A Soldier of Virginia Part 6

The week that followed dwells in my memory as some tremendous nightmare, lightened here and there by the unvarying kindness of my friend and of his sister. I wandered along the river and gazed out across the changing water for hours at a time, with eyes that saw nothing of what was before them. Often I remained thus until some one came for me and led me gently back into the house. My brain seemed numbed, and no longer capable of thought. Mr. Fontaine took charge of our affairs, doing everything that could be done, keeping the frightened negroes to their work, and praying with my mother through the tight-closed door. He had no fear, and would have entered and prayed with her beside the bed, had she permitted.

I was sitting by the river-bank one evening, watching the shadows lengthen across the water, when I heard a step behind me, and turned to see my friend approaching. A glance at his face brought me to my feet.

"What is it?" I cried, and ran to him.

He took my hands in his.

"Your father died an hour ago, Tom," he said, and smoothed my hair in the familiar way which seemed to comfort him as well as me.

"And my mother?" I asked, for it was of her I was thinking.

"Your mother is ill, too," he said, and placed his arms about me and held me close, "but with G.o.d's grace we will save her life."

But I had started from him.

"If she is ill," I cried, "I must go to her. She will want me."

He shook his head, still holding to my hands.

"No, she does not want you, Tom," he said. "The one thing that will make her happy is the thought that you are quite removed from danger. I believed my place was at her bedside, but she would not permit it."

And then he told me, with glistening eyes, that my old mammy, who had been my mother's thirty years before, was nursing her and would not be sent away. She had burst in the door of the plague chamber the moment she had heard that her mistress was ill, and dared any one disturb her.

Old Doctor Brayle had commanded that she be given her will, and declared that in this old negro woman's careful nursing lay my mother's great chance of life.

The scalding tears poured down my cheeks as Mr. Fontaine told me this,--the first, I think, that I had shed that week, for after that dreadful night, my sorrow had been of a dry and bitter kind,--and a stinging remorse seized me as I thought of the times I had been cross and disobedient to mammy. Ah, how I loved her now! It was the accustomed irony of my life that I was never to tell her so.

Ere daylight the next morning I was seated beside my friend as he drove me home. The river was cloaked in mist, and the dawn seemed inexpressibly dreary. As we approached the house, I wondered to see how forlorn and neglected it appeared. A crowd of wailing negroes surrounded the chaise when we stopped, and I would have got out, but Mr. Fontaine held me firmly in my seat.

"We must remain here," he said, and I dropped back beside him, and waited in a kind of stupor.

Presently they brought the coffin down, the negroes who carried it wreathing themselves in tobacco smoke, and placed it in a cart. We followed at a distance as it rolled slowly toward the Wyeth burying-ground in the grove of willows near the road. The thought came to me that my father should lie with the Stewarts, not with the Wyeths, and then suddenly a great sickness and faintness came upon me, and I remember nothing of what followed until I found Miss Fontaine lifting me from the chaise at the door. I was put to bed, and not until the next day was I able to crawl forth again.

Then came days of anguish and suspense, days spent by me roaming the woods, or lying face downward beneath the trees, and praying that G.o.d would spare my mother's life. Bulletins were brought me from her bedside,--she was better, she was worse, she was better,--how shall I tell the rest?--until at last one day came my dear friend, his lips quivering, the tears streaming down his face unrestrained, and told me that she was dead. I think the sight of his great sorrow frightened me, and I bore the blow with greater composure than I had thought possible.

Had she sent me no message? Yes, she had sent me a message,--her last thought had been of me. She asked me to be a good boy and an honest man, to follow the counsel of Mr. Fontaine in all things, and to keep my promise to my father. So, even in death her love for him and for the honor of his memory triumphed, as I would have had it do.

Again there was a dismal procession through the gray morning to the willow grove, where we stood beneath the dripping branches, while afar off the rude coffin was lowered to its last resting-place. The negroes grouped themselves about, and my friend stood at my side, his head bare, his face raised to heaven, as though he saw her there.

"'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.'"

I felt the threads of my life slipping from me one by one, even as the trees faded from before my eyes. Only that strong, exultant voice at my side went on and on.

"'Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.'" On and on went the voice; there was nothing else in the whole wide world but that voice crying out over my mother's grave. "'I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me. Write. From henceforth blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.'" And then the voice faltered and broke. "She was the light of my life and the joy of my heart," it was no longer the ritual of the church; "and yet had I to walk beside her and tell her naught. And now is she taken from me, for the Lord hath received her to His bosom to live in the light of His love forevermore."

I looked up into his face and saw the secret of his heart revealed,--the secret he had kept so well, but which his anguish had wrung from him. It was only for an instant, yet I think he knew I had read his heart--I, alone of all the world, understood. Had my mother known, I wonder? Yes, I think she had, and in the greatness of his love found help and comfort.

Good man and lovely woman, G.o.d rest and keep you both.

I went home with him, remembering with a pang that the place I had called home was mine no longer. Those among my friends who know the history of my boyhood understand to some extent my loathing for the cards and dice.

It is perhaps unreasonable,--I might be the first to deem it so in any other man,--but when I count up the woe they brought my mother,--father and husband slaves to the same frenzy,--how they wrecked her life and embittered it, my pa.s.sion rises in my throat to choke me. Never did I hate them more than in the days which followed; for they had made me outcast, and what the future held for me, I could not guess. The question was answered of a sudden a week later, when there came from my grandfather a curt note bidding me be sent to Riverview. It was decided at once that I must go. I myself looked forward to the change with a boy's blind longing for adventure, and said farewell to the man who had been so much to me with a willingness I wince to think upon.

CHAPTER VI

I AM TREATED TO A SURPRISE

The rain was falling dismally as the coach in which I had made the journey rolled up the drive to Riverview, and I caught but a glimpse of the house as I was rushed up the steps and into the wide hall. A lady dressed in a loose green gown was seated in an easy-chair before the open fire, and she did not rise as I entered, doubtless because her lap was full of knitting.

"Gracious, how wet the child is!" she cried, looking me over critically.

"Take him to his room, Sally, and see that he has a bath and change of clothing. I'm sure he needs both."

I turned away without a word and followed the negro maid. Of course the lady thought me a surly boor, but my heart was burning, for I had hoped for a different welcome. As I pa.s.sed along the hall and up the broad staircase, the thought came to me that all of this would one day be mine, should I choose to claim it, and then, with crimson cheeks, I put the thought from me, as unworthy of my mother's son.

But my room looked very warm and cheerful even on this chilly day, and from the window I could see broad fields of new-planted tobacco, and beyond them the yellow road and then the river. I stood long looking out at it and wondering what my life here had in store. Half an hour later, word came from my grandfather that he wished to see me, and the same maid led me down the stairs and to his study, I stumbling along beside her with a madly beating heart. As I crossed the lower hall, I heard a burst of childish laughter, and saw a boy and girl, both younger than myself, playing near the chair where the lady sat. I looked at them with interest, but the sight of me seemed to freeze the laughter on their faces, and they gazed with staring eyes until I turned the corner and was out of sight. But I had little time to wonder at this astonishing behavior, for in a moment I was in my grandfather's office.

He was seated at a great table, and had apparently been going over some accounts, for the board in front of him was littered with books and papers. I saw, even beneath the disguise of his red face and white hair, his strong resemblance to my father, and my heart went out to him on the instant. For I had loved my father, despite the wild behavior which marred his later clays. Indeed, I always think of him during that time as suffering with a grievous malady, of which he could not rid himself, and which ate his heart out all the faster because he saw how great was the anguish it caused the woman he loved. That it was some such disease I am quite certain, so different was his naturally strong and sunny disposition.

My grandfather gazed at me some moments without speaking, as I stood there, longing to throw myself into his arms, and all the misery of the years that followed might never have been, had I buried my pride and followed the dictates of my heart. But I waited for him to speak, and the moment pa.s.sed.

"So this is Tom's boy," he said at last. "My G.o.d, how like he is!"

He fell silent for a moment,--silenced, no doubt, by bitter memories.

"You wonder, perhaps," he said in a sterner tone, "why I have sent for you; but I could do no less. The letter from your pastor which announced the deaths of your father and your mother brought me the tidings also that your mother's fortune had been diced away down to the last penny, and that even the negroes must be sold to satisfy the claims against it.

However undutiful your father may have been, I could not permit his son to become a charge upon the poor funds."

I felt my cheeks flushing, but I judged it best to choke back the words which trembled on my lips.

"I can read your thought," said my grandfather quickly. "You are thinking that the heir of Riverview could hardly be called a pauper. Do not forget that your father forfeited his claim to the estate by his ungentlemanly conduct."

"I shall not forget it," I burst out. "My father made sure that I should never forget it. I shall never claim the estate. And my father's conduct was never ungentlemanly."

"As you will," said my grandfather scornfully. "I am not apt at mincing words. I told him one thing many years ago which I should have thought he would remember, and which I now repeat to you. I told him that a gentleman ceased to be a gentleman when once he gambled beyond his means."

I waited to hear no more, but with crimson cheeks and head in air, I turned on my heel and started for the door.

"d.a.m.n my stars, sir!" he roared. "Wait to hear me out."

But I would not wait. After a moment's struggle with the latch, I had the door open and marched straight to my room. Once inside, I bolted the door, and throwing myself on the floor, sobbed myself to sleep.

What need to detail further? There were a hundred such scenes between us in the four years that followed, and as I look back upon them now, I realize that through it all I, too, showed my full share of Stewart obstinacy and temper. I more than suspect that my grandfather in his most violent outbursts was inwardly trembling with tenderness for me, as was I for him, and that a single gentle word, spoken at the right time, would have brought us into each other's arms. And I realize too late that it was for me, and not for him, to speak that word. It was only when I saw him lying in his bed, stricken with paralysis, bereft of the power of speech or movement, that I knew how great my love for him had been. His eyes, as they met mine on that last day, had in them infinite tenderness and pleading, and my heart melted as I bent and kissed his lips. He struggled to speak, and the sweat broke from his forehead at the effort, but what he would have said I can only guess, for he died that night, without the iron bands which held him fast loosening for an instant. Yet I love to fancy that his last words, could he have spoken them, would have been words of love and forgiveness, for my father as well as for myself, and such, I am sure, they would have been. With him there pa.s.sed away the only one at Riverview whom I had grown to love.

And now a word about the others among whom I pa.s.sed the second period of my boyhood. My father's younger brother, James, had married seven or eight years before a lady whose estate adjoined Riverview,--Mrs.

Constance Randolph, a widow some years older than himself. She had one child living, a daughter, Dorothy, who, at the time I came to Riverview, was a girl of nine, and a year after her second marriage she bore a son, who was named James, much against the wishes of his mother. She would have called him Thomas, a name which had for five generations been that of the head of the house. But this my grandfather would by no means allow, and so the child was christened after his father. I think that ever since the day she had entered the Stewart family, my aunt had thought me a spectre across her path, for she was an ambitious woman and wished the whole estate for her son,--in which I do not greatly blame her. But she had brooded over her fear until it had become a phantom which haunted her unceasingly, and she had come to deem me a kind of monster, who stood between her boy and his inheritance. Her second husband died three years after their marriage,--he was drowned one day in January while crossing the river on the ice, which gave way under him,--and after that she became the mistress of Riverview in earnest, ruling my grandfather with a rod of iron, for though bold enough with men, and especially with the men of his own family, he would succ.u.mb in a moment to a woman's shrewish temper.

Only twice had he revolted against her rule. The first time was when she had announced her intention of naming her boy Thomas, as I have already mentioned. The second was when he decided to summon me to Riverview. This she had opposed with all her might, but he had persisted, and finally ended the argument by putting her from the room,--doubtless with great inward trepidation. So I came to be a phantom in the flesh, and do not wonder that she hated me, so sour will the human heart become which broods forever on its selfishness. Her children she kept from me as from the plague, and during the years preceding my grandfather's death, I had almost no communication with them. He required, however, that every respect be shown me, placed me on his right at table,--how often have I looked up from my plate to find his eyes upon me,--selected half a dozen negroes to be my especial servants, engaged the Rev. James Scott, pastor of the Quantico church, as my tutor, and even ordered for me an elaborate wardrobe from his factor in London.