Joscelyn Cheshire Part 31

"Betty came for her wools?" she asked her mother at bedtime.

"Yes. And I forgot to tell you that after I had gone from the house Eustace Singleton came to say good-by to you. When I returned from Ann's, I found him in the parlour, where his presence must greatly have annoyed Betty, for she was red and fl.u.s.tered. I am sure I was sorry, but I was in no way to blame for her disturbance." And then tearfully she went on to tell how her mission with Aunt Clevering had again failed.

The change that came upon Hillsboro' with the going of the British was as swift as it was p.r.o.nounced. Where before had been sullen repression among the people, all was now animation and exuberance of spirits; the Tories were intimidated, and the place bristled with patriotic evidences. It was as though a slide had been slipped in a stereopticon, and a new picture projected upon the canvas. All the talk now ran on Greene, who had moved down from the Dan and lay upon the heights of Troublesome Creek, only thirteen miles from where Cornwallis had pitched his own camp. For nearly two weeks the entire country watched with panting interest these two generals play their advance-guards and reconnoitring parties against each other as though they were so many ivory figures upon a chessboard. Then came the meeting at Guildford Court-house, the fame of which blew through the land like a sirocco's breath.

"Lord Cornwallis has won the game at Guildford," cried Joscelyn.

"Ay, won it so hard and fast that he has had to run away to hold the stakes," retorted Mistress Strudwick, equally rejoiced over the British retreat to Wilmington.

"Had the militia but done their share, we should have finished Cornwallis for good," Richard wrote to Joscelyn after the battle.

"But praise be to Heaven, Banastre Tarleton is among the wounded. I do hope and believe it was my bullet that hit him, for I singled him out for my aim, remembering his bearing to you and my mother last month. If so I hear that his wound proves fatal, I shall wear no mourning."

And, truth to say, Joscelyn herself sorrowed never a bit over the short colonel's discomfiture. Later on came another letter:--

"We are on the march to the south to aid Marion, Sumter, and Pickens to s.n.a.t.c.h South Carolina and Georgia from the foe. We know of the terrible doings of Arnold in Virginia, and General La Fayette has been sent to check him, but much I doubt his success.

Ye G.o.ds! what a soldier we lost when Arnold went over to the enemy in that traitorous way. He was the one man in our army who was Tarleton's match in a raid. If the Marquis catches him, however, I should like to be at the reckoning. A traitor with the fire of genius in his veins! At Guildford I looked at his old command, and said to myself that the day had gone differently had Arnold led them. Men followed him like sheep to victory or to death. Think you what a demon it takes to harrow one's country, to fight against one's own people!"

As the weeks pa.s.sed and the spring advanced, Joscelyn's position in the community grew more irksome, for Tory supremacy was at an end and the patriotic spirit was dominant. "Only the rudeness of some excited boys,"

the older folk had said of the incident of her homeward ride the day the British withdrew; but it was rather the true index of the public temper against her, and not a day went by but she was made to feel it keenly.

Never was an occasion to annoy her neglected, until between her and her neighbours was a bloodless but hara.s.sing feud that destroyed utterly the old harmony and good will. She felt the change bitterly; every neglect or retort rankled in her thoughts until it became as a fester corrupting her happiness. But she kept a brave face to the world, and sang her Tory ballads on the veranda in the soft spring twilights, or as she worked through the sunny hours in the side yard where no flowers but those that blossomed red were permitted to blow. And Mistress Strudwick said to her cronies, with genuine admiration, that twenty Guildfords could not break the spirit of a girl like that.

But necessarily the thing that hurt Joscelyn most was Aunt Clevering's treatment. Not content to be a spectator, she often took the initiative in the persecution the girl was made to suffer, ignoring her in public or noticing her only to taunt her with some uncivil word or look. A few sentences from Joscelyn might have swept away the barriers and restored the old friendship, but she would not buy her pardon thus. She possibly might not be believed without the proof of Richard's letter, that first short, fervid missive he had sent her on the eve of the great battle; and that she could not show, not even to his own mother, such a heroine did it make of her, such an ardent, grateful lover of him. Then, too, if this quarrel with Aunt Clevering should be healed, people would ask questions, and when the truth should be known she would be in no better plight--a Tory maid risking everything, even life itself, to hide a Continental spy! Neither friends nor foes would understand; her motives would be misinterpreted, her loyalty questioned; and so her last estate would be no better than her first. Thus did she hold her peace and hide her tears under cover of darkness, the while by day she sang her daring little ditties among the growing things of her garden.

Having been the arch-Royalist of the town, it was but natural that public resentment should be most p.r.o.nounced against her. The Singletons and Moores were less outspoken, and so drew upon themselves less of contumely. Her caustic speeches, on the contrary, were not forgotten, until Mistress Strudwick threatened half tearfully, half playfully to clip her tongue with her sharp scissors. But the chief thing that kept alive the animosity against her were the letters that came to her now and then from Cornwallis's camp. She did not deny their reception, but steadily refused to divulge their contents; and as it was believed that in one way or another she contrived to answer them, the idea got abroad that she was in the employ of the British general to keep him posted as to the state of things in Hillsboro'-town. Nothing else could so have set the people against her as this supposed espionage, and all through the advancing summer she felt the weight of their displeasure. Mistress Bryce openly denounced her, boys shouted disrespectful things under her window at night, and the shopkeepers so neglected or refused her orders that, had it not been for Mistress Strudwick, she and her mother would have suffered; but that good friend stood stanchly by her. So loud were the outcries against her when she rode abroad that out of deference to her mother's wishes, and also to save herself from needless mortification, she never had the saddle put upon her horse.

And yet innocent enough were those letters that caused so much of trouble, filled as they were, not with army news, but with a man's tender love throes,--the vehement pleadings of a heart swayed by its first grand pa.s.sion.

CHAPTER XXVI.

BY THE BELEAGUERED CITY.

"Peace; come away; the song of woe Is after all an earthy song: Peace; come away; we do him wrong To sing so wildly: let us go."

--TENNYSON.

The summer seemed interminable, lit all along though it was with the glimmer of lilies and iridescent gleams of parti-coloured roses. It was the season of the year which Joscelyn loved best; but now the ceaseless sunshine, the mosaic marvels of the turf, the kaleidoscopic changes of earth and sky wearied her, so that she longed for the coming of autumn.

It came at last, unfurling its red and yellow banners in the woodlands, and setting its russet seal upon the meadows. And with it came the news of the siege of Yorktown; and the town of Hillsboro' waked to new enthusiasm and thrilled or shuddered at every alternating rumour.

And in each of those far-away armies on the York was a man who watched the sun go westward every eve, and sent a silent message to a girl with dark hair and sea-blue eyes who pruned her roses in a new garden of the Hesperides beside the Eno. Unknown to each other, their thoughts had yet a common Mecca. But fate was not content that they should stand thus forever apart.

In Yorktown, Cornwallis had thought to be safe either to escape to Clinton or be rescued by that general's fleet sailing down the Atlantic from New York. But instead to the east, in Lynn Haven Bay, De Gra.s.se's ships held the pa.s.ses to the sea; while on the land side--one wing on York and one on Wormley creek--in two great crescents stretched the lines of the allied armies, with Warwick creek running darkly between.

Over the tents that gleamed in the autumn sunshine there flew, side by side, the stars and stripes of the Republic and the _fleur-de-lys_ of France. And there were sallies and repulses, and daily encroachments and skirmishes between the allies without and the British within.

It so happened one day that Richard's company was detailed to guard the ditchers who were making a new trench, and throwing up a fresh line of breastworks that would enable them to draw yet nearer to the red-coated pickets. Already these latter had been forced--by the horns of that ever encroaching crescent--to withdraw twice, and now a third retreat seemed imminent. But not without a struggle would they yield their posts; and so presently, on that mellow autumn day, a flash of scarlet came in the sun as an a.s.saulting column swept out toward the projected line where the shovels were at work; and the Continental guard, after discharging their guns with signal success, waited with fixed bayonets to receive the advancing column. It was a fierce contest fought almost hand to hand; then the Redcoats began to fall back, and with a quick rush the Continentals turned their retreat to a rout.

Returning from that fierce charge with the flush of the fight upon him, Richard came upon a man lying p.r.o.ne upon his face in the stubble--the gallant English captain who had led the sally. He had seen him as he fell far in advance of his column. There the retreat had left him inside the new lines of the Continentals, and finding him still alive, Richard turned him over softly so as not to start his wound afresh; and as he did so he caught one word from the pale lips:--

"_Joscelyn._"

The name unlocked the floodgates of the young Continental's sympathies.

"Dunn," he said to the man in front of him, "give me a hand, that I may get this poor fellow to my tent."

"The surgeon will find him here directly and have him moved to the field hospital."

"He could not stand so long a trip; see how near he is already gone with this bullet hole in his side. Come, I have a fancy not to see him die here in the wet gra.s.s."

So Dunn lent his aid, and the wounded man was put down in Richard's tent, murmuring again that talismanic name.

"He may possibly live till morning," the surgeon said, when at last he came from attending to his own men, "but he cannot be moved. I will try and send some one to look after him."

Richard touched his cap, "If you please, I am off duty to-night; I will willingly nurse him, if so you give me directions."

And the man was left in his care; and during the slow hours, word by word and sentence by sentence, he patched together the fevered ramblings of his patient, until he knew that the Joscelyn of his own hopes and fears and dreams was identical with the girl of this other man's thoughts.

With the knowledge something seemed to catch at his throat, to tighten about his heart; and he went out and stood awhile at the tent door, gazing up into the clear heavens whose steadfast stars were shining also on the distant Carolina hills, watching a window behind which a girl lay sleeping--dreaming perhaps of the man yonder on the pallet. Had he lost her through this other one? Was his life to miss its one strong purpose, in missing her?

By and by, when he was calmer, he came again to the pallet where the dying man lay, and picked up the sword which, along with his own, was propped against the canvas wall of the tent. It was of beautiful workmanship with a crest on the jewelled scabbard, and below a graven name which, by the light of the tallow dip, Richard at last spelled out:--

"Barry."

He stood thinking for a moment. Why, this then was the man for whom Ellen Singleton had mistaken him that night he played the squire to her in a borrowed military cloak at the fete in Philadelphia. What strange fate had brought them thus together? "The finest officer who wears the red, and a lady-killer," Dunn had said. And that tightness gathered again at Richard's heart, for where else had he heard of the man?

Stay, was not Barry the name--Yes, it was the very name he had heard coupled with Joscelyn's that night while he lay hiding in the freezing attic. "She is sitting on the stair with Captain Barry." The very tones of the speaker came back to him, bringing again that thirsty desire to open the door and look for her which he had not been able to resist, though life itself might pay the forfeit.

He went back to the pallet, and bent down that he might see the face of his patient. So this was the man who had won her away from the rest of her company, the man to whom she had bent down so low that from the rear only the dark crown of her hair could be seen as she sat on her steps--this was the man to whose love tale she had listened smilingly, while he himself was a prisoner hiding for his very life. A lady-killer, Dunn had said; and well he could believe it from the traces of manly beauty still lingering in the suffering face. A fierce jealousy tore at his heart. Evidently, from his ramblings, Joscelyn had listened to this other's wooing, and had written him letters, while she mocked him and sent him never so much as one little line in answer to all the pages he wrote her. He had always known that other men would love her,--it could not be otherwise with her sweetness and her beauty,--but always in his thoughts she had kept herself for him. Had it been a false hope; had she loved this brave Briton who called upon her with such pathos of tenderness? If so, then was his own dream-castle in ruins.

By and by, just before the end, there came a lucid hour. The wounded man turned his eyes questioningly upon his nurse.

"I found you after the fight, so far in our lines that your own men had missed you in their retreat, and the surgeon left you in my care,"

Richard said gently.

"To die? Yes, I see it in your eyes."

"You fell at the head of your men, as a soldier wishes death to find him."

The other smiled faintly, "My mother will perchance be a little comforted by that. You will write her?"

"Yes--And Joscelyn?"

"Joscelyn?--how do you happen--?"

"You talked of her in your delirium. She lives in the Carolina hill country. I, too, know her and--love her."

And then each told something of his story to the other; and they clasped hands as brave men can when enmity and prejudice and jealousy are swallowed up in the wide sympathy that lurks forever in the precincts of the Great Shadow.