Placing himself in a large chair, the young Senator tilted it back till his hard, squarish head rested against the mantel, and he felt along the strings almost purposelessly, till the plaintive air came forth:
"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon!
How can ye bloom so fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I so full of care?
Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings beside thy mate;
For so I sat, and so I sang,
And wist not of my fate."
He closed his eyes on the strains, and a thickening at his throat, and movement of his broad, athletic chest, as he continued the air, showed that he was inwardly laboring with some strong emotion.
His cousin, the Chief-justice, made a signal with his hat, and one by one the sitters stole out into the square noiselessly, and went their ways, leaving the young man playing on, with the negro child at his knee, leaning there as if to spy out the living voice in his violin.
Other children came to the door—white children from the square, black children from the garden—and some ventured a little way in to hear the tender wooing of the sympathetic strings. He moved his bow mechanically, but the music sprang forth as if it knew its sister, Grief, was waiting on the chords. At last a bolder child than the rest came and pushed his elbow and said,
"Papa!"
"My boy, my dear boy!" the fiddler cried, as tears streamed down his cheeks, and he lifted the lad to his heart and kissed him.
Judge Custis, though no word passed upon the subject, saw the solitary canker at the Senator's heart—his wife's dead form in the old Presbyterian kirk-yard.
It was soon apparent to Judge Custis, from this and other silent things, that a light-hearted, affectionate, strong, yet womanly, engine of energy constituted the young Delaware lawyer-politician. Keen, cunning, impulsive, hopeful, his feet provincial, his head among the birds, he combined facility and earnestness in almost mercurial relations to each other, and the Judge saw that these must constitute a remarkable jury lawyer.
His face was shaven smooth; his throat and chin showed an early tendency to flesh; the poise of his head and thoughtful darting of his eyes and slight aqualinity of his nose indicated one who loved mental action and competition, yet drew that love from a great, healthy body that had to be watched lest it relapse into indolence. The loss of his wife so soon after marriage had been followed by nearly complete indifference to women, and he had made politics his only consolation and mistress, harnessing her like a young mare with his old roadster of the law, and driving them together in the slender confines of his principality, and then locking the law up among his office students to drive politics into the national arena at Washington.