QUAKER LADIES
When Stephen returned at mid-morning of that same day, his horses
steaming in the cold air and his two serving-men trailing out behind
him, unable to keep up with the furious pace their master had set, he
found that, for the first time, there was no one at the door to greet
him. He had spent the night at a small town twenty miles from Hopewell
and, on hearing at dawn of the successful British expedition, he had
pushed forward with all haste, quite ignorant still of the happenings at
his own house. His eyes opened wide at the sight of blue-coated soldiers
scattered about his grounds, but he did not stop to question them. He
came into the hall and found no one there, he mounted the stairs and on
the landing met Mother Jeanne, who greeted him with such a torrent of
incoherent French that he had not the slightest idea of what she sought
to tell him. After looking in at several of the open doors, his
expression of wonder growing every moment, he finally encountered Doctor
Thorndyke, just coming downstairs after a lengthy examination of the
wounded officer.
“In Heaven’s name,” said Stephen to him, “will some one tell me what is
amiss in this house? I come home to find my garden in the possession of
soldiers, Mère Jeanne apparently quite out of her senses, Clotilde
asleep, a total stranger installed in my best bedroom and a scarlet
coat, covered with blood, hanging over the back of a chair. Is all the
world gone mad, or is it only I?”
The Doctor laughed.
“It is indeed somewhat disturbing,” he said, “to come home to a peaceful
house and find a wounded prisoner of war, a young heroine whose praises
every one is singing and a frantic Frenchwoman whom excitement seems to
have robbed of all her English. But come downstairs, Stephen, and I will
give you the whole story as well as I have managed to learn it from a
dozen different people who all sought to tell me at once. The one who
knows the most is up yonder in your guest room and will be unable to
state his version of the matter for some time to come.”
In Stephen’s study, where Mother Jeanne, who had at last collected her
wits a little, brought them breakfast, the Doctor related the story of
the escape of Andrew Shadwell and the night’s adventures of Clotilde.
“She knew,” commented Stephen, when he heard of her toiling so late in
the empty cottage; “she knew well indeed that, had I been here, I would
never have permitted such a thing. She was making the most of my
absence, the minx!”
When he heard how the English soldiers had marched past Hopewell unheard
and unseen in the storm, and had brought the troublesome Tories safely
away, he chuckled aloud and slapped his knee.
“We are well rid of Andrew Shadwell, the slippery rogue,” he said, “and
this was, after all, the best way out of the situation. I wish the
English joy of him. But when I overtook the troops from Boston this
morning, I found them a disappointed set who had just learned that they
had arrived a few hours too late. Their leader had naught to do but to
march his men back again with as good a grace as he could, for the ship
that brought the English troops was already far out to sea.”
When the Doctor reached that part of the tale dealing with the young
Captain’s return to see that Clotilde was safe, he warmed to his task of
storyteller.
“It was the deed of a gallant fellow,” he concluded, “and I would the
boy were not so sorely hurt. I find I have a friendly feeling for him,
not only on account of his courage but because of his resemblance to
you. Even as he lies there, white and unconscious, he has a familiar
look that strikes me as uncanny. Just go and see for yourself, if you do
not believe me.”
Stephen mounted the stairs once more and stepped into the room where the
wounded soldier lay. Bidding the Doctor’s servant, who watched beside
the bed, to draw aside the curtain, he stood for some time gazing at the
white face on the pillow. Then he turned, without a word, and went back
to his waiting friend.
“I will show you why his face is so familiar,” he said.
He led the physician into the dining-room and pointed to the portrait
that hung in the place of honour above the sideboard. It was a picture
of Amos Bardwell, painted in England and sent many years ago to Alisoun
Sheffield. As was the somewhat unnatural fashion of that day, the artist
had pictured the young man on horseback, his painted steed prancing, his
cloak flying out behind him and his plumed hat held aloft in his hand.
Behind him was the usual background of woods and distant cliffs crowned
by a castle. Face and figure were so much like the young officer’s
upstairs that it was small wonder that Clotilde, when she saw him gallop
down the road that October morning, had felt so sure she had seen him
before. As Stephen and the Doctor looked at the portrait, both were
thinking that it might have been meant for the wounded stranger himself,
save that the picture was fifty years old and the young soldier was
surely not half that age.
“Amos Bardwell!” exclaimed the doctor. “How happily we used to play
together when we two were little eager lads and he was a big, kindly
one. Do you mind how he taught us the game of ‘King William was King
James’ Son’ and how you would never let us play it again after your
friend the fat British Sergeant gave you the true history of King
William and King James? Heard you ever what became of that doughty
officer?”
“Sergeant Branderby?” said Stephen. “I fear that he perished the next
year in the great Jacobite uprising, for I never heard news of him
again. Do you remember his tales of the Low Countries to which we used
to listen so breathlessly?”
The Doctor did not answer at once as he was still gazing at the picture.
“So this lad upstairs is Amos’ son!” he observed at last.
“His grandson, more likely,” Stephen answered, looking reflectively at
the picture. “You forget, comrade, how time passes and that we were not
boys yesterday. Amos’ only child was a daughter, of whom we lost all
trace after he died, nor ever knew even whom she married. When I was in
England, I went down to the little place in the country that was his
home when he was not at sea: I saw his grave in the churchyard, but of
his daughter I could get no news. The village people said only that she
never came back there after her father’s death, but had, they thought,
finally gone to dwell with some distant kindred in Scotland. One old
woman had heard it rumoured that the girl had married one of these
far-removed cousins, but she could not recollect the name.”
As they turned way from the picture, the Doctor said in a tone of
misgiving:
“That boy upstairs seems a sturdy fellow, but my heart fails me
concerning him, none the less. It will take skilled and faithful nursing
to bring back to health a lad with one bullet lodged in his ribs and
another gone through his knee. My man is with him now, but even he is
not so good an attendant as is needed, while that old Frenchwoman who
cared so well for you, Stephen, is now too old and prone to the losing
of her wits. Who is to be the boy’s nurse I do not know.”
“Here is his nurse,” said a quiet voice in the doorway, and the two
wheeled to see Clotilde standing there, gay and sweet as a flower after
her long sleep and none the worse for her adventures.
“You? Why you are but a child!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Only last week,
it seems to me, I saw you, a little maid, standing in that doorway with
your white-frilled apron and your braided hair and with a smoking
blunderbuss held in your hand as daintily as though it were a rose.”
Clotilde smiled, but soberly.
“That was more like seven years ago than seven days,” she answered, “and
I am surely now a woman grown although I have failed somehow to reach a
woman’s stature. I have wished often,” she added with a sigh, for this
was a sore subject with her, “that I could have grown tall and stately
like all of those of Master Simon’s kindred.”
“Whatever her age and size, she has done a woman’s work since the war
began,” said Stephen. “And as for your height, my child, sigh not over
that as being unlike the others. Radpaths, Bardwells and Sheffields, we
are all proud to call you one of us!”
At which speech, Clotilde first dropped him a stately curtsey and then
ran across the room to throw her arms about his neck.
It was a long, long time, as the Doctor had feared, before the young
English officer made even enough progress on the road toward health to
warrant them in hoping that he could be brought the whole of that
toilsome way. Many weeks it was before his fevered mind became wholly
clear, or the Doctor would permit his being questioned as to who he was
and whether there was really reason for his resemblance to the portrait
in the dining room. Upon the first day that he sat up, however, he put
all doubts to an end by giving a full account of himself. Not only did
he prove to be of Stephen’s kindred and the grandson of Amos Bardwell,
but his surname was the same as Master Simon’s. His mother had married a
distant kinsman of Master Simon’s and the boy’s name, therefore, was
Radpath, Gerald Radpath.
“And I am as proud of my Puritan ancestor as any of you Americans can
be,” he said to Stephen and Clotilde as they sat beside his bed. “I have
heard from my mother all the tales of that far journey among the Indians
and how his daughter and my own grandfather, Amos Bardwell, dared to
stand firm at the witch trial. But my knowledge of scenes and places was
vague, having come through so many hands and I never dreamed, that night
when I found Mademoiselle Clotilde that the place of our meeting was the
shoemaker’s cottage and that the snow-covered scene of my disaster was
Master Simon’s famous garden.”
“But how could you,” burst out Clotilde, “if you were of Master Simon’s
blood, draw your sword against the Colonies and maintain the unjust
cause of the King?”
Stephen held up his hand in warning against the speaking of such
vigorous reproaches to a man weak and ill and propped up among his
pillows for the first time. But Gerald Radpath only smiled.
“You forget, Mademoiselle,” he replied, “that we also were of your kin
and that you drew your swords against us. Moreover, Master Simon was as
loyal a subject of Queen Elizabeth and the first King James as am I, of
King George. Did not his father, Robin Radpath, die in the effort to
bear the great Queen’s message to the Emperor of Cathay? And I think you
do not understand,” he went on more earnestly, “that we who came over to
America in the King’s army had no very real knowledge of the cause in
which we were fighting. Many such as I came up from the counties far
from London, heard that beyond the seas was a company of ungrateful
rebels who wished to make over our Parliament’s laws to suit themselves,
and so threw ourselves headlong into our country’s service. We were
amazed, later, to find that we were facing a spirited people who fought
for a splendid cause, one that they, and even we ourselves in the end,
knew was a just one. We had little taste for our task, most of us,
before much time had passed; this I tell you freely since now I lie here
wounded with no great chance of fighting again before the war is over.
But I tell you also that, once having sworn allegiance to the King’s
service, we will not turn traitors and betray his side to the enemy. His
officers will fight on until a chance comes to withdraw honourably—we
are not turncoats like Andrew Shadwell.”
“You are a good lad and a loyal soldier,” said Stephen, holding out his
hand to clasp his cousin’s heartily. “A brave heart is a brave heart on
whichever side it stands.”
“Had you ever had to do with Andrew Shadwell before?” inquired Clotilde,
for she noticed his tone of extreme bitterness when he spoke of their
Tory neighbour.
“That night my companions surrendered to the Colonial soldiers, and I
managed to escape,” Gerald answered, “Andrew Shadwell hid me in his barn
from midnight until dawn. Then he came out to say that he had decided to
swear allegiance to the American cause, since fortune seemed to be
against the English, and so he turned me out into the growing daylight.
Nor would he even give me information as to the road, lest it should be
held against him that he had given aid to the enemy. Later, when the
tide of success seemed to have set in our direction again, he changed
his party once more and clamoured for rescue so loudly that the British
Commander, in return for some information that he had given, was obliged
to comply with his request. The traitorous fellow had the grace to
stammer and turn red when he saw who it was that had been sent to save
him. Had he remained, he would have been a loyal citizen of the United
States again, by now, I do not doubt.”
Andrew Shadwell, wherever he had taken refuge, must indeed have chided
himself bitterly for fleeing to the English just when success seemed to
have returned to the side of the Colonies. Victory was with the American
arms all through the Spring, for the troops that had braved the horrors
of the Valley Forge winter, found thereafter that the dangers of battle
were small by comparison.
So, at least, did Miles Atherton explain the turn of fortune in the
American favour. He had been sent by General Washington on some errand
to Boston and had ridden down to Hopewell for a hasty visit to his
family and to Stephen and Clotilde. It was a bright, sweet, warm June
day that they sat together in the garden, when all the gayest birds were
singing and all the softest breezes blowing—a day to which Clotilde long
looked back with wistful memory.
Stephen had been ill and seemed now quite well again: that was one
reason why she was so happy. His malady was one which he himself
pronounced of no importance but over which the Doctor looked grave.
“These flutterings of the heart,” jested Stephen, “are less worthy of an
old man than of a young maid. Were they Clotilde’s—”
“It is no matter for joking,” his old friend interrupted sternly.
“Flutterings of the heart must be attended to or they will have grave
effect.”
“You cannot frighten an old man whose span is almost completed,”
returned Stephen. “Besides I will live to see the end of this long
struggle; to do that I am determined.”
So the Doctor had gone out muttering anxiously to himself, but Stephen
had managed to quiet Clotilde’s fears and to make her smile again.
Two other pleasant things had also happened on that same morning,
previous to Miles’ coming. One was Gerald Radpath’s walking unaided for
the first time. He had come out into the garden and had limped as far as
the bench by the sundial, with such success that Clotilde had felt that
they could believe at last that his recovery was not so hopelessly far
away. Weak and pale as he still was, he seemed, for the first time as he
sat there in the sunshine, to be somewhat more than the mere ghost of
that sturdy soldier who had carried her across the snowy meadow. Another
joy, one even more unexpected, was that the linden tree, after standing
black and bare for two Springs, this year put forth leaves and, on that
very day, had come once more into bloom. Many times the question had
been raised as to whether it ought not to be cut down, but each time
Stephen had refused, saying that trees so injured had been known to
stand seven years dead and then put forth life again. Now his patience
had been rewarded, the happy bees hummed in the branches, the grass was
green in the little Queen’s garden and the hedges were growing tall
again.
“It is surely a pleasant world,” said Gerald, as he drank in long
breaths of the fresh warm air and looked out at the dancing blue waters
of the harbour.
It was at this moment that the gate slammed and Miles came hurrying up
the path to greet Clotilde and Stephen. When he turned to Gerald, the
faces of both were a study, since the one remembered keenly the moment
when his foolhardiness had nearly caused his death as a spy, while the
other had the unhappy knowledge that, surrounded though he was by
comfort and kindness, he was now the prisoner who had then been the
captor. The moment of confusion was not long, however, for Clotilde
began telling pell-mell the reason of that resemblance that had puzzled
them all. Having finished, she began to ply Miles with questions as to
all that had befallen him during that season of suffering at Valley
Forge. The thought of all that the patriots had undergone stirred Miles
to what was, for him, an unusual flow of speech.
“The memory of that winter will last all of us to our dying day, and
after,” he said. “There were bitter cruel winds that cut through our
threadbare coats as though they had been made of gossamer, there were
steep slippery paths where our benumbed feet stumbled and the ice tore
our worn-out shoes and gashed us to the bone. Our little huts of logs
and earth were more like the burrows of animals than the abiding places
of humans.”
“And all the time,” said Clotilde, “the British army was so near by, and
so warm and comfortable in Philadelphia.”
“Yes,” replied Miles, “we could climb to the hilltop and see the smoke
of the city and know that it was there the English soldiers were
spending the winter in pleasant ease. My heart used to fill with
bitterness, at times, and I would wonder how it could be that all should
be so fair for them while such hardship was meted out to us.”
“Nevertheless,” commented Stephen, “you had a great man to lead you
through your time of suffering.”
Miles’ eyes shone at the recollection.
“We had indeed,” he said, “and there were no such thoughts could assail
me when I came near General Washington. I used to meet him sometimes
walking the snowy path before his little, rough stone house, or I would
see him through the window, writing letters in the cold bare room. I
would see that his grey, drawn face was growing gaunter and older every
day and my heart would burn in me to do my utmost for such a man. There
was not one of his soldiers but loved him just as I did. Our shoes and
clothes were worn and our strength was wasted but had he asked us to
walk to Jericho and back for his simple pleasure we would have done it
joyfully. It is the love of the soldiers for General Washington that has
fought this war, it is that spirit of his, sombre, slow, but never
turning back, that will lead us to victory in the end. I would that my
words were not so futile, that I could make you see what manner of man
he is.”
“You have not done so ill, boy, as it is,” said Stephen, a little
huskily, as he sat looking straight before him down to the sea. The tide
was coming in along the sandy beach and past the rocky headlands. It
must have been that he likened it in his mind to the rising tide of the
cause of Liberty, coming so slowly but not to be stopped or stayed by
the hand of any man. He must have wondered whether that cause would
touch its high-water mark while he still lived.
“And when the Spring came, Miles, were you not happy then?” questioned
Clotilde.
Miles’ eyes danced, while his face and tone changed so completely that
Stephen turned sharply to look at him in startled wonder.
“Ah, you never saw such a Spring as that which comes to Pennsylvania,”
he exclaimed, “not the headlong season we have here, when one week the
meadows are white with snow and the next are as green as in midsummer,
but a long, warm, slow-coming Spring when the little, brown, wooded
hills turn green so gradually that you scarce can see the change from
day to day, when the sunny banks are thicker with blue violets than with
grass, and when a strange wild herb grows thick in the meadows and
smells sharp and sweet when the grazing horses trample it. Our Spring
comes in a great breathtaking wave, but theirs like some rippling tide
that breaks and rises a little and breaks again.”
“It is so we have Spring in England,” said Gerald. He, as well as
Stephen seemed to have observed the change in Miles’ manner, and was
regarding him with keen curiosity. Clotilde alone seemed not to notice
anything unusual, so absorbed was she in what he said.
“I can never forget,” went on Miles, “a meadow all green and yellow with
new grasses and a tiny stream flowing through the midst, its banks
blue-grey with masses of flowers called Quaker Ladies. Such sweet,
gay-hearted little blossoms, growing in thousands beside the marshy
bank—”
He suddenly caught Stephen’s eye fixed upon him and stopped in a scarlet
agony of embarrassment. Getting up from his seat he announced hastily
that he must go, that his time was short in Hopewell and there was much
to do.
“Then come first to the house with me,” said Stephen. “I have a letter
for General Washington written some days since, and have been vainly
seeking a messenger.”
As they walked up the path together he once more regarded the boy oddly.
“It seems to me,” he observed, “that I never before heard a bluff
soldier talk so fondly of blossoms and meadows and—Quaker Ladies.”
He was unkind enough to laugh aloud as Miles floundered vainly in his
effort to explain.
“But you do not understand,” the poor youth began vainly to protest in
stammering explanation, “that the Quaker Ladies are flowers—that grow
beside brooks—”
“Ay, and there is another variety, that peeps through farm-house windows
when brave soldier lads go riding by,” Stephen suggested. “But never
mind, boy,” he added, his kind voice full of warm affection, “do not
blush so. Know you not that no one wishes you greater happiness than do
Clotilde and I?”
“Thank you—ah, thank you, Master Sheffield,” Miles managed to get out,
and with that seized the letter and made his escape.
It was not strange that Clotilde looked back upon this day as one of
especial happiness. They had been so gay there in the garden, all four
of them together, so little realising the changes that were to come so
soon. Gerald’s returning health made him talk more and more of imposing
on their hospitality no longer: a month later his exchange was effected
and he made ready for departure. It was arranged that he should go back
to England since he had neither the power nor, if the truth were told,
the heart for further fighting. David Thurston came home on leave at
just that time and it was arranged that Captain Radpath was to ride back
with him as far as New York where he could take ship for home.
Stephen had whispered to Clotilde some of his suspicions as to the state
of Miles’ heart and together they made very merry over the secret. When
a letter came from him, sent by the hand of David, she ran with it into
the garden eager to see if it contained any further hints of that
suspected affair of the Quaker Lady. She was smiling as she opened the
letter, smiling for the first time in many days.
Gerald Radpath was to leave in less than a week’s time. Strange to say,
he too had seemed very sombre these last few days, very quiet and
thoughtful and much unlike his former cheery self. Many times Stephen
had caught him watching with wistful eyes as Clotilde went to and fro
about the house or garden.
“Well, is it small wonder?” Stephen had said with a sigh to Mother
Jeanne, whose sharp black eyes, you may be sure, had noticed the same
thing. “He dared much for her and she has been a faithful nurse to him.
I think that great happiness is to come out of that adventure in
Skerry’s cottage.”
But, apparently, Stephen for once was wrong. He could not know that, on
the morning that Miles’ letter came, Gerald had been walking long in the
garden and had finally come hurrying up the path, his face bright with
happy resolve. He had paused when he came upon Clotilde, seated under
the linden tree, just unfolding the paper in her hands.
“A letter?” he said inquiringly.
“Yes, from Miles,” she returned with a bright smile, and, not realising
that he had stopped beside her instead of going on, she began to read.
Gerald watched her as her eyes ran with eager interest from line to
line, thought he could guess the reason of her being so absorbed and,
with all the new happiness gone from his face, he turned away.
When, a few days later, he said good-bye to her before the door of the
great house, he tried to mutter some words about “thanks for her great
kindness” and “sincere hopes for her welfare always,” but both he and
she fell into desperate confusion and, in the end, he strode away down
the steps, his farewells only half said. Clotilde watched him mount his
grey horse and ride away down the driveway. She saw him disappear beyond
the turn and felt, all of a sudden, very little and lonely in the midst
of a very big, dreary, empty world.
It seemed to her, poor child, that for an absolutely unlimited time
thereafter she had spent all her days in the dullest and weariest of
tasks, of which the most unwelcome was the tending of cabbages. She grew
to hate the great, coarse, clumsy vegetables that filled Master Simon’s
garden and that must continue to grow there, for the feeding of the
poor, as long as the war should last. And the war dragged on endlessly,
winter, summer, winter again and another summer: would it never cease?
Stephen grew frailer and his face was often sharp with suffering, but
still he jested over all his ills. He would not even allow Clotilde to
complain that it was unjust that he should undergo so much.
“Every one suffers in war time,” he would say. “We can expect nothing
else.”
“And will the war never end?” she exclaimed one day.
“Ay, some day, my dear,” he answered, so gently that she was ashamed of
her vehemence. “Remember that Jacob served for Rachel seven years; would
you have us, who are serving for Liberty, stop at only five?”
“If seven years were all,” she could not help replying, “but it looks
now as though it were to be seven hundred.”
There came at last a bright autumn morning that she was never to forget.
The brisk spiciness in the air made the sun seem pleasant, so that
Stephen, who had been ailing a little more than usual, had had his chair
moved to the window that he might bask in the grateful warmth. Clotilde
had made him comfortable with cushions and had gone to attend to her
other duties about the house. She was standing at the china-cupboard in
the dining-room when she heard the sound of horse’s feet on the drive,
heard the rattle of the knocker and old Jason’s shuffling steps as he
went to open the door. There was a pause, then Stephen’s voice called to
her from the next room.
“Clotilde, my child,” he said, “a despatch from General Washington, and
such joyful news. Come quickly and read it. But wait, first attend to
the messenger, I have never seen a man so spent.”
“Yes, Master Sheffield, I will come to you in a moment,” she answered.
Jason was conducting the man to the kitchen and she followed to see that
he had what he needed. He did indeed seem to have ridden so hard as to
be utterly worn out; he sat in the chimney corner scarcely able to
speak, so she spent some time in brewing a drink that would help to
revive his strength. It must have been nearly twenty minutes later that
she went into the study.
Stephen was leaning back in his big chair, the letter still lying on his
knee. He had dropped asleep there in the peaceful sunshine and seemed to
be dreaming of happy things, so contented was his smile. She took the
paper and read, only a few short words, but joyful news indeed.
“On October nineteenth, Lord Cornwallis surrendered his entire force to
the allied French and American armies. I think we may say, dear friend,
and thank God in so saying, that this means the end of the war.”
The end of the war! What might that not mean to all of them? She had a
sudden, joyful thought that it might bring the return of—of some one,
then her conscience smote her that her first thought had been for
herself. How happy Stephen looked, how he was resting after all this
heavy labour and weary waiting!
She sat down beside him to wait patiently until he should awake and they
could enjoy the great news together. For some time she sat there, very
quietly, watching the slow sunshine creep up along his hand and arm and
finally touch his smiling face and his white hair. How young he still
looked, somehow, and how boyish in spite of all the years.
She waited happily, she could not tell how long. It was not until Mère
Jeanne came in, not until she saw the old Frenchwoman’s face suddenly
grow white and heard her cry—
“Ah, the good angels protect us now!” that she realised that the
peaceful sleep into which Stephen had fallen was of the sort that lasts
forever.