And Peggy was left alone. Alone! With wide, unseeing eyes she stared at a patch of green grass in front of her where ox-eyed daisies grew like golden stars. Alone! Harriet had not come, as Peggy had been hoping she would. And her father! Could he not get leave? Alone! Alone! What comfort could she, a mere girl, be to her cousin in this trying hour?
Far afield the milkweed nodded a soft welcome to the butterflies winging, like flying flowers, over the fields. A bumblebee droned drowsily near, humming his song to unheeding ears. Where the tall pine trees of the forest met the sky argosies of clouds spread their portly sails along the blue. In the heat of the July morning Peggy sat shaking like a leaf.
“I must be brave,” she told herself again and again. “He hath no one here but me. I must be Harriet and Cousin William both to him. I must be of comfort to him.”
Long she sat there under the tree trying to pull herself together, but after a while she rose and made her way into the house. It was well on toward the end of the afternoon when Colonel Dayton came to her.
“Your cousin wishes to see you, child,” he said pityingly. “He bears up well, but I need not say to you that he will need all his fortitude to go through with this ordeal.”
“I shall not fail him, friend,” said Peggy with quivering lips. “I am all of kith or kin that is near him. I shall not fail.”
But the maiden had need of all her resolution when she entered the guard-house where Clifford was, for he was most despondent.
“I am glad it is ended, Peggy,” he said gloomily. “The restlessness of waiting is over at last. All the feverish anxiety, the hope, the longing, are past, and the end hath come. Do you remember last year, when John Drayton, that Yankee captain, was condemned to this same sort of death, what father said? He said, ‘The vicissitudes of war are many, my son. By sad fortune you might find yourself in the same condition as this young fellow.’ And here I am, in very truth, condemned to die on the gallows. I have been thinking of it all day.”
“Clifford,” she cried in alarm, for there sounded a note of agitation in his words that made her fearful lest he lose his self-control, “thee must not talk like that. Think on something else.”
“But to die like this,” he cried. “An Owen on the gibbet! ’Tis bitter, bitter! I had planned a different death. ’Twas on the battle-field. Gloriously to fall, fighting for the king and England. I do not fear death, my cousin. It is not that. ’Tis the awfulness of the mode. I cannot help but think of that other death which I would so gladly die. I have ever loved martial music, and ’twas my thought that at my death the muffled drum would beat for a soldier’s honorable funeral.”