“A committee of our Association will wait upon Mr. Everett at the Governor’s house this forenoon. I will smuggle you in, if you will go with us. I shall call for you at eleven.”
When we four who had come together were ushered into the spacious drawing-room of the gubernatorial mansion, we had it to ourselves. Mrs. Ritchie, with a pretty gesture that reminded one of her French birth, fell to arranging five or six chairs near the middle of the room, into a seemingly careless group. One faced the rest at a conversational angle.
“Now!” she uttered, with a playful pretence of secrecy; “you will see Mr. Everett seat himself just there! He can do nothing else. Call it a stage trick, if you like. But he must sit there!”
The words had hardly left her lips when Mr. Everett entered, accompanied by a younger man, erect in carriage and bronzed in complexion, whom he presented to us as “My son-in-law, Lieutenant Wise.”
To our secret amusement, Mr. Everett took the chair set for him, and this, when three remained vacant after the ladies were all seated.
Lieutenant Wise and I, as the non-attached personages present, drifted to the other side of the room while official talk went on between the orator-statesman and the committee.
The retentive memory, which has, from my babyhood, been both bane and blessing, speedily identified my companion with the author of Los Gringos (The Yankees), a satirical and very clever work that had fallen in my way a couple of years before. He was a cousin of the Governor. I learned to-day of his connection with the Everetts.
He was social, and a witty talker. I had time to discover this before the Governor appeared with his daughter, a charming girl of seventeen, who did the honors of the house with unaffected grace and ease.
I had met her before, and I knew her father quite well. Mrs. Ritchie had taken herself severely to task that very week for speaking of him as “our warm-hearted, hot-headed Governor.”
The characterization was just. We all knew him to be both, and loved him none the less for the warm temper that had hurried him into many a scrape, political and personal. We were rather proud of his belligerency, and took real pride in wondering what “he would do next.” He was eloquent in debate, a bitter partisan, a warrior who would fight to the death for friend, country or principle. Virginia never had a Governor whom she loved more, and of whom she was more justly proud.