An hour after midnight the sober house of Papa Mazet was knocked up by Bess, with François, and when the sunrise of a July morning was gilding the spires of Paris, Bess, with François still for an escort, was well out of Paris on the road to Calais.
On the afternoon of the second day Bess Lukens touched her native soil again after an absence of more than seven years.
She felt no thrill of joy, or of any other emotion, when she looked about her on the shore at Dover. She had been a miserable creature in England; all her early associations with her own country were repugnant to her. The passionate attachment which Dicky Egremont felt for his own land was a mystery to Bess Lukens.
“Now, Mr. Roger may well love Egremont; but Dicky, without an acre of ground, a stick or a stone in England—why can’t the boy rest quiet in France?” For nothing could ever make Bess believe Dicky to be aught but a boy still.
Bess’s knowledge of the humble class to which she belonged was complete, and she knew perfectly well how to achieve success with innkeepers, post-boys, and the like. So she inaugurated her journey to London by walking up boldly to the first decent inn she saw, and asking for the landlord, and demanding, first, dinner, and afterward horses for London. At the same time she offered some French gold in exchange for English money.
The landlord looked at her keenly, but Bess, handsomely dressed and perfectly calm and composed, was entirely at her ease.
“How did you come by this, mistress?” asked the innkeeper, turning over the gold.
“’Tis none of your business, sir,” tartly replied Bess. “If you don’t want to change it, there’s other inns, I reckon, in Dover; and if you change it, don’t you go for to playing me any tricks in the exchange. I know to a farthing what I ought to have, and I’ll have it if there is law in the land.”
Boldness is the best diplomacy in the world sometimes, and Bess Lukens was always master of this sort of diplomacy. The innkeeper, who would probably have had her arrested had she shown the smallest timidity, was himself somewhat awed by Bess’s lofty tone and commanding manner, and proceeded to change the money. Bess watched him narrowly, pounced upon a couple of worn sixpences, threw them out, and then demanded that the horses should be made ready while she ate.
The innkeeper very obsequiously followed her commands, but his curiosity tempted him to say, in the presence of the postilions, just as Bess was starting, “I should think, ma’am, you’d be afeerd to go the journey to London alone.”