The Maid-At-Arms.
by Robert W. Chambers.
PREFACE
After a hundred years the history of a great war waged by a successful nation is commonly reviewed by that nation with retrospective complacency.
Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in the pageant until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothly across the horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph.
Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was too terrible, its scars too deep to hide or cover.
For us, the pages of the past turn all undimmed; battles, brutally etched, stand clear as our own hills against the sky--for in this land we have no haze to soften truth.
Treading the austere corridor of our Pantheon, we, too, come at last to victory--but what a victory! Not the familiar, gracious G.o.ddess, wide-winged, crowned, bearing wreaths, but a naked, desperate creature, gaunt, dauntless, turning her iron face to the west.
The trampling centuries can raise for us no golden dust to cloak the flanks of the starved ranks that press across our horizon.
Our ragged armies muster in a pitiless glare of light, every man distinct, every battle in detail.
Pangs that they suffered we suffer.
The faint-hearted who failed are judged by us as though they failed before the nation yesterday; the brave are re-enshrined as we read; the traitor, to us, is no grotesque Guy Fawkes, but a living Judas of to-day.
We remember that Ethan Allen thundered on the portal of all earthly kings at Ticonderoga; but we also remember that his hatred for the great state of New York brought him and his men of Vermont perilously close to the mire which defiled Charles Lee and Conway, and which engulfed poor Benedict Arnold.
We follow Gates"s army with painful sympathy to Saratoga, and there we applaud a victory, but we turn from the commander in contempt, his brutal, selfish, shallow nature all revealed.
We know him. We know them all--Ledyard, who died stainless, with his own sword murdered; Herkimer, who died because he was not brave enough to do his duty and be called a coward for doing it; Woolsey, the craven Major at the Middle Fort, stammering filthy speeches in his terror when Sir John Johnson"s rangers closed in; Poor, who threw his life away for vanity when that life belonged to the land! Yes, we know them all--great, greater, and less great--our grandfather Franklin, who trotted through a perfectly cold and selfishly contemptuous French court, aged, alert, cheerful to the end; Schuyler, calm and imperturbable, watching the North, which was his trust, and utterly unmindful of self or of the pack yelping at his heels; Stark, Morgan, Murphy, and Elerson, the brave riflemen; Spencer, the interpreter; Visscher, Helmer, and the Stoners.
Into our horizon, too, move terrible shapes--not shadowy or lurid, but living, breathing figures, who turn their eyes on us and hold out their butcher hands: Walter Butler, with his awful smile; Sir John Johnson, heavy and pallid--pallid, perhaps, with the memory of his broken parole; Barry St. Leger, the drunken dealer in scalps; Guy Johnson, organizer of wholesale murder; Brant, called Thayendanegea, brave, terrible, faithful, but--a Mohawk; and that frightful she-devil, Catrine Montour, in whose hot veins seethed savage blood and the blood of a governor of Canada, who smote us, hip and thigh, until the brawling brooks of Tryon ran blood!
No, there is no illusion for us; no splendid armies, banner--laden, pa.s.sing through unbroken triumphs across the sunset"s glory; no winged victory, with smooth brow laurelled to teach us to forget the holocaust.
Neither can we veil our history, nor soften our legends. Romance alone can justify a theme inspired by truth; for Romance is more vital than history, which, after all, is but the fleshless skeleton of Romance.
R.W.C.
BROADALBIN,
May 26, 1902.
THE MAID-AT-ARMS
I
THE ROAD TO VARICKS"
We drew bridle at the cross-roads; he stretched his legs in his stirrups, raised his arms, yawned, and dropped his huge hands upon either thigh with a resounding slap.
"Well, good-bye," he said, gravely, but made no movement to leave me.
"Do we part here?" I asked, sorry to quit my chance acquaintance of the Johnstown highway.
He nodded, yawned again, and removed his round cap of silver-fox fur to scratch his curly head.
"We certainly do part at these cross-roads, if you are bound for Varicks"," he said.
I waited a moment, then thanked him for the pleasant entertainment his company had afforded me, and wished him a safe journey.
"A safe journey?" he repeated, carelessly. "Oh yes, of course; safe journeys are rare enough in these parts. I"m obliged to you for the thought. You are very civil, sir. Good-bye."
Yet neither he nor I gathered bridle to wheel our horses, but sat there in mid-road, looking at each other.
"My name is Mount," he said at length; "let me guess yours. No, sir!
don"t tell me. Give me three sportsman"s guesses; my hunting-knife against the wheat straw you are chewing!"
"With pleasure," I said, amused, "but you could scarcely guess it."
"Your name is Varick?"
I shook my head.
"Butler?"
"No. Look sharp to your knife, friend."
"Oh, then I have guessed it," he said, coolly; "your name is Ormond--and I"m glad of it."
"Why are you glad of it?" I asked, curiously, wondering, too, at his knowledge of me, a stranger.
"You will answer that question for yourself when you meet your kin, the Varicks and Butlers," he said; and the reply had an insolent ring that did not please me, yet I was loath to quarrel with this boyish giant whose amiable company I had found agreeable on my long journey through a land so new to me.
"My friend," I said, "you are blunt."
"Only in speech, sir," he replied, lazily swinging one huge leg over the pommel of his saddle. Sitting at ease in the sunshine, he opened his fringed hunting-shirt to the breeze blowing.
"So you go to the Varicks?" he mused aloud, eyes slowly closing in the sunshine like the brilliant eyes of a basking lynx.
"Do you know the lord of the manor?" I asked.
"Who? The patroon?"
"I mean Sir Lupus Varick."
"Yes; I know him--I know Sir Lupus. We call him the patroon, though he"s not of the same litter as the Livingstons, the Cosbys, the Phillipses, Van Rensselaers, and those feudal gentlemen who juggle with the high justice, the middle, and the low--and who will juggle no more."
"Am I mistaken," said I, "in taking you for a Boston man?"