“I saw Darthea to-day,” he goes on to write. “She is going to New York. She talked to me with such frankness as almost broke my heart. She does not know how dear she is to me. I was near to telling her; but if she said No,—and she would,—I might—oh, I could not see her again. I had rather live in doubt. And whether Hugh loves her or not I would I knew. Mistress Wynne does but laugh and say, ‘Lord bless us! they all love her!’ Hugh is, as to some things, reticent, and of Darthea likes so little to speak that I am led to think it is a serious business for him; and if it be so, what can I but go! for how could I come between him and a woman he loved? Never, surely. Why is life such a tangle? As concerns this thing, it is well I am going. What else is left for me? My duty has long been plain.
“I did venture to ask Darthea of Mr. Arthur Wynne. She said quietly, ‘I have had a letter to-day;’ and with this she looked at me in a sort of defiant way. I like the man not at all, and wonder that women fancy him so greatly. When I said I was sorry she was going, she replied, ‘It is no one’s business;’ and then added, ‘nor Mr. Wynne’s neither,’ as if Hugh had said a word. In fact, Miss Peniston was almost as cross and abrupt as dear Miss Wynne at her worst. If ever, God willing, I should marry her,—there, I am blushing even to think of such a sweet impossibility,—she would drive me frantic. I should be in small rages or begging her pardon every half-hour of the day.
“What will Hugh say when he hears the Meeting means to disown us? It troubles me deeply. My father is trembling too, for since a month he is all for resisting oppression, and who has been talking to him I do not know. Miss Wynne called him a decrepit weathercock to me last month, and then was in a fury at herself, and sorry too; but she will talk with him no more. It cannot be because he has sold his Holland cloths so well to the clothier-general. I never can think that.
“When I saw Miss Wynne, and would have seen Hugh had he been in, I told her of my meaning to go away by the packet to Burlington, and thence through New Jersey. She said it was well, but that Hugh should not go yet. He should go soon. Mr. Lee, the new general, had been to see her—a great soldier, she was told. But she had not liked him, because he let her believe he came of the same family as Mr. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, whereas this is not so. He was lank, sour, and ill dressed, she said, and fetched his two dogs into the house. When he saw Hugh, he said it was time all the young men were out. Miss Wynne disliked this, and it is reported that Mrs. Ferguson and she, meeting after church, had nearly come to blows, because Mrs. Ferguson had said the people who made the war should be in the war, and on this the old lady desired to know if this arrow was meant for her or for her nephew. Mrs. F., not lacking courage, said she might choose.
“So Madam Wynne is pulled this way and that, and I must go alone; and I shall have a lieutenant’s commission, and a pretty fellow am I to order other men about. I like best the continental line.”
I saw Jack the day after my ride with Miss Peniston. I said sadly that he was right, and we talked it all over that week, running down the river at early morning after ducks, and through the wide channel between League Island and the Neck; or else we were away to Red Bank, or to the Jersey coast, if the ice permitted, as it often did. It was a wonderful, open winter, as it chanced, and we had more than our usual share of the ducks, which were very abundant. As we lay in the gray weeds below the bluff at Red Bank, we little thought of what it was to see. Our gallant Mercer, who fell at Princeton, was to give a name to the fort we built long after; and there, too, was to die Count Donop, as brave a man, far from home, sold by his own prince to be the hireling of a shameful king.
The ducks flew over thick, and between times, as we waited, we talked at intervals of the war, of Montgomery’s failure to capture Quebec, and of the lingering siege of Boston; of how the brutal destruction of Norfolk in December had stirred the Virginians, and indeed every true heart in the colonies. Jack would write when occasion served.
That last day (it was now February, as I have said) we supped with my aunt, Jack and I. After the meal was over, she went out of the room, and, coming back, gave Jack a handsome, serviceable sword, with a proper sash and tie. Then she must make him take a hundred pounds in a purse she had netted; and when he would not she said he was going to school, and must have a tip, and would hear no more, and kissed him, at which he got very red. Indeed, she was deeply moved, as was plain to see from the way she talked, speaking fast, and saying all manner of foolish things.
This business of the sword troubled me more than it ought to have done, and I resolved that nothing should long keep me out of the field; but alas! it was many a day before my going became possible. And so my Jack went away, and Miss Peniston.
The war was dull for a time, as the armies got ready for a spring at each other’s throats. At last, in March, his Excellency seized Dorchester Heights, and Boston became no longer tenable. Howe left it on March 17, and, what was as desirable, some two hundred cannon and vast stores of ammunition. Then, on Cambridge Common, our chief threw to the free winds our flag, with its thirteen stripes, and still in the corner the blood-red cross of St. George.