Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

At the window, sniffing the fresh dawn, I listened.

  “Footfalls in the hills!” she said, trembling. “Out of the morning men are coming! God make me brave! God make me brave!”

  For a long time we stood silent; the village slept below us; the stillness of the dawn remained unbroken, save by a golden-robin’s note, fluting from a spectral elm.

  “It is not yet time,” I said: “let us sleep on, dear heart.”

  But she would not, and I was fain to dress me in my leather, lest the summons coming swift might find me all unready at the call.

  Then she roused Betty and the maid and servants, bidding them call up Mount and Renard, for the hour was close upon us all.

  “Dear love,” I said, “this is a strange fear that takes you from your pillows there, at dawn.”

  “Strange things befall a blindly loving heart,” she said; “I heard them in my dreams, and knew them, all marching with their yellow moccasins and raccoon-caps and green thrums blowing in the wind.”

  “Riflemen?”

  “Ay, dear love.”

  “Foolish prophetess!”

  “Too wise! Too wise!” she whispered, wearily, nestling within my arms, a second only, then:

  “Sir Michael!” roared Mount below my window; “Cresap is on the hills with five hundred men of Maryland!”

  Stunned, I stared at Silver Heels; her face was marble, glorified.

  As the sun rose I left her, and, scarce knowing what I did, threw my long rifle on my shoulder and ran out swiftly through the garden.

  Suddenly, as though by magic summoned, the whole street was filled with riflemen, marching silently and swiftly, with moccasined feet, their raccoon caps pushed back, the green thrums tossing on sleeve and thigh. On they came, rank on rank, like brown deer herding through a rock run; and, on the hunting-shirts, lettered in white across each breast, I read:

  LIBERTY OR DEATH.

  Mount and the Weasel came up, rifles shouldered, coon-skin caps swinging in their hands. Mount shyly touched the hand that Silver Heels held out; Cade Renard took the fingers, and, bending above them with a flicker of his aged gallantly, pressed them with his shrivelled lips.

  “We will watch over your husband, my lady,” he said, raising his dim eyes to hers.

  “Ay, we will bring him back, Lady Cardigan,” muttered Jack Mount, twisting his cap in his huge paws.

  Silver Heels, holding them each by the hand, strove to speak, but the voice in her white throat froze, and she only looked silently from them to me with pitiful gray eyes.

  “To kill the Red Beast,” muttered Mount; “it is quickly done, Lady Cardigan. Then your husband will return.”

  “To kill the Beast,” repeated Renard; “the Red Beast with twin heads. Ay, it can be done, my lady. Then he will return.”

  “I swear it!” cried Mount, flinging up his great arm. “He will return.”

  “To doubt it is to doubt God’s grace, child. He will return,” said Cade Renard.

  She looked at me, at Mount, at the Weasel, then at the torrent of dusty riflemen steadily passing without a break.

  “If he — he must go—” she began. Her voice failed; she caught my hands and kissed them.

  “For our honour — go!” she gasped. “Michael! Michael! Come back to me—”

  “Truly, dear heart — truly! truly!”

  “Ho! Cardigan!” rang out a voice like a pistol-shot from the passing ranks.

  Through my tear-dimmed eyes I saw Cresap, sword shining in his hand.

  “We come,” cried Mount, shaking his rifle towards the rising sun; “death to the Red Beast!”

  “Death to the Beast!” shouted Cresap, shaking his shining sword.

  Half a thousand heavy rifles shook high; half a thousand deep voices roared thunderously through the stony street:

  “Liberty! Liberty or Death!”

  THE END

  And now that of a truth the Red Beast is slain, as all men know, follow these mellow years through which our children move, watching the world like a great witch-flower unfold. Content, I sit with her I love, at dusk, tying my soft feather-flies just as I tied them for Sir William in the golden time. The trout have nothing changed, nor I, though kings already live as legends.

  Bitter-sweet on porch and paling, woodbine and white-starred clematis, and the deep hum of bees; and in the sunlit garden poppies, red as the blood of martyrs. Then moonlight and my dear wife at the door.

  Betty, she hath cradled our tot, Felicity, to croon some soft charm of Southern sorcery, whereby sleep settles like gray dusk-moths on tired lids.

  But for the boy, William, it serves not, and he defies us with his wooden gun, declaiming that a man whose grandsire died with Wolfe will not be taken off to bed at such an hour. And so my sweetheart cradles him, unheeding my stern hint of rods a-pickle for the wilful; and, in the moonlight, joining my fish-rod, I hear her from the nursery, singing the song of blessed days departed, yet with each dawn renewed:

  “For courts are full of flattery,

  As hath too oft been tried;

  The city full of wantonness,

  And both be full of Pride:

  Then care away,

  And wend along with me!”

  “I know a trout,” quoth Jack Mount, taking his cob-pipe from his teeth, “a monstrous huge one, lad, hard by the thunder-stricken hemlock where the Kennyetto turns upon itself. Shemuel did mark the fish, sleeping at noon three days since.”

  “Bring Cade along,” said I, opening the garden gate, and gathering my rod and line lest the fly-hook catch in the rosebush; “and fetch the gaff, Jack, when you return.”

  But when he came again into the moonlit garden he came alone, swinging the bright steel gaff.

  “Cade sleeps by the fire in the great hall,” he said. “Truly, lad, we age apace, and the sly beast, Death, follows us, sniffing, as we go. Lord! Lord! How old we grow — how old, how old! All of us, save Lady Cardigan and you! Years freshen her.”

  “The years are kind,” I said.

  So we descended through the dusk to the sweet water flowing under the clustered stars.

  THE MAID-AT-ARMS

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  TO

  MISS KATHARINE HUSTED

  PREFACE

  After a hundred years the history of a great war waged by a successful nation is commonly reviewed by that nation with retrospective complacency.

  Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in the pageant until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothly across the horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph.

  Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was too terrible, its scars too deep to hide or cover.

  For us, the pages of the past turn all undimmed; battles, brutally etched, stand clear as our own hills against the sky — for in this land we have no haze to soften truth.

  Treading the austere corridor of our Pantheon, we, too, come at last to victory — but what a victory! Not the familiar, gracious goddess, wide-winged, crowned, bearing wreaths, but a naked, desperate creature, gaunt, dauntless, turning her iron face to the west.

  The trampling centuries can raise for us no golden dust to cloak the flanks of the starved ranks that press across our horizon.

  Our ragged armies muster in a pitiless glare of light, every man distinct, every battle in detail.

  Pangs that they suffered we suffer.

  The faint-hearted who failed are judged by u
s as though they failed before the nation yesterday; the brave are re-enshrined as we read; the traitor, to us, is no grotesque Guy Fawkes, but a living Judas of to-day.

  We remember that Ethan Allen thundered on the portal of all earthly kings at Ticonderoga; but we also remember that his hatred for the great state of New York brought him and his men of Vermont perilously close to the mire which defiled Charles Lee and Conway, and which engulfed poor Benedict Arnold.

  We follow Gates’s army with painful sympathy to Saratoga, and there we applaud a victory, but we turn from the commander in contempt, his brutal, selfish, shallow nature all revealed.

  We know him. We know them all — Ledyard, who died stainless, with his own sword murdered; Herkimer, who died because he was not brave enough to do his duty and be called a coward for doing it; Woolsey, the craven Major at the Middle Fort, stammering filthy speeches in his terror when Sir John Johnson’s rangers closed in; Poor, who threw his life away for vanity when that life belonged to the land! Yes, we know them all — great, greater, and less great — our grandfather Franklin, who trotted through a perfectly cold and selfishly contemptuous French court, aged, alert, cheerful to the end; Schuyler, calm and imperturbable, watching the North, which was his trust, and utterly unmindful of self or of the pack yelping at his heels; Stark, Morgan, Murphy, and Elerson, the brave riflemen; Spencer, the interpreter; Visscher, Helmer, and the Stoners.

  Into our horizon, too, move terrible shapes — not shadowy or lurid, but living, breathing figures, who turn their eyes on us and hold out their butcher hands: Walter Butler, with his awful smile; Sir John Johnson, heavy and pallid — pallid, perhaps, with the memory of his broken parole; Barry St. Leger, the drunken dealer in scalps; Guy Johnson, organizer of wholesale murder; Brant, called Thayendanegea, brave, terrible, faithful, but — a Mohawk; and that frightful she-devil, Catrine Montour, in whose hot veins seethed savage blood and the blood of a governor of Canada, who smote us, hip and thigh, until the brawling brooks of Tryon ran blood!

  No, there is no illusion for us; no splendid armies, banner — laden, passing through unbroken triumphs across the sunset’s glory; no winged victory, with smooth brow laurelled to teach us to forget the holocaust. Neither can we veil our history, nor soften our legends. Romance alone can justify a theme inspired by truth; for Romance is more vital than history, which, after all, is but the fleshless skeleton of Romance.

  R.W.C.

  BROADALBIN,

  May 26, 1902.

  I

  THE ROAD TO VARICKS’

  We drew bridle at the cross-roads; he stretched his legs in his stirrups, raised his arms, yawned, and dropped his huge hands upon either thigh with a resounding slap.

  “Well, good-bye,” he said, gravely, but made no movement to leave me.

  “Do we part here?” I asked, sorry to quit my chance acquaintance of the Johnstown highway.

  He nodded, yawned again, and removed his round cap of silver-fox fur to scratch his curly head.

  “We certainly do part at these cross-roads, if you are bound for Varicks’,” he said.

  I waited a moment, then thanked him for the pleasant entertainment his company had afforded me, and wished him a safe journey.

  “A safe journey?” he repeated, carelessly. “Oh yes, of course; safe journeys are rare enough in these parts. I’m obliged to you for the thought. You are very civil, sir. Good-bye.”

  Yet neither he nor I gathered bridle to wheel our horses, but sat there in mid-road, looking at each other.

  “My name is Mount,” he said at length; “let me guess yours. No, sir! don’t tell me. Give me three sportsman’s guesses; my hunting-knife against the wheat straw you are chewing!”

  “With pleasure,” I said, amused, “but you could scarcely guess it.”

  “Your name is Varick?”

  I shook my head.

  “Butler?”

  “No. Look sharp to your knife, friend.”

  “Oh, then I have guessed it,” he said, coolly; “your name is Ormond — and I’m glad of it.”

  “Why are you glad of it?” I asked, curiously, wondering, too, at his knowledge of me, a stranger.

  “You will answer that question for yourself when you meet your kin, the Varicks and Butlers,” he said; and the reply had an insolent ring that did not please me, yet I was loath to quarrel with this boyish giant whose amiable company I had found agreeable on my long journey through a land so new to me.

  “My friend,” I said, “you are blunt.”

  “Only in speech, sir,” he replied, lazily swinging one huge leg over the pommel of his saddle. Sitting at ease in the sunshine, he opened his fringed hunting-shirt to the breeze blowing.

  “So you go to the Varicks?” he mused aloud, eyes slowly closing in the sunshine like the brilliant eyes of a basking lynx.

  “Do you know the lord of the manor?” I asked.

  “Who? The patroon?”

  “I mean Sir Lupus Varick.”

  “Yes; I know him — I know Sir Lupus. We call him the patroon, though he’s not of the same litter as the Livingstons, the Cosbys, the Phillipses, Van Rensselaers, and those feudal gentlemen who juggle with the high justice, the middle, and the low — and who will juggle no more.”

  “Am I mistaken,” said I, “in taking you for a Boston man?”

  “In one sense you are,” he said, opening his eyes. “I was born in Vermont.”

  “Then you are a rebel?”

  “Lord!” he said, laughing, “how you twist our English tongue! ’Tis his Majesty across the waters who rebels at our home-made Congress.”

  “Is it not dangerous to confess such things to a stranger?” I asked, smiling.

  His bright eyes reassured me. “Not to all strangers,” he drawled, swinging his free foot over his horse’s neck and settling his bulk on the saddle. One big hand fell, as by accident, over the pan of his long rifle. Watching, without seeming to, I saw his forefinger touch the priming, stealthily, and find it dry.

  “You are no King’s man,” he said, calmly.

  “Oh, do you take me for a rebel, too?” I demanded.

  “No, sir; you are neither the one nor the other — like a tadpole with legs, neither frog nor pollywog. But you will be.”

  “Which?” I asked, laughing.

  “My wisdom cannot draw that veil for you, sir,” he said. “You may take your chameleon color from your friends the Varicks and remain gray, or from the Butlers and turn red, or from the Schuylers and turn blue and buff.”

  “You credit me with little strength of character,” I said.

  “I credit you with some twenty-odd years and no experience.”

  “With nothing more?”

  “Yes, sir; with sincerity and a Spanish rifle — which you may have need of ere this month of May has melted into June.”

  I glanced at the beautiful Spanish weapon resting across my pommel.

  “What do you know of the Varicks?” I asked, smiling.

  “More than do you,” he said, “for all that they are your kin. Look at me, sir! Like myself, you wear deer-skin from throat to ankle, and your nose is ever sniffing to windward. But this is a strange wind to you. You see, you smell, but your eyes ask, ‘What is it?’ You are a woodsman, but a stranger among your own kin. You have never seen a living Varick; you have never even seen a partridge.”

  “Your wisdom is at fault there,” I said, maliciously.

  “Have you seen a Varick?”

  “No; but the partridge—”

  “Pooh! a little creature, like a gray meadow-lark remoulded! You call it partridge, I call it quail. But I speak of the crested thunder — drumming cock that struts all ruffed like a Spanish grandee of ancient times. Wait, sir!” and he pointed to a string of birds’ footprints in the dust just ahead. “Tell me what manner of creature left its mark there?”

  I leaned from my saddle, scanning the sign carefully, but the bird that made it was a strange bird to me. Still bending from my saddle, I heard his m
ocking laugh, but did not look up.

  “You wear a lynx-skin for a saddle-cloth,” he said, “yet that lynx never squalled within a thousand miles of these hills.”

  “Do you mean to say there are no lynxes here?” I asked.

  “Plenty, sir, but their ears bear no black-and-white marks. Pardon, I do not mean to vex you; I read as I run, sir; it is my habit.”

  “So you have traced me on a back trail for a thousand miles — from habit,” I said, not exactly pleased.

  “A thousand miles — by your leave.”

  “Or without it.”

  “Or without it — a thousand miles, sir, on a back trail, through forests that blossom like gigantic gardens in May with flowers sweeter than our white water-lilies abloom on trees that bear glossy leaves the year round; through thickets that spread great, green, many-fingered hands at you, all adrip with golden jasmine; where pine wood is fat as bacon; where the two oaks shed their leaves, yet are ever in foliage; where the thick, blunt snakes lie in the mud and give no warning when they deal death. So far, sir, I trail you, back to the soil where your baby fingers first dug — soil as white as the snow which you are yet to see for the first time in your life of twenty-three years. A land where there are no hills; a land where the vultures sail all day without flapping their tip-curled wings; where slimy dragon things watch from the water’s edge; where Greek slaves sweat at indigo-vats that draw vultures like carrion; where black men, toiling, sing all day on the sea-islands, plucking cotton-blossoms; where monstrous horrors, hornless and legless, wallow out to the sedge and graze like cattle—”

  “Man! You picture a hell!” I said, angrily, “while I come from paradise!”

  “The outer edges of paradise border on hell,” he said. “Wait! Sniff that odor floating.”

  “It is jasmine!” I muttered, and my throat tightened with a homesick spasm.

  “It is the last of the arbutus,” he said, dropping his voice to a gentle monotone. “This is New York province, county of Tryon, sir, and yonder bird trilling is not that gray minstrel of the Spanish orange-tree, mocking the jays and the crimson fire-birds which sing ‘Peet! peet!’ among the china-berries. Do you know the wild partridge-pea of the pine barrens, that scatters its seeds with a faint report when the pods are touched? There is in this land a red bud which has burst thundering into crimson bloom, scattering seeds o’ death to the eight winds. And every seed breeds a battle, and every root drinks blood!”