I have seen many beautiful things in my life, as happens to every
one living in a world which hath little fault as to its appearance,
if one can outlook the shadow which his own selfishness of sorrow
and disappointment may cast before him; but it seemed that evening,
when I saw Mary Cavendish dressed for the governor's ball, that she
was the crown of all. I verily believe that never since the world
was made, not even that beautiful first woman who comprehended in
herself all those witcheries of her sex which have been ever since
to our rapture and undoing, not even Eve when Adam first saw her in
Paradise, nor Helen, nor Cleopatra, nor any of those women whose
faces have made powers of them and given them niches in history,
were as beautiful as Mary Cavendish that night. And I doubt if it
were because she was beheld by the eyes of a lover. I verily believe
that I saw aright, and gave her beauty no glamour because of my
fondness for her, for not one whit more did I love her in that
splendour than in her plainest gown. But, oh, when she stood before
her grandmother and me and a concourse of slaves all in a ferment of
awe and admiration, with flashings of white teeth and upheavals of
eyes and flingings aloft of hands in half-savage gesticulation, and
courtesied and turned herself about in innocent delight at her own
loveliness, and yet with the sweetest modesty and apology that she
was knowing to it!
That stuff which had been sent to my Lady
Culpeper and which had been intercepted ere it reached her was of a
most rich and wonderful kind. The blue of it was like the sky, and
through it ran the gleam of silver in a flower pattern, and a great
string of pearls gleamed on her bosom, and never was anything like
that mixture of triumph in, and abashedness before, her own
exceeding beauty and her perception of it in our eyes in her dear
and lovely face. She looked at us and actually shrank a little, as
if our admiration were something of an affront to her maiden
modesty, and blushed, and then she laughed to cover it, and swept a
courtesy in her circling shimmer of blue, and tossed her head and
flirted a little fan, which looked like the wing of a butterfly,
before her face.
"Well, how do you like me, madam?" said she to her grandmother, "and
am I fine enough for the governor's ball?"
Madam Cavendish gazed at her with that rapture of admiration in a
beloved object which can almost glorify age to youth. She called
Mary to her and stroked the rich folds of her gown; she straightened
a flutter of ribbon. "'Tis a fine stuff of the gown," she said, "and
blue was always my colour. I was married in it. 'Tis fine enough for
the governor's wife, or the queen for that matter." She pulled out a
fold so that a long trail of silver flowers caught the light and
gleamed like frost. No misgivings and no suspicions she had, and
none, by that time, had Mary, believing as she did that her sister
had bought all that bravery for her, and that it was hers by right,
and only troubled by the necessity of secrecy with her grandmother
lest she discover for what purpose her own money had been spent. But
Catherine eyed her with such exceedingly worshipful love,
admiration, and yet distress that even I pitied her. Catherine
herself that night did no discredit to her beauty, her dress being,
though it was an old one, as rich as Mary's, of her favourite green
with a rose pattern broidered on the front of it, and a twist of
green gauze in her fair hair, and that same necklace of green stones
which she had shown me in the morning around her long throat, and
her long, milky-white arms hanging at her sides in the green folds
of her gown, and that pale radiance of perfection in her every
feature that made many call her the pearl of Virginia, though, as I
have said before, she had no lovers. She and Mary were going to the
ball, and a company of black servants with them. As for me, balls
were out of the question for a convict tutor, and I knew it, and so
did they. But suddenly, to my great amazement, Madam Cavendish
turned to me: "And wherefore are you not dressed for the ball,
Master Wingfield?" she said.