivelled up most women, she
walked into the Custom House quite unsupported.  Becky only laughed:
but I don't think she liked it.  She felt she was alone, quite alone,
and the far-off shining cliffs of England were impassable to her.

The behaviour of the men had undergone too I don't know what change.
Grinstone showed his teeth and laughed in her face with a familiarity
that was not pleasant. Little Bob Suckling, who was cap in hand to her
three months before, and would walk a mile in the rain to see for her
carriage in the line at Gaunt House, was talking to Fitzoof of the
Guards (Lord Heehaw's son) one day upon the jetty, as Becky took her
walk there. Little Bobby nodded to her over his shoulder, without
moving his hat, and continued his conversation with the heir of Heehaw.
Tom Raikes tried to walk into her sitting-room at the inn with a cigar
in his mouth, but she closed the door upon him, and would have locked
it, only that his fingers were inside.  She began to feel that she was
very lonely indeed.  "If HE'D been here," she said, "those cowards
would never have dared to insult me." She thought about "him" with
great sadness and perhaps longing--about his honest, stupid, constant
kindness and fidelity; his never-ceasing obedience; his good humour;
his bravery and courage.  Very likely she cried, for she was
particularly lively, and had put on a little extra rouge, when she came
down to dinner.

She rouged regularly now; and--and her maid got Cognac for her besides
that which was charged in the hotel bill.

Perhaps the insults of the men were not, however, so intolerable to her
as the sympathy of certain women. Mrs. Crackenbury and Mrs. Washington
White passed through Boulogne on their way to Switzerland.  The party
were protected by Colonel Horner, young Beaumoris, and of course old
Crackenbury, and Mrs. White's little girl. THEY did not avoid her.
They giggled, cackled, tattled, condoled, consoled, and patronized her
until they drove her almost wild with rage.  To be patronized by THEM!
she thought, as they went away simpering after kissing her.  And she
heard Beaumoris's laugh ringing on the stair and knew quite well how to
interpret his hilarity.

It was after this visit that Becky, who had paid her weekly bills,
Becky who had made herself agreeable to everybody in the house, who
smiled at the landlady, called the waiters "monsieur," and paid the
chambermaids in politeness and apologies, what far more than
compensated for a little niggardliness in point of money (of which
Becky never was free), that Becky, we say, received a notice to quit
from the landlord, who had been told by some one that she was quite an
unfit person to have at his hotel, where English ladies would not sit
down with her.  And she was forced to fly into lodgings of which the
dulness and solitude were most wearisome to her.

Still she held up, in spite of these rebuffs, and tried to make a
character for herself and conquer scandal.  She went to church very
regularly and sang louder than anybody there.  She took up the cause of
the widows of the shipwrecked fishermen, and gave work and drawings for
the Quashyboo Mission; she subscribed to the Assembly and WOULDN'T
waltz.  In a word, she did everything that was respectable, and that is
why we dwell upon this part of her career with more fondness than upon
subsequent parts of her history, which are not so pleasant. She saw
people avoiding her, and still laboriously smiled upon them; you never
could suppose from her countenance what pangs of humiliation she might
be enduring inwardly.

Her history was after all a mystery.  Parties were divided about her.
Some people who took the trouble to busy themselves in the matter said
that she was the criminal, whilst others vowed that she was as innocent
as a lamb and that her odious husband was in fault. She won over a good
many by bursting into tears about her boy and exhibiting the most
frantic grief when his name was mentioned, or she saw anybody like him.
She gained good Mrs. Alderney's heart in that way, who was rather the
Queen of British Boulogne and gave the most dinners and balls of all
the residents there, by weeping when Master Alderney came from Dr.
Swishtail's academy to pass his holidays with his mother.  "He and her
Rawdon were of the same age, and so like," Becky said in a voice
choking with agony; whereas there was five years' difference between
the boys' ages, and no more likeness between them than between my
respected reader and his humble servant.  Wenham, when he was going
abroad, on his way to Kissingen to join Lord Steyne, enlightened Mrs.
Alderney on this point and told her how he was much more able to
describe little Rawdon than his mamma, who notoriously hated him and
never saw him; how he was thirteen years old, while little Alderney was
but nine, fair, while the other darling was dark--in a word, caused the
lady in question to repent of her good humour.

Whenever Becky made a little circle for herself with incredible toils
and labour, somebody came and swept it down rudely, and she had all her
work to begin over again.  It was very hard; very hard; lonely and
disheartening.

There was Mrs. Newbright, who took her up for some time, attracted by
the sweetness of her singing at church and by her proper views upon
serious subjects, concerning which in former days, at Queen's Crawley,
Mrs. Becky had had a good deal of instruction.  Well, she not only took
tracts, but she read them.  She worked flannel petticoats for the
Quashyboos--cotton night-caps for the Cocoanut Indians--painted
handscreens for the conversion of the Pope and the Jews--sat under Mr.
Rowls on Wednesdays, Mr. Huggleton on Thursdays, attended two Sunday
services at church, besides Mr. Bawler, the Darbyite, in the evening,
and all in vain.  Mrs. Newbright had occasion to correspond with the
Countess of Southdown about the Warmingpan Fund for the Fiji Islanders
(for the management of which admirable charity both these ladies formed
part of a female committee), and having mentioned her "sweet friend,"
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, the Dowager Countess wrote back such a letter
regarding Becky, with such particulars, hints, facts, falsehoods, and
general comminations, that intimacy between Mrs. Newbright and Mrs.
Crawley ceased forthwith, and all the serious world of Tours, where
this misfortune took place, immediately parted company with the
reprobate.  Those who know the English Colonies abroad know that we
carry with us us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces,
cayenne-peppers, and other Lares, making a little Britain wherever we
settle down.

From one colony to another Becky fled uneasily.  From Boulogne to
Dieppe, from Dieppe to Caen, from Caen to Tours--trying with all her
might to be respectable, and alas!  always found out some day or other
and pecked out of the cage by the real daws.

Mrs. Hook Eagles took her up at one of these places--a woman without a
blemish in her character and a house in Portman Square.  She was
staying at the hotel at Dieppe, whither Becky fled, and they made each
other's acquaintance first at sea, where they were swimming together,
and subsequently at the table d'hote of the hotel.  Mrs Eagles had
heard--who indeed had not?--some of the scandal of the Steyne affair;
but after a conversation with Becky, she pronounced that Mrs. Crawley
was an angel, her husband a ruffian, Lord Steyne an unprincipled
wretch, as everybody knew, and the whole case against Mrs. Crawley an
infamous and wicked conspiracy of that rascal Wenham.  "If you were a
man of any spirit, Mr. Eagles, you would box the wretch's ears the next
time you see him at the Club," she said to her husband.  But Eagles was
only a quiet old gentleman, husband to Mrs. Eagles, with a taste for
geology, and not tall enough to reach anybody's ears.

The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to live with her at
her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the ambassador's wife because
she would not receive her protegee, and did all that lay in woman's
power to keep Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.

Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the life of
humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before long.  It was the
same routine every day, the same dulness and comfort, the same drive
over the same stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an evening,
the same Blair's Sermon of a Sunday night--the same opera always being
acted over and over again; Becky was dying of weariness, when, luckily
for her, young Mr. Eagles came from Cambridge, and his mother, seeing
the impression which her little friend made upon him, straightway gave
Becky warning.

Then she tried keeping house with a female friend; then the double
menage began to quarrel and get into debt.  Then she determined upon a
boarding-house existence and lived for some time at that famous mansion
kept by Madame de Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at Paris, where she
began exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dandies
and fly-blown beauties who frequented her landlady's salons.  Becky
loved society and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an
opium-eater without his dram, and she was happy enough at the period of
her boarding-house life.  "The women here are as amusing as those in
May Fair," she told an old London friend who met her, "only, their
dresses are not quite so fresh.  The men wear cleaned gloves, and are
sad rogues, certainly, but they are not worse than Jack This and Tom
That.  The mistress of the house is a little vulgar, but I don't think
she is so vulgar as Lady ------" and here she named the name of a great
leader of fashion that I would die rather than reveal.  In fact, when
you saw Madame de Saint Amour's rooms lighted up of a night, men with
plaques and cordons at the ecarte tables, and the women at a little
distance, you might fancy yourself for a while in good society, and
that Madame was a real Countess.  Many people did so fancy, and Becky
was for a while one of the most dashing ladies of the Countess's salons.

But it is probable that her old creditors of 1815 found her out and
caused her to leave Paris, for the poor little woman was forced to fly
from the city rather suddenly, and went thence to Brussels.

How well she remembered the place!  She grinned as she looked up at the
little entresol which she had occupied, and thought of the Bareacres
family, bawling for horses and flight, as their carriage stood in the
porte-cochere of the hotel.  She went to Waterloo and to Laeken, where
George Osborne's monument much struck her.  She made a little sketch of
it.  "That poor Cupid!" she said; "how dreadfully he was in love with
me, and what a fool he was!  I wonder whether little Emmy is alive.  It
was a good little creature; and that fat brother of hers.  I have his
funny fat picture still among my papers.  They were kind simple people."

At Brussels Becky arrived, recommended by Madame de Saint Amour to her
friend, Madame la Comtesse de Borodino, widow of Napoleon's General,
the famous Count de Borodino, who was left with no resource by the
deceased hero but that of a table d'hote and an ecarte table.
Second-rate dandies and roues, widow-ladies who always have a lawsuit,
and very simple English folks, who fancy they see "Continental society"
at these houses, put down their money, or ate their meals, at Madame de
Borodino's tables.  The gallant young fellows treated the company round
to champagne at the table d'hote, rode out with the women, or hired
horses on country excursions, clubbed money to take boxes at the play
or the opera, betted over the fair shoulders of the ladies at the
ecarte tables, and wrote home to their parents in Devonshire about
their felicitous introduction to foreign society.

Here, as at Paris, Becky was a boarding-house queen, and ruled in
select pensions.  She never refused the champagne, or the bouquets, or
the drives into the country, or the private boxes; but what she
preferred was the ecarte at night,--and she played audaciously. First
she played only for a little, then for five-franc pieces, then for
Napoleons, then for notes:  then she would not be able to pay her
month's pension:  then she borrowed from the young gentlemen: then she
got into cash again and bullied Madame de Borodino, whom she had coaxed
and wheedled before:  then she was playing for ten sous at a time, and
in a dire state of poverty:  then her quarter's allowance would come
in, and she would pay off Madame de Borodino's score and would once
more take the cards against Monsieur de Rossignol, or the Chevalier de
Raff.

When Becky left Brussels, the sad truth is that she owed three months'
pension to Madame de Borodino, of which fact, and of the gambling, and
of the drinking, and of the going down on her knees to the Reverend Mr.
Muff, Ministre Anglican, and borrowing money of him, and of her coaxing
and flirting with Milor Noodle, son of Sir Noodle, pupil of the Rev.
Mr. Muff, whom she used to take into her private room, and of whom she
won large sums at ecarte--of which fact, I say, and of a hundred of her
other knaveries, the Countess de Borodino informs every English person
who stops at her establishment, and announces that Madame Rawdon was no
better than a vipere.

So our little wanderer went about setting up her tent in various cities
of Europe, as restless as Ulysses or Bampfylde Moore Carew. Her taste
for disrespectability grew more and more remarkable.  She became a
perfect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would make your
hair stand on end to meet.

There is no town of any mark in Europe but it has its little colony of
English raffs--men whose names Mr. Hemp the officer reads out
periodically at the Sheriffs' Court--young gentlemen of very good
family often, only that the latter disowns them; frequenters of
billiard-rooms and estaminets, patrons of foreign races and
gaming-tables.  They people the debtors' prisons--they drink and
swagger--they fight and brawl--they run away without paying--they have
duels with French and German officers--they cheat Mr. Spooney at
ecarte--they get the money and drive off to Baden in magnificent
britzkas--they try their infallible martingale and lurk about the tables
with empty pockets, shabby bullies, penniless bucks, until they can
swindle a Jew banker with a sham bill of exchange, or find another Mr.
Spooney to rob. The alternations of splendour and misery which these
people undergo are very queer to view.  Their life must be one of great
excitement.  Becky--must it be owned?--took to this life, and took to
it not unkindly.  She went about from town to town among these
Bohemians.  The lucky Mrs. Rawdon was known at every play-table in
Germany.  She and Madame de Cruchecassee kept house at Florence
together.  It is said she was ordered out of Munich, and my friend Mr.
Frederick Pigeon avers that it was at her house at Lausanne that he was
hocussed at supper and lost eight hundred pounds to Major Loder and the
Honourable Mr. Deuceace.  We are bound, you see, to give some account
of Becky's biography, but of this part, the less, perhaps, that is said
the better.

They say that, when Mrs. Crawley was particularly down on her luck, she
gave concerts and lessons in music here and there.  There was a Madame
de Raudon, who certainly had a matinee musicale at Wildbad, accompanied
by Herr Spoff, premier pianist to the Hospodar of Wallachia, and my
little friend Mr. Eaves, who knew everybody and had travelled
everywhere, always used to declare that he was at Strasburg in the year
1830, when a certain Madame Rebecque made her appearance in the opera
of the Dame Blanche, giving occasion to a furious row in the theatre
there.  She was hissed off the stage by the audience, partly from her
own incompetency, but chiefly from the ill-advised sympathy of some
persons in the parquet, (where the officers of the garrison had their
admissions); and Eaves was certain that the unfortunate debutante in
question was no other than Mrs. Rawdon Crawley.

She was, in fact, no better than a vagabond upon this earth.  When she
got her money she gambled; when she had gambled it she was put to
shifts to live; who knows how or by what means she succeeded? It is
said that she was once seen at St.  Petersburg, but was summarily
dismissed from that capital by the police, so that there cannot be any
possibility of truth in the report that she was a Russian spy at
Toplitz and Vienna afterwards.  I have even been informed that at Paris
she discovered a relation of her own, no less a person than her
maternal grandmother, who was not by any means a Montmorenci, but a
hideous old box-opener at a theatre on the Boulevards.  The meeting
between them, of which other persons, as it is hinted elsewhere, seem
to have been acquainted, must have been a very affecting interview.
The present historian can give no certain details regarding the event.

It happened at Rome once that Mrs. de Rawdon's half-year's salary had
just been paid into the principal banker's there, and, as everybody who
had a balance of above five hundred scudi was invited to the balls
which this prince of merchants gave during the winter, Becky had the
honour of a card, and appeared at one of the Prince and Princess
Polonia's splendid evening entertainments. The Princess was of the
family of Pompili, lineally descended from the second king of Rome, and
Egeria of the house of Olympus, while the Prince's grandfather,
Alessandro Polonia, sold wash-balls, essences, tobacco, and
pocket-handkerchiefs, ran errands for gentlemen, and lent money in a
small way.  All the great company in Rome thronged to his
saloons--Princes, Dukes, Ambassadors, artists, fiddlers, monsignori,
young bears with their leaders--every rank and condition of man. His
halls blazed with light and magnificence; were resplendent with gilt
frames (containing pictures), and dubious antiques; and the enormous
gilt crown and arms of the princely owner, a gold mushroom on a crimson
field (the colour of the pocket-handkerchiefs which he sold), and the
silver fountain of the Pompili family shone all over the roof, doors,
and panels of the house, and over the grand velvet baldaquins prepared
to receive Popes and Emperors.

So Becky, who had arrived in the diligence from Florence, and was
lodged at an inn in a very modest way, got a card for Prince Polonia's
entertainment, and her maid dressed her with unusual care, and she went
to this fine ball leaning on the arm of Major Loder, with whom she
happened to be travelling at the time--(the same man who shot Prince
Ravoli at Naples the next year, and was caned by Sir John Buckskin for
carrying four kings in his hat besides those which he used in playing
at ecarte )--and this pair went into the rooms together, and Becky saw
a number of old faces which she remembered in happier days, when she
was not innocent, but not found out. Major Loder knew a great number of
foreigners, keen-looking whiskered men with dirty striped ribbons in
their buttonholes, and a very small display of linen; but his own
countrymen, it might be remarked, eschewed the Major.  Becky, too, knew
some ladies here and there--French widows, dubious Italian countesses,
whose husbands had treated them ill--faugh--what shall we say, we who
have moved among some of the finest company of Vanity Fair, of this
refuse and sediment of rascals? If we play, let it be with clean cards,
and not with this dirty pack.  But every man who has formed one of the
innumerable army of travellers has seen these marauding irregulars
hanging on, like Nym and Pistol, to the main force, wearing the king's
colours and boasting of his commission, but pillaging for themselves,
and occasionally gibbeted by the roadside.

Well, she was hanging on the arm of Major Loder, and they went through
the rooms together, and drank a great quantity of champagne at the
buffet, where the people, and especially the Major's irregular corps,
struggled furiously for refreshments, of which when the pair had had
enough, they pushed on until they reached the Duchess's own pink velvet
saloon, at the end of the suite of apartments (where the statue of the
Venus is, and the great Venice looking-glasses, framed in silver), and
where the princely family were entertaining their most distinguished
guests at a round table at supper.  It was just such a little select
banquet as that of which Becky recollected that she had partaken at
Lord Steyne's--and there he sat at Polonia's table, and she saw him.
The scar cut by the diamond on his white, bald, shining forehead made a
burning red mark; his red whiskers were dyed of a purple hue, which
made his pale face look still paler.  He wore his collar and orders,
his blue ribbon and garter.  He was a greater Prince than any there,
though there was a reigning Duke and a Royal Highness, with their
princesses, and near his Lordship was seated the beautiful Countess of
Belladonna, nee de Glandier, whose husband (the Count Paolo della
Belladonna), so well known for his brilliant entomological collections,
had been long absent on a mission to the Emperor of Morocco.

When Becky beheld that familiar and illustrious face, how vulgar all of
a sudden did Major Loder appear to her, and how that odious Captain
Rook did smell of tobacco!  In one instant she reassumed her
fine-ladyship and tried to look and feel as if she were in May Fair
once more.  "That woman looks stupid and ill-humoured," she thought; "I
am sure she can't amuse him.  No, he must be bored by her--he never was
by me." A hundred such touching hopes, fears, and memories palpitated
in her little heart, as she looked with her brightest eyes (the rouge
which she wore up to her eyelids made them twinkle) towards the great
nobleman.  Of a Star and Garter night Lord Steyne used also to put on
his grandest manner and to look and speak like a great prince, as he
was. Becky admired him smiling sumptuously, easy, lofty, and stately.
Ah, bon Dieu, what a pleasant companion he was, what a brilliant wit,
what a rich fund of talk, what a grand manner!--and she had exchanged
this for Major Loder, reeking of cigars and brandy-and-water, and
Captain Rook with his horsejockey jokes and prize-ring slang, and their
like.  "I wonder whether he will know me," she thought.  Lord Steyne
was talking and laughing with a great and illustrious lady at his side,
when he looked up and saw Becky.

She was all over in a flutter as their eyes met, and she put on the
very best smile she could muster, and dropped him a little, timid,
imploring curtsey.  He stared aghast at her for a minute, as Macbeth
might on beholding Banquo's sudden appearance at his ball-supper, and
remained looking at her with open mouth, when that horrid Major Loder
pulled her away.

"Come away into the supper-room, Mrs. R.," was that gentleman's remark:
"seeing these nobs grubbing away has made me peckish too. Let's go and
try the old governor's champagne." Becky thought the Major had had a
great deal too much already.

The day after she went to walk on the Pincian Hill--the Hyde Park of
the Roman idlers--possibly in hopes to have another sight of Lord
Steyne.  But she met another acquaintance there:  it was Mr. Fiche, his
lordship's confidential man, who came up nodding to her rather
familiarly and putting a finger to his hat.  "I knew that Madame was
here," he said; "I followed her from her hotel.  I have some advice to
give Madame."

"From the Marquis of Steyne?" Becky asked, resuming as much of her
dignity as she could muster, and not a little agitated by hope and
expectation.

"No," said the valet; "it is from me.  Rome is very unwholesome."

"Not at this season, Monsieur Fiche--not till after Easter."

"I tell Madame it is unwholesome now.  There is always malaria for some
people.  That cursed marsh wind kills many at all seasons. Look, Madame
Crawley, you were always bon enfant, and I have an interest in you,
parole d'honneur.  Be warned.  Go away from Rome, I tell you--or you
will be ill and die."

Becky laughed, though in rage and fury.  "What! assassinate poor little
me?" she said.  "How romantic!  Does my lord carry bravos for couriers,
and stilettos in the fourgons? Bah!  I will stay, if but to plague him.
I have those who will defend me whilst I am here."

It was Monsieur Fiche's turn to laugh now.  "Defend you," he said, "and
who? The Major, the Captain, any one of those gambling men whom Madame
sees would take her life for a hundred louis.  We know things about
Major Loder (he is no more a Major than I am my Lord the Marquis) which
would send him to the galleys or worse.  We know everything and have
friends everywhere. We know whom you saw at Paris, and what relations
you found there.  Yes, Madame may stare, but we do.  How was it that no
minister on the Continent would receive Madame? She has offended
somebody:  who never forgives--whose rage redoubled when he saw you.
He was like a madman last night when he came home.  Madame de
Belladonna made him a scene about you and fired off in one of her
furies."

"Oh, it was Madame de Belladonna, was it?" Becky said, relieved a
little, for the information she had just got had scared her.

"No--she does not matter--she is always jealous.  I tell you it was
Monseigneur.  You did wrong to show yourself to him.  And if you stay
here you will repent it.  Mark my words.  Go.  Here is my lord's
carriage"--and seizing Becky's arm, he rushed down an alley of the
garden as Lord Steyne's barouche, blazing with heraldic devices, came
whirling along the avenue, borne by the almost priceless horses, and
bearing Madame de Belladonna lolling on the cushions, dark, sulky, and
blooming, a King Charles in her lap, a white parasol swaying over her
head, and old Steyne stretched at her side with a livid face and
ghastly eyes.  Hate, or anger, or desire caused them to brighten now
and then still, but ordinarily, they gave no light, and seemed tired of
looking out on a world of which almost all the pleasure and all the
best beauty had palled upon the worn-out wicked old man.

"Monseigneur has never recovered the shock of that night, never,"
Monsieur Fiche whispered to Mrs. Crawley as the carriage flashed by,
and she peeped out at it from behind the shrubs that hid her.  "That
was a consolation at any rate," Becky thought.

Whether my lord really had murderous intentions towards Mrs. Becky as
Monsieur Fiche said (since Monseigneur's death he has returned to his
native country, where he lives much respected, and has purchased from
his Prince the title of Baron Ficci), and the factotum objected to have
to do with assassination; or whether he simply had a commission to
frighten Mrs. Crawley out of a city where his Lordship proposed to pass
the winter, and the sight of her would be eminently disagreeable to the
great nobleman, is a point which has never been ascertained:  but the
threat had its effect upon the little woman, and she sought no more to
intrude herself upon the presence of her old patron.

Everybody knows the melancholy end of that nobleman, which befell at
Naples two months after the French Revolution of 1830; when the Most
Honourable George Gustavus, Marquis of Steyne, Earl of Gaunt and of
Gaunt Castle, in the Peerage of Ireland, Viscount Hellborough, Baron
Pitchley and Grillsby, a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter,
of the Golden Fleece of Spain, of the Russian Order of Saint Nicholas
of the First Class, of the Turkish Order of the Crescent, First Lord of
the Powder Closet and Groom of the Back Stairs, Colonel of the Gaunt or
Regent's Own Regiment of Militia, a Trustee of the British Museum, an
Elder Brother of the Trinity House, a Governor of the White Friars, and
D.C.L.--died after a series of fits brought on, as the papers said, by
the shock occasioned to his lordship's sensibilities by the downfall of
the ancient French monarchy.

An eloquent catalogue appeared in a weekly print, describing his
virtues, his magnificence, his talents, and his good actions.  His
sensibility, his attachment to the illustrious House of Bourbon, with
which he claimed an alliance, were such that he could not survive the
misfortunes of his august kinsmen.  His body was buried at Naples, and
his heart--that heart which always beat with every generous and noble
emotion was brought back to Castle Gaunt in a silver urn.  "In him,"
Mr. Wagg said, "the poor and the Fine Arts have lost a beneficent
patron, society one of its most brilliant ornaments, and England one of
her loftiest patriots and statesmen," &c., &c.

His will was a good deal disputed, and an attempt was made to force
from Madame de Belladonna the celebrated jewel called the "Jew's-eye"
diamond, which his lordship always wore on his forefinger, and which it
was said that she removed from it after his lamented demise. But his
confidential friend and attendant, Monsieur Fiche proved that the ring
had been presented to the said Madame de Belladonna two days before the
Marquis's death, as were the bank-notes, jewels, Neapolitan and French
bonds, &c., found in his lordship's secretaire and claimed by his heirs
from that injured woman.

Full of Business and Pleasure

The day after the meeting at the play-table, Jos had himself arrayed
with unusual care and splendour, and without thinking it necessary to
say a word to any member of his family regarding the occurrences of the
previous night, or asking for their company in his walk, he sallied
forth at an early hour, and was presently seen making inquiries at the
door of the Elephant Hotel.  In consequence of the fetes the house was
full of company, the tables in the street were already surrounded by
persons smoking and drinking the national small-beer, the public rooms
were in a cloud of smoke, and Mr. Jos having, in his pompous way, and
with his clumsy German, made inquiries for the person of whom he was in
search, was directed to the very top of the house, above the
first-floor rooms where some travelling pedlars had lived, and were
exhibiting their jewellery and brocades; above the second-floor
apartments occupied by the etat major of the gambling firm; above the
third-floor rooms, tenanted by the band of renowned Bohemian vaulters
and tumblers; and so on to the little cabins of the roof, where, among
students, bagmen, small tradesmen, and country-folks come in for the
festival, Becky had found a little nest--as dirty a little refuge as
ever beauty lay hid in.

Becky liked the life.  She was at home with everybody in the place,
pedlars, punters, tumblers, students and all. She was of a wild, roving
nature, inherited from father and mother, who were both Bohemians, by
taste and circumstance; if a lord was not by, she would talk to his
courier with the greatest pleasure; the din, the stir, the drink, the
smoke, the tattle of the Hebrew pedlars, the solemn, braggart ways of
the poor tumblers, the sournois talk of the gambling-table officials,
the songs and swagger of the students, and the general buzz and hum of
the place had pleased and tickled the little woman, even when her luck
was down and she had not wherewithal to pay her bill.  How pleasant was
all the bustle to her now that her purse was full of the money which
little Georgy had won for her the night before!

As Jos came creaking and puffing up the final stairs, and was
speechless when he got to the landing, and began to wipe his face and
then to look for No. 92, the room where he was directed to seek for the
person he wanted, the door of the opposite chamber, No. 90, was open,
and a student, in jack-boots and a dirty schlafrock, was lying on the
bed smoking a long pipe; whilst another student in long yellow hair and
a braided coat, exceeding smart and dirty too, was actually on his
knees at No. 92, bawling through the keyhole supplications to the
person within.

"Go away," said a well-known voice, which made Jos thrill, "I expect
somebody; I expect my grandpapa.  He mustn't see you there."

"Angel Englanderinn!" bellowed the kneeling student with the whity-brown
ringlets and the large finger-ring, "do take compassion upon us.
Make an appointment. Dine with me and Fritz at the inn in the park.  We
will have roast pheasants and porter, plum-pudding and French wine.  We
shall die if you don't."

"That we will," said the young nobleman on the bed; and this colloquy
Jos overheard, though he did not comprehend it, for the reason that he
had never studied the language in which it was carried on.

"Newmero kattervang dooze, si vous plait," Jos said in his grandest
manner, when he was able to speak.

"Quater fang tooce!" said the student, starting up, and he bounced into
his own room, where he locked the door, and where Jos heard him
laughing with his comrade on the bed.

The gentleman from Bengal was standing, disconcerted by this incident,
when the door of the 92 opened of itself and Becky's little head peeped
out full of archness and mischief.  She lighted on Jos.  "It's you,"
she said, coming out.  "How I have been waiting for you!  Stop! not
yet--in one minute you shall come in." In that instant she put a
rouge-pot, a brandy bottle, and a plate of broken meat into the bed,
gave one smooth to her hair, and finally let in her visitor.

She had, by way of morning robe, a pink domino, a trifle faded and
soiled, and marked here and there with pomaturn; but her arms shone out
from the loose sleeves of the dress very white and fair, and it was
tied round her little waist so as not ill to set off the trim little
figure of the wearer.  She led Jos by the hand into her garret. "Come
in," she said.  "Come and talk to me.  Sit yonder on the chair"; and
she gave the civilian's hand a little squeeze and laughingly placed him
upon it.  As for herself, she placed herself on the bed--not on the
bottle and plate, you may be sure--on which Jos might have reposed, had
he chosen that seat; and so there she sat and talked with her old
admirer.   "How little years have changed you," she said with a look of
tender interest.  "I should have known you anywhere.  What a comfort it
is amongst strangers to see once more the frank honest face of an old
friend!"

The frank honest face, to tell the truth, at this moment bore any
expression but one of openness and honesty:  it was, on the contrary,
much perturbed and puzzled in look.  Jos was surveying the queer little
apartment in which he found his old flame.  One of her gowns hung over
the bed, another depending from a hook of the door; her bonnet obscured
half the looking-glass, on which, too, lay the prettiest little pair of
bronze boots; a French novel was on the table by the bedside, with a
candle, not of wax.  Becky thought of popping that into the bed too,
but she only put in the little paper night-cap with which she had put
the candle out on going to sleep.

"I should have known you anywhere," she continued; "a woman never
forgets some things.  And you were the first man I ever--I ever saw."

"Was I really?" said Jos.  "God bless my soul, you--you don't say so."

"When I came with your sister from Chiswick, I was scarcely more than a
child," Becky said.  "How is that, dear love? Oh, her husband was a sad
wicked man, and of course it was of me that the poor dear was jealous.
As if I cared about him, heigho!  when there was somebody--but
no--don't let us talk of old times"; and she passed her handkerchief
with the tattered lace across her eyelids.

"Is not this a strange place," she continued, "for a woman, who has
lived in a very different world too, to be found in? I have had so many
griefs and wrongs, Joseph Sedley; I have been made to suffer so cruelly
that I am almost made mad sometimes.  I can't stay still in any place,
but wander about always restless and unhappy. All my friends have been
false to me--all.  There is no such thing as an honest man in the
world.  I was the truest wife that ever lived, though I married my
husband out of pique, because somebody else--but never mind that.  I
was true, and he trampled upon me and deserted me.  I was the fondest
mother.  I had but one child, one darling, one hope, one joy, which I
held to my heart with a mother's affection, which was my life, my
prayer, my--my blessing; and they--they tore it from me--tore it from
me"; and she put her hand to her heart with a passionate gesture of
despair, burying her face for a moment on the bed.

The brandy-bottle inside clinked up against the plate which held the
cold sausage.  Both were moved, no doubt, by the exhibition of so much
grief.  Max and Fritz were at the door, listening with wonder to Mrs.
Becky's sobs and cries.  Jos, too, was a good deal frightened and
affected at seeing his old flame in this condition. And she began,
forthwith, to tell her story--a tale so neat, simple, and artless that
it was quite evident from hearing her that if ever there was a
white-robed angel escaped from heaven to be subject to the infernal
machinations and villainy of fiends here below, that spotless
being--that miserable unsullied martyr, was present on the bed before
Jos--on the bed, sitting on the brandy-bottle.

They had a very long, amicable, and confidential talk there, in the
course of which Jos Sedley was somehow made aware (but in a manner that
did not in the least scare or offend him) that Becky's heart had first
learned to beat at his enchanting presence; that George Osborne had
certainly paid an unjustifiable court to HER, which might account for
Amelia's jealousy and their little rupture; but that Becky never gave
the least encouragement to the unfortunate officer, and that she had
never ceased to think about Jos from the very first day she had seen
him, though, of course, her duties as a married woman were
paramount--duties which she had always preserved, and would, to her
dying day, or until the proverbially bad climate in which Colonel
Crawley was living should release her from a yoke which his cruelty had
rendered odious to her.

Jos went away, convinced that she was the most virtuous, as she was one
of the most fascinating of women, and revolving in his mind all sorts
of benevolent schemes for her welfare.  Her persecutions ought to be
ended: she ought to return to the society of which she was an ornament.
He would see what ought to be done.  She must quit that place and take
a quiet lodging.  Amelia must come and see her and befriend her.  He
would go and settle about it, and consult with the Major.  She wept
tears of heart-felt gratitude as she parted from him, and pressed his
hand as the gallant stout gentleman stooped down to kiss hers.

So Becky bowed Jos out of her little garret with as much grace as if it
was a palace of which she did the honours; and that heavy gentleman
having disappeared down the stairs, Max and Fritz came out of their
hole, pipe in mouth, and she amused herself by mimicking Jos to them as
she munched her cold bread and sausage and took draughts of her
favourite brandy-and-water.

Jos walked over to Dobbin's lodgings with great solemnity and there
imparted to him the affecting history with which he had just been made
acquainted, without, however, mentioning the play business of the night
before. And the two gentlemen were laying their heads together and
consulting as to the best means of being useful to Mrs. Becky, while
she was finishing her interrupted dejeuner a la fourchette.

How was it that she had come to that little town? How was it that she
had no friends and was wandering about alone? Little boys at school are
taught in their earliest Latin book that the path of Avernus is very
easy of descent.  Let us skip over the interval in the history of her
downward progress.  She was not worse now than she had been in the days
of her prosperity--only a little down on her luck.

As for Mrs. Amelia, she was a woman of such a soft and foolish
disposition that when she heard of anybody unhappy, her heart
straightway melted towards the sufferer; and as she had never thought
or done anything mortally guilty herself, she had not that abhorrence
for wickedness which distinguishes moralists much more knowing.  If she
spoiled everybody who came near her with kindness and compliments--if
she begged pardon of all her servants for troubling them to answer the
bell--if she apologized to a shopboy who showed her a piece of silk, or
made a curtsey to a street-sweeper with a complimentary remark upon
the elegant state of his crossing--and she was almost capable of every
one of these follies--the notion that an old acquaintance was
miserable was sure to soften her heart; nor would she hear of anybody's
being deservedly unhappy. A world under such legislation as hers would
not be a very orderly place of abode; but there are not many women, at
least not of the rulers, who are of her sort.  This lady, I believe,
would have abolished all gaols, punishments, handcuffs, whippings,
poverty, sickness, hunger, in the world, and was such a mean-spirited
creature that--we are obliged to confess it--she could even forget a
mortal injury.

When the Major heard from Jos of the sentimental adventure which had
just befallen the latter, he was not, it must be owned, nearly as much
interested as the gentleman from Bengal.  On the contrary, his
excitement was quite the reverse from a pleasurable one; he made use of
a brief but improper expression regarding a poor woman in distress,
saying, in fact, "The little minx, has she come to light again?" He
never had had the slightest liking for her, but had heartily mistrusted
her from the very first moment when her green eyes had looked at, and
turned away from, his own.

"That little devil brings mischief wherever she goes," the Major said
disrespectfully.  "Who knows what sort of life she has been leading?
And what business has she here abroad and alone? Don't tell me about
persecutors and enemies; an honest woman always has friends and never
is separated from her family.  Why has she left her husband? He may
have been disreputable and wicked, as you say.  He always was.  I
remember the confounded blackleg and the way in which he used to cheat
and hoodwink poor George.  Wasn't there a scandal about their
separation? I think I heard something," cried out Major Dobbin, who did
not care much about gossip, and whom Jos tried in vain to convince that
Mrs. Becky was in all respects a most injured and virtuous female.

"Well, well; let's ask Mrs. George," said that arch-diplomatist of a
Major.  "Only let us go and consult her. I suppose you will allow that
she is a good judge at any rate, and knows what is right in such
matters."

"Hm!  Emmy is very well," said Jos, who did not happen to be in love
with his sister.

"Very well? By Gad, sir, she's the finest lady I ever met in my life,"
bounced out the Major.  "I say at once, let us go and ask her if this
woman ought to be visited or not--I will be content with her verdict."
Now this odious, artful rogue of a Major was thinking in his own mind
that he was sure of his case.  Emmy, he remembered, was at one time
cruelly and deservedly jealous of Rebecca, never mentioned her name but
with a shrinking and terror--a jealous woman never forgives, thought
Dobbin:  and so the pair went across the street to Mrs. George's house,
where she was contentedly warbling at a music lesson with Madame
Strumpff.

When that lady took her leave, Jos opened the business with his usual
pomp of words.  "Amelia, my dear," said he, "I have just had the most
extraordinary--yes--God bless my soul!  the most extraordinary
adventure--an old friend--yes, a most interesting old friend of yours,
and I may say in old times, has just arrived here, and I should like
you to see her."

"Her!" said Amelia, "who is it? Major Dobbin, if you please not to
break my scissors." The Major was twirling them round by the little
chain from which they sometimes hung to their lady's waist, and was
thereby endangering his own eye.

"It is a woman whom I dislike very much," said the Major, doggedly, "and
whom you have no cause to love."

"It is Rebecca, I'm sure it is Rebecca," Amelia said, blushing and
being very much agitated.

"You are right; you always are," Dobbin answered. Brussels, Waterloo,
old, old times, griefs, pangs, remembrances, rushed back into Amelia's
gentle heart and caused a cruel agitation there.

"Don't let me see her," Emmy continued.  "I couldn't see her."

"I told you so," Dobbin said to Jos.

"She is very unhappy, and--and that sort of thing," Jos urged.  "She is
very poor and unprotected, and has been ill--exceedingly ill--and that
scoundrel of a husband has deserted her."

"Ah!" said Amelia.

"She hasn't a friend in the world," Jos went on, not undexterously,
"and she said she thought she might trust in you.  She's so miserable,
Emmy.  She has been almost mad with grief.  Her story quite affected
me--'pon my word and honour, it did--never was such a cruel persecution
borne so angelically, I may say.  Her family has been most cruel to
her."

"Poor creature!" Amelia said.

"And if she can get no friend, she says she thinks she'll die," Jos
proceeded in a low tremulous voice.  "God bless my soul!  do you know
that she tried to kill herself? She carries laudanum with her--I saw
the bottle in her room--such a miserable little room--at a third-rate
house, the Elephant, up in the roof at the top of all.  I went there."

This did not seem to affect Emmy.  She even smiled a little. Perhaps
she figured Jos to herself panting up the stair.

"She's beside herself with grief," he resumed.  "The agonies that woman
has endured are quite frightful to hear of.  She had a little boy, of
the same age as Georgy."

"Yes, yes, I think I remember," Emmy remarked. "Well?"

"The most beautiful child ever seen," Jos said, who was very fat, and
easily moved, and had been touched by the story Becky told; "a perfect
angel, who adored his mother.  The ruffians tore him shrieking out of
her arms, and have never allowed him to see her."

"Dear Joseph," Emmy cried out, starting up at once, "let us go and see
her this minute." And she ran into her adjoining bedchamber, tied on
her bonnet in a flutter, came out with her shawl on her arm, and
ordered Dobbin to follow.

He went and put her shawl--it was a white cashmere, consigned to her by
the Major himself from India--over her shoulders.  He saw there was
nothing for it but to obey, and she put her hand into his arm, and they
went away.

"It is number 92, up four pair of stairs," Jos said, perhaps not very
willing to ascend the steps again; but he placed himself in the window
of his drawing-room, which commands the place on which the Elephant
stands, and saw the pair marching through the market.

It was as well that Becky saw them too from her garret, for she and the
two students were chattering and laughing there; they had been joking
about the appearance of Becky's grandpapa--whose arrival and departure
they had witnessed--but she had time to dismiss them, and have her
little room clear before the landlord of the Elephant, who knew that
Mrs. Osborne was a great favourite at the Serene Court, and respected
her accordingly, led the way up the stairs to the roof story,
encouraging Miladi and the Herr Major as they achieved the ascent.

"Gracious lady, gracious lady!" said the landlord, knocking at Becky's
door; he had called her Madame the day before, and was by no means
courteous to her.

"Who is it?" Becky said, putting out her head, and she gave a little
scream.  There stood Emmy in a tremble, and Dobbin, the tall Major,
with his cane.

He stood still watching, and very much interested at the scene; but
Emmy sprang forward with open arms towards Rebecca, and forgave her at
that moment, and embraced her and kissed her with all her heart. Ah,
poor wretch, when was your lip pressed before by such pure kisses?

Amantium Irae

Frankness and kindness like Amelia's were likely to touch even such a
hardened little reprobate as Becky.  She returned Emmy's caresses and
kind speeches with something very like gratitude, and an emotion which,
if it was not lasting, for a moment was almost genuine.  That was a
lucky stroke of hers about the child "torn from her arms shrieking." It
was by that harrowing misfortune that Becky had won her friend back,
and it was one of the very first points, we may be certain, upon which
our poor simple little Emmy began to talk to her new-found acquaintance.

"And so they took your darling child from you?" our simpleton cried
out.  "Oh, Rebecca, my poor dear suffering friend, I know what it is to
lose a boy, and to feel for those who have lost one.  But please Heaven
yours will be restored to you, as a merciful merciful Providence has
brought me back mine."

"The child, my child? Oh, yes, my agonies were frightful," Becky owned,
not perhaps without a twinge of conscience. It jarred upon her to be
obliged to commence instantly to tell lies in reply to so much
confidence and simplicity.  But that is the misfortune of beginning
with this kind of forgery.  When one fib becomes due as it were, you
must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of
your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of
detection increases every day.

"My agonies," Becky continued, "were terrible (I hope she won't sit
down on the bottle) when they took him away from me; I thought I should
die; but I fortunately had a brain fever, during which my doctor gave
me up, and--and I recovered, and--and here I am, poor and friendless."

"How old is he?" Emmy asked.

"Eleven," said Becky.

"Eleven!" cried the other.  "Why, he was born the same year with
Georgy, who is--"

"I know, I know," Becky cried out, who had in fact quite forgotten all
about little Rawdon's age.  "Grief has made me forget so many things,
dearest Amelia.  I am very much changed:  half-wild sometimes.  He was
eleven when they took him away from me.  Bless his sweet face; I have
never seen it again."

"Was he fair or dark?" went on that absurd little Emmy.  "Show me his
hair."

Becky almost laughed at her simplicity.  "Not to-day, love--some other
time, when my trunks arrive from Leipzig, whence I came to this
place--and a little drawing of him, which I made in happy days."

"Poor Becky, poor Becky!" said Emmy.  "How thankful, how thankful I
ought to be"; (though I doubt whether that practice of piety inculcated
upon us by our womankind in early youth, namely, to be thankful because
we are better off than somebody else, be a very rational religious
exercise) and then she began to think, as usual, how her son was the
handsomest, the best, and the cleverest boy in the whole world.

"You will see my Georgy," was the best thing Emmy could think of to
console Becky.  If anything could make her comfortable that would.

And so the two women continued talking for an hour or more, during
which Becky had the opportunity of giving her new friend a full and
complete version of her private history.  She showed how her marriage
with Rawdon Crawley had always been viewed by the family with feelings
of the utmost hostility; how her sister-in-law (an artful woman) had
poisoned her husband's mind against her; how he had formed odious
connections, which had estranged his affections from her:  how she had
borne everything--poverty, neglect, coldness from the being whom she
most loved--and all for the sake of her child; how, finally, and by the
most flagrant outrage, she had been driven into demanding a separation
from her husband, when the wretch did not scruple to ask that she
should sacrifice her own fair fame so that he might procure advancement
through the means of a very great and powerful but unprincipled
man--the Marquis of Steyne, indeed.  The atrocious monster!

This part of her eventful history Becky gave with the utmost feminine
delicacy and the most indignant virtue. Forced to fly her husband's
roof by this insult, the coward had pursued his revenge by taking her
child from her. And thus Becky said she was a wanderer, poor,
unprotected, friendless, and wretched.

Emmy received this story, which was told at some length, as those
persons who are acquainted with her character may imagine that she
would.  She quivered with indignation at the account of the conduct of
the miserable Rawdon and the unprincipled Steyne.  Her eyes made notes
of admiration for every one of the sentences in which Becky described
the persecutions of her aristocratic relatives and the falling away of
her husband. (Becky did not abuse him.  She spoke rather in sorrow than
in anger.  She had loved him only too fondly: and was he not the father
of her boy?) And as for the separation scene from the child, while
Becky was reciting it, Emmy retired altogether behind her
pocket-handkerchief, so that the consummate little tragedian must have
been charmed to see the effect which her performance produced on her
audience.

Whilst the ladies were carrying on their conversation, Amelia's
constant escort, the Major (who, of course, did not wish to interrupt
their conference, and found himself rather tired of creaking about the
narrow stair passage of which the roof brushed the nap from his hat)
descended to the ground-floor of the house and into the great room
common to all the frequenters of the Elephant, out of which the stair
led.  This apartment is always in a fume of smoke and liberally
sprinkled with beer.  On a dirty table stand scores of corresponding
brass candlesticks with tallow candles for the lodgers, whose keys hang
up in rows over the candles.  Emmy had passed blushing through the room
anon, where all sorts of people were collected; Tyrolese glove-sellers
and Danubian linen-merchants, with their packs; students recruiting
themselves with butterbrods and meat; idlers, playing cards or dominoes
on the sloppy, beery tables; tumblers refreshing during the cessation
of their performances--in a word, all the fumum and strepitus of a
German inn in fair time.  The waiter brought the Major a mug of beer,
as a matter of course, and he took out a cigar and amused himself with
that pernicious vegetable and a newspaper until his charge should come
down to claim him.

Max and Fritz came presently downstairs, their caps on one side, their
spurs jingling, their pipes splendid with coats of arms and full-blown
tassels, and they hung up the key of No. 90 on the board and called for
the ration of butterbrod and beer.  The pair sat down by the Major and
fell into a conversation of which he could not help hearing somewhat.
It was mainly about "Fuchs" and "Philister," and duels and
drinking-bouts at the neighbouring University of Schoppenhausen, from
which renowned seat of learning they had just come in the Eilwagen,
with Becky, as it appeared, by their side, and in order to be present
at the bridal fetes at Pumpernickel.

"The title Englanderinn seems to be en bays de gonnoisance," said Max,
who knew the French language, to Fritz, his comrade.  "After the fat
grandfather went away, there came a pretty little compatriot.  I heard
them chattering and whimpering together in the little woman's chamber."

"We must take the tickets for her concert," Fritz said. "Hast thou any
money, Max?"

"Bah," said the other, "the concert is a concert in nubibus.  Hans said
that she advertised one at Leipzig, and the Burschen took many tickets.
But she went off without singing.  She said in the coach yesterday that
her pianist had fallen ill at Dresden.  She cannot sing, it is my
belief: her voice is as cracked as thine, O thou beer-soaking Renowner!"

"It is cracked; I hear her trying out of her window a schrecklich
English ballad, called 'De Rose upon de Balgony.'"

"Saufen and singen go not together," observed Fritz with the red nose,
who evidently preferred the former amusement.  "No, thou shalt take
none of her tickets. She won money at the trente and quarante last
night.  I saw her:  she made a little English boy play for her. We will
spend thy money there or at the theatre, or we will treat her to French
wine or Cognac in the Aurelius Garden, but the tickets we will not buy.
What sayest thou? Yet, another mug of beer?" and one and another
successively having buried their blond whiskers in the mawkish draught,
curled them and swaggered off into the fair.

The Major, who had seen the key of No. 90 put up on its hook and had
heard the conversation of the two young University bloods, was not at a
loss to understand that their talk related to Becky.  "The little devil
is at her old tricks," he thought, and he smiled as he recalled old
days, when he had witnessed the desperate flirtation with Jos and the
ludicrous end of that adventure. He and George had often laughed over
it subsequently, and until a few weeks after George's marriage, when he
also was caught in the little Circe's toils, and had an understanding
with her which his comrade certainly suspected, but preferred to
ignore.  William was too much hurt or ashamed to ask to fathom that
disgraceful mystery, although once, and evidently with remorse on his
mind, George had alluded to it. It was on the morning of Waterloo, as
the young men stood together in front of their line, surveying the
black masses of Frenchmen who crowned the opposite heights, and as the
rain was coming down, "I have been mixing in a foolish intrigue with a
woman," George said. "I am glad we were marched away.  If I drop, I
hope Emmy will never know of that business.  I wish to God it had never
been begun!" And William was pleased to think, and had more than once
soothed poor George's widow with the narrative, that Osborne, after
quitting his wife, and after the action of Quatre Bras, on the first
day, spoke gravely and affectionately to his comrade of his father and
his wife.  On these facts, too, William had insisted very strongly in
his conversations with the elder Osborne, and had thus been the means
of reconciling the old gentleman to his son's memory, just at the close
of the elder man's life.

"And so this devil is still going on with her intrigues," thought
William.  "I wish she were a hundred miles from here.  She brings
mischief wherever she goes." And he was pursuing these forebodings and
this uncomfortable train of thought, with his head between his hands,
and the Pumpernickel Gazette of last week unread under his nose, when
somebody tapped his shoulder with a parasol, and he looked up and saw
Mrs. Amelia.

This woman had a way of tyrannizing over Major Dobbin (for the weakest
of all people will domineer over somebody), and she ordered him about,
and patted him, and made him fetch and carry just as if he was a great
Newfoundland dog.  He liked, so to speak, to jump into the water if she
said "High, Dobbin!" and to trot behind her with her reticule in his
mouth.  This history has been written to very little purpose if the
reader has not perceived that the Major was a spooney.

"Why did you not wait for me, sir, to escort me downstairs?" she said,
giving a little toss of her head and a most sarcastic curtsey.

"I couldn't stand up in the passage," he answered with a comical
deprecatory look; and, delighted to give her his arm and to take her
out of the horrid smoky place, he would have walked off without even so
much as remembering the waiter, had not the young fellow run after him
and stopped him on the threshold of the Elephant to make him pay for
the beer which he had not consumed.  Emmy laughed:  she called him a
naughty man, who wanted to run away in debt, and, in fact, made some
jokes suitable to the occasion and the small-beer. She was in high
spirits and good humour, and tripped across the market-place very
briskly.  She wanted to see Jos that instant.  The Major laughed at the
impetuous affection Mrs. Amelia exhibited; for, in truth, it was not
very often that she wanted her brother "that instant."  They found the
civilian in his saloon on the first-floor; he had been pacing the room,
and biting his nails, and looking over the market-place towards the
Elephant a hundred times at least during the past hour whilst Emmy was
closeted with her friend in the garret and the Major was beating the
tattoo on the sloppy tables of the public room below, and he was, on
his side too, very anxious to see Mrs. Osborne.

"Well?" said he.

"The poor dear creature, how she has suffered!" Emmy said.

"God bless my soul, yes," Jos said, wagging his head, so that his
cheeks quivered like jellies.

"She may have Payne's room, who can go upstairs," Emmy continued. Payne
was a staid English maid and personal attendant upon Mrs. Osborne, to
whom the courier, as in duty bound, paid court, and whom Georgy used to
"lark" dreadfully with accounts of German robbers and ghosts.  She
passed her time chiefly in grumbling, in ordering about her mistress,
and in stating her intention to return the next morning to her native
village of Clapham.  "She may have Payne's room," Emmy said.

"Why, you don't mean to say you are going to have that woman into the
house?" bounced out the Major, jumping up.

"Of course we are," said Amelia in the most innocent way in the world.
"Don't be angry and break the furniture, Major Dobbin.  Of course we
are going to have her here."

"Of course, my dear," Jos said.

"The poor creature, after all her sufferings," Emmy continued; "her
horrid banker broken and run away; her husband--wicked wretch--having
deserted her and taken her child away from her" (here she doubled her
two little fists and held them in a most menacing attitude before her,
so that the Major was charmed to see such a dauntless virago) "the poor
dear thing!  quite alone and absolutely forced to give lessons in
singing to get her bread--and not have her here!"

"Take lessons, my dear Mrs. George," cried the Major, "but don't have
her in the house.  I implore you don't."

"Pooh," said Jos.

"You who are always good and kind--always used to be at any rate--I'm
astonished at you, Major William," Amelia cried.  "Why, what is the
moment to help her but when she is so miserable? Now is the time to be
of service to her.  The oldest friend I ever had, and not--"

"She was not always your friend, Amelia," the Major said, for he was
quite angry.  This allusion was too much for Emmy, who, looking the
Major almost fiercely in the face, said, "For shame, Major Dobbin!" and
after having fired this shot, she walked out of the room with a most
majestic air and shut her own door briskly on herself and her outraged
dignity.

"To allude to THAT!" she said, when the door was closed.  "Oh, it was
cruel of him to remind me of it," and she looked up at George's
picture, which hung there as usual, with the portrait of the boy
underneath.  "It was cruel of him.  If I had forgiven it, ought he to
have spoken? No.  And it is from his own lips that I know how wicked
and groundless my jealousy was; and that you were pure--oh, yes, you
were pure, my saint in heaven!"

She paced the room, trembling and indignant.  She went and leaned on
the chest of drawers over which the picture hung, and gazed and gazed
at it.  Its eyes seemed to look down on her with a reproach that
deepened as she looked. The early dear, dear memories of that brief
prime of love rushed back upon her.  The wound which years had scarcely
cicatrized bled afresh, and oh, how bitterly!  She could not bear the
reproaches of the husband there before her.  It couldn't be.  Never,
never.

Poor Dobbin; poor old William!  That unlucky word had undone the work
of many a year--the long laborious edifice of a life of love and
constancy--raised too upon what secret and hidden foundations, wherein
lay buried passions, uncounted struggles, unknown sacrifices--a little
word was spoken, and down fell the fair palace of hope--one word, and
away flew the bird which he had been trying all his life to lure!

William, though he saw by Amelia's looks that a great crisis had come,
nevertheless continued to implore Sedley, in the most energetic terms,
to beware of Rebecca; and he eagerly, almost frantically, adjured Jos
not to receive her.  He besought Mr. Sedley to inquire at least
regarding her; told him how he had heard that she was in the company of
gamblers and people of ill repute; pointed out what evil she had done
in former days, how she and Crawley had misled poor George into ruin,
how she was now parted from her husband, by her own confession, and,
perhaps, for good reason.  What a dangerous companion she would be for
his sister, who knew nothing of the affairs of the world!  William
implored Jos, with all the eloquence which he could bring to bear, and
a great deal more energy than this quiet gentleman was ordinarily in
the habit of showing, to keep Rebecca out of his household.

Had he been less violent, or more dexterous, he might have succeeded in
his supplications to Jos; but the civilian was not a little jealous of
the airs of superiority which the Major constantly exhibited towards
him, as he fancied (indeed, he had imparted his opinions to Mr. Kirsch,
the courier, whose bills Major Dobbin checked on this journey, and who
sided with his master), and he began a blustering speech about his
competency to defend his own honour, his desire not to have his affairs
meddled with, his intention, in fine, to rebel against the Major, when
the colloquy--rather a long and stormy one--was put an end to in the
simplest way possible, namely, by the arrival of Mrs. Becky, with a
porter from the Elephant Hotel in charge of her very meagre baggage.

She greeted her host with affectionate respect and made a shrinking,
but amicable salutation to Major Dobbin, who, as her instinct assured
her at once, was her enemy, and had been speaking against her; and the
bustle and clatter consequent upon her arrival brought Amelia out of
her room.  Emmy went up and embraced her guest with the greatest
warmth, and took no notice of the Major, except to fling him an angry
look--the most unjust and scornful glance that had perhaps ever
appeared in that poor little woman's face since she was born.  But she
had private reasons of her own, and was bent upon being angry with him.
And Dobbin, indignant at the injustice, not at the defeat, went off,
making her a bow quite as haughty as the killing curtsey with which the
little woman chose to bid him farewell.

He being gone, Emmy was particularly lively and affectionate to
Rebecca, and bustled about the apartments and installed her guest in
her room with an eagerness and activity seldom exhibited by our placid
little friend.  But when an act of injustice is to be done, especially
by weak people, it is best that it should be done quickly, and Emmy
thought she was displaying a great deal of firmness and proper feeling
and veneration for the late Captain Osborne in her present behaviour.

Georgy came in from the fetes for dinner-time and found four covers
laid as usual; but one of the places was occupied by a lady, instead of
by Major Dobbin. "Hullo!  where's Dob?" the young gentleman asked with
his usual simplicity of language.  "Major Dobbin is dining out, I
suppose," his mother said, and, drawing the boy to her, kissed him a
great deal, and put his hair off his forehead, and introduced him to
Mrs. Crawley.  "This is my boy, Rebecca," Mrs. Osborne said--as much as
to say--can the world produce anything like that? Becky looked at him
with rapture and pressed his hand fondly. "Dear boy!" she said--"he is
just like my--" Emotion choked her further utterance, but Amelia
understood, as well as if she had spoken, that Becky was thinking of
her own blessed child.  However, the company of her friend consoled
Mrs. Crawley, and she ate a very good dinner.

During the repast, she had occasion to speak several times, when Georgy
eyed her and listened to her.  At the desert Emmy was gone out to
superintend further domestic arrangements; Jos was in his great chair
dozing over Galignani; Georgy and the new arrival sat close to each
other--he had continued to look at her knowingly more than once, and at
last he laid down the nutcrackers.

"I say," said Georgy.

"What do you say?" Becky said, laughing.

"You're the lady I saw in the mask at the Rouge et Noir."

"Hush!  you little sly creature," Becky said, taking up his hand and
kissing it.  "Your uncle was there too, and Mamma mustn't know."

"Oh, no--not by no means," answered the little fellow.

"You see we are quite good friends already," Becky said to Emmy, who
now re-entered; and it must be owned that Mrs. Osborne had introduced a
most judicious and amiable companion into her house.

William, in a state of great indignation, though still unaware of all
the treason that was in store for him, walked about the town wildly
until he fell upon the Secretary of Legation, Tapeworm, who invited him
to dinner.  As they were discussing that meal, he took occasion to ask
the Secretary whether he knew anything about a certain Mrs. Rawdon
Crawley, who had, he believed, made some noise in London; and then
Tapeworm, who of course knew all the London gossip, and was besides a
relative of Lady Gaunt, poured out into the astonished Major's ears
such a history about Becky and her husband as astonished the querist,
and supplied all the points of this narrative, for it was at that very
table years ago that the present writer had the pleasure of hearing the
tale.  Tufto, Steyne, the Crawleys, and their history--everything
connected with Becky and her previous life passed under the record of
the bitter diplomatist. He knew everything and a great deal besides,
about all the world--in a word, he made the most astounding revelations
to the simple-hearted Major.  When Dobbin said that Mrs. Osborne and
Mr. Sedley had taken her into their house, Tapeworm burst into a peal
of laughter which shocked the Major, and asked if they had not better
send into the prison and take in one or two of the gentlemen in shaved
heads and yellow jackets who swept the streets of Pumpernickel, chained
in pairs, to board and lodge, and act as tutor to that little
scapegrace Georgy.

This information astonished and horrified the Major not a little. It
had been agreed in the morning (before meeting with Rebecca) that
Amelia should go to the Court ball that night.  There would be the
place where he should tell her.  The Major went home, and dressed
himself in his uniform, and repaired to Court, in hopes to see Mrs.
Osborne.  She never came.  When he returned to his lodgings all the
lights in the Sedley tenement were put out.  He could not see her till
the morning.  I don't know what sort of a night's rest he had with this
frightful secret in bed with him.

At the earliest convenient hour in the morning he sent his servant
across the way with a note, saying that he wished very particularly to
speak with her.  A message came back to say that Mrs. Osborne was
exceedingly unwell and was keeping her room.

She, too, had been awake all that night.  She had been thinking of a
thing which had agitated her mind a hundred times before.  A hundred
times on the point of yielding, she had shrunk back from a sacrifice
which she felt was too much for her.  She couldn't, in spite of his
love and constancy and her own acknowledged regard, respect, and
gratitude.  What are benefits, what is constancy, or merit? One curl of
a girl's ringlet, one hair of a whisker, will turn the scale against
them all in a minute. They did not weigh with Emmy more than with other
women.  She had tried them; wanted to make them pass; could not; and
the pitiless little woman had found a pretext, and determined to be
free.

When at length, in the afternoon, the Major gained admission to Amelia,
instead of the cordial and affectionate greeting, to which he had been
accustomed now for many a long day, he received the salutation of a
curtsey, and of a little gloved hand, retracted the moment after it was
accorded to him.

Rebecca, too, was in the room, and advanced to meet him with a smile
and an extended hand.  Dobbin drew back rather confusedly, "I--I beg
your pardon, m'am," he said; "but I am bound to tell you that it is not
as your friend that I am come here now."

"Pooh!  damn; don't let us have this sort of thing!" Jos cried out,
alarmed, and anxious to get rid of a scene.

"I wonder what Major Dobbin has to say against Rebecca?" Amelia said in
a low, clear voice with a slight quiver in it, and a very determined
look about the eyes.

"I will not have this sort of thing in my house," Jos again interposed.
"I say I will not have it; and Dobbin, I beg, sir, you'll stop it." And
he looked round, trembling and turning very red, and gave a great puff,
and made for his door.

"Dear friend!" Rebecca said with angelic sweetness, "do hear what Major
Dobbin has to say against me."

"I will not hear it, I say," squeaked out Jos at the top of his voice,
and, gathering up his dressing-gown, he was gone.

"We are only two women," Amelia said.  "You can speak now, sir."

"This manner towards me is one which scarcely becomes you, Amelia," the
Major answered haughtily; "nor I believe am I guilty of habitual
harshness to women.  It is not a pleasure to me to do the duty which I
am come to do."

"Pray proceed with it quickly, if you please, Major Dobbin," said
Amelia, who was more and more in a pet.  The expression of Dobbin's
face, as she spoke in this imperious manner, was not pleasant.

"I came to say--and as you stay, Mrs. Crawley, I must say it in your
presence--that I think you--you ought not to form a member of the
family of my friends.  A lady who is separated from her husband, who
travels not under her own name, who frequents public gaming-tables--"

"It was to the ball I went," cried out Becky.

"--is not a fit companion for Mrs. Osborne and her son," Dobbin went
on:  "and I may add that there are people here who know you, and who
profess to know that regarding your conduct about which I don't even
wish to speak before--before Mrs. Osborne."

"Yours is a very modest and convenient sort of calumny, Major Dobbin,"
Rebecca said.  "You leave me under the weight of an accusation which,
after all, is unsaid. What is it? Is it unfaithfulness to my husband? I
scorn it and defy anybody to prove it--I defy you, I say.  My honour is
as untouched as that of the bitterest enemy who ever maligned me.  Is
it of being poor, forsaken, wretched, that you accuse me? Yes, I am
guilty of those faults, and punished for them every day.  Let me go,
Emmy.  It is only to suppose that I have not met you, and I am no worse
to-day than I was yesterday.  It is only to suppose that the night is
over and the poor wanderer is on her way.  Don't you remember the song
we used to sing in old, dear old days? I have been wandering ever since
then--a poor castaway, scorned for being miserable, and insulted
because I am alone.  Let me go:  my stay here interferes with the plans
of this gentleman."

"Indeed it does, madam," said the Major.  "If I have any authority in
this house--"

"Authority, none!" broke out Amelia "Rebecca, you stay with me.  I
won't desert you because you have been persecuted, or insult you
because--because Major Dobbin chooses to do so.  Come away, dear." And
the two women made towards the door.

William opened it.  As they were going out, however, he took Amelia's
hand and said--"Will you stay a moment and speak to me?"

"He wishes to speak to you away from me," said Becky, looking like a
martyr.  Amelia gripped her hand in reply.

"Upon my honour it is not about you that I am going to speak," Dobbin
said.  "Come back, Amelia," and she came.  Dobbin bowed to Mrs.
Crawley, as he shut the door upon her.  Amelia looked at him, leaning
against the glass:  her face and her lips were quite white.

"I was confused when I spoke just now," the Major said after a pause,
"and I misused the word authority."

"You did," said Amelia with her teeth chattering.

"At least I have claims to be heard," Dobbin continued.

"It is generous to remind me of our obligations to you," the woman
answered.

"The claims I mean are those left me by George's father," William said.

"Yes, and you insulted his memory.  You did yesterday. You know you
did.  And I will never forgive you.  Never!" said Amelia.  She shot out
each little sentence in a tremor of anger and emotion.

"You don't mean that, Amelia?" William said sadly. "You don't mean that
these words, uttered in a hurried moment, are to weigh against a whole
life's devotion? I think that George's memory has not been injured by
the way in which I have dealt with it, and if we are come to bandying
reproaches, I at least merit none from his widow and the mother of his
son.  Reflect, afterwards when--when you are at leisure, and your
conscience will withdraw this accusation.  It does even now." Amelia
held down her head.

"It is not that speech of yesterday," he continued, "which moves you.
That is but the pretext, Amelia, or I have loved you and watched you
for fifteen years in vain. Have I not learned in that time to read all
your feelings and look into your thoughts? I know what your heart is
capable of:  it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a
fancy, but it can't feel such an attachment as mine deserves to mate
with, and such as I would have won from a woman more generous than you.
No, you are not worthy of the love which I have devoted to you. I knew
all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the
winning; that I was a fool, with fond fancies, too, bartering away my
all of truth and ardour against your little feeble remnant of love.  I
will bargain no more:  I withdraw.  I find no fault with you.  You are
very good-natured, and have done your best, but you couldn't--you
couldn't reach up to the height of the attachment which I bore you, and
which a loftier soul than yours might have been proud to share.
Good-bye, Amelia! I have watched your struggle.  Let it end.  We are
both weary of it."

Amelia stood scared and silent as William thus suddenly broke the chain
by which she held him and declared his independence and superiority.
He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman
had been accustomed to trample upon him.  She didn't wish to marry him,
but she wished to keep him.  She wished to give him nothing, but that
he should give her all.  It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in
love.

William's sally had quite broken and cast her down. HER assault was
long since over and beaten back.

"Am I to understand then, that you are going--away, William?" she said.

He gave a sad laugh.  "I went once before," he said, "and came back
after twelve years.  We were young then, Amelia.  Good-bye.  I have
spent enough of my life at this play."

Whilst they had been talking, the door into Mrs. Osborne's room had
opened ever so little; indeed, Becky had kept a hold of the handle and
had turned it on the instant when Dobbin quitted it, and she heard
every word of the conversation that had passed between these two. "What
a noble heart that man has," she thought, "and how shamefully that
woman plays with it!" She admired Dobbin; she bore him no rancour for
the part he had taken against her.  It was an open move in the game,
and played fairly.  "Ah!" she thought, "if I could have had such a
husband as that--a man with a heart and brains too!  I would not have
minded his large feet"; and running into her room, she absolutely
bethought herself of something, and wrote him a note, beseeching him to
stop for a few days--not to think of going--and that she could serve
him with A.

The parting was over.  Once more poor William walked to the door and
was gone; and the little widow, the author of all this work, had her
will, and had won her victory, and was left to enjoy it as she best
might.  Let the ladies envy her triumph.

At the romantic hour of dinner, Mr. Georgy made his appearance and
again remarked the absence of "Old Dob." The meal was eaten in silence
by the party.  Jos's appetite not being diminished, but Emmy taking
nothing at all.

After the meal, Georgy was lolling in the cushions of the old window, a
large window, with three sides of glass abutting from the gable, and
commanding on one side the market-place, where the Elephant is, his
mother being busy hard by, when he remarked symptoms of movement at the
Major's house on the other side of the street.

"Hullo!" said he, "there's Dob's trap--they are bringing it out of the
court-yard." The "trap" in question was a carriage which the Major had
bought for six pounds sterling, and about which they used to rally him
a good deal.

Emmy gave a little start, but said nothing.

"Hullo!" Georgy continued, "there's Francis coming out with the
portmanteaus, and Kunz, the one-eyed postilion, coming down the market
with three schimmels. Look at his boots and yellow jacket--ain't he a
rum one? Why--they're putting the horses to Dob's carriage. Is he going
anywhere?"

"Yes," said Emmy, "he is going on a journey."

"Going on a journey; and when is he coming back?"

"He is--not coming back," answered Emmy.

"Not coming back!" cried out Georgy, jumping up. "Stay here, sir,"
roared out Jos.  "Stay, Georgy," said his mother with a very sad face.
The boy stopped, kicked about the room, jumped up and down from the
window-seat with his knees, and showed every symptom of uneasiness and
curiosity.

The horses were put to.  The baggage was strapped on.  Francis came out
with his master's sword, cane, and umbrella tied up together, and laid
them in the well, and his desk and old tin cocked-hat case, which he
placed under the seat.  Francis brought out the stained old blue cloak
lined with red camlet, which had wrapped the owner up any time these
fifteen years, and had manchen Sturm erlebt, as a favourite song of
those days said.  It had been new for the campaign of Waterloo and had
covered George and William after the night of Quatre Bras.

Old Burcke, the landlord of the lodgings, came out, then Francis, with
more packages--final packages--then Major William--Burcke wanted to
kiss him.  The Major was adored by all people with whom he had to do.
It was with difficulty he could escape from this demonstration of
attachment.

"By Jove, I will go!" screamed out George.  "Give him this," said
Becky, quite interested, and put a paper into the boy's hand.  He had
rushed down the stairs and flung across the street in a minute--the
yellow postilion was cracking his whip gently.

William had got into the carriage, released from the embraces of his
landlord.  George bounded in afterwards, and flung his arms round the
Major's neck (as they saw from the window), and began asking him
multiplied questions.  Then he felt in his waistcoat pocket and gave
him a note.  William seized at it rather eagerly, he opened it
trembling, but instantly his countenance changed, and he tore the paper
in two and dropped it out of the carriage.  He kissed Georgy on the
head, and the boy got out, doubling his fists into his eyes, and with
the aid of Francis.  He lingered with his hand on the panel.  Fort,
Schwager!  The yellow postilion cracked his whip prodigiously, up
sprang Francis to the box, away went the schimmels, and Dobbin with his
head on his breast.  He never looked up as they passed under Amelia's
window, and Georgy, left alone in the street, burst out crying in the
face of all the crowd.

Emmy's maid heard him howling again during the night and brought him
some preserved apricots to console him.  She mingled her lamentations
with his.  All the poor, all the humble, all honest folks, all good men
who knew him, loved that kind-hearted and simple gentleman.

As for Emmy, had she not done her duty? She had her picture of George
for a consolation.

Which Contains Births, Marriages, and Deaths

Whatever Becky's private plan might be by which Dobbin's true love was
to be crowned with success, the little woman thought that the secret
might keep, and indeed, being by no means so much interested about
anybody's welfare as about her own, she had a great number of things
pertaining to herself to consider, and which concerned her a great deal
more than Major Dobbin's happiness in this life.

She found herself suddenly and unexpectedly in snug comfortable
quarters, surrounded by friends, kindness, and good-natured simple
people such as she had not met with for many a long day; and, wanderer
as she was by force and inclination, there were moments when rest was
pleasant to her.  As the most hardened Arab that ever careered across
the desert over the hump of a dromedary likes to repose sometimes under
the date-trees by the water, or to come into the cities, walk into the
bazaars, refresh himself in the baths, and say his prayers in the
mosques, before he goes out again marauding, so Jos's tents and pilau
were pleasant to this little Ishmaelite. She picketed her steed, hung
up her weapons, and warmed herself comfortably by his fire.  The halt
in that roving, restless life was inexpressibly soothing and pleasant
to her.

So, pleased herself, she tried with all her might to please everybody;
and we know that she was eminent and successful as a practitioner in
the art of giving pleasure.  As for Jos, even in that little interview
in the garret at the Elephant Inn, she had found means to win back a
great deal of his good-will.  In the course of a week, the civilian was
her sworn slave and frantic admirer.  He didn't go to sleep after
dinner, as his custom was in the much less lively society of Amelia.
He drove out with Becky in his open carriage.  He asked little parties
and invented festivities to do her honour.

Tapeworm, the Charge d'Affaires, who had abused her so cruelly, came to
dine with Jos, and then came every day to pay his respects to Becky.
Poor Emmy, who was never very talkative, and more glum and silent than
ever after Dobbin's departure, was quite forgotten when this superior
genius made her appearance.  The French Minister was as much charmed
with her as his English rival. The German ladies, never particularly
squeamish as regards morals, especially in English people, were
delighted with the cleverness and wit of Mrs. Osborne's charming
friend, and though she did not ask to go to Court, yet the most august
and Transparent Personages there heard of her fascinations and were
quite curious to know her.  When it became known that she was noble, of
an ancient English family, that her husband was a Colonel of the Guard,
Excellenz and Governor of an island, only separated from his lady by
one of those trifling differences which are of little account in a
country where Werther is still read and the Wahlverwandtschaften of
Goethe is considered an edifying moral book, nobody thought of refusing
to receive her in the very highest society of the little Duchy; and the
ladies were even more ready to call her du and to swear eternal
friendship for her than they had been to bestow the same inestimable
benefits upon Amelia.  Love and Liberty are interpreted by those simple
Germans in a way which honest folks in Yorkshire and Somersetshire
little understand, and a lady might, in some philosophic and civilized
towns, be divorced ever so many times from her respective husbands and
keep her character in society.  Jos's house never was so pleasant since
he had a house of his own as Rebecca caused it to be. She sang, she
played, she laughed, she talked in two or three languages, she brought
everybody to the house, and she made Jos believe that it was his own
great social talents and wit which gathered the society of the place
round about him.

As for Emmy, who found herself not in the least mistress of her own
house, except when the bills were to be paid, Becky soon discovered the
way to soothe and please her.  She talked to her perpetually about
Major Dobbin sent about his business, and made no scruple of declaring
her admiration for that excellent, high-minded gentleman, and of
telling Emmy that she had behaved most cruelly regarding him. Emmy
defended her conduct and showed that it was dictated only by the purest
religious principles; that a woman once, &c., and to such an angel as
him whom she had had the good fortune to marry, was married forever;
but she had no objection to hear the Major praised as much as ever
Becky chose to praise him, and indeed, brought the conversation round
to the Dobbin subject a score of times every day.

Means were easily found to win the favour of Georgy and the servants.
Amelia's maid, it has been said, was heart and soul in favour of the
generous Major.  Having at first disliked Becky for being the means of
dismissing him from the presence of her mistress, she was reconciled to
Mrs. Crawley subsequently, because the latter became William's most
ardent admirer and champion.  And in those nightly conclaves in which
the two ladies indulged after their parties, and while Miss Payne was
"brushing their 'airs," as she called the yellow locks of the one and
the soft brown tresses of the other, this girl always put in her word
for that dear good gentleman Major Dobbin.  Her advocacy did not make
Amelia angry any more than Rebecca's admiration of him.  She made
George write to him constantly and persisted in sending Mamma's kind
love in a postscript.  And as she looked at her husband's portrait of
nights, it no longer reproached her--perhaps she reproached it, now
William was gone.

Emmy was not very happy after her heroic sacrifice. She was very
distraite, nervous, silent, and ill to please. The family had never
known her so peevish.  She grew pale and ill.  She used to try to sing
certain songs ("Einsam bin ich nicht alleine," was one of them, that
tender love-song of Weber's which in old-fashioned days, young ladies,
and when you were scarcely born, showed that those who lived before you
knew too how to love and to sing) certain songs, I say, to which the
Major was partial; and as she warbled them in the twilight in the
drawing-room, she would break off in the midst of the song, and walk
into her neighbouring apartment, and there, no doubt, take refuge in
the miniature of her husband.

Some books still subsisted, after Dobbin's departure, with his name
written in them; a German dictionary, for instance, with "William
Dobbin, --th Reg.," in the fly-leaf; a guide-book with his initials;
and one or two other volumes which belonged to the Major.  Emmy cleared
these away and put them on the drawers, where she placed her work-box,
her desk, her Bible, and prayer-book, under the pictures of the two
Georges.  And the Major, on going away, having left his gloves behind
him, it is a fact that Georgy, rummaging his mother's desk some time
afterwards, found the gloves neatly folded up and put away in what they
call the secret-drawers of the desk.

Not caring for society, and moping there a great deal, Emmy's chief
pleasure in the summer evenings was to take long walks with Georgy
(during which Rebecca was left to the society of Mr. Joseph), and then
the mother and son used to talk about the Major in a way which even
made the boy smile.  She told him that she thought Major William was
the best man in all the world--the gentlest and the kindest, the
bravest and the humblest.  Over and over again she told him how they
owed everything which they possessed in the world to that kind friend's
benevolent care of them; how he had befriended them all through their
poverty and misfortunes; watched over them when nobody cared for them;
how all his comrades admired him though he never spoke of his own
gallant actions; how Georgy's father trusted him beyond all other men,
and had been constantly befriended by the good William.  "Why, when
your papa was a little boy," she said, "he often told me that it was
William who defended him against a tyrant at the school where they
were; and their friendship never ceased from that day until the last,
when your dear father fell."

"Did Dobbin kill the man who killed Papa?" Georgy said.  "I'm sure he
did, or he would if he could have caught him, wouldn't he, Mother? When
I'm in the Army, won't I hate the French?--that's all."

In such colloquies the mother and the child passed a great deal of
their time together.  The artless woman had made a confidant of the
boy.  He was as much William's friend as everybody else who knew him
well.

By the way, Mrs. Becky, not to be behind hand in sentiment, had got a
miniature too hanging up in her room, to the surprise and amusement of
most people, and the delight of the original, who was no other than our
friend Jos.  On her first coming to favour the Sedleys with a visit,
the little woman, who had arrived with a remarkably small shabby kit,
was perhaps ashamed of the meanness of her trunks and bandboxes, and
often spoke with great respect about her baggage left behind at
Leipzig, which she must have from that city.  When a traveller talks to
you perpetually about the splendour of his luggage, which he does not
happen to have with him, my son, beware of that traveller!  He is, ten
to one, an impostor.

Neither Jos nor Emmy knew this important maxim.  It seemed to them of
no consequence whether Becky had a quantity of very fine clothes in
invisible trunks; but as her present supply was exceedingly shabby,
Emmy supplied her out of her own stores, or took her to the best
milliner in the town and there fitted her out.  It was no more torn
collars now, I promise you, and faded silks trailing off at the
shoulder.  Becky changed her habits with her situation in life--the
rouge-pot was suspended--another excitement to which she had accustomed
herself was also put aside, or at least only indulged in in privacy, as
when she was prevailed on by Jos of a summer evening, Emmy and the boy
being absent on their walks, to take a little spirit-and-water.  But if
she did not indulge--the courier did: that rascal Kirsch could not be
kept from the bottle, nor could he tell how much he took when he
applied to it.  He was sometimes surprised himself at the way in which
Mr. Sedley's Cognac diminished.  Well, well, this is a painful subject.
Becky did not very likely indulge so much as she used before she
entered a decorous family.

At last the much-bragged-about boxes arrived from Leipzig; three of
them not by any means large or splendid; nor did Becky appear to take
out any sort of dresses or ornaments from the boxes when they did
arrive.  But out of one, which contained a mass of her papers (it was
that very box which Rawdon Crawley had ransacked in his furious hunt
for Becky's concealed money), she took a picture with great glee, which
she pinned up in her room, and to which she introduced Jos.  It was the
portrait of a gentleman in pencil, his face having the advantage of
being painted up in pink.  He was riding on an elephant away from some
cocoa-nut trees and a pagoda: it was an Eastern scene.

"God bless my soul, it is my portrait," Jos cried out. It was he
indeed, blooming in youth and beauty, in a nankeen jacket of the cut of
1804.  It was the old picture that used to hang up in Russell Square.

"I bought it," said Becky in a voice trembling with emotion; "I went to
see if I could be of any use to my kind friends.  I have never parted
with that picture--I never will."

"Won't you?" Jos cried with a look of unutterable rapture and
satisfaction.  "Did you really now value it for my sake?"

"You know I did, well enough," said Becky; "but why speak--why
think--why look back!  It is too late now!"

That evening's conversation was delicious for Jos. Emmy only came in to
go to bed very tired and unwell. Jos and his fair guest had a charming
tete-a-tete, and his sister could hear, as she lay awake in her
adjoining chamber, Rebecca singing over to Jos the old songs of 1815.
He did not sleep, for a wonder, that night, any more than Amelia.

It was June, and, by consequence, high season in London; Jos, who read
the incomparable Galignani (the exile's best friend) through every day,
used to favour the ladies with extracts from his paper during their
breakfast.  Every week in this paper there is a full account of
military movements, in which Jos, as a man who had seen service, was
especially interested.  On one occasion he read out--"Arrival of the
--th regiment.  Gravesend, June 20.--The Ramchunder, East Indiaman,
came into the river this morning, having on board 14 officers, and 132
rank and file of this gallant corps.  They have been absent from
England fourteen years, having been embarked the year after Waterloo,
in which glorious conflict they took an active part, and having
subsequently distinguished themselves in the Burmese war.  The veteran
colonel, Sir Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., with his lady and sister, landed
here yesterday, with Captains Posky, Stubble, Macraw, Malony;
Lieutenants Smith, Jones, Thompson, F. Thomson; Ensigns Hicks and
Grady; the band on the pier playing the national anthem, and the crowd
loudly cheering the gallant veterans as they went into Wayte's hotel,
where a sumptuous banquet was provided for the defenders of Old
England.  During the repast, which we need not say was served up in
Wayte's best style, the cheering continued so enthusiastically that
Lady O'Dowd and the Colonel came forward to the balcony and drank the
healths of their fellow-countrymen in a bumper of Wayte's best claret."

On a second occasion Jos read a brief announcement--Major Dobbin had
joined the --th regiment at Chatham; and subsequently he promulgated
accounts of the presentations at the Drawing-room of Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd, K.C.B., Lady O'Dowd (by Mrs. Malloy Malony of
Ballymalony), and Miss Glorvina O'Dowd (by Lady O'Dowd).  Almost
directly after this, Dobbin's name appeared among the Lieutenant-Colonels:
for old Marshal Tiptoff had died during the passage of the
--th from Madras, and the Sovereign was pleased to advance Colonel Sir
Michael O'Dowd to the rank of Major-General on his return to England,
with an intimation that he should be Colonel of the distinguished
regiment which he had so long commanded.

Amelia had been made aware of some of these movements.  The
correspondence between George and his guardian had not ceased by any
means:  William had even written once or twice to her since his
departure, but in a manner so unconstrainedly cold that the poor woman
felt now in her turn that she had lost her power over him and that, as
he had said, he was free.  He had left her, and she was wretched.  The
memory of his almost countless services, and lofty and affectionate
regard, now presented itself to her and rebuked her day and night.  She
brooded over those recollections according to her wont, saw the purity
and beauty of the affection with which she had trifled, and reproached
herself for having flung away such a treasure.

It was gone indeed.  William had spent it all out.  He loved her no
more, he thought, as he had loved her. He never could again.  That sort
of regard, which he had proffered to her for so many faithful years,
can't be flung down and shattered and mended so as to show no scars.
The little heedless tyrant had so destroyed it.  No, William thought
again and again, "It was myself I deluded and persisted in cajoling;
had she been worthy of the love I gave her, she would have returned it
long ago.  It was a fond mistake.  Isn't the whole course of life made
up of such? And suppose I had won her, should I not have been
disenchanted the day after my victory? Why pine, or be ashamed of my
defeat?" The more he thought of this long passage of his life, the more
clearly he saw his deception.  "I'll go into harness again," he said,
"and do my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Heaven to
place me.  I will see that the buttons of the recruits are properly
bright and that the sergeants make no mistakes in their accounts.  I
will dine at mess and listen to the Scotch surgeon telling his stories.
When I am old and broken, I will go on half-pay, and my old sisters
shall scold me.  I have geliebt und gelebet, as the girl in
'Wallenstein' says.  I am done.  Pay the bills and get me a cigar:
find out what there is at the play to-night, Francis; to-morrow we
cross by the Batavier." He made the above speech, whereof Francis only
heard the last two lines, pacing up and down the Boompjes at Rotterdam.
The Batavier was lying in the basin.  He could see the place on the
quarter-deck where he and Emmy had sat on the happy voyage out.  What
had that little Mrs. Crawley to say to him? Psha; to-morrow we will put
to sea, and return to England, home, and duty!

After June all the little Court Society of Pumpernickel used to
separate, according to the German plan, and make for a hundred
watering-places, where they drank at the wells, rode upon donkeys,
gambled at the redoutes if they had money and a mind, rushed with
hundreds of their kind to gourmandise at the tables d'hote, and idled
away the summer.  The English diplomatists went off to Teoplitz and
Kissingen, their French rivals shut up their chancellerie and whisked
away to their darling Boulevard de Gand. The Transparent reigning
family took too to the waters, or retired to their hunting lodges.
Everybody went away having any pretensions to politeness, and of
course, with them, Doctor von Glauber, the Court Doctor, and his
Baroness.  The seasons for the baths were the most productive periods
of the Doctor's practice--he united business with pleasure, and his
chief place of resort was Ostend, which is much frequented by Germans,
and where the Doctor treated himself and his spouse to what he called a
"dib" in the sea.

His interesting patient, Jos, was a regular milch-cow to the Doctor,
and he easily persuaded the civilian, both for his own health's sake
and that of his charming sister, which was really very much shattered,
to pass the summer at that hideous seaport town.  Emmy did not care
where she went much.  Georgy jumped at the idea of a move.  As for
Becky, she came as a matter of course in the fourth place inside of the
fine barouche Mr. Jos had bought, the two domestics being on the box in
front. She might have some misgivings about the friends whom she should
meet at Ostend, and who might be likely to tell ugly stories--but bah!
she was strong enough to hold her own.  She had cast such an anchor in
Jos now as would require a strong storm to shake.  That incident of the
picture had finished him.  Becky took down her elephant and put it into
the little box which she had had from Amelia ever so many years ago.
Emmy also came off with her Lares--her two pictures--and the party,
finally, were, lodged in an exceedingly dear and uncomfortable house at
Ostend.

There Amelia began to take baths and get what good she could from them,
and though scores of people of Becky's acquaintance passed her and cut
her, yet Mrs. Osborne, who walked about with her, and who knew nobody,
was not aware of the treatment experienced by the friend whom she had
chosen so judiciously as a companion; indeed, Becky never thought fit
to tell her what was passing under her innocent eyes.

Some of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acquaintances, however, acknowledged her
readily enough,--perhaps more readily than she would have desired.
Among those were Major Loder (unattached), and Captain Rook (late of
the Rifles), who might be seen any day on the Dike, smoking and staring
at the women, and who speedily got an introduction to the hospitable
board and select circle of Mr. Joseph Sedley.  In fact they would take
no denial; they burst into the house whether Becky was at home or not,
walked into Mrs. Osborne's drawing-room, which they perfumed with their
coats and mustachios, called Jos "Old buck," and invaded his
dinner-table, and laughed and drank for long hours there.

"What can they mean?" asked Georgy, who did not like these gentlemen.
"I heard the Major say to Mrs. Crawley yesterday, 'No, no, Becky, you
shan't keep the old buck to yourself.  We must have the bones in, or,
dammy, I'll split.' What could the Major mean, Mamma?"

"Major!  don't call him Major!" Emmy said.  "I'm sure I can't tell what
he meant." His presence and that of his friend inspired the little lady
with intolerable terror and aversion.  They paid her tipsy compliments;
they leered at her over the dinner-table.  And the Captain made her
advances that filled her with sickening dismay, nor would she ever see
him unless she had George by her side.

Rebecca, to do her justice, never would let either of these men remain
alone with Amelia; the Major was disengaged too, and swore he would be
the winner of her. A couple of ruffians were fighting for this innocent
creature, gambling for her at her own table, and though she was not
aware of the rascals' designs upon her, yet she felt a horror and
uneasiness in their presence and longed to fly.

She besought, she entreated Jos to go.  Not he.  He was slow of
movement, tied to his Doctor, and perhaps to some other leading-strings.
At least Becky was not anxious to go to England.

At last she took a great resolution--made the great plunge.  She wrote
off a letter to a friend whom she had on the other side of the water, a
letter about which she did not speak a word to anybody, which she
carried herself to the post under her shawl; nor was any remark made
about it, only that she looked very much flushed and agitated when
Georgy met her, and she kissed him, and hung over him a great deal that
night.  She did not come out of her room after her return from her
walk. Becky thought it was Major Loder and the Captain who frightened
her.

"She mustn't stop here," Becky reasoned with herself. "She must go
away, the silly little fool.  She is still whimpering after that gaby
of a husband--dead (and served right!) these fifteen years. She shan't
marry either of these men.  It's too bad of Loder.  No; she shall marry
the bamboo cane, I'll settle it this very night."

So Becky took a cup of tea to Amelia in her private apartment and found
that lady in the company of her miniatures, and in a most melancholy
and nervous condition.  She laid down the cup of tea.

"Thank you," said Amelia.

"Listen to me, Amelia," said Becky, marching up and down the room
before the other and surveying her with a sort of contemptuous
kindness.  "I want to talk to you. You must go away from here and from
the impertinences of these men.  I won't have you harassed by them:
and they will insult you if you stay.  I tell you they are rascals: men
fit to send to the hulks.  Never mind how I know them. I know
everybody.  Jos can't protect you; he is too weak and wants a protector
himself.  You are no more fit to live in the world than a baby in arms.
You must marry, or you and your precious boy will go to ruin.  You must
have a husband, you fool; and one of the best gentlemen I ever saw has
offered you a hundred times, and you have rejected him, you silly,
heartless, ungrateful little creature!"

"I tried--I tried my best, indeed I did, Rebecca," said Amelia
deprecatingly, "but I couldn't forget--"; and she finished the sentence
by looking up at the portrait.

"Couldn't forget HIM!" cried out Becky, "that selfish humbug, that
low-bred cockney dandy, that padded booby, who had neither wit, nor
manners, nor heart, and was no more to be compared to your friend with
the bamboo cane than you are to Queen Elizabeth.  Why, the man was
weary of you, and would have jilted you, but that Dobbin forced him to
keep his word.  He owned it to me.  He never cared for you. He used to
sneer about you to me, time after time, and made love to me the week
after he married you."

"It's false!  It's false!  Rebecca," cried out Amelia, starting up.

"Look there, you fool," Becky said, still with provoking good humour,
and taking a little paper out of her belt, she opened it and flung it
into Emmy's lap.  "You know his handwriting.  He wrote that to
me--wanted me to run away with him--gave it me under your nose, the day
before he was shot--and served him right!" Becky repeated.

Emmy did not hear her; she was looking at the letter. It was that which
George had put into the bouquet and given to Becky on the night of the
Duchess of Richmond's ball.  It was as she said:  the foolish young man
had asked her to fly.

Emmy's head sank down, and for almost the last time in which she shall
be called upon to weep in this history, she commenced that work.  Her
head fell to her bosom, and her hands went up to her eyes; and there
for a while, she gave way to her emotions, as Becky stood on and
regarded her.  Who shall analyse those tears and say whether they were
sweet or bitter? Was she most grieved because the idol of her life was
tumbled down and shivered at her feet, or indignant that her love had
been so despised, or glad because the barrier was removed which modesty
had placed between her and a new, a real affection? "There is nothing
to forbid me now," she thought. "I may love him with all my heart now.
Oh, I will, I will, if he will but let me and forgive me." I believe it
was this feeling rushed over all the others which agitated that gentle
little bosom.

Indeed, she did not cry so much as Becky expected--the other soothed
and kissed her--a rare mark of sympathy with Mrs. Becky.  She treated
Emmy like a child and patted her head.  "And now let us get pen and ink
and write to him to come this minute," she said.

"I--I wrote to him this morning," Emmy said, blushing exceedingly.
Becky screamed with laughter--"Un biglietto," she sang out with Rosina,
"eccolo qua!"--the whole house echoed with her shrill singing.

Two mornings after this little scene, although the day was rainy and
gusty, and Amelia had had an exceedingly wakeful night, listening to
the wind roaring, and pitying all travellers by land and by water, yet
she got up early and insisted upon taking a walk on the Dike with
Georgy; and there she paced as the rain beat into her face, and she
looked out westward across the dark sea line and over the swollen
billows which came tumbling and frothing to the shore. Neither spoke
much, except now and then, when the boy said a few words to his timid
companion, indicative of sympathy and protection.

"I hope he won't cross in such weather," Emmy said.

"I bet ten to one he does," the boy answered.  "Look, Mother, there's
the smoke of the steamer." It was that signal, sure enough.

But though the steamer was under way, he might not be on board; he
might not have got the letter; he might not choose to come.  A hundred
fears poured one over the other into the little heart, as fast as the
waves on to the Dike.

The boat followed the smoke into sight.  Georgy had a dandy telescope
and got the vessel under view in the most skilful manner. And he made
appropriate nautical comments upon the manner of the approach of the
steamer as she came nearer and nearer, dipping and rising in the water.
The signal of an English steamer in sight went fluttering up to the
mast on the pier.  I daresay Mrs. Amelia's heart was in a similar
flutter.

Emmy tried to look through the telescope over George's shoulder, but
she could make nothing of it. She only saw a black eclipse bobbing up
and down before her eyes.

George took the glass again and raked the vessel. "How she does pitch!"
he said.  "There goes a wave slap over her bows.  There's only two
people on deck besides the steersman.  There's a man lying down, and
a--chap in a--cloak with a--Hooray!--it's Dob, by Jingo!" He clapped to
the telescope and flung his arms round his mother.  As for that lady,
let us say what she did in the words of a favourite poet--"Dakruoen
gelasasa." She was sure it was William.  It could be no other.  What
she had said about hoping that he would not come was all hypocrisy.  Of
course he would come; what could he do else but come? She knew he would
come.

The ship came swiftly nearer and nearer.  As they went in to meet her
at the landing-place at the quay, Emmy's knees trembled so that she
scarcely could run.  She would have liked to kneel down and say her
prayers of thanks there.  Oh, she thought, she would be all her life
saying them!

It was such a bad day that as the vessel came alongside of the quay
there were no idlers abroad, scarcely even a commissioner on the look
out for the few passengers in the steamer.  That young scapegrace
George had fled too, and as the gentleman in the old cloak lined with
red stuff stepped on to the shore, there was scarcely any one present
to see what took place, which was briefly this:

A lady in a dripping white bonnet and shawl, with her two little hands
out before her, went up to him, and in the next minute she had
altogether disappeared under the folds of the old cloak, and was
kissing one of his hands with all her might; whilst the other, I
suppose, was engaged in holding her to his heart (which her head just
about reached) and in preventing her from tumbling down.  She was
murmuring something about--forgive--dear William--dear, dear, dearest
friend--kiss, kiss, kiss, and so forth--and in fact went on under the
cloak in an absurd manner.

When Emmy emerged from it, she still kept tight hold of one of
William's hands, and looked up in his face.  It was full of sadness and
tender love and pity.  She understood its reproach and hung down her
head.

"It was time you sent for me, dear Amelia," he said.

"You will never go again, William?"

"No, never," he answered, and pressed the dear little soul once more to
his heart.

As they issued out of the custom-house precincts, Georgy broke out on
them, with his telescope up to his eye, and a loud laugh of welcome; he
danced round the couple and performed many facetious antics as he led
them up to the house.  Jos wasn't up yet; Becky not visible (though she
looked at them through the blinds). Georgy ran off to see about
breakfast.  Emmy, whose shawl and bonnet were off in the passage in the
hands of Mrs. Payne, now went to undo the clasp of William's cloak,
and--we will, if you please, go with George, and look after breakfast
for the Colonel.  The vessel is in port. He has got the prize he has
been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last.  There it
is with its head on his shoulder, billing and cooing close up to his
heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings.  This is what he has
asked for every day and hour for eighteen years.  This is what he pined
after.  Here it is--the summit, the end--the last page of the third
volume. Good-bye, Colonel--God bless you, honest William!--Farewell,
dear Amelia--Grow green again, tender little parasite, round the rugged
old oak to which you cling!

Perhaps it was compunction towards the kind and simple creature, who
had been the first in life to defend her, perhaps it was a dislike to
all such sentimental scenes--but Rebecca, satisfied with her part in
the transaction, never presented herself before Colonel Dobbin and the
lady whom he married.  "Particular business," she said, took her to
Bruges, whither she went, and only Georgy and his uncle were present at
the marriage ceremony. When it was over, and Georgy had rejoined his
parents, Mrs. Becky returned (just for a few days) to comfort the
solitary bachelor, Joseph Sedley.  He preferred a continental life, he
said, and declined to join in housekeeping with his sister and her
husband.

Emmy was very glad in her heart to think that she had written to her
husband before she read or knew of that letter of George's.  "I knew it
all along," William said; "but could I use that weapon against the poor
fellow's memory? It was that which made me suffer so when you--"

"Never speak of that day again," Emmy cried out, so contrite and humble
that William turned off the conversation by his account of Glorvina and
dear old Peggy O'Dowd, with whom he was sitting when the letter of
recall reached him.  "If you hadn't sent for me," he added with a
laugh, "who knows what Glorvina's name might be now?"

At present it is Glorvina Posky (now Mrs. Major Posky); she took him on
the death of his first wife, having resolved never to marry out of the
regiment.  Lady O'Dowd is also so attached to it that, she says, if
anything were to happen to Mick, bedad she'd come back and marry some
of 'em.  But the Major-General is quite well and lives in great
splendour at O'Dowdstown, with a pack of beagles, and (with the
exception of perhaps their neighbour, Hoggarty of Castle Hoggarty) he
is the first man of his county.  Her Ladyship still dances jigs, and
insisted on standing up with the Master of the Horse at the Lord
Lieutenant's last ball.  Both she and Glorvina declared that Dobbin had
used the latter SHEAMFULLY, but Posky falling in, Glorvina was
consoled, and a beautiful turban from Paris appeased the wrath of Lady
O'Dowd.

When Colonel Dobbin quitted the service, which he did immediately after
his marriage, he rented a pretty little country place in Hampshire, not
far from Queen's Crawley, where, after the passing of the Reform Bill,
Sir Pitt and his family constantly resided now. All idea of a Peerage
was out of the question, the Baronet's two seats in Parliament being
lost.  He was both out of pocket and out of spirits by that
catastrophe, failed in his health, and prophesied the speedy ruin of
the Empire.

Lady Jane and Mrs. Dobbin became great friends--there was a perpetual
crossing of pony-chaises between the Hall and the Evergreens, the
Colonel's place (rented of his friend Major Ponto, who was abroad with
his family).  Her Ladyship was godmother to Mrs. Dobbin's child, which
bore her name, and was christened by the Rev. James Crawley, who
succeeded his father in the living: and a pretty close friendship
subsisted between the two lads, George and Rawdon, who hunted and shot
together in the vacations, were both entered of the same college at
Cambridge, and quarrelled with each other about Lady Jane's daughter,
with whom they were both, of course, in love. A match between George
and that young lady was long a favourite scheme of both the matrons,
though I have heard that Miss Crawley herself inclined towards her
cousin.

Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's name was never mentioned by either family. There
were reasons why all should be silent regarding her.  For wherever Mr.
Joseph Sedley went, she travelled likewise, and that infatuated man
seemed to be entirely her slave.  The Colonel's lawyers informed him
that his brother-in-law had effected a heavy insurance upon his life,
whence it was probable that he had been raising money to discharge
debts.  He procured prolonged leave of absence from the East India
House, and indeed, his infirmities were daily increasing.

On hearing the news about the insurance, Amelia, in a good deal of
alarm, entreated her husband to go to Brussels, where Jos then was, and
inquire into the state of his affairs.  The Colonel quitted home with
reluctance (for he was deeply immersed in his History of the Punjaub
which still occupies him, and much alarmed about his little daughter,
whom he idolizes, and who was just recovering from the chicken-pox) and
went to Brussels and found Jos living at one of the enormous hotels in
that city.  Mrs. Crawley, who had her carriage, gave entertainments,
and lived in a very genteel manner, occupied another suite of
apartments in the same hotel.

The Colonel, of course, did not desire to see that lady, or even think
proper to notify his arrival at Brussels, except privately to Jos by a
message through his valet.  Jos begged the Colonel to come and see him
that night, when Mrs. Crawley would be at a soiree, and when they could
meet alone.  He found his brother-in-law in a condition of pitiable
infirmity--and dreadfully afraid of Rebecca, though eager in his
praises of her.  She tended him through a series of unheard-of
illnesses with a fidelity most admirable.  She had been a daughter to
him.  "But--but--oh, for God's sake, do come and live near me,
and--and--see me sometimes," whimpered out the unfortunate man.

The Colonel's brow darkened at this.  "We can't, Jos," he said.
"Considering the circumstances, Amelia can't visit you."

"I swear to you--I swear to you on the Bible," gasped out Joseph,
wanting to kiss the book, "that she is as innocent as a child, as
spotless as your own wife."

"It may be so," said the Colonel gloomily, "but Emmy can't come to you.
Be a man, Jos:  break off this disreputable connection.  Come home to
your family.  We hear your affairs are involved."

"Involved!" cried Jos.  "Who has told such calumnies? All my money is
placed out most advantageously.  Mrs. Crawley--that is--I mean--it is
laid out to the best interest."

"You are not in debt, then? Why did you insure your life?"

"I thought--a little present to her--in case anything happened; and you
know my health is so delicate--common gratitude you know--and I intend
to leave all my money to you--and I can spare it out of my income,
indeed I can," cried out William's weak brother-in-law.

The Colonel besought Jos to fly at once--to go back to India, whither
Mrs. Crawley could not follow him; to do anything to break off a
connection which might have the most fatal consequences to him.

Jos clasped his hands and cried, "He would go back to India.  He would
do anything, only he must have time: they mustn't say anything to Mrs.
Crawley--she'd--she'd kill me if she knew it.  You don't know what a
terrible woman she is," the poor wretch said.

"Then, why not come away with me?" said Dobbin in reply; but Jos had
not the courage.  "He would see Dobbin again in the morning; he must on
no account say that he had been there.  He must go now.  Becky might
come in." And Dobbin quitted him, full of forebodings.

He never saw Jos more.  Three months afterwards Joseph Sedley died at
Aix-la-Chapelle.  It was found that all his property had been muddled
away in speculations, and was represented by valueless shares in
different bubble companies.  All his available assets were the two
thousand pounds for which his life was insured, and which were left
equally between his beloved "sister Amelia, wife of, &c., and his
friend and invaluable attendant during sickness, Rebecca, wife of
Lieutenant-Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B.," who was appointed
administratrix.

The solicitor of the insurance company swore it was the blackest case
that ever had come before him, talked of sending a commission to Aix to
examine into the death, and the Company refused payment of the policy.
But Mrs., or Lady Crawley, as she styled herself, came to town at once
(attended with her solicitors, Messrs.  Burke, Thurtell, and Hayes, of
Thavies Inn) and dared the Company to refuse the payment.  They invited
examination, they declared that she was the object of an infamous
conspiracy, which had been pursuing her all through life, and triumphed
finally.  The money was paid, and her character established, but
Colonel Dobbin sent back his share of the legacy to the insurance
office and rigidly declined to hold any communication with Rebecca.

She never was Lady Crawley, though she continued so to call herself.
His Excellency Colonel Rawdon Crawley died of yellow fever at Coventry
Island, most deeply beloved and deplored, and six weeks before the
demise of his brother, Sir Pitt.  The estate consequently devolved upon
the present Sir Rawdon Crawley, Bart.

He, too, has declined to see his mother, to whom he makes a liberal
allowance, and who, besides, appears to be very wealthy.  The Baronet
lives entirely at Queen's Crawley, with Lady Jane and her daughter,
whilst Rebecca, Lady Crawley, chiefly hangs about Bath and Cheltenham,
where a very strong party of excellent people consider her to be a most
injured woman.  She has her enemies.  Who has not? Her life is her
answer to them. She busies herself in works of piety.  She goes to
church, and never without a footman.  Her name is in all the Charity
Lists.  The destitute orange-girl, the neglected washerwoman, the
distressed muffin-man find in her a fast and generous friend.  She is
always having stalls at Fancy Fairs for the benefit of these hapless
beings.  Emmy, her children, and the Colonel, coming to London some
time back, found themselves suddenly before her at one of these fairs.
She cast down her eyes demurely and smiled as they started away from
her; Emmy scurrying off on the arm of George (now grown a dashing young
gentleman) and the Colonel seizing up his little Janey, of whom he is
fonder than of anything in the world--fonder even than of his History
of the Punjaub.

"Fonder than he is of me," Emmy thinks with a sigh. But he never said a
word to Amelia that was not kind and gentle, or thought of a want of
hers that he did not try to gratify.

Ah!  Vanitas Vanitatum!  which of us is happy in this world? Which of
us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?--come, children, let us
shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Mr. Sedley passes away, telling his daughter before he dies that he is sorry wasn't fair to her. Mr. Osborne is also doing his best to reconcile with those he mistreated. He tells Georgy that Mr. Sedley was a much better man than he. He even sends a letter to the late Mr. Sedley. Dobbin visits him, and it is revealed that Dobbin supported Amelia and Georgy all these years. Mr. Osborne dies from a stroke before he can make amends with Amelia. Mr. Osborne, much to his son-in-law Mr. Bullocks' dismay, has left half of his inheritance to Georgy, and the other half he has split equally between his daughters, Jane and Maria. He has given Amelia an allowance and custody over Georgy and has made Dobbin executor of his will. He has also given Dobbin enough money for a promotion to colonel. Amelia finds out that Dobbin has been taking care of her all these years, but she still cannot love him. Jos, Amelia, Dobbin and Georgy decide to take a pleasure trip to Europe. On many occasions, people assume that Amelia is Mrs. Dobbin. She does in fact start to appreciate Dobbin more while they are on this trip, and it seems that they are both the happiest they have ever been. Amelia discovers opera, enjoys painting and, for the first time, begins to let go of George's memory. They settle in Germany, where they are very happy. One night, the group is out at a festival, and Georgy slips away from his babysitter to join the gambling table. He ends up sitting next to a masked woman dressed in black, who is losing quite a bit. Recognizing Georgy, she asks him to play for her, and he wins the round. Dobbin notices what Georgy is up to, grabs him away from the table, and gives him a harsh scolding. Meanwhile, Jos has joined the table, and he recognizes the woman in black. It is Becky Sharp, who has been masquerading as Madame de Raudon. Becky asks Jos to walk with her. The narrator claims that he does not want to go over the details of Becky's absence, because everything she has been engaged in has been unpleasant. However, contradicting his intentions, he proceeds to provide an account of Becky's activities up until her encounter with her old friends. Rawdon divorces Becky, and he leaves her with a small alimony. She tries to regain Sir Pitt's favor, but Lord Steyne has sent his messenger to inform Pitt about the person Becky really is, and he does not forgive her. She is forced to leave the continent because of her bad reputation and in order to escape creditors. She tries to stay in hotels, but many turn her away, remarking that hotels are meant for respectable people. She meets her grandmother in Paris but is disgusted by her poverty and abrasive disposition. She tries several times to form a social circle, but always she is found out by someone who is connected to the people who know about her reputation. In Rome, she attends a ball and runs into Lord Steyne, who tells her that if she doesn't leave, she will be in danger. She finds out later that he has died in Naples. Becky has been staying in a bohemian hotel, living quite modestly. Jos listens to Becky weave a false tale of her trials and tribulations. She inevitably blames her friends for everything. Jos is moved by her story, but he does not confess to the others that he has run into Becky. Finally, he tells the rest of the group about her being in Pumpernickel, and he exhorts them to go see her. At first, they refuse, but Jos persists, finally mentioning that the terms of the divorce demanded that Becky's son be taken away from her. This is what finally moves Amelia, since she cannot stand the thought of a mother losing her child. She decides to go see Becky with Dobbin. The two women are quite emotional when they see each other. Amelia asks questions about Becky's son, which Becky can't really answer. Becky then launches into a fabrication. She claims that the marriage to her husband was looked upon as a disgrace, and that she suffered because of it. She claims that her sister-in-law treated her terribly, and that Rawdon demanded that she engage inappropriately with Lord Steyne just so he could further himself. She claims that she was eventually forced to ask him for a divorce. Meanwhile, Dobbin speaks with two men in the hotel lobby about Becky, and his fears are confirmed: she is once again up to no good. Since Amelia believed Becky, she tells Dobbin she wants Becky moving in with them. Dobbin is outraged, making the mistake of alluding to the fact that Becky is clearly no friend of Amelia's since she had an inappropriate relationship with her deceased husband. Amelia, furious that he would allude to such a thing and taint her husband's good name, storms out of the room and shuts herself up in her bedroom. Dobbin leaves to find out everything he can about Becky. She arrives at Amelia's place and Amelia sets up the guest room for her. When Dobbin returns, he attempts to tell Amelia everything that he found out, and he desperately warns Jos and Amelia about her. But they still refuse to believe him. Dobbin takes Amelia into a room and gives her a long speech about how terrible it is that she is not able to make a distinction between honest and dishonest people. He tells her how painful it has been to love someone who cannot see him for what he is and see the people who have abused her for the disgraceful characters they clearly are. Dobbin prepares to leave, and Amelia does not stop him. She won't even let Georgy say goodbye, but he sneaks away. Becky, who listened to the speech at the door, feels bad, and she gives Georgy a note for Dobbin. When Becky and her friends move in, Amelia feels threatened and writes to Dobbin to come back. Becky finally repents and gives Amelia the letter that George wrote to her on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. In it, George asks Becky to run away with him. Amelia finally realizes what her dead husband was like, and she realizes that she is in love with Dobbin. He returns and they get married. They have another child, Janey. Becky, meanwhile, tries to manipulate Jos Sedley. He is terrified of her, but somehow, she ends up getting most of his money. He also dies prematurely, and it is suggested that Becky had something to do with it. Rawdon and Sir Pitt also die. Little Rawdon becomes the master of Queen's Crawley. Amelia and Dobbin move in next to Little Rawdon and Lady Jane, and the families become close friends. No one associates with Becky any longer, but her son sends her an allowance.