Vanity Fair (35 page)

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.