“The young lady I saw yesterday, is she?”
“Tooby sho’.”
“She is Captain Wilmer’s daughter, I suppose?”
“Dat’s w’at I laid out fer to tell you.”
I did not want to seem curious or I should have asked if “Madam” was married. I refrained out of prudence. I went on eating and Mammy Jacks went on looking at me, and presently, “I speck you monst’ous bad, cruel man,” she said with unction. “I hear Ma’am Constantia say you make smart heap uv trubble fer cullud folks, en tote em to ’Badoes en Antigo! She say you drefful ar’ogant insolent Englishman! You too bad ter live, I’ low.”
“And Madam Constantia told you to tell me that?”
The woman’s start and her look of alarm answered me. Before she could put in a protest, however, the negro who had been with her the previous evening appeared and relieved her from the difficulty. He came to attend to my arm, and did his work with a skill that would not have disgraced a passed surgeon. While he was going about the business, I was aware of a slender shadow on the threshold, the shadow of some one who listened, yet did not wish to be seen. “Confound her!” I thought. “The jade! I believe that she is there to hear me whimper!” And I set my teeth—she had called me a milksop, had she?—well, she should not hear me cry again. The shadow lay on the threshold a short minute, then it vanished. But more than once on that day and the two following days I was aware of it. It was all I saw of the girl; and though I knew, and had the best of grounds for knowing her sentiments respecting me, I confess that this steady avoidance of me—lonely and in pain as I was, and her guest—hurt me more than was reasonable.
As for Wilmer he was gone, without beat of drum, and without seeing me; and save Mammy Jacks and the nigger, Tom, no one came near me except Aunt Lyddy, and she came only once. She was a little old lady, deaf and smiling, who labored under the belief that I had met with my injuries in fighting against the French. She was quite unable to distinguish this war from the old French war; when she thought of the fighting at all, she thought of it as in progress in Canada or Louisiana, under the leadership of Braddock and Forbes and Wolfe. The taking of Quebec was to her an event of yesterday, and I might have drunk all the tea in the world, and she would not have objected. Such was Aunt Lyddy; and even, such as she was, I wondered with bitterness, that she was allowed to visit me.
Yet when I came to think more calmly, the position surprised me less. It was in the nature of this war to create a rancour which bred cruel deeds, and these again produced reprisals. After the capture of Charles Town in May and the subsequent defeat of Gates, the country had apparently returned to its allegiance. The King’s friends had raised their heads. The waverers had declared themselves, opposition in the field had ceased. If one thing had seemed more certain than another it was that my Lord Cornwallis’s base in the southern province was secure, and that he might now devote himself, without a backward glance, to the conquest of North Carolina and Virginia.
Then in a month, in a week, almost in a day had come a change. God knows whether it was the result of mismanagement on our part, or of some ill-judged severity; or, as many now think, of the lack of civil government, a lack ill-borne by a people of our race. At any rate the change came. In a week secret midnight war flamed up everywhere. In a month the whole province was on fire. Partisans came together and attacked their neighbors, rebels took loyalists by the throat, burned their houses, harried their plantations, and in turn suffered the same things. By day the King’s writ ran; at first it was the exception for these irregulars to meet us in the field. But by night attacks, by ambuscades, by besetting every ford and every ferry, they cut our communications, starved our posts and killed our messengers. For a time the royalists showed themselves as active. They, too, came together, formed bands, burned and harried. Presently the father was in one camp, the son in the other; neighbor fought with neighbor, old feuds were revived, old friendships were broken; and this it was that gave to this blind, bloody warfare, in the woods, in the morasses, in the cane-brakes, its savage character.