“I daresay she’ll recover it,” Becky
said with a smile—and they drove on and
talked about something else.
Who Played on the Piano Captain Dobbin Bought
Our surprised story now finds itself for a moment
among very famous events and personages, and hanging
on to the skirts of history. When the eagles
of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart, were
flying from Provence, where they had perched after
a brief sojourn in Elba, and from steeple to steeple
until they reached the towers of Notre Dame, I wonder
whether the Imperial birds had any eye for a little
corner of the parish of Bloomsbury, London, which you
might have thought so quiet, that even the whirring
and flapping of those mighty wings would pass unobserved
there?
“Napoleon has landed at Cannes.”
Such news might create a panic at Vienna, and cause
Russia to drop his cards, and take Prussia into a
corner, and Talleyrand and Metternich to wag their
heads together, while Prince Hardenberg, and even
the present Marquis of Londonderry, were puzzled;
but how was this intelligence to affect a young lady
in Russell Square, before whose door the watchman sang
the hours when she was asleep: who, if she strolled
in the square, was guarded there by the railings and
the beadle: who, if she walked ever so short
a distance to buy a ribbon in Southampton Row, was
followed by Black Sambo with an enormous cane:
who was always cared for, dressed, put to bed, and
watched over by ever so many guardian angels, with
and without wages? Bon Dieu, I say, is it not
hard that the fateful rush of the great Imperial struggle
can’t take place without affecting a poor little
harmless girl of eighteen, who is occupied in billing
and cooing, or working muslin collars in Russell Square?
You too, kindly, homely flower!—is the
great roaring war tempest coming to sweep you down,
here, although cowering under the shelter of Holborn?
Yes; Napoleon is flinging his last stake, and poor
little Emmy Sedley’s happiness forms, somehow,
part of it.
In the first place, her father’s fortune was
swept down with that fatal news. All his speculations
had of late gone wrong with the luckless old gentleman.
Ventures had failed; merchants had broken; funds
had risen when he calculated they would fall.
What need to particularize? If success is rare
and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin
is. Old Sedley had kept his own sad counsel.
Everything seemed to go on as usual in the quiet, opulent
house; the good-natured mistress pursuing, quite unsuspiciously,
her bustling idleness, and daily easy avocations;
the daughter absorbed still in one selfish, tender
thought, and quite regardless of all the world besides,
when that final crash came, under which the worthy
family fell.
