Across a narrow passage-way on the other side of the house was the "best bedroom" of the little old inn. Here, upon the high bed, carefully covered from the sun and any stray atom of dust with a clean linen sheet, lay half of Claude's wardrobe. As Mistress Vawse threw the cover aside Deborah uttered a little exclamation. Before her were the two court-suits of pink and white satin, with their delicate silver and silken embroidery, their elaborate waistcoats, point-lace ruffles, and silk stockings. Beside them lay orderly little piles of red-heeled slippers with paste buckles, linen shirts, a jewelled scabbard, two or three pins of diamonds, of which neither woman guessed the value, some rings, a white, three-cornered hat, two wigs, and an ivory snuff-box, in whose cover was the miniature of a woman, surrounded with pearls.
"How beautiful!" murmured Deborah, laying one finger gently on the embroidered pocket of the pink coat. "How beautiful! I have never seen aught like them."
"Nor I. Not on the Governor himself."
There was a silence as the two colonial women stood over the courtier's wardrobe, in this little bedroom of the far new world. Then again Deborah said, more to herself than to her companion:
"And the ladies—do they, too, have such things as these?"
"Oh, Miss Debby! Have you forgot Madam Trevor's wedding satin, with the veil and train? And the brocade she wore to the Governor's ball?"
But the girl shook her head impatiently. "Madam has nothing in the cedar chest so wonderful as this," she answered, lifting up a ruffle of Venice lace, as delicate as frost upon a window-pane. She looked at it lovingly for a long moment, and was about to replace it, when her eye fell on something which had lain beneath. It was a white kid glove, its back embroidered in tarnished gold and set with little blue stones, while in the centre of the arabesques was a crest, also in gold, unstudded. The girl turned it over, mechanically. Yes, there was something on the palm—the painting of a man's face and shoulders, a handsome face, if distorted a little by the brush; the face of a man comparatively young, something dull of expression, with a pair of great, sapphire blue eyes, and curling locks of bright gold tied loosely back, but unpowdered.
Deborah raised her eyes till they met those of Mistress Vawse.
"This—does not belong to him? Is not, I mean, a man's—gauntlet?"
"No, Miss Debby. When I took off his old suit yesterday, I found that glove pinned to his shirt on the left side, over—"