“I don’t know what she forgot, I don’t care what she forgot,” the old man answered. He sat down on the bench again, and put his hands over his face. He was crying—the slow, hard tears of age.
At sunset they started. The negro chamber-maid, to whom Jack had taken a fancy, went with them as nurse, and twenty shining black faces were at the station to see her off.
“Good-bye, Porley; take keer yersef.”
“Yere’s luck, Porley; doan yer forgot us.”
“Step libely, Jonah; Porley’s a-lookin’ at yer.”
“Good-lye, Porley!”
The train moved out.
XII.
A DOCK on the Cuyahoga River, at Cleveland. The high bows of a propeller loomed up far above them; a wooden bridge, with hand-rails of rope, extended from a square opening in its side to the place where they were standing—the judge, bewildered by the deafening noise of the letting-off of steam and by the hustling of the deck-hands who ran to and fro putting on freight; little Jack, round-eyed with wonder, surveying the scene from his nurse’s arms; Cicely, listless, unhearing; and Eve, with the same pale-cheeked self-control and the same devoted attention to Cicely which had marked her manner through all their rapid journey across the broad country from Charleston to Washington, from Washington to Pittsburgh, from Pittsburgh to Cleveland.