“Lord Cornwallis has won the game at Guildford,” cried Joscelyn.
“Ay, won it so hard and fast that he has had to run away to hold the stakes,” retorted Mistress Strudwick, equally rejoiced over the British retreat to Wilmington.
“Had the militia but done their share, we should have finished Cornwallis for good,” Richard wrote to Joscelyn after the battle. “But praise be to Heaven, Banastre Tarleton is among the wounded. I do hope and believe it was my bullet that hit him, for I singled him out for my aim, remembering his bearing to you and my mother last month. If so I hear that his wound proves fatal, I shall wear no mourning.”
And, truth to say, Joscelyn herself sorrowed never a bit over the short colonel’s discomfiture. Later on came another letter:—
“We are on the march to the south to aid Marion, Sumter, and Pickens to snatch South Carolina and Georgia from the foe. We know of the terrible doings of Arnold in Virginia, and General La Fayette has been sent to check him, but much I doubt his success. Ye gods! what a soldier we lost when Arnold went over to the enemy in that traitorous way. He was the one man in our army who was Tarleton’s match in a raid. If the Marquis catches him, however, I should like to be at the reckoning. A traitor with the fire of genius in his veins! At Guildford I looked at his old command, and said to myself that the day had gone differently had Arnold led them. Men followed him like sheep to victory or to death. Think you what a demon it takes to harrow one’s country, to fight against one’s own people!”
As the weeks passed and the spring advanced, Joscelyn’s position in the community grew more irksome, for Tory supremacy was at an end and the patriotic spirit was dominant. “Only the rudeness of some excited boys,” the older folk had said of the incident of her homeward ride the day the British withdrew; but it was rather the true index of the public temper against her, and not a day went by but she was made to feel it keenly. Never was an occasion to annoy her neglected, until between her and her neighbours was a bloodless but harassing feud that destroyed utterly the old harmony and good will. She felt the change bitterly; every neglect or retort rankled in her thoughts until it became as a fester corrupting her happiness. But she kept a brave face to the world, and sang her Tory ballads on the veranda in the soft spring twilights, or as she worked through the sunny hours in the side yard where no flowers but those that blossomed red were permitted to blow. And Mistress Strudwick said to her cronies, with genuine admiration, that twenty Guildfords could not break the spirit of a girl like that.
But necessarily the thing that hurt Joscelyn most was Aunt Clevering’s treatment. Not content to be a spectator, she often took the initiative in the persecution the girl was made to suffer, ignoring her in public or noticing her only to taunt her with some uncivil word or look. A few sentences from Joscelyn might have swept away the barriers and restored the old friendship, but she would not buy her pardon thus. She possibly might not be believed without the proof of Richard’s letter, that first short, fervid missive he had sent her on the eve of the great battle; and that she could not show, not even to his own mother, such a heroine did it make of her, such an ardent, grateful lover of him. Then, too, if this quarrel with Aunt Clevering should be healed, people would ask questions, and when the truth should be known she would be in no better plight—a Tory maid risking everything, even life itself, to hide a Continental spy! Neither friends nor foes would understand; her motives would be misinterpreted, her loyalty questioned; and so her last estate would be no better than her first. Thus did she hold her peace and hide her tears under cover of darkness, the while by day she sang her daring little ditties among the growing things of her garden.
Having been the arch-Royalist of the town, it was but natural that public resentment should be most pronounced against her. The Singletons and Moores were less outspoken, and so drew upon themselves less of contumely. Her caustic speeches, on the contrary, were not forgotten, until Mistress Strudwick threatened half tearfully, half playfully to clip her tongue with her sharp scissors. But the chief thing that kept alive the animosity against her were the letters that came to her now and then from Cornwallis’s camp. She did not deny their reception, but steadily refused to divulge their contents; and as it was believed that in one way or another she contrived to answer them, the idea got abroad that she was in the employ of the British general to keep him posted as to the state of things in Hillsboro’-town. Nothing else could so have set the people against her as this supposed espionage, and all through the advancing summer she felt the weight of their displeasure. Mistress Bryce openly denounced her, boys shouted disrespectful things under her window at night, and the shopkeepers so neglected or refused her orders that, had it not been for Mistress Strudwick, she and her mother would have suffered; but that good friend stood stanchly by her. So loud were the outcries against her when she rode abroad that out of deference to her mother’s wishes, and also to save herself from needless mortification, she never had the saddle put upon her horse.
And yet innocent enough were those letters that caused so much of trouble, filled as they were, not with army news, but with a man’s tender love throes,—the vehement pleadings of a heart swayed by its first grand passion.