“Who will guard me?”
“The Governor will see that you are kept from harm.”
“No, no, no. Go, Peter, go—out into the night. I want the King to know that he has one heart that is true to him in the land of the cedars. Go! I will bolt my door nights—and will chop wood. That is what I tell people who come to visit me—I chop wood—and I will say no more.
“You would die for the Governor, and I am willing to suffer any danger for my king—for King George of Hanover. Go!”
Peter went out into the night. There was something in his grim uncle’s loyalty that kindled his admiration, and there was a touch in the old man’s desire that he should possess his property that really awakened a chord of love in his heart. He resolved that he would be as true to the old man as ever his duties to the cause would allow, although the rugged Tory had said to him a second time, “Out you go!” The heart knows its own.
Peter could ride like the wind. So the people said “that he streaked it through the air.” With his night service, and his placing of beacons on the hills, and his place at the door of the war office in the store, which he yet sometimes filled, and the spirit that he had shown toward his unhappy old uncle, the wood-chopper, he was making for himself a personality.
The Governor entrusted him with a message to the army at Valley Forge.
The Governor’s wife was a noble woman, as we have seen. She was true to her own. Her family were very tender-hearted and affectionate. Her daughter Faith, who could paint and who had inspired her brother, the great historic painter, in his boyhood, died of insanity after hearing the thunders of Bunker Hill. She had married Colonel Huntington, who went to the camps around Boston. She hoped to meet him there, but arrived just as the battle of Bunker Hill was rending the air.
When she thought of what war might mean to her father, her husband, and her brother, who was an officer, her mind could not withstand the dark vision that arose before her, and it went out. She died at Dedham. One of her brothers, too, had so much of the human and elemental nature as to have become greatly depressed by disappointment. The Trumbulls were a marvelous family, with a divine spark in them all, but not all the children had the rugged nerve of their father.