Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 October 1897 — THE FAMILY STORY [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE FAMILY STORY

THE GOVERNOR’S TRAGEDY.

AS the Governor rode past my grandmother’s house on the spring morning when he left the State forever he wore his uniform and carried the. sword with which he afterwards led the charge at San Jacinto. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and well-knit, with a certain graceful stateliness which, though he had it by nature, he had not left uncultivated. It was held in those days to be a mark of the person of quality, and from the time when as a boy of 10 he had lain on the puncheon floor of his father’s cabin spelling out Pope's Iliad by the light of a pine knot, the Governor had always felt himself a person of quality. My grandmother was on the porch as he passed and he bowed low to her, ceremoniously doffing his hat, as he always did to ladies. It was the last time she ever saw him, and though she had been his waijmest friend, he kept his own counsel with her as with every one else. To the day of his death, he never explained himself. “Sir,” he would say, in response to every attempt to draw him out, “let us speak of something else.” And the bow with which he said ft was conclusive. When he had just reached the summit of what had been his ambition; when he was Governor •of what was then the pivotal State of the Union, with the Presidency as a possibility for him, and the United States Senate for life a certainty, why It was that he chose to dress himself in his uniform and ride out into the wilderness beyond the 5 ississtppi, never to return, his biographers have not been able to explain except in ▼ague generalities. How my grandmother knew the story I cannot say, further than that she was the friend not only of the Governor himself, but of Virginia Frazer and of John Endicott, the Governor’s private secretary, who made the trouble between them. “It is true, my dear,” said my grandmother to me, “that Endicott was a STankee and an Impecunious school teacher, but he was a Harvard graduate and a gentleman. The Endicotts ■re an fexcellent family—almost as good ■a our own, or as Virginia’s. And the Governor, you know, though one of the best bred men I ever saw, lacked the great advantage of descent from wellbred people.” Those who conclude from this that my grandmother was something of a Tory will not be wholly mistaken, but if they had known the charming old lady as well as I they would forgiyj? her as easily as I do. even is not likely—they are as radical in their politics as I am thought to be by ■ome.

The Governor’s honeymoon was barely over when he left the State. The fact of his resignation, which he had addressed in due form to the presiding officer of the Senate, was not generally known until he was 300 miles away, Bitting in a Cherokee cabin, smoking an Indian pipe, as silent and Impassive as any other savage of those around htan. For that was ' undoubtedly his Idea at the time to renounce civilization forever and live a barbarian among barbarians. Mrs. Frazer, Virginia's mother, was a famous match-maker and one of the Governor’s staunchest partisans. “If he was born in a cabin,” she said to my grandfather a few days before the wedding, “he has more brains than any •ther man in the State. I expect to see him President yet.” With visions of Virginia in the White House and herself as the power behind the throne, she was correspondingly elated on the night of the wedding. It la no part of my purpose to attempt to describe her feelings when the catastrophe came and she found herself face to face with the climax of one of those tragedies which compel silence In all who are incapable of resignation. When Endicott first met Virginia Frazer he was not more than 25, very handsome, and with an unassuming •elf-possession which made amends for his lack of the ceremonious courtesy habitual to the society into which he was thrown. There had been a marked attraction between him and Virginia from their first acquaintance, and r ime who did not know her mother expected It to be a match. But Virginia, before any one knew of her engagement to the Governor, had begun toehold Endicott at arm’s length, and after the climax there was never the slightest scandal connecting her name with his. She was not more than 20 at the time Other marriage. Six weeks later, when ■be stood before the fireplace of her •tttlng-room as the Governor entered •t U o'cloak at night, »he wore the

muslin whose contrasting whiteness had so heightened her brunette beauty on the day after her marriage. The Governor had just come from a conference of his political friends and was flushed and hopeful. His wife did not move as he entered the room. Her face was half averted when, with his usual impressive gallantry, he took off his hat at the door and crossed the room to kiss her hand. He had taken it in his and his lips had almost touched it when she hastily—almost violently—withdrew it. Slipping past him, she stood in the center of the room facing him as he turned, not understanding her at all and thinking that she had begun to develop an unaccustomed playfulness. She did not leave him long in error. “Do not toucu me!” she said in a voice which, though It trembled with excitement, showed the decisiveness of long premeditation. “Do not touch me.. I cannot bear it.” The Governor stood motionless, with the puzzled look of one whose intellect is overcome. She might have pitied him and receded had she been capable either of seeing or understanding, but she had become a mere automaton, governed by long-suppressed emotion. “I cannot bear it!” she repeated. “I do not love you. I have never loved you. I have tried to learn. I cannot. I have tried to become a true and dutiful wife to you. I cannot. I have tried to forget the only man I ever loved. I cannot. There must be an end of it all, and it must come now!” “Virginia!” said the Governor, helplessly. “Virginia ” “Do not stop me!” she went on, with increasing rapidity. “I am not insane, though lam near it. lam a good woman, sir. At least. I have nothing with which to reproach myself, except the shame of having allowed them to make you believe I loVe you. It was all my mother’s fault and yours. Why did you follow me? Why did she force me on you, when I did not love you, when I never can love you; when I have ceased to wish to love you?” She paused a moment for breath. The Governor did not move. He had leaned * his elbow on the mantel, and now, with his hand supporting his chin, he stood looking at her blankly. “I will not be stopped,” she said, catching her breath with a sob. “I will tell you everything, everything, the whole miserable truth that is killing me. I love John Endicott. I have never loved anyone else. I never will. He does not know it, and he never can know it, unless you tell him. Now you know what a wretch I am, and you know what you have done to make me so.” As she stopped she drew herself up and threw back her long black hair, which bad escaped from her comb and fallen around her face. As yet the Governor’s mind had assimilated hardly anything of what she had said. It had come upon him a supreme calamity at the climax of his good fortune. He seemed to himself to have died suddenly and to be striving to wake to consciousness in another world. The one idea which shaped itself clearly in the chaos of his brain was tint his wife had never been so splendidly beautiful as now, when she stood with head thrown back and flashing eyes, lifted

above herself by the stress of such an effort as no one person ever makes twice in a lifetime, as very few ever make at alt A moment later, overcome by the inevitable reaction, she had rushed sobbing from the room, leaving the Governor still standing at the mantel, immovable, as he had stood since she began. He had made no attempt to follow her. She had gone only a few minutes when he stood upright, threvf back his shoulders, walked twice up and down the room and then took his seat before a writing desk, drawn close to a win-

dow overlooking the river. Settling down in the chair with bls elbows on its arms and his hands locked across his breast, he looked steadily out of the window, motionless, as the clock on the mantel struck the hours, one after another, until the small, square window panes began to grow luminous with the dawn. Then he rose, and unlocking a drawer in the lower part of hie desk, took out a mahogany box with silver-mounted corners and a heavy silver plate in he center c<. the lid. He unlocked it deliberately, and, taking from, it a pair of the long blue steel dueling pistols of the period, tried the lor .j of both, and then looking at them, said aloud: “They are the ones Benton gave me—‘The same, sir, I had the misfortune to be obliged to use in my difficulty with my much-respected friend, Gen. Jackson.” * Before he had concluded his unconscious mimicry of Benton’s presentation speech he recognized the fact that he had caught the solemn pomp of that statesman’s carefully-modulated periods. The incongruity of the idea grew upon him, and es-he turned one nf the pistols over and over m his hand he almost smiled at the u'ter lack of logical sequence in his own mental processes. Simultaneously he seemed to have reached a conclusion, for he replaced the pistols and locked the case. “No,” he said, “I will not do it. He Is a good boy and it is not his fault nor hers either. She is as good a woman as ever lived, and I am a fool.” He spoke now with the decisiveness he had shown at Horseshoe Bend, where, as everyone knows, Gen. Jackson had called him the bravest man in the army. He was almost cheerful as he rose and left the house, walking towards the bluffs, as was his morning habit, with the light, swinging step he had learned on the trail with the Cherokee friends of his boyhood. He did

not return until 11 o’clock, and going straight to his office he found John Endicott, his secretary, waiting for him with a formidable bundle of papers. “Use your own judgment, my boy, on all that will not keep until to-morrow. I am busy to-day with work that _annot wait.” He passed into his inner rooms as he said this, and began sorting the papers in his private pigeonholes. Endicott could hear him tearing them, but if he wondered, he asked no questions, and the Governor kept up his work long after his usual dinner hour. When he went home he found what he had expected. His wife had gone to her mother, and lie never saw her again. It is said he wrote her a most affectionate letter, but if he did, nothing he said in it changed the course of his life or hers. “Nonsense. His heart did not break,” said my grandmother. Why, all the world heard of him at San Jacinto. A brave man’s heart never breaks while he has work to do.” Perhaps she was right. At any rate, there was no tremor in the Governor's voice as he spoke to her that morning, riding with his horse’s head turned toward the old Cherokee trail that led across the Mississippi through Arkansas to the Indian Territory. “Good morning, Mrs. Tupton,” he said as he bowed to my grandmother. “It is a beautiful day, and your roses are almost beautiful enough to be worthy of you.”—Utica Globe.

IT WAS THE LAST TIME SHE SAW HIM.

THE GOVERNOR DID NOT MOVE.