In the Valley Part 39

As she spoke there rose in my mind a sudden consciousness that perhaps my wisdom was at fault. How was it that I--a coa.r.s.e-fibred male animal, returned from slaughter, even now with the blood of fellow-creatures on my hands--should be discoursing of duty and of good and bad to this pure and gentle and sweet-souled woman? What was my t.i.tle to do this?--to rebuke her for not seeing the right? Had I been in truth generous? Rather had I not, in the purely selfish desire to win my own self-approbation, brought pain and perplexity down upon the head of this poor woman? I had thought much of my own goodness--my own strength of purpose and self-sacrifice and fidelity to duty. Had I given so much as a mental glance at the effect of my acts upon the one whom, of all others, I should have first guarded from trouble and grief?

My tongue was tied. Perhaps I had been all wrong. Perhaps I should not have brought back to her the man whose folly and obstinacy had so well-nigh wrecked her life. I could no longer be sure. I kept silence, feeling indirectly now that her woman's instinct would be truer and better than my logic. She was thinking; she would find the real right and wrong.

Ah, no! To this day we are not settled in our minds, we two old people, as to the exact balance between duty and common-sense in that strange question of our far-away youth.

There broke upon our ears, of a sudden, as we neared the wooded crest of the gulf, a weird and piercing scream--an unnatural and repellent yell, like a hyena's horrid hooting! It rose with terrible distinctness from the thicket close before us. As its echoes returned, we heard confused sounds of other voices, excited and vibrant.

Daisy clutched my arm, and began hurrying me forward, impelled by some formless fear of she knew not what.

"It is Tulp," she murmured, as we went breathlessly on. "Oh, I should have kept him back! Why did I not think of it?"

"What about Tulp?" I asked, with difficulty keeping beside her in the narrow path. "I had no thought of him. I did not see him. He was not among the others, was he?"

"He has gone mad!"

"What--Tulp, poor boy? Oh, not as bad as that, surely! He has been strange and slow of wit for years, but--"

"Nay, the tidings of your death--you know I told you we heard that you were dead--drove him into perfect madness. I doubt he knew you when you came. Only yesterday we spoke of confining him, but poor old father pleaded not. When you see Tulp, you shall decide. Oh! what has happened?

Who is this man?"

In the path before us, some yards away, appeared the tall, gaunt form of Enoch, advancing slowly. In the dusk of the wooded shades behind him huddled the group of slaves. They bore nothing in their hands. Where was the canoe? They seemed affrighted or oppressed by something out of the common, and Enoch, too, wore a strange air. What could it mean?

When Enoch saw us he lifted his hand in a warning gesture.

"Have her go back!" he called out, with brusque sharpness.

"Will you walk back a little?" I asked her. "There is something here we do not understand. I will join you in a moment.

"For G.o.d's sake, what is it, Enoch?" I demanded, as I confronted him.

"Tell me quick."

"Well, we've had our five days' tussle for nothing, and you're minus a n.i.g.g.e.r. That's about what it comes to."

"Speak out, can't you! Is he dead? What was the yell we heard?"

"It was all done like a flash of lightning. We were coming up the side nighest us here--we had got just where that spruce, you know, hangs over--when all at once that hump-backed n.i.g.g.e.r of yours raised a scream like a painter, and flung himself head first against the canoe. Over it went, and he with it--rip, smash, plumb to the bottom!"

The negroes broke forth in a babel of mournful cries at this, and cl.u.s.tered about us. I grew sick and faint under this shock of fresh horrors, and was fain to lean on Enoch's arm, as I turned to walk back to where I had left Daisy. She was not visible as we approached, and I closed my eyes in abject terror of some further tragedy.

Thank G.o.d, she had only swooned, and lay mercifully senseless in the tall gra.s.s, her waxen face upturned in the twilight.

Chapter x.x.xVII.

The Peaceful Ending of It All.

In the general paralysis of suffering and despair which rested now upon the Valley, the terrible double tragedy of the gulf pa.s.sed almost unnoted.

Women everywhere were mourning for the husbands, sons, lovers who would never return. Fathers strove in vain to look dry-eyed at familiar places which should know the brave lads--true boys of theirs--no more. The play and prattle of children were hushed in a hundred homes where some honest farmer's life, struck fiercely at by a savage or Tory, still hung in the dread balance. Each day from some house issued forth the procession of death, until all our little churchyards along the winding river had more new graves than old--not to speak of that grim, unconsecrated G.o.d's-acre in the forest pa.s.s, more cruel still to think upon. And with all this to bear, there was no a.s.surance that the morrow might not bring the torch and tomahawk of invasion to our very doors.

So our own strange tragedy had, as I have said, scant attention. People listened to the recital, and made answer: "Both dead at the foot of the cliff, eh? Have you heard how William Seeber is to-day?" or "Is it true that Herkimer's leg must be cut off?"

In those first few days there was little enough heart to measure or boast of the grandeur of the fight our simple Valley farmers had waged, there in the ambushed ravine of Oriskany. Still less was there at hand information by the light of which the results of that battle could be estimated.

Nothing was known, at the time of which I write, save that there had been hideous slaughter, and that the invaders had forborne to immediately follow our shattered forces down the Valley. It was not until much later--until definite news came not only of St. Leger's flight back to Canada, but of the capture of the whole British army at Saratoga--that the men of the Mohawk began to comprehend what they had really done.

To my way of thinking, they have ever since been unduly modest about this truly historic achievement. As I wrote long ago, we of New York have chosen to make money, and to allow our neighbors to make histories. Thus it happens that the great decisive struggle of the whole long war for Independence--the conflict which, in fact, made America free--is suffered to pa.s.s into the records as a mere frontier skirmish. Yet, if one will but think, it is as clear as daylight that Oriskany was the turning-point of the war. The Palatines, who had been originally colonized on the upper Mohawk by the English to serve as a s.h.i.+eld against savagery for their own Atlantic settlements, reared a barrier of their own flesh and bones, there at Oriskany, over which St. Leger and Johnson strove in vain to pa.s.s. That failure settled everything. The essential feature of Burgoyne's plan had been that this force, which we so roughly stopped and turned back in the forest defile, should victoriously sweep down our Valley, raising the Tory gentry as they progressed, and join him at Albany. If that had been done, he would have held the whole Hudson, separating the rest of the colonies from New England, and having it in his power to punish and subdue, first the Yankees, then the others at his leisure.

Oriskany prevented this! Coming as it did, at the darkest hour of Was.h.i.+ngton's trials and the Colonies' despondency, it altered the face of things as gloriously as does the southern sun rising swiftly upon the heels of night. Burgoyne's expected allies never reached him; he was compelled, in consequence, to surrender--and from that day there was no doubt who would in the long-run triumph.

Therefore, I say, all honor and glory to the rude, unlettered, great souled yeomen of the Mohawk Valley, who braved death in the wildwood gulch at Oriskany that Congress and the free Colonies might live.

But in these first few days, be it repeated, n.o.body talked or thought much of glory. There were too many dead left behind--too many maimed and wounded brought home--to leave much room for patriotic meditations around the saddened hearth-stones. And personal grief was everywhere too deep and general to make it possible that men should care much about the strange occurrence by which Philip and Tulp lost their lives together in the gulf.

I went on the following day to my mother, and she and my sister Margaret returned with me to Cairncross, to relieve from smaller cares, as much as might be, our poor dear girl. All was done to s.h.i.+eld both her and the stricken old gentleman, our common second father, from contact with material reminders of the shock that had fallen upon us, and as soon as possible afterward they were both taken to Albany, out of reach of the scene's sad suggestions.

From the gulf's bottom, where Death had dealt his double stroke, the soldier's remains were borne one way, to his mansion; the slave's the other, to his old home at the Cedars. Between their graves the turbulent stream still dashes, the deep ravine still yawns. For years I could not visit the spot without hearing, in and above the ceaseless shouting of the waters, poor mad Tulp's awful death-scream.

During the month immediately following the event, my time was closely engaged in public work. It was my melancholy duty to go up to the Falls to represent General Schuyler and Congress at the funeral of brave old Brigadier Nicholas Herkimer, who succ.u.mbed to the effects of an unskilful amputation ten days after the battle. A few days later I went with Arnold and his relieving force up the Valley, saw the siege raised and the flood of invasion rolled back, and had the delight of grasping Peter Gansevoort, the stout commander of the long-beleaguered garrison, once more by the hand. On my return I had barely time to lease the Cedars to a good tenant, and put in train the finally successful efforts to save Cairncross from confiscation, when I was summoned to Albany to attend upon my chief. It was none too soon, for my old wounds had broken out again, under the exposure and travail of the trying battle week, and I was more fit for a hospital than for the saddle.

I found the kindliest of nursing and care in my old quarters in the Schuyler mansion. It was there, one morning in January of the new year 1778, that a quiet wedding breakfast was celebrated for Daisy and me; and neither words nor wishes could have been more tender had we been truly the children of the great man, Philip Schuyler, and his good dame. The exact date of this ceremony does not matter; let it be kept sacred within the knowledge of us two old people, who look back still to it as to the sunrise of a new long day, peaceful, serene, and almost cloudless, and not less happy even now because the ashen shadows of twilight begin gently to gather over it.

Though the war had still the greater half of its course to run, my part thereafter in it was far removed from camp and field. No opportunity came to me to see fighting again, or to rise beyond my major's estate. Yet I was of as much service, perhaps, as though I had been out in the thick of the conflict; certainly Daisy was happier to have it so.

Twice during the year 1780 did we suffer grievous material loss at the hands of the raiding parties which malignant Sir John Johnson piloted into the Valley of his birth. In one of these the Cairncross mansion was rifled and burned, and the tenants despoiled and driven into the woods. This meant a considerable monetary damage to us; yet our memories of the place were all so sad that its demolition seemed almost a relief, particularly as Enoch, to whom we had presented a freehold of the wilder part of the grant, that nearest the Sacondaga, miraculously escaped molestation.

But it was a genuine affliction when, later in the year, Sir John personally superintended the burning down of the dear old Cedars, the home of our youth. If I were able to forgive him all other harm he has wrought, alike to me and to his neighbors, this would still remain obstinately to steel my heart against him, for he knew that we had been good to his wife, and that we loved the place better than any other on earth. We were very melancholy over this for a long time, and, to the end of his placid days of second childhood pa.s.sed with us, we never allowed Mr. Stewart to learn of it. But even here there was the recompense that the ruffians, though they crossed the river and frightened the women into running for safety to the woods, did not pursue them, and thus my mother and sisters, along with Mrs. Romeyn and others, escaped. Alas! that the Tory brutes could not also have forborne to slay on his own doorstep my G.o.dfather, honest old Douw Fonda!

There was still another raid upon the Valley the ensuing year, but it touched us only in that it brought news of the violent death of Walter Butler, slain on the bank of the East Canada Creek by the Oneida chief Skenandoah. Both Daisy and I had known him from childhood, and had in the old times been fond of him. Yet there had been so much innocent blood upon those delicate hands of his, before they clutched the gravel on the lonely forest stream's edge in their death-grasp, that we could scarcely wish him alive again.

Our first boy was born about this time--a dark-skinned, brawny man-child whom it seemed the most natural thing in the world to christen Douw. He bears the name still, and on the whole, though he has forgotten all the Dutch I taught him, bears it creditably.

In the mid-autumn of the next year--it was in fact the very day on which the glorious news of Yorktown reached Albany--a second little boy was born. He was a fair-haired, slender creature, differing from the other as suns.h.i.+ne differs from thunder-clouds. He had nothing like the other's breadth of shoulders or strength of lung and limb, and we petted him accordingly, as is the wont of parents.

When the question of his name came up, I sat, I remember, by his mother's bedside, holding her hand in mine, and we both looked down upon the tiny, fair babe nestled upon her arm.

"Ought we not to call him for the dear old father--give him the two names, 'Thomas' and 'Stewart'?" I asked.

Daisy stroked the child's hair gently, and looked with tender melancholy into my eyes.

"I have been thinking," she murmured, "thinking often of late--it is all so far behind us now, and time has pa.s.sed so sweetly and softened so much our memories of past trouble and of the--the dead--I nave been thinking, dear, that it would be a comfort to have the lad called Philip."

I sat for a long time thus by her side, and we talked more freely than we had ever done before of him who lay buried by the ruined walls of Cairncross. Time had indeed softened much. We spoke of him now with gentle sorrow--as of a friend whose life had left somewhat to be desired, yet whose death had given room for naught but pity. He had been handsome and fearless and wilful--and unfortunate; our minds were closed against any harsher word. And it came about that when it was time for me to leave the room, and I bent over to kiss lightly the sleeping infant, I was glad in my heart that he was to be called Philip. Thus he was called, and though the General was his G.o.dfather at the old Dutch church, we did not conceal from him that the Philip for whom the name was given was another. It was easily within Schuyler's kindly nature to comprehend the feelings which prompted us, and I often fancied he was even the fonder of the child because of the link formed by his name with his parents' time of grief and tragic romance.

In truth, we all made much of this light-haired, beautiful, imperious little boy, who from the beginning quite cast into the shade his elder and slower brother, the dusky-skinned and patient Douw. Old Mr. Stewart, in particular, became dotingly attached to the younger lad, and scarce could bear to have him out of sight the whole day long. It was a pretty spectacle indeed--one which makes my old heart yearn in memory, even now--to see the simple, soft-mannered, childish patriarch gravely obeying the whims and freaks of the boy, and finding the chief delight of his waning life in being thus commanded. Sometimes, to be sure, my heart smote me with the fear that poor quiet Master Douw felt keenly underneath his calm exterior this preference, and often, too, I grew nervous lest our fondness was spoiling the younger child. But it was not in us to resist him.

The little Philip died suddenly, in his sixth year, and within the month Mr. Stewart followed him. Great and overpowering as was our grief, it seemed almost perfunctory beside the heart-breaking anguish of the old man. He literally staggered and died under the blow.