He followed her awkwardly. They reached the cottage without further molestation, and entered it unobserved.
On the morning following the drums beat assembly soon after the sounding of the reveille. The different commands filed out of their camps, and, forming into a column, took up the line of march out of the city.
CHAPTER XIX—HARRIET AT LAST
| “Awake on your hills, on your islands awake, Brave sons of the mountain, the frith, and the lake. Be the brand of each chieftain like Fin’s in his ire. May the blood through his veins flow like currents of fire. Burst the base foreign yoke as your sires did of yore, Or die like your sires, and endure it no more.” —“Battle Song,” Scott. |
With the courage born of the desperateness of the situation the citizens of Williamsburg set about repairing the devastation wrought by the invader. Wrecked homes and desolated families followed fast in the wake of the British army. From field and hills the militia assembled to repel their approach, leaving the crops to the care of the men too old for service, the women who bravely shouldered tasks too heavy for delicate frames, and the few negroes who remained faithful to their owners. Patiently demolished gardens were replanted, poultry yards restocked, depleted larders replenished in order that want, stark and gaunt, might not be added to other foes.
And the sunny days of April became the brighter ones of May, and the forests about the city blossomed into riotous greens, starred by the white of dogwood, or the purplish-pink mist of the Judas-tree. The mulberries and sycamores were haunts of song. Out of the cerulean sky the sun shone brilliantly upon the leaf-strewn earth. All Nature rejoiced, and sent forth a profusion of bloom and verdure as though to compensate the land for the bloody war waged throughout its length and breadth. For that great game, whose moves and counter-moves were to terminate so soon in the cul-de-sac of Yorktown, had begun. From the seacoast where Greene had sent him Cornwallis, recovered at last from the dearly bought victory of Guilford Court House, was moving rapidly across North Carolina for a junction with the forces in Virginia. There was no longer a doubt but that the subjugation of the state was the aim of the British.
An empty treasury, a scarcity of arms, a formidable combination to oppose in the West, a continual demand upon her resources to answer for the army in the North, with all these contingencies to face Virginia had now to prepare to meet this new foe advancing from the South.
Late one afternoon in the latter part of May Peggy and her cousin sat in the palace grounds under the shade of a large oak tree. The girl had been reading aloud, but now the book lay closed upon the grass beside her, and she sat regarding the youth who lay sprawled full length upon the grass.
“And so thee is going back to the army?” she asked. “Is thee sure that thee is strong enough?”
“Yes; I tire of inaction. I told General Phillips when he passed through two weeks ago on his way to Petersburg that I would join him when the combined army reached Richmond. I would have gone with him then but that I hoped Harriet might still come here. I do not understand why I have not heard from her, if she is, as you say, in New York.”