Sambo of the bandy legs slammed the carriage door
on his young weeping mistress. He sprang up
behind the carriage. “Stop!” cried
Miss Jemima, rushing to the gate with a parcel.
“It’s some sandwiches, my dear,”
said she to Amelia. “You may be hungry,
you know; and Becky, Becky Sharp, here’s a book
for you that my sister—that is, I—Johnson’s
Dixonary, you know; you mustn’t leave us without
that. Good-by. Drive on, coachman.
God bless you!”
And the kind creature retreated into the garden, overcome
with emotion.
But, lo! and just as the coach drove off, Miss Sharp
put her pale face out of the window and actually flung
the book back into the garden.
This almost caused Jemima to faint with terror.
“Well, I never”— said she—“what
an audacious”—Emotion prevented her
from completing either sentence. The carriage
rolled away; the great gates were closed; the bell
rang for the dancing lesson. The world is before
the two young ladies; and so, farewell to Chiswick
Mall.
In Which Miss Sharp and Miss Sedley Prepare to Open
the Campaign
When Miss Sharp had performed the heroical act mentioned
in the last chapter, and had seen the Dixonary, flying
over the pavement of the little garden, fall at length
at the feet of the astonished Miss Jemima, the young
lady’s countenance, which had before worn an
almost livid look of hatred, assumed a smile that perhaps
was scarcely more agreeable, and she sank back in
the carriage in an easy frame of mind, saying—“So
much for the Dixonary; and, thank God, I’m out
of Chiswick.”
Miss Sedley was almost as flurried at the act of defiance
as Miss Jemima had been; for, consider, it was but
one minute that she had left school, and the impressions
of six years are not got over in that space of time.
Nay, with some persons those awes and terrors of
youth last for ever and ever. I know, for instance,
an old gentleman of sixty-eight, who said to me one
morning at breakfast, with a very agitated countenance,
“I dreamed last night that I was flogged by
Dr. Raine.” Fancy had carried him back five-and-fifty
years in the course of that evening. Dr. Raine
and his rod were just as awful to him in his heart,
then, at sixty-eight, as they had been at thirteen.
If the Doctor, with a large birch, had appeared bodily
to him, even at the age of threescore and eight, and
had said in awful voice, “Boy, take down your
pant—“? Well, well, Miss Sedley
was exceedingly alarmed at this act of insubordination.
“How could you do so, Rebecca?” at last
she said, after a pause.
“Why, do you think Miss Pinkerton will come
out and order me back to the black-hole?” said
Rebecca, laughing.
“No: but—”
“I hate the whole house,” continued Miss
Sharp in a fury. “I hope I may never set
eyes on it again. I wish it were in the bottom
of the Thames, I do; and if Miss Pinkerton were there,
I wouldn’t pick her out, that I wouldn’t.
O how I should like to see her floating in the water
yonder, turban and all, with her train streaming after
her, and her nose like the beak of a wherry.”
