Chapter: Eothen

It was one of the many causes for personal pride with which old Osborne
chose to recreate himself that Sedley, his ancient rival, enemy, and
benefactor, was in his last days so utterly defeated and humiliated as
to be forced to accept pecuniary obligations at the hands of the man
who had most injured and insulted him.  The successful man of the world
cursed the old pauper and relieved him from time to time.  As he
furnished George with money for his mother, he gave the boy to
understand by hints, delivered in his brutal, coarse way, that George's
maternal grandfather was but a wretched old bankrupt and dependant, and
that John Sedley might thank the man to whom he already owed ever so
much money for the aid which his generosity now chose to administer.
George carried the pompous supplies to his mother and the shattered old
widower whom it was now the main business of her life to tend and
comfort.  The little fellow patronized the feeble and disappointed old
man.

It may have shown a want of "proper pride" in Amelia that she chose to
accept these money benefits at the hands of her father's enemy. But
proper pride and this poor lady had never had much acquaintance
together. A disposition naturally simple and demanding protection; a
long course of poverty and humility, of daily privations, and hard
words, of kind offices and no returns, had been her lot ever since
womanhood almost, or since her luckless marriage with George Osborne.
You who see your betters bearing up under this shame every day, meekly
suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied, poor, and
rather despised for their poverty, do you ever step down from your
prosperity and wash the feet of these poor wearied beggars? The very
thought of them is odious and low.  "There must be classes--there must
be rich and poor," Dives says, smacking his claret (it is well if he
even sends the broken meat out to Lazarus sitting under the window).
Very true; but think how mysterious and often unaccountable it is--that
lottery of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen and
sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for comforters.

So I must own that, without much repining, on the contrary with
something akin to gratitude, Amelia took the crumbs that her father-in-law
let drop now and then, and with them fed her own parent.
Directly she understood it to be her duty, it was this young woman's
nature (ladies, she is but thirty still, and we choose to call her a
young woman even at that age) it was, I say, her nature to sacrifice
herself and to fling all that she had at the feet of the beloved
object.  During what long thankless nights had she worked out her
fingers for little Georgy whilst at home with her; what buffets,
scorns, privations, poverties had she endured for father and mother!
And in the midst of all these solitary resignations and unseen
sacrifices, she did not respect herself any more than the world
respected her, but I believe thought in her heart that she was a
poor-spirited, despicable little creature, whose luck in life was only
too good for her merits.  O you poor women!  O you poor secret martyrs
and victims, whose life is a torture, who are stretched on racks in
your bedrooms, and who lay your heads down on the block daily at the
drawing-room table; every man who watches your pains, or peers into
those dark places where the torture is administered to you, must pity
you--and--and thank God that he has a beard.  I recollect seeing, years
ago, at the prisons for idiots and madmen at Bicetre, near Paris, a
poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his imprisonment and his
personal infirmity, to whom one of our party gave a halfpenny worth of
snuff in a cornet or "screw" of paper.  The kindness was too much for
the poor epileptic creature. He cried in an anguish of delight and
gratitude:  if anybody gave you and me a thousand a year, or saved our
lives, we could not be so affected.  And so, if you properly tyrannize
over a woman, you will find a ha'p'orth of kindness act upon her and
bring tears into her eyes, as though you were an angel benefiting her.

Some such boons as these were the best which Fortune allotted to poor
little Amelia.  Her life, begun not unprosperously, had come down to
this--to a mean prison and a long, ignoble bondage.  Little George
visited her captivity sometimes and consoled it with feeble gleams of
encouragement.  Russell Square was the boundary of her prison:  she
might walk thither occasionally, but was always back to sleep in her
cell at night; to perform cheerless duties; to watch by thankless
sick-beds; to suffer the harassment and tyranny of querulous
disappointed old age.  How many thousands of people are there, women
for the most part, who are doomed to endure this long slavery?--who are
hospital nurses without wages--sisters of Charity, if you like, without
the romance and the sentiment of sacrifice--who strive, fast, watch,
and suffer, unpitied, and fade away ignobly and unknown.

The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind
is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise,
and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked. Oh, be humble,
my brother, in your prosperity!  Be gentle with those who are less
lucky, if not more deserving.  Think, what right have you to be
scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may
be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity
is very likely a satire.

They buried Amelia's mother in the churchyard at Brompton, upon just
such a rainy, dark day as Amelia recollected when first she had been
there to marry George. Her little boy sat by her side in pompous new
sables. She remembered the old pew-woman and clerk.  Her thoughts were
away in other times as the parson read. But that she held George's hand
in her own, perhaps she would have liked to change places with....
Then, as usual, she felt ashamed of her selfish thoughts and prayed
inwardly to be strengthened to do her duty.

So she determined with all her might and strength to try and make her
old father happy.  She slaved, toiled, patched, and mended, sang and
played backgammon, read out the newspaper, cooked dishes for old
Sedley, walked him out sedulously into Kensington Gardens or the
Brompton Lanes, listened to his stories with untiring smiles and
affectionate hypocrisy, or sat musing by his side and communing with
her own thoughts and reminiscences, as the old man, feeble and
querulous, sunned himself on the garden benches and prattled about his
wrongs or his sorrows.  What sad, unsatisfactory thoughts those of the
widow were!  The children running up and down the slopes and broad
paths in the gardens reminded her of George, who was taken from her;
the first George was taken from her; her selfish, guilty love, in both
instances, had been rebuked and bitterly chastised. She strove to think
it was right that she should be so punished. She was such a miserable
wicked sinner.  She was quite alone in the world.

I know that the account of this kind of solitary imprisonment is
insufferably tedious, unless there is some cheerful or humorous
incident to enliven it--a tender gaoler, for instance, or a waggish
commandant of the fortress, or a mouse to come out and play about
Latude's beard and whiskers, or a subterranean passage under the
castle, dug by Trenck with his nails and a toothpick:  the historian
has no such enlivening incident to relate in the narrative of Amelia's
captivity.  Fancy her, if you please, during this period, very sad, but
always ready to smile when spoken to; in a very mean, poor, not to say
vulgar position of life; singing songs, making puddings, playing cards,
mending stockings, for her old father's benefit.  So, never mind,
whether she be a heroine or no; or you and I, however old, scolding,
and bankrupt--may we have in our last days a kind soft shoulder on
which to lean and a gentle hand to soothe our gouty old pillows.

Old Sedley grew very fond of his daughter after his wife's death, and
Amelia had her consolation in doing her duty by the old man.

But we are not going to leave these two people long in such a low and
ungenteel station of life.  Better days, as far as worldly prosperity
went, were in store for both. Perhaps the ingenious reader has guessed
who was the stout gentleman who called upon Georgy at his school in
company with our old friend Major Dobbin. It was another old
acquaintance returned to England, and at a time when his presence was
likely to be of great comfort to his relatives there.

Major Dobbin having easily succeeded in getting leave from his
good-natured commandant to proceed to Madras, and thence probably to
Europe, on urgent private affairs, never ceased travelling night and day
until he reached his journey's end, and had directed his march with such
celerity that he arrived at Madras in a high fever.  His servants who
accompanied him brought him to the house of the friend with whom he had
resolved to stay until his departure for Europe in a state of delirium;
and it was thought for many, many days that he would never travel
farther than the burying-ground of the church of St.  George's, where
the troops should fire a salvo over his grave, and where many a gallant
officer lies far away from his home.

Here, as the poor fellow lay tossing in his fever, the people who
watched him might have heard him raving about Amelia.  The idea that he
should never see her again depressed him in his lucid hours.  He
thought his last day was come, and he made his solemn preparations for
departure, setting his affairs in this world in order and leaving the
little property of which he was possessed to those whom he most desired
to benefit.  The friend in whose house he was located witnessed his
testament.  He desired to be buried with a little brown hair-chain
which he wore round his neck and which, if the truth must be known, he
had got from Amelia's maid at Brussels, when the young widow's hair was
cut off, during the fever which prostrated her after the death of
George Osborne on the plateau at Mount St.  John.

He recovered, rallied, relapsed again, having undergone such a process
of blood-letting and calomel as showed the strength of his original
constitution.  He was almost a skeleton when they put him on board the
Ramchunder East Indiaman, Captain Bragg, from Calcutta, touching at
Madras, and so weak and prostrate that his friend who had tended him
through his illness prophesied that the honest Major would never
survive the voyage, and that he would pass some morning, shrouded in
flag and hammock, over the ship's side, and carrying down to the sea
with him the relic that he wore at his heart.  But whether it was the
sea air, or the hope which sprung up in him afresh, from the day that
the ship spread her canvas and stood out of the roads towards home, our
friend began to amend, and he was quite well (though as gaunt as a
greyhound) before they reached the Cape.  "Kirk will be disappointed of
his majority this time," he said with a smile; "he will expect to find
himself gazetted by the time the regiment reaches home." For it must be
premised that while the Major was lying ill at Madras, having made such
prodigious haste to go thither, the gallant --th, which had passed many
years abroad, which after its return from the West Indies had been
baulked of its stay at home by the Waterloo campaign, and had been
ordered from Flanders to India, had received orders home; and the Major
might have accompanied his comrades, had he chosen to wait for their
arrival at Madras.

Perhaps he was not inclined to put himself in his exhausted state again
under the guardianship of Glorvina. "I think Miss O'Dowd would have
done for me," he said laughingly to a fellow-passenger, "if we had had
her on board, and when she had sunk me, she would have fallen upon you,
depend upon it, and carried you in as a prize to Southampton, Jos, my
boy."

For indeed it was no other than our stout friend who was also a
passenger on board the Ramchunder.  He had passed ten years in Bengal.
Constant dinners, tiffins, pale ale and claret, the prodigious labour
of cutcherry, and the refreshment of brandy-pawnee which he was forced
to take there, had their effect upon Waterloo Sedley. A voyage to
Europe was pronounced necessary for him--and having served his full
time in India and had fine appointments which had enabled him to lay by
a considerable sum of money, he was free to come home and stay with a
good pension, or to return and resume that rank in the service to which
his seniority and his vast talents entitled him.

He was rather thinner than when we last saw him, but had gained in
majesty and solemnity of demeanour. He had resumed the mustachios to
which his services at Waterloo entitled him, and swaggered about on
deck in a magnificent velvet cap with a gold band and a profuse
ornamentation of pins and jewellery about his person. He took breakfast
in his cabin and dressed as solemnly to appear on the quarter-deck as
if he were going to turn out for Bond Street, or the Course at
Calcutta.  He brought a native servant with him, who was his valet and
pipe-bearer and who wore the Sedley crest in silver on his turban.
That oriental menial had a wretched life under the tyranny of Jos
Sedley.  Jos was as vain of his person as a woman, and took as long a
time at his toilette as any fading beauty.  The youngsters among the
passengers, Young Chaffers of the 150th, and poor little Ricketts,
coming home after his third fever, used to draw out Sedley at the
cuddy-table and make him tell prodigious stories about himself and his
exploits against tigers and Napoleon. He was great when he visited the
Emperor's tomb at Longwood, when to these gentlemen and the young
officers of the ship, Major Dobbin not being by, he described the whole
battle of Waterloo and all but announced that Napoleon never would have
gone to Saint Helena at all but for him, Jos Sedley.

After leaving St.  Helena he became very generous, disposing of a great
quantity of ship stores, claret, preserved meats, and great casks
packed with soda-water, brought out for his private delectation.  There
were no ladies on board; the Major gave the pas of precedency to the
civilian, so that he was the first dignitary at table, and treated by
Captain Bragg and the officers of the Ramchunder with the respect which
his rank warranted.  He disappeared rather in a panic during a
two-days' gale, in which he had the portholes of his cabin battened
down, and remained in his cot reading the Washerwoman of Finchley
Common, left on board the Ramchunder by the Right Honourable the Lady
Emily Hornblower, wife of the Rev. Silas Hornblower, when on their
passage out to the Cape, where the Reverend gentleman was a missionary;
but, for common reading, he had brought a stock of novels and plays
which he lent to the rest of the ship, and rendered himself agreeable
to all by his kindness and condescension.

Many and many a night as the ship was cutting through the roaring dark
sea, the moon and stars shining overhead and the bell singing out the
watch, Mr. Sedley and the Major would sit on the quarter-deck of the
vessel talking about home, as the Major smoked his cheroot and the
civilian puffed at the hookah which his servant prepared for him.

In these conversations it was wonderful with what perseverance and
ingenuity Major Dobbin would manage to bring the talk round to the
subject of Amelia and her little boy.  Jos, a little testy about his
father's misfortunes and unceremonious applications to him, was soothed
down by the Major, who pointed out the elder's ill fortunes and old
age.  He would not perhaps like to live with the old couple, whose ways
and hours might not agree with those of a younger man, accustomed to
different society (Jos bowed at this compliment); but, the Major
pointed out, how advantageous it would be for Jos Sedley to have a
house of his own in London, and not a mere bachelor's establishment as
before; how his sister Amelia would be the very person to preside over
it; how elegant, how gentle she was, and of what refined good manners.
He recounted stories of the success which Mrs. George Osborne had had
in former days at Brussels, and in London, where she was much admired
by people of very great fashion; and he then hinted how becoming it
would be for Jos to send Georgy to a good school and make a man of him,
for his mother and her parents would be sure to spoil him.  In a word,
this artful Major made the civilian promise to take charge of Amelia
and her unprotected child.  He did not know as yet what events had
happened in the little Sedley family, and how death had removed the
mother, and riches had carried off George from Amelia.  But the fact is
that every day and always, this love-smitten and middle-aged gentleman
was thinking about Mrs. Osborne, and his whole heart was bent upon
doing her good.  He coaxed, wheedled, cajoled, and complimented Jos
Sedley with a perseverance and cordiality of which he was not aware
himself, very likely; but some men who have unmarried sisters or
daughters even, may remember how uncommonly agreeable gentlemen are to
the male relations when they are courting the females; and perhaps this
rogue of a Dobbin was urged by a similar hypocrisy.

The truth is, when Major Dobbin came on board the Ramchumder, very
sick, and for the three days she lay in the Madras Roads, he did not
begin to rally, nor did even the appearance and recognition of his old
acquaintance, Mr. Sedley, on board much cheer him, until after a
conversation which they had one day, as the Major was laid languidly on
the deck.  He said then he thought he was doomed; he had left a little
something to his godson in his will, and he trusted Mrs. Osborne would
remember him kindly and be happy in the marriage she was about to make.
"Married? not the least," Jos answered; "he had heard from her:  she
made no mention of the marriage, and by the way, it was curious, she
wrote to say that Major Dobbin was going to be married, and hoped that
HE would be happy." What were the dates of Sedley's letters from
Europe? The civilian fetched them. They were two months later than the
Major's; and the ship's surgeon congratulated himself upon the
treatment adopted by him towards his new patient, who had been
consigned to shipboard by the Madras practitioner with very small hopes
indeed; for, from that day, the very day that he changed the draught,
Major Dobbin began to mend. And thus it was that deserving officer,
Captain Kirk, was disappointed of his majority.

After they passed St.  Helena, Major Dobbin's gaiety and strength was
such as to astonish all his fellow passengers.  He larked with the
midshipmen, played single-stick with the mates, ran up the shrouds like
a boy, sang a comic song one night to the amusement of the whole party
assembled over their grog after supper, and rendered himself so gay,
lively, and amiable that even Captain Bragg, who thought there was
nothing in his passenger, and considered he was a poor-spirited feller
at first, was constrained to own that the Major was a reserved but
well-informed and meritorious officer.  "He ain't got distangy manners,
dammy," Bragg observed to his first mate; "he wouldn't do at Government
House, Roper, where his Lordship and Lady William was as kind to me,
and shook hands with me before the whole company, and asking me at
dinner to take beer with him, before the Commander-in-Chief himself; he
ain't got manners, but there's something about him--" And thus Captain
Bragg showed that he possessed discrimination as a man, as well as
ability as a commander.

But a calm taking place when the Ramchunder was within ten days' sail
of England, Dobbin became so impatient and ill-humoured as to surprise
those comrades who had before admired his vivacity and good temper. He
did not recover until the breeze sprang up again, and was in a highly
excited state when the pilot came on board.  Good God, how his heart
beat as the two friendly spires of Southampton came in sight.

 At her mother's funeral, Amelia almost wishes she were in the casket instead. Her life seems like it's over. She is forced to live on the charity of Mr. Osborne and to take care of her aging and somewhat mentally unstable father. Still, she bucks up and determines to try her best to make her father's time on earth happy. She sews, cooks, plays cards, and sings, and he is at least appreciative. Meanwhile, Major Dobbin has been traveling from India back to England. In the middle of his trip, he fell gravely ill. The doctors finally washed their hands of him and assumed he would die. Then he briefly recovered, then fell sick again, then again kind of recovered and got on the ship to go around the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of Africa. Dobbin is traveling with Jos, who has now served out his appointment in India and can return home to live on his pension. Jos is lively and generous onboard the ship, but still as vain as ever. In the last days of his illness, Dobbin talked about Amelia to Jos, who told him that she was not actually going to be married. Dobbin recovered in no time at all. As they travel, Dobbin talks about Amelia and George Jr. to Jos all the time, basically trying to get him to agree to take care of them in London. Jos agrees. Obviously, Dobbin doesn't know yet that Mrs. Sedley is dead and that George Jr. lives with Mr. Osborne.

