Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray (portable ebook reader .txt) 📖

as the boardinghouse 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 noncommissioned 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 teaspoon.

Amelia flung the bottle crashing into the fireplace. “I will not have baby poisoned, Mamma,” cried Emmy, rocking the infant about violently with both her arms round him and turning with flashing eyes at her mother.

“Poisoned, Amelia!” said the old lady; “this language to me?”

“He shall not have any medicine but that which Mr. Pestler sends for him. He told me that Daffy’s Elixir was poison.”

“Very good: you think I’m a murderess then,” replied Mrs. Sedley. “This is the language you use to your mother. I have met with misfortunes: I have sunk low in life: I have kept my carriage, and now walk on foot: but I did not know I was a murderess before, and thank you for the news.”

“Mamma,” said the poor girl, who was always ready for tears⁠—“you shouldn’t be hard upon me. I⁠—I didn’t mean⁠—I mean, I did not wish to say you would do any wrong to this dear child, only⁠—”

“Oh, no, my love⁠—only that I was a murderess; in which case I had better go to the Old Bailey. Though I didn’t poison you, when you were a child, but gave you the best of education and the most expensive masters money could procure. Yes; I’ve nursed five children and buried three; and the one I loved the best of all, and tended through croup, and teething, and measles, and whooping-cough, and brought up with foreign masters, regardless of expense, and with accomplishments at Minerva House⁠—which I never had when I was a girl⁠—when I was too glad to honour my father and mother, that I might live long in the land, and to be useful, and not to mope all day in my room and act the fine lady⁠—says I’m a murderess. Ah, Mrs. Osborne!