Audrey

In that country and time there was no unsociable and undignified scurrying

homeward after church. Decorous silence prevailed until the house was

exchanged for the green and shady churchyard: but then tongues were

loosened, and the flower-bed broken into clusters. One must greet one's

neighbors; present or be presented to what company might be staying at the

various great houses within the parish; talk, laugh, coquet, and ogle;

make appointments for business or for pleasure; speak of the last

horse-race, the condition of wheat and tobacco, and the news brought in by

the Valour, man-of-war, that the King was gone to Hanover. In short, for

the nonce, the churchyard became a drawing-room, with the sun for candles,

with no painted images of the past and gone upon the walls, but with the

dead themselves beneath the floor.

The minister, having questions to settle with clerk and sexton, tarried

in the vestry room; but his wife, with Audrey and the schoolmaster, waited

for him outside, in the shade of an oak-tree that was just without the

pale of the drawing-room. Mistress Deborah, in her tarnished amber satin

and ribbons that had outworn their youth, bit her lip and tapped her foot

upon the ground. Audrey watched her apprehensively. She knew the signs,

and that when they reached home a storm might break that would leave its

mark upon her shoulders. The minister's wife was not approved of by the

ladies of Fair View parish, but had they seen how wistful was the face of

the brown girl with her, they might have turned aside, spoken, and let the

storm go by. The girl herself was scarcely noticed. Few had ever heard her

story, or, hearing it, had remembered; the careless many thought her an

orphan, bound to Darden and his wife,--in effect their servant. If she had

beauty, the ladies and gentlemen who saw her, Sunday after Sunday, in the

minister's pew, had scarce discovered it. She was too dark, too slim, too

shy and strange of look, with her great brown eyes and that startled turn

of her head. Their taste was for lilies and roses, and it was not an age

that counted shyness a grace.

Mr. Marmaduke Haward was not likely to be accused of diffidence. He had

come out of church with the sleepy-headed churchwarden, who was now wide

awake and mightily concerned to know what horse Mr. Haward meant to enter

for the great race at Mulberry Island, while at the foot of the steps he

was seized upon by another portly vestryman, and borne off to be presented

to three blooming young ladies, quick to second their papa's invitation

home to dinner. Mr. Haward was ready to curse his luck that he was

engaged elsewhere; but were not these Graces the children to whom he had

used to send sugar-plums from Williamsburgh, years and years ago? He vowed

that the payment, which he had never received, he would take now with

usury, and proceeded to salute the cheek of each protesting fair. The

ladies found him vastly agreeable; old and new friends crowded around him;

he put forth his powers and charmed all hearts,--and all the while

inwardly cursed the length of way to the gates, and the tardy progress

thereto of his friends and neighbors.