The Virginia country was full of golden autumn sunshine and blue haze.
The long hours spent on a slow-moving train were full of shocks and
surprises to a young traveler who knew almost every civilized country
better than his own. The lonely look of the fields, the trees
shattered by war, which had not yet had time enough to muffle their
broken tops with green; the negroes, who crowded on board the train,
lawless, and unequal to holding their liberty with steady hands,
looked poor and less respectable than in the old plantation days--it
was as if the long discipline of their former state had counted for
nothing. Tom Burton felt himself for the first time to have something
of a statesman's thoughts and schemes as he moralized along the way.
Presently he noticed with deep sympathy a lady who came down the
crowded car, and took the seat just in front of him. She carried a
magazine under her arm a copy of--"Blackwood," which was presently
proved to bear the date of 1851, and to be open at an article on the
death of Wordsworth. She was the first lady he had seen that
day--there was little money left for journeying and pleasure among the
white Virginians; but two or three stations beyond this a group of
young English men and women stood with the gay negroes on the
platform, and came into the train with cheerful greetings to their
friends. It seemed as if England had begun to settle Virginia all over
again, and their clear, lively voices had no foreign sound. There were
going to be races at some court-house town in the neighborhood. Burton
was a great lover of horses himself, and the new scenes grew more and
more interesting. In one of the gay groups was a different figure from
any of the fresh-cheeked young wives of the English planters--a
slender girl, pale and spirited, with a look of care beyond her years.
She was the queen of her little company. It was to her that every one
looked for approval and sympathy as the laugh went to and fro. There
was something so high-bred and elegant in her bearing, something so
exquisitely sure and stately, that her companions were made clumsy and
rustic in their looks by contrast. The eager talk of the coming races,
of the untried thoroughbreds, the winners and losers of the year
before, made more distinct this young Virginia lady's own look of
high-breeding, and emphasized her advantage of race. She was the newer
and finer Norman among Saxons. She alone seemed to have that
inheritance of swiftness of mind, of sureness of training. It was the
highest type of English civilization refined still further by long
growth in favoring soil. Tom Burton read her unconscious face as if it
were a romance; he believed that one of the great Virginia houses must
still exist, and that she was its young mistress. The house's fortune
was no doubt gone; the long-worn and carefully mended black silk gown
that followed the lines of her lovely figure told plainly enough that
worldly prosperity was a thing of the past. But what nature could give
of its best, and only age and death could take away, were hers. He
watched her more and more; at one moment she glanced up suddenly and
held his eyes with hers for one revealing moment. There was no
surprise in the look, but a confession of pathos, a recognition of
sympathy, which made even a stranger feel that he had the inmost
secret of her heart.