University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE GUARDIAN.

“He left no will—and as I am the nearest relation of
Sidney, I am the most proper person to be appointed his
guardian, you know,” said Ralph to his wife, a few days
subsequent to his brother's decease.

“Of course you are,” replied Mrs. Werter, with great
interest, “but perhaps he will prefer some one else.”

“The law does not regard the preferences of babies; he
has no right to choose for himself.'

“Ah! then indeed—”

“And I think I can make it appear, especially to
Esquire Hampton, that I am the most suitable person.
Hampton lives in one of my houses, you know, and wants
to buy it. I'll let him have it at his offer, if necessary—
not that I would use any undue influence, of course—
but it is quite right, you know, that I should be the guardian.”

“Oh, never mind about explanations. It is to be done,
that's enough—the shortest way is the best, only see that
you are quick about it. Somebody else might be stirring.”

Ralph was quick about it. There was no one to oppose
him. Sidney's mother had long been dead, and the poor
boy, only in his tenth year, had no proper appreciation
either of his great loss or of the vast change which it had
produced in his position in life. He scarcely knew what a
guardian was, and certainly had no conception as to the
mode of making one, and when, a few days after his

father's decease, he was informed that his uncle stood in
that legal relation to him, he received the intelligence with
but little interest or curiosity. Boy-like, he supposed it to
be a matter of course, and he dreamed nothing of the far-reaching
influences which it was to have on his future
destiny. Sidney was not what is usually called a bright
child. He was reserved and diffident, with a confiding and
affectionate disposition, and a temper of great mildness and
placidity. Suspecting no evil in others, and no merit in
himself, he was an easy subject for the yoke of any tyrant
into whose hands he might fall, and he was speedily supplied
with a master. His guardian took him at once into
his own family, where his first lessons were on the embarrassed
situation in which his father had left his property,
and the great and unrewarded trouble which the son was
destined to give his relations.

Sidney was sorry, and promised to do all that he could
to lighten the charge which his uncle had assumed. He
knew very little about his estate, for the avaricious father,
fearful of implanting spendthrift propensities in the breast
of his heir, had kept him as much as possible in ignorance
of the vast wealth which was to descend to him. This circumstance
unfortunately served Ralph as a pretext for
perpetuating the ignorance of the child; for what, he
argued, could be more proper in him than to pursue
towards the son the same plan which had been adopted by
his father. Did he not stand “in loco parentis” to the
boy, as the appointing officer had informed him, with great
gravity, and explained to him with great condescension?
It would go hard indeed with the guardian if he did not
even improve upon the lessons of his predecessor, especially
as he had the aid of a willing and hearty coadjutor in
the person of Hester—and it was not long before poor
Sidney, with a rent-roll of tens of thousands, had learned

to believe himself but a few removes from a pauper, and
under the greatest obligations to his uncle and aunt for
their gratuitous care of him. It was an easy task to rivet
these chains upon the mind of the unsuspecting child, and
although advancing years must, in spite of every precaution,
bring enlightment to his ward, Ralph doubted not that
he should in the mean time gain a complete influence and
ascendency over him.

In what particular way this great power was to be
wielded, he had perhaps not definitely determined, but his
own interests and those of his family were of course paramount
in his views, while his poor nephew, poor in the
midst of his vast wealth, was regarded as a mere cypher,
towards whom scarcely the slightest consideration was due.

There was one material element in the calculations of
the guardian which has not been named, but which, assuming
vast proportions at first in his mind, still grew by contemplation
until it became to him an absorbing theme of
thought. Sidney might die a minor, leaving his uncle the
legal heir to his estates. Until the age of twenty-one he
would have no power to make a will, and how great the
probability that before that time arrived he might fall a
victim to some of the many dangers and diseases incident
to childhood and youth. Ralph certainly did not bestow
any extraordinary care upon his ward's health.

“He must take his chance,” he said, when, six months
after the lad had become a member of his family, he was
seized with an epidemic then prevalent in the neighborhood,
“we cannot be calling a physician for every trifling
ailing. Hester will nurse him.”

Hester did. She gave him whatever he wanted. What
could be kinder? Some people believed that a patient in
a raging fever should not be allowed to drink very cold
water in unlimited quantities, especially if the sufferer were

a child of weak judgment, and delirious at that. Mrs.
Werter had no such scruples, and Sidney was not allowed
to suffer from thirst, or from too much company. He was
allowed to remain alone with his thoughts, and fever-phantoms,
through long days and nights, interrupted at rare
intervals by the hasty visits of his nurse, to whose sharp
inquiries after his wants, his feeble reply of “Nothing,
Aunty,” was ever satisfactory and ever the same. But
hydropathy triumphed, and the child recovered, with
enough of constitution left to carry him subsequently
through other diseases similarly treated. It would be
painful without profit to paint the details of suffering of an
orphan boy, without sister or brother, surrounded by and
confiding in those whose interests were all antagonistic to
his own—aye, to his very existence.

Sidney was a sufferer, but ere he had reached his thirteenth
year, there were signs of a coming release which no
guardianship could avert. It might be near, it might be
remote, but those strange eyes, now dull and hazy, and
now shining with a brilliant, meteor-like light, and the
transparent skin, tinted at times with the flush of doom,
seemed to proclaim it certain.