Vanity Fair - Page 366/573

This letter, which arrived by the very same ship which brought out

Lady O'Dowd's box of millinery from London (and which you may be sure

Dobbin opened before any one of the other packets which the mail

brought him), put the receiver into such a state of mind that Glorvina,

and her pink satin, and everything belonging to her became perfectly

odious to him. The Major cursed the talk of women, and the sex in

general. Everything annoyed him that day--the parade was insufferably

hot and wearisome. Good heavens! was a man of intellect to waste his

life, day after day, inspecting cross-belts and putting fools through

their manoeuvres? The senseless chatter of the young men at mess was

more than ever jarring. What cared he, a man on the high road to forty,

to know how many snipes Lieutenant Smith had shot, or what were the

performances of Ensign Brown's mare? The jokes about the table filled

him with shame. He was too old to listen to the banter of the

assistant surgeon and the slang of the youngsters, at which old O'Dowd,

with his bald head and red face, laughed quite easily. The old man had

listened to those jokes any time these thirty years--Dobbin himself had

been fifteen years hearing them. And after the boisterous dulness of

the mess-table, the quarrels and scandal of the ladies of the regiment!

It was unbearable, shameful. "O Amelia, Amelia," he thought, "you to

whom I have been so faithful--you reproach me! It is because you

cannot feel for me that I drag on this wearisome life. And you reward

me after years of devotion by giving me your blessing upon my marriage,

forsooth, with this flaunting Irish girl!" Sick and sorry felt poor

William; more than ever wretched and lonely. He would like to have

done with life and its vanity altogether--so bootless and

unsatisfactory the struggle, so cheerless and dreary the prospect

seemed to him. He lay all that night sleepless, and yearning to go

home. Amelia's letter had fallen as a blank upon him. No fidelity, no

constant truth and passion, could move her into warmth. She would not

see that he loved her. Tossing in his bed, he spoke out to her. "Good

God, Amelia!" he said, "don't you know that I only love you in the

world--you, who are a stone to me--you, whom I tended through months

and months of illness and grief, and who bade me farewell with a smile

on your face, and forgot me before the door shut between us!" The

native servants lying outside his verandas beheld with wonder the

Major, so cold and quiet ordinarily, at present so passionately moved

and cast down. Would she have pitied him had she seen him? He read

over and over all the letters which he ever had from her--letters of

business relative to the little property which he had made her believe

her husband had left to her--brief notes of invitation--every scrap of

writing that she had ever sent to him--how cold, how kind, how

hopeless, how selfish they were!