The people, in carriages, or on horseback, bore little resemblance to the usual country gathering. They were gentlepeople tinged with rusticity. All of them had good, high sounding Anglo-Saxon names. There was some magnificence of an antique pattern. One huge family ark was drawn by four sleek old horses, with a venerable black coachman on the box, and inside a superb old lady with a black veil falling over her white hair. There were but two really correct equipages in the field. One was a trim, chocolate-colored victoria, with brown horses and a chocolate-colored coachman to match. In it sat a showy woman, with a profusion of dazzling blonde hair, and beside her was an immaculately well dressed blonde man. The turnout looked like a finely finished photograph among a lot of dingy old family portraits.
The other carriage that would have passed muster was a large and handsome landau, respectfully called “the Isleham carriage,” and in it sat Colonel Berkeley and his daughter Olivia. The Colonel was a genuine Virginia colonel, and claimed to be the last man in the State to wear a ruffled shirt bosom. A billowy expanse of thread cambric ruffles rushed out of his waistcoat; his snow white hair was carefully combed down upon his coat collar. At the carriage door stood his double—an elderly negro as grizzled as his master, to whom he bore that curious resemblance that comes of fifty years association. This resemblance was very much increased when Colonel Berkeley’s back was turned, and in the privacy of the kitchen, Petrarch—or more commonly Pete—pished and pshawed and railed and swore in the colonel’s most inimitable manner. Each, too, possessed a type of aggressive piety, which in Colonel Berkeley took the form of a loud declaration that a gentleman, in order to be a gentleman, must be a member of the Episcopal Church. This once accomplished, the Colonel was willing to allow liberally for the weaknesses of human nature, and considered too great strictness of behavior as “deuced ungentlemanlike, begad.” Petrarch regarded himself as a second Isaiah the prophet, and a vessel of election—having reached the stage of perfectibility—a usual thing in the experience of a genuine African. The Colonel described Petrarch as “that infernal rascally boy of mine,” and this “boy” was the one individual he had never been able to overawe or silence. Possibly an exception might be made to this in Miss Olivia, who sitting up, slim and straight and pretty, was treated by her father with elaborate old-fashioned courtesy. Colonel Berkeley was in a particularly happy and virtuous frame of mind on this day. This was his first appearance in public since his return from Europe, where a serious bodily injury had kept him during the whole four years of the war. He gloried in the consciousness that he was no renegade, but had returned to the sacred soil as soon as he possibly could, when he might have been enjoying himself elsewhere. When the Colonel said “the State of Virginia,” he really meant the whole planetary system. Nevertheless, two weeks in his beloved Virginia had bored him dreadfully, and he was “more orkarder,” as Petrarch expressed it, than any other two weeks of his whole life. The Campdown races he hailed as a godsend. He had a good competence left, in spite of having sent orders to his agents to convert lands, stocks, bonds, and everything, into Confederate securities—cotton bonds, Confederate gunboat stock, anything in which the State of Virginia was bound up. As far as in him lay, he had made ducks and drakes of a splendid fortune, from the finest and most disinterested motives that ever inspired a mistaken old gentleman, but fate had befriended him against his will. An investment at the North that the colonel had vainly tried to throw in the general wreck, had escaped confiscation, and had increased, a hundredfold in value. His orders to sell half of Isleham, his family place, for Confederate money, had arrived too late for his agent to carry it out. He had done the handsome thing, as it was esteemed, and after having practiced the strictest virtue, he was rewarded with all the pleasures that are commonly supposed to be the reward of vice.
“Don’t you think, papa,” the young girl said to him at once, “that we should go up on the grand stand? It might look a little—a little standoffish for us to remain here—and the county people—”
The Virginians inherit from their English ancestry, a vast and preposterous respect for their county people—and Miss Olivia Berkeley, fresh from Paris and London, was more anxious that no fault should be found with her by these out-of-the-way provincials than any of the fine people she had met during a considerable transatlantic experience. So was Colonel Berkeley—but there was a fly in his ointment.
“I would with pleasure, my love, but damme if those Hibbses are not sitting up on the stand along with their betters—and I won’t rub elbows with the Hibbses. It’s everywhere the same. Society is so infernally mixed now that I am always expecting to meet my tailor at dinner. I thought certainly, in old Virginia, the people would know how to keep the canaille in their places, and there, by George, sits a family like the Hibbses staring me in the face.”
“Yes,” replied Olivia, smiling. “It’s everywhere the same—you are bound to meet some of the Hibbses everywhere in the world—so we might as well do the right thing in spite of them. Petrarch, open the carriage door.”
The Colonel, with old-fashioned gallantry, assisted his daughter to alight, and giving her his arm, they crossed the track in full view of the grand stand, and went up the rickety wooden stairs at the end.
At no period in her life had Olivia Berkeley felt herself so thoroughly on exhibition as then. Her figure, her air—both of which were singularly graceful and refined—her gown which was Paris-made—all were minutely examined by hundreds of eyes that had not seen her since, as a pretty, half-grown girl, she went to church and paid visits under the charge of a demure governess. After they had crossed the white track, they were greeted by numerous gentlemen who sauntered back and forth about the quarter-stretch. Colonel Berkeley was elaborately gracious, and Olivia was by nature affable—to all except the Hibbses. But when they passed that inoffending family, the Colonel stalked on pointedly oblivious, and Olivia’s slight bow was not warming or cheering.
People moved up to shake hands with them—girls of Olivia’s age, soft voiced, matronly women, elderly men, a little shaky and broken, as all the old men looked after the war—and young men with something of the camp hanging to them still. Olivia was all grace, kindness, and tact. She had forgotten nobody.
Meanwhile Petrarch, who had followed them, managed to edge up to her and whisper: