"I am glad," said Evelyn,--"very glad."
"You are a noble lady," he answered. "Once, long ago, I styled myself your
friend, your equal. Now I know better my place and yours, and as from a
princess I take your alms. For your letter--that letter, Evelyn, which
told me what you thought, which showed me what to do--I humbly thank you."
She let fall her hand from her silken lap, and watched with unseeing eyes
the mimicry of life upon the stage before them, where Selima knelt to
Tamerlane, and Moneses mourned for Arpasia. Presently she said again, "I
am glad;" and then, when they had kept silence for a while, "You will live
at Fair View?"
"Ay," he replied. "I will make it well for her here in Virginia."
"You must let me help you," she said. "So old a friend as I may claim that
as a right. To-morrow I may visit her, may I not? Now we must look at the
players. When she enters there is no need to cry for silence. It comes of
itself, and stays; we watch her with straining eyes. Who is that man in a
cloak, staring at us from the pit? See, with the great peruke and the
scar!"
Haward, bending, looked over the rail, then drew back with a smile. "A
half-breed trader," he said, "by name Jean Hugon. Something of a
character."
"He looked strangely at us," said Evelyn, "with how haggard a face! My
scarf, Mr. Lee? Thank you. Madam, have you the right of the matter from
Kitty Page?"
The conversation became general, and soon, the act approaching its end,
and other gentlemen pressing into the box which held so beautiful a woman,
so great a catch, and so assured a belle as Mistress Evelyn Byrd, Haward
arose and took his leave. To others of the brilliant company assembled in
the playhouse he paid his respects, speaking deferentially to the
Governor, gayly to his fellow Councilors and planters, and bowing low to
many ladies. All this was in the interval between the acts. At the second
parting of the curtain he resumed his former station in the pit. With
intention he had chosen a section of it where were few of his own class.
From the midst of the ruder sort he could watch her more freely, could
exult at his ease in her beauty both of face and mind.
The curtains parted, and the fiddlers strove for warlike music. Tamerlane,
surrounded by the Tartar host, received his prisoners, and the defiant
rant of Bajazet shook the rafters. All the sound and fury of the stage
could not drown the noise of the audience. Idle talk and laughter, loud
comment upon the players, went on,--went on until there entered Darden's
Audrey, dressed in red silk, with a jeweled circlet like a line of flame
about her dark flowing hair. The noise sank, voices of men and women died
away; for a moment the rustle of silk, the flutter of fans, continued,
then this also ceased.