Throckmorton: A Novel

by Molly Elliot Seawell

CHAPTER V.

Miracles usually happen in cycles. They unquestionably did in the Severn neighborhood. Before the hurricane of talk over Throckmorton’s arrival, Jack’s audacity, and Sweeney’s brogue had fairly reached a crisis, a letter came one day to General Temple, from his nephew, Temple Freke, announcing his intention of paying a visit to his dear uncle and aunt at Barn Elms.

General Temple handed the letter to Mrs. Temple with a sort of groan.

“This is he—I mean, my love, this is most discomposing.”

At this Mrs. Temple shook her head in a manner expressing perfect despair. The problem whether Throckmorton should be admitted within the doors of Barn Elms was a mere nothing compared with this. Both of them firmly believed in a personal devil; and Temple Freke, with his extravagance, his vices, his unprincipled behavior, stood for Satan himself. This Freke was very unlike the conservative, home-keeping type of a gentleman that prevailed in Virginia. He was born and brought up in Louisiana, and was fifteen years old when, by the death of his father, General Temple became his guardian, and he was brought to Barn Elms to lead the staid Beverley into all sorts of scrapes, and to torment General Temple’s honest soul almost to madness. The elder Freke, perhaps, knowing the boy’s disposition, had made General Temple’s guardianship to extend until Temple Freke’s twenty-fifth birthday.

Of the horrors of that guardianship, nobody but the kind and simple-hearted general could tell—of Freke’s extravagance, of his gambling and betting and drinking, and one frightful scene, when Freke, with a loaded pistol in his hand, swore that, unless a certain debt of honor was paid, he would kill himself on the spot; and General Temple, who was not easily frightened, promptly paid it, with the conviction that the young fellow was quite capable of carrying out the threat. Immediately after this, General Temple shipped him off to Europe, but apparently it made bad worse. For six whole years was General Temple commanding, entreating, praying, and wheedling to get Freke back to Virginia. It was true, he might have cut off supplies, but Freke made no bones of saying that, if he couldn’t get his own money, he would contrive to get somebody else’s; so the poor general, with groans and moans, would cash Freke’s drafts on him as long as money could be screwed out of the Louisiana sugar plantations to do it with.

But, as Mrs. Temple often said, Freke was unquestionably a gentleman; he was mild-mannered to a degree, and his very impertinences were brought out with a diffidence that frequently hoodwinked General Temple. He was not nearly so handsome as Beverley, being much shorter and sandy-haired, in contrast with Beverley’s blonde beauty; but Mrs. Temple always felt in the old days, with a little pang of jealousy, that this ordinary-looking boy, with his exquisite manners—not the least affected or effeminate, but simply the perfection of personal bearing—could put Beverley at a disadvantage. The two had little in common, and had never met after their school-days, when General Temple, in the innocence of his heart, had sent Freke abroad, to reform, until the very time of Beverley’s death. Freke, whose courage was as flawless in its way as General Temple’s, had come home during the war and enlisted in the Southern army. A strange fate had placed him close to Beverley when he was killed. He had held Beverley’s dying hand, and to him were intrusted the last messages to the mother and the young wife, who waited and prayed at Barn Elms. Nothing on earth but this could have brought Mrs. Temple to tolerate Freke at all, after the sensational career which had begun with the pistol scene. Moreover, to increase the abnormal conditions about this unregenerate being, as the Temples considered him, he was perfectly irresistible. How it was, General Temple gloomily declared, he didn’t know, but Freke had the most extraordinary way of insinuating himself into the good graces of both men and women—not by any affectation of goodness, for there was a frankness about his wickedness that was peculiarly appalling to General Temple. Freke was no handsomer as a man than as a boy; he had been steadily making ducks and drakes of his fortune since he was twenty-five; yet, somehow, Freke always seemed to have a plenty of friends, solely by the charm of his personality. The most serious escapade that had come to General Temple’s knowledge since Freke was of age was his running away with a Cuban girl in New Orleans, and afterward getting a divorce by some hocus-pocus, and thereafter, with serene confidence, he bore himself as an unmarried man. Now, divorce was practically unknown in that old part of Virginia, and the Temples regarded it as in the category with murder and arson; so that this final iniquity of Freke’s would have quite put him beyond the pale, but for those hours he spent kneeling on the ground with the dying Beverley.

General Temple had a sort of Arab hospitality that would not have begrudged itself to the Evil One himself, and to tell Freke that he was not welcome under the roof of Barn Elms, where his grandfather and his grandfather’s father had lived, was an enormity of which he was not capable. And Mrs. Temple was no manner of use to him in the case. In vain he tried to shuffle the decision off on her. Mrs. Temple would not accept it. Like the general, she sighed and groaned, and turned it over in her mind; but always came back that picture of Beverley lying bleeding and dying, and Freke risking his life to stay by him. So at last, after a week of mutual misery, one night, in the privacy of the “charmber,” Mrs. Temple, watching the general stalking up and down during one of his fits of midnight restlessness, said, tremulously:

“My love, we must let Freke come. We can not refuse it—for—for Beverley’s sake.”