Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (best thriller novels to read TXT) 📕

words of hope, such as her pious simple heart could best feel and utter, and closed the eyes that had once looked so tenderly upon her.

Then all her time and tenderness were devoted to the consolation and comfort of the bereaved old father, who was stunned by the blow which had befallen him, and stood utterly alone in the world. His wife, his honour, his fortune, everything he loved best had fallen away from him. There was only Amelia to stand by and support with her gentle arms the tottering, heartbroken old man. We are not going to write the history: it would be too dreary and stupid. I can see Vanity Fair yawning over it d’avance.

One day, as the young gentlemen were assembled in the study at the Rev. Mr. Veal’s, and the domestic chaplain to the Right Honourable the Earl of Bareacres was spouting away as usual, a smart carriage drove up to the door decorated with the statue of Athene, and two gentlemen stepped out. The young Masters Bangles rushed to the window with a vague notion that their father might have arrived from Bombay. The great hulking scholar of three-and-twenty, who was crying secretly over a passage of Eutropius, flattened his neglected nose against the panes and looked at the drag, as the laquais de place sprang from the box and let out the persons in the carriage.

“It’s a fat one and a thin one,” Mr. Bluck said as a thundering knock came to the door.

Everybody was interested, from the domestic chaplain himself, who hoped he saw the fathers of some future pupils, down to Master Georgy, glad of any pretext for laying his book down.

The boy in the shabby livery with the faded copper buttons, who always thrust himself into the tight coat to open the door, came into the study and said, “Two gentlemen want to see Master Osborne.” The professor had had a trifling altercation in the morning with that young gentleman, owing to a difference about the introduction of crackers in school-time; but his face resumed its habitual expression of bland courtesy as he said, “Master Osborne, I give you full permission to go and see your carriage friends⁠—to whom I beg you to convey the respectful compliments of myself and Mrs. Veal.”

Georgy went into the reception-room and saw two strangers, whom he looked at with his head up, in his usual haughty manner. One was fat, with mustachios, and the other was lean and long, in a blue frock-coat, with a brown face and a grizzled head.

“My God, how like he is!” said the long gentleman with a start. “Can you guess who we are, George?”

The boy’s face flushed up, as it did usually when he was moved, and his eyes brightened. “I don’t know the other,” he said, “but I should think you must be Major Dobbin.”

Indeed it was our old friend. His voice trembled with pleasure as he greeted the boy, and taking both the other’s hands in his own, drew the lad to him.

“Your mother has talked to you about me⁠—has she?” he said.

“That she has,” Georgy answered, “hundreds and hundreds of times.”

LVII Eothen

It was one of the many causes for personal pride with which old Osborne chose to recreate himself that Sedley, his ancient rival, enemy, and benefactor, was in his last days so utterly defeated and humiliated as to be forced to accept pecuniary obligations at the hands of the man who had most injured and insulted him. The successful man of the world cursed the old pauper and relieved him from time to time. As he furnished George with money for his mother, he gave the boy to understand by hints, delivered in his brutal, coarse way, that George’s maternal grandfather was but a wretched old bankrupt and dependant, and that John Sedley might thank the man to whom he already owed ever so much money for the aid which his generosity now chose to administer. George carried the pompous supplies to his mother and the shattered old widower whom it was now the main business of her life to tend and comfort. The little fellow patronized the feeble and disappointed old man.

It may have shown a want of “proper pride” in Amelia that she chose to accept these money benefits at the hands of her father’s enemy. But proper pride and this poor lady had never had much acquaintance together. A disposition naturally simple and demanding protection; a long course of poverty and humility, of daily privations, and hard words, of kind offices and no returns, had been her lot ever since womanhood almost, or since her luckless marriage with George Osborne. You who see your betters bearing up under this shame every day, meekly suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied, poor, and rather despised for their poverty, do you ever step down from your prosperity and wash the feet of these poor wearied beggars? The very thought of them is odious and low. “There must be classes⁠—there must be rich and poor,” Dives says, smacking his claret (it is well if he even sends the broken meat out to Lazarus sitting under the window). Very true; but think how mysterious and often unaccountable it is⁠—that lottery of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen and sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for comforters.

So I must own that, without much repining, on the contrary with something akin to gratitude, Amelia took the crumbs that her father-in-law let drop now and then, and with them fed her own parent. Directly she understood it to be her duty, it was this young woman’s nature (ladies, she is but thirty still, and we choose to call her a young woman even at that age) it was, I say, her nature to sacrifice herself and to fling all that she had at the feet of the beloved object. During what long