He recovered, rallied, relapsed again, having undergone such a process
of blood-letting and calomel as showed the strength of his original
constitution. He was almost a skeleton when they put him on board the
Ramchunder East Indiaman, Captain Bragg, from Calcutta, touching at
Madras, and so weak and prostrate that his friend who had tended him
through his illness prophesied that the honest Major would never
survive the voyage, and that he would pass some morning, shrouded in
flag and hammock, over the ship's side, and carrying down to the sea
with him the relic that he wore at his heart. But whether it was the
sea air, or the hope which sprung up in him afresh, from the day that
the ship spread her canvas and stood out of the roads towards home, our
friend began to amend, and he was quite well (though as gaunt as a
greyhound) before they reached the Cape. "Kirk will be disappointed of
his majority this time," he said with a smile; "he will expect to find
himself gazetted by the time the regiment reaches home." For it must be
premised that while the Major was lying ill at Madras, having made such
prodigious haste to go thither, the gallant --th, which had passed many
years abroad, which after its return from the West Indies had been
baulked of its stay at home by the Waterloo campaign, and had been
ordered from Flanders to India, had received orders home; and the Major
might have accompanied his comrades, had he chosen to wait for their
arrival at Madras.
Perhaps he was not inclined to put himself in his exhausted state again
under the guardianship of Glorvina. "I think Miss O'Dowd would have
done for me," he said laughingly to a fellow-passenger, "if we had had
her on board, and when she had sunk me, she would have fallen upon you,
depend upon it, and carried you in as a prize to Southampton, Jos, my
boy."
For indeed it was no other than our stout friend who was also a
passenger on board the Ramchunder. He had passed ten years in Bengal.
Constant dinners, tiffins, pale ale and claret, the prodigious labour
of cutcherry, and the refreshment of brandy-pawnee which he was forced
to take there, had their effect upon Waterloo Sedley. A voyage to
Europe was pronounced necessary for him--and having served his full
time in India and had fine appointments which had enabled him to lay by
a considerable sum of money, he was free to come home and stay with a
good pension, or to return and resume that rank in the service to which
his seniority and his vast talents entitled him.
He was rather thinner than when we last saw him, but had gained in
majesty and solemnity of demeanour. He had resumed the mustachios to
which his services at Waterloo entitled him, and swaggered about on
deck in a magnificent velvet cap with a gold band and a profuse
ornamentation of pins and jewellery about his person. He took breakfast
in his cabin and dressed as solemnly to appear on the quarter-deck as
if he were going to turn out for Bond Street, or the Course at
Calcutta. He brought a native servant with him, who was his valet and
pipe-bearer and who wore the Sedley crest in silver on his turban.
That oriental menial had a wretched life under the tyranny of Jos
Sedley. Jos was as vain of his person as a woman, and took as long a
time at his toilette as any fading beauty. The youngsters among the
passengers, Young Chaffers of the 150th, and poor little Ricketts,
coming home after his third fever, used to draw out Sedley at the
cuddy-table and make him tell prodigious stories about himself and his
exploits against tigers and Napoleon. He was great when he visited the
Emperor's tomb at Longwood, when to these gentlemen and the young
officers of the ship, Major Dobbin not being by, he described the whole
battle of Waterloo and all but announced that Napoleon never would have
gone to Saint Helena at all but for him, Jos Sedley.