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.