Page:Seventy-six, or, Love and battle (IA seventysixlove00nealrich).pdf/10

 Nothing else, I am persuaded, could have disturbed him, like this wavering of allegiance in his wife. He loved her ardently, truly, but he loved her like a man. And as he never warmed but on one theme—till the cry for independence rang like a trumpet throughout the mountains—and that was, whenever the character of her father, the man of war, was named, I have had no better opportunity of seeing his nature than you yourselves have had, till within a few years of his death.

My infancy, boyhood, and manhood too. I might say, were spent much as they are with most of the world, who are born apart from all but a few sober, plain dealing country neighbours; for I was nearly twenty-two, and probably the stoutest fellow of any age in the whole country and Archibald, a poor weakly creature, about twenty, when the war of the revolution broke out, and gave to our characters, and that of my father, a strange, unexpected power, revealing many deeply-hidden properties, that might have been, and no doubt would have been, buried forever, but for the events that I am now about to relate.

We were very happy and though we heard of the war, and the numerous temptations of bounty and equipment, and advance even at our own doors, from the continental recruiting officers that came among us, yet nobody from our neighbourhood seemed to regard it as a possible thing for one of us to go really and truly into battle. We read of such things and talked of them but somehow or other it never entered our head, that they who did such feats as we were told of, were flesh and blood, like ourselves, raw countryman who would turn pale in the beginning of a campaign at the sight of blood, and stand up before it had finished like a veteran before the roar of artillery, and rattling of bullets, and the sure approach of the bayonet.

None of our neighbours had actually gone into service, though several had threatened violently, just before the affair of Long Island, and the abandonment of Fort Lee and Washington; but when they happened, one after the other with some other disasters, in such rapid succession, it is too true, my children, that the stout-hearted among us began to look about for darkness to cover them. Sir Henry Clinton was now in New York; our army had dwindled down to a few miserable battalions, with no cavalry and Cornwallis was mustering in the rear of poor Washington, who really began to totter, even in the estimation of my father.

We were about fourteen miles from the high road, over which our countrymen were afterwards hunted by Sir William Howe and already we had heard "the drum beat at dead of night," and seen, away on the verge of the horizon, the red light of farm houses, set fire to by the royal banditti: and once, I remember, when my cousin Arthur, a fine, free-spirited fellow, and Archibald and I were out upon a high hill, late in the afternoon, we heard a heavy cannonading in the east, and were soon after told there had been a bloody affair with some of the outposts that Sir Henry Clinton had established to protect his foraging parties.

In the evening, as we sat together in a mournful silence, Arthur at last with a deep sigh, turning to my father, asked him what he thought of the matter?

The old man shook his head, and his large bony hands as they lay on the table before him were raised for a moment with a convulsive pressure, and then he shook his head again.

"A dreary winter, father," said I, "and the farmers complain bitterly of the depredations committed by their own countrymen."

There was another deep silence of some minutes, when the old man groaned aloud, as if his heart were in travail.

Archibald arose and went to him, and put his hand upon his shoulder, in that silent, strange way which was so natural to him, even when a boy, and lifting his deep blue eyes with a melancholy look of determination, said—

"Surely, sir, you do not complain of these things?"

"No, Archy," replied my father, putting his arm round his waist, "no, my boy, I do not complain that my cattle are driven away from me to feed the poor fellows in camp; for I know that Washington has no other way of feeding them, particularly since the removal of Commissary Trumbull but I do complain when I see my cattle slaughtered and hewed to pieces in my barnyard, and left there, weltering in their blood, by the savages that are detached from our army!"

"Father!" said Archibald, retreating two or three paces, folding his arms, and looking him in the face, as if he thought he had not heard him alright—

"I know what you are thinking, Archibald," said my father, "and I cannot blame you. You have not forgotten my words, when the Declaration of Independence was read to us, have you ?"

"No, sir," said my brother, his pale face growing still paler, and his slender form shivering with the depth and excess of some inward and unknown feeling, and then added, in a manner that awed me as much as if a dumb creature had suddenly found his tongue; for such had been the melancholy, deep, and solemn abstraction of his nature, from the age of about eighteen, that we had learnt never to attempt any conversation with him, leaving him alone and unmolested to his thought, as a poor distempered creature whom it was a pity to worry in his humours and now, when he broke out upon us much after the following fashion, our amazement held us speechless; and that of my father was dashed with a feeling of shame, that even I could tee, for the red blood shot over his temples and up through his bald forehead, showing that he felt the rebuke of Archibald even to his old heart.

"No, sir! I have not forgotten it," said my brother, standing motionless before him, "and I did believe that not one of this house would ever forget it. But now—now, in the time of his tribulation, when all that is dearest to us, our home and country, is about to be laid waste with fire and sword—they that have sworn to stand by George Washington, though Heaven itself rained fire upon their heads (your own words, sir), are the first to abandon him—withhold their succour, drive off their cattle to the woods, bury their provisions, and refuse the currency of the country; nay, more, the first to quail at sound of cannon, the first to lay their hands upon their own children and say, you shall not fight the battles of your country." He faltered as he concluded, and when he had done, and the echo of his own words came back loudly to him from the ceiling, he started, and looked about him with a troubled air for a moment, and then put his thin