We passed him in
silence, - I with a slight bow, she with a slighter curtsy. An hour
later, going down the street in the dusk of the storm, I ran against
Dr. Lawrence Bohun. "Don't stop me!" he panted. "The Italian
doctor is away in the woods gathering simples, and they found my
Lord Carnal in a fit among the graves, half an hour agone." My
lord was bled, and the next morning went hunting.
The lady whom I had married abode with me in the minister's
house, held her head high, and looked the world in the face. She
seldom went from home, but when she did take the air it was with
pomp and circumstance. When that slender figure and exquisite
face, set off by as rich apparel as could be bought from a store of
finery brought in by the Southampton, and attended by a turbaned
negress and a serving man who had been to the wars, and had
escaped the wheel by the skin of his teeth, appeared in the street,
small wonder if a greater commotion arose than had been since the
days of the Princess Pocahontas and her train of dusky beauties. To
this fairer, more imperial dame gold lace doffed its hat and made
its courtliest bow, and young planters bent to their saddlebows,
while the common folk nudged and stared and had their say. The
beauty, the grace, the pride, that deigned small response to
well-meant words, - all that would have been intolerable in plain
Mistress Percy, once a waiting maid, then a piece of merchandise
to be sold for one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, then the
wife of a poor gentleman, was pardoned readily enough to the
Lady Jocelyn Leigh, the ward of the King, the bride to be (so soon
as the King's Court of High Commission should have snapped in
twain an inconvenient and ill-welded fetter) of the King's minion.
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