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"Disparity of means " began my father. "Oh, no matter," interrupted Mrs. Leare: "her father always told her just to please herself. Mr. Farquhar is an Englishman and of good family. He has his profession to keep him out of mischief, and Hermie will more than pay her own expenses.
Miss Leare bowed to me gracefully and motioned to her chasseur to open the carriage-door. "Get in," she said. "I have the carriage for two hours: what shall we do with it? Mamma is at the dentist's. Amy, I thought you would enjoy a drive, and so I came for you." I helped Amy in, and was making my bow when Miss Leare stopped me.
Leare, I would not relinquish it. I resolved to go out to America and see him, and wrote to England to secure letters of introduction to the chief engineers in the United States and Canada. Meantime, my father proposed that we should go together and call upon Mrs. and Miss Leare. Hermione received us in the boudoir, looking like a bruised lily: her mother came in afterward.
Those men had all had mothers, and each man had some sort of womanly ideal. I could not have managed a crowd of poissardes, but, thank Heaven, there is yet a chord that a woman may strike in the hearts of men." The dawn of Thursday, February 24, 1848, was breaking at the eastward when I arrived with Mrs. Leare, Hermione, the nurse and child at their own apartment. I went up stairs with them.
As we stepped into the street, however, a gay carriage with high-stepping gray horses, a chasseur with knife and feathers, and a coachman in a modest livery on a hammer-cloth resplendent with yellow fringes and embroideries, drew up at our door: a pretty hand was laid upon the portière and a voice cried, "Amy! Amy! I was coming for you." "My brother Miss Leare," said Amy.
Leare wants to marry her to that Neapolitan marquis who is so often there," put in Ellen. "On dit, she will have a dot of two millions of francs, or, as they call it, half a million of dollars." "Such a rumor," I broke in, rather annoyed by this turn in the conversation, "may well buy her the right to be a marchioness if she will."
Leare was leaning on Hermione's arm; Mammy Christine and Claribel cowered close and held her by her drapery. "Make no remonstrances," she said in a low voice: "let us not excite attention. An Englishman never knows when not to complain: an American accepts his fate more quietly. These people mean to sack the train. We had better get away as soon as possible." "But how?" I cried. "I can walk.
At this moment, stealing from a porte-cochère where she had taken refuge during the fright and sauve gui peut, came a figure wrapped in dark drapery. Could it be possible? Hermione Leare! In a moment I was at her side. She was very pale and breathless, and she was glad to take my arm. "What brings you here?" I whispered. "Our servants have all run away: they think mamma is compromised.
Here I feel all the time as if I were walking among traps blindfolded." The ball of the Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Élysées was a superb success. The immense glass-house was fitted up for dancing, and all went merry as a marriage-bell, with a crater about to open under our feet, as at the duchess of Richmond's ball at Brussels. Miss Leare was there, but quiet and dignified.
Again, thank you: your kindness will not be forgotten by H. LEARE." This note reassured me. I no longer endeavored to overtake the carriage, but I pushed my way as fast as possible beyond the nearest barrier. Once outside the wall of Paris, I was in the Banlieu, that zone of rascality whose inhabitants are all suspected by the police and live under the ban.
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