Sir Charles, being dry after his song, drank to Hospitality,—"A duty," he said, smiling, "that you gentlemen make so paramount that you must wonder at the omission of 'Thou shalt be hospitable' from the Decalogue."
"Faith, sir!" cried Mr. Peyton, "God is too good a Virginian not to consider such a commandment superfluous."
The Governor commenced a story which all present, but one, had heard a dozen times. It mattered the less, as it was a good one. Sir Charles capped it with a better. The Governor told a weird tale of Lunsford's men, the "babe-eating" regiment. Sir Charles recounted a little adventure of His Grace of Buckingham with a quack astrologer, a Court lady, and an orange girl, which made the company die of laughter.
"Rat me! but you tell a story well, sir!" said the Governor, wiping his eyes.
"I serve King Charles the Second, your Excellency."
"And so have to live by your wit, eh, sir?"
"Precisely, your Excellency."
"Emigrate to Virginia, man! to the land of good eating, good drinking, good fighting, stout men, and pretty women—who make angelic wives." And the Governor, who loved his own wife with chivalric devotion, kissed a locket which he wore at his neck. "Come to Virginia where we need loyal men and true. Lord! we all thought the millennium was come with the king, but damme! if it doesn't seem as far off as ever! Not that his Majesty is to blame," he added quickly, as though fearing that his words might be taken as an aspersion upon Charles's ability to conduct the millennium single-handed. "The naughty spirit of the age sets itself against the Lord's Anointed. The Puritan snake is but scotched, not killed. It's the old prate of freedom of conscience, government by the people, and the like disgusting stuff (no offense to you, Major Carrington) that makes the trouble of the times both here and at home. I sigh for the good old days when, for eleven sweet years, no Parliament sat to meddle in affairs of state, when Wentworth kept down faction and the saintly Laud built up the Church which he adorned." And the Governor buried his woes in the Rhenish.
"Sir William Berkeley's loyalty is proverbial," said Sir Charles suavely. "The King knows that while he is at the helm in Virginia, the colony is on the high road to that era of peace and prosperity which his majesty so ardently desires—for his tax-paying people. And I have thought more than once of late that I might do worse than to dispose of my majority in the 'Blues,' bid the Court adieu, and obtaining from his Majesty a grant of land, retire here to Virginia to pass my days on my own land and amid a little court of my own, in the patriarchal fashion you gentlemen affect. Under certain circumstances it is a course I might possibly pursue." He glanced at his kinsman, whose countenance showed high approval of a plan which dovetailed nicely with one of his own making.
"Can you guess the 'certain circumstances' which are to give us the pleasure of his confounded company?" whispered Mr. Peyton to Mr. Carey.