Prisoners of Hope | Page 2

of Venice point. The
stockings are blue silk, and come from the French house in Covent
Garden, as doth the scarf of striped gauze and the shoes, gallooned with
silver. Then there are my combs, gloves, a laced waistcoat, a red satin
bodice, a scarlet taffetas mantle, a plumed hat, a pair of clasped garters,

a riding mask, a string of pearls, and the latest romances."
"A pretty list! Is that all?"
"There are things for aunt Lettice, petticoats and ribbons, a gilt
stomacher and a China monster, and for my father, lace ruffles and
bands, a pair of French laced boots, a periwig, a new scabbard for his
rapier, and so on."
The young man laughed. "'Tis a curious life you Virginians lead," he
said. "The embroidered suits and ruffles, the cosmetics and perfumes of
Whitehall in the midst of oyster beds and tobacco fields, savage Indians
and negro slaves."
The girl put on a charming look of mock offense. "We are a little bit of
England set down here in the wilderness. Why should we not clothe
ourselves like gentlefolk as well as our kindred and friends at home?
And sure both England and Virginia have had enough of sad colored
raiment. Better go like a peacock than like a horrid Roundhead."
Her companion laughed musically and sang a stave of a cavalier love
song. He was a slender, well-made man, dressed in the extreme of the
mode of the year of grace sixteen hundred and sixty-three, in a richly
laced suit of camlet with points of blue ribbon, and the great scented
periwig then newly come into fashion. The close curled rings of hair
descending far over his cravat of finest Holland framed a handsome,
lazily insolent face, with large steel-blue eyes and beautifully cut,
mocking lips. A rapier with a jeweled hilt hung at his side, and one
white hand, half buried in snowy ruffles, held a beribboned cane with
which, as he talked, he ruthlessly decapitated the pink and white
morning-glories with which the porch was trellised.
The house to which the porch belonged was long and low, built of
wood, with many small windows, and at either end a great brick
chimney. From the porch to the water, a hundred yards away, stretched
a walk of crushed shells bisecting an expanse of green turf dotted with
noble trees--the cedar and the cypress predominating. Diverging from
this central walk were two narrower paths which, winding in and out in

eccentric figures, led, on the one hand, to a rustic summer-house
overgrown with honeysuckle and trumpet-vine, and on the other to a
tiny grotto constructed of shells and set in a tangle of periwinkle. Along
one side of the house, and protected by a stout locust paling overrun
with grape-vines, lay the garden, where flowers and vegetables
flourished contentedly side by side, the hollyhocks and tall white lilies,
the hundred-leaved roses and scarlet poppies showing like gilded
officers amidst the rank and file of sober esculents. Behind the house
were clustered various offices, then came an orchard where the June
apples and the great red cherries were ripening in the hot sunshine, then
on the shore of a second and narrower creek rose the quarters for the
plantation servants, white and black--a long double row of cabins,
dominated by the overseer's house and shaded by ragged yellow pines.
Along one shore of this inlet was planted the Indian corn prescribed by
law, and from the other gleamed the soft yellow of ripening wheat, but
beyond the water and away to the westward stretched acre after acre of
tobacco, a sea of vivid green, broken only by an occasional shed or
drying house, and merging at last into the darker hue of the forest. Over
all the fair scene, the flashing water, the velvet marshes, the smiling
fields, the fringe of dark and mysterious woodland, hung a Virginia
heaven, a cloudless blue, soft, pure, intense. The air was full of subdued
sound--the distant hum of voices from the fields of maize and tobacco,
the faint clink of iron from the smithy, the wash and lap of the water,
the drone of bees from the hives beneath the eaves of the house. Great
bronze butterflies fluttered in the sunshine, brilliant humming-birds
plunged deep into the long trumpet-flowers; from the topmost bough of
a locust, heavy with bloom, came the liquid trill of a mock-bird.
It was a fair domain, and a wealthy. The Englishman thought of certain
appalling sums lost to Sedley and Roscommon, and there flitted
through his brain a swift little calculation as to the number of
hogsheads of Orenoko or sweet-scented it would take to wipe off the
score. And the girl beside him was beautiful enough to take Whitehall
by storm, to be berhymed by Waller,