And by the time she had finished preparing her toilet for the night journey, a maid-servant appeared with a tablecloth and tea tray.
Drusilla drank two cups of tea, for she was feverishly thirsty. And then, being scolded into the measure by mammy, who assured her that two lives depended on her feeding, she ate a buttered muffin, and the breast of a boiled chicken with cream sauce.
Drusilla, in the child-like simplicity of her heart, would have made her nurse sit down to the table and partake her supper.
But mammy asserted that she—Aunt Hector—knew her place. And so she filled the slop bowl brimming full of tea, piled up a plate with three quarters of the chicken and half a dozen muffins, went off to a distant corner of the room, seated herself upon an old chest, ranged her supper around her, and, with a promptness and dispatch that made her mistress stare, she dispatched all these edibles, and announced herself in condition to pursue her journey.
“And now if the coach is ready, I is.”
But if mammy and the coach were both ready, the passengers at the tea-table down stairs were not; but the coach was not so very strictly confined to time, and so it was a good quarter of an hour longer, and Drusilla had ample leisure to put on her bonnet, and to pay her bill, before she and her attendant were summoned to take their places.
The guard kindly and carefully assisted the delicate young matron into her corner of the back seat, saying that he would warn the other passengers who were coming in for the night that the whole of it belonged to her.
She thanked him, and then called to her nurse to make haste and enter.
“Yes, honey, yes; I’m coming just as soon’s ever I catch my eyes on them two little red morocky trunks, which I haven’t seen ’em since we left Alexandry,” said mammy, who was behind the coach, engaged in a sharp argument with both coachman and hostler.
“I tell you, woman,” said the former, “the blamed red trunks is all right. They is inside of the boot, kivered over with the ile skin to keep out the wet.”