Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker Part 24

"Then I am the bearer of ill news. He is to join your new general in a week or two. He could not find you this morning. I think he was relieved to know I should tell you. How much he cares for you! It is not like a man friends.h.i.+p. It is like the way we weak girls care for one another.

How can he be such a brave gentleman as he seems--as he must be? I should have thought it would be you who would have gone first. Why do you not go? Here is Miss Wynne's pet girl-boy away to fight, and you--why do not you go?"

I was puzzled, as well I might be. "Dost thou want me to go!"

A quick light came into those brown eyes, and a little flush to the cheeks as she said,--oh, so very quickly,--"I want all my friends to do what seems to them right."

"I am glad to answer," I said. "It seems to me my duty to be with the army; my friends have gone, and now Graydon, the last to leave, has also gone. I fancy people smiling to see me still at home--I who am so positive, so outspoken. But here is my father, with whom if I go I break for life, and here is my Aunt Gainor, who bursts into tears if I do but mention my wish to leave her."

"I see," said Darthea, not looking at me; "now I understand fully; I did not before. But--will you think it strange if--if I say--I, a good and loyal woman--that you should go, and soon?" Then there was a long pause, and she added, "When will this cruel war end?"

"G.o.d knows," said I. "Thank thee; thou art right, Darthea."

Another pause as long came after, when she said abruptly, and in quite another voice, "You do not like Mr. Arthur Wynne; why do you not?"

I was startled. One never knew when she would get under one's guard and put some p.r.i.c.kly question.

"Dost thou think I have reason to like him?" I said. "I did like him once, but now I do not; nor does he love me any better. Why dost thou ask me?"

"Oh, for--no matter! I am not going to say why."

"I think thou knowest, Darthea, that he is no friend of mine."

"Let us join your aunt," she said gravely.

"One word more," said I, "and I shall trouble thee no further. Best sure that, come what may, there is one man who loves thee with a love no man can better."

"I wish you had not said that. There are some, Mr. Wynne, who never know when to take No for an answer."

"I am one," said I.

To this she made no reply, and rode on looking ahead in a dreamy way that fetched back to my memory a prettiness my dear mother had.

Presently turning, she said:

"Let it end here; and--and my name is Miss p.e.n.i.ston, please."

There was no pettishness in her voice--only a certain dignity which sits better on little women than on little men, and provokes no smile. She was looking at me with a curious steadiness of gaze as she spoke. It was my last chance for many a day, and I could not let her go with a mere bow of meek submission.

"If I have been rude or discourteous, I am more sorry than I can say. If I called thee Darthea, it was because hope seemed to bring us nearer for one dear moment. Ah! I may call thee Miss p.e.n.i.ston, but for me always thou wilt be Darthea; and I shall love Darthea to the end, even when Miss p.e.n.i.ston has come to be a distant dream and has another name. I am most sorry to have given thee annoyance. Forget that, and pardon me."

"Mr. Wynne, you are a kindly and courteous gentleman. I wish--and you must not misapprehend me--that I loved you. Oh, I do not. Your aunt, who is so good to me, is a fierce wooer. I am afraid of her, and--she must be miles away; let us join her." And with this she shook her bridle, and was off at speed, and my mare and I at her side.

If I have made those who loved Darthea p.e.n.i.ston and me understand this winning soul, I shall be glad; and if not I shall at least have had the pleasure of repeating words and describing actions which live in my remembrance with such exactness as does not apply to much of what, to the outer world, may seem far better ent.i.tled to be remembered. She had it in her to hurt you, help you, pity you, mock or amuse you, and back of it all was the honesty and truth of a womanhood capable of courageous conduct, and despising all forms of meanness. That she was variously regarded was natural. Margaret s.h.i.+ppen said she cared only for dress and the men; and the witty Miss Franks, seeing further, but not all, said that Darthea p.e.n.i.ston was an actress of the minute, who believed her every role to be real. My wise aunt declared that she was several women, and that she did not always keep some of them in order. It was clear, to me at least, that she was growing older in mind, and was beginning to keep stricter school for those other women with whom my aunt credited this perplexing little lady.

Before I quite leave her for a time, I must let Jack say a word. It will tell more than I then knew or could know, and will save me from saying that which were better said by another.

"At last there is certainty of a long war, and I, being well again, must take my side. It is fortunate when choice is so easy, for I find it often hard in life to know just what is right. Poor Hugh, who has gone further than I from our fathers' faith, will still declare he is of Friends; but he commonly drops our language if he is not excited or greatly interested, and the rest will go too. It is strange that his resoluteness and clear notions of duty have so helped me, and yet that he is so caught and tied fast by Miss Gainor's dependence upon him, and by his scruples as to his father. He cannot do the thing he would. Now that my own father has sold out his business, I at least am left without excuse. I shall go at once, for fear I shall change my mind." A more unlikely thing I cannot imagine to have happened to John Warder.

"I saw Darthea to-day," he goes on to write. "She is going to New York.

She talked to me with such frankness as almost broke my heart. She does not know how dear she is to me. I was near to telling her; but if she said No,--and she would,--I might--oh, I could not see her again. I had rather live in doubt. And whether Hugh loves her or not I would I knew.

Mistress Wynne does but laugh and say, 'Lord bless us! they all love her!' Hugh is, as to some things, reticent, and of Darthea likes so little to speak that I am led to think it is a serious business for him; and if it be so, what can I but go! for how could I come between him and a woman he loved? Never, surely. Why is life such a tangle? As concerns this thing, it is well I am going. What else is left for me? My duty has long been plain.

"I did venture to ask Darthea of Mr. Arthur Wynne. She said quietly, 'I have had a letter to-day;' and with this she looked at me in a sort of defiant way. I like the man not at all, and wonder that women fancy him so greatly. When I said I was sorry she was going, she replied, 'It is no one's business;' and then added, 'nor Mr. Wynne's neither,' as if Hugh had said a word. In fact, Miss p.e.n.i.ston was almost as cross and abrupt as dear Miss Wynne at her worst. If ever, G.o.d willing, I should marry her,--there, I am blus.h.i.+ng even to think of such a sweet impossibility,--she would drive me frantic. I should be in small rages or begging her pardon every half-hour of the day.

"What will Hugh say when he hears the Meeting means to disown us? It troubles me deeply. My father is trembling too, for since a month he is all for resisting oppression, and who has been talking to him I do not know. Miss Wynne called him a decrepit weatherc.o.c.k to me last month, and then was in a fury at herself, and sorry too; but she will talk with him no more. It cannot be because he has sold his Holland cloths so well to the clothier-general. I never can think that.

"When I saw Miss Wynne, and would have seen Hugh had he been in, I told her of my meaning to go away by the packet to Burlington, and thence through New Jersey. She said it was well, but that Hugh should not go yet. He should go soon. Mr. Lee, the new general, had been to see her--a great soldier, she was told. But she had not liked him, because he let her believe he came of the same family as Mr. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, whereas this is not so. He was lank, sour, and ill dressed, she said, and fetched his two dogs into the house. When he saw Hugh, he said it was time all the young men were out. Miss Wynne disliked this, and it is reported that Mrs. Ferguson and she, meeting after church, had nearly come to blows, because Mrs. Ferguson had said the people who made the war should be in the war, and on this the old lady desired to know if this arrow was meant for her or for her nephew. Mrs. F., not lacking courage, said she might choose.

"So Madam Wynne is pulled this way and that, and I must go alone; and I shall have a lieutenant's commission, and a pretty fellow am I to order other men about. I like best the continental line."

I saw Jack the day after my ride with Miss p.e.n.i.ston. I said sadly that he was right, and we talked it all over that week, running down the river at early morning after ducks, and through the wide channel between League Island and the Neck; or else we were away to Red Bank, or to the Jersey coast, if the ice permitted, as it often did. It was a wonderful, open winter, as it chanced, and we had more than our usual share of the ducks, which were very abundant. As we lay in the gray weeds below the bluff at Red Bank, we little thought of what it was to see. Our gallant Mercer, who fell at Princeton, was to give a name to the fort we built long after; and there, too, was to die Count Donop, as brave a man, far from home, sold by his own prince to be the hireling of a shameful king.

The ducks flew over thick, and between times, as we waited, we talked at intervals of the war, of Montgomery's failure to capture Quebec, and of the lingering siege of Boston; of how the brutal destruction of Norfolk in December had stirred the Virginians, and indeed every true heart in the colonies. Jack would write when occasion served.

That last day (it was now February, as I have said) we supped with my aunt, Jack and I. After the meal was over, she went out of the room, and, coming back, gave Jack a handsome, serviceable sword, with a proper sash and tie. Then she must make him take a hundred pounds in a purse she had netted; and when he would not she said he was going to school, and must have a tip, and would hear no more, and kissed him, at which he got very red. Indeed, she was deeply moved, as was plain to see from the way she talked, speaking fast, and saying all manner of foolish things.

This business of the sword troubled me more than it ought to have done, and I resolved that nothing should long keep me out of the field; but alas! it was many a day before my going became possible. And so my Jack went away, and Miss p.e.n.i.ston.

The war was dull for a time, as the armies got ready for a spring at each other's throats. At last, in March, his Excellency seized Dorchester Heights, and Boston became no longer tenable. Howe left it on March 17, and, what was as desirable, some two hundred cannon and vast stores of ammunition. Then, on Cambridge Common, our chief threw to the free winds our flag, with its thirteen stripes, and still in the corner the blood-red cross of St. George.

Late in this winter of '75-'76, an event took place, or rather the sequel of an event, which made me feel deeply the embarra.s.sment in which the condition of my aunt and father placed me. He who reads may remember my speaking of a young fellow whom I saw at the Woodlands, John Macpherson. I took a great fancy to him later, and we fished and shot together until he went away, in August of '75, to join Arnold for his wild march into Canada.

His father, broken and sad, now brought to my aunt the news of his son's death in the a.s.sault on Quebec, and, speechless with grief, showed her the young fellow's letter, writ the night before he fell. He wrote, with other matter: "I cannot resist the inclination I feel to a.s.sure you that I experience no reluctance in this cause to venture a life I consider as only lent, and to be used when my country demands it." He went on to say that, if he died, he could wish his brother William, an adjutant in the king's army, would not continue in the service of our enemies. I saw, too, General Schuyler's letter of condolence, but this was later.

Nothing had moved me like this. I went away, leaving the father and my aunt. People came to this strong woman, sure of her tenderest help, and I trust she comforted her friend in his loss. This was the first officer of our own set our city lost in war, and the news, I think, affected me more than any. How, indeed, could I dare to stay when the best manhood of the land was facing death in a cause as dear to me as to any?

In June a new calamity fell on me, or I should say on my father; for I felt it but little, or only as in some degree a release from bonds which I hesitated to sever by my own act. On the morning of June 25, my father called me into his counting-room, and, closing the door, sat down, I, as was thought fit, standing until told to be seated. Since he made no sign of any such desire on his part, I knew at once that this was not to be a talk about our affairs, in which, I may say, I had no interest except as to a very moderate salary.

"Thou wilt have to-day a call from Friend Pemberton. The overseers are moved, at last, to call thee to an account. I have lost hope that thou wilt forsake and condemn thy error. I have worked with the overseers to give thee and thy friend, John Warder, time, and this has been with tenderness accorded. No good is yet come of it. If this private admonition be of no effect, thy case will come before overseers again, and thou wilt be dealt with as a disorderly person, recommended to be disowned, when thy misdeeds come to be laid before the Quarterly Meeting for discipline. Already the Yearly Meeting hath found fault with us for lax dealing with such as thou art. Thou hast ceased to obey either thy father or thy G.o.d, and now my shame for thee is opened to all men."

Not greatly moved I listened to this summary of what was to happen. "It is too late," I said, "to argue this matter, my dear father. I cannot sin against my conscience. I will receive Mr. Pemberton as thy friend.

He is a man whom all men respect and many love, but his ways are no longer my ways. Is that all?" I added. I feared any long talk with my father. We were as sure to fall out at last as were he and my Aunt Gainor.

"Yes," he said; "that is all. And tell Wilson to bring me the invoice of the 'Saucy Sally.'"

This time neither of us had lost temper. He had transacted a piece of business which concerned my soul, and I had listened. It had left me sore, but that was an old and too familiar story. Reflecting on what had pa.s.sed in the counting-house,--and my conclusion now shows me how fast I was growing older,--I put on my hat at once, and set out to find the overseer deputed to make a private remonstrance with my father's son.

I suppose that my action was also hastened by a disinclination to lie still, awaiting an unpleasant and unavoidable business.

Finding James Pemberton in his office, I told him that my errand was out of respect to relieve him of the need to call upon a younger man. He seemed pleased, and opened the matter in a way so gentle and considerate that I am sure no man could have bettered the manner of doing it. My attention to business and quieter life had for a time rea.s.sured the overseers. He would not speak of blood-guiltiness now, for out of kindness to my distressed parent they had seen fit to wait, and for a time to set it aside. My father had been in much affliction, and Friends had taken note of this. Now he had to call to my mind the testimony of Friends as to war, and even how many had been reported to the Yearly Meeting for Sufferings on account of righteous unwillingness to resist const.i.tuted authority, and how men of my views had oppressed and abused them. Had I read the letter of the Yearly Meeting of 1774, warning members not to depart from their peaceful principles by taking part in any of the political matters then being stirred up, reminding all Friends that under the king's government they had been favoured with a peaceful and prosperous enjoyment of their rights, and the like?

I listened quietly, and said it was too late to discuss these questions, which were many; that my mind was fully made up, and that as soon as possible I meant to enter the army. He had the good sense to see that I was of no inclination to change; and so, after some words of the most tender remonstrance, he bade me to prayerfully consider the business further, since overseers would not meet at once, and even when they did there would be time to manifest to Friends a just sense of my errors.

I thanked him, and went my way, making, however, no sign of grace, so that, on July 4 of this 1776, late in the evening, I received in my aunt's presence a letter from Isaac Freeman, clerk of the Meeting, inclosing a formal minute of the final action of Friends in my case.

"What is that?" said Aunt Gainor, very cheerful over a letter of thanks to her for having sold at cost to the Committee of Safety the cloth of Holland and the blankets she had induced my father to buy for her.

She had stored them away for this hour of need, and was now full of satisfaction because of having made my father the means of clothing the continental troops.

"Read it aloud. What is it, sir?" I was smiling over what a few years before would have cost me many a bitter thought.