The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray (top books to read txt) 📕

General Knox, who was nearest, came forward, and the Chief, with tears in his eyes, embraced him. The others came, one by one, to him, and took their leave without a word. A line of infantry was formed from the tavern to the ferry, and the General, with his officers following him, walked silently to the water. He stood up in the barge, taking off his hat, and waving a farewell. And his comrades remained bareheaded on the shore till their leader's boat was out of view.

As Harry speaks very low, in the grey of evening, with sometimes a break in his voice, we all sit touched and silent. Hetty goes up and kisses her father.

“You tell us of others, General Harry,” she says, passing a handkerchief across her eyes, “of Marion and Sumpter, of Greene and Wayne, and Rawdon and Cornwallis, too, but you never mention Colonel Warrington!”

“My dear, he will tell you his story in private!” whispers my wife, clinging to her sister, “and you can write it for him.”

But it was not to be. My Lady Theo, and her husband too, I own, catching the infection from her, never would let Harry rest, until we had coaxed, wheedled, and ordered him to ask Hetty in marriage. He obeyed, and it was she who now declined. “She had always,” she said, “the truest regard for him from the dear old times when they had met as almost children together. But she would never leave her father. When it pleased God to take him, she hoped she would be too old to think of bearing any other name but her own. Harry should have her love always as the best of brothers; and as George and Theo have such a nurseryful of children,” adds Hester, “we must show our love to them, by saving for the young ones.” She sent him her answer in writing, leaving home on a visit to friends at a distance, as though she would have him to understand that her decision was final. As such Hal received it. He did not break his heart. Cupid's arrows, ladies, don't bite very deep into the tough skins of gentlemen of our age; though, to be sure, at the time of which I write, my brother was still a young man, being little more than fifty. Aunt Het is now a staid little lady with a voice of which years have touched the sweet chords, and a head which Time has powdered over with silver. There are days when she looks surprisingly young and blooming. Ah me, my dear, it seems but a little while since the hair was golden brown, and the cheeks as fresh as roses! And then came the bitter blast of love unrequited which withered them; and that long loneliness of heart which, they say, follows. Why should Theo and I have been so happy, and thou so lonely? Why should my meal be garnished with love, and spread with plenty, while yon solitary outcast shivers at my gate? I bow my head humbly before the Dispenser of pain and poverty, wealth and health; I feel sometimes as if, for the prizes which have fallen to the lot of me unworthy, I did not dare to be grateful. But I hear the voices of my children in their garden, or look up at their mother from my book, or perhaps my sick-bed, and my heart fills with instinctive gratitude towards the bountiful Heaven that has so blest me.

Since my accession to my uncle's title and estate my intercourse with my good cousin Lord Castlewood had been very rare. I had always supposed him to be a follower of the winning side in politics, and was not a little astonished to hear of his sudden appearance in opposition. A disappointment in respect to a place at court, of which he pretended to have had some promise, was partly the occasion of his rupture with the Ministry. It is said that the most August Person in the realm had flatly refused to receive into the R-y-l Household a nobleman whose character was so notoriously bad, and whose example (so the August Objector was pleased to say) would ruin and corrupt any respectable family. I heard of the Castlewoods during our travels in Europe, and that the mania for play had again seized upon his lordship. His impaired fortunes having been retrieved by the prudence of his wife and father-in-law, he had again begun to dissipate his income at hombre and lansquenet. There were tales of malpractices in which he had been discovered, and even of chastisement inflicted upon him by the victims of his unscrupulous arts. His wife's beauty and freshness faded early; we met but once at Aix-la-Chapelle, where Lady Castlewood besought my wife to go and see her, and afflicted Lady Warrington's kind heart by stories of the neglect and outrage of which her unfortunate husband was guilty. We were willing to receive these as some excuse and palliation for the unhappy lady's own conduct. A notorious adventurer, gambler, and spadassin, calling himself the Chevalier de Barry, and said to be a relative of the mistress of the French King, but afterwards turning out to be an Irishman of low extraction, was in constant attendance upon the Earl and Countess at this time, and conspicuous for the audacity of his lies, the extravagance of his play, and somewhat mercenary gallantry towards the other sex, and a ferocious bravo courage, which, however, failed him on one or two awkward occasions, if common report said true. He subsequently married, and rendered miserable a lady of title and fortune in England. The poor little American lady's interested union with Lord Castlewood was scarcely more happy.

I remember our little Miles's infantile envy being excited by learning that Lord Castlewood's second son, a child a few months younger than himself, was already an ensign on the Irish establishment, whose pay the fond parents regularly drew. This piece of preferment my lord must have got for his cadet whilst he was on good terms with the Minister, during which period of favour Will Esmond was also shifted off to New York. Whilst I was in America myself, we read in an English journal that Captain Charles Esmond had resigned his commission in his Majesty's service, as not wishing to take up arms against the countrymen of his mother, the Countess of Castlewood. “It is the doing of the old fox, Van den Bosch,” Madam Esmond said; “he wishes to keep his Virginian property safe, whatever side should win!” I may mention, with respect to this old worthy, that he continued to reside in England for a while after the Declaration of Independence, not at all denying his sympathy with the American cause, but keeping a pretty quiet tongue, and alleging that such a very old man as himself was past the age of action or mischief, in which opinion the Government concurred, no doubt, as he was left quite unmolested. But of a sudden a warrant was out after him, when it was surprising with what agility he stirred himself, and skipped off to France, whence he presently embarked upon his return to Virginia.

The old man bore the worst reputation amongst the Loyalists of our colony; and was nicknamed “Jack the Painter” amongst them, much to his indignation, after a certain miscreant who was hung in England for burning naval stores in our ports there. He professed to have lost prodigious sums at home by the persecution of the Government, distinguished himself by the loudest patriotism and the most violent religious outcries in Virginia; where, nevertheless, he was not much more liked by the Whigs than by the party who still remained faithful to the Crown. He wondered that such an old Tory as Madam Esmond of Castlewood was suffered to go at large, and was for ever crying out against her amongst the gentlemen of the new Assembly, the Governor, and officers of the State. He and Fanny had high words in Richmond one day, when she told him he was an old swindler and traitor, and that the mother of Colonel Henry Warrington, the