The old cavalier bowed low, his hand upon his heart: “Madam, I am the friend of your son. I can say nothing more to a mother!”
The fine courtesy, the graceful deference to age, the instant adaptation of manner and words to the circumstances, have set the episode aside in my heart as a gem of its kind.
He wore on that Sunday, and he wore on every other day the year around, a scarlet hunting-coat. I wonder if there were more eccentrics in Virginia in that generation than are to be met with there—or anywhere else—nowadays? Certain it is that nobody thought of inquiring why Captain Cocke, whose ancestors had served under Washington and Lafayette in the war for freedom, chose to sport the British livery. We had ceased to remark upon it by the time I write of. When strangers expressed wonderment at the queer garb, we had a resentful impression of officiousness.
Mr. Rhodes, with the rest of his party, was thoroughly dissatisfied with the policy (or want of policy) of John Tyler, who had been called to the presidential chair by the untimely death of Gen. W. H. Harrison. In the progress of his review of national affairs, he came to this name when he had spoken half an hour or so.
Whereupon uprose the majestic figure clad in scarlet, from his seat a few feet away from the platform. The Captain straightened his bent shoulders and lifted lean arms and quivering fingers toward heaven. The red tan of his weather-beaten cheeks was a dusky crimson.
“The Lord have mercy upon the nation!” he cried, his voice solemn with wrath, and sonorous with the potency of the mint-juleps for which “The Bell” was noted. “Fellow-citizens! I always cry to High Heaven for mercy upon this country when John Tyler’s name is mentioned! Amen and amen!”
He had a hearty round of applause mingled with echoes of his “amens” and much good-humored laughter. They all knew and loved the Captain. I felt the blood rush to my face, and I saw others glance around reprovingly when a city girl who sat behind me, and carried on a whispered flirtation with a fopling at her side during Mr. Rhodes’s speech, drawled:
“What voice from the tombs is that?”
Mrs. James Saunders, née Mary Cocke, was my mother’s right-hand neighbor. With perfect temper and an agreeable smile, she looked over her shoulder into the babyish face of the cockney guest—
“That is my Uncle John,” she uttered, courteously.