CHAPTER VII—THE CONQUERING THEODOSIA
WHILE young Aaron, in his camp by the Ramapo, is wringing the withers of his men with merciless drills, sixteen miles away, in the outskirts of the village of Paranius dwells Madam Theodosia Prévost. Madam Prévost is the widow of an English Colonel Prévost, who was swept up by yellow fever in Jamaica. With her are her mother, her sister, her two little boys. The family name is De Visme, which is a Swiss name from the French cantons.
The hungry English in New York are running short of food. Two thousand of them cross the Hudson, and commence combing the country for beef. Word of that cow-driving reaches young Aaron by the Ramapo. Hackensack is given as the theater of those beef triumphs of the hungry English.
From rustical ones bewailing vanished kine, young Aaron receives the tale first hand. Instantly he springs to the defense of the continental cow. He orders out his regiment, and marches away for that stricken Hackensack region of ravished flocks and herds.
At Paramus, excited by stories of a cow-conquering English, the militia of the neighborhood are fallen to a frenzied building of breastworks. Certain of these home guards look up from their breastwork building long enough to decide that Madam Prévost, as the widow of a former English colonel, is a Tory.
Arriving at this conclusion, the home guards make the next natural step, and argue—because of their nearness to Madam Prévost—that the mother and sister and little boys are Tories. The quietly elegant home of Madam Prévost is declared a nest of Tories, against which judgment a belief that the mansion is worth looting is not allowed to militate.
As young Aaron, on his rescuing way to Hackensack, marches into Paramus, the judgmatical home guards, in the name of a patriotism which believes in spoiling the Egyptian, are about to begin their work of sack and pillage. Young Aaron, who does not think that robbery assists the cause of freedom, calls a halt. He drives off the home guards at the point of his sword, and places sentinels upon the premises. Also he promises to hang the first home guard who, in the name of liberty, or for any more private reason, touches a shilling’s worth of Madam Prevost’s chattels.
Having established his protectorate in favor of the threatened Prévost household, young Aaron enters, hat in hand, with the pardonable purpose of discovering what manner of folk he has pledged himself to keep safe. It may be that he is beset by visions of distressed fair ones—disheveled, tearful, beautiful! If so, his dreams receive a shock. ‘Instead of that flushed, frightened, clinging, tear-stained loveliness, so common of romance, he is met by a severely angular lady who, plain of face, with high, harsh cheek bones, and a scar on her forehead, is two inches taller and twelve years older than himself.
Madam Prévost owns all these; and yet, beyond and above them, she also possesses an ineffable, impalpable something, which is like an atmosphere, a perfume, a melody of manner, and marks her as that greatest of graceful rarities, a well-bred, cultured woman of the world. Polished, fine, Madam Prévost is familiar with the society of two continents. She knows literature, music, art; she is wise, erudite, nobly high. These attributes invest her with a soft brilliancy, into which those uglinesses and bony angularities retreat as into a kind of moonlight, to recur in gentle reassertion as the poetic sublimation of all that charms.