"No: I put greater trust in my own powers of persuasion.—Mammy dear, take good care of mamma: we shall be back directly."
Her we was very sweet to me, and I shared her mistrust of my French and my diplomacy.
The glare of the burning bridge lighted our steps: the air was full of falling flakes of fire. The cottage was a quarter of a mile off. Hermione refused my arm, but, holding her skirts daintily, stepped bravely at my side. She exhibited no bashfulness, no excitement, no confusion, no fear: she was simply bent on business. We reached the peasant's farmyard. He and his family were outside the house. We like to say a Frenchman has no word for home. But the conclusion that the man of Anglo-Saxon birth deduces from this lack in his vocabulary is false: no man cares more for the domicile that shelters him. Hermione made her request with sweet persuasiveness. I saw at once it would have been refused if I had made it, but to her they made excuses. The old horse, they said, was very old, the old cart was broken.
"Let me look at it," said Hermione. At this they led us into an outhouse, where she assisted me to make a careful inspection. I might have rejected the old trap at once, but she offered a few suggestions, which she told me in an aside were the fruit of her experiences in Maryland and Virginia, and the cart was pronounced safe enough to be driven slowly with a light load.
A half-grown son of the house was put in charge of it. Hermione suggested he should bring the family clothes-line in case of a breakdown, and prevailed upon the farmer's wife to put in plenty of fresh straw, a blanket and a pillow. She made a bargain, less extravagant than I expected, with the peasant proprietor, promising, however, a very handsome pourboire to his son in the event of our good fortune. The farmer stipulated, in his turn, that cart, horse and lad were not to pass the barrier, that the boy should walk at the horse's head, and that the cart was to contain only two women and little Claribel.
It was harnessed up immediately. Hermione and I followed it on foot back to the little band of travellers waiting beside the railway.
"Can we not get some of your trunks out?" I said to her.
"No," she answered: "leave them to their fate. I dare not overload the cart, and I doubt whether those men with hungry eyes would let us take them. Mamma," she whispered, "has her diamonds."
"You will get into the cart, Miss Leare?" I said as I saw her motioning to the old colored woman to take the place beside her mother.
"No indeed," she replied: "our contract stipulated only for mamma, Mammy and Clary: Mammy is crippled with rheumatism. If you have no objection I will walk with you."