He liked to dwell on the picture of her as a little school-girl herself:
sent fastidiously on her way, with long gloves covering her arms, a white
linen mask tied over her face to screen her complexion from tan, a sunbonnet
sewed tightly on her head to keep it secure from the capricious winds of
heaven and the more variable gusts of her own wilfulness; or on another
picture of her--as a lonely little lass--begging to be taken to court, where
she could marvel at her father, an awful judge in his wig and his robe of
scarlet and black velvet; or on a third picture of her--as when she was
marshalled into church behind a liveried servant bearing the family
prayer-book, sat in the raised pew upholstered in purple velvet, with its
canopy overhead and the gilt letters of the family name in front; and a
little farther away on the wall of the church the Lord's Prayer and the
Commandments put there by her father at the cost of two thousand pounds of
his best tobacco; finally to be preached to by a minister with whom her
father sometimes spilt wine on the table-cloth, and who had once fought a
successful duel behind his own sanctuary of peace and good will to all men.
Here succeeded other scenes; for as his interest deepened, he never grew
tired of this restorative image-building by which she could be brought
always more vividly before his imagination.
Her childhood gone, then, he followed her as she glided along the shining
creeks from plantation to plantation in a canoe manned by singing black
oarsmen: or rode abroad followed by her greyhound, her face concealed by a
black velvet riding mask kept in place by a silver mouth-piece held between
her teeth; or when autumn waned, went rolling slowly along towards
Williamsburg or Annapolis in the great family coach of mahogany, with its
yellow facings, Venetian windows, projection lamps, and high seat for
footmen and coachman --there to take a house for the winter season--there to
give and to be given balls, where she trod the minuet, stiff in blue
brocade, her white shoulders rising out of a bodice hung with gems, her
beautiful head bearing aloft its tower of long white feathers.
Yet with most of her life passed at the great lonely country-house by the
bright river: qazing wistfully out of the deep-mullioned windows of diamond
panes; flitting up and down the wide staircase of carven oak; buried in its
library, with its wainscoted walls crossed with swords and hung with
portraits of soldierly faces: all of which pleased him best, he being a
home-lover. So that when facts were lacking, sometimes he would kindle true
fancies of her young life in this place: as when she reclined on mats and
cushions in the breeze-swept balls, fanned by a slave and reading the Tatler
or the Spectator; or if it were the chill twilights of October, perhaps came
in from a walk in the cool woods with a red leaf at her white throat, and
seated herself at the spinet, while a low blaze from the deep chimney seat
flickered over her face, and the low music flickered with the shadows; or
when the white tempests of winter raved outside, gave her nights to the
reading of "Tom Jones," by the light of myrtleberry candles on a
slender-legged mahogany table.