The Choir Invisible

But he had heard a great deal of her visits at the other great country

places of the day. Often at Greenway Court, where her father went to ride to

hounds with Lord Fairfax and Washington; at Carter's Grove; at the homes of

the Berkeleys, the Masons, the Spottswoods; once, indeed, at Castlewood

itself, where the stately Madam Esmond Warrington had placed her by her own

side at dinner and had kissed her check at leaving; but oftenest at Brandon

Mansion where one of her heroines had lived--Evelyn Byrd; so that, Sir

Godfrey Knell having painted that sad young lady, who now lies with a heavy

stone on her heavier heart in the dim old burying-ground at Westover, she

would have it that hers must be painted in the same identical fashion, with

herself sitting on a green bank, a cluster of roses in her hand, a

shepherd's crook across her knees.

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. Then not long after that, the

manor-house on the James turned into the unkindest of battlefields; one

brother defending at the head of troops within, the other attacking at the

head of troops without; the snowy bedrooms becoming the red-stained wards of

a hospital; the staircase hacked by swords; the poor little spinet and the

slender-legged little mahogany tables overturned and smashed, the portraits

slashed, the library scattered. Then one night, seen from a distance, a vast

flame licking the low clouds; and afterwards a black ruin where the great

house had stood, and so the end of it all forever.