Vanity Fair - Page 484/573

He recovered, rallied, relapsed again, having undergone such a process

of blood-letting and calomel as showed the strength of his original

constitution. He was almost a skeleton when they put him on board the

Ramchunder East Indiaman, Captain Bragg, from Calcutta, touching at

Madras, and so weak and prostrate that his friend who had tended him

through his illness prophesied that the honest Major would never

survive the voyage, and that he would pass some morning, shrouded in

flag and hammock, over the ship's side, and carrying down to the sea

with him the relic that he wore at his heart. But whether it was the

sea air, or the hope which sprung up in him afresh, from the day that

the ship spread her canvas and stood out of the roads towards home, our

friend began to amend, and he was quite well (though as gaunt as a

greyhound) before they reached the Cape. "Kirk will be disappointed of

his majority this time," he said with a smile; "he will expect to find

himself gazetted by the time the regiment reaches home." For it must be

premised that while the Major was lying ill at Madras, having made such

prodigious haste to go thither, the gallant --th, which had passed many

years abroad, which after its return from the West Indies had been

baulked of its stay at home by the Waterloo campaign, and had been

ordered from Flanders to India, had received orders home; and the Major

might have accompanied his comrades, had he chosen to wait for their

arrival at Madras.

Perhaps he was not inclined to put himself in his exhausted state again

under the guardianship of Glorvina. "I think Miss O'Dowd would have

done for me," he said laughingly to a fellow-passenger, "if we had had

her on board, and when she had sunk me, she would have fallen upon you,

depend upon it, and carried you in as a prize to Southampton, Jos, my

boy."

For indeed it was no other than our stout friend who was also a

passenger on board the Ramchunder. He had passed ten years in Bengal.

Constant dinners, tiffins, pale ale and claret, the prodigious labour

of cutcherry, and the refreshment of brandy-pawnee which he was forced

to take there, had their effect upon Waterloo Sedley. A voyage to

Europe was pronounced necessary for him--and having served his full

time in India and had fine appointments which had enabled him to lay by

a considerable sum of money, he was free to come home and stay with a

good pension, or to return and resume that rank in the service to which

his seniority and his vast talents entitled him.

He was rather thinner than when we last saw him, but had gained in

majesty and solemnity of demeanour. He had resumed the mustachios to

which his services at Waterloo entitled him, and swaggered about on

deck in a magnificent velvet cap with a gold band and a profuse

ornamentation of pins and jewellery about his person. He took breakfast

in his cabin and dressed as solemnly to appear on the quarter-deck as

if he were going to turn out for Bond Street, or the Course at

Calcutta. He brought a native servant with him, who was his valet and

pipe-bearer and who wore the Sedley crest in silver on his turban.

That oriental menial had a wretched life under the tyranny of Jos

Sedley. Jos was as vain of his person as a woman, and took as long a

time at his toilette as any fading beauty. The youngsters among the

passengers, Young Chaffers of the 150th, and poor little Ricketts,

coming home after his third fever, used to draw out Sedley at the

cuddy-table and make him tell prodigious stories about himself and his

exploits against tigers and Napoleon. He was great when he visited the

Emperor's tomb at Longwood, when to these gentlemen and the young

officers of the ship, Major Dobbin not being by, he described the whole

battle of Waterloo and all but announced that Napoleon never would have

gone to Saint Helena at all but for him, Jos Sedley.