“Constance is a very loyal and a very large-minded woman,” replied Thorndyke, absently. He had used her first name inadvertently, and only became conscious of it when Annette began laughing softly. Then he coloured violently, and explained that he had lost his mind, or lost his manners, or something of the sort, to account for his calling Miss Maitland by her first name.
They came upon Constance very smartly dressed, as always, and looking young and animated. She was superintending the tickets and luggage of herself and her five servants. There were innumerable boxes and trunks to be seen to, besides a couple of traps and a pair of horses, and Constance was doing it vigorously, with Scipio Africanus, her young butler, and Charles Sumner Pickup, her coachman, acting as purely ornamental adjuncts, giving her frequent and disinterested advice about the horses, the trunks, and other impedimenta, but in reality being waited on by their mistress. Whenever negroes go on a journey, they at once become children, and are treated as such by those who understand them. In a group stood the cook, an elderly, respectable negro woman, dressed in black, with the stamp of “fo’ de war” written all over her honest black face, and a housemaid and a lady’s maid, both chocolate coloured.
Whenever Thorndyke had observed Constance’s servants before, they had been dressed with entire correctness—but on this occasion they had evidently been allowed complete latitude. The two maids wore the shortest of short skirts, with violent-coloured shirtwaists. They had on hats exactly alike—large picture-hats of white, with wreaths of red roses. The same riot of colour had broken out on Scipio Africanus and Charles Sumner Pickup. Scipio sported a scarf-pin composed of two United States flags crossed, while Charles Sumner Pickup carried a cane from the handle of which fluttered red, white, and blue ribbons. The cook, who was plainly an ante-bellum product, had donned, for the journey, an immense crape veil, which dangled to the ground, and implied that she was in the first stages of widowhood. As a fact, she had “planted her ole man,” in the Afro-American vernacular, about thirty years before, but at intervals since, she had adorned herself with the crape veil, as a dissipation in dress akin to the maids’ wreaths of red roses, and the butler and coachman’s assumption of the national colours.
Thorndyke, on reaching Constance’s side, proffered his assistance, but his offer was promptly repulsed.
“How on earth would you manage five negroes?” she asked. “You would lose your patience in five minutes—you do not know what they know or what they do not know. I think I have everything straight now—I will keep the tickets myself”—and then, escorted by Thorndyke, she saw her five charges and the horses, the traps, and the trunks in their proper cars, and, sending Thorndyke after Annette Crane, herself took her place in the drawing-room car for her two hours’ trip.
When Annette stepped in the car to spend ten minutes with her, Constance was sincerely glad. She felt a strong and strange sympathy with Annette Crane. Never were women more dissimilar in type, in environment, in ideas, than those two women; but both were gentlewomen of sense and right feeling, and on that common ground they met and became friends.
Constance expressed a wish that Mrs. Crane might be in Washington the next winter, and Annette quietly replied that she expected to be.
Thorndyke then began telling her of his amusement at watching Constance, with five servants, working like a Trojan for them.
“Of course, you, with your cool Northern temperament, cannot understand the negro,” replied Constance, good-humouredly. “You would expect a negro to work when he could help it. What a delusion! Suppose I had trusted Scipio or Charles to buy those tickets and get those horses aboard, and meanwhile a street-band had come along?”
“I suppose Scipio or Charles would have got the tickets and attended to the horses just the same,” answered Thorndyke.