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—"
"As I believe, she would not have had the dress had not Cate told
Cicely Hyde, who is so intimate with Mary Cavendish," said my Lady
Culpeper. "I had it from my lord's sister that 'twas the newest
fashion in London. How else would the chit have heard of it, I pray?"
"How else, indeed?" asked the burgess's wife.
"And here my poor Cate must go in her old murrey-coloured petticoat," said my lady.
"But even thus, to one who looks at her and not at her attire, she outshines Mary Cavendish," said the other. That was, to my thinking, as flagrant hypocrisy as was ever heard, for if those two maids had been clad alike as beggars, Mary Cavendish would have carried off the palm, with no dissenting voice, though Cate Culpeper was fair enough to see, with her father's grace of manner, and his harshness of feature softened by her rose-bloom of youth.
Catherine Cavendish was dancing as the others, but seemingly with no heart in it, whereas her sister was all glowing with delight in the merriment of it, and her sense of her own beauty, and the admiration of all about her, and smiling as if the whole world, and at life itself, with the innocent radiance of a child.
As I stood watching her, I felt a touch on my arm, and looked, and there stood Mistress Cicely Hyde, and her brown face was so puckered with wrath and jealousy that I scarcely knew her. "Did not Mary's grandmother send you to escort her home, Master Wingfield?" said she in a sharp whisper, and I stared at her in amazement. "When the ball is over, Mistress Hyde," I said.
"'Tis time the ball was over now," said she. "'Tis folly to keep it up so late as this, and Mary hath not had a word for me since we came."