Vanity Fair - Page 57/573

It is likewise needless to say that the driver, if he had any such

hopes as those above stated, was grossly disappointed; and that the

worthy Baronet whom he drove to the City did not give him one single

penny more than his fare. It was in vain that Jehu appealed and

stormed; that he flung down Miss Sharp's bandboxes in the gutter at the

'Necks, and swore he would take the law of his fare.

"You'd better not," said one of the ostlers; "it's Sir Pitt Crawley."

"So it is, Joe," cried the Baronet, approvingly; "and I'd like to see

the man can do me."

"So should oi," said Joe, grinning sulkily, and mounting the Baronet's

baggage on the roof of the coach.

"Keep the box for me, Leader," exclaims the Member of Parliament to the

coachman; who replied, "Yes, Sir Pitt," with a touch of his hat, and

rage in his soul (for he had promised the box to a young gentleman from

Cambridge, who would have given a crown to a certainty), and Miss Sharp

was accommodated with a back seat inside the carriage, which might be

said to be carrying her into the wide world.

How the young man from Cambridge sulkily put his five great-coats in

front; but was reconciled when little Miss Sharp was made to quit the

carriage, and mount up beside him--when he covered her up in one of his

Benjamins, and became perfectly good-humoured--how the asthmatic

gentleman, the prim lady, who declared upon her sacred honour she had

never travelled in a public carriage before (there is always such a

lady in a coach--Alas! was; for the coaches, where are they?), and the

fat widow with the brandy-bottle, took their places inside--how the

porter asked them all for money, and got sixpence from the gentleman

and five greasy halfpence from the fat widow--and how the carriage at

length drove away--now threading the dark lanes of Aldersgate, anon

clattering by the Blue Cupola of St. Paul's, jingling rapidly by the

strangers' entry of Fleet-Market, which, with Exeter 'Change, has now

departed to the world of shadows--how they passed the White Bear in

Piccadilly, and saw the dew rising up from the market-gardens of

Knightsbridge--how Turnhamgreen, Brentwood, Bagshot, were passed--need

not be told here. But the writer of these pages, who has pursued in

former days, and in the same bright weather, the same remarkable

journey, cannot but think of it with a sweet and tender regret. Where

is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? Is there no Chelsea

or Greenwich for the old honest pimple-nosed coachmen? I wonder where

are they, those good fellows? Is old Weller alive or dead? and the

waiters, yea, and the inns at which they waited, and the cold rounds of

beef inside, and the stunted ostler, with his blue nose and clinking

pail, where is he, and where is his generation? To those great

geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved

reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and

history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. For them

stage-coaches will have become romances--a team of four bays as

fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess. Ah, how their coats shone, as

the stable-men pulled their clothes off, and away they went--ah, how

their tails shook, as with smoking sides at the stage's end they

demurely walked away into the inn-yard. Alas! we shall never hear the

horn sing at midnight, or see the pike-gates fly open any more.

Whither, however, is the light four-inside Trafalgar coach carrying us?

Let us be set down at Queen's Crawley without further divagation, and

see how Miss Rebecca Sharp speeds there.