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

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 Coffeehouse 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 tête-à-tête 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 sat 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 sat 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 forever. 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 wrongheaded. 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