A Soldier of Virginia: A Tale of Colonel Washington and Braddock's Defeat

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

"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.

"Damn 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 passed away the only one at Riverview whom I had grown to love.

And now a word about the others among whom I passed 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 succumb in a moment to a woman's shrewish temper.