"Make it short, sir," said Osborne, with an oath.
"I'm here as your son's closest friend," said the Major, "and the executor of his will. Are you aware how small his means were, and of the straitened circumstances of his widow? Do you know, sir, Mrs. Osborne's condition? Her life and her reason almost have been shaken by the blow which has fallen on her. She will be a mother soon. Will you visit the parent's offence upon the child's head? Or will you forgive the child for poor George's sake?"
Osborne broke into a rhapsody of self praise and imprecations. No father in all England could have behaved more generously to a son who had rebelled against him, and had died without even confessing he was wrong. As for himself, he had sworn never to speak to that woman, or to recognise her as his son's wife. "And that's what I will stick to till the last day of my life," he concluded, with an oath.
There was no hope from that quarter then. The widow must live on her slender pittance, or on such aid as Joseph could give her.
For six years Amelia did live on this pittance in shabby genteel poverty with her boy and her parents in Fulham. Dobbin and Joseph Sedley were in India now, and old Sedley, always speculating in bootless schemes, once more brought ruin on his family.
Mr. Osborne had seen his grandson, and had formally offered to take the boy and make him heir to the fortune intended for his father. He would make Mrs. George Osborne an allowance, such as to assure her a decent competency. But it must be understood that the child would live entirely with his grandfather in Russell Square, and that he would be occasionally permitted to see Mrs. George Osborne at her own residence.
At first Amelia rejected the offer with indignation. It was only on the knowledge that her father, in his speculations, had made away with the annuity from Joseph that poverty and misery made her capitulate. Her own, pittance would barely enable her to support her parents, and would not suffice for her son.
"What! Mrs. Pride has come down, has she?" old Osborne said when with a tremulous, eager voice, Miss Osborne, the only unmarried daughter, read him Amelia's letter.
"Regular starve out, hey? ha, ha! I knew she would." He tried to keep his dignity, as he chuckled and swore to himself behind his paper.
"Get the room over mine--his room that was--ready. And you had better send that woman some money," Mr. Osborne said before he went out. "She shan't want for nothing. Send her a hundred pound. But she don't come in here, mind. No, not for all the money in London."