Vanity Fair - Page 58/573

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.