Vanity Fair (12 page)

"She was as bad as he," said Tinker. "She took the law of every one
of her tradesmen; and turned away forty-eight footmen in four year."

"She was close—very close," said the Baronet, simply; "but she was
a valyble woman to me, and saved me a steward."—And in this
confidential strain, and much to the amusement of the new-comer, the
conversation continued for a considerable time. Whatever Sir Pitt
Crawley's qualities might be, good or bad, he did not make the least
disguise of them. He talked of himself incessantly, sometimes in
the coarsest and vulgarest Hampshire accent; sometimes adopting the
tone of a man of the world. And so, with injunctions to Miss Sharp
to be ready at five in the morning, he bade her good night.
"You'll sleep with Tinker to-night," he said; "it's a big bed, and
there's room for two. Lady Crawley died in it. Good night."

Sir Pitt went off after this benediction, and the solemn Tinker,
rushlight in hand, led the way up the great bleak stone stairs, past
the great dreary drawing-room doors, with the handles muffled up in
paper, into the great front bedroom, where Lady Crawley had slept
her last. The bed and chamber were so funereal and gloomy, you
might have fancied, not only that Lady Crawley died in the room, but
that her ghost inhabited it. Rebecca sprang about the apartment,
however, with the greatest liveliness, and had peeped into the huge
wardrobes, and the closets, and the cupboards, and tried the drawers
which were locked, and examined the dreary pictures and toilette
appointments, while the old charwoman was saying her prayers. "I
shouldn't like to sleep in this yeer bed without a good conscience,
Miss," said the old woman. "There's room for us and a half-dozen of
ghosts in it," says Rebecca. "Tell me all about Lady Crawley and
Sir Pitt Crawley, and everybody, my DEAR Mrs. Tinker."

But old Tinker was not to be pumped by this little cross-questioner;
and signifying to her that bed was a place for sleeping, not
conversation, set up in her corner of the bed such a snore as only
the nose of innocence can produce. Rebecca lay awake for a long,
long time, thinking of the morrow, and of the new world into which
she was going, and of her chances of success there. The rushlight
flickered in the basin. The mantelpiece cast up a great black
shadow, over half of a mouldy old sampler, which her defunct
ladyship had worked, no doubt, and over two little family pictures
of young lads, one in a college gown, and the other in a red jacket
like a soldier. When she went to sleep, Rebecca chose that one to
dream about.

At four o'clock, on such a roseate summer's morning as even made
Great Gaunt Street look cheerful, the faithful Tinker, having
wakened her bedfellow, and bid her prepare for departure, unbarred
and unbolted the great hall door (the clanging and clapping whereof
startled the sleeping echoes in the street), and taking her way into
Oxford Street, summoned a coach from a stand there. It is needless
to particularize the number of the vehicle, or to state that the
driver was stationed thus early in the neighbourhood of Swallow
Street, in hopes that some young buck, reeling homeward from the
tavern, might need the aid of his vehicle, and pay him with the
generosity of intoxication.

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.

Private and Confidential

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.

A carriage and four splendid horses, covered with armorial bearings,
however, awaited us at Mudbury, four miles from Queen's Crawley, and
we made our entrance to the baronet's park in state. There is a
fine avenue of a mile long leading to the house, and the woman at
the lodge-gate (over the pillars of which are a serpent and a dove,
the supporters of the Crawley arms), made us a number of curtsies as
she flung open the old iron carved doors, which are something like
those at odious Chiswick.

"There's an avenue," said Sir Pitt, "a mile long. There's six
thousand pound of timber in them there trees. Do you call that
nothing?" He pronounced avenue—EVENUE, and nothing—NOTHINK, so
droll; and he had a Mr. Hodson, his hind from Mudbury, into the
carriage with him, and they talked about distraining, and selling
up, and draining and subsoiling, and a great deal about tenants and
farming—much more than I could understand. Sam Miles had been
caught poaching, and Peter Bailey had gone to the workhouse at last.
"Serve him right," said Sir Pitt; "him and his family has been
cheating me on that farm these hundred and fifty years." Some old
tenant, I suppose, who could not pay his rent. Sir Pitt might have
said "he and his family," to be sure; but rich baronets do not need
to be careful about grammar, as poor governesses must be.

As we passed, I remarked a beautiful church-spire rising above some
old elms in the park; and before them, in the midst of a lawn, and
some outhouses, an old red house with tall chimneys covered with
ivy, and the windows shining in the sun. "Is that your church,
sir?" I said.

"Yes, hang it," (said Sir Pitt, only he used, dear, A MUCH WICKEDER
WORD); "how's Buty, Hodson? Buty's my brother Bute, my dear—my
brother the parson. Buty and the Beast I call him, ha, ha!"

Hodson laughed too, and then looking more grave and nodding his
head, said, "I'm afraid he's better, Sir Pitt. He was out on his
pony yesterday, looking at our corn."

"Looking after his tithes, hang'un (only he used the same wicked
word). Will brandy and water never kill him? He's as tough as old
whatdyecallum—old Methusalem."

Mr. Hodson laughed again. "The young men is home from college.
They've whopped John Scroggins till he's well nigh dead."

"Whop my second keeper!" roared out Sir Pitt.

"He was on the parson's ground, sir," replied Mr. Hodson; and Sir
Pitt in a fury swore that if he ever caught 'em poaching on his
ground, he'd transport 'em, by the lord he would. However, he said,
"I've sold the presentation of the living, Hodson; none of that
breed shall get it, I war'nt"; and Mr. Hodson said he was quite
right: and I have no doubt from this that the two brothers are at
variance—as brothers often are, and sisters too. Don't you
remember the two Miss Scratchleys at Chiswick, how they used always
to fight and quarrel—and Mary Box, how she was always thumping
Louisa?

Presently, seeing two little boys gathering sticks in the wood, Mr.
Hodson jumped out of the carriage, at Sir Pitt's order, and rushed
upon them with his whip. "Pitch into 'em, Hodson," roared the
baronet; "flog their little souls out, and bring 'em up to the
house, the vagabonds; I'll commit 'em as sure as my name's Pitt."
And presently we heard Mr. Hodson's whip cracking on the shoulders
of the poor little blubbering wretches, and Sir Pitt, seeing that
the malefactors were in custody, drove on to the hall.

All the servants were ready to meet us, and . . .

Here, my dear, I was interrupted last night by a dreadful thumping
at my door: and who do you think it was? Sir Pitt Crawley in his
night-cap and dressing-gown, such a figure! As I shrank away from
such a visitor, he came forward and seized my candle. "No candles
after eleven o'clock, Miss Becky," said he. "Go to bed in the dark,
you pretty little hussy" (that is what he called me), "and unless
you wish me to come for the candle every night, mind and be in bed
at eleven." And with this, he and Mr. Horrocks the butler went off
laughing. You may be sure I shall not encourage any more of their
visits. They let loose two immense bloodhounds at night, which all
last night were yelling and howling at the moon. "I call the dog
Gorer," said Sir Pitt; "he's killed a man that dog has, and is
master of a bull, and the mother I used to call Flora; but now I
calls her Aroarer, for she's too old to bite. Haw, haw!"