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Updated: May 4, 2025
The minister addressed, leaning forward, laid it off to his Lordship how that the vestries in Virginia did not incline to have ministers inducted, and, being very powerful, kept the poor servants of the Church upon uneasy seats; but that he, Gideon Darden, had the love of his flock, rich and poor, gentle and simple, and that in the first year of his ministry the gentlemen of his vestry had been pleased to present his name to the Governor for induction.
"Colonel French has never been at my house," he said, "and I shouldn't care to seem to intrude." "Come on, mayor," said Mr. Darden, taking the official by the arm, "these fine distinctions are not becoming in the presence of death. The colonel will be glad to see you."
Stagg saw their minions depart, and then themselves left the little white house in Palace Street. Mistress Deborah was with them, but not Audrey. "She can't abide the sight of an Indian," said the minister's wife indifferently. "Besides, Darden will be here from the church presently, and he may want her to write for him. She and Peggy can mind the house."
Come in the both of you. There are cakes and a bottle of Madeira." Audrey fastened the horse against the time that Darden should remember to send for it, and then followed the ex-waiting-woman and the former queen of a company of strollers up a grassy path and through a little green door into a pleasant room, where grape leaves wreathed the windows and cast their shadows upon a sanded floor.
Darden, riding home through the night, and in liquor, perhaps, has fallen and broken his neck, and Deborah can't come. And says Mirabell But la, my dear, there you stand in your safeguard, and I'm keeping the gate shut on you! Come in. Come in, Audrey. Why, you've grown to be a woman! You were just a brown slip of a thing, that Lady Day, two years ago, that I spent with Deborah.
"And you had best be careful, or you'll prove yourself another! There's been talk enough already. Audrey, village innocent that she is, is the only one that doesn't know it. The town's not the country; if he sets tongues a-clacking here" "He won't," said Darden roughly. "He's no hare-brained one-and-twenty! And Audrey's a good girl. Go send her here, Deborah.
He told her that he would speak to Darden, and did not despair of persuading that worthy to forbid the trader his house. Also he told her that in this settled, pleasant, every-day Virginia, and in the eighteenth century, a maid, however poor and humble, might not be married against her will. If this half-breed had threats to utter, there was always the law of the land.
Audrey, sitting beside a table which had been drawn in front of the window, turned her face aside, and was away, sense and soul, out of the meanly furnished room into the midst of the great bouquets of bloom, with the blue between and above. Darden, walking up and down, with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco smoke curling like an aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the window.
There's naught in it, I'll swear, but some fal-lal about your flowered gown or an old woman's black cat and corner broomstick." Mistress Deborah Darden pressed her thin lips together, and eyed her lord and master with scant measure of conjugal fondness. "It's about some one nearer home than your bishops and commissaries," she said. "Hide passed by this morning, going to the river field.
There was no one in the summer-house. Haward walked on to the grape arbor, and found there a black girl, who pointed to an open door, pertaining not to the small white house, but to that portion of the theatre which abutted upon the garden. Haward, passing a window of Mr. Stagg's domicile, was aware of Darden sitting within, much engaged with a great book and a tankard of sack.
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