For Love of Country Part 26

"Sir, I beg to thank you for this distinguished courtesy," said Seymour, with deep feeling, extending his hand to the knightly Briton.

"Do not mention it, sir, I beg of you," replied Cornwallis, shaking his hand warmly. "You will do the same for one of us, I am sure, should occasion ever demand a like service at your hands. I will see that your other men and officers are properly buried. Do you return now?"

"Immediately, my lord."

"Pray present my compliments to Mr.--nay, General--Washington," said the generous commander, "and congratulate him upon his brilliant campaign. Ay, and tell him we look forward eagerly to trying conclusions with him again. Good-by, sir. Come, gentlemen," he cried, raising his hat gracefully as he mounted his horse and rode away, followed by his staff.

CHAPTER XXIX

_The Last of the Talbots_

It was with a sinking heart that Seymour rode up the hill toward Fairview Hall a few days later. There had been a light fall of snow during the preceding night, and the brilliant sun of the early morning had not yet gained sufficient strength to melt it away. There was a softening touch therefore about the familiar scene, and Seymour, who had never viewed it in the glory of its summer, thought he had never known it to look so beautiful. Heartily greeted as he pa.s.sed on by the various servants of the family, with whom he was a great favorite, he finally drew rein and dismounted before the great flight of steps which led up to the terrace upon which the house stood. His arrival had not been unnoticed, and Madam Talbot was standing in the doorway to greet him. He noticed that she looked paler and thinner and older, but she held herself as erect and carried herself as proudly as she had always done. Grief and disappointment and broken hope might change and destroy the natural tissues and fibres of her being, but they could not alter her iron will.

Tossing the bridle to one of the attendant servants, Seymour, hat in hand, walked slowly up the steps and across the gra.s.s plat, and stepped upon the porch. She watched him in silence, with a frightful sinking of the heart; the gravity of his demeanor and the pallor of his face, in which she seemed to detect a shade of pity which her pride resented, apprised her that whatever news he had brought would be ill for her to hear, but her rigid face and composed manner gave no indication of the deadly conflict within. Seymour bowed low to her, and she returned his salute with a sweeping courtesy, old-fashioned and graceful.

"Lieutenant Seymour is very welcome to Fairview Hall, though I trust it be not the compelling necessity of a wound which makes him seek our hospitality again," she said, faintly smiling.

"Oh, madam," said Seymour, softly, yet in utter desperation as to how to begin, "unfortunately it is not to be cured of wounds, but to inflict them that this time I am come. I--I am sorry--that I have to tell you that--I--" he continued with great hesitation.

"You are a bearer of ill tidings, I perceive," she continued gravely.

"Speak your message, sir. Whatever it may be, I trust the G.o.d I serve to give me strength to bear it. Is it--is it--Hilary?" she went on, with just a suggestion of a break in her even, carefully modulated tones.

"Yes, dear madam. He--he--"

"Stop! I had almost forgotten my duty. Tell me first of the armies of my king. The king first of all with our house, you know."

Poor Seymour! he must overwhelm her with bad news in every field of her affection. For a moment he almost wished the results had been the other way. The perspiration stood out upon his forehead in spite of the coldness, and he felt he would rather charge a battery than face this terrible old woman who put the armies of a king--and such a king too--before the fate of her only son! And yet he knew that what he had to tell her would break down even her iron will, and reaching the mother's heart beating warm within her in spite of her a.s.sumed coldness and self-repression, would probably give her a death-blow. He felt literally like a murderer before her, but he had to answer. Talbot's own letter, General Washington's command, and the promptings of his own affection had made him an actor in this pathetic drama. He had no choice but to proceed. The truth must be told. Nerving himself to the inevitable, he replied to her question,--

"The armies of the king have been defeated and forced to retire. General Washington has outmanoeuvred and outfought them; they are now shut up in New York again. The Jerseys are free, and we have taken upward of two thousand prisoners, and many are killed and wounded among them,--on both sides, in truth," he added.

"The worst news first," she replied. "One knows not why these things are so. It seems the G.o.d of Justice slumbers when subjects rebel against their rightful kings! But I have faith, sir. The right will win in the end--must win."

"So be it," he said, accepting the implied challenge, but adding nothing further. He would wait to be questioned now, and this strange woman should have the story in the way that pleased her best. As for her she could not trust herself to speak. Never before had her trembling body, her beating heart escaped from the domination of her resolute will.

Never before had her mobile lips refused to formulate the commands of her active brain. She fought her battle out in silence, and finally turned toward him once more.

"There was something else you said, I think. My--my son?" Her voice sank to a whisper; in spite of herself one hand went to her heart. Ah, mother, mother, this was indeed thy king! "Is--is he wounded?--My G.o.d, sir! Not dead?"

His open hand which he had extended to her held two little objects. What were they? The bright sunlight was reflected from one of them, the locket she had given him. There was a dark discoloration on one side of it which she had never seen before. The other was his Prayer Book. O G.o.d--prayer! Was there then a G.o.d, that such things could happen? Where was He that day? She had given that book to him when he was yet a child.

"Dead,"--she whispered,--"dead," shrinking back and staring at him.

"Would G.o.d I had died in his place, dear madam!" he said with infinite pity.

"How--how was it?" she went on, dry-eyed, in agony, moistening her cracking lips.

"Fighting like a hero over the body of General Mercer at Princeton. His men retreated and left them--"

"The rebel cowards," she interrupted.

"Nay, not cowards, but perhaps less brave than he. The British charged with their bayonets; our men had not that weapon, they fell back."

"Were you there, sir?"

"Surely not! Should I be here now if I had been there then, madam?" he replied proudly.

"True, true! you at least are a gentleman. Forgive the question."

"General Mercer and some of his officers sprang at the line. I had it from his own lips. Some one cut the general down; Hilary interposed, and enabled him to rise to his feet; they were attacked, fought bravely until--until--they died."

Stricken to the death at least, but determined to die as the rest had died, fighting, she drew herself up resolutely, and lifted her hand to that pitiless heaven above her. "So--be--it--unto--all--the--enemies--"

When had he heard her say that before, he wondered in horror. She stopped, her face went whiter before him, the light went out of it.

"Oh, my son, my son--O G.o.d, my son, my son--Oh, give him back, my son--my son!" She reeled and fell against him, moaning and beating the air with her little feeble hands. The break had come at last; she was no longer a Talbot, but a woman. With infinite pity and infinite care he half led, half carried her into the house, and then, after being bidden not to summon a.s.sistance, he sank down on his knees by her side, where she lay on the sofa in the parlor, crushed, broken, feeble, helpless, old. With many interruptions he told her the sad story. He laid the long dark lock of hair he had cut from her son's head in her hand. There was a letter from George Washington which he read to her, in which, after many tender words of consolation, he spoke of Talbot as "one who would have done honor to any country." He told her of that military funeral, the kind words of Cornwallis, the guard of honor, the soldiers of the king, and then he put Talbot's own letter to him before her, and she must be told of the loss of the frigate. Kate dead too, and Colonel Wilton. Alas, poor friends! But all her plans and hopes were gone; what mattered it--what mattered anything now!

"Oh, what a load must those unrighteous men bear before G.o.d who have inaugurated this wicked war!" she cried; but no echo of her reproach was heard in the houses of Parliament in London, or whispered in the antechamber of the king, to whom, a.s.suredly, they belonged.

And by and by he left her. It wrung his heart so to do, but the call of duty was stronger than her need. His ship was ready, or would be in a short time, and he had s.n.a.t.c.hed a few days from his pressing work to fulfil this task. His presence was absolutely necessary on the vessel, and he must go. Saying nay to her piteous plea that he should stay, and most reluctantly refusing her proffers of hospitality, after leaving with her the letters and the pictures, he left the room. But in the doorway he looked back at her. The tears had come at last. Moved by a sudden impulse, he ran back and knelt down by her, and took her old face between his hands and kissed her.

"Good-by, dear madam," he whispered; "would it had been I!"

She laid her thin hands upon his head.

"Good-by," she whispered; "G.o.d bless you. Oh, my boy--my boy!" She turned her face to the wall in bitterness, and so he fled.

On the brow of the hill one could see, if he were keen-eyed, the Wilton place. There was the boat-house. There she had said she loved him. He struck spurs to his horse and galloped madly away. Was there nothing but grief and sorrow, then, under the sun?

The lawyer and the doctor and the minister were with Madam Talbot all that day, but it was little they could do. She added a codicil to her will with the lawyer, submissively took the medicine the doctor left her, and listened quietly to the prayers of the priest. In the morning they found her whiter, stiller, calmer than ever. She had gone to meet her son in that new country where none rebel against the King!

BOOK IV

A DEATH GRAPPLE ON THE DEEP

CHAPTER x.x.x

_A Sailor's Opinion of the Land_

It was a delightful morning in February. The Continental ship Randolph, a tight little thirty-two-gun frigate, the first to get to sea of those ordered by Congress in 1775, was just leaving the beautiful harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, by way of the main ship channel, on her maiden cruise, under the command of Captain John Seymour Seymour, late first lieutenant of the Ranger. This was the second departure she had taken from that port. Forced by severe damages, incurred in an encounter with a heavy gale shortly after leaving Philadelphia, to put into that harbor for needed repairs to the new and unsettled vessel, she had put to sea again after a short interval, and in one week had taken six valuable prizes, one of them, an armed vessel of twenty guns, after a short action. After this brief and brilliant excursion she had put back to Charleston to dispose of her prizes, re-collect her prize crews, and land her prisoners.

There was another motive, however, for the sudden return. From one of the prizes it had been learned that the English thirty-two-gun frigate Carrysford, the twenty-gun sloop Perseus, the sixteen-gun sloop Hinchinbrook, with several privateers, had been cruising off the coast together, and the commander of the Randolph was most anxious to get the help of some of the South Carolina State cruisers to go in search of the British ships. The indefatigable Governor Rutledge, when the news had been communicated to him, had worked a.s.siduously to provide the State ships, and the young captain of the Randolph speedily found himself at the head of a little fleet of war vessels outward bound.

The departure of the squadron, the Randolph in the lead, the rest following, and all under full sail, made a pretty picture to the enthusiastic Carolinians, who watched them from the islands and fortifications in the harbor, and from a number of small boats which accompanied the war ships a short distance on their voyage. Besides Seymour's own vessel, there were the eighteen-gun ship General Moultrie, the two sixteen-gun ships Notre Dame and Polly, and the fourteen-gun brig Fair American; the last commanded by a certain master, Philip Wilton. They made officers of very young men in those days, and mere boys often occupied positions of trust and responsibility apparently far beyond their years,--even Seymour himself, though now a commodore or flag officer by courtesy, was very young for the position; and Governor Rutledge, moved by a warm friendship of long standing for old Colonel Wilton, and upon Seymour's own urgent recommendation, had intrusted the smallest vessel to young Captain Philip. We shall see how he showed himself worthy of the trust reposed in him in spite of his tender years.