Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- Fiction
My lord and I met, perforce, in the street, at the Governor's house,
in church, on the river, in the saddle. If we met in the presence of
others, we spoke the necessary formal words of greeting or leave-taking,
and he kept his countenance; if none were by, off went the mask. The
man himself and I looked each other in the eyes and passed on. Once we
encountered on a late evening among the graves, and I was not alone.
Mistress Percy had been restless, and had gone, despite the minister's
protests, to sit upon the river bank. When I returned from the assembly
and found her gone, I went to fetch her. A storm was rolling slowly up.
Returning the long way through the churchyard, we came upon him sitting
beside a sunken grave, his knees drawn up to meet his chin, his eyes
gloomily regardful of the dark broad river, the unseen ocean, and
the ship that could not return for weeks to come. We passed him in
silence,--I with a slight bow, she with a slighter curtsy. An hour
later, going down the street in the dusk of the storm, I ran against Dr.
Lawrence Bohun. “Don't stop me!” he panted. “The Italian doctor is away
in the woods gathering simples, and they found my Lord Carnal in a fit
among the graves, half an hour agone.” My lord was bled, and the next
morning went hunting.
The lady whom I had married abode with me in the minister's house, held
her head high, and looked the world in the face. She seldom went from
home, but when she did take the air it was with pomp and circumstance.
When that slender figure and exquisite face, set off by as rich apparel
as could be bought from a store of finery brought in by the Southampton,
and attended by a turbaned negress and a serving man who had been to the
wars, and had escaped the wheel by the skin of his teeth, appeared in
the street, small wonder if a greater commotion arose than had been
since the days of the Princess Pocahontas and her train of dusky
beauties. To this fairer, more imperial dame gold lace doffed its
hat and made its courtliest bow, and young planters bent to their
saddlebows, while the common folk nudged and stared and had their
say. The beauty, the grace, the pride, that deigned small response
to well-meant words,--all that would have been intolerable in plain
Mistress Percy, once a waiting maid, then a piece of merchandise to be
sold for one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, then the wife of a
poor gentleman, was pardoned readily enough to the Lady Jocelyn Leigh,
the ward of the King, the bride to be (so soon as the King's Court
of High Commission should have snapped in twain an inconvenient and
ill-welded fetter) of the King's minion.
So she passed like a splendid vision through the street perhaps once a
week. On Sundays she went with me to church, and the people looked at
her instead of at the minister, who rebuked them not, because his eyes
were upon the same errand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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