Miss Rebecca Sharp to Miss Amelia Sedley, Russell Square, London.
(Free.--Pitt Crawley.) MY DEAREST, SWEETEST AMELIA, With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the pen to write to my
dearest friend! Oh, what a change between to-day and yesterday! Now I
am friendless and alone; yesterday I was at home, in the sweet company
of a sister, whom I shall ever, ever cherish!
I will not tell you in what tears and sadness I passed the fatal night
in which I separated from you. YOU went on Tuesday to joy and
happiness, with your mother and YOUR DEVOTED YOUNG SOLDIER by your
side; and I thought of you all night, dancing at the Perkins's, the
prettiest, I am sure, of all the young ladies at the Ball. I was
brought by the groom in the old carriage to Sir Pitt Crawley's town
house, where, after John the groom had behaved most rudely and
insolently to me (alas! 'twas safe to insult poverty and misfortune!),
I was given over to Sir P.'s care, and made to pass the night in an old
gloomy bed, and by the side of a horrid gloomy old charwoman, who keeps
the house. I did not sleep one single wink the whole night.
Sir Pitt is not what we silly girls, when we used to read Cecilia at
Chiswick, imagined a baronet must have been. Anything, indeed, less
like Lord Orville cannot be imagined. Fancy an old, stumpy, short,
vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby old gaiters, who
smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan.
He speaks with a country accent, and swore a great deal at the old
charwoman, at the hackney coachman who drove us to the inn where the
coach went from, and on which I made the journey OUTSIDE FOR THE
GREATER PART OF THE WAY.
I was awakened at daybreak by the charwoman, and having arrived at the
inn, was at first placed inside the coach. But, when we got to a place
called Leakington, where the rain began to fall very heavily--will you
believe it?--I was forced to come outside; for Sir Pitt is a proprietor
of the coach, and as a passenger came at Mudbury, who wanted an inside
place, I was obliged to go outside in the rain, where, however, a young
gentleman from Cambridge College sheltered me very kindly in one of his
several great coats.
This gentleman and the guard seemed to know Sir Pitt very well, and
laughed at him a great deal. They both agreed in calling him an old
screw; which means a very stingy, avaricious person. He never gives
any money to anybody, they said (and this meanness I hate); and the
young gentleman made me remark that we drove very slow for the last two
stages on the road, because Sir Pitt was on the box, and because he is
proprietor of the horses for this part of the journey. "But won't I
flog 'em on to Squashmore, when I take the ribbons?" said the young
Cantab. "And sarve 'em right, Master Jack," said the guard. When I
comprehended the meaning of this phrase, and that Master Jack intended
to drive the rest of the way, and revenge himself on Sir Pitt's horses,
of course I laughed too.