Boys and Girls from ThackeraySweetser, Kate Dickinson
General
Boys and Girls from Thackeray
Sweetser, Kate Dickinson
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1811-1863 -- Characters
The young widow being left penniless, her mother, who had disowned the
runaway couple, was obliged to become reconciled to her daughter and to
share her small income of one hundred and twenty pounds a year with her.
Upon this at the boarding-house in Brussels the two managed to live. The
twins were put out, after the foreign fashion, to nurse, and a village in
the neighbourhood, and the widow and her mother maintained a very good
appearance despite their small income; and it was not long before the
Widow McCarty married a young Englishman, James Gann, Esq.--of the great
oil-house of Gann, Blubbery, and Gann,--who was boarding in the same
house with Mrs. Crabb and her daughter. These ladies, who had their full
share of common sense, took care to keep the twins in the background
until such time as the Widow McCarty had become Mrs. Gann. Then on the
day after the wedding, in the presence of many friends who had come to
offer their congratulations, a stout nurse, bearing the two chubby little
ones, made her appearance; and these rosy urchins, springing forward,
shouted affectionately, "_Maman! Maman_!" to the great astonishment and
bewilderment of James Gann, who well-nigh fainted at this sudden
paternity so put upon him. However, being a good-humoured, soft-hearted
man, he kissed his lady hurriedly, and vowed that he would take care of
the poor little things, whom he would also have kissed, but the darlings
refused his caress with many roars.
Soon after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. James Gann returned to England and
occupied a house in Thames Street, City, until the death of Gann, Sr.,
when his son, becoming head of the firm, mounted higher on the social
ladder and went to live in the neighbourhood of Putney, where a neat box,
a couple of spare bedrooms, a good cellar, and a smart gig made a real
gentleman of him. About this period, a daughter was born to him, called
Caroline Blandenburg Gann, so named after a large mansion near
Hammersmith, and an injured queen who lived there at the time of the
little girl's birth.
At this time Mrs. James Gann sent the twins, Rosalind Clancy and Isabella
Finigan Wellesley McCarty, to a boarding-school for young ladies, and
grumbled much at the amount of the bills which her husband was obliged to
pay for them; for, although James discharged them with perfect
good-humour, his lady began to entertain a mean opinion indeed of her
pretty young children. They could expect no fortune, she said, from Mr.
Gann, and she wondered that he should think of bringing them up
expensively, when he had a darling child of his own for whom to save all
the money that he could lay by.
Grandmamma, too, doted on the little Caroline Brandenburg, and vowed
that she would leave her three thousand pounds to this dear infant; for
in this way does the world show its respect for that most respectable
thing, prosperity, and little Caroline was the daughter of prosperous
James Gann.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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