I answered truthfully that I never had. Sir Humphrey, in his blue
velvet suit with the silver buttons, with his rosy face and powdered
wig, was one to look at twice and yet again, and I regarded him as
always, with that liking for him and that fury of jealousy.
I looked at him and loved him as I might have loved my son, with
such a sweet and brave honesty of simplicity he eyed me, and for the
sake of Mary Cavendish, who might find his love for her precious,
and I wished with all my heart that I might fling him to the floor
where he stood; every nerve and muscle in me tingled with the
restraint of the desire, for such an enhancement of a woman's beauty
as was Mary Cavendish's that night, will do away with the best
instincts of men, whether they will or not.
The next dance was the minuet, and Mary Cavendish danced it with my
Lord Culpeper, the Governor of Virginia. The governor, though I
liked him not, was a most personable man with much grace of manner,
which had additional value from a certain harshness of feature which
led one not to expect such suavity, and he was clad most richly in
such a dazzle of gold broidery and fling of yellow laces, and
glitter of buttons, as could not be surpassed.
My Lord was in fact clad much more richly than his wife and
daughter, whose attire, though fair enough, was not of the freshest.
It was my good luck to overhear my Lady Culpeper telling in no very
honeyed tones, a gossip of hers, the lady of one of the burgesses,
that her goods, for which she had sent to England, had miscarried,
and were it not for the fact that there was a whisper of fever on
the ship, she would have had the captain herself for a good rating,
and had my Lord Culpeper not been for him, saying that the man was
of an honest record, she would have had him set in the stocks for
his remissness, that he had not seen to it that her goods were on
board when the ship sailed. "And there goes poor Cate in her old
murrey-coloured satin petticoat," said my lady with a bitter
lengthening of her face, "and there is Mary Cavendish in a
blue-flowered satin with silver, which is the very twin of the one I
ordered for Cate, and which came in on the Cavendish ship."
"Well," said the other woman, who was long and lean, and had wedded
late in life a man she would have scorned in her girlhood, and could
not forgive the wrong she had done herself, and was filled with an
inconsistency of spleen toward all younger and fairer than she, and
who, moreover, was a born toad-eater for all in high places, "'tis
fine feathers make fine birds, and were thy Cate arrayed in that
same gown in Mistress Cavendish's stead--"