The Colonels Dream | Page 7

the firm, and when death removed his relative,
took his place at its head.
He had looked forward to the time, not very far in the future, when he
might retire from business and devote his leisure to study and travel,
tastes which for years he had subordinated to the pursuit of wealth; not
entirely, for his life had been many sided; and not so much for the
money, as because, being in a game where dollars were the counters, it
was his instinct to play it well. He was winning already, and when the
bagging trust paid him, for his share of the business, a sum double his
investment, he found himself, at some years less than fifty, relieved of
business cares and in command of an ample fortune.
This change in the colonel's affairs--and we shall henceforth call him
the colonel, because the scene of this story is laid in the South, where
titles are seldom ignored, and where the colonel could hardly have
escaped his own, even had he desired to do so--this change in the
colonel's affairs coincided with that climacteric of the mind, from
which, without ceasing to look forward, it turns, at times, in wistful
retrospect, toward the distant past, which it sees thenceforward through
a mellowing glow of sentiment. Emancipated from the counting room,
and ordered South by the doctor, the colonel's thoughts turned easily
and naturally to the old town that had given him birth; and he felt a
twinge of something like remorse at the reflection that never once since
leaving it had he set foot within its borders. For years he had been too
busy. His wife had never manifested any desire to visit the South, nor

was her temperament one to evoke or sympathise with sentimental
reminiscence. He had married, rather late in life, a New York woman,
much younger than himself; and while he had admired her beauty and
they had lived very pleasantly together, there had not existed between
them the entire union of souls essential to perfect felicity, and the
current of his life had not been greatly altered by her loss.
Toward little Phil, however, the child she had borne him, his feeling
was very different. His young wife had been, after all, but a sweet and
pleasant graft upon a sturdy tree. Little Phil was flesh of his flesh and
bone of his bone. Upon his only child the colonel lavished all of his
affection. Already, to his father's eye, the boy gave promise of a noble
manhood. His frame was graceful and active. His hair was even more
brightly golden than his mother's had been; his eyes more deeply blue
than hers; while his features were a duplicate of his father's at the same
age, as was evidenced by a faded daguerreotype among the colonel's
few souvenirs of his own childhood. Little Phil had a sweet temper, a
loving disposition, and endeared himself to all with whom he came in
contact.
The hack, after a brief passage down the main street, deposited the
passengers at the front of the Clarendon Hotel. The colonel paid the
black driver the quarter he demanded--two dollars would have been the
New York price--ran the gauntlet of the dozen pairs of eyes in the
heads of the men leaning back in the splint-bottomed armchairs under
the shade trees on the sidewalk, registered in the book pushed forward
by a clerk with curled mustaches and pomatumed hair, and
accompanied by Phil, followed the smiling black bellboy along a
passage and up one flight of stairs to a spacious, well-lighted and neatly
furnished room, looking out upon the main street.

Three
When the colonel and Phil had removed the dust and disorder of travel
from their appearance, they went down to dinner. After they had eaten,
the colonel, still accompanied by the child, left the hotel, and following

the main street for a short distance, turned into another thoroughfare
bordered with ancient elms, and stopped for a moment before an old
gray house with high steps and broad piazza--a large, square-built,
two-storied house, with a roof sloping down toward the front, broken
by dormer windows and buttressed by a massive brick chimney at
either end. In spite of the gray monotone to which the paintless years
had reduced the once white weatherboarding and green Venetian blinds,
the house possessed a certain stateliness of style which was
independent of circumstance, and a solidity of construction that resisted
sturdily the disintegrating hand of time. Heart-pine and live-oak, mused
the colonel, like other things Southern, live long and die hard. The old
house had been built of the best materials, and its woodwork dowelled
and mortised and tongued and grooved by men who knew their trade
and had not learned to scamp their work.