The Major folded his arms round her, holding her to
him as if she was a child, and kissed her head.
“I will not change, dear Amelia,” he
said. “I ask for no more than your love.
I think I would not have it otherwise. Only
let me stay near you and see you often.”
“Yes, often,” Amelia said. And so
William was at liberty to look and long—as
the poor boy at school who has no money may sigh after
the contents of the tart-woman’s tray.
Returns to the Genteel World
Good fortune now begins to smile upon Amelia.
We are glad to get her out of that low sphere in
which she has been creeping hitherto and introduce
her into a polite circle—not so grand and
refined as that in which our other female friend,
Mrs. Becky, has appeared, but still having no small
pretensions to gentility and fashion. Jos’s
friends were all from the three presidencies, and his
new house was in the comfortable Anglo-Indian district
of which Moira Place is the centre. Minto Square,
Great Clive Street, Warren Street, Hastings Street,
Ochterlony Place, Plassy Square, Assaye Terrace ("gardens”
was a felicitous word not applied to stucco houses
with asphalt terraces in front, so early as 1827)—who
does not know these respectable abodes of the retired
Indian aristocracy, and the quarter which Mr. Wenham
calls the Black Hole, in a word? Jos’s
position in life was not grand enough to entitle him
to a house in Moira Place, where none can live but
retired Members of Council, and partners of Indian
firms (who break, after having settled a hundred thousand
pounds on their wives, and retire into comparative
penury to a country place and four thousand a year);
he engaged a comfortable house of a second- or third-rate
order in Gillespie Street, purchasing the carpets,
costly mirrors, and handsome and appropriate planned
furniture by Seddons from the assignees of Mr. Scape,
lately admitted partner into the great Calcutta House
of Fogle, Fake, and Cracksman, in which poor Scape
had embarked seventy thousand pounds, the earnings
of a long and honourable life, taking Fake’s
place, who retired to a princely park in Sussex (the
Fogles have been long out of the firm, and Sir Horace
Fogle is about to be raised to the peerage as Baron
Bandanna)—admitted, I say, partner into
the great agency house of Fogle and Fake two years
before it failed for a million and plunged half the
Indian public into misery and ruin.
Scape, ruined, honest, and broken-hearted at sixty-five
years of age, went out to Calcutta to wind up the
affairs of the house. Walter Scape was withdrawn
from Eton and put into a merchant’s house.
Florence Scape, Fanny Scape, and their mother faded
away to Boulogne, and will be heard of no more.
To be brief, Jos stepped in and bought their carpets
and sideboards and admired himself in the mirrors
which had reflected their kind handsome faces.
The Scape tradesmen, all honourably paid, left their
