The Berkeleys and their neighbors

A PROVINCIAL Virginia race-course is an excellent place to observe a people which has preserved its distinctiveness as well as the Virginians. So far, they have escaped that general and fatiguing likeness which prevails in most of the universe these days.

Therefore, the Campdown race-course, on a golden day in October, looked like itself and nothing else. The track had started out with the intention of making a perfect ellipse, but meeting a steep incline, it saved the trouble of bringing up the grade, by boldly avoiding the obstacle--so the winning post was considerably nearer the half-mile than the starting post was. Nobody objected to a little thing like this, though. The Virginians are good-natured creatures, and seldom bother about trifles.

It was the fall meeting of the Campdown Jockey Club--a famous institution “befo’ the war.”

At this time the great awakening had not come--the war was not long over. For these people, had they but known it, the end of the war really meant the end of the world--but the change was too stupendous for any human mind to grasp all at once. There came a period of shock before the pain was felt, when the people, groping amid the ruins of their social fabric, patched it up a little here and a little there. They resumed in a dazed and incomplete way their old amusements, their old habits and ways of life. They mortgaged their lands--all that was left to them--with great coolness and a superstitious faith in the future--Virginians are prone to hanker after mortgages--and spent the money untroubled by any reflections where any more was to come from when that was gone.

They were intense pleasure lovers. In that happy afternoon haze in which they had lived until the storm broke, pleasure was the chief end of man. So now, the whole county turned out to see two or three broken-down hacks, and a green colt or two, race for the mythical stakes. It is true, a green silk bag, embroidered in gold, with the legend “$300” hung aloft on a tall pole, for the sweepstakes, but it did not contain three hundred dollars, but about one-half of it in gold, and a check drawn by the president of the Jockey Club against the treasurer for the balance. Most of the members had not paid their dues, and the treasurer didn’t know where the money was to come from, nor the president either, for that matter; but it takes a good deal to discount a Virginian’s faith in the future. The public, too, was fully acquainted with the state of affairs, and the fact that there was any gold at all in the bag, would eventually be in the nature of a pleasant surprise.

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:

“Miss ’Livy, ain’t dat ar Marse French Pembroke an’ he b’rer Miles? Look a-yander by de aige o’ de bench.”

Olivia glanced that way, and a slight wave of color swept over her face--and at that moment “Marse French’s b’rer Miles” turned his full face toward her.

He was a mere lad, of eighteen at the utmost. One side of his face, as she had first seen his profile, was of the purest Greek beauty. But on the other side, a shot had done dreadful work. One eye was drawn out of place. A horrid gash in the cheek remained, and one side of the mouth was painfully disfigured. On the same side, an arm was missing.

A torrent of pity almost overwhelmed Olivia as she looked at the boy--her little playmate in years gone by. And then the elder brother caught her eye, and bowed and smiled. He did not possess the beauty that had once belonged to Miles. He was dark and tanned, and his features had a manly irregularity. But he stood up straight and tall, and had the figure of a soldier. In a moment or two Olivia was shaking hands with Miles, looking straight and boldly into his face, as if there was nothing remarkable there. But just as she touched French Pembroke’s hand, the blonde woman in the victoria came within her line of vision.

Olivia threw up her head, and greeted Pembroke with a kind of chilling sweetness. But this all dissolved toward Miles.

“How delightful to see you again,” she said. “I suppose I shall have to say Mr. Miles now, although I never can think of you as anything but a dear little tormenting boy.”

The ghost of a smile--his smile was a mere contortion--came into Miles’ face--and while he talked, he thrust his one hand into his trousers pocket with a gesture of boyish shyness. Olivia thought she heard the tell-tale rattle of marbles in the pocket.