Vanity Fair | Page 5

"Heaven bless you, my child," said she, embracing Amelia,
and scowling the while over the girl's shoulder at Miss Sharp. "Come
away, Becky," said Miss Jemima, pulling the young woman away in
great alarm, and the drawing-room door closed upon them for ever.
Then came the struggle and parting below. Words refuse to tell it. All
the servants were there in the hall--all the dear friend--all the young
ladies--the dancing-master who had just arrived; and there was such a
scuffling, and hugging, and kissing, and crying, with the hysterical
YOOPS of Miss Swartz, the parlour-boarder, from her room, as no pen
can depict, and as the tender heart would fain pass over. The embracing

was over; they parted--that is, Miss Sedley parted from her friends.
Miss Sharp had demurely entered the carriage some minutes before.
Nobody cried for leaving HER.
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.
CHAPTER II
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."
"Hush!" cried Miss Sedley.
"Why, will the black footman tell tales?" cried Miss Rebecca, laughing.
"He may go back and tell Miss Pinkerton that I hate her with all my
soul; and I wish he would; and I wish I had a means of proving it, too.
For two years I have only had insults and outrage from her. I have been
treated worse than any servant in the kitchen. I have never had a friend
or a kind word, except from you. I have been made to tend the little
girls in the lower schoolroom, and to talk French to the Misses, until I

grew sick of my mother tongue. But that talking French to