And then, just as she was fairly opening into the earliest flower of
womanhood, the sudden, awful end of all this half-barbaric,
half-aristocratic life--the revolt of the colonies, the outbreak of the
Revolution, the blaze of way that swept the land like a forest fire, and
that enveloped in its furies even the great house on the James. One of her
brothers turned Whig, and already gone impetuously away in his uniform of
buff and blue, to follow the fortunes of Washington; the other siding with
the "home" across the sea, and he too already ridden impetuously away in
scarlet. Her proud father, his heart long torn between these two and
between his two countries, pacing the great hall, his face flushed with
wine, his eyes turning confusedly, pitifully, on the soldierly portraits of
his ancestors; until at last he too was gone, to keep his sword and his
conscience loyal to his king.
And then more dreadful years and still sadder times; as when one dark
morning toward daybreak, by the edge of a darker forest draped with snow
where the frozen dead lay thick, they found an officer's hat half filled
with snow, and near by, her father fallen face downward; and turning him
over, saw a bullet-hole over his breast, and the crimson of his blood on the
scarlet of his waistcoat; so departed, with manfulness out of this world and
leaving behind him some finer things than his debts and mortgages over dice
and cards and dogs and wine and lotteries.
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