The Linwoods

by Catharine Maria Sedgwick

  262Strange as it may seem, though thus forewarned, he felt that he was not forearmed, at least in panoply divine; he distrusted his power of resistance, and was anxious to secure himself with grappling irons before he should be wafted by his mother’s influence whither she would. Once assured by her own lips, of what he had but the faintest doubt, that Isabella Linwood loved him, his fate would be fixed. He could tell his mother it was so, and she would be saved the trouble of setting her toils, and he from the necessity of avoiding her snare, and—from the danger of falling into it. If Jasper Meredith’s virtue was infirm, he was sagacious, and had at least the merit of being conscious of the tottering base on which it rested.

  When he left Isabella, he deferred his filial duties, and proceeded forthwith to the city prison, then called the Provost, where the prisoners of war who were in the city, with the exception of such officers as were on their parole, were herded together, and treated in all respects like criminals.

  Meredith, provided with an order from Robertson, the commandant, and countersigned by Cunningham (of infamous memory), the keeper of the city prison, made his way through dens crowded with American soldiers, to a small inner cell which Linwood was allowed the privilege of occupying alone. Meredith had paid Linwood daily visits, had reported to him his father’s condition, and had each day laboured to give such a bias to his mind as to lead him to the course which he was now authorized to set before him.

  “Good morning, and good news for you, Linwood!” he said, as he shut the door after him.

  “Ha! has General Washington interposed for me?”

  Meredith shrugged his shoulders: “I alluded to your father.”

  “God forgive me! he is better, then?”

  263“Quite relieved—the gout has gone to the feet, and if—if he were easy about you, there would be no danger of a relapse. But, my dear Linwood, you are looking ill yourself.”

  “Not ill—no, but deused hungry. Cunningham’s short and sour commons leave an aching void, I assure you.” Linwood placed his hands upon the seat of his most painful sensations at the moment.

  “I hoped the partridges and madeira I smuggled in yesterday would have made you independent of Cunningham’s tender mercies, for twenty-four hours at least.”

  “Don’t mention them just now, if you love me. I worked myself up to making them over to some poor wretches out there, who are dying by inches of bad and insufficient food—but hunger is selfish, and sharp-set as I now am, I am afraid I shall repent me of my good deeds—so don’t speak of them. Are there no despatches, no letters, nothing yet from West Point?”

  Meredith told him of the official communication received from Washington, and the letter from Eliot; of the one he spoke contemptuously, of the other coldly. He then paused for Herbert to give utterance to the disappointment expressed in his truth-telling face, but he was silent, and Meredith proceeded :—“One would think that a brave young officer who, like you, had sacrificed every thing to a fancied duty, deserved a kind word at least from his commander; but these old-fashioned courtesies have a little too much of the aristocratic feudal taint for your republican leader. They savour of the protection the lord extends to his follower in return for services that are more cheaply paid in continental rags, or in the promises of King Congress! It is a hard service where there is neither honour, favour, nor profit.” Meredith again paused. Linwood was still silent, and he went on to make the proposition authorized by Sir Henry, and which he enforced 264by arguments of policy so artfully and plausibly urged, that an older and sterner casuist than our friend Herbert might have been puzzled, if not tempted. But “it was a joyous sight to see” how he brushed away the web that was spun about him. He opened the door that communicated with the adjoining apartment, and the generous blood mounting to his cheeks, “Do you see that young man?” he asked, in a low but energetic voice, and pointing to a youth who, pale and haggard, was stretched on the floor in one corner, wrapped in his camp-cloak, eating a crust of mouldy bread; “he is from Carolina, and as bold and generous a soldier as ever shouldered a musket. He and his two brothers joined the American army and came to the north—by the way, Jasper, please mark how the scattered and distant members of our vast country are drawn and bound together by one sentiment—we fight for Carolina, and Carolina fights for us. This poor fellow is the survivor of his two brothers—they fell in battle. His widowed mother lives on a small plantation. Her slaves have been decoyed away by the offer of freedom from your British officers—generous, forsooth! and she is left with one son. Yesterday this young man contrived to get a letter forwarded, entreating his mother to give up this son to her country. Look at that man with the frame of a Hercules, his joints loosened, and staggering as he crawls about from the effects of starvation, and the cursed fetid atmosphere of this hole! He is a Connecticut farmer, who began his career at Bunker Hill. Think you he spends his time in bewailing unrequited services, and whining about continental money? No, but in stimulating the spirits of these poor fellows by visions of the future glory of their free and independent country. ‘Never mind, boys,’ he says; ‘let ’em burn our houses (his was burned at Fairfield), our children shall live in better, and shall tie the flag with thirteen stripes, and maybe more, to the mast-head of their own ships.’ Jasper, there is not one of 265these most abused men whose heart does not beat true to his country—to die doing battle for her would be nothing; that is the common lot of a soldier—but they are pining, starving, dying by inches here, without one thought disloyal to her. And I,” he continued, after reclosing the door, “am to be humbled and galled with offers that the most squalid wretch among them would spurn. Perhaps I deserve it; there was one moment—but one, thank God! when, tempted by more than all the gold and all the honour in the king’s gift, I swerved. I was saved by a look from Isabella. Do you think I could ever meet that eye again after I had joined Sir Henry’s honourable corps of Reformees. I am humble, and with reason, Heaven knows; but I do marvel, Jasper, that you could suggest dishonour to Isabella’s brother.”

  “Pardon me, Mr. Linwood, we have different views of the honour of the course I proposed, which appears to me simply a return to your inalienable duty.”

  “We certainly have very different views, Jasper. You call those poor fellows out there rebels, I patriots. You think they deserve to be ground to the dust, I that they are infernally abused. You think Washington is cold, selfish, calculating, ambitious; and I believe that he is generous, disinterested, just, (thereby I suffer,) and humane I know him to be; for there is not a man within these walls, myself excepted, who has not received some intimation that he is remembered and cared for by his general. Now, with these views, I could as easily put on the poisoned tunic of Nessus as the uniform of the Reformees.”

  The young men were both awkwardly silent for a few moments. Meredith was discomfited and mortified. Linwood’s vexation had effervesced in his long speech; to use a household simile, the scum had boiled over and left the liquor clear. “Hang it, Jasper,” he resumed, in his natural good-humoured tone, “don’t let’s quarrel, though the more you will serve me 266the more I won’t be served. We will agree to make over these contested topics to dame Posterity, who, instead of peering forward, as we must, into the dark future, has only to cast her eyes behind her to award an infallible decision. Fifty years hence, my dear fellow, would that we could be here to see it, New-York will still be, if you are right, a petty colonial station for British officers; if I am, the rich metropolis of an independent empire. But, allons—is there no news, no gossip, no agreeable scandal afloat?”

  Meredith suddenly recollected and communicated the arrival of his mother and Lady Anne Seton, and the propriety of hastening to receive them. Linwood heartily congratulated him, little thinking how deeply his own fate was involved in this arrival.

  Meredith went to play his filial part, and Herbert was left to solitary but not sad reflection. He felt a most comfortable, and perhaps unexpected assurance, that his virtues were purified and s
trengthened in the fires of adversity.

  267CHAPTER XXIII.

  “She, the fair sun of all her sex

  Has bless’d my glorious day;

  And shall a glimmering planet fix

  My worship to its ray?”—BURNS.

  Meredith, after leaving the Provost, was hastening down Broad-street, when he perceived a carriage approaching him. At this moment a band of black musicians, who were in training, bearing the British flag, turned from Beaver into Broad-street; and as they turned, struck up a march in the faces of the horses. The suddenness of the apparition and the clamour terrified them, they reared and plunged. A lady screamed from the coach to the musicians to stop; but the souls of the Africans were lapt in the elysium of their own music, and they neither heard nor heeded till Meredith, springing forward, dashed the instrument of their leader to the ground. The music then ceased, and the coachman, by great adroitness or strength, or both, checked the progress of his steeds, while two ladies sprang from the coach, and were followed by shrieking waiting-maids and broken bandboxes, with their contents of feathers, flowers, ribands, fans, &c., showering over the pavement.

  The elder of the two ladies looked as if she could have lifted up her hands and wept; the younger did lift up hers and laugh. “Make haste, Nancy,” said the elder; “oh, the coloured 268hair-powders—shut up the box, they are all blowing away—we can get none here.”

  “Dépêchez vous, Thérése,” cried the young lady; “oh, mes fleurs—mes plumes!”

  “Ah, oui, mon Dieu! qu’est ce que c’est qu’une demoiselle sans plumes, sans fleurs!” replied the little trig Française, fluttering hither and yon to reclaim her treasures from the dispersing winds.

  “My dear mother!” exclaimed a voice, that for a moment silenced the chattering, and called forth a parenthetical and sotto-voce exclamation from Thérése—“Ah, le fils de madame—un bel homme!”

  While the usual expressions of a joyful meeting were interchanging, Mrs. Linwood, who from her window had watched the affair to its dénouement, appeared at her door, calling “Jasper, bring the ladies here, I entreat you. My dear Mrs. Meredith, I am so sorry you have had such a fright, and yet so very glad to see you.”

  “For the love of Heaven, who is she?” asked Mrs. Meredith, so averting her face as to limit her query to her son.

  “Mrs. Linwood.”

  A shadow passed over Mrs. Meredith’s face; but she instantly replied, “My dear Mrs. Linwood, how very happy I am to see you again—an awkward début, this,” shrugging her shoulders; “but so fortunate it should have happened at your door; that the first house my foot enters in America should be that of a friend.”

  “A friend! Mrs. Linwood! strange, I never heard my aunt mention the name,” thought Lady Anne.

  “Lady Anne Seton,” continued Mrs. Meredith, presenting her niece; “and how is the dear husband? and Herbert, my harem-scarem little friend, as I used to call him? Miss Belle—ah, ten years make such changes—‘the boy and girl to man and woman grown;’ and yourself—upon my word, 269Mrs. Linwood, the ten years have slipped by without touching you.”

  “Aunt forgets she did not recognise her,” thought Lady Anne; and she conveyed her observation of the discrepancy by such an arch glance at her aunt, that she checked the flood-tide of her civilities, and gave Mrs. Linwood, who was nearly overpowered by them, time to rally. She, good woman, received them all literally; and, in return, furnished the most circumstantial details of her husband’s late illness, told when he took physic and when he did not; when his laudanum made him sleep and when it would not—to all of which Mrs. Meredith “lent the pitying ear” of a thoroughbred lady, while she was mentally wondering the woman could be such a fool as to think she cared whether her husband were dead or alive. After having threaded the mazes of the materia medica, Mrs. Linwood concluded with, “Bless me! I have not sent for Isabella!” The good lady trusted she had given Isabella time to make her toilet. Mrs. Linwood’s artifices were very pardonable, and never exceeded some trifling manœuvre to keep the best foot forward without apparent limping. She rung the bell;—no one answered. “Jasper, will you have the goodness,” she said, “to tap at her father’s door, and let Belle know who is here—you see Jasper is quite one of us, Mrs. Meredith.”

  A more acute observer than Mrs. Linwood would have understood the lowering of Mrs. Meredith’s brow as her eye followed her son. “Jasper has been fortunate, indeed, in making such friends,” she said; “a great security is it, my dear Mrs. Linwood, for a young man to have domestic influences, and such influences.”

  On opening Mr. Linwood’s door, Meredith found Isabella apparently absorbed in reading a political pamphlet to her father. “Ah, Jasper, I’m glad to see you!” cried out Mr. Linwood: “I give you joy. I have been trying, ever since I heard your mother was below, to drive this girl down; but 270she sticks to me like the breath of my nostrils. Now Jasper has come for you, you must go, Belle.”

  “Not must, sir, unless Miss Linwood prefers to do so.”

  “Did you come for me—I mean, did my mother send for me?”

  “Do not go down if it is disagreeable to you,” said Meredith, replying to rather more than met the ear.

  “Pshaw! go Belle; your dress is well enough; the ladies—no disrespect, Jasper, it’s the nature of the animal—will like you all the better for being worse dressed than themselves.”

  Isabella was not sorry to have her reluctance ascribed to her dishabille; but that, though she had some womanish feeling about it, constituted a very small portion of her shrinking from a presentation to Jasper’s mother and fair cousin. She had, however, enough self-control to do well whatever must be done; and without farther hesitation she gave her arm to Meredith. As soon as her father’s door was closed after them, he paused. He was intensely anxious to intimate to his mother, at their first meeting, the relation that he believed would subsist between them; but while he hesitated how to word this wish, Isabella prevented him.

  “You have seen Herbert?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the result?” she added, with a quivering lip.

  “Precisely as you wished.”

  “Dear, dear Herbert!” she exclaimed, and sprang forward with a lightened heart and buoyant step. The first flush of elevated and gratified feeling beamed from her soul-lit eye and died her cheek.

  The light within shone on all without her. Her personal anxieties were forgotten; and to her natural elegance of manner there was a graciousness and brightness that made her at once shine forth as the sun of the little circle. Mrs. Meredith had proposed to herself to be condescending to 271Miss Linwood; and was quite sure that Lady Anne, whom she had induced, with an eye to a first impression on Jasper, to array herself before leaving the ship in a French walking-dress, would be frappante. But both ladies were destined to feel in Isabella’s presence that they were lesser lights. Her simple morning-dress, and the classic arrangement of her dark rich hair, unspoiled and untouched by the profane fashion of the times, contrasted most favourably with the forced, prim, and fantastical mode of the day.

  Mrs. Meredith was as near being astounded as a woman of the world ever can be, and was actually embarrassed and uncomfortable; but Lady Anne, though surprised, was charmed. For a moment she might have felt overshadowed; but nothing could, for more than one moment, cloud her sunny self-complacency. “Qu’elle a l’air noble!” she whispered to her cousin—“She has been abroad?—in France?”

  “No,” he replied; “but undisputed superiority anywhere is apt to produce ‘l’air noble.’” Meredith was not a man of independent opinions; and he had never felt a more assured admiration of Isabella than now, that he witnessed her impression on his reluctant and lady-of-the-world mother, and his à-la-mode cousin.

  “You find Isabella grown?” said Mrs. Linwood, expecting to elicit a flood of compliments.

  “Oh, certainly,” replied Mrs. Meredith, “very much grown: ten years, you know, makes a vast difference. Miss Linwood was not, I
believe, much over twelve when I went home.”

  “Ten—twelve—twenty-two—bless me! no, dear Mrs. Meredith, she is not yet quite twenty,” said the simple mother, as eagerly as if she were putting in the plea “not guilty.”

  “Scarcely three years older than my niece,” replied Mrs. Meredith, with an evident satisfaction in the three years minus.

  272“And what are three years?” exclaimed Lady Anne; “they shall make no gulf between us, Miss Linwood—we will be friends at once—intimate—will we not?”

  “You are very kind.”

  “Oh, not in the least. It will be quite as much my gain as yours. Aunt has brought me out to make my début here; and half the pleasure I think must consist in having a friend—a confidante, to talk over one’s conquests with.”

  “Lady Anne, my love, you are so elated by getting out of that odious ship, that you hardly know what you are talking about.”

  “I beg your pardon, aunt, I do. I was talking on the most enchanting subjects: lovers, conquests, and confidantes.”

  “And what do you know about lovers and confidantes, my dear child? They are the unknown inhabitants of a terra incognita to you.”

  “My veteran mother,” thought Meredith, “would fain shelter my pretty cousin with the ægis of simplicity.” But simplicity was not in the rôle of the young lady. “Mille pardons, chere tante,” she replied—“have you not for the last twelve months been teaching me the geography of this unknown world?—and, besides, what think you we read of, talk of, dream of at boarding-school—history?—Greeks and Romans?—no, no, dear lady: young lords and nice officers in scarlet coats and epauletters, and, now and then, par parenthése—un beau cousin.” A bright glance at Jasper with these last words propitiated his mother, and Lady Anne was permitted to proceed. “I take it for granted, Miss Linwood, that New-York is quite a paradise just now?”