Private and Confidential
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.
