Vanity Fair (66 page)

Now Rawdon Crawley, rascal as the Colonel was, had certain manly
tendencies of affection in his heart and could love a child and a
woman still. For Rawdon minor he had a great secret tenderness
then, which did not escape Rebecca, though she did not talk about it
to her husband. It did not annoy her: she was too good-natured.
It only increased her scorn for him. He felt somehow ashamed of
this paternal softness and hid it from his wife—only indulging in
it when alone with the boy.

He used to take him out of mornings when they would go to the
stables together and to the park. Little Lord Southdown, the best-
natured of men, who would make you a present of the hat from his
head, and whose main occupation in life was to buy knick-knacks that
he might give them away afterwards, bought the little chap a pony
not much bigger than a large rat, the donor said, and on this little
black Shetland pygmy young Rawdon's great father was pleased to
mount the boy, and to walk by his side in the park. It pleased him
to see his old quarters, and his old fellow-guardsmen at
Knightsbridge: he had begun to think of his bachelorhood with
something like regret. The old troopers were glad to recognize
their ancient officer and dandle the little colonel. Colonel Crawley
found dining at mess and with his brother-officers very pleasant.
"Hang it, I ain't clever enough for her—I know it. She won't miss
me," he used to say: and he was right, his wife did not miss him.

Rebecca was fond of her husband. She was always perfectly good-
humoured and kind to him. She did not even show her scorn much for
him; perhaps she liked him the better for being a fool. He was her
upper servant and maitre d'hotel. He went on her errands; obeyed
her orders without question; drove in the carriage in the ring with
her without repining; took her to the opera-box, solaced himself at
his club during the performance, and came punctually back to fetch
her when due. He would have liked her to be a little fonder of the
boy, but even to that he reconciled himself. "Hang it, you know
she's so clever," he said, "and I'm not literary and that, you
know." For, as we have said before, it requires no great wisdom to
be able to win at cards and billiards, and Rawdon made no
pretensions to any other sort of skill.

When the companion came, his domestic duties became very light. His
wife encouraged him to dine abroad: she would let him off duty at
the opera. "Don't stay and stupefy yourself at home to-night, my
dear," she would say. "Some men are coming who will only bore you.
I would not ask them, but you know it's for your good, and now I
have a sheep-dog, I need not be afraid to be alone."

"A sheep-dog—a companion! Becky Sharp with a companion! Isn't it
good fun?" thought Mrs. Crawley to herself. The notion tickled
hugely her sense of humour.

One Sunday morning, as Rawdon Crawley, his little son, and the pony
were taking their accustomed walk in the park, they passed by an old
acquaintance of the Colonel's, Corporal Clink, of the regiment, who
was in conversation with a friend, an old gentleman, who held a boy
in his arms about the age of little Rawdon. This other youngster
had seized hold of the Waterloo medal which the Corporal wore, and
was examining it with delight.

"Good morning, your Honour," said Clink, in reply to the "How do,
Clink?" of the Colonel. "This ere young gentleman is about the
little Colonel's age, sir," continued the corporal.

"His father was a Waterloo man, too," said the old gentleman, who
carried the boy. "Wasn't he, Georgy?"

"Yes," said Georgy. He and the little chap on the pony were looking
at each other with all their might—solemnly scanning each other as
children do.

"In a line regiment," Clink said with a patronizing air.

"He was a Captain in the —th regiment," said the old gentleman
rather pompously. "Captain George Osborne, sir—perhaps you knew
him. He died the death of a hero, sir, fighting against the
Corsican tyrant." Colonel Crawley blushed quite red. "I knew him
very well, sir," he said, "and his wife, his dear little wife, sir—
how is she?"

"She is my daughter, sir," said the old gentleman, putting down the
boy and taking out a card with great solemnity, which he handed to
the Colonel. On it written—

"Mr. Sedley, Sole Agent for the Black Diamond and Anti-Cinder Coal
Association, Bunker's Wharf, Thames Street, and Anna-Maria Cottages,
Fulham Road West."

Little Georgy went up and looked at the Shetland pony.

"Should you like to have a ride?" said Rawdon minor from the saddle.

"Yes," said Georgy. The Colonel, who had been looking at him with
some interest, took up the child and put him on the pony behind
Rawdon minor.

"Take hold of him, Georgy," he said—"take my little boy round the
waist—his name is Rawdon." And both the children began to laugh.

"You won't see a prettier pair I think, THIS summer's day, sir,"
said the good-natured Corporal; and the Colonel, the Corporal, and
old Mr. Sedley with his umbrella, walked by the side of the
children.

A Family in a Very Small Way

We must suppose little George Osborne has ridden from Knightsbridge
towards Fulham, and will stop and make inquiries at that village
regarding some friends whom we have left there. How is Mrs. Amelia
after the storm of Waterloo? Is she living and thriving? What has
come of Major Dobbin, whose cab was always hankering about her
premises? And is there any news of the Collector of Boggley Wollah?
The facts concerning the latter are briefly these:

Our worthy fat friend Joseph Sedley returned to India not long after
his escape from Brussels. Either his furlough was up, or he dreaded
to meet any witnesses of his Waterloo flight. However it might be,
he went back to his duties in Bengal very soon after Napoleon had
taken up his residence at St. Helena, where Jos saw the ex-Emperor.
To hear Mr. Sedley talk on board ship you would have supposed that
it was not the first time he and the Corsican had met, and that the
civilian had bearded the French General at Mount St. John. He had
a thousand anecdotes about the famous battles; he knew the position
of every regiment and the loss which each had incurred. He did not
deny that he had been concerned in those victories—that he had been
with the army and carried despatches for the Duke of Wellington. And
he described what the Duke did and said on every conceivable moment
of the day of Waterloo, with such an accurate knowledge of his
Grace's sentiments and proceedings that it was clear he must have
been by the conqueror's side throughout the day; though, as a non-
combatant, his name was not mentioned in the public documents
relative to the battle. Perhaps he actually worked himself up to
believe that he had been engaged with the army; certain it is that
he made a prodigious sensation for some time at Calcutta, and was
called Waterloo Sedley during the whole of his subsequent stay in
Bengal.

The bills which Jos had given for the purchase of those unlucky
horses were paid without question by him and his agents. He never
was heard to allude to the bargain, and nobody knows for a certainty
what became of the horses, or how he got rid of them, or of Isidor,
his Belgian servant, who sold a grey horse, very like the one which
Jos rode, at Valenciennes sometime during the autumn of 1815.

Jos's London agents had orders to pay one hundred and twenty pounds
yearly to his parents at Fulham. It was the chief support of the
old couple; for Mr. Sedley's speculations in life subsequent to his
bankruptcy did not by any means retrieve the broken old gentleman's
fortune. He tried to be a wine-merchant, a coal-merchant, a
commission lottery agent, &c., &c. He sent round prospectuses to
his friends whenever he took a new trade, and ordered a new brass
plate for the door, and talked pompously about making his fortune
still. But Fortune never came back to the feeble and stricken old
man. One by one his friends dropped off, and were weary of buying
dear coals and bad wine from him; and there was only his wife in all
the world who fancied, when he tottered off to the City of a
morning, that he was still doing any business there. At evening he
crawled slowly back; and he used to go of nights to a little club at
a tavern, where he disposed of the finances of the nation. It was
wonderful to hear him talk about millions, and agios, and discounts,
and what Rothschild was doing, and Baring Brothers. He talked of
such vast sums that the gentlemen of the club (the apothecary, the
undertaker, the great carpenter and builder, the parish clerk, who
was allowed to come stealthily, and Mr. Clapp, our old
acquaintance,) respected the old gentleman. "I was better off once,
sir," he did not fail to tell everybody who "used the room." "My
son, sir, is at this minute chief magistrate of Ramgunge in the
Presidency of Bengal, and touching his four thousand rupees per
mensem. My daughter might be a Colonel's lady if she liked. I
might draw upon my son, the first magistrate, sir, for two thousand
pounds to-morrow, and Alexander would cash my bill, down sir, down
on the counter, sir. But the Sedleys were always a proud family."
You and I, my dear reader, may drop into this condition one day:
for have not many of our friends attained it? Our luck may fail: our
powers forsake us: our place on the boards be taken by better and
younger mimes—the chance of life roll away and leave us shattered
and stranded. Then men will walk across the road when they meet
you—or, worse still, hold you out a couple of fingers and patronize
you in a pitying way—then you will know, as soon as your back is
turned, that your friend begins with a "Poor devil, what imprudences
he has committed, what chances that chap has thrown away!" Well,
well—a carriage and three thousand a year is not the summit of the
reward nor the end of God's judgment of men. If quacks prosper as
often as they go to the wall—if zanies succeed and knaves arrive at
fortune, and, vice versa, sharing ill luck and prosperity for all
the world like the ablest and most honest amongst us—I say,
brother, the gifts and pleasures of Vanity Fair cannot be held of
any great account, and that it is probable . . . but we are
wandering out of the domain of the story.

Had Mrs. Sedley been a woman of energy, she would have exerted it
after her husband's ruin and, occupying a large house, would have
taken in boarders. The broken Sedley would have acted well as the
boarding-house landlady's husband; the Munoz of private life; the
titular lord and master: the carver, house-steward, and humble
husband of the occupier of the dingy throne. I have seen men of
good brains and breeding, and of good hopes and vigour once, who
feasted squires and kept hunters in their youth, meekly cutting up
legs of mutton for rancorous old harridans and pretending to preside
over their dreary tables—but Mrs. Sedley, we say, had not spirit
enough to bustle about for "a few select inmates to join a cheerful
musical family," such as one reads of in the Times. She was content
to lie on the shore where fortune had stranded her—and you could
see that the career of this old couple was over.

I don't think they were unhappy. Perhaps they were a little prouder
in their downfall than in their prosperity. Mrs. Sedley was always a
great person for her landlady, Mrs. Clapp, when she descended and
passed many hours with her in the basement or ornamented kitchen.
The Irish maid Betty Flanagan's bonnets and ribbons, her sauciness,
her idleness, her reckless prodigality of kitchen candles, her
consumption of tea and sugar, and so forth occupied and amused the
old lady almost as much as the doings of her former household, when
she had Sambo and the coachman, and a groom, and a footboy, and a
housekeeper with a regiment of female domestics—her former
household, about which the good lady talked a hundred times a day.
And besides Betty Flanagan, Mrs. Sedley had all the maids-of-all-
work in the street to superintend. She knew how each tenant of the
cottages paid or owed his little rent. She stepped aside when Mrs.
Rougemont the actress passed with her dubious family. She flung up
her head when Mrs. Pestler, the apothecary's lady, drove by in her
husband's professional one-horse chaise. She had colloquies with
the greengrocer about the pennorth of turnips which Mr. Sedley
loved; she kept an eye upon the milkman and the baker's boy; and
made visitations to the butcher, who sold hundreds of oxen very
likely with less ado than was made about Mrs. Sedley's loin of
mutton: and she counted the potatoes under the joint on Sundays, on
which days, dressed in her best, she went to church twice and read
Blair's Sermons in the evening.

On that day, for "business" prevented him on weekdays from taking
such a pleasure, it was old Sedley's delight to take out his little
grandson Georgy to the neighbouring parks or Kensington Gardens, to
see the soldiers or to feed the ducks. Georgy loved the redcoats,
and his grandpapa told him how his father had been a famous soldier,
and introduced him to many sergeants and others with Waterloo medals
on their breasts, to whom the old grandfather pompously presented
the child as the son of Captain Osborne of the —th, who died
gloriously on the glorious eighteenth. He has been known to treat
some of these non-commissioned gentlemen to a glass of porter, and,
indeed, in their first Sunday walks was disposed to spoil little
Georgy, sadly gorging the boy with apples and parliament, to the
detriment of his health—until Amelia declared that George should
never go out with his grandpapa unless the latter promised solemnly,
and on his honour, not to give the child any cakes, lollipops, or
stall produce whatever.

Between Mrs. Sedley and her daughter there was a sort of coolness
about this boy, and a secret jealousy—for one evening in George's
very early days, Amelia, who had been seated at work in their little
parlour scarcely remarking that the old lady had quitted the room,
ran upstairs instinctively to the nursery at the cries of the child,
who had been asleep until that moment—and there found Mrs. Sedley
in the act of surreptitiously administering Daffy's Elixir to the
infant. Amelia, the gentlest and sweetest of everyday mortals, when
she found this meddling with her maternal authority, thrilled and
trembled all over with anger. Her cheeks, ordinarily pale, now
flushed up, until they were as red as they used to be when she was a
child of twelve years old. She seized the baby out of her mother's
arms and then grasped at the bottle, leaving the old lady gaping at
her, furious, and holding the guilty tea-spoon.