Philip Comes at Last to London.
A human life will drone along uneventfully for years with scarce a perceptible progress, retrogression, or change; and then suddenly, with a few leaps, will cover more of alteration and event in a week than it has passed through in a decade. So will the critical occurrences of a day fill chapters, after those of a year have failed to yield more material than will eke out a paragraph. Experience proceeds by fits and starts. Only in fiction does a career run in an unbroken line of adventures or memorable incidents.
The personal life of Philip Winwood, as distinguished from his military career, which had no difference from that of other commanders of rebel partisan horse, and which needs no record at my hands, was marked by no conspicuous event from the night when he learned and defeated Madge's plot, to the end of the war. The news of her departure, and of Tom's death, came to him with a fresh shock, it is true, but they only settled him deeper in the groove of sorrow, and in the resolution to pay full retribution where it was due.
He had no pusillanimous notion of the unworthiness of revenge. He believed retaliation, when complete and inflicted without cost or injury to the giver, to be a most logical and fitting thing. But he knew that revenge is a two-edged weapon, and that it must be wielded carefully, so as not to cause self-damage. He required, too, that it should be wielded in open and honourable manner; and in that manner he was resolved to use it upon Captain Falconer. As for Madge, I believe he forgave her from the first, holding her "more in sorrow than in anger," and pitying rather than reproaching.
Well, he served throughout the war, keeping his sorrow to himself, being known always for a quietly cheerful mien, giving and taking hard blows, and always yielding way to others in the pressure for promotion. Such was the state of affairs in the rebel army, that his willingness to defer his claims for advancement, when there were restless and ambitious spirits to be conciliated and so kept in the service, was availed of for the sake of expediency. But he went not without appreciation. On one occasion, when a discontented but useful Pennsylvanian was pacified with a colonelcy, General Washington remarked to Light Horse Harry Lee: "And yet you are but a major, and Winwood remains a captain; but let me tell you, there is less honour in the titles of general and colonel, as borne by many, than there is in the mere names of Major Lee and Captain Winwood."
When Lee's troop was sent to participate in the Southern campaign, Philip's accompanied it, and he had hard campaigning under Greene, which continued against our Southernmost forces until long after the time of the capitulation of Lord Cornwallis's army at Yorktown, to the combined rebel and French armies under Washington. It happened that our battalion, wherein I was promoted to a lieutenantcy shortly after my abortive meeting with Captain Falconer near Kingsbridge, went South by sea for the fighting there, being the only one of De Lancey's battalions that left the vicinity of New York. We had bloody work enough then to balance our idleness in the years we had covered outposts above New York, and 'twas but a small fraction of our number that came home alive at last. I never met Philip while we were both in the South, nor saw him till the war was over.
Shiploads of our New York loyalists left, after Cornwallis's defeat at Yorktown showed what the end was to be; some of them going to England but many of them sailing to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, there to begin afresh the toiling with the wilderness, and to build up new English colonies in North America. Others contrived to make their way by land to Canada, which thereby owes its English population mainly to those who fled from the independent states rather than give up their loyalty to the mother country. The government set up by the victorious rebels had taken away the lands and homes of the loyalists, by acts of attainder, and any who remained in the country did so at the risk of life or liberty. What a time of sad leave-taking it was!—families going forth poor to a strange land, who had lived rich in that of their birth—what losses, what wrenches, what heart-rendings! And how little compensation England could give them, notwithstanding all their claims and petitions! Well, they would deserve little credit for their loyalty if they had followed it without willingness to lose for it.
But my mother and I had possessed nothing to lose in America but our house and ground, our money being in the English funds. Fortunately, and thanks to our insignificance, we had been overlooked in the first act of attainder, and, taking warning by that, my mother had gratefully accepted Mr. Faringfield's offer to buy our home, for which we had thereafter paid him rent. Thus we had nothing to confiscate, when the war was over. As for Mr. Faringfield, he was on the triumphant side of Independence, which he had supported with secret contributions from the first; of course he was not to be held accountable for the treason of his eldest son, and the open service of poor Tom on the king's side.
My mother feared dreadful things when the victorious rebels should take possession—imprisonment, trial for treason, and similar horrors; and she was for sailing to England with the British army. But I flatly refused to go, pretending I was no such coward, and that I would leave when I was quite ready. I was selfish in this, of course; but I could not bring myself to go so far from Fanny. Our union was still as uncertain a possibility as ever. Only one thing was sure: she would not leave her parents at present.
The close of the war did not bring Philip back to us at once. On that day when, the last of the British vessels having gone down the bay, with the last British soldier aboard, the strangely empty-looking town took on a holiday humour, and General Washington rode in by the Bowery lane, with a number of his officers, and a few war-worn troops to make up a kind of procession of entry, and the stars and stripes were run up at the Battery—on that day of sadness, humiliation, and apprehension to those of us loyalists who had dared stay, I would have felt like cheering with the crowd, had Philip been one of those who entered. But he was still in the South, recovering from a bullet wound in his shoulder.