Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth CenturyPeacock, Virginia Tatnall
History
Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century
Peacock, Virginia Tatnall
Women -- United States -- Biography
On March 23, 1871, the younger of his daughters, the child of his
third marriage, was married to William Sprague Hoyt, of New York, a
cousin of her sister's husband. Her wedding fastened another brilliant
memory upon her father's Washington home at Sixth and E Streets. In
the drawing-room, to which she had already brought so much fame,
Kate Chase again stood beside her father, and their presence on
that day constitutes to many people still living at the capital a
memory-picture which, with all deference to the bride, yet supersedes
all others of that eventful day. He was a magnificent man, over six
feet in height, fair as a Saxon in coloring, with a fine head, clearly
defined and well-made features, and a noble beauty of countenance;
and she, robed in blue velvet of a turquoise tone, that brought out
the glorious red-gold of her hair and the hazel of her eyes, with
an Elizabethan collar rolling high about her patrician neck, tall,
slender, and full of willowy grace. Perhaps the picture abides because
it was the last before the falling of those lengthening shadows whence
neither ever emerged.
On the 4th of March, 1873, Chase administered the oath of office to
President Grant, and in May of the same year he occupied his chair as
Chief Justice for the last time. A few days before the last on which he
had felt able to go to court, his daughters and his grandchildren, whom
he was accustomed to have much with him, being away from him, a sudden
sense of loneliness, a yearning for some loving human presence, seems
to have overpowered him, for he wrote to a young relative in New York
that he was going to her to be for a while with her and her children.
The day after he arrived, however, he went forth quietly and perhaps
suddenly on that lonely voyage whence neither love nor the glow of
any human presence may withhold us when it comes to be our turn. His
body was sent back to Washington, where it arrived on Sunday morning,
the 11th of May. There, clad in the awful dignity of death, he lay a
day and a night within the bar of the court his living presence had
rendered so illustrious. A simple wreath of white rosebuds, not more
spotless than the life of him they crowned, was the last offering of
the daughter to whom his death, so far as the world knew, brought her
first sorrow.
She had, however, already come to the turn in her short road of
happiness, and had confronted not alone the spectre of disillusion,
which in itself would have been formidable enough to a woman of her
temperament, but a substantial form of unhappiness that neither her
pride nor a brave spirit that never quailed before it could long
conceal. Her life has been so probed, so bared to the scrutiny of the
world, that but little of its sorrow can be left to conjecture. That
in one of her own deficiencies lay undoubtedly the cause of much of
her unhappiness, while it served to render others less culpable, in no
degree lessened the force of the misery it entailed upon her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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