In that country and time there was no unsociable and undignified scurrying
homeward after church. Decorous silence prevailed until the house was
exchanged for the green and shady churchyard: but then tongues were
loosened, and the flower-bed broken into clusters. One must greet one's
neighbors; present or be presented to what company might be staying at the
various great houses within the parish; talk, laugh, coquet, and ogle;
make appointments for business or for pleasure; speak of the last
horse-race, the condition of wheat and tobacco, and the news brought in by
the Valour, man-of-war, that the King was gone to Hanover. In short, for
the nonce, the churchyard became a drawing-room, with the sun for candles,
with no painted images of the past and gone upon the walls, but with the
dead themselves beneath the floor.
The minister, having questions to settle with clerk and sexton, tarried
in the vestry room; but his wife, with Audrey and the schoolmaster, waited
for him outside, in the shade of an oak-tree that was just without the
pale of the drawing-room. Mistress Deborah, in her tarnished amber satin
and ribbons that had outworn their youth, bit her lip and tapped her foot
upon the ground. Audrey watched her apprehensively. She knew the signs,
and that when they reached home a storm might break that would leave its
mark upon her shoulders. The minister's wife was not approved of by the
ladies of Fair View parish, but had they seen how wistful was the face of
the brown girl with her, they might have turned aside, spoken, and let the
storm go by. The girl herself was scarcely noticed. Few had ever heard her
story, or, hearing it, had remembered; the careless many thought her an
orphan, bound to Darden and his wife,--in effect their servant. If she had
beauty, the ladies and gentlemen who saw her, Sunday after Sunday, in the
minister's pew, had scarce discovered it. She was too dark, too slim, too
shy and strange of look, with her great brown eyes and that startled turn
of her head. Their taste was for lilies and roses, and it was not an age
that counted shyness a grace.
Mr. Marmaduke Haward was not likely to be accused of diffidence. He had
come out of church with the sleepy-headed churchwarden, who was now wide
awake and mightily concerned to know what horse Mr. Haward meant to enter
for the great race at Mulberry Island, while at the foot of the steps he
was seized upon by another portly vestryman, and borne off to be presented
to three blooming young ladies, quick to second their papa's invitation
home to dinner. Mr. Haward was ready to curse his luck that he was
engaged elsewhere; but were not these Graces the children to whom he had
used to send sugar-plums from Williamsburgh, years and years ago? He vowed
that the payment, which he had never received, he would take now with
usury, and proceeded to salute the cheek of each protesting fair. The
ladies found him vastly agreeable; old and new friends crowded around him;
he put forth his powers and charmed all hearts,--and all the while
inwardly cursed the length of way to the gates, and the tardy progress
thereto of his friends and neighbors.