Threads of Grey and Gold

Thinking the voyage might prove beneficial, her husband reluctantly consented, and passage was engaged for her on a pilot-boat that had been out privateering, and had stopped for supplies before going on to New York.

The vessel sailed – and a storm swept the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida. It was supposed that the ship went down off Cape Hatteras, but forty years afterward, a sailor, who died in Texas, confessed on his death-bed that he was one of a crew of mutineers who took possession of the Patriot and forced the passengers, as well as the officers and men, to walk the plank. He professed to remember Mrs. Alston well, and said she was the last one who perished. He never forgot her look of despair as she stepped into the sea – with her head held high even in the face of death.

Among Theodosia’s papers was found a letter addressed to her husband, written at a time when she was weary of the struggle. On the envelope was written: “My Husband. To be delivered after my death. I wish this to be read immediately and before my burial.”

He never saw the letter, for he never had the courage to go through her papers, and after his death it was sent to her father. It came to him like a message from the grave:

“Let my father see my son, sometimes,” she had written. “Do not be unkind to him whom I have loved so much, I beseech of you. Burn all my papers except my father’s letters, which I beg you to return to him.”

A long time afterward, her father married Madame Jumel, a rich New York woman who was many years his junior, but the alliance was unfortunate, and was soon annulled. Through all the rest of his life, he never wholly gave up the hope that Theodosia might return. He clung fondly to the belief that she had been picked up by another ship, and some day would be brought back to him.

Day by day, he haunted the Battery, anxiously searching the faces of the incoming passengers, asking some of them for tidings of his daughter, and always believing that the next ship would bring her back.

He became a familiar figure, for he was almost always there – a bent, shrunken little man, white-haired, leaning heavily upon his cane, asking questions in a thin piping voice, and straining his dim eyes forever toward the unsounded waters, from whence the idol of his heart never came.

For out within those waters, cruel, changeless,
She sleeps, beyond all rage of earth or sea;
A smile upon her dear lips, dumb, but waiting,
And I – I hear the sea-voice calling me.

The Sea-Voice

Beyond the sands I hear the sea-voice calling
With passion all but human in its pain,
While from my eyes the bitter tears are falling,
And all the summer land seems blind with rain;
For out within those waters, cruel, changeless,
She sleeps, beyond all rage of earth or sea,
A smile upon her dear lips, dumb, but waiting,
And I – I hear the sea-voice calling me.

The tide comes in. The moonlight flood and glory
Of that unresting surge thrill earth with bliss,
And I can hear the passionate sweet story
Of waves that waited round her for her kiss.
Sweetheart, they love you; silent and unseeing,
Old Ocean holds his court around you there,
And while I reach out through the dark to find you
His fingers twine the sea-weed in your hair.

The tide goes out and in the dawn’s new splendour
The dreams of dark first fade, then pass away,
And I awake from visions soft and tender
To face the shuddering agony of day
For out within those waters, cruel, changeless,
She sleeps, beyond all rage of earth or sea;
A smile upon her dear lips, dumb, but waiting,
And I – I hear the sea-voice calling me.

The Mystery of Randolph’s Courtship

It is said that in order to know a man, one must begin with his ancestors, and the truth of the saying is strikingly exemplified in the case of “John Randolph of Roanoke,” as he loved to write his name.

His contemporaries have told us what manner of man he was – fiery, excitable, of strong passions and strong will, capable of great bitterness, obstinate, revengeful, and extremely sensitive.

“I have been all my life,” he says, “the creature of impulse, the sport of chance, the victim of my own uncontrolled and uncontrollable sensations, and of a poetic temperament.”

He was sarcastic to a degree, proud, haughty, and subject to fits of Byronic despair and morbid gloom. For these traits we must look back to the Norman Conquest from which he traced his descent in an unbroken line, while, on the side of his maternal grandmother, he was the seventh in descent from Pocahontas, the Indian maiden who married John Rolfe.

The Indian blood was evident, even in his personal appearance. He was tall, slender, and dignified in his bearing; his hands were thin, his fingers long and bony; his face was dark, sallow, and wrinkled, oval in shape and seamed with lines by the inward conflict which forever raged in his soul. His chin was pointed but firm, and his lips were set; around his mouth were marked the tiny, almost imperceptible lines which mean cruelty. His nose was aquiline, his ears large at the top, tapering almost to a point at the lobe, and his forehead unusually high and broad. His hair was soft, and his skin, although dark, suffered from extreme sensitiveness.

“There is no accounting for thinness of skins in different animals, human, or brute [he once said]. Mine, I believe to be more tender than many infants of a month old. Indeed I have remarked in myself, from my earliest recollection, a delicacy or effeminacy of complexion, which but for a spice of the devil in my temper would have consigned me to the distaff or the needle.”

“A spice of the devil” is mild indeed, considering that before he was four years old he frequently swooned in fits of passion, and was restored to consciousness with difficulty.

His most striking feature was his eyes. They were deep, dark, and fiery, filled with passion and great sadness at the same time. “When he first entered an assembly of people,” said one who knew him, “they were the eyes of the eagle in search of his prey, darting about from place to place to see upon whom to light. When he was assailed they flashed fire and proclaimed a torrent of rage within.”

The voice of this great statesman was a rare gift:

“One might live a hundred years [says one,] and never hear another like it. The wonder was why the sweet tone of a woman was so harmoniously blended with that of a man. His very whisper could be distinguished above the ordinary tones of other men. His voice was so singularly clear, distinct, and melodious that it was a positive pleasure to hear him articulate anything.”

Such was the man who swayed the multitude at will, punished offenders with sarcasm and invective, inspired fear even in his equals, and loved and suffered more than any other prominent man of his generation.

He had many acquaintances, a few friends, and three loves – his mother, his brother, and the beautiful young woman who held his heart in the hollow of her hand, until the Gray Angel, taking pity, closed his eyes in the last sleep.

His mother, who was Frances Bland, married John Randolph in 1769, and John Randolph, of Roanoke, was their third son.

Tradition tells us of the unusual beauty of the mother —

“the high expanded forehead, the smooth arched brow; the brilliant dark eyes; the well defined nose; the full round laughing lips; the tall graceful figure, the beautiful dark hair; an open cheerful countenance – suffused with that deep, rich Oriental tint which never seems to fade, all of which made her the most beautiful and attractive woman of her age.”

She was a wife at sixteen, and at twenty-six a widow. Three years after the death of her husband, she married St. George Tucker, of Bermuda who proved to be a kind father to her children.

In the winter of 1781, Benedict Arnold, the traitor who had spread ruin through his native state, was sent to Virginia on an expedition of ravage. He landed at the mouth of the James, and advanced toward Petersburg. Matoax, Randolph’s home, was directly in the line of the invading army, so the family set out on a cold January morning, and at night entered the home of Benjamin Ward, Jr.

John Randolph was seven years old, and little Maria Ward had just passed her fifth birthday. The two children played together happily, and in the boy’s heart was sown the seed of that grand passion which dominated his life.

After a few days, the family went on to Bizarre, a large estate on both sides of the Appomattox, and here Mrs. Tucker and her sons spent the remainder of the year, while her husband joined General Greene’s army, and afterward, the force of Lafayette.

In 1788, John Randolph’s mother died, and his first grief swept over him in an overwhelming torrent. The boy of fifteen spent bitter nights, his face buried in the grass, sobbing over his mother’s grave. Years afterward, he wrote to a friend, “I am a fatalist. I am all but friendless. Only one human being ever knew me. She only knew me.”

He kept his mother’s portrait always in his room, and enshrined her in loving remembrance in his heart. He had never seen his father’s face to remember it distinctly, and for a long time he wore his miniature in his bosom. In 1796, his brother Richard died, and the unexpected blow crushed him to earth. More than thirty years afterward he wrote to his half-brother, Henry St. George Tucker, the following note:

“Dear Henry

“Our poor brother Richard was born in 1770. He would have been fifty-six years old the ninth of this month. I can no more.

    ”J. R. of R.”