I was an old man when I, Hugh Wynne, read these pages, and I am not ashamed to say they cost me some tears.
So far as I remember, neither Jack nor Darthea betrayed by their manner what I learned naught of for so many years. Neither did my Aunt Gainor’s shrewdness get any hint of what passed at Cliveden. I recall, however, that Jack became more and more eager to rejoin his regiment, and this he did some two weeks later.
My father’s condition was such as at times to alarm me, and at last I proposed to him to see Dr. Rush. To my surprise, he consented. I say to my surprise, for he had a vast distrust of doctors, and, to tell the truth, had never needed their help. The day after the doctor’s visit I saw our great physician, whom now all the world has learned to revere, and who was ever more wise in matters of medicine than in matters of state.
He told me that my father was beginning to have some failure of brain because of his arteries being older than the rest of him, which I did not quite comprehend. He had, he said, losses of memory which were not constant. Especially was he affected with forgetfulness as to people, and for a time mistook them, so that for a while he had taken Dr. Rush for his old clerk Mason. The doctor said it was more common to lack remembrance of places. In my father’s condition he might take one man for another, and to-morrow be as clear as to his acquaintance as ever he had been; but that as to business, as was in such eases rare, his mind continued to be lucid, except at times, when his memory would suddenly fail him for a few minutes. The doctor saw no remedy for his condition, and I mention it only because my father’s varying peculiarities came in a measure to affect me and others in a way of which I shall have occasion to speak.
My sense of his state did much to make me more tender and more able to endure the sad outbreaks of passion which Dr. Rush taught me were to be looked for. Nor was my aunt less troubled than I. Indeed, from this time she showed as regarded my father all of that gentleness which lay beneath the exterior roughness of her masculine nature. I observed that she looked after his house, paying him frequent visits, and in all ways was solicitous that he should be made comfortable.
Near about the 1st of March—I am not quite sure of the date—I was asked in the absence of Major Clarkson, chief of the staff, to take his duties for a few days. I then saw how needlessly the general was creating enmities. His worst foe, Mr. Joseph Reed, had become in December president of the Council of State, and we—I say we—were thenceforward forever at outs with the body over which he presided. When at last, thoroughly disgusted, General Arnold was about to resign from the army, those unpleasant charges were made against him which came to little or nothing, but which embittered a life already harassed by disappointed ambition and want of means, and now also by the need to show a fair face to Mr. Shippen, whose daughter’s hand he had asked.
General Arnold’s indifference as to privacy in his affairs amazed me, and I saw enough to make me both wonder and grieve. The friend of Schuyler and of Warren, the soldier whom Washington at one time absolutely trusted, attached me to him by his kindness and lavish generosity, and as an officer he had my unbounded admiration. Surely his place was in the field, and not at the dinner tables of Tories, whose society, as I have said, he much affected. It was a sign of weakness that he overesteemed the homage of a merely gay and fashionable set, and took with avidity the dangerous flattery of the Tory dames.
He was withal a somewhat coarse man, with a vast amount of vanity. It was a blow to his self-estimate when he was unjustly passed over in the promotions to major-general. He felt it deeply, and was at no pains to hide his disgust. I did not wonder that the Shippens did all they could to break off this strange love-affair. They failed; for when a delicate-minded, sensitive, well-bred woman falls in love with a strong, coarse, passionate man, there is no more to be said except, “Take her.”