It was all the more devastating for having been withheld.
Wanton! Hussy! Baggage! Designing intriguing slut! Meess de Malheur! What was Pamela, after all, but a stray apprentice, and an English one at that, flung upon her, Madame Eglantine’s, benevolence for the sake of old friendship, living on charity, a beggar! Cette Lydie, how she had haggled! But if such wickedness had been paid for in all the gold of false Albion, Madame Eglantine would not have kept her, to the destruction of her domestic happiness!
“Meess, you pack this day.”
She further added a flood of vituperation, to which Pamela, all her pretty carnations dead on her white cheeks, listened in a fixed silence.
When the Frenchwoman had run herself out of breath on a high scream, Pamela answered her in English, which the whilom Bath milliner spoke brokenly, but understood perfectly. “That’ll do, M’dame. I’m as pleased to get out of this place as ever you can be to see the back of me. As for that fat husband of yours, I wouldn’t touch him with a pair of tongs. And as for yourself, I’d not remain a moment longer than I can help with one as doesn’t know the meaning of truth, and would take an honest girl’s character away out of pure spite and malice. And don’t you dare,” pursued Pamela, with a swelling voice, “say anything against my character, or as sure as there is justice in Heaven, I’ll bring your business about your ears. I’ll tell that old cat, my Aunt Lydia, what’s happened, that you caught your horrid old Ildefonse ogling me in the glass, and that you haven’t that trust in him—and sure, I’m with you there, for he ain’t fit to be trusted the length of your apron, and so I tell you fair—you haven’t that trust in him that you could have another moment of peace with me under your roof. God help you; I don’t blame you! Give me the price of my ticket home, and I’ll see Aunt don’t get at you over the indenture.”
For all her courage, for all the longing which the thought of England brought her, the heart of Pamela Pounce was heavy as lead. She knew that, at the Kentish farm, things were going badly with the yeoman; she knew that she dared not add the burden of her penniless self to that which rested on his shoulders. She knew that odious as it would be, that abominably as her relative would abuse of the situation, there would be nothing for it, but to throw herself again on her Aunt Lydia’s family feeling, as soon as the Dover coach landed her in London town.
Her aunt was now with her mistress in Hertford Street, back from the Wells, according to the latest reports, and that was one bit of luck; another was, that judging by the tone of the letter just received by Madame Eglantine with an order for hats, my Lady Kilcroney’s maid was in the highest exultation over her mistress’s royal promotion.
CHAPTER III
In which Miss Pamela Pounce, the Milliner’s Assistant,
becomes Arbiter of Life and Death in High
Society