Chapter: How Captain Dobbin Bought a Piano

If there is any exhibition in all Vanity Fair which Satire and
Sentiment can visit arm in arm together; where you light on the
strangest contrasts laughable and tearful: where you may be gentle and
pathetic, or savage and cynical with perfect propriety: it is at one of
those public assemblies, a crowd of which are advertised every day in
the last page of the Times newspaper, and over which the late Mr.
George Robins used to preside with so much dignity. There are very few
London people, as I fancy, who have not attended at these meetings, and
all with a taste for moralizing must have thought, with a sensation and
interest not a little startling and queer, of the day when their turn
shall come too, and Mr. Hammerdown will sell by the orders of Diogenes'
assignees, or will be instructed by the executors, to offer to public
competition, the library, furniture, plate, wardrobe, and choice cellar
of wines of Epicurus deceased.

Even with the most selfish disposition, the Vanity Fairian, as he
witnesses this sordid part of the obsequies of a departed friend, can't
but feel some sympathies and regret. My Lord Dives's remains are in the
family vault: the statuaries are cutting an inscription veraciously
commemorating his virtues, and the sorrows of his heir, who is
disposing of his goods.  What guest at Dives's table can pass the
familiar house without a sigh?--the familiar house of which the lights
used to shine so cheerfully at seven o'clock, of which the hall-doors
opened so readily, of which the obsequious servants, as you passed up
the comfortable stair, sounded your name from landing to landing, until
it reached the apartment where jolly old Dives welcomed his friends!
What a number of them he had; and what a noble way of entertaining
them.  How witty people used to be here who were morose when they got
out of the door; and how courteous and friendly men who slandered and
hated each other everywhere else!  He was pompous, but with such a cook
what would one not swallow? he was rather dull, perhaps, but would not
such wine make any conversation pleasant?  We must get some of his
Burgundy at any price, the mourners cry at his club.  "I got this box
at old Dives's sale," Pincher says, handing it round, "one of Louis
XV's mistresses--pretty thing, is it not?--sweet miniature," and they
talk of the way in which young Dives is dissipating his fortune.

How changed the house is, though!  The front is patched over with
bills, setting forth the particulars of the furniture in staring
capitals.  They have hung a shred of carpet out of an upstairs
window--a half dozen of porters are lounging on the dirty steps--the
hall swarms with dingy guests of oriental countenance, who thrust
printed cards into your hand, and offer to bid.  Old women and amateurs
have invaded the upper apartments, pinching the bed-curtains, poking
into the feathers, shampooing the mattresses, and clapping the wardrobe
drawers to and fro. Enterprising young housekeepers are measuring the
looking-glasses and hangings to see if they will suit the new menage
(Snob will brag for years that he has purchased this or that at Dives's
sale), and Mr. Hammerdown is sitting on the great mahogany
dining-tables, in the dining-room below, waving the ivory hammer, and
employing all the artifices of eloquence, enthusiasm, entreaty, reason,
despair; shouting to his people; satirizing Mr. Davids for his
sluggishness; inspiriting Mr. Moss into action; imploring, commanding,
bellowing, until down comes the hammer like fate, and we pass to the
next lot.  O Dives, who would ever have thought, as we sat round the
broad table sparkling with plate and spotless linen, to have seen such
a dish at the head of it as that roaring auctioneer?

It was rather late in the sale.  The excellent drawing-room furniture
by the best makers; the rare and famous wines selected, regardless of
cost, and with the well-known taste of the purchaser; the rich and
complete set of family plate had been sold on the previous days.
Certain of the best wines (which all had a great character among
amateurs in the neighbourhood) had been purchased for his master, who
knew them very well, by the butler of our friend John Osborne, Esquire,
of Russell Square.  A small portion of the most useful articles of the
plate had been bought by some young stockbrokers from the City.  And
now the public being invited to the purchase of minor objects, it
happened that the orator on the table was expatiating on the merits of
a picture, which he sought to recommend to his audience: it was by no
means so select or numerous a company as had attended the previous days
of the auction.

"No. 369," roared Mr. Hammerdown.  "Portrait of a gentleman on an
elephant.  Who'll bid for the gentleman on the elephant?  Lift up the
picture, Blowman, and let the company examine this lot." A long, pale,
military-looking gentleman, seated demurely at the mahogany table,
could not help grinning as this valuable lot was shown by Mr. Blowman.
"Turn the elephant to the Captain, Blowman.  What shall we say, sir,
for the elephant?" but the Captain, blushing in a very hurried and
discomfited manner, turned away his head.

"Shall we say twenty guineas for this work of art?--fifteen, five, name
your own price.  The gentleman without the elephant is worth five
pound."

"I wonder it ain't come down with him," said a professional wag, "he's
anyhow a precious big one"; at which (for the elephant-rider was
represented as of a very stout figure) there was a general giggle in
the room.

"Don't be trying to deprecate the value of the lot, Mr. Moss," Mr.
Hammerdown said; "let the company examine it as a work of art--the
attitude of the gallant animal quite according to natur'; the gentleman
in a nankeen jacket, his gun in his hand, is going to the chase; in the
distance a banyhann tree and a pagody, most likely resemblances of some
interesting spot in our famous Eastern possessions.  How much for this
lot? Come, gentlemen, don't keep me here all day."

Some one bid five shillings, at which the military gentleman looked
towards the quarter from which this splendid offer had come, and there
saw another officer with a young lady on his arm, who both appeared to
be highly amused with the scene, and to whom, finally, this lot was
knocked down for half a guinea.  He at the table looked more surprised
and discomposed than ever when he spied this pair, and his head sank
into his military collar, and he turned his back upon them, so as to
avoid them altogether.

Of all the other articles which Mr. Hammerdown had the honour to offer
for public competition that day it is not our purpose to make mention,
save of one only, a little square piano, which came down from the upper
regions of the house (the state grand piano having been disposed of
previously); this the young lady tried with a rapid and skilful hand
(making the officer blush and start again), and for it, when its turn
came, her agent began to bid.

But there was an opposition here.  The Hebrew aide-de-camp in the
service of the officer at the table bid against the Hebrew gentleman
employed by the elephant purchasers, and a brisk battle ensued over
this little piano, the combatants being greatly encouraged by Mr.
Hammerdown.

At last, when the competition had been prolonged for some time, the
elephant captain and lady desisted from the race; and the hammer coming
down, the auctioneer said:--"Mr. Lewis, twenty-five," and Mr. Lewis's
chief thus became the proprietor of the little square piano. Having
effected the purchase, he sate up as if he was greatly relieved, and
the unsuccessful competitors catching a glimpse of him at this moment,
the lady said to her friend,

"Why, Rawdon, it's Captain Dobbin."

I suppose Becky was discontented with the new piano her husband had
hired for her, or perhaps the proprietors of that instrument had
fetched it away, declining farther credit, or perhaps she had a
particular attachment for the one which she had just tried to purchase,
recollecting it in old days, when she used to play upon it, in the
little sitting-room of our dear Amelia Sedley.

The sale was at the old house in Russell Square, where we passed some
evenings together at the beginning of this story.  Good old John Sedley
was a ruined man.  His name had been proclaimed as a defaulter on the
Stock Exchange, and his bankruptcy and commercial extermination had
followed.  Mr. Osborne's butler came to buy some of the famous port
wine to transfer to the cellars over the way. As for one dozen
well-manufactured silver spoons and forks at per oz., and one dozen
dessert ditto ditto, there were three young stockbrokers (Messrs. Dale,
Spiggot, and Dale, of Threadneedle Street, indeed), who, having had
dealings with the old man, and kindnesses from him in days when he was
kind to everybody with whom he dealt, sent this little spar out of the
wreck with their love to good Mrs. Sedley; and with respect to the
piano, as it had been Amelia's, and as she might miss it and want one
now, and as Captain William Dobbin could no more play upon it than he
could dance on the tight rope, it is probable that he did not purchase
the instrument for his own use.

In a word, it arrived that evening at a wonderful small cottage in a
street leading from the Fulham Road--one of those streets which have
the finest romantic names--(this was called St. Adelaide Villas,
Anna-Maria Road West), where the houses look like baby-houses; where
the people, looking out of the first-floor windows, must infallibly, as
you think, sit with their feet in the parlours; where the shrubs in the
little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little
children's pinafores, little red socks, caps, &c. (polyandria
polygynia); whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women
singing; where little porter pots hang on the railings sunning
themselves; whither of evenings you see City clerks padding wearily:
here it was that Mr. Clapp, the clerk of Mr. Sedley, had his domicile,
and in this asylum the good old gentleman hid his head with his wife
and daughter when the crash came.

Jos Sedley had acted as a man of his disposition would, when the
announcement of the family misfortune reached him.  He did not come to
London, but he wrote to his mother to draw upon his agents for whatever
money was wanted, so that his kind broken-spirited old parents had no
present poverty to fear.  This done, Jos went on at the boarding-house
at Cheltenham pretty much as before.  He drove his curricle; he drank
his claret; he played his rubber; he told his Indian stories, and the
Irish widow consoled and flattered him as usual. His present of money,
needful as it was, made little impression on his parents; and I have
heard Amelia say that the first day on which she saw her father lift up
his head after the failure was on the receipt of the packet of forks
and spoons with the young stockbrokers' love, over which he burst out
crying like a child, being greatly more affected than even his wife, to
whom the present was addressed.  Edward Dale, the junior of the house,
who purchased the spoons for the firm, was, in fact, very sweet upon
Amelia, and offered for her in spite of all. He married Miss Louisa
Cutts (daughter of Higham and Cutts, the eminent cornfactors) with a
handsome fortune in 1820; and is now living in splendour, and with a
numerous family, at his elegant villa, Muswell Hill.  But we must not
let the recollections of this good fellow cause us to diverge from the
principal history.

I hope the reader has much too good an opinion of Captain and Mrs.
Crawley to suppose that they ever would have dreamed of paying a visit
to so remote a district as Bloomsbury, if they thought the family whom
they proposed to honour with a visit were not merely out of fashion,
but out of money, and could be serviceable to them in no possible
manner.  Rebecca was entirely surprised at the sight of the comfortable
old house where she had met with no small kindness, ransacked by
brokers and bargainers, and its quiet family treasures given up to
public desecration and plunder.  A month after her flight, she had
bethought her of Amelia, and Rawdon, with a horse-laugh, had expressed
a perfect willingness to see young George Osborne again.  "He's a very
agreeable acquaintance, Beck," the wag added.  "I'd like to sell him
another horse, Beck.  I'd like to play a few more games at billiards
with him.  He'd be what I call useful just now, Mrs. C.--ha, ha!" by
which sort of speech it is not to be supposed that Rawdon Crawley had a
deliberate desire to cheat Mr. Osborne at play, but only wished to take
that fair advantage of him which almost every sporting gentleman in
Vanity Fair considers to be his due from his neighbour.

The old aunt was long in "coming-to." A month had elapsed.  Rawdon was
denied the door by Mr. Bowls; his servants could not get a lodgment in
the house at Park Lane; his letters were sent back unopened.  Miss
Crawley never stirred out--she was unwell--and Mrs. Bute remained still
and never left her.  Crawley and his wife both of them augured evil
from the continued presence of Mrs. Bute.

"Gad, I begin to perceive now why she was always bringing us together
at Queen's Crawley," Rawdon said.

"What an artful little woman!" ejaculated Rebecca.

"Well, I don't regret it, if you don't," the Captain cried, still in an
amorous rapture with his wife, who rewarded him with a kiss by way of
reply, and was indeed not a little gratified by the generous confidence
of her husband.

"If he had but a little more brains," she thought to herself, "I might
make something of him"; but she never let him perceive the opinion she
had of him; listened with indefatigable complacency to his stories of
the stable and the mess; laughed at all his jokes; felt the greatest
interest in Jack Spatterdash, whose cab-horse had come down, and Bob
Martingale, who had been taken up in a gambling-house, and Tom
Cinqbars, who was going to ride the steeplechase. When he came home she
was alert and happy: when he went out she pressed him to go: when he
stayed at home, she played and sang for him, made him good drinks,
superintended his dinner, warmed his slippers, and steeped his soul in
comfort.  The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are
hypocrites.  We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful
they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those
frank smiles which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or
disarm--I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models,
and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman hide the
dulness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one?  We
accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it: we call
this pretty treachery truth.  A good housewife is of necessity a
humbug; and Cornelia's husband was hoodwinked, as Potiphar was--only in
a different way.

By these attentions, that veteran rake, Rawdon Crawley, found himself
converted into a very happy and submissive married man.  His former
haunts knew him not. They asked about him once or twice at his clubs,
but did not miss him much: in those booths of Vanity Fair people seldom
do miss each other.  His secluded wife ever smiling and cheerful, his
little comfortable lodgings, snug meals, and homely evenings, had all
the charms of novelty and secrecy.  The marriage was not yet declared
to the world, or published in the Morning Post.  All his creditors
would have come rushing on him in a body, had they known that he was
united to a woman without fortune. "My relations won't cry fie upon
me," Becky said, with rather a bitter laugh; and she was quite
contented to wait until the old aunt should be reconciled, before she
claimed her place in society.  So she lived at Brompton, and meanwhile
saw no one, or only those few of her husband's male companions who were
admitted into her little dining-room.  These were all charmed with her.
The little dinners, the laughing and chatting, the music afterwards,
delighted all who participated in these enjoyments.  Major Martingale
never thought about asking to see the marriage licence, Captain
Cinqbars was perfectly enchanted with her skill in making punch.  And
young Lieutenant Spatterdash (who was fond of piquet, and whom Crawley
would often invite) was evidently and quickly smitten by Mrs. Crawley;
but her own circumspection and modesty never forsook her for a moment,
and Crawley's reputation as a fire-eating and jealous warrior was a
further and complete defence to his little wife.

There are gentlemen of very good blood and fashion in this city, who
never have entered a lady's drawing-room; so that though Rawdon
Crawley's marriage might be talked about in his county, where, of
course, Mrs. Bute had spread the news, in London it was doubted, or not
heeded, or not talked about at all.  He lived comfortably on credit.
He had a large capital of debts, which laid out judiciously, will carry
a man along for many years, and on which certain men about town
contrive to live a hundred times better than even men with ready money
can do.  Indeed who is there that walks London streets, but can point
out a half-dozen of men riding by him splendidly, while he is on foot,
courted by fashion, bowed into their carriages by tradesmen, denying
themselves nothing, and living on who knows what?  We see Jack
Thriftless prancing in the park, or darting in his brougham down Pall
Mall: we eat his dinners served on his miraculous plate.  "How did this
begin," we say, "or where will it end?" "My dear fellow," I heard Jack
once say, "I owe money in every capital in Europe."  The end must come
some day, but in the meantime Jack thrives as much as ever; people are
glad enough to shake him by the hand, ignore the little dark stories
that are whispered every now and then against him, and pronounce him a
good-natured, jovial, reckless fellow.

Truth obliges us to confess that Rebecca had married a gentleman of
this order.  Everything was plentiful in his house but ready money, of
which their menage pretty early felt the want; and reading the Gazette
one day, and coming upon the announcement of "Lieutenant G. Osborne to
be Captain by purchase, vice Smith, who exchanges," Rawdon uttered that
sentiment regarding Amelia's lover, which ended in the visit to Russell
Square.

When Rawdon and his wife wished to communicate with Captain Dobbin at
the sale, and to know particulars of the catastrophe which had befallen
Rebecca's old acquaintances, the Captain had vanished; and such
information as they got was from a stray porter or broker at the
auction.

"Look at them with their hooked beaks," Becky said, getting into the
buggy, her picture under her arm, in great glee.  "They're like
vultures after a battle."

"Don't know.  Never was in action, my dear.  Ask Martingale; he was in
Spain, aide-de-camp to General Blazes."

"He was a very kind old man, Mr. Sedley," Rebecca said; "I'm really
sorry he's gone wrong."

"O stockbrokers--bankrupts--used to it, you know," Rawdon replied,
cutting a fly off the horse's ear.

"I wish we could have afforded some of the plate, Rawdon," the wife
continued sentimentally.  "Five-and-twenty guineas was monstrously dear
for that little piano. We chose it at Broadwood's for Amelia, when she
came from school.  It only cost five-and-thirty then."

"What-d'-ye-call'em--'Osborne,' will cry off now, I suppose, since the
family is smashed.  How cut up your pretty little friend will be; hey,
Becky?"

"I daresay she'll recover it," Becky said with a smile--and they drove
on and talked about something else.



Who Played on the Piano Captain Dobbin Bought

Our surprised story now finds itself for a moment among very famous
events and personages, and hanging on to the skirts of history. When
the eagles of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart, were flying
from Provence, where they had perched after a brief sojourn in Elba,
and from steeple to steeple until they reached the towers of Notre
Dame, I wonder whether the Imperial birds had any eye for a little
corner of the parish of Bloomsbury, London, which you might have
thought so quiet, that even the whirring and flapping of those mighty
wings would pass unobserved there?

"Napoleon has landed at Cannes."  Such news might create a panic at
Vienna, and cause Russia to drop his cards, and take Prussia into a
corner, and Talleyrand and Metternich to wag their heads together,
while Prince Hardenberg, and even the present Marquis of Londonderry,
were puzzled; but how was this intelligence to affect a young lady in
Russell Square, before whose door the watchman sang the hours when she
was asleep: who, if she strolled in the square, was guarded there by
the railings and the beadle:  who, if she walked ever so short a
distance to buy a ribbon in Southampton Row, was followed by Black
Sambo with an enormous cane:  who was always cared for, dressed, put to
bed, and watched over by ever so many guardian angels, with and without
wages?  Bon Dieu, I say, is it not hard that the fateful rush of the
great Imperial struggle can't take place without affecting a poor
little harmless girl of eighteen, who is occupied in billing and
cooing, or working muslin collars in Russell Square?  You too, kindly,
homely flower!--is the great roaring war tempest coming to sweep you
down, here, although cowering under the shelter of Holborn?  Yes;
Napoleon is flinging his last stake, and poor little Emmy Sedley's
happiness forms, somehow, part of it.

In the first place, her father's fortune was swept down with that fatal
news.  All his speculations had of late gone wrong with the luckless
old gentleman.  Ventures had failed; merchants had broken; funds had
risen when he calculated they would fall.  What need to particularize?
If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin
is.  Old Sedley had kept his own sad counsel. Everything seemed to go
on as usual in the quiet, opulent house; the good-natured mistress
pursuing, quite unsuspiciously, her bustling idleness, and daily easy
avocations; the daughter absorbed still in one selfish, tender thought,
and quite regardless of all the world besides, when that final crash
came, under which the worthy family fell.

One night Mrs. Sedley was writing cards for a party; the Osbornes had
given one, and she must not be behindhand; John Sedley, who had come
home very late from the City, sate silent at the chimney side, while
his wife was prattling to him; Emmy had gone up to her room ailing and
low-spirited.  "She's not happy," the mother went on. "George Osborne
neglects her.  I've no patience with the airs of those people.  The
girls have not been in the house these three weeks; and George has been
twice in town without coming.  Edward Dale saw him at the Opera.
Edward would marry her I'm sure: and there's Captain Dobbin who, I
think, would--only I hate all army men.  Such a dandy as George has
become.  With his military airs, indeed!  We must show some folks that
we're as good as they.  Only give Edward Dale any encouragement, and
you'll see.  We must have a party, Mr. S.  Why don't you speak, John?
Shall I say Tuesday fortnight? Why don't you answer? Good God, John,
what has happened?"

John Sedley sprang up out of his chair to meet his wife, who ran to
him.  He seized her in his arms, and said with a hasty voice, "We're
ruined, Mary.  We've got the world to begin over again, dear.  It's
best that you should know all, and at once."  As he spoke, he trembled
in every limb, and almost fell.  He thought the news would have
overpowered his wife--his wife, to whom he had never said a hard word.
But it was he that was the most moved, sudden as the shock was to her.
When he sank back into his seat, it was the wife that took the office
of consoler.  She took his trembling hand, and kissed it, and put it
round her neck: she called him her John--her dear John--her old
man--her kind old man; she poured out a hundred words of incoherent
love and tenderness; her faithful voice and simple caresses wrought
this sad heart up to an inexpressible delight and anguish, and cheered
and solaced his over-burdened soul.

Only once in the course of the long night as they sate together, and
poor Sedley opened his pent-up soul, and told the story of his losses
and embarrassments--the treason of some of his oldest friends, the
manly kindness of some, from whom he never could have expected it--in a
general confession--only once did the faithful wife give way to emotion.

"My God, my God, it will break Emmy's heart," she said.

The father had forgotten the poor girl.  She was lying, awake and
unhappy, overhead.  In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents,
she was alone.  To how many people can any one tell all?  Who will be
open where there is no sympathy, or has call to speak to those who
never can understand?  Our gentle Amelia was thus solitary.  She had no
confidante, so to speak, ever since she had anything to confide.  She
could not tell the old mother her doubts and cares; the would-be
sisters seemed every day more strange to her.  And she had misgivings
and fears which she dared not acknowledge to herself, though she was
always secretly brooding over them.

Her heart tried to persist in asserting that George Osborne was worthy
and faithful to her, though she knew otherwise.  How many a thing had
she said, and got no echo from him.  How many suspicions of selfishness
and indifference had she to encounter and obstinately overcome.  To
whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily struggles and
tortures?  Her hero himself only half understood her. She did not dare
to own that the man she loved was her inferior; or to feel that she had
given her heart away too soon.  Given once, the pure bashful maiden was
too modest, too tender, too trustful, too weak, too much woman to
recall it.  We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have
made them subscribe to our doctrine too.  We let their bodies go abroad
liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise
them instead of veils and yakmaks.  But their souls must be seen by
only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at
home as our slaves--ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.

So imprisoned and tortured was this gentle little heart, when in the
month of March, Anno Domini 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes, and Louis
XVIII fled, and all Europe was in alarm, and the funds fell, and old
John Sedley was ruined.

We are not going to follow the worthy old stockbroker through those
last pangs and agonies of ruin through which he passed before his
commercial demise befell. They declared him at the Stock Exchange; he
was absent from his house of business: his bills were protested: his
act of bankruptcy formal.  The house and furniture of Russell Square
were seized and sold up, and he and his family were thrust away, as we
have seen, to hide their heads where they might.

John Sedley had not the heart to review the domestic establishment who
have appeared now and anon in our pages and of whom he was now forced
by poverty to take leave.  The wages of those worthy people were
discharged with that punctuality which men frequently show who only owe
in great sums--they were sorry to leave good places--but they did not
break their hearts at parting from their adored master and mistress.
Amelia's maid was profuse in condolences, but went off quite resigned
to better herself in a genteeler quarter of the town.  Black Sambo,
with the infatuation of his profession, determined on setting up a
public-house.  Honest old Mrs. Blenkinsop indeed, who had seen the
birth of Jos and Amelia, and the wooing of John Sedley and his wife,
was for staying by them without wages, having amassed a considerable
sum in their service: and she accompanied the fallen people into their
new and humble place of refuge, where she tended them and grumbled
against them for a while.

Of all Sedley's opponents in his debates with his creditors which now
ensued, and harassed the feelings of the humiliated old gentleman so
severely, that in six weeks he oldened more than he had done for
fifteen years before--the most determined and obstinate seemed to be
John Osborne, his old friend and neighbour--John Osborne, whom he had
set up in life--who was under a hundred obligations to him--and whose
son was to marry Sedley's daughter. Any one of these circumstances
would account for the bitterness of Osborne's opposition.

When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another,
with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it
were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger
would be.  To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in
such a case, you are bound to prove the other party's crime.  It is not
that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a
speculation--no, no--it is that your partner has led you into it by the
basest treachery and with the most sinister motives.  From a mere sense
of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a
villain--otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself.

And as a general rule, which may make all creditors who are inclined to
be severe pretty comfortable in their minds, no men embarrassed are
altogether honest, very likely.  They conceal something; they
exaggerate chances of good luck; hide away the real state of affairs;
say that things are flourishing when they are hopeless, keep a smiling
face (a dreary smile it is) upon the verge of bankruptcy--are ready to
lay hold of any pretext for delay or of any money, so as to stave off
the inevitable ruin a few days longer. "Down with such dishonesty,"
says the creditor in triumph, and reviles his sinking enemy.  "You
fool, why do you catch at a straw?" calm good sense says to the man
that is drowning.  "You villain, why do you shrink from plunging into
the irretrievable Gazette?" says prosperity to the poor devil battling
in that black gulf.  Who has not remarked the readiness with which the
closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other
of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it.
Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.

Then Osborne had the intolerable sense of former benefits to goad and
irritate him: these are always a cause of hostility aggravated.
Finally, he had to break off the match between Sedley's daughter and
his son; and as it had gone very far indeed, and as the poor girl's
happiness and perhaps character were compromised, it was necessary to
show the strongest reasons for the rupture, and for John Osborne to
prove John Sedley to be a very bad character indeed.

At the meetings of creditors, then, he comported himself with a
savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in breaking
the heart of that ruined bankrupt man.  On George's intercourse with
Amelia he put an instant veto--menacing the youth with maledictions if
he broke his commands, and vilipending the poor innocent girl as the
basest and most artful of vixens. One of the great conditions of anger
and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated
object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

When the great crash came--the announcement of ruin, and the departure
from Russell Square, and the declaration that all was over between her
and George--all over between her and love, her and happiness, her and
faith in the world--a brutal letter from John Osborne told her in a few
curt lines that her father's conduct had been of such a nature that all
engagements between the families were at an end--when the final award
came, it did not shock her so much as her parents, as her mother rather
expected (for John Sedley himself was entirely prostrate in the ruins
of his own affairs and shattered honour).  Amelia took the news very
palely and calmly. It was only the confirmation of the dark presages
which had long gone before.  It was the mere reading of the
sentence--of the crime she had long ago been guilty--the crime of
loving wrongly, too violently, against reason. She told no more of her
thoughts now than she had before.  She seemed scarcely more unhappy now
when convinced all hope was over, than before when she felt but dared
not confess that it was gone.  So she changed from the large house to
the small one without any mark or difference; remained in her little
room for the most part; pined silently; and died away day by day.  I do
not mean to say that all females are so.  My dear Miss Bullock, I do
not think your heart would break in this way.  You are a strong-minded
young woman with proper principles. I do not venture to say that mine
would; it has suffered, and, it must be confessed, survived. But there
are some souls thus gently constituted, thus frail, and delicate, and
tender.

Whenever old John Sedley thought of the affair between George and
Amelia, or alluded to it, it was with bitterness almost as great as Mr.
Osborne himself had shown.  He cursed Osborne and his family as
heartless, wicked, and ungrateful.  No power on earth, he swore, would
induce him to marry his daughter to the son of such a villain, and he
ordered Emmy to banish George from her mind, and to return all the
presents and letters which she had ever had from him.

She promised acquiescence, and tried to obey.  She put up the two or
three trinkets: and, as for the letters, she drew them out of the place
where she kept them; and read them over--as if she did not know them by
heart already: but she could not part with them.  That effort was too
much for her; she placed them back in her bosom again--as you have seen
a woman nurse a child that is dead.  Young Amelia felt that she would
die or lose her senses outright, if torn away from this last
consolation. How she used to blush and lighten up when those letters
came!  How she used to trip away with a beating heart, so that she
might read unseen!  If they were cold, yet how perversely this fond
little soul interpreted them into warmth.  If they were short or
selfish, what excuses she found for the writer!

It was over these few worthless papers that she brooded and brooded.
She lived in her past life--every letter seemed to recall some
circumstance of it.  How well she remembered them all!  His looks and
tones, his dress, what he said and how--these relics and remembrances
of dead affection were all that were left her in the world. And the
business of her life, was--to watch the corpse of Love.

To death she looked with inexpressible longing.  Then, she thought, I
shall always be able to follow him.  I am not praising her conduct or
setting her up as a model for Miss Bullock to imitate.  Miss B. knows
how to regulate her feelings better than this poor little creature.
Miss B. would never have committed herself as that imprudent Amelia had
done; pledged her love irretrievably; confessed her heart away, and got
back nothing--only a brittle promise which was snapt and worthless in a
moment.  A long engagement is a partnership which one party is free to
keep or to break, but which involves all the capital of the other.

Be cautious then, young ladies; be wary how you engage.  Be shy of
loving frankly; never tell all you feel, or (a better way still), feel
very little.  See the consequences of being prematurely honest and
confiding, and mistrust yourselves and everybody.  Get yourselves
married as they do in France, where the lawyers are the bridesmaids and
confidantes.  At any rate, never have any feelings which may make you
uncomfortable, or make any promises which you cannot at any required
moment command and withdraw.  That is the way to get on, and be
respected, and have a virtuous character in Vanity Fair.

If Amelia could have heard the comments regarding her which were made
in the circle from which her father's ruin had just driven her, she
would have seen what her own crimes were, and how entirely her
character was jeopardised.  Such criminal imprudence Mrs. Smith never
knew of; such horrid familiarities Mrs. Brown had always condemned, and
the end might be a warning to HER daughters. "Captain Osborne, of
course, could not marry a bankrupt's daughter," the Misses Dobbin said.
"It was quite enough to have been swindled by the father.  As for that
little Amelia, her folly had really passed all--"

"All what?" Captain Dobbin roared out.  "Haven't they been engaged ever
since they were children?  Wasn't it as good as a marriage? Dare any
soul on earth breathe a word against the sweetest, the purest, the
tenderest, the most angelical of young women?"

"La, William, don't be so highty-tighty with US.  We're not men.  We
can't fight you," Miss Jane said.  "We've said nothing against Miss
Sedley: but that her conduct throughout was MOST IMPRUDENT, not to call
it by any worse name; and that her parents are people who certainly
merit their misfortunes."

"Hadn't you better, now that Miss Sedley is free, propose for her
yourself, William?" Miss Ann asked sarcastically.  "It would be a most
eligible family connection.  He!  he!"

"I marry her!" Dobbin said, blushing very much, and talking quick. "If
you are so ready, young ladies, to chop and change, do you suppose that
she is?  Laugh and sneer at that angel.  She can't hear it; and she's
miserable and unfortunate, and deserves to be laughed at.  Go on
joking, Ann.  You're the wit of the family, and the others like to hear
it."

"I must tell you again we're not in a barrack, William," Miss Ann
remarked.

"In a barrack, by Jove--I wish anybody in a barrack would say what you
do," cried out this uproused British lion.  "I should like to hear a
man breathe a word against her, by Jupiter.  But men don't talk in this
way, Ann: it's only women, who get together and hiss, and shriek, and
cackle.  There, get away--don't begin to cry.  I only said you were a
couple of geese," Will Dobbin said, perceiving Miss Ann's pink eyes
were beginning to moisten as usual.  "Well, you're not geese, you're
swans--anything you like, only do, do leave Miss Sedley alone."

Anything like William's infatuation about that silly little flirting,
ogling thing was never known, the mamma and sisters agreed together in
thinking: and they trembled lest, her engagement being off with
Osborne, she should take up immediately her other admirer and Captain.
In which forebodings these worthy young women no doubt judged according
to the best of their experience; or rather (for as yet they had had no
opportunities of marrying or of jilting) according to their own notions
of right and wrong.

"It is a mercy, Mamma, that the regiment is ordered abroad," the girls
said.  "THIS danger, at any rate, is spared our brother."

Such, indeed, was the fact; and so it is that the French Emperor comes
in to perform a part in this domestic comedy of Vanity Fair which we
are now playing, and which would never have been enacted without the
intervention of this august mute personage.  It was he that ruined the
Bourbons and Mr. John Sedley.  It was he whose arrival in his capital
called up all France in arms to defend him there; and all Europe to
oust him. While the French nation and army were swearing fidelity round
the eagles in the Champ de Mars, four mighty European hosts were
getting in motion for the great chasse a l'aigle; and one of these was
a British army, of which two heroes of ours, Captain Dobbin and Captain
Osborne, formed a portion.

The news of Napoleon's escape and landing was received by the gallant
--th with a fiery delight and enthusiasm, which everybody can
understand who knows that famous corps.  From the colonel to the
smallest drummer in the regiment, all were filled with hope and
ambition and patriotic fury; and thanked the French Emperor as for a
personal kindness in coming to disturb the peace of Europe.  Now was
the time the --th had so long panted for, to show their comrades in
arms that they could fight as well as the Peninsular veterans, and that
all the pluck and valour of the --th had not been killed by the West
Indies and the yellow fever.  Stubble and Spooney looked to get their
companies without purchase. Before the end of the campaign (which she
resolved to share), Mrs. Major O'Dowd hoped to write herself Mrs.
Colonel O'Dowd, C.B.  Our two friends (Dobbin and Osborne) were quite
as much excited as the rest: and each in his way--Mr. Dobbin very
quietly, Mr. Osborne very loudly and energetically--was bent upon doing
his duty, and gaining his share of honour and distinction.

The agitation thrilling through the country and army in consequence of
this news was so great, that private matters were little heeded: and
hence probably George Osborne, just gazetted to his company, busy with
preparations for the march, which must come inevitably, and panting for
further promotion--was not so much affected by other incidents which
would have interested him at a more quiet period. He was not, it must
be confessed, very much cast down by good old Mr. Sedley's catastrophe.
He tried his new uniform, which became him very handsomely, on the day
when the first meeting of the creditors of the unfortunate gentleman
took place. His father told him of the wicked, rascally, shameful
conduct of the bankrupt, reminded him of what he had said about Amelia,
and that their connection was broken off for ever; and gave him that
evening a good sum of money to pay for the new clothes and epaulets in
which he looked so well.  Money was always useful to this free-handed
young fellow, and he took it without many words. The bills were up in
the Sedley house, where he had passed so many, many happy hours.  He
could see them as he walked from home that night (to the Old
Slaughters', where he put up when in town) shining white in the moon.
That comfortable home was shut, then, upon Amelia and her parents:
where had they taken refuge? The thought of their ruin affected him not
a little.  He was very melancholy that night in the coffee-room at the
Slaughters'; and drank a good deal, as his comrades remarked there.

Dobbin came in presently, cautioned him about the drink, which he only
took, he said, because he was deuced low; but when his friend began to
put to him clumsy inquiries, and asked him for news in a significant
manner, Osborne declined entering into conversation with him, avowing,
however, that he was devilish disturbed and unhappy.

Three days afterwards, Dobbin found Osborne in his room at the
barracks--his head on the table, a number of papers about, the young
Captain evidently in a state of great despondency.  "She--she's sent me
back some things I gave her--some damned trinkets.  Look here!" There
was a little packet directed in the well-known hand to Captain George
Osborne, and some things lying about--a ring, a silver knife he had
bought, as a boy, for her at a fair; a gold chain, and a locket with
hair in it.  "It's all over," said he, with a groan of sickening
remorse. "Look, Will, you may read it if you like."

There was a little letter of a few lines, to which he pointed, which
said:

My papa has ordered me to return to you these presents, which you made
in happier days to me; and I am to write to you for the last time.  I
think, I know you feel as much as I do the blow which has come upon us.
It is I that absolve you from an engagement which is impossible in our
present misery.  I am sure you had no share in it, or in the cruel
suspicions of Mr. Osborne, which are the hardest of all our griefs to
bear.  Farewell. Farewell.  I pray God to strengthen me to bear this
and other calamities, and to bless you always.     A.

I shall often play upon the piano--your piano.  It was like you to send
it.

Dobbin was very soft-hearted.  The sight of women and children in pain
always used to melt him.  The idea of Amelia broken-hearted and lonely
tore that good-natured soul with anguish.  And he broke out into an
emotion, which anybody who likes may consider unmanly. He swore that
Amelia was an angel, to which Osborne said aye with all his heart.  He,
too, had been reviewing the history of their lives--and had seen her
from her childhood to her present age, so sweet, so innocent, so
charmingly simple, and artlessly fond and tender.

What a pang it was to lose all that: to have had it and not prized it!
A thousand homely scenes and recollections crowded on him--in which he
always saw her good and beautiful.  And for himself, he blushed with
remorse and shame, as the remembrance of his own selfishness and
indifference contrasted with that perfect purity. For a while, glory,
war, everything was forgotten, and the pair of friends talked about her
only.

"Where are they?" Osborne asked, after a long talk, and a long
pause--and, in truth, with no little shame at thinking that he had
taken no steps to follow her.  "Where are they? There's no address to
the note."

Dobbin knew.  He had not merely sent the piano; but had written a note
to Mrs. Sedley, and asked permission to come and see her--and he had
seen her, and Amelia too, yesterday, before he came down to Chatham;
and, what is more, he had brought that farewell letter and packet which
had so moved them.

The good-natured fellow had found Mrs. Sedley only too willing to
receive him, and greatly agitated by the arrival of the piano, which,
as she conjectured, MUST have come from George, and was a signal of
amity on his part.  Captain Dobbin did not correct this error of the
worthy lady, but listened to all her story of complaints and
misfortunes with great sympathy--condoled with her losses and
privations, and agreed in reprehending the cruel conduct of Mr. Osborne
towards his first benefactor. When she had eased her overflowing bosom
somewhat, and poured forth many of her sorrows, he had the courage to
ask actually to see Amelia, who was above in her room as usual, and
whom her mother led trembling downstairs.

Her appearance was so ghastly, and her look of despair so pathetic,
that honest William Dobbin was frightened as he beheld it; and read the
most fatal forebodings in that pale fixed face.  After sitting in his
company a minute or two, she put the packet into his hand, and said,
"Take this to Captain Osborne, if you please, and--and I hope he's
quite well--and it was very kind of you to come and see us--and we like
our new house very much. And I--I think I'll go upstairs, Mamma, for
I'm not very strong." And with this, and a curtsey and a smile, the
poor child went her way.  The mother, as she led her up, cast back
looks of anguish towards Dobbin.  The good fellow wanted no such
appeal.  He loved her himself too fondly for that.  Inexpressible
grief, and pity, and terror pursued him, and he came away as if he was
a criminal after seeing her.

When Osborne heard that his friend had found her, he made hot and
anxious inquiries regarding the poor child.  How was she?  How did she
look?  What did she say?  His comrade took his hand, and looked him in
the face.

"George, she's dying," William Dobbin said--and could speak no more.

There was a buxom Irish servant-girl, who performed all the duties of
the little house where the Sedley family had found refuge: and this
girl had in vain, on many previous days, striven to give Amelia aid or
consolation. Emmy was much too sad to answer, or even to be aware of
the attempts the other was making in her favour.

Four hours after the talk between Dobbin and Osborne, this servant-maid
came into Amelia's room, where she sate as usual, brooding
silently over her letters--her little treasures.  The girl, smiling,
and looking arch and happy, made many trials to attract poor Emmy's
attention, who, however, took no heed of her.

"Miss Emmy," said the girl.

"I'm coming," Emmy said, not looking round.

"There's a message," the maid went on.  "There's
something--somebody--sure, here's a new letter for you--don't be reading
them old ones any more." And she gave her a letter, which Emmy took, and
read.

"I must see you," the letter said.  "Dearest Emmy--dearest
love--dearest wife, come to me."

George and her mother were outside, waiting until she had read the
letter.



Miss Crawley at Nurse

We have seen how Mrs. Firkin, the lady's maid, as soon as any event of
importance to the Crawley family came to her knowledge, felt bound to
communicate it to Mrs. Bute Crawley, at the Rectory; and have before
mentioned how particularly kind and attentive that good-natured lady
was to Miss Crawley's confidential servant. She had been a gracious
friend to Miss Briggs, the companion, also; and had secured the
latter's good-will by a number of those attentions and promises, which
cost so little in the making, and are yet so valuable and agreeable to
the recipient.  Indeed every good economist and manager of a household
must know how cheap and yet how amiable these professions are, and what
a flavour they give to the most homely dish in life.  Who was the
blundering idiot who said that "fine words butter no parsnips"?  Half
the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other
sauce.  As the immortal Alexis Soyer can make more delicious soup for a
half-penny than an ignorant cook can concoct with pounds of vegetables
and meat, so a skilful artist will make a few simple and pleasing
phrases go farther than ever so much substantial benefit-stock in the
hands of a mere bungler. Nay, we know that substantial benefits often
sicken some stomachs; whereas, most will digest any amount of fine
words, and be always eager for more of the same food. Mrs. Bute had
told Briggs and Firkin so often of the depth of her affection for them;
and what she would do, if she had Miss Crawley's fortune, for friends
so excellent and attached, that the ladies in question had the deepest
regard for her; and felt as much gratitude and confidence as if Mrs.
Bute had loaded them with the most expensive favours.

Rawdon Crawley, on the other hand, like a selfish heavy dragoon as he
was, never took the least trouble to conciliate his aunt's aides-de-camp,
showed his contempt for the pair with entire frankness--made
Firkin pull off his boots on one occasion--sent her out in the rain on
ignominious messages--and if he gave her a guinea, flung it to her as
if it were a box on the ear.  As his aunt, too, made a butt of Briggs,
the Captain followed the example, and levelled his jokes at her--jokes
about as delicate as a kick from his charger. Whereas, Mrs. Bute
consulted her in matters of taste or difficulty, admired her poetry,
and by a thousand acts of kindness and politeness, showed her
appreciation of Briggs; and if she made Firkin a twopenny-halfpenny
present, accompanied it with so many compliments, that the
twopence-half-penny was transmuted into gold in the heart of the
grateful waiting-maid, who, besides, was looking forwards quite
contentedly to some prodigious benefit which must happen to her on the
day when Mrs. Bute came into her fortune.

The different conduct of these two people is pointed out respectfully
to the attention of persons commencing the world. Praise everybody, I
say to such: never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both
point-blank in a man's face, and behind his back, when you know there
is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again.  Never lose a chance of
saying a kind word.  As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his
estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal
with your compliments through life.  An acorn costs nothing; but it may
sprout into a prodigious bit of timber.

In a word, during Rawdon Crawley's prosperity, he was only obeyed with
sulky acquiescence; when his disgrace came, there was nobody to help or
pity him.  Whereas, when Mrs. Bute took the command at Miss Crawley's
house, the garrison there were charmed to act under such a leader,
expecting all sorts of promotion from her promises, her generosity, and
her kind words.

That he would consider himself beaten, after one defeat, and make no
attempt to regain the position he had lost, Mrs. Bute Crawley never
allowed herself to suppose. She knew Rebecca to be too clever and
spirited and desperate a woman to submit without a struggle; and felt
that she must prepare for that combat, and be incessantly watchful
against assault; or mine, or surprise.

In the first place, though she held the town, was she sure of the
principal inhabitant?  Would Miss Crawley herself hold out; and had she
not a secret longing to welcome back the ousted adversary?  The old
lady liked Rawdon, and Rebecca, who amused her.  Mrs. Bute could not
disguise from herself the fact that none of her party could so
contribute to the pleasures of the town-bred lady.  "My girls' singing,
after that little odious governess's, I know is unbearable," the candid
Rector's wife owned to herself.  "She always used to go to sleep when
Martha and Louisa played their duets. Jim's stiff college manners and
poor dear Bute's talk about his dogs and horses always annoyed her.  If
I took her to the Rectory, she would grow angry with us all, and fly, I
know she would; and might fall into that horrid Rawdon's clutches
again, and be the victim of that little viper of a Sharp.  Meanwhile,
it is clear to me that she is exceedingly unwell, and cannot move for
some weeks, at any rate; during which we must think of some plan to
protect her from the arts of those unprincipled people."

In the very best of moments, if anybody told Miss Crawley that she was,
or looked ill, the trembling old lady sent off for her doctor; and I
daresay she was very unwell after the sudden family event, which might
serve to shake stronger nerves than hers.  At least, Mrs. Bute thought
it was her duty to inform the physician, and the apothecary, and the
dame-de-compagnie, and the domestics, that Miss Crawley was in a most
critical state, and that they were to act accordingly.  She had the
street laid knee-deep with straw; and the knocker put by with Mr.
Bowls's plate.  She insisted that the Doctor should call twice a day;
and deluged her patient with draughts every two hours.  When anybody
entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that
it frightened the poor old lady in her bed, from which she could not
look without seeing Mrs. Bute's beady eyes eagerly fixed on her, as the
latter sate steadfast in the arm-chair by the bedside.  They seemed to
lighten in the dark (for she kept the curtains closed) as she moved
about the room on velvet paws like a cat.  There Miss Crawley lay for
days--ever so many days--Mr. Bute reading books of devotion to her: for
nights, long nights, during which she had to hear the watchman sing,
the night-light sputter; visited at midnight, the last thing, by the
stealthy apothecary; and then left to look at Mrs. Bute's twinkling
eyes, or the flicks of yellow that the rushlight threw on the dreary
darkened ceiling.  Hygeia herself would have fallen sick under such a
regimen; and how much more this poor old nervous victim?  It has been
said that when she was in health and good spirits, this venerable
inhabitant of Vanity Fair had as free notions about religion and morals
as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire, but when illness overtook
her, it was aggravated by the most dreadful terrors of death, and an
utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner.

Sick-bed homilies and pious reflections are, to be sure, out of place
in mere story-books, and we are not going (after the fashion of some
novelists of the present day) to cajole the public into a sermon, when
it is only a comedy that the reader pays his money to witness.  But,
without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the
bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair
exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private
life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal
repentances sometimes overcome him.  Recollection of the best ordained
banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most
becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to
console faded beauties.  Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of
existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant
divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very
small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view,
about which all of us must some day or other be speculating.  O brother
wearers of motley!  Are there not moments when one grows sick of
grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells?  This, dear
friends and companions, is my amiable object--to walk with you through
the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should
all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be
perfectly miserable in private.

"If that poor man of mine had a head on his shoulders," Mrs. Bute
Crawley thought to herself, "how useful he might be, under present
circumstances, to this unhappy old lady!  He might make her repent of
her shocking free-thinking ways; he might urge her to do her duty, and
cast off that odious reprobate who has disgraced himself and his
family; and he might induce her to do justice to my dear girls and the
two boys, who require and deserve, I am sure, every assistance which
their relatives can give them."

And, as the hatred of vice is always a progress towards virtue, Mrs.
Bute Crawley endeavoured to instil her sister-in-law a proper
abhorrence for all Rawdon Crawley's manifold sins: of which his uncle's
wife brought forward such a catalogue as indeed would have served to
condemn a whole regiment of young officers.  If a man has committed
wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his
errors out to the world than his own relations; so Mrs. Bute showed a
perfect family interest and knowledge of Rawdon's history.  She had all
the particulars of that ugly quarrel with Captain Marker, in which
Rawdon, wrong from the beginning, ended in shooting the Captain.  She
knew how the unhappy Lord Dovedale, whose mamma had taken a house at
Oxford, so that he might be educated there, and who had never touched a
card in his life till he came to London, was perverted by Rawdon at the
Cocoa-Tree, made helplessly tipsy by this abominable seducer and
perverter of youth, and fleeced of four thousand pounds.  She described
with the most vivid minuteness the agonies of the country families whom
he had ruined--the sons whom he had plunged into dishonour and
poverty--the daughters whom he had inveigled into perdition.  She knew
the poor tradesmen who were bankrupt by his extravagance--the mean
shifts and rogueries with which he had ministered to it--the astounding
falsehoods by which he had imposed upon the most generous of aunts, and
the ingratitude and ridicule by which he had repaid her sacrifices.
She imparted these stories gradually to Miss Crawley; gave her the
whole benefit of them; felt it to be her bounden duty as a Christian
woman and mother of a family to do so; had not the smallest remorse or
compunction for the victim whom her tongue was immolating; nay, very
likely thought her act was quite meritorious, and plumed herself upon
her resolute manner of performing it.  Yes, if a man's character is to
be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relation to do the
business.  And one is bound to own, regarding this unfortunate wretch
of a Rawdon Crawley, that the mere truth was enough to condemn him, and
that all inventions of scandal were quite superfluous pains on his
friends' parts.

Rebecca, too, being now a relative, came in for the fullest share of
Mrs. Bute's kind inquiries.  This indefatigable pursuer of truth
(having given strict orders that the door was to be denied to all
emissaries or letters from Rawdon), took Miss Crawley's carriage, and
drove to her old friend Miss Pinkerton, at Minerva House, Chiswick
Mall, to whom she announced the dreadful intelligence of Captain
Rawdon's seduction by Miss Sharp, and from whom she got sundry strange
particulars regarding the ex-governess's birth and early history.  The
friend of the Lexicographer had plenty of information to give.  Miss
Jemima was made to fetch the drawing-master's receipts and letters.
This one was from a spunging-house: that entreated an advance: another
was full of gratitude for Rebecca's reception by the ladies of
Chiswick: and the last document from the unlucky artist's pen was that
in which, from his dying bed, he recommended his orphan child to Miss
Pinkerton's protection. There were juvenile letters and petitions from
Rebecca, too, in the collection, imploring aid for her father or
declaring her own gratitude.  Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no
better satires than letters.  Take a bundle of your dear friend's of
ten years back--your dear friend whom you hate now.  Look at a file of
your sister's! how you clung to each other till you quarrelled about
the twenty-pound legacy!  Get down the round-hand scrawls of your son
who has half broken your heart with selfish undutifulness since; or a
parcel of your own, breathing endless ardour and love eternal, which
were sent back by your mistress when she married the Nabob--your
mistress for whom you now care no more than for Queen Elizabeth. Vows,
love, promises, confidences, gratitude, how queerly they read after a
while!  There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction
of every written document (except receipted tradesmen's bills) after a
certain brief and proper interval.  Those quacks and misanthropes who
advertise indelible Japan ink should be made to perish along with their
wicked discoveries.  The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that
faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank,
so that you might write on it to somebody else.

From Miss Pinkerton's the indefatigable Mrs. Bute followed the track of
Sharp and his daughter back to the lodgings in Greek Street, which the
defunct painter had occupied; and where portraits of the landlady in
white satin, and of the husband in brass buttons, done by Sharp in lieu
of a quarter's rent, still decorated the parlour walls.  Mrs. Stokes
was a communicative person, and quickly told all she knew about Mr.
Sharp; how dissolute and poor he was; how good-natured and amusing;
how he was always hunted by bailiffs and duns; how, to the landlady's
horror, though she never could abide the woman, he did not marry his
wife till a short time before her death; and what a queer little wild
vixen his daughter was; how she kept them all laughing with her fun and
mimicry; how she used to fetch the gin from the public-house, and was
known in all the studios in the quarter--in brief, Mrs. Bute got such a
full account of her new niece's parentage, education, and behaviour as
would scarcely have pleased Rebecca, had the latter known that such
inquiries were being made concerning her.

Of all these industrious researches Miss Crawley had the full benefit.
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley was the daughter of an opera-girl. She had danced
herself.  She had been a model to the painters.  She was brought up as
became her mother's daughter.  She drank gin with her father, &c. &c.
It was a lost woman who was married to a lost man; and the moral to be
inferred from Mrs. Bute's tale was, that the knavery of the pair was
irremediable, and that no properly conducted person should ever notice
them again.

These were the materials which prudent Mrs. Bute gathered together in
Park Lane, the provisions and ammunition as it were with which she
fortified the house against the siege which she knew that Rawdon and
his wife would lay to Miss Crawley.

But if a fault may be found with her arrangements, it is this, that she
was too eager: she managed rather too well; undoubtedly she made Miss
Crawley more ill than was necessary; and though the old invalid
succumbed to her authority, it was so harassing and severe, that the
victim would be inclined to escape at the very first chance which fell
in her way.  Managing women, the ornaments of their sex--women who
order everything for everybody, and know so much better than any person
concerned what is good for their neighbours, don't sometimes speculate
upon the possibility of a domestic revolt, or upon other extreme
consequences resulting from their overstrained authority.

Thus, for instance, Mrs. Bute, with the best intentions no doubt in the
world, and wearing herself to death as she did by foregoing sleep,
dinner, fresh air, for the sake of her invalid sister-in-law, carried
her conviction of the old lady's illness so far that she almost managed
her into her coffin.  She pointed out her sacrifices and their results
one day to the constant apothecary, Mr. Clump.

"I am sure, my dear Mr. Clump," she said, "no efforts of mine have been
wanting to restore our dear invalid, whom the ingratitude of her nephew
has laid on the bed of sickness.  I never shrink from personal
discomfort: I never refuse to sacrifice myself."

"Your devotion, it must be confessed, is admirable," Mr. Clump says,
with a low bow; "but--"

"I have scarcely closed my eyes since my arrival: I give up sleep,
health, every comfort, to my sense of duty. When my poor James was in
the smallpox, did I allow any hireling to nurse him?  No."

"You did what became an excellent mother, my dear Madam--the best of
mothers; but--"

"As the mother of a family and the wife of an English clergyman, I
humbly trust that my principles are good," Mrs. Bute said, with a happy
solemnity of conviction; "and, as long as Nature supports me, never,
never, Mr. Clump, will I desert the post of duty.  Others may bring
that grey head with sorrow to the bed of sickness (here Mrs. Bute,
waving her hand, pointed to one of old Miss Crawley's coffee-coloured
fronts, which was perched on a stand in the dressing-room), but I will
never quit it. Ah, Mr. Clump!  I fear, I know, that the couch needs
spiritual as well as medical consolation."

"What I was going to observe, my dear Madam,"--here the resolute Clump
once more interposed with a bland air--"what I was going to observe
when you gave utterance to sentiments which do you so much honour, was
that I think you alarm yourself needlessly about our kind friend, and
sacrifice your own health too prodigally in her favour."

"I would lay down my life for my duty, or for any member of my
husband's family," Mrs. Bute interposed.

"Yes, Madam, if need were; but we don't want Mrs Bute Crawley to be a
martyr," Clump said gallantly.  "Dr Squills and myself have both
considered Miss Crawley's case with every anxiety and care, as you may
suppose.  We see her low-spirited and nervous; family events have
agitated her."

"Her nephew will come to perdition," Mrs. Crawley cried.

"Have agitated her: and you arrived like a guardian angel, my dear
Madam, a positive guardian angel, I assure you, to soothe her under the
pressure of calamity. But Dr. Squills and I were thinking that our
amiable friend is not in such a state as renders confinement to her bed
necessary.  She is depressed, but this confinement perhaps adds to her
depression.  She should have change, fresh air, gaiety; the most
delightful remedies in the pharmacopoeia," Mr. Clump said, grinning and
showing his handsome teeth.  "Persuade her to rise, dear Madam; drag
her from her couch and her low spirits; insist upon her taking little
drives.  They will restore the roses too to your cheeks, if I may so
speak to Mrs. Bute Crawley."

"The sight of her horrid nephew casually in the Park, where I am told
the wretch drives with the brazen partner of his crimes," Mrs. Bute
said (letting the cat of selfishness out of the bag of secrecy), "would
cause her such a shock, that we should have to bring her back to bed
again.  She must not go out, Mr. Clump.  She shall not go out as long
as I remain to watch over her; And as for my health, what matters it?
I give it cheerfully, sir.  I sacrifice it at the altar of my duty."

"Upon my word, Madam," Mr. Clump now said bluntly, "I won't answer for
her life if she remains locked up in that dark room.  She is so nervous
that we may lose her any day; and if you wish Captain Crawley to be her
heir, I warn you frankly, Madam, that you are doing your very best to
serve him."

"Gracious mercy! is her life in danger?" Mrs. Bute cried.  "Why, why,
Mr. Clump, did you not inform me sooner?"

The night before, Mr. Clump and Dr. Squills had had a consultation
(over a bottle of wine at the house of Sir Lapin Warren, whose lady was
about to present him with a thirteenth blessing), regarding Miss
Crawley and her case.

"What a little harpy that woman from Hampshire is, Clump," Squills
remarked, "that has seized upon old Tilly Crawley.  Devilish good
Madeira."

"What a fool Rawdon Crawley has been," Clump replied, "to go and marry
a governess!  There was something about the girl, too."

"Green eyes, fair skin, pretty figure, famous frontal development,"
Squills remarked.  "There is something about her; and Crawley was a
fool, Squills."

"A d---- fool--always was," the apothecary replied.

"Of course the old girl will fling him over," said the physician, and
after a pause added, "She'll cut up well, I suppose."

"Cut up," says Clump with a grin; "I wouldn't have her cut up for two
hundred a year."

"That Hampshire woman will kill her in two months, Clump, my boy, if
she stops about her," Dr. Squills said. "Old woman; full feeder;
nervous subject; palpitation of the heart; pressure on the brain;
apoplexy; off she goes. Get her up, Clump; get her out: or I wouldn't
give many weeks' purchase for your two hundred a year." And it was
acting upon this hint that the worthy apothecary spoke with so much
candour to Mrs. Bute Crawley.

Having the old lady under her hand: in bed: with nobody near, Mrs. Bute
had made more than one assault upon her, to induce her to alter her
will.  But Miss Crawley's usual terrors regarding death increased
greatly when such dismal propositions were made to her, and Mrs. Bute
saw that she must get her patient into cheerful spirits and health
before she could hope to attain the pious object which she had in view.
Whither to take her was the next puzzle. The only place where she is
not likely to meet those odious Rawdons is at church, and that won't
amuse her, Mrs. Bute justly felt.  "We must go and visit our beautiful
suburbs of London," she then thought.  "I hear they are the most
picturesque in the world"; and so she had a sudden interest for
Hampstead, and Hornsey, and found that Dulwich had great charms for
her, and getting her victim into her carriage, drove her to those
rustic spots, beguiling the little journeys with conversations about
Rawdon and his wife, and telling every story to the old lady which
could add to her indignation against this pair of reprobates.

Perhaps Mrs. Bute pulled the string unnecessarily tight. For though she
worked up Miss Crawley to a proper dislike of her disobedient nephew,
the invalid had a great hatred and secret terror of her victimizer, and
panted to escape from her.  After a brief space, she rebelled against
Highgate and Hornsey utterly.  She would go into the Park.  Mrs. Bute
knew they would meet the abominable Rawdon there, and she was right.
One day in the ring, Rawdon's stanhope came in sight; Rebecca was
seated by him.  In the enemy's equipage Miss Crawley occupied her usual
place, with Mrs. Bute on her left, the poodle and Miss Briggs on the
back seat.  It was a nervous moment, and Rebecca's heart beat quick as
she recognized the carriage; and as the two vehicles crossed each other
in a line, she clasped her hands, and looked towards the spinster with
a face of agonized attachment and devotion. Rawdon himself trembled,
and his face grew purple behind his dyed mustachios.  Only old Briggs
was moved in the other carriage, and cast her great eyes nervously
towards her old friends.  Miss Crawley's bonnet was resolutely turned
towards the Serpentine.  Mrs. Bute happened to be in ecstasies with the
poodle, and was calling him a little darling, and a sweet little zoggy,
and a pretty pet.  The carriages moved on, each in his line.

"Done, by Jove," Rawdon said to his wife.

"Try once more, Rawdon," Rebecca answered.  "Could not you lock your
wheels into theirs, dearest?"

Rawdon had not the heart for that manoeuvre.  When the carriages met
again, he stood up in his stanhope; he raised his hand ready to doff
his hat; he looked with all his eyes.  But this time Miss Crawley's
face was not turned away; she and Mrs. Bute looked him full in the
face, and cut their nephew pitilessly.  He sank back in his seat with
an oath, and striking out of the ring, dashed away desperately
homewards.

It was a gallant and decided triumph for Mrs. Bute. But she felt the
danger of many such meetings, as she saw the evident nervousness of
Miss Crawley; and she determined that it was most necessary for her
dear friend's health, that they should leave town for a while, and
recommended Brighton very strongly.



In Which Captain Dobbin Acts as the Messenger of Hymen

Without knowing how, Captain William Dobbin found himself the great
promoter, arranger, and manager of the match between George Osborne and
Amelia.  But for him it never would have taken place:  he could not but
confess as much to himself, and smiled rather bitterly as he thought
that he of all men in the world should be the person upon whom the care
of this marriage had fallen. But though indeed the conducting of this
negotiation was about as painful a task as could be set to him, yet
when he had a duty to perform, Captain Dobbin was accustomed to go
through it without many words or much hesitation: and, having made up
his mind completely, that if Miss Sedley was balked of her husband she
would die of the disappointment, he was determined to use all his best
endeavours to keep her alive.

I forbear to enter into minute particulars of the interview between
George and Amelia, when the former was brought back to the feet (or
should we venture to say the arms?) of his young mistress by the
intervention of his friend honest William.  A much harder heart than
George's would have melted at the sight of that sweet face so sadly
ravaged by grief and despair, and at the simple tender accents in which
she told her little broken-hearted story: but as she did not faint when
her mother, trembling, brought Osborne to her; and as she only gave
relief to her overcharged grief, by laying her head on her lover's
shoulder and there weeping for a while the most tender, copious, and
refreshing tears--old Mrs. Sedley, too greatly relieved, thought it was
best to leave the young persons to themselves; and so quitted Emmy
crying over George's hand, and kissing it humbly, as if he were her
supreme chief and master, and as if she were quite a guilty and
unworthy person needing every favour and grace from him.

This prostration and sweet unrepining obedience exquisitely touched and
flattered George Osborne.  He saw a slave before him in that simple
yielding faithful creature, and his soul within him thrilled secretly
somehow at the knowledge of his power.  He would be generous-minded,
Sultan as he was, and raise up this kneeling Esther and make a queen of
her:  besides, her sadness and beauty touched him as much as her
submission, and so he cheered her, and raised her up and forgave her,
so to speak.  All her hopes and feelings, which were dying and
withering, this her sun having been removed from her, bloomed again and
at once, its light being restored. You would scarcely have recognised
the beaming little face upon Amelia's pillow that night as the one that
was laid there the night before, so wan, so lifeless, so careless of
all round about.  The honest Irish maid-servant, delighted with the
change, asked leave to kiss the face that had grown all of a sudden so
rosy.  Amelia put her arms round the girl's neck and kissed her with
all her heart, like a child.  She was little more.  She had that night
a sweet refreshing sleep, like one--and what a spring of inexpressible
happiness as she woke in the morning sunshine!

"He will be here again to-day," Amelia thought.  "He is the greatest
and best of men."  And the fact is, that George thought he was one of
the generousest creatures alive: and that he was making a tremendous
sacrifice in marrying this young creature.

While she and Osborne were having their delightful tete-a-tete above
stairs, old Mrs. Sedley and Captain Dobbin were conversing below upon
the state of the affairs, and the chances and future arrangements of
the young people.  Mrs. Sedley having brought the two lovers together
and left them embracing each other with all their might, like a true
woman, was of opinion that no power on earth would induce Mr. Sedley to
consent to the match between his daughter and the son of a man who had
so shamefully, wickedly, and monstrously treated him.  And she told a
long story about happier days and their earlier splendours, when
Osborne lived in a very humble way in the New Road, and his wife was
too glad to receive some of Jos's little baby things, with which Mrs.
Sedley accommodated her at the birth of one of Osborne's own children.
The fiendish ingratitude of that man, she was sure, had broken Mr. S.'s
heart: and as for a marriage, he would never, never, never, never
consent.

"They must run away together, Ma'am," Dobbin said, laughing, "and
follow the example of Captain Rawdon Crawley, and Miss Emmy's friend
the little governess." Was it possible? Well she never!  Mrs. Sedley
was all excitement about this news.  She wished that Blenkinsop were
here to hear it:  Blenkinsop always mistrusted that Miss Sharp.-- What
an escape Jos had had! and she described the already well-known
love-passages between Rebecca and the Collector of Boggley Wollah.

It was not, however, Mr. Sedley's wrath which Dobbin feared, so much as
that of the other parent concerned, and he owned that he had a very
considerable doubt and anxiety respecting the behaviour of the
black-browed old tyrant of a Russia merchant in Russell Square.  He has
forbidden the match peremptorily, Dobbin thought. He knew what a savage
determined man Osborne was, and how he stuck by his word. "The only
chance George has of reconcilement," argued his friend, "is by
distinguishing himself in the coming campaign.  If he dies they both go
together.  If he fails in distinction--what then?  He has some money
from his mother, I have heard enough to purchase his majority--or he
must sell out and go and dig in Canada, or rough it in a cottage in the
country." With such a partner Dobbin thought he would not mind
Siberia--and, strange to say, this absurd and utterly imprudent young
fellow never for a moment considered that the want of means to keep a
nice carriage and horses, and of an income which should enable its
possessors to entertain their friends genteelly, ought to operate as
bars to the union of George and Miss Sedley.

It was these weighty considerations which made him think too that the
marriage should take place as quickly as possible.  Was he anxious
himself, I wonder, to have it over?--as people, when death has
occurred, like to press forward the funeral, or when a parting is
resolved upon, hasten it.  It is certain that Mr. Dobbin, having taken
the matter in hand, was most extraordinarily eager in the conduct of
it.  He urged on George the necessity of immediate action:  he showed
the chances of reconciliation with his father, which a favourable
mention of his name in the Gazette must bring about.  If need were he
would go himself and brave both the fathers in the business.  At all
events, he besought George to go through with it before the orders
came, which everybody expected, for the departure of the regiment from
England on foreign service.

Bent upon these hymeneal projects, and with the applause and consent of
Mrs. Sedley, who did not care to break the matter personally to her
husband, Mr. Dobbin went to seek John Sedley at his house of call in
the City, the Tapioca Coffee-house, where, since his own offices were
shut up, and fate had overtaken him, the poor broken-down old
gentleman used to betake himself daily, and write letters and receive
them, and tie them up into mysterious bundles, several of which he
carried in the flaps of his coat.  I don't know anything more dismal
than that business and bustle and mystery of a ruined man:  those
letters from the wealthy which he shows you:  those worn greasy
documents promising support and offering condolence which he places
wistfully before you, and on which he builds his hopes of restoration
and future fortune. My beloved reader has no doubt in the course of his
experience been waylaid by many such a luckless companion.  He takes
you into the corner; he has his bundle of papers out of his gaping coat
pocket; and the tape off, and the string in his mouth, and the
favourite letters selected and laid before you; and who does not know
the sad eager half-crazy look which he fixes on you with his hopeless
eyes?

Changed into a man of this sort, Dobbin found the once florid, jovial,
and prosperous John Sedley.  His coat, that used to be so glossy and
trim, was white at the seams, and the buttons showed the copper.  His
face had fallen in, and was unshorn; his frill and neckcloth hung limp
under his bagging waistcoat.  When he used to treat the boys in old
days at a coffee-house, he would shout and laugh louder than anybody
there, and have all the waiters skipping round him; it was quite
painful to see how humble and civil he was to John of the Tapioca, a
blear-eyed old attendant in dingy stockings and cracked pumps, whose
business it was to serve glasses of wafers, and bumpers of ink in
pewter, and slices of paper to the frequenters of this dreary house of
entertainment, where nothing else seemed to be consumed.  As for
William Dobbin, whom he had tipped repeatedly in his youth, and who had
been the old gentleman's butt on a thousand occasions, old Sedley gave
his hand to him in a very hesitating humble manner now, and called him
"Sir." A feeling of shame and remorse took possession of William Dobbin
as the broken old man so received and addressed him, as if he himself
had been somehow guilty of the misfortunes which had brought Sedley so
low.

"I am very glad to see you, Captain Dobbin, sir," says he, after a
skulking look or two at his visitor (whose lanky figure and military
appearance caused some excitement likewise to twinkle in the blear eyes
of the waiter in the cracked dancing pumps, and awakened the old lady
in black, who dozed among the mouldy old coffee-cups in the bar).  "How
is the worthy alderman, and my lady, your excellent mother, sir?"  He
looked round at the waiter as he said, "My lady," as much as to say,
"Hark ye, John, I have friends still, and persons of rank and
reputation, too."  "Are you come to do anything in my way, sir?  My
young friends Dale and Spiggot do all my business for me now, until my
new offices are ready; for I'm only here temporarily, you know,
Captain.  What can we do for you, sir?  Will you like to take anything?"

Dobbin, with a great deal of hesitation and stuttering, protested that
he was not in the least hungry or thirsty; that he had no business to
transact; that he only came to ask if Mr. Sedley was well, and to shake
hands with an old friend; and, he added, with a desperate perversion of
truth, "My mother is very well--that is, she's been very unwell, and is
only waiting for the first fine day to go out and call upon Mrs.
Sedley.  How is Mrs. Sedley, sir?  I hope she's quite well."  And here
he paused, reflecting on his own consummate hypocrisy; for the day was
as fine, and the sunshine as bright as it ever is in Coffin Court,
where the Tapioca Coffee-house is situated: and Mr. Dobbin remembered
that he had seen Mrs. Sedley himself only an hour before, having driven
Osborne down to Fulham in his gig, and left him there tete-a-tete with
Miss Amelia.

"My wife will be very happy to see her ladyship," Sedley replied,
pulling out his papers.  "I've a very kind letter here from your
father, sir, and beg my respectful compliments to him.  Lady D. will
find us in rather a smaller house than we were accustomed to receive
our friends in; but it's snug, and the change of air does good to my
daughter, who was suffering in town rather--you remember little Emmy,
sir?--yes, suffering a good deal." The old gentleman's eyes were
wandering as he spoke, and he was thinking of something else, as he
sate thrumming on his papers and fumbling at the worn red tape.

"You're a military man," he went on; "I ask you, Bill Dobbin, could any
man ever have speculated upon the return of that Corsican scoundrel
from Elba?  When the allied sovereigns were here last year, and we gave
'em that dinner in the City, sir, and we saw the Temple of Concord, and
the fireworks, and the Chinese bridge in St. James's Park, could any
sensible man suppose that peace wasn't really concluded, after we'd
actually sung Te Deum for it, sir?  I ask you, William, could I suppose
that the Emperor of Austria was a damned traitor--a traitor, and
nothing more?  I don't mince words--a double-faced infernal traitor and
schemer, who meant to have his son-in-law back all along.  And I say
that the escape of Boney from Elba was a damned imposition and plot,
sir, in which half the powers of Europe were concerned, to bring the
funds down, and to ruin this country.  That's why I'm here, William.
That's why my name's in the Gazette.  Why, sir?--because I trusted the
Emperor of Russia and the Prince Regent.  Look here.  Look at my
papers.  Look what the funds were on the 1st of March--what the French
fives were when I bought for the count.  And what they're at now.
There was collusion, sir, or that villain never would have escaped.
Where was the English Commissioner who allowed him to get away?  He
ought to be shot, sir--brought to a court-martial, and shot, by Jove."

"We're going to hunt Boney out, sir," Dobbin said, rather alarmed at
the fury of the old man, the veins of whose forehead began to swell,
and who sate drumming his papers with his clenched fist.  "We are going
to hunt him out, sir--the Duke's in Belgium already, and we expect
marching orders every day."

"Give him no quarter.  Bring back the villain's head, sir. Shoot the
coward down, sir," Sedley roared.  "I'd enlist myself, by--; but I'm a
broken old man--ruined by that damned scoundrel--and by a parcel of
swindling thieves in this country whom I made, sir, and who are rolling
in their carriages now," he added, with a break in his voice.

Dobbin was not a little affected by the sight of this once kind old
friend, crazed almost with misfortune and raving with senile anger.
Pity the fallen gentleman: you to whom money and fair repute are the
chiefest good; and so, surely, are they in Vanity Fair.

"Yes," he continued, "there are some vipers that you warm, and they
sting you afterwards.  There are some beggars that you put on
horseback, and they're the first to ride you down.  You know whom I
mean, William Dobbin, my boy.  I mean a purse-proud villain in Russell
Square, whom I knew without a shilling, and whom I pray and hope to see
a beggar as he was when I befriended him."

"I have heard something of this, sir, from my friend George," Dobbin
said, anxious to come to his point.  "The quarrel between you and his
father has cut him up a great deal, sir.  Indeed, I'm the bearer of a
message from him."

"O, THAT'S your errand, is it?" cried the old man, jumping up. "What!
perhaps he condoles with me, does he? Very kind of him, the
stiff-backed prig, with his dandified airs and West End swagger. He's
hankering about my house, is he still?  If my son had the courage of a
man, he'd shoot him.  He's as big a villain as his father.  I won't
have his name mentioned in my house.  I curse the day that ever I let
him into it; and I'd rather see my daughter dead at my feet than
married to him."

"His father's harshness is not George's fault, sir.  Your daughter's
love for him is as much your doing as his.  Who are you, that you are
to play with two young people's affections and break their hearts at
your will?"

"Recollect it's not his father that breaks the match off," old Sedley
cried out.  "It's I that forbid it.  That family and mine are separated
for ever.  I'm fallen low, but not so low as that: no, no. And so you
may tell the whole race--son, and father and sisters, and all."

"It's my belief, sir, that you have not the power or the right to
separate those two," Dobbin answered in a low voice; "and that if you
don't give your daughter your consent it will be her duty to marry
without it.  There's no reason she should die or live miserably because
you are wrong-headed.  To my thinking, she's just as much married as if
the banns had been read in all the churches in London.  And what better
answer can there be to Osborne's charges against you, as charges there
are, than that his son claims to enter your family and marry your
daughter?"

A light of something like satisfaction seemed to break over old Sedley
as this point was put to him: but he still persisted that with his
consent the marriage between Amelia and George should never take place.

"We must do it without," Dobbin said, smiling, and told Mr. Sedley, as
he had told Mrs. Sedley in the day, before, the story of Rebecca's
elopement with Captain Crawley.  It evidently amused the old gentleman.
"You're terrible fellows, you Captains," said he, tying up his papers;
and his face wore something like a smile upon it, to the astonishment
of the blear-eyed waiter who now entered, and had never seen such an
expression upon Sedley's countenance since he had used the dismal
coffee-house.

The idea of hitting his enemy Osborne such a blow soothed, perhaps, the
old gentleman: and, their colloquy presently ending, he and Dobbin
parted pretty good friends.

"My sisters say she has diamonds as big as pigeons' eggs," George said,
laughing.  "How they must set off her complexion!  A perfect
illumination it must be when her jewels are on her neck.  Her
jet-black hair is as curly as Sambo's.  I dare say she wore a nose ring
when she went to court; and with a plume of feathers in her top-knot
she would look a perfect Belle Sauvage."

George, in conversation with Amelia, was rallying the appearance of a
young lady of whom his father and sisters had lately made the
acquaintance, and who was an object of vast respect to the Russell
Square family.  She was reported to have I don't know how many
plantations in the West Indies; a deal of money in the funds; and three
stars to her name in the East India stockholders' list.  She had a
mansion in Surrey, and a house in Portland Place. The name of the rich
West India heiress had been mentioned with applause in the Morning
Post.  Mrs. Haggistoun, Colonel Haggistoun's widow, her relative,
"chaperoned" her, and kept her house.  She was just from school, where
she had completed her education, and George and his sisters had met her
at an evening party at old Hulker's house, Devonshire Place (Hulker,
Bullock, and Co. were long the correspondents of her house in the West
Indies), and the girls had made the most cordial advances to her, which
the heiress had received with great good humour. An orphan in her
position--with her money--so interesting! the Misses Osborne said.
They were full of their new friend when they returned from the Hulker
ball to Miss Wirt, their companion; they had made arrangements for
continually meeting, and had the carriage and drove to see her the very
next day.  Mrs. Haggistoun, Colonel Haggistoun's widow, a relation of
Lord Binkie, and always talking of him, struck the dear unsophisticated
girls as rather haughty, and too much inclined to talk about her great
relations: but Rhoda was everything they could wish--the frankest,
kindest, most agreeable creature--wanting a little polish, but so
good-natured.  The girls Christian-named each other at once.

"You should have seen her dress for court, Emmy," Osborne cried,
laughing.  "She came to my sisters to show it off, before she was
presented in state by my Lady Binkie, the Haggistoun's kinswoman. She's
related to every one, that Haggistoun.  Her diamonds blazed out like
Vauxhall on the night we were there.  (Do you remember Vauxhall, Emmy,
and Jos singing to his dearest diddle diddle darling?)  Diamonds and
mahogany, my dear! think what an advantageous contrast--and the white
feathers in her hair--I mean in her wool.  She had earrings like
chandeliers; you might have lighted 'em up, by Jove--and a yellow satin
train that streeled after her like the tail of a comet."

"How old is she?" asked Emmy, to whom George was rattling away
regarding this dark paragon, on the morning of their reunion--rattling
away as no other man in the world surely could.

"Why the Black Princess, though she has only just left school, must be
two or three and twenty.  And you should see the hand she writes! Mrs.
Colonel Haggistoun usually writes her letters, but in a moment of
confidence, she put pen to paper for my sisters; she spelt satin
satting, and Saint James's, Saint Jams."

"Why, surely it must be Miss Swartz, the parlour boarder," Emmy said,
remembering that good-natured young mulatto girl, who had been so
hysterically affected when Amelia left Miss Pinkerton's academy.

"The very name," George said.  "Her father was a German Jew--a
slave-owner they say--connected with the Cannibal Islands in some way
or other.  He died last year, and Miss Pinkerton has finished her
education.  She can play two pieces on the piano; she knows three
songs; she can write when Mrs. Haggistoun is by to spell for her; and
Jane and Maria already have got to love her as a sister."

"I wish they would have loved me," said Emmy, wistfully. "They were
always very cold to me."

"My dear child, they would have loved you if you had had two hundred
thousand pounds," George replied.  "That is the way in which they have
been brought up.  Ours is a ready-money society.  We live among bankers
and City big-wigs, and be hanged to them, and every man, as he talks to
you, is jingling his guineas in his pocket.  There is that jackass Fred
Bullock is going to marry Maria--there's Goldmore, the East India
Director, there's Dipley, in the tallow trade--OUR trade," George said,
with an uneasy laugh and a blush.  "Curse the whole pack of
money-grubbing vulgarians!  I fall asleep at their great heavy dinners.
I feel ashamed in my father's great stupid parties.  I've been
accustomed to live with gentlemen, and men of the world and fashion,
Emmy, not with a parcel of turtle-fed tradesmen.  Dear little woman,
you are the only person of our set who ever looked, or thought, or
spoke like a lady: and you do it because you're an angel and can't help
it.  Don't remonstrate.  You are the only lady. Didn't Miss Crawley
remark it, who has lived in the best company in Europe?  And as for
Crawley, of the Life Guards, hang it, he's a fine fellow: and I like
him for marrying the girl he had chosen."

Amelia admired Mr. Crawley very much, too, for this; and trusted
Rebecca would be happy with him, and hoped (with a laugh) Jos would be
consoled.  And so the pair went on prattling, as in quite early days.
Amelia's confidence being perfectly restored to her, though she
expressed a great deal of pretty jealousy about Miss Swartz, and
professed to be dreadfully frightened--like a hypocrite as she was--lest
George should forget her for the heiress and her money and her
estates in Saint Kitt's.  But the fact is, she was a great deal too
happy to have fears or doubts or misgivings of any sort: and having
George at her side again, was not afraid of any heiress or beauty, or
indeed of any sort of danger.

When Captain Dobbin came back in the afternoon to these people--which
he did with a great deal of sympathy for them--it did his heart good to
see how Amelia had grown young again--how she laughed, and chirped, and
sang familiar old songs at the piano, which were only interrupted by
the bell from without proclaiming Mr. Sedley's return from the City,
before whom George received a signal to retreat.

Beyond the first smile of recognition--and even that was an hypocrisy,
for she thought his arrival rather provoking--Miss Sedley did not once
notice Dobbin during his visit.  But he was content, so that he saw her
happy; and thankful to have been the means of making her so.



A Quarrel About an Heiress

Love may be felt for any young lady endowed with such qualities as Miss
Swartz possessed; and a great dream of ambition entered into old Mr.
Osborne's soul, which she was to realize.  He encouraged, with the
utmost enthusiasm and friendliness, his daughters' amiable attachment
to the young heiress, and protested that it gave him the sincerest
pleasure as a father to see the love of his girls so well disposed.

"You won't find," he would say to Miss Rhoda, "that splendour and rank
to which you are accustomed at the West End, my dear Miss, at our
humble mansion in Russell Square.  My daughters are plain,
disinterested girls, but their hearts are in the right place, and
they've conceived an attachment for you which does them honour--I say,
which does them honour.  I'm a plain, simple, humble British
merchant--an honest one, as my respected friends Hulker and Bullock
will vouch, who were the correspondents of your late lamented father.
You'll find us a united, simple, happy, and I think I may say
respected, family--a plain table, a plain people, but a warm welcome,
my dear Miss Rhoda--Rhoda, let me say, for my heart warms to you, it
does really.  I'm a frank man, and I like you.  A glass of Champagne!
Hicks, Champagne to Miss Swartz."

There is little doubt that old Osborne believed all he said, and that
the girls were quite earnest in their protestations of affection for
Miss Swartz.  People in Vanity Fair fasten on to rich folks quite
naturally.  If the simplest people are disposed to look not a little
kindly on great Prosperity (for I defy any member of the British public
to say that the notion of Wealth has not something awful and pleasing
to him; and you, if you are told that the man next you at dinner has
got half a million, not to look at him with a certain interest)--if the
simple look benevolently on money, how much more do your old worldlings
regard it!  Their affections rush out to meet and welcome money.  Their
kind sentiments awaken spontaneously towards the interesting possessors
of it.  I know some respectable people who don't consider themselves at
liberty to indulge in friendship for any individual who has not a
certain competency, or place in society.  They give a loose to their
feelings on proper occasions.  And the proof is, that the major part of
the Osborne family, who had not, in fifteen years, been able to get up
a hearty regard for Amelia Sedley, became as fond of Miss Swartz in the
course of a single evening as the most romantic advocate of friendship
at first sight could desire.

What a match for George she'd be (the sisters and Miss Wirt agreed),
and how much better than that insignificant little Amelia!  Such a
dashing young fellow as he is, with his good looks, rank, and
accomplishments, would be the very husband for her.  Visions of balls
in Portland Place, presentations at Court, and introductions to half
the peerage, filled the minds of the young ladies; who talked of
nothing but George and his grand acquaintances to their beloved new
friend.

Old Osborne thought she would be a great match, too, for his son. He
should leave the army; he should go into Parliament; he should cut a
figure in the fashion and in the state.  His blood boiled with honest
British exultation, as he saw the name of Osborne ennobled in the
person of his son, and thought that he might be the progenitor of a
glorious line of baronets.  He worked in the City and on 'Change, until
he knew everything relating to the fortune of the heiress, how her
money was placed, and where her estates lay.  Young Fred Bullock, one
of his chief informants, would have liked to make a bid for her himself
(it was so the young banker expressed it), only he was booked to Maria
Osborne.  But not being able to secure her as a wife, the disinterested
Fred quite approved of her as a sister-in-law.  "Let George cut in
directly and win her," was his advice.  "Strike while the iron's hot,
you know--while she's fresh to the town: in a few weeks some d----
fellow from the West End will come in with a title and a rotten
rent-roll and cut all us City men out, as Lord Fitzrufus did last year
with Miss Grogram, who was actually engaged to Podder, of Podder &
Brown's.  The sooner it is done the better, Mr. Osborne; them's my
sentiments," the wag said; though, when Osborne had left the bank
parlour, Mr. Bullock remembered Amelia, and what a pretty girl she was,
and how attached to George Osborne; and he gave up at least ten seconds
of his valuable time to regretting the misfortune which had befallen
that unlucky young woman.

While thus George Osborne's good feelings, and his good friend and
genius, Dobbin, were carrying back the truant to Amelia's feet,
George's parent and sisters were arranging this splendid match for him,
which they never dreamed he would resist.

When the elder Osborne gave what he called "a hint," there was no
possibility for the most obtuse to mistake his meaning.  He called
kicking a footman downstairs a hint to the latter to leave his service.
With his usual frankness and delicacy he told Mrs. Haggistoun that he
would give her a cheque for five thousand pounds on the day his son was
married to her ward; and called that proposal a hint, and considered it
a very dexterous piece of diplomacy.  He gave George finally such
another hint regarding the heiress; and ordered him to marry her out of
hand, as he would have ordered his butler to draw a cork, or his clerk
to write a letter.

This imperative hint disturbed George a good deal.  He was in the very
first enthusiasm and delight of his second courtship of Amelia, which
was inexpressibly sweet to him.  The contrast of her manners and
appearance with those of the heiress, made the idea of a union with the
latter appear doubly ludicrous and odious.  Carriages and opera-boxes,
thought he; fancy being seen in them by the side of such a mahogany
charmer as that!  Add to all that the junior Osborne was quite as
obstinate as the senior: when he wanted a thing, quite as firm in his
resolution to get it; and quite as violent when angered, as his father
in his most stern moments.

On the first day when his father formally gave him the hint that he was
to place his affections at Miss Swartz's feet, George temporised with
the old gentleman.  "You should have thought of the matter sooner,
sir," he said. "It can't be done now, when we're expecting every day to
go on foreign service.  Wait till my return, if I do return"; and then
he represented, that the time when the regiment was daily expecting to
quit England, was exceedingly ill-chosen: that the few days or weeks
during which they were still to remain at home, must be devoted to
business and not to love-making: time enough for that when he came home
with his majority; "for, I promise you," said he, with a satisfied air,
"that one way or other you shall read the name of George Osborne in the
Gazette."

The father's reply to this was founded upon the information which he
had got in the City: that the West End chaps would infallibly catch
hold of the heiress if any delay took place: that if he didn't marry
Miss S., he might at least have an engagement in writing, to come into
effect when he returned to England; and that a man who could get ten
thousand a year by staying at home, was a fool to risk his life abroad.

"So that you would have me shown up as a coward, sir, and our name
dishonoured for the sake of Miss Swartz's money," George interposed.

This remark staggered the old gentleman; but as he had to reply to it,
and as his mind was nevertheless made up, he said, "You will dine here
to-morrow, sir, and every day Miss Swartz comes, you will be here to
pay your respects to her.  If you want for money, call upon Mr.
Chopper." Thus a new obstacle was in George's way, to interfere with
his plans regarding Amelia; and about which he and Dobbin had more than
one confidential consultation.  His friend's opinion respecting the
line of conduct which he ought to pursue, we know already.  And as for
Osborne, when he was once bent on a thing, a fresh obstacle or two only
rendered him the more resolute.

The dark object of the conspiracy into which the chiefs of the Osborne
family had entered, was quite ignorant of all their plans regarding her
(which, strange to say, her friend and chaperon did not divulge), and,
taking all the young ladies' flattery for genuine sentiment, and being,
as we have before had occasion to show, of a very warm and impetuous
nature, responded to their affection with quite a tropical ardour.  And
if the truth may be told, I dare say that she too had some selfish
attraction in the Russell Square house; and in a word, thought George
Osborne a very nice young man. His whiskers had made an impression upon
her, on the very first night she beheld them at the ball at Messrs.
Hulkers; and, as we know, she was not the first woman who had been
charmed by them. George had an air at once swaggering and melancholy,
languid and fierce.  He looked like a man who had passions, secrets,
and private harrowing griefs and adventures.  His voice was rich and
deep.  He would say it was a warm evening, or ask his partner to take
an ice, with a tone as sad and confidential as if he were breaking her
mother's death to her, or preluding a declaration of love.  He trampled
over all the young bucks of his father's circle, and was the hero among
those third-rate men.  Some few sneered at him and hated him. Some,
like Dobbin, fanatically admired him.  And his whiskers had begun to do
their work, and to curl themselves round the affections of Miss Swartz.

Whenever there was a chance of meeting him in Russell Square, that
simple and good-natured young woman was quite in a flurry to see her
dear Misses Osborne.  She went to great expenses in new gowns, and
bracelets, and bonnets, and in prodigious feathers.  She adorned her
person with her utmost skill to please the Conqueror, and exhibited all
her simple accomplishments to win his favour.  The girls would ask her,
with the greatest gravity, for a little music, and she would sing her
three songs and play her two little pieces as often as ever they asked,
and with an always increasing pleasure to herself.  During these
delectable entertainments, Miss Wirt and the chaperon sate by, and
conned over the peerage, and talked about the nobility.

The day after George had his hint from his father, and a short time
before the hour of dinner, he was lolling upon a sofa in the
drawing-room in a very becoming and perfectly natural attitude of
melancholy.  He had been, at his father's request, to Mr. Chopper in
the City (the old gentleman, though he gave great sums to his son,
would never specify any fixed allowance for him, and rewarded him only
as he was in the humour).  He had then been to pass three hours with
Amelia, his dear little Amelia, at Fulham; and he came home to find his
sisters spread in starched muslin in the drawing-room, the dowagers
cackling in the background, and honest Swartz in her favourite
amber-coloured satin, with turquoise bracelets, countless rings,
flowers, feathers, and all sorts of tags and gimcracks, about as
elegantly decorated as a she chimney-sweep on May-day.

The girls, after vain attempts to engage him in conversation, talked
about fashions and the last drawing-room until he was perfectly sick of
their chatter.  He contrasted their behaviour with little Emmy's--their
shrill voices with her tender ringing tones; their attitudes and their
elbows and their starch, with her humble soft movements and modest
graces.  Poor Swartz was seated in a place where Emmy had been
accustomed to sit. Her bejewelled hands lay sprawling in her amber
satin lap.  Her tags and ear-rings twinkled, and her big eyes rolled
about.  She was doing nothing with perfect contentment, and thinking
herself charming.  Anything so becoming as the satin the sisters had
never seen.

"Dammy," George said to a confidential friend, "she looked like a China
doll, which has nothing to do all day but to grin and wag its head.  By
Jove, Will, it was all I I could do to prevent myself from throwing the
sofa-cushion at her." He restrained that exhibition of sentiment,
however.

The sisters began to play the Battle of Prague.  "Stop that d----
thing," George howled out in a fury from the sofa.  "It makes me mad.
You play us something, Miss Swartz, do.  Sing something, anything but
the Battle of Prague."

"Shall I sing 'Blue Eyed Mary' or the air from the Cabinet?" Miss
Swartz asked.

"That sweet thing from the Cabinet," the sisters said.

"We've had that," replied the misanthrope on the sofa.

"I can sing 'Fluvy du Tajy,'" Swartz said, in a meek voice, "if I had
the words." It was the last of the worthy young woman's collection.

"O, 'Fleuve du Tage,'" Miss Maria cried; "we have the song," and went
off to fetch the book in which it was.

Now it happened that this song, then in the height of the fashion, had
been given to the young ladies by a young friend of theirs, whose name
was on the title, and Miss Swartz, having concluded the ditty with
George's applause (for he remembered that it was a favourite of
Amelia's), was hoping for an encore perhaps, and fiddling with the
leaves of the music, when her eye fell upon the title, and she saw
"Amelia Sedley" written in the comer.

"Lor!" cried Miss Swartz, spinning swiftly round on the music-stool,
"is it my Amelia?  Amelia that was at Miss P.'s at Hammersmith?  I know
it is.  It's her, and--  Tell me about her--where is she?"

"Don't mention her," Miss Maria Osborne said hastily.  "Her family has
disgraced itself.  Her father cheated Papa, and as for her, she is
never to be mentioned HERE." This was Miss Maria's return for George's
rudeness about the Battle of Prague.

"Are you a friend of Amelia's?" George said, bouncing up.  "God bless
you for it, Miss Swartz.  Don't believe what the girls say. SHE'S not
to blame at any rate. She's the best--"

"You know you're not to speak about her, George," cried Jane.  "Papa
forbids it."

"Who's to prevent me?" George cried out.  "I will speak of her.  I say
she's the best, the kindest, the gentlest, the sweetest girl in
England; and that, bankrupt or no, my sisters are not fit to hold
candles to her.  If you like her, go and see her, Miss Swartz; she
wants friends now; and I say, God bless everybody who befriends her.
Anybody who speaks kindly of her is my friend; anybody who speaks
against her is my enemy.  Thank you, Miss Swartz"; and he went up and
wrung her hand.

"George! George!" one of the sisters cried imploringly.

"I say," George said fiercely, "I thank everybody who loves Amelia
Sed--" He stopped.  Old Osborne was in the room with a face livid with
rage, and eyes like hot coals.

Though George had stopped in his sentence, yet, his blood being up, he
was not to be cowed by all the generations of Osborne; rallying
instantly, he replied to the bullying look of his father, with another
so indicative of resolution and defiance that the elder man quailed in
his turn, and looked away.  He felt that the tussle was coming.  "Mrs.
Haggistoun, let me take you down to dinner," he said. "Give your arm to
Miss Swartz, George," and they marched.

"Miss Swartz, I love Amelia, and we've been engaged almost all our
lives," Osborne said to his partner; and during all the dinner, George
rattled on with a volubility which surprised himself, and made his
father doubly nervous for the fight which was to take place as soon as
the ladies were gone.

The difference between the pair was, that while the father was violent
and a bully, the son had thrice the nerve and courage of the parent,
and could not merely make an attack, but resist it; and finding that
the moment was now come when the contest between him and his father was
to be decided, he took his dinner with perfect coolness and appetite
before the engagement began.  Old Osborne, on the contrary, was
nervous, and drank much.  He floundered in his conversation with the
ladies, his neighbours: George's coolness only rendering him more
angry.  It made him half mad to see the calm way in which George,
flapping his napkin, and with a swaggering bow, opened the door for the
ladies to leave the room; and filling himself a glass of wine, smacked
it, and looked his father full in the face, as if to say, "Gentlemen of
the Guard, fire first." The old man also took a supply of ammunition,
but his decanter clinked against the glass as he tried to fill it.

After giving a great heave, and with a purple choking face, he then
began.  "How dare you, sir, mention that person's name before Miss
Swartz to-day, in my drawing-room? I ask you, sir, how dare you do it?"

"Stop, sir," says George, "don't say dare, sir.  Dare isn't a word to
be used to a Captain in the British Army."

"I shall say what I like to my son, sir.  I can cut him off with a
shilling if I like.  I can make him a beggar if I like. I WILL say what
I like," the elder said.

"I'm a gentleman though I AM your son, sir," George answered haughtily.
"Any communications which you have to make to me, or any orders which
you may please to give, I beg may be couched in that kind of language
which I am accustomed to hear."

Whenever the lad assumed his haughty manner, it always created either
great awe or great irritation in the parent.  Old Osborne stood in
secret terror of his son as a better gentleman than himself; and
perhaps my readers may have remarked in their experience of this Vanity
Fair of ours, that there is no character which a low-minded man so much
mistrusts as that of a gentleman.

"My father didn't give me the education you have had, nor the
advantages you have had, nor the money you have had.  If I had kept the
company SOME FOLKS have had through MY MEANS, perhaps my son wouldn't
have any reason to brag, sir, of his SUPERIORITY and WEST END AIRS
(these words were uttered in the elder Osborne's most sarcastic tones).
But it wasn't considered the part of a gentleman, in MY time, for a man
to insult his father. If I'd done any such thing, mine would have
kicked me downstairs, sir."

"I never insulted you, sir.  I said I begged you to remember your son
was a gentleman as well as yourself. I know very well that you give me
plenty of money," said George (fingering a bundle of notes which he had
got in the morning from Mr. Chopper).  "You tell it me often enough,
sir.  There's no fear of my forgetting it."

"I wish you'd remember other things as well, sir," the sire answered.
"I wish you'd remember that in this house--so long as you choose to
HONOUR it with your COMPANY, Captain--I'm the master, and that name,
and that that--that you--that I say--"

"That what, sir?" George asked, with scarcely a sneer, filling another
glass of claret.

"----!" burst out his father with a screaming oath--"that the name of
those Sedleys never be mentioned here, sir--not one of the whole damned
lot of 'em, sir."

"It wasn't I, sir, that introduced Miss Sedley's name.  It was my
sisters who spoke ill of her to Miss Swartz; and by Jove I'll defend
her wherever I go.  Nobody shall speak lightly of that name in my
presence.  Our family has done her quite enough injury already, I
think, and may leave off reviling her now she's down.  I'll shoot any
man but you who says a word against her."

"Go on, sir, go on," the old gentleman said, his eyes starting out of
his head.

"Go on about what, sir? about the way in which we've treated that angel
of a girl?  Who told me to love her?  It was your doing.  I might have
chosen elsewhere, and looked higher, perhaps, than your society: but I
obeyed you.  And now that her heart's mine you give me orders to fling
it away, and punish her, kill her perhaps--for the faults of other
people.  It's a shame, by Heavens," said George, working himself up
into passion and enthusiasm as he proceeded, "to play at fast and loose
with a young girl's affections--and with such an angel as that--one so
superior to the people amongst whom she lived, that she might have
excited envy, only she was so good and gentle, that it's a wonder
anybody dared to hate her. If I desert her, sir, do you suppose she
forgets me?"

"I ain't going to have any of this dam sentimental nonsense and humbug
here, sir," the father cried out.  "There shall be no beggar-marriages
in my family.  If you choose to fling away eight thousand a year, which
you may have for the asking, you may do it: but by Jove you take your
pack and walk out of this house, sir.  Will you do as I tell you, once
for all, sir, or will you not?"

"Marry that mulatto woman?" George said, pulling up his shirt-collars.
"I don't like the colour, sir.  Ask the black that sweeps opposite
Fleet Market, sir.  I'm not going to marry a Hottentot Venus."

Mr. Osborne pulled frantically at the cord by which he was accustomed
to summon the butler when he wanted wine--and almost black in the face,
ordered that functionary to call a coach for Captain Osborne.

"I've done it," said George, coming into the Slaughters' an hour
afterwards, looking very pale.

"What, my boy?" says Dobbin.

George told what had passed between his father and himself.

"I'll marry her to-morrow," he said with an oath.  "I love her more
every day, Dobbin."



A Marriage and Part of a Honeymoon

Enemies the most obstinate and courageous can't hold out against
starvation; so the elder Osborne felt himself pretty easy about his
adversary in the encounter we have just described; and as soon as
George's supplies fell short, confidently expected his unconditional
submission. It was unlucky, to be sure, that the lad should have
secured a stock of provisions on the very day when the first encounter
took place; but this relief was only temporary, old Osborne thought,
and would but delay George's surrender.  No communication passed
between father and son for some days.  The former was sulky at this
silence, but not disquieted; for, as he said, he knew where he could
put the screw upon George, and only waited the result of that
operation.  He told the sisters the upshot of the dispute between them,
but ordered them to take no notice of the matter, and welcome George on
his return as if nothing had happened.  His cover was laid as usual
every day, and perhaps the old gentleman rather anxiously expected him;
but he never came. Some one inquired at the Slaughters' regarding him,
where it was said that he and his friend Captain Dobbin had left town.

One gusty, raw day at the end of April--the rain whipping the pavement
of that ancient street where the old Slaughters' Coffee-house was once
situated--George Osborne came into the coffee-room, looking very
haggard and pale; although dressed rather smartly in a blue coat and
brass buttons, and a neat buff waistcoat of the fashion of those days.
Here was his friend Captain Dobbin, in blue and brass too, having
abandoned the military frock and French-grey trousers, which were the
usual coverings of his lanky person.

Dobbin had been in the coffee-room for an hour or more.  He had tried
all the papers, but could not read them.  He had looked at the clock
many scores of times; and at the street, where the rain was pattering
down, and the people as they clinked by in pattens, left long
reflections on the shining stone: he tattooed at the table: he bit his
nails most completely, and nearly to the quick (he was accustomed to
ornament his great big hands in this way): he balanced the tea-spoon
dexterously on the milk jug: upset it, &c., &c.; and in fact showed
those signs of disquietude, and practised those desperate attempts at
amusement, which men are accustomed to employ when very anxious, and
expectant, and perturbed in mind.

Some of his comrades, gentlemen who used the room, joked him about the
splendour of his costume and his agitation of manner.  One asked him if
he was going to be married?  Dobbin laughed, and said he would send his
acquaintance (Major Wagstaff of the Engineers) a piece of cake when
that event took place.  At length Captain Osborne made his appearance,
very smartly dressed, but very pale and agitated as we have said.  He
wiped his pale face with a large yellow bandanna pocket-handkerchief
that was prodigiously scented. He shook hands with Dobbin, looked at
the clock, and told John, the waiter, to bring him some curacao.  Of
this cordial he swallowed off a couple of glasses with nervous
eagerness. His friend asked with some interest about his health.

"Couldn't get a wink of sleep till daylight, Dob," said he. "Infernal
headache and fever.  Got up at nine, and went down to the Hummums for a
bath.  I say, Dob, I feel just as I did on the morning I went out with
Rocket at Quebec."

"So do I," William responded.  "I was a deuced deal more nervous than
you were that morning.  You made a famous breakfast, I remember.  Eat
something now."

"You're a good old fellow, Will.  I'll drink your health, old boy, and
farewell to--"

"No, no; two glasses are enough," Dobbin interrupted him.  "Here, take
away the liqueurs, John.  Have some cayenne-pepper with your fowl.
Make haste though, for it is time we were there."

It was about half an hour from twelve when this brief meeting and
colloquy took place between the two captains.  A coach, into which
Captain Osborne's servant put his master's desk and dressing-case, had
been in waiting for some time; and into this the two gentlemen hurried
under an umbrella, and the valet mounted on the box, cursing the rain
and the dampness of the coachman who was steaming beside him.  "We
shall find a better trap than this at the church-door," says he;
"that's a comfort." And the carriage drove on, taking the road down
Piccadilly, where Apsley House and St. George's Hospital wore red
jackets still; where there were oil-lamps; where Achilles was not yet
born; nor the Pimlico arch raised; nor the hideous equestrian monster
which pervades it and the neighbourhood; and so they drove down by
Brompton to a certain chapel near the Fulham Road there.

A chariot was in waiting with four horses; likewise a coach of the kind
called glass coaches.  Only a very few idlers were collected on account
of the dismal rain.

"Hang it!" said George, "I said only a pair."

"My master would have four," said Mr. Joseph Sedley's servant, who was
in waiting; and he and Mr. Osborne's man agreed as they followed George
and William into the church, that it was a "reg'lar shabby turn hout;
and with scarce so much as a breakfast or a wedding faviour."

"Here you are," said our old friend, Jos Sedley, coming forward.
"You're five minutes late, George, my boy. What a day, eh? Demmy, it's
like the commencement of the rainy season in Bengal.  But you'll find
my carriage is watertight.  Come along, my mother and Emmy are in the
vestry."

Jos Sedley was splendid.  He was fatter than ever.  His shirt collars
were higher; his face was redder; his shirt-frill flaunted gorgeously
out of his variegated waistcoat. Varnished boots were not invented as
yet; but the Hessians on his beautiful legs shone so, that they must
have been the identical pair in which the gentleman in the old picture
used to shave himself; and on his light green coat there bloomed a fine
wedding favour, like a great white spreading magnolia.

In a word, George had thrown the great cast.  He was going to be
married.  Hence his pallor and nervousness--his sleepless night and
agitation in the morning.  I have heard people who have gone through
the same thing own to the same emotion.  After three or four
ceremonies, you get accustomed to it, no doubt; but the first dip,
everybody allows, is awful.

The bride was dressed in a brown silk pelisse (as Captain Dobbin has
since informed me), and wore a straw bonnet with a pink ribbon; over
the bonnet she had a veil of white Chantilly lace, a gift from Mr.
Joseph Sedley, her brother.  Captain Dobbin himself had asked leave to
present her with a gold chain and watch, which she sported on this
occasion; and her mother gave her her diamond brooch--almost the only
trinket which was left to the old lady.  As the service went on, Mrs.
Sedley sat and whimpered a great deal in a pew, consoled by the Irish
maid-servant and Mrs. Clapp from the lodgings. Old Sedley would not be
present.  Jos acted for his father, giving away the bride, whilst
Captain Dobbin stepped up as groomsman to his friend George.

There was nobody in the church besides the officiating persons and the
small marriage party and their attendants. The two valets sat aloof
superciliously.  The rain came rattling down on the windows. In the
intervals of the service you heard it, and the sobbing of old Mrs.
Sedley in the pew.  The parson's tones echoed sadly through the empty
walls.  Osborne's "I will" was sounded in very deep bass. Emmy's
response came fluttering up to her lips from her heart, but was
scarcely heard by anybody except Captain Dobbin.

When the service was completed, Jos Sedley came forward and kissed his
sister, the bride, for the first time for many months--George's look of
gloom had gone, and he seemed quite proud and radiant. "It's your turn,
William," says he, putting his hand fondly upon Dobbin's shoulder; and
Dobbin went up and touched Amelia on the cheek.

Then they went into the vestry and signed the register. "God bless you,
Old Dobbin," George said, grasping him by the hand, with something very
like moisture glistening in his eyes.  William replied only by nodding
his head. His heart was too full to say much.

"Write directly, and come down as soon as you can, you know," Osborne
said.  After Mrs. Sedley had taken an hysterical adieu of her daughter,
the pair went off to the carriage.  "Get out of the way, you little
devils," George cried to a small crowd of damp urchins, that were
hanging about the chapel-door.  The rain drove into the bride and
bridegroom's faces as they passed to the chariot. The postilions'
favours draggled on their dripping jackets. The few children made a
dismal cheer, as the carriage, splashing mud, drove away.

William Dobbin stood in the church-porch, looking at it, a queer
figure.  The small crew of spectators jeered him. He was not thinking
about them or their laughter.

"Come home and have some tiffin, Dobbin," a voice cried behind him; as
a pudgy hand was laid on his shoulder, and the honest fellow's reverie
was interrupted.  But the Captain had no heart to go a-feasting with
Jos Sedley. He put the weeping old lady and her attendants into the
carriage along with Jos, and left them without any farther words
passing.  This carriage, too, drove away, and the urchins gave another
sarcastical cheer.

"Here, you little beggars," Dobbin said, giving some sixpences amongst
them, and then went off by himself through the rain.  It was all over.
They were married, and happy, he prayed God.  Never since he was a boy
had he felt so miserable and so lonely.  He longed with a heart-sick
yearning for the first few days to be over, that he might see her again.

Some ten days after the above ceremony, three young men of our
acquaintance were enjoying that beautiful prospect of bow windows on
the one side and blue sea on the other, which Brighton affords to the
traveller. Sometimes it is towards the ocean--smiling with countless
dimples, speckled with white sails, with a hundred bathing-machines
kissing the skirt of his blue garment--that the Londoner looks
enraptured: sometimes, on the contrary, a lover of human nature rather
than of prospects of any kind, it is towards the bow windows that he
turns, and that swarm of human life which they exhibit.  From one issue
the notes of a piano, which a young lady in ringlets practises six
hours daily, to the delight of the fellow-lodgers: at another, lovely
Polly, the nurse-maid, may be seen dandling Master Omnium in her arms:
whilst Jacob, his papa, is beheld eating prawns, and devouring the
Times for breakfast, at the window below. Yonder are the Misses Leery,
who are looking out for the young officers of the Heavies, who are
pretty sure to be pacing the cliff; or again it is a City man, with a
nautical turn, and a telescope, the size of a six-pounder, who has his
instrument pointed seawards, so as to command every pleasure-boat,
herring-boat, or bathing-machine that comes to, or quits, the shore,
&c., &c.  But have we any leisure for a description of Brighton?--for
Brighton, a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni--for Brighton, that
always looks brisk, gay, and gaudy, like a harlequin's jacket--for
Brighton, which used to be seven hours distant from London at the time
of our story; which is now only a hundred minutes off; and which may
approach who knows how much nearer, unless Joinville comes and untimely
bombards it?

"What a monstrous fine girl that is in the lodgings over the
milliner's," one of these three promenaders remarked to the other;
"Gad, Crawley, did you see what a wink she gave me as I passed?"

"Don't break her heart, Jos, you rascal," said another. "Don't trifle
with her affections, you Don Juan!"

"Get away," said Jos Sedley, quite pleased, and leering up at the
maid-servant in question with a most killing ogle.  Jos was even more
splendid at Brighton than he had been at his sister's marriage. He had
brilliant under-waistcoats, any one of which would have set up a
moderate buck. He sported a military frock-coat, ornamented with frogs,
knobs, black buttons, and meandering embroidery. He had affected a
military appearance and habits of late; and he walked with his two
friends, who were of that profession, clinking his boot-spurs,
swaggering prodigiously, and shooting death-glances at all the servant
girls who were worthy to be slain.

"What shall we do, boys, till the ladies return?" the buck asked. The
ladies were out to Rottingdean in his carriage on a drive.

"Let's have a game at billiards," one of his friends said--the tall
one, with lacquered mustachios.

"No, dammy; no, Captain," Jos replied, rather alarmed.  "No billiards
to-day, Crawley, my boy; yesterday was enough."

"You play very well," said Crawley, laughing.  "Don't he, Osborne? How
well he made that five stroke, eh?"

"Famous," Osborne said.  "Jos is a devil of a fellow at billiards, and
at everything else, too.  I wish there were any tiger-hunting about
here! we might go and kill a few before dinner.  (There goes a fine
girl! what an ankle, eh, Jos?) Tell us that story about the tiger-hunt,
and the way you did for him in the jungle--it's a wonderful story that,
Crawley." Here George Osborne gave a yawn. "It's rather slow work,"
said he, "down here; what shall we do?"

"Shall we go and look at some horses that Snaffler's just brought from
Lewes fair?" Crawley said.

"Suppose we go and have some jellies at Dutton's," and the rogue Jos,
willing to kill two birds with one stone.  "Devilish fine gal at
Dutton's."

"Suppose we go and see the Lightning come in, it's just about time?"
George said.  This advice prevailing over the stables and the jelly,
they turned towards the coach-office to witness the Lightning's arrival.

As they passed, they met the carriage--Jos Sedley's open carriage, with
its magnificent armorial bearings--that splendid conveyance in which he
used to drive, about at Cheltenham, majestic and solitary, with his
arms folded, and his hat cocked; or, more happy, with ladies by his
side.

Two were in the carriage now: one a little person, with light hair, and
dressed in the height of the fashion; the other in a brown silk
pelisse, and a straw bonnet with pink ribbons, with a rosy, round,
happy face, that did you good to behold.  She checked the carriage as
it neared the three gentlemen, after which exercise of authority she
looked rather nervous, and then began to blush most absurdly. "We have
had a delightful drive, George," she said, "and--and we're so glad to
come back; and, Joseph, don't let him be late."

"Don't be leading our husbands into mischief, Mr. Sedley, you wicked,
wicked man you," Rebecca said, shaking at Jos a pretty little finger
covered with the neatest French kid glove.  "No billiards, no smoking,
no naughtiness!"

"My dear Mrs. Crawley--Ah now! upon my honour!" was all Jos could
ejaculate by way of reply; but he managed to fall into a tolerable
attitude, with his head lying on his shoulder, grinning upwards at his
victim, with one hand at his back, which he supported on his cane, and
the other hand (the one with the diamond ring) fumbling in his
shirt-frill and among his under-waistcoats.  As the carriage drove off
he kissed the diamond hand to the fair ladies within.  He wished all
Cheltenham, all Chowringhee, all Calcutta, could see him in that
position, waving his hand to such a beauty, and in company with such a
famous buck as Rawdon Crawley of the Guards.

Our young bride and bridegroom had chosen Brighton as the place where
they would pass the first few days after their marriage; and having
engaged apartments at the Ship Inn, enjoyed themselves there in great
comfort and quietude, until Jos presently joined them.  Nor was he the
only companion they found there.  As they were coming into the hotel
from a sea-side walk one afternoon, on whom should they light but
Rebecca and her husband.  The recognition was immediate.  Rebecca flew
into the arms of her dearest friend. Crawley and Osborne shook hands
together cordially enough: and Becky, in the course of a very few
hours, found means to make the latter forget that little unpleasant
passage of words which had happened between them.  "Do you remember the
last time we met at Miss Crawley's, when I was so rude to you, dear
Captain Osborne? I thought you seemed careless about dear Amelia.  It
was that made me angry: and so pert: and so unkind: and so ungrateful.
Do forgive me!" Rebecca said, and she held out her hand with so frank
and winning a grace, that Osborne could not but take it.  By humbly and
frankly acknowledging yourself to be in the wrong, there is no knowing,
my son, what good you may do.  I knew once a gentleman and very worthy
practitioner in Vanity Fair, who used to do little wrongs to his
neighbours on purpose, and in order to apologise for them in an open
and manly way afterwards--and what ensued?  My friend Crocky Doyle was
liked everywhere, and deemed to be rather impetuous--but the honestest
fellow.  Becky's humility passed for sincerity with George Osborne.

These two young couples had plenty of tales to relate to each other.
The marriages of either were discussed; and their prospects in life
canvassed with the greatest frankness and interest on both sides.
George's marriage was to be made known to his father by his friend
Captain Dobbin; and young Osborne trembled rather for the result of
that communication.  Miss Crawley, on whom all Rawdon's hopes depended,
still held out.  Unable to make an entry into her house in Park Lane,
her affectionate nephew and niece had followed her to Brighton, where
they had emissaries continually planted at her door.

"I wish you could see some of Rawdon's friends who are always about our
door," Rebecca said, laughing.  "Did you ever see a dun, my dear; or a
bailiff and his man? Two of the abominable wretches watched all last
week at the greengrocer's opposite, and we could not get away until
Sunday.  If Aunty does not relent, what shall we do?"

Rawdon, with roars of laughter, related a dozen amusing anecdotes of
his duns, and Rebecca's adroit treatment of them.  He vowed with a
great oath that there was no woman in Europe who could talk a creditor
over as she could.  Almost immediately after their marriage, her
practice had begun, and her husband found the immense value of such a
wife.  They had credit in plenty, but they had bills also in abundance,
and laboured under a scarcity of ready money. Did these
debt-difficulties affect Rawdon's good spirits?  No. Everybody in
Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably
and thoroughly in debt: how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and
easy they are in their minds.  Rawdon and his wife had the very best
apartments at the inn at Brighton; the landlord, as he brought in the
first dish, bowed before them as to his greatest customers: and Rawdon
abused the dinners and wine with an audacity which no grandee in the
land could surpass.  Long custom, a manly appearance, faultless boots
and clothes, and a happy fierceness of manner, will often help a man as
much as a great balance at the banker's.

The two wedding parties met constantly in each other's apartments.
After two or three nights the gentlemen of an evening had a little
piquet, as their wives sate and chatted apart.  This pastime, and the
arrival of Jos Sedley, who made his appearance in his grand open
carriage, and who played a few games at billiards with Captain Crawley,
replenished Rawdon's purse somewhat, and gave him the benefit of that
ready money for which the greatest spirits are sometimes at a
stand-still.

So the three gentlemen walked down to see the Lightning coach come in.
Punctual to the minute, the coach crowded inside and out, the guard
blowing his accustomed tune on the horn--the Lightning came tearing
down the street, and pulled up at the coach-office.

"Hullo! there's old Dobbin," George cried, quite delighted to see his
old friend perched on the roof; and whose promised visit to Brighton
had been delayed until now.  "How are you, old fellow? Glad you're come
down. Emmy'll be delighted to see you," Osborne said, shaking his
comrade warmly by the hand as soon as his descent from the vehicle was
effected--and then he added, in a lower and agitated voice, "What's the
news?  Have you been in Russell Square? What does the governor say?
Tell me everything."

Dobbin looked very pale and grave.  "I've seen your father," said he.
"How's Amelia--Mrs. George?  I'll tell you all the news presently: but
I've brought the great news of all: and that is--"

"Out with it, old fellow," George said.

"We're ordered to Belgium.  All the army goes--guards and all.
Heavytop's got the gout, and is mad at not being able to move. O'Dowd
goes in command, and we embark from Chatham next week." This news of
war could not but come with a shock upon our lovers, and caused all
these gentlemen to look very serious.



Captain Dobbin Proceeds on His Canvass

What is the secret mesmerism which friendship possesses, and under the
operation of which a person ordinarily sluggish, or cold, or timid,
becomes wise, active, and resolute, in another's behalf?  As Alexis,
after a few passes from Dr. Elliotson, despises pain, reads with the
back of his head, sees miles off, looks into next week, and performs
other wonders, of which, in his own private normal condition, he is
quite incapable; so you see, in the affairs of the world and under the
magnetism of friendships, the modest man becomes bold, the shy
confident, the lazy active, or the impetuous prudent and peaceful.
What is it, on the other hand, that makes the lawyer eschew his own
cause, and call in his learned brother as an adviser? And what causes
the doctor, when ailing, to send for his rival, and not sit down and
examine his own tongue in the chimney glass, or write his own
prescription at his study-table?  I throw out these queries for
intelligent readers to answer, who know, at once, how credulous we are,
and how sceptical, how soft and how obstinate, how firm for others and
how diffident about ourselves:  meanwhile, it is certain that our
friend William Dobbin, who was personally of so complying a disposition
that if his parents had pressed him much, it is probable he would have
stepped down into the kitchen and married the cook, and who, to further
his own interests, would have found the most insuperable difficulty in
walking across the street, found himself as busy and eager in the
conduct of George Osborne's affairs, as the most selfish tactician
could be in the pursuit of his own.

Whilst our friend George and his young wife were enjoying the first
blushing days of the honeymoon at Brighton, honest William was left as
George's plenipotentiary in London, to transact all the business part
of the marriage. His duty it was to call upon old Sedley and his wife,
and to keep the former in good humour:  to draw Jos and his
brother-in-law nearer together, so that Jos's position and dignity, as
collector of Boggley Wollah, might compensate for his father's loss of
station, and tend to reconcile old Osborne to the alliance:  and
finally, to communicate it to the latter in such a way as should least
irritate the old gentleman.

Now, before he faced the head of the Osborne house with the news which
it was his duty to tell, Dobbin bethought him that it would be politic
to make friends of the rest of the family, and, if possible, have the
ladies on his side. They can't be angry in their hearts, thought he.
No woman ever was really angry at a romantic marriage. A little crying
out, and they must come round to their brother; when the three of us
will lay siege to old Mr. Osborne.  So this Machiavellian captain of
infantry cast about him for some happy means or stratagem by which he
could gently and gradually bring the Misses Osborne to a knowledge of
their brother's secret.

By a little inquiry regarding his mother's engagements, he was pretty
soon able to find out by whom of her ladyship's friends parties were
given at that season; where he would be likely to meet Osborne's
sisters; and, though he had that abhorrence of routs and evening
parties which many sensible men, alas! entertain, he soon found one
where the Misses Osborne were to be present. Making his appearance at
the ball, where he danced a couple of sets with both of them, and was
prodigiously polite, he actually had the courage to ask Miss Osborne
for a few minutes' conversation at an early hour the next day, when he
had, he said, to communicate to her news of the very greatest interest.

What was it that made her start back, and gaze upon him for a moment,
and then on the ground at her feet, and make as if she would faint on
his arm, had he not by opportunely treading on her toes, brought the
young lady back to self-control?  Why was she so violently agitated at
Dobbin's request?  This can never be known. But when he came the next
day, Maria was not in the drawing-room with her sister, and Miss Wirt
went off for the purpose of fetching the latter, and the Captain and
Miss Osborne were left together. They were both so silent that the
ticktock of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia clock on the mantelpiece became
quite rudely audible.

"What a nice party it was last night," Miss Osborne at length began,
encouragingly; "and--and how you're improved in your dancing, Captain
Dobbin.  Surely somebody has taught you," she added, with amiable
archness.

"You should see me dance a reel with Mrs. Major O'Dowd of ours; and a
jig--did you ever see a jig?  But I think anybody could dance with you,
Miss Osborne, who dance so well."

"Is the Major's lady young and beautiful, Captain?" the fair questioner
continued.  "Ah, what a terrible thing it must be to be a soldier's
wife!  I wonder they have any spirits to dance, and in these dreadful
times of war, too! O Captain Dobbin, I tremble sometimes when I think
of our dearest George, and the dangers of the poor soldier. Are there
many married officers of the --th, Captain Dobbin?"

"Upon my word, she's playing her hand rather too openly," Miss Wirt
thought; but this observation is merely parenthetic, and was not heard
through the crevice of the door at which the governess uttered it.

"One of our young men is just married," Dobbin said, now coming to the
point.  "It was a very old attachment, and the young couple are as poor
as church mice." "O, how delightful! O, how romantic!" Miss Osborne
cried, as the Captain said "old attachment" and "poor." Her sympathy
encouraged him.

"The finest young fellow in the regiment," he continued. "Not a braver
or handsomer officer in the army; and such a charming wife! How you
would like her!  how you will like her when you know her, Miss
Osborne."  The young lady thought the actual moment had arrived, and
that Dobbin's nervousness which now came on and was visible in many
twitchings of his face, in his manner of beating the ground with his
great feet, in the rapid buttoning and unbuttoning of his frock-coat,
&c.--Miss Osborne, I say, thought that when he had given himself a
little air, he would unbosom himself entirely, and prepared eagerly to
listen.  And the clock, in the altar on which Iphigenia was situated,
beginning, after a preparatory convulsion, to toll twelve, the mere
tolling seemed as if it would last until one--so prolonged was the
knell to the anxious spinster.

"But it's not about marriage that I came to speak--that is that
marriage--that is--no, I mean--my dear Miss Osborne, it's about our
dear friend George," Dobbin said.

"About George?" she said in a tone so discomfited that Maria and Miss
Wirt laughed at the other side of the door, and even that abandoned
wretch of a Dobbin felt inclined to smile himself; for he was not
altogether unconscious of the state of affairs:  George having often
bantered him gracefully and said, "Hang it, Will, why don't you take
old Jane?  She'll have you if you ask her. I'll bet you five to two she
will."

"Yes, about George, then," he continued.  "There has been a difference
between him and Mr. Osborne.  And I regard him so much--for you know
we have been like brothers--that I hope and pray the quarrel may be
settled.  We must go abroad, Miss Osborne.  We may be ordered off at a
day's warning.  Who knows what may happen in the campaign?  Don't be
agitated, dear Miss Osborne; and those two at least should part
friends."

"There has been no quarrel, Captain Dobbin, except a little usual scene
with Papa," the lady said.  "We are expecting George back daily.  What
Papa wanted was only for his good.  He has but to come back, and I'm
sure all will be well; and dear Rhoda, who went away from here in sad
sad anger, I know will forgive him.  Woman forgives but too readily,
Captain."

"Such an angel as YOU I am sure would," Mr. Dobbin said, with atrocious
astuteness.  "And no man can pardon himself for giving a woman pain.
What would you feel, if a man were faithless to you?"

"I should perish--I should throw myself out of window--I should take
poison--I should pine and die.  I know I should," Miss cried, who had
nevertheless gone through one or two affairs of the heart without any
idea of suicide.

"And there are others," Dobbin continued, "as true and as kind-hearted
as yourself.  I'm not speaking about the West Indian heiress, Miss
Osborne, but about a poor girl whom George once loved, and who was bred
from her childhood to think of nobody but him. I've seen her in her
poverty uncomplaining, broken-hearted, without a fault.  It is of Miss
Sedley I speak.  Dear Miss Osborne, can your generous heart quarrel
with your brother for being faithful to her? Could his own conscience
ever forgive him if he deserted her?  Be her friend--she always loved
you--and--and I am come here charged by George to tell you that he
holds his engagement to her as the most sacred duty he has; and to
entreat you, at least, to be on his side."

When any strong emotion took possession of Mr. Dobbin, and after the
first word or two of hesitation, he could speak with perfect fluency,
and it was evident that his eloquence on this occasion made some
impression upon the lady whom he addressed.

"Well," said she, "this is--most surprising--most painful--most
extraordinary--what will Papa say?--that George should fling away such
a superb establishment as was offered to him but at any rate he has
found a very brave champion in you, Captain Dobbin.  It is of no use,
however," she continued, after a pause; "I feel for poor Miss Sedley,
most certainly--most sincerely, you know. We never thought the match a
good one, though we were always very kind to her here--very.  But Papa
will never consent, I am sure.  And a well brought up young woman, you
know--with a well-regulated mind, must--George must give her up, dear
Captain Dobbin, indeed he must."

"Ought a man to give up the woman he loved, just when misfortune befell
her?" Dobbin said, holding out his hand.  "Dear Miss Osborne, is this
the counsel I hear from you?  My dear young lady! you must befriend
her. He can't give her up.  He must not give her up.  Would a man,
think you, give YOU up if you were poor?"

This adroit question touched the heart of Miss Jane Osborne not a
little.  "I don't know whether we poor girls ought to believe what you
men say, Captain," she said. "There is that in woman's tenderness which
induces her to believe too easily.  I'm afraid you are cruel, cruel
deceivers,"--and Dobbin certainly thought he felt a pressure of the
hand which Miss Osborne had extended to him.

He dropped it in some alarm.  "Deceivers!" said he. "No, dear Miss
Osborne, all men are not; your brother is not; George has loved Amelia
Sedley ever since they were children; no wealth would make him marry
any but her.  Ought he to forsake her?  Would you counsel him to do so?"

What could Miss Jane say to such a question, and with her own peculiar
views?  She could not answer it, so she parried it by saying, "Well, if
you are not a deceiver, at least you are very romantic"; and Captain
William let this observation pass without challenge.

At length when, by the help of farther polite speeches, he deemed that
Miss Osborne was sufficiently prepared to receive the whole news, he
poured it into her ear. "George could not give up Amelia--George was
married to her"--and then he related the circumstances of the marriage
as we know them already:  how the poor girl would have died had not her
lover kept his faith:  how Old Sedley had refused all consent to the
match, and a licence had been got: and Jos Sedley had come from
Cheltenham to give away the bride: how they had gone to Brighton in
Jos's chariot-and-four to pass the honeymoon: and how George counted on
his dear kind sisters to befriend him with their father, as women--so
true and tender as they were--assuredly would do.  And so, asking
permission (readily granted) to see her again, and rightly conjecturing
that the news he had brought would be told in the next five minutes to
the other ladies, Captain Dobbin made his bow and took his leave.

He was scarcely out of the house, when Miss Maria and Miss Wirt rushed
in to Miss Osborne, and the whole wonderful secret was imparted to them
by that lady.  To do them justice, neither of the sisters was very much
displeased.  There is something about a runaway match with which few
ladies can be seriously angry, and Amelia rather rose in their
estimation, from the spirit which she had displayed in consenting to
the union.  As they debated the story, and prattled about it, and
wondered what Papa would do and say, came a loud knock, as of an
avenging thunder-clap, at the door, which made these conspirators
start.  It must be Papa, they thought. But it was not he.  It was only
Mr. Frederick Bullock, who had come from the City according to
appointment, to conduct the ladies to a flower-show.

This gentleman, as may be imagined, was not kept long in ignorance of
the secret.  But his face, when he heard it, showed an amazement which
was very different to that look of sentimental wonder which the
countenances of the sisters wore.  Mr. Bullock was a man of the world,
and a junior partner of a wealthy firm.  He knew what money was, and
the value of it: and a delightful throb of expectation lighted up his
little eyes, and caused him to smile on his Maria, as he thought that
by this piece of folly of Mr. George's she might be worth thirty
thousand pounds more than he had ever hoped to get with her.

"Gad!  Jane," said he, surveying even the elder sister with some
interest, "Eels will be sorry he cried off.  You may be a fifty
thousand pounder yet."

The sisters had never thought of the money question up to that moment,
but Fred Bullock bantered them with graceful gaiety about it during
their forenoon's excursion; and they had risen not a little in their
own esteem by the time when, the morning amusement over, they drove
back to dinner.  And do not let my respected reader exclaim against
this selfishness as unnatural.  It was but this present morning, as he
rode on the omnibus from Richmond; while it changed horses, this
present chronicler, being on the roof, marked three little children
playing in a puddle below, very dirty, and friendly, and happy.  To
these three presently came another little one. "POLLY," says she, "YOUR
SISTER'S GOT A PENNY."  At which the children got up from the puddle
instantly, and ran off to pay their court to Peggy.  And as the omnibus
drove off I saw Peggy with the infantine procession at her tail,
marching with great dignity towards the stall of a neighbouring
lollipop-woman.



In Which Mr. Osborne Takes Down the Family Bible

So having prepared the sisters, Dobbin hastened away to the City to
perform the rest and more difficult part of the task which he had
undertaken.  The idea of facing old Osborne rendered him not a little
nervous, and more than once he thought of leaving the young ladies to
communicate the secret, which, as he was aware, they could not long
retain.  But he had promised to report to George upon the manner in
which the elder Osborne bore the intelligence; so going into the City
to the paternal counting-house in Thames Street, he despatched thence a
note to Mr. Osborne begging for a half-hour's conversation relative to
the affairs of his son George.  Dobbin's messenger returned from Mr.
Osborne's house of business, with the compliments of the latter, who
would be very happy to see the Captain immediately, and away
accordingly Dobbin went to confront him.

The Captain, with a half-guilty secret to confess, and with the
prospect of a painful and stormy interview before him, entered Mr.
Osborne's offices with a most dismal countenance and abashed gait, and,
passing through the outer room where Mr. Chopper presided, was greeted
by that functionary from his desk with a waggish air which farther
discomfited him.  Mr. Chopper winked and nodded and pointed his pen
towards his patron's door, and said, "You'll find the governor all
right," with the most provoking good humour.

Osborne rose too, and shook him heartily by the hand, and said, "How
do, my dear boy?" with a cordiality that made poor George's ambassador
feel doubly guilty.  His hand lay as if dead in the old gentleman's
grasp.  He felt that he, Dobbin, was more or less the cause of all that
had happened.  It was he had brought back George to Amelia: it was he
had applauded, encouraged, transacted almost the marriage which he was
come to reveal to George's father:  and the latter was receiving him
with smiles of welcome; patting him on the shoulder, and calling him
"Dobbin, my dear boy." The envoy had indeed good reason to hang his
head.

Osborne fully believed that Dobbin had come to announce his son's
surrender.  Mr. Chopper and his principal were talking over the matter
between George and his father, at the very moment when Dobbin's
messenger arrived.  Both agreed that George was sending in his
submission.  Both had been expecting it for some days--and "Lord!
Chopper, what a marriage we'll have!" Mr. Osborne said to his clerk,
snapping his big fingers, and jingling all the guineas and shillings in
his great pockets as he eyed his subordinate with a look of triumph.

With similar operations conducted in both pockets, and a knowing jolly
air, Osborne from his chair regarded Dobbin seated blank and silent
opposite to him.  "What a bumpkin he is for a Captain in the army," old
Osborne thought.  "I wonder George hasn't taught him better manners."

At last Dobbin summoned courage to begin.  "Sir," said he, "I've
brought you some very grave news.  I have been at the Horse Guards this
morning, and there's no doubt that our regiment will be ordered abroad,
and on its way to Belgium before the week is over.  And you know, sir,
that we shan't be home again before a tussle which may be fatal to many
of us."   Osborne looked grave.  "My s--, the regiment will do its
duty, sir, I daresay," he said.

"The French are very strong, sir," Dobbin went on. "The Russians and
Austrians will be a long time before they can bring their troops down.
We shall have the first of the fight, sir; and depend on it Boney will
take care that it shall be a hard one."

"What are you driving at, Dobbin?" his interlocutor said, uneasy and
with a scowl.  "I suppose no Briton's afraid of any d---- Frenchman,
hey?"

"I only mean, that before we go, and considering the great and certain
risk that hangs over every one of us--if there are any differences
between you and George--it would be as well, sir, that--that you
should shake hands: wouldn't it?  Should anything happen to him, I
think you would never forgive yourself if you hadn't parted in charity."

As he said this, poor William Dobbin blushed crimson, and felt and
owned that he himself was a traitor.  But for him, perhaps, this
severance need never have taken place.  Why had not George's marriage
been delayed? What call was there to press it on so eagerly?  He felt
that George would have parted from Amelia at any rate without a mortal
pang.  Amelia, too, MIGHT have recovered the shock of losing him.  It
was his counsel had brought about this marriage, and all that was to
ensue from it. And why was it? Because he loved her so much that he
could not bear to see her unhappy:  or because his own sufferings of
suspense were so unendurable that he was glad to crush them at once--as
we hasten a funeral after a death, or, when a separation from those we
love is imminent, cannot rest until the parting be over.

"You are a good fellow, William," said Mr. Osborne in a softened voice;
"and me and George shouldn't part in anger, that is true. Look here.
I've done for him as much as any father ever did.  He's had three times
as much money from me, as I warrant your father ever gave you.  But I
don't brag about that.  How I've toiled for him, and worked and
employed my talents and energy, I won't say.  Ask Chopper.  Ask
himself.  Ask the City of London.  Well, I propose to him such a
marriage as any nobleman in the land might be proud of--the only thing
in life I ever asked him--and he refuses me.  Am I wrong? Is the
quarrel of MY making?  What do I seek but his good, for which I've been
toiling like a convict ever since he was born? Nobody can say there's
anything selfish in me.  Let him come back. I say, here's my hand.  I
say, forget and forgive.  As for marrying now, it's out of the
question.  Let him and Miss S. make it up, and make out the marriage
afterwards, when he comes back a Colonel; for he shall be a Colonel, by
G-- he shall, if money can do it.  I'm glad you've brought him round.
I know it's you, Dobbin.  You've took him out of many a scrape before.
Let him come.  I shan't be hard.  Come along, and dine in Russell
Square to-day: both of you.  The old shop, the old hour.  You'll find a
neck of venison, and no questions asked."

This praise and confidence smote Dobbin's heart very keenly.  Every
moment the colloquy continued in this tone, he felt more and more
guilty.  "Sir," said he, "I fear you deceive yourself.  I am sure you
do.  George is much too high-minded a man ever to marry for money.  A
threat on your part that you would disinherit him in case of
disobedience would only be followed by resistance on his."

"Why, hang it, man, you don't call offering him eight or ten thousand a
year threatening him?" Mr. Osborne said, with still provoking good
humour.  "'Gad, if Miss S. will have me, I'm her man. I ain't
particular about a shade or so of tawny." And the old gentleman gave
his knowing grin and coarse laugh.

"You forget, sir, previous engagements into which Captain Osborne had
entered," the ambassador said, gravely.

"What engagements? What the devil do you mean? You don't mean," Mr.
Osborne continued, gathering wrath and astonishment as the thought now
first came upon him; "you don't mean that he's such a d---- fool as to
be still hankering after that swindling old bankrupt's daughter? You've
not come here for to make me suppose that he wants to marry HER?  Marry
HER, that IS a good one.  My son and heir marry a beggar's girl out of
a gutter.  D---- him, if he does, let him buy a broom and sweep a
crossing.  She was always dangling and ogling after him, I recollect
now; and I've no doubt she was put on by her old sharper of a father."

"Mr. Sedley was your very good friend, sir," Dobbin interposed, almost
pleased at finding himself growing angry.  "Time was you called him
better names than rogue and swindler.  The match was of your making.
George had no right to play fast and loose--"

"Fast and loose!" howled out old Osborne.  "Fast and loose!  Why, hang
me, those are the very words my gentleman used himself when he gave
himself airs, last Thursday was a fortnight, and talked about the
British army to his father who made him.  What, it's you who have been
a setting of him up--is it? and my service to you, CAPTAIN.  It's you
who want to introduce beggars into my family. Thank you for nothing,
Captain.  Marry HER indeed--he, he! why should he?  I warrant you she'd
go to him fast enough without."

"Sir," said Dobbin, starting up in undisguised anger; "no man shall
abuse that lady in my hearing, and you least of all."

"O, you're a-going to call me out, are you?  Stop, let me ring the bell
for pistols for two.  Mr. George sent you here to insult his father,
did he?" Osborne said, pulling at the bell-cord.

"Mr. Osborne," said Dobbin, with a faltering voice, "it's you who are
insulting the best creature in the world. You had best spare her, sir,
for she's your son's wife."

And with this, feeling that he could say no more, Dobbin went away,
Osborne sinking back in his chair, and looking wildly after him.  A
clerk came in, obedient to the bell; and the Captain was scarcely out
of the court where Mr. Osborne's offices were, when Mr. Chopper the
chief clerk came rushing hatless after him.

"For God's sake, what is it?" Mr. Chopper said, catching the Captain by
the skirt.  "The governor's in a fit. What has Mr. George been doing?"

"He married Miss Sedley five days ago," Dobbin replied. "I was his
groomsman, Mr. Chopper, and you must stand his friend."

The old clerk shook his head.  "If that's your news, Captain, it's bad.
The governor will never forgive him."

Dobbin begged Chopper to report progress to him at the hotel where he
was stopping, and walked off moodily westwards, greatly perturbed as to
the past and the future.

When the Russell Square family came to dinner that evening, they found
the father of the house seated in his usual place, but with that air of
gloom on his face, which, whenever it appeared there, kept the whole
circle silent. The ladies, and Mr. Bullock who dined with them, felt
that the news had been communicated to Mr. Osborne. His dark looks
affected Mr. Bullock so far as to render him still and quiet: but he
was unusually bland and attentive to Miss Maria, by whom he sat, and to
her sister presiding at the head of the table.

Miss Wirt, by consequence, was alone on her side of the board, a gap
being left between her and Miss Jane Osborne.  Now this was George's
place when he dined at home; and his cover, as we said, was laid for
him in expectation of that truant's return.  Nothing occurred during
dinner-time except smiling Mr. Frederick's flagging confidential
whispers, and the clinking of plate and china, to interrupt the silence
of the repast.  The servants went about stealthily doing their duty.
Mutes at funerals could not look more glum than the domestics of Mr.
Osborne The neck of venison of which he had invited Dobbin to partake,
was carved by him in perfect silence; but his own share went away
almost untasted, though he drank much, and the butler assiduously
filled his glass.

At last, just at the end of the dinner, his eyes, which had been
staring at everybody in turn, fixed themselves for a while upon the
plate laid for George.  He pointed to it presently with his left hand.
His daughters looked at him and did not comprehend, or choose to
comprehend, the signal; nor did the servants at first understand it.

"Take that plate away," at last he said, getting up with an oath--and
with this pushing his chair back, he walked into his own room.

Behind Mr. Osborne's dining-room was the usual apartment which went in
his house by the name of the study; and was sacred to the master of the
house.  Hither Mr. Osborne would retire of a Sunday forenoon when not
minded to go to church; and here pass the morning in his crimson
leather chair, reading the paper.  A couple of glazed book-cases were
here, containing standard works in stout gilt bindings. The "Annual
Register," the "Gentleman's Magazine," "Blair's Sermons," and "Hume and
Smollett." From year's end to year's end he never took one of these
volumes from the shelf; but there was no member of the family that
would dare for his life to touch one of the books, except upon those
rare Sunday evenings when there was no dinner-party, and when the great
scarlet Bible and Prayer-book were taken out from the corner where they
stood beside his copy of the Peerage, and the servants being rung up to
the dining parlour, Osborne read the evening service to his family in a
loud grating pompous voice.  No member of the household, child, or
domestic, ever entered that room without a certain terror.  Here he
checked the housekeeper's accounts, and overhauled the butler's
cellar-book. Hence he could command, across the clean gravel
court-yard, the back entrance of the stables with which one of his
bells communicated, and into this yard the coachman issued from his
premises as into a dock, and Osborne swore at him from the study
window.  Four times a year Miss Wirt entered this apartment to get her
salary; and his daughters to receive their quarterly allowance.  George
as a boy had been horsewhipped in this room many times; his mother
sitting sick on the stair listening to the cuts of the whip.  The boy
was scarcely ever known to cry under the punishment; the poor woman
used to fondle and kiss him secretly, and give him money to soothe him
when he came out.

There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither
from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death--George was on a pony,
the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by
her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering
on each other in the approved family-portrait manner.  The mother lay
underground now, long since forgotten--the sisters and brother had a
hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were
utterly estranged from each other.  Some few score of years afterwards,
when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire
there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce
of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and
self-satisfied.  Osborne's own state portrait, with that of his great
silver inkstand and arm-chair, had taken the place of honour in the
dining-room, vacated by the family-piece.

To this study old Osborne retired then, greatly to the relief of the
small party whom he left.  When the servants had withdrawn, they began
to talk for a while volubly but very low; then they went upstairs
quietly, Mr. Bullock accompanying them stealthily on his creaking
shoes.  He had no heart to sit alone drinking wine, and so close to the
terrible old gentleman in the study hard at hand.

An hour at least after dark, the butler, not having received any
summons, ventured to tap at his door and take him in wax candles and
tea.  The master of the house sate in his chair, pretending to read the
paper, and when the servant, placing the lights and refreshment on the
table by him, retired, Mr. Osborne got up and locked the door after
him.  This time there was no mistaking the matter; all the household
knew that some great catastrophe was going to happen which was likely
direly to affect Master George.

In the large shining mahogany escritoire Mr. Osborne had a drawer
especially devoted to his son's affairs and papers.  Here he kept all
the documents relating to him ever since he had been a boy: here were
his prize copy-books and drawing-books, all bearing George's hand, and
that of the master:  here were his first letters in large round-hand
sending his love to papa and mamma, and conveying his petitions for a
cake.  His dear godpapa Sedley was more than once mentioned in them.
Curses quivered on old Osborne's livid lips, and horrid hatred and
disappointment writhed in his heart, as looking through some of these
papers he came on that name. They were all marked and docketed, and
tied with red tape. It was--"From Georgy, requesting 5s., April 23,
18--; answered, April 25"--or "Georgy about a pony, October 13"--and so
forth. In another packet were "Dr. S.'s accounts"--"G.'s tailor's bills
and outfits, drafts on me by G. Osborne, jun.," &c.--his letters from
the West Indies--his agent's letters, and the newspapers containing his
commissions: here was a whip he had when a boy, and in a paper a locket
containing his hair, which his mother used to wear.

Turning one over after another, and musing over these memorials, the
unhappy man passed many hours.  His dearest vanities, ambitious hopes,
had all been here.  What pride he had in his boy!  He was the
handsomest child ever seen.  Everybody said he was like a nobleman's
son.  A royal princess had remarked him, and kissed him, and asked his
name in Kew Gardens.  What City man could show such another? Could a
prince have been better cared for?  Anything that money could buy had
been his son's.  He used to go down on speech-days with four horses and
new liveries, and scatter new shillings among the boys at the school
where George was:  when he went with George to the depot of his
regiment, before the boy embarked for Canada, he gave the officers such
a dinner as the Duke of York might have sat down to.  Had he ever
refused a bill when George drew one? There they were--paid without a
word.  Many a general in the army couldn't ride the horses he had!  He
had the child before his eyes, on a hundred different days when he
remembered George after dinner, when he used to come in as bold as a
lord and drink off his glass by his father's side, at the head of the
table--on the pony at Brighton, when he cleared the hedge and kept up
with the huntsman--on the day when he was presented to the Prince
Regent at the levee, when all Saint James's couldn't produce a finer
young fellow.  And this, this was the end of all!--to marry a bankrupt
and fly in the face of duty and fortune!  What humiliation and fury:
what pangs of sickening rage, balked ambition and love; what wounds of
outraged vanity, tenderness even, had this old worldling now to suffer
under!

Having examined these papers, and pondered over this one and the other,
in that bitterest of all helpless woe, with which miserable men think
of happy past times--George's father took the whole of the documents
out of the drawer in which he had kept them so long, and locked them
into a writing-box, which he tied, and sealed with his seal.  Then he
opened the book-case, and took down the great red Bible we have spoken
of a pompous book, seldom looked at, and shining all over with gold.
There was a frontispiece to the volume, representing Abraham
sacrificing Isaac.  Here, according to custom, Osborne had recorded on
the fly-leaf, and in his large clerk-like hand, the dates of his
marriage and his wife's death, and the births and Christian names of
his children. Jane came first, then George Sedley Osborne, then Maria
Frances, and the days of the christening of each.  Taking a pen, he
carefully obliterated George's names from the page; and when the leaf
was quite dry, restored the volume to the place from which he had moved
it.  Then he took a document out of another drawer, where his own
private papers were kept; and having read it, crumpled it up and
lighted it at one of the candles, and saw it burn entirely away in the
grate.  It was his will; which being burned, he sate down and wrote off
a letter, and rang for his servant, whom he charged to deliver it in
the morning.  It was morning already: as he went up to bed, the whole
house was alight with the sunshine; and the birds were singing among
the fresh green leaves in Russell Square.

Anxious to keep all Mr. Osborne's family and dependants in good humour,
and to make as many friends as possible for George in his hour of
adversity, William Dobbin, who knew the effect which good dinners and
good wines have upon the soul of man, wrote off immediately on his
return to his inn the most hospitable of invitations to Thomas Chopper,
Esquire, begging that gentleman to dine with him at the Slaughters'
next day.  The note reached Mr. Chopper before he left the City, and
the instant reply was, that "Mr. Chopper presents his respectful
compliments, and will have the honour and pleasure of waiting on
Captain D."  The invitation and the rough draft of the answer were
shown to Mrs. Chopper and her daughters on his return to Somers' Town
that evening, and they talked about military gents and West End men
with great exultation as the family sate and partook of tea.  When the
girls had gone to rest, Mr. and Mrs. C. discoursed upon the strange
events which were occurring in the governor's family.  Never had the
clerk seen his principal so moved.  When he went in to Mr. Osborne,
after Captain Dobbin's departure, Mr. Chopper found his chief black in
the face, and all but in a fit: some dreadful quarrel, he was certain,
had occurred between Mr. O. and the young Captain.  Chopper had been
instructed to make out an account of all sums paid to Captain Osborne
within the last three years.  "And a precious lot of money he has had
too," the chief clerk said, and respected his old and young master the
more, for the liberal way in which the guineas had been flung about.
The dispute was something about Miss Sedley.  Mrs. Chopper vowed and
declared she pitied that poor young lady to lose such a handsome young
fellow as the Capting. As the daughter of an unlucky speculator, who
had paid a very shabby dividend, Mr. Chopper had no great regard for
Miss Sedley.  He respected the house of Osborne before all others in
the City of London: and his hope and wish was that Captain George
should marry a nobleman's daughter. The clerk slept a great deal
sounder than his principal that night; and, cuddling his children after
breakfast (of which he partook with a very hearty appetite, though his
modest cup of life was only sweetened with brown sugar), he set off in
his best Sunday suit and frilled shirt for business, promising his
admiring wife not to punish Captain D.'s port too severely that evening.

Mr. Osborne's countenance, when he arrived in the City at his usual
time, struck those dependants who were accustomed, for good reasons, to
watch its expression, as peculiarly ghastly and worn.  At twelve
o'clock Mr. Higgs (of the firm of Higgs & Blatherwick, solicitors,
Bedford Row) called by appointment, and was ushered into the governor's
private room, and closeted there for more than an hour. At about one
Mr. Chopper received a note brought by Captain Dobbin's man, and
containing an inclosure for Mr. Osborne, which the clerk went in and
delivered.  A short time afterwards Mr. Chopper and Mr. Birch, the next
clerk, were summoned, and requested to witness a paper.  "I've been
making a new will," Mr. Osborne said, to which these gentlemen appended
their names accordingly.  No conversation passed.  Mr. Higgs looked
exceedingly grave as he came into the outer rooms, and very hard in Mr.
Chopper's face; but there were not any explanations.  It was remarked
that Mr. Osborne was particularly quiet and gentle all day, to the
surprise of those who had augured ill from his darkling demeanour.  He
called no man names that day, and was not heard to swear once.  He left
business early; and before going away, summoned his chief clerk once
more, and having given him general instructions, asked him, after some
seeming hesitation and reluctance to speak, if he knew whether Captain
Dobbin was in town?

Chopper said he believed he was.  Indeed both of them knew the fact
perfectly.

Osborne took a letter directed to that officer, and giving it to the
clerk, requested the latter to deliver it into Dobbin's own hands
immediately.

"And now, Chopper," says he, taking his hat, and with a strange look,
"my mind will be easy."  Exactly as the clock struck two (there was no
doubt an appointment between the pair) Mr. Frederick Bullock called,
and he and Mr. Osborne walked away together.

The Colonel of the --th regiment, in which Messieurs Dobbin and Osborne
had companies, was an old General who had made his first campaign under
Wolfe at Quebec, and was long since quite too old and feeble for
command; but he took some interest in the regiment of which he was the
nominal head, and made certain of his young officers welcome at his
table, a kind of hospitality which I believe is not now common amongst
his brethren.  Captain Dobbin was an especial favourite of this old
General.  Dobbin was versed in the literature of his profession, and
could talk about the great Frederick, and the Empress Queen, and their
wars, almost as well as the General himself, who was indifferent to the
triumphs of the present day, and whose heart was with the tacticians of
fifty years back.  This officer sent a summons to Dobbin to come and
breakfast with him, on the morning when Mr. Osborne altered his will
and Mr. Chopper put on his best shirt frill, and then informed his
young favourite, a couple of days in advance, of that which they were
all expecting--a marching order to go to Belgium. The order for the
regiment to hold itself in readiness would leave the Horse Guards in a
day or two; and as transports were in plenty, they would get their
route before the week was over.  Recruits had come in during the stay
of the regiment at Chatham; and the old General hoped that the regiment
which had helped to beat Montcalm in Canada, and to rout Mr. Washington
on Long Island, would prove itself worthy of its historical reputation
on the oft-trodden battle-grounds of the Low Countries.  "And so, my
good friend, if you have any affaire la," said the old General, taking a
pinch of snuff with his trembling white old hand, and then pointing to
the spot of his robe de chambre under which his heart was still feebly
beating, "if you have any Phillis to console, or to bid farewell to
papa and mamma, or any will to make, I recommend you to set about your
business without delay." With which the General gave his young friend a
finger to shake, and a good-natured nod of his powdered and pigtailed
head; and the door being closed upon Dobbin, sate down to pen a poulet
(he was exceedingly vain of his French) to Mademoiselle Amenaide of His
Majesty's Theatre.

This news made Dobbin grave, and he thought of our friends at Brighton,
and then he was ashamed of himself that Amelia was always the first
thing in his thoughts (always before anybody--before father and mother,
sisters and duty--always at waking and sleeping indeed, and all day
long); and returning to his hotel, he sent off a brief note to Mr.
Osborne acquainting him with the information which he had received, and
which might tend farther, he hoped, to bring about a reconciliation
with George.

This note, despatched by the same messenger who had carried the
invitation to Chopper on the previous day, alarmed the worthy clerk not
a little.  It was inclosed to him, and as he opened the letter he
trembled lest the dinner should be put off on which he was calculating.
His mind was inexpressibly relieved when he found that the envelope was
only a reminder for himself.  ("I shall expect you at half-past five,"
Captain Dobbin wrote.) He was very much interested about his employer's
family; but, que voulez-vous? a grand dinner was of more concern to him
than the affairs of any other mortal.

Dobbin was quite justified in repeating the General's information to
any officers of the regiment whom he should see in the course of his
peregrinations; accordingly he imparted it to Ensign Stubble, whom he
met at the agent's, and who--such was his military ardour--went off
instantly to purchase a new sword at the accoutrement-maker's. Here
this young fellow, who, though only seventeen years of age, and about
sixty-five inches high, with a constitution naturally rickety and much
impaired by premature brandy and water, had an undoubted courage and a
lion's heart, poised, tried, bent, and balanced a weapon such as he
thought would do execution amongst Frenchmen. Shouting "Ha, ha!" and
stamping his little feet with tremendous energy, he delivered the point
twice or thrice at Captain Dobbin, who parried the thrust laughingly
with his bamboo walking-stick.

Mr. Stubble, as may be supposed from his size and slenderness, was of
the Light Bobs.  Ensign Spooney, on the contrary, was a tall youth, and
belonged to (Captain Dobbin's) the Grenadier Company, and he tried on a
new bearskin cap, under which he looked savage beyond his years.  Then
these two lads went off to the Slaughters', and having ordered a famous
dinner, sate down and wrote off letters to the kind anxious parents at
home--letters full of love and heartiness, and pluck and bad spelling.
Ah! there were many anxious hearts beating through England at that
time; and mothers' prayers and tears flowing in many homesteads.

Seeing young Stubble engaged in composition at one of the coffee-room
tables at the Slaughters', and the tears trickling down his nose on to
the paper (for the youngster was thinking of his mamma, and that he
might never see her again), Dobbin, who was going to write off a letter
to George Osborne, relented, and locked up his desk.  "Why should I?"
said he.  "Let her have this night happy. I'll go and see my parents
early in the morning, and go down to Brighton myself to-morrow."

So he went up and laid his big hand on young Stubble's shoulder, and
backed up that young champion, and told him if he would leave off
brandy and water he would be a good soldier, as he always was a
gentlemanly good-hearted fellow.  Young Stubble's eyes brightened up at
this, for Dobbin was greatly respected in the regiment, as the best
officer and the cleverest man in it.

"Thank you, Dobbin," he said, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles, "I
was just--just telling her I would.  And, O Sir, she's so dam kind to
me." The water pumps were at work again, and I am not sure that the
soft-hearted Captain's eyes did not also twinkle.

The two ensigns, the Captain, and Mr. Chopper, dined together in the
same box.  Chopper brought the letter from Mr. Osborne, in which the
latter briefly presented his compliments to Captain Dobbin, and
requested him to forward the inclosed to Captain George Osborne.
Chopper knew nothing further; he described Mr. Osborne's appearance, it
is true, and his interview with his lawyer, wondered how the governor
had sworn at nobody, and--especially as the wine circled
round--abounded in speculations and conjectures.  But these grew more
vague with every glass, and at length became perfectly unintelligible.
At a late hour Captain Dobbin put his guest into a hackney coach, in a
hiccupping state, and swearing that he would be the kick--the
kick--Captain's friend for ever and ever.

When Captain Dobbin took leave of Miss Osborne we have said that he
asked leave to come and pay her another visit, and the spinster
expected him for some hours the next day, when, perhaps, had he come,
and had he asked her that question which she was prepared to answer,
she would have declared herself as her brother's friend, and a
reconciliation might have been effected between George and his angry
father.  But though she waited at home the Captain never came. He had
his own affairs to pursue; his own parents to visit and console; and at
an early hour of the day to take his place on the Lightning coach, and
go down to his friends at Brighton.  In the course of the day Miss
Osborne heard her father give orders that that meddling scoundrel,
Captain Dobbin, should never be admitted within his doors again, and
any hopes in which she may have indulged privately were thus abruptly
brought to an end.  Mr. Frederick Bullock came, and was particularly
affectionate to Maria, and attentive to the broken-spirited old
gentleman.  For though he said his mind would be easy, the means which
he had taken to secure quiet did not seem to have succeeded as yet, and
the events of the past two days had visibly shattered him.

 Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty One, Twenty Two, Twenty Three and Twenty Four Chapter Seventeen begins with an auction of the contents of a house. It is gradually revealed that this is the Sedley home. Although not named at first, we later discover that a painting of a stout man on an elephant is bought by Rawdon and Becky; Dobbin outbids them for the piano. Sedley's downfall is then described and it is explained that he is a ruined man. The family are staying at Mr Clapp's cottage. Mr Clapp used to be Sedley's clerk when business was thriving. Joseph stays on in Cheltenham, but lets his mother know they can draw money whenever they wish. Becky was surprised to find the house for sale and has just returned after being away with Rawdon for a month. He is always in debt and lives on credit, and it is ironic that Sedley is made bankrupt and disgraced for also being in debt. In Chapter Eighteen, Sedley is most hurt by Osborne senior. Sedley had helped him in the past, but now Osborne senior is savage with him in creditor meetings. He also wants his son to break the match with Amelia. Dobbin and Osborne's regiment is ordered abroad as Napoleon has returned to France. Osborne is somewhat melancholic when he receives the note from Amelia confirming the end of their engagement . She also thanks him for buying the piano, as she does not know this was done by Dobbin. Dobbin visits her and reports to Osborne that she is 'dying'. Osborne writes to her and calls her 'dearest wife'. Chapter Nineteen examines Mrs Bute Crawley's machinations. She takes over the care of Miss Crawley and exaggerates her invalid status. She also tells Miss Crawley about Rawdon's many faults and discovers more about Becky's childhood . After Rawdon and Becky cross their path in the park, Mrs Bute Crawley decides to take her charge to Brighton. In Chapter Twenty, Dobbin finds himself arranging the match between Osborne and Amelia. He finds it painful, though, as he obviously cares about her. He talks to Sedley about Amelia and manages to persuade him that if he does not consent to their marriage, they will elope anyway. Osborne senior encourages his daughters' friendship with Miss Swartz, the young heiress, in Chapter Twenty One, as he thinks she is suitable for his son. Osborne does not think highly of her and refers to her as a 'mahogany charmer'. Through dinner, Osborne talks about Amelia and later tells his father he refuses to marry Miss Swartz as he 'does not like her colour'. When he leaves the house, his father threatens to cut him off. Chapter Twenty Two begins with references to the wedding of Osborne and Amelia. The narrative shifts to Brighton, with Osborne, Joseph and Rawdon talking whilst the ladies are out on a drive. Joseph is there to visit Amelia and Osborne on their honeymoon. Becky and Rawdon are there with a hope to seeing Miss Crawley. Dobbin appears a few days later and tells George the army has been ordered to Belgium. They will embark next week. In Chapter Twenty Three, the narrative moves backs to Dobbin in London when he was attempting to soften up Osborne's sisters before telling them of their brother's marriage. Fred Bullock comes to visit Maria and on hearing the news he realizes that the sisters will now be worth more money as their brother will be cut out of the will. In Chapter Twenty Four, Dobbin tells Osborne senior of the marriage in Chapter Twenty Four, as he promised Osborne he would do this. On hearing the news, Osborne senior takes to his study and looks through documents and letters pertaining to his son. He then opens the family Bible and looks at the names of the family members he has listed. He crosses out his son's name and burns his will. He sends a letter to Osborne, via Dobbin, and calls Dobbin a meddler. Dobbin is abashed and nervous about the interview with Mr. Osborne in his office, in which he will break the news of George's marriage in person. Mr. Osborne is cordial to Dobbin, thinking he is bringing news of George's surrender. Osborne thinks Dobbin is a bumpkin in his appearance and manners, not realizing Dobbin is feeling guilt, for the whole turn of events is due to him. He wonders to himself why he was so hasty in getting them married? It was because of his love and not wanting to be in further suspense himself. Mr. Osborne explains that his whole life and career have been a sacrifice for his son, to promote him to glory. Dobbin tries to tell him that his son is too high minded to marry for money, but the father does not understand, for he himself would marry Miss Swartz without shame. Dobbin blurts out the news and then leaves. He asks Chopper, the clerk to report to him the progress of Osborne's feelings on the topic. Osborne goes home, and no word is spoken by anyone at the family dinner with daughters, Miss Wirt, and Mr. Bullock. Afterwards, the old man goes to his study, and looks at all of George's papers since he was a child. In grief, he seals them up in a box. He takes down the family Bible and strikes out George's name. The next day Mr. Osborne goes to his office and changes his will, giving a letter to George to Mr. Chopper to deliver to Dobbin. Meanwhile, Dobbin's superior officer sends for him and tells him of the immediate deployment of the regiment. He should say his good-bys. Dobbin considers sending an immediate letter to Brighton but decides to give Amelia one more day of peace and to deliver the news next day himself. While Dobbin waits for Mr. Chopper at Slaughter's coffee house, he encourages young Ensigns Stubble and Spooney, who are getting prepared for their first battle. Chopper delivers the letter to Dobbin. Osborne forbids admittance to his house of either George or Dobbin again.

