He assured me that our general would never end the war; for in revolutions it was not they who began them who ever did bring them to auspicious conclusions. Our general, the doctor went on to tell us, was a weak man, and soon all would be of this opinion.
As he spoke I saw Hamilton in the doorway, and I made haste to present him to the doctor.
The young aide said modestly that he must venture to differ as to our chief. He was a man dull in talk, not entertaining, given to cautious silence, but surely not weak, only slow in judgment, although most decisive in action.
“No great soldier, sir,” said the doctor, “and never will be.”
“He is learning the business, like the rest of us, Dr. Rush. ‘T is a hard school, sir, but it is character that wins at last; may I venture to say this man has character, and can restrain both his tongue and his own nature, which is quick to wrath.”
“Nonsense!” cried the doctor. “The whole country is discontented. We should elect a commander-in-chief once a year.”
In fact, many were of this strange opinion. Hamilton smiled, but made no reply.
I saw Jack flush, and I shook my head at him. I thought what was said foolish and ignorant, but it became not men as young as we to contradict the doctor. It was Rush who, in ‘77, with Adams and others, sustained Gates, and put him in the Board of War, to the bewilderment of affairs. How deep he was in the scheme of that officer and Conway and Lee to displace our chief none know. My aunt insists he had naught to do with it. He was an honourable, honest man, but he was also a good, permanent hater, and sustained his hatreds with a fine escort of rancorous words, where Jack or I would have been profane and brief.
The cabal broke up with Lee’s trial, and when Cadwalader shot Conway through the mouth, and, as he said, stopped one d—- lying tongue, it did not change our doctor’s views. When he and Dr. Shippen, who was no Tory like the rest of his family, quarrelled, as all doctors do, Rush preferred charges, and was disgusted because his Excellency approved the acquittal with some not very agreeable comments. I think he never forgave the slight, but yet I liked him, and shall ever revere his memory as that of a man who deserved well of his country, and had the noble courage of his profession, as he showed amply in the great yellow-fever plague of ‘93.
He told me of my father as still much the same, and of my Aunt Gainor, and of Darthea, who, he thought, was troubled in mind, although why he knew not. She had long since ceased answering the messages we sent her through my aunt. Mr. Warder, he told me later, had given up his suit to Madam Peniston, and was now an outspoken Whig. The lady was disposed to seek refuge again with her De Lancey cousins in New York, but Darthea was obstinate, and not to be moved. And so we got all the gossip of our old town, and heard of Mrs. Arnold’s having been ordered to leave, and of how the doctor, like our own Wayne, had always distrusted her husband. Indeed, we had asked a thousand questions before we let the doctor get to my bed, and we ourselves, pulling on our sherry-vallies, a kind of overalls, to protect our silk stockings from the mud, were away to the ball.