All the guests, save one, had arrived. Colonel Verney fidgeted, sent a servant wench to look at the kitchen clock, and dispatched his secretary to an upstairs window, whence was visible a long stretch of what courtesy called the highroad.
The secretary returned and whispered his master. "God be thanked!" exclaimed the latter. "I feared that his machine had mired in the Two-Mile Swamp, or had toppled into a gully coming through the Devil's Strip. Gentlemen, the Governor's coach is in sight. Shall we adjourn to the porch and there await his Excellency?"
A mighty straining, jingling and lumbering came with the breeze down the road and proceeded from a pillar of dust which was approaching the house with reasonable rapidity. Presently the road changed from a trough of dust into a ribbon of greensward. The cloud dissipated itself, streaming away like the tail of a comet, and a ponderous and much begilt coach, drawn by six horses, their manes and tails tied with red ribbons, and outriders in gorgeous livery at the heads of each pair, rolled, or rather bumped into sight. With a seasick motion it undulated over the green acclivities of the road, and finally drew up beside the great horse-block at the gate.
Two lackeys sprang from their perch behind the vehicle, flung open the door, and lowered a short flight of steps. A very stately gentleman, richly dressed, with a handkerchief of point in one hand and a jeweled snuff-box in the other, descended the steps, placing one shapely leg in its maroon-colored stocking before the other with the mannered grace of the leader of a Coranto.
Colonel Verney met him with a low bow and smiling face, after which the two embraced, for they were old friends.
"My dear Governor!"
"My dear Colonel!"
"I am charmed to welcome your Excellency to my poor house."
"My dear Colonel, I am charmed to be here. Gad! the possession of the only chariot in the Colony is a burdensome honor! I thought dinner would be over, and the stirrup cup in order while I was creeping, like a snail with his house on his back, over these 'fair and pleasant roads'—as I call them in my book, eh, Dick! But you have a goodly company, I see; Ludwell, Fitzhugh, Carey, Anthony Nash, mine ancient enemy Lawrence, Wormeley, Carrington our Puritan convert and his pretty daughter, young Peyton, and that pretty fellow, your nephew or cousin, is he? Odzooks! he is much what I was at his age, begotten of Delilah and Lucifer, hand of iron in glove of velvet, eh, Dick! I hear he is hail-fellow-well-met with the King and with Buckingham and Killigrew and their wild set. Ah, boys will be boys! 'We have heard the chimes at midnight,' eh, Dick?"
And the Governor in high good humor skipped up the steps with the agility of youth, bent low with sugared compliments over the hands of his hostesses and of Mistress Betty Carrington, and gave courteous greeting to the assembled gentlemen, after which the company flowed back into the grateful twilight of hall and "great room," where the weather, the state of the crops, and the last horse-race engaged them until the announcement of dinner.