Vanity Fair - Page 514/573

The Major's position, as guardian to Georgy, whose possession had been

ceded to his grandfather, rendered some meetings between the two

gentlemen inevitable; and it was in one of these that old Osborne, a

keen man of business, looking into the Major's accounts with his ward

and the boy's mother, got a hint, which staggered him very much, and at

once pained and pleased him, that it was out of William Dobbin's own

pocket that a part of the fund had been supplied upon which the poor

widow and the child had subsisted.

When pressed upon the point, Dobbin, who could not tell lies, blushed

and stammered a good deal and finally confessed. "The marriage," he

said (at which his interlocutor's face grew dark) "was very much my

doing. I thought my poor friend had gone so far that retreat from his

engagement would have been dishonour to him and death to Mrs. Osborne,

and I could do no less, when she was left without resources, than give

what money I could spare to maintain her."

"Major D.," Mr. Osborne said, looking hard at him and turning very red

too--"you did me a great injury; but give me leave to tell you, sir,

you are an honest feller. There's my hand, sir, though I little thought

that my flesh and blood was living on you--" and the pair shook hands,

with great confusion on Major Dobbin's part, thus found out in his act

of charitable hypocrisy.

He strove to soften the old man and reconcile him towards his son's

memory. "He was such a noble fellow," he said, "that all of us loved

him, and would have done anything for him. I, as a young man in those

days, was flattered beyond measure by his preference for me, and was

more pleased to be seen in his company than in that of the

Commander-in-Chief. I never saw his equal for pluck and daring and all

the qualities of a soldier"; and Dobbin told the old father as many

stories as he could remember regarding the gallantry and achievements

of his son. "And Georgy is so like him," the Major added.

"He's so like him that he makes me tremble sometimes," the grandfather

said.

On one or two evenings the Major came to dine with Mr. Osborne (it was

during the time of the sickness of Mr. Sedley), and as the two sat

together in the evening after dinner, all their talk was about the

departed hero. The father boasted about him according to his wont,

glorifying himself in recounting his son's feats and gallantry, but his

mood was at any rate better and more charitable than that in which he

had been disposed until now to regard the poor fellow; and the

Christian heart of the kind Major was pleased at these symptoms of

returning peace and good-will. On the second evening old Osborne

called Dobbin William, just as he used to do at the time when Dobbin

and George were boys together, and the honest gentleman was pleased by

that mark of reconciliation.