“Are you not the general’s daughter?” said the sergeant.
“Behold my father!” said the countess, pointing to Fabrizio. The gendarmes burst into a roar of laughter.
“Show your passports, and don’t bandy words!” said the sergeant, nettled by the general mirth.
“These ladies never take any passport to go to Milan,” said the coachman, with a cool and philosophic air; “they are coming from their house at Grianta. This one is the Countess Pietranera, and that one is the Marchesa del Dongo.”
The sergeant, quite put out of countenance, went to the horses’ heads, and there held council with his men. The conference had lasted quite five minutes, when the countess begged the carriage might be moved a few paces farther into the shade; the heat was overwhelming, though it was only eleven o’clock in the day. Fabrizio, who had been looking about carefully in all directions, with a view to making his escape, noticed, emerging from a field path which led on to the dusty road, a young girl of fourteen or fifteen, with her handkerchief to her face, shedding frightened tears. She walked between two gendarmes in uniform, and three paces behind her, also flanked by gendarmes, came a tall, bony man, who gave himself dignified airs, like a prefect walking in a procession.
“But where did you find them?” said the sergeant, who now appeared quite drunk.
“Running away across the fields, and not a passport between them!” The sergeant seemed to have quite lost his bearings. He had five prisoners now, instead of the two he had been sent out to take. He retired a little distance, leaving only one man to look after the prisoner with the majestic demeanour, and another to keep the horses from moving on.
“Stay here,” whispered the countess to Fabrizio, who had already jumped out of the carriage. “It will all come right.”
They heard a gendarme exclaim: “What does it matter? If they have no passports we have a right to take them up.”
The sergeant did not seem quite so sure. The name of Pietranera had alarmed him. He had known the general, and he was not aware of his death. “The general,” he reflected, “is not the man to forego his vengeance if I arrest his wife without authority.”