“If they were like ever to take that view, they would not all have refused you their own company.”
“They refused because they neither supposed that I would come alone nor that Providence would send me an escort in the shape of a surly major on leave of absence from Staten Island! Come, Jack, you needn’t tremble in dread of their wrath. By this time my amiable papa and my solicitous mamma and my anxious brothers and sisters are in such a state of mind about me that, when you return to-night and report I’ve been safely consigned to Aunt Sally’s care, they’ll fairly worship you as a messenger of good news. So be as cheerful as the wind and the cold will let you. We are almost there. It seems an age since we passed Van Cortlandt’s.”
Major Colden merely sighed and looked more dismal, as if knowing the futility of speech.
“There’s the steeple!” presently cried the girl, looking ahead. “We’ll be at the parsonage in ten minutes, and safe in the manor-house in five more. Do look relieved, Jack! The journey’s end is in sight, and we haven’t had sight of a soldier this side of King’s Bridge,—except Van Wrumb’s Hessians across Tippett’s Vale, and they are friends. Br-r-r-r! I’ll have Williams make a fire in every room in the manor-house!”
Now while these three rode in seeming security from the south towards the church, parsonage, country tavern, and great manor-house that constituted 21 the village then called, sometimes Lower Philipsburgh and sometimes Younker’s, that same hill-varied, forest-set, stream-divided place was being approached afar from the north by a company of mounted troops riding as if the devil was after them. It was not the devil, but another body of cavalry, riding at equal speed, though at a great distance behind. The three people from New York as yet neither saw nor heard anything of these horsemen dashing down from the north. Yet the major’s spirits sank lower and lower, as if he had an omen of coming evil.
He was a handsome young man, Major John Colden, being not more than twenty-seven years old, and having the clearly outlined features best suited to that period of smooth-shaven faces. His dark eyes and his pensive expression were none the less effective for the white powder on his cued hair. A slightly petulant, uneasy look rather added to his countenance. He was of medium height and regular figure. He wore a civilian’s cloak or outer coat over the uniform of his rank and corps, thus hiding also his sword and pistol. Other externals of his attire were riding-boots, gloves, and a three-cornered hat without a military cockade. He was mounted on a sorrel horse a little darker in hue than the animal ridden by Miss Elizabeth’s black boy, Cuff, who wore the rich livery of the Philipses.
The steed of Miss Elizabeth was a slender black, sensitive and responsive to her slightest command—a fit mount for this, the most imperious, though not the oldest, daughter of Colonel Frederick Philipse, third lord, under the bygone royal régime, of the manor of Philipsburgh in the Province of New York. They gave classic names to quadrupeds in those days and Addison’s tragedy was highly respected, so Elizabeth’s scholarly father had christened this horse Cato. Howsoever the others who loved her regarded her present jaunt, no opposition was shown by Cato. Obedient now as ever, the animal bore her zealously forward, be it to danger or to what she would.
Elizabeth’s resolve to revisit the manor hall on the Hudson, which had been left closed up in the steward’s charge when the family had sought safety in their New York City residence in 1777, had sprung in part from a powerful longing for the country and in part from a dream which had reawakened strongly her love for the old house of her birth and of most of her girlhood. The peril of her resolve only increased her determination to carry it out. Her parents, brothers, and sisters stood aghast at the project, and refused in any way to countenance it. But there was no other will in the Philipse household able to cope with Elizabeth’s. She held that the thing was most practicable and simple, inasmuch as the steward, 23 with the aid of two servants, kept the deserted house in a state of habitation, and as her mother’s sister, Miss Sarah Williams, was living with the widow Babcock in the parsonage of Lower Philipsburgh and could transfer her abode to the manor-house for the time of Elizabeth’s stay. Major Colden, an unloved lover,—for Elizabeth, accepting marriage as one of the inevitables, yet declared that she could never love any man, love being admittedly a weakness, and she not a weak person,—was ever watchful for the opportunity of ingratiating himself with the superb girl, and so fearful of displeasing her that he dared not refuse to ride with her. He was less able even than her own family to combat her purpose. One day some one had asked him why, since she called him Jack, and he was on the road to thirty years, while she was yet in her teens, he did not call her Betty or Bess, as all other Elizabeths were called in those days. He meditated a moment, then replied, “I never heard any one, even in her own family, call her so. I can’t imagine any one ever calling her by any more familiar name than Elizabeth.”