Vanity Fair - Page 322/573

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.