THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

June came to tide-water Virginia with long, warm days and with the odor of many roses.  Day by day the cloudless sunshine visited the land:  night by night the large pale stars looked into its waters.  It was a slumberous land, of many creeks and rivers that were wide, slow, and deep, of tobacco fields and lofty, solemn forests, of vague marshes, of white mists, of a haze of heat far and near.  The moon of blossoms was past, and the red men—­few in number now—­had returned from their hunting, and lay in the shade of the trees in the villages that the English had left them, while the women brought them fish from the weirs, and strawberries from the vines that carpeted every poisoned field or neglected clearing.  The black men toiled amidst the tobacco and the maize; at noontide it was as hot in the fields as in the middle passage, and the voices of those who sang over their work fell to a dull crooning.  The white men who were bound served listlessly; they that were well were as lazy as the weather; they that were newly come over and ill with the “seasoning” fever tossed upon their pallets, longing for the cooling waters of home.  The white men who were free swore that the world, though fair, was warm, and none walked if he could ride.  The sunny, dusty roads were left for shadowed bridle paths; in a land where most places could be reached by boat, the water would have been the highway but that the languid air would not fill the sails.  It was agreed that the heat was unnatural, and that, likely enough, there would be a deal of fever during the summer.

But there was thick shade in the Fair View garden, and when there was air at all it visited the terrace above the river.  The rooms of the house were large and high-pitched; draw to the shutters, and they became as cool as caverns.  Around the place the heat lay in wait:  heat of wide, shadowless fields, where Haward’s slaves toiled from morn to eve; heat of the great river, unstirred by any wind, hot and sleeping beneath the blazing sun; heat of sluggish creeks and of the marshes, shadeless as the fields.  Once reach the mighty trees drawn like a cordon around house and garden, and there was escape.

To and fro and up and down in the house went the erst waiting-woman to my Lady Squander, carrying matters with a high hand.  The negresses who worked under her eye found her a hard taskmistress.  Was a room clean to-day, to-morrow it was found that there was dust upon the polished floor, finger marks on the paneled walls.  The same furniture must be placed now in this room, now in that; china slowly washed and bestowed in one closet transferred to another; an eternity spent upon the household linen, another on the sewing and resewing, the hanging and rehanging, of damask curtains.  The slaves, silent when the greenish eyes and tight, vixenish face were by, chattered, laughed, and sung when they were left alone.  If they fell idle, and little was done of a morning, they went unrebuked; thoroughness, and not haste, appearing to be Mistress Deborah’s motto.