A quick light came into those brown eyes, and a little flush to the
cheeks as she said,--oh, so very quickly,--“I want all my friends to do
what seems to them right.”
“I am glad to answer,” I said. “It seems to me my duty to be with the
army; my friends have gone, and now Graydon, the last to leave, has
also gone. I fancy people smiling to see me still at home--I who am so
positive, so outspoken. But here is my father, with whom if I go I break
for life, and here is my Aunt Gainor, who bursts into tears if I do but
mention my wish to leave her.”
“I see,” said Darthea, not looking at me; “now I understand fully; I did
not before. But--will you think it strange if--if I say--I, a good and
loyal woman--that you should go, and soon?” Then there was a long pause,
and she added, “When will this cruel war end?”
“God knows,” said I. “Thank thee; thou art right, Darthea.”
Another pause as long came after, when she said abruptly, and in quite
another voice, “You do not like Mr. Arthur Wynne; why do you not?”
I was startled. One never knew when she would get under one’s guard and
put some prickly question.
“Dost thou think I have reason to like him?” I said. “I did like him
once, but now I do not; nor does he love me any better. Why dost thou
ask me?”
“Oh, for--no matter! I am not going to say why.”
“I think thou knowest, Darthea, that he is no friend of mine.”
“Let us join your aunt,” she said gravely.
“One word more,” said I, “and I shall trouble thee no further. Best sure
that, come what may, there is one man who loves thee with a love no man
can better.”
“I wish you had not said that. There are some, Mr. Wynne, who never know
when to take No for an answer.”
“I am one,” said I.
To this she made no reply, and rode on looking ahead in a dreamy
way that fetched back to my memory a prettiness my dear mother had.
Presently turning, she said:
“Let it end here; and--and my name is Miss Peniston, please.”
There was no pettishness in her voice--only a certain dignity which sits
better on little women than on little men, and provokes no smile. She
was looking at me with a curious steadiness of gaze as she spoke. It was
my last chance for many a day, and I could not let her go with a mere
bow of meek submission.
“If I have been rude or discourteous, I am more sorry than I can say. If
I called thee Darthea, it was because hope seemed to bring us nearer for
one dear moment. Ah! I may call thee Miss Peniston, but for me always
thou wilt be Darthea; and I shall love Darthea to the end, even when
Miss Peniston has come to be a distant dream and has another name. I am
most sorry to have given thee annoyance. Forget that, and pardon me.”
“Mr. Wynne, you are a kindly and courteous gentleman. I wish--and you
must not misapprehend me--that I loved you. Oh, I do not. Your aunt, who
is so good to me, is a fierce wooer. I am afraid of her, and--she must
be miles away; let us join her.” And with this she shook her bridle, and
was off at speed, and my mare and I at her side.
If I have made those who loved Darthea Peniston and me understand this
winning soul, I shall be glad; and if not I shall at least have had
the pleasure of repeating words and describing actions which live in my
remembrance with such exactness as does not apply to much of what, to
the outer world, may seem far better entitled to be remembered. She had
it in her to hurt you, help you, pity you, mock or amuse you, and back
of it all was the honesty and truth of a womanhood capable of courageous
conduct, and despising all forms of meanness. That she was variously
regarded was natural. Margaret Shippen said she cared only for dress and
the men; and the witty Miss Franks, seeing further, but not all, said
that Darthea Peniston was an actress of the minute, who believed her
every role to be real. My wise aunt declared that she was several women,
and that she did not always keep some of them in order. It was clear,
to me at least, that she was growing older in mind, and was beginning
to keep stricter school for those other women with whom my aunt credited
this perplexing little lady.
Before I quite leave her for a time, I must let Jack say a word. It will
tell more than I then knew or could know, and will save me from saying
that which were better said by another.
“At last there is certainty of a long war, and I, being well again,
must take my side. It is fortunate when choice is so easy, for I find it
often hard in life to know just what is right. Poor Hugh, who has gone
further than I from our fathers’ faith, will still declare he is of
Friends; but he commonly drops our language if he is not excited or
greatly interested, and the rest will go too. It is strange that his
resoluteness and clear notions of duty have so helped me, and yet that
he is so caught and tied fast by Miss Gainor’s dependence upon him, and
by his scruples as to his father. He cannot do the thing he would. Now
that my own father has sold out his business, I at least am left without
excuse. I shall go at once, for fear I shall change my mind.” A more
unlikely thing I cannot imagine to have happened to John Warder.
“I saw Darthea to-day,” he goes on to write. “She is going to New York.
She talked to me with such frankness as almost broke my heart. She does
not know how dear she is to me. I was near to telling her; but if she
said No,--and she would,--I might--oh, I could not see her again. I had
rather live in doubt. And whether Hugh loves her or not I would I knew.
Mistress Wynne does but laugh and say, ‘Lord bless us! they all love
her!’ Hugh is, as to some things, reticent, and of Darthea likes so
little to speak that I am led to think it is a serious business for him;
and if it be so, what can I but go! for how could I come between him and
a woman he loved? Never, surely. Why is life such a tangle? As concerns
this thing, it is well I am going. What else is left for me? My duty has
long been plain.
“I did venture to ask Darthea of Mr. Arthur Wynne. She said quietly, ‘I
have had a letter to-day;’ and with this she looked at me in a sort of
defiant way. I like the man not at all, and wonder that women fancy him
so greatly. When I said I was sorry she was going, she replied, ‘It is
no one’s business;’ and then added, ‘nor Mr. Wynne’s neither,’ as if
Hugh had said a word. In fact, Miss Peniston was almost as cross and
abrupt as dear Miss Wynne at her worst. If ever, God willing, I
should marry her,--there, I am blushing even to think of such a sweet
impossibility,--she would drive me frantic. I should be in small rages
or begging her pardon every half-hour of the day.
“What will Hugh say when he hears the Meeting means to disown us? It
troubles me deeply. My father is trembling too, for since a month he is
all for resisting oppression, and who has been talking to him I do not
know. Miss Wynne called him a decrepit weathercock to me last month, and
then was in a fury at herself, and sorry too; but she will talk with him
no more. It cannot be because he has sold his Holland cloths so well to
the clothier-general. I never can think that.
“When I saw Miss Wynne, and would have seen Hugh had he been in, I told
her of my meaning to go away by the packet to Burlington, and thence
through New Jersey. She said it was well, but that Hugh should not go
yet. He should go soon. Mr. Lee, the new general, had been to see her--a
great soldier, she was told. But she had not liked him, because he
let her believe he came of the same family as Mr. Richard Henry Lee of
Virginia, whereas this is not so. He was lank, sour, and ill dressed,
she said, and fetched his two dogs into the house. When he saw Hugh, he
said it was time all the young men were out. Miss Wynne disliked this,
and it is reported that Mrs. Ferguson and she, meeting after church, had
nearly come to blows, because Mrs. Ferguson had said the people who made
the war should be in the war, and on this the old lady desired to know
if this arrow was meant for her or for her nephew. Mrs. F., not lacking
courage, said she might choose.
“So Madam Wynne is pulled this way and that, and I must go alone; and I
shall have a lieutenant’s commission, and a pretty fellow am I to order
other men about. I like best the continental line.”
I saw Jack the day after my ride with Miss Peniston. I said sadly that
he was right, and we talked it all over that week, running down the
river at early morning after ducks, and through the wide channel between
League Island and the Neck; or else we were away to Red Bank, or to the
Jersey coast, if the ice permitted, as it often did. It was a wonderful,
open winter, as it chanced, and we had more than our usual share of the
ducks, which were very abundant. As we lay in the gray weeds below the
bluff at Red Bank, we little thought of what it was to see. Our gallant
Mercer, who fell at Princeton, was to give a name to the fort we built
long after; and there, too, was to die Count Donop, as brave a man, far
from home, sold by his own prince to be the hireling of a shameful king.
The ducks flew over thick, and between times, as we waited, we talked at
intervals of the war, of Montgomery’s failure to capture Quebec, and of
the lingering siege of Boston; of how the brutal destruction of Norfolk
in December had stirred the Virginians, and indeed every true heart in
the colonies. Jack would write when occasion served.
That last day (it was now February, as I have said) we supped with my
aunt, Jack and I. After the meal was over, she went out of the room,
and, coming back, gave Jack a handsome, serviceable sword, with a proper
sash and tie. Then she must make him take a hundred pounds in a purse
she had netted; and when he would not she said he was going to school,
and must have a tip, and would hear no more, and kissed him, at which he
got very red. Indeed, she was deeply moved, as was plain to see from the
way she talked, speaking fast, and saying all manner of foolish things.
This business of the sword troubled me more than it ought to have done,
and I resolved that nothing should long keep me out of the field; but
alas! it was many a day before my going became possible. And so my Jack
went away, and Miss Peniston.
The war was dull for a time, as the armies got ready for a spring
at each other’s throats. At last, in March, his Excellency seized
Dorchester Heights, and Boston became no longer tenable. Howe left it on
March 17, and, what was as desirable, some two hundred cannon and vast
stores of ammunition. Then, on Cambridge Common, our chief threw to the
free winds our flag, with its thirteen stripes, and still in the corner
the blood-red cross of St. George.
Late in this winter of ‘75-’76, an event took place, or rather the
sequel of an event, which made me feel deeply the embarrassment in which
the condition of my aunt and father placed me. He who reads may
remember my speaking of a young fellow whom I saw at the Woodlands, John
Macpherson. I took a great fancy to him later, and we fished and shot
together until he went away, in August of ‘75, to join Arnold for his
wild march into Canada.
His father, broken and sad, now brought to my aunt the news of his son’s
death in the assault on Quebec, and, speechless with grief, showed her
the young fellow’s letter, writ the night before he fell. He wrote, with
other matter: “I cannot resist the inclination I feel to assure you that
I experience no reluctance in this cause to venture a life I consider as
only lent, and to be used when my country demands it.” He went on to say
that, if he died, he could wish his brother William, an adjutant in the
king’s army, would not continue in the service of our enemies. I saw,
too, General Schuyler’s letter of condolence, but this was later.
Nothing had moved me like this. I went away, leaving the father and my
aunt. People came to this strong woman, sure of her tenderest help, and
I trust she comforted her friend in his loss. This was the first officer
of our own set our city lost in war, and the news, I think, affected me
more than any. How, indeed, could I dare to stay when the best manhood
of the land was facing death in a cause as dear to me as to any?
In June a new calamity fell on me, or I should say on my father; for I
felt it but little, or only as in some degree a release from bonds which
I hesitated to sever by my own act. On the morning of June 25, my father
called me into his counting-room, and, closing the door, sat down, I, as
was thought fit, standing until told to be seated. Since he made no sign
of any such desire on his part, I knew at once that this was not to be a
talk about our affairs, in which, I may say, I had no interest except as
to a very moderate salary.
“Thou wilt have to-day a call from Friend Pemberton. The overseers are
moved, at last, to call thee to an account. I have lost hope that thou
wilt forsake and condemn thy error. I have worked with the overseers
to give thee and thy friend, John Warder, time, and this has been
with tenderness accorded. No good is yet come of it. If this private
admonition be of no effect, thy case will come before overseers again,
and thou wilt be dealt with as a disorderly person, recommended to be
disowned, when thy misdeeds come to be laid before the Quarterly Meeting
for discipline. Already the Yearly Meeting hath found fault with us for
lax dealing with such as thou art. Thou hast ceased to obey either thy
father or thy God, and now my shame for thee is opened to all men.”
Not greatly moved I listened to this summary of what was to happen. “It
is too late,” I said, “to argue this matter, my dear father. I cannot
sin against my conscience. I will receive Mr. Pemberton as thy friend.
He is a man whom all men respect and many love, but his ways are no
longer my ways. Is that all?” I added. I feared any long talk with
my father. We were as sure to fall out at last as were he and my Aunt
Gainor.
“Yes,” he said; “that is all. And tell Wilson to bring me the invoice of
the ‘Saucy Sally.’”
This time neither of us had lost temper. He had transacted a piece of
business which concerned my soul, and I had listened. It had left me
sore, but that was an old and too familiar story. Reflecting on what had
passed in the counting-house,--and my conclusion now shows me how fast
I was growing older,--I put on my hat at once, and set out to find the
overseer deputed to make a private remonstrance with my father’s son.
I suppose that my action was also hastened by a disinclination to lie
still, awaiting an unpleasant and unavoidable business.
Finding James Pemberton in his office, I told him that my errand was
out of respect to relieve him of the need to call upon a younger man. He
seemed pleased, and opened the matter in a way so gentle and considerate
that I am sure no man could have bettered the manner of doing it. My
attention to business and quieter life had for a time reassured the
overseers. He would not speak of blood-guiltiness now, for out of
kindness to my distressed parent they had seen fit to wait, and for a
time to set it aside. My father had been in much affliction, and Friends
had taken note of this. Now he had to call to my mind the testimony of
Friends as to war, and even how many had been reported to the Yearly
Meeting for Sufferings on account of righteous unwillingness to resist
constituted authority, and how men of my views had oppressed and abused
them. Had I read the letter of the Yearly Meeting of 1774, warning
members not to depart from their peaceful principles by taking part
in any of the political matters then being stirred up, reminding all
Friends that under the king’s government they had been favoured with a
peaceful and prosperous enjoyment of their rights, and the like?
I listened quietly, and said it was too late to discuss these questions,
which were many; that my mind was fully made up, and that as soon as
possible I meant to enter the army. He had the good sense to see that
I was of no inclination to change; and so, after some words of the most
tender remonstrance, he bade me to prayerfully consider the business
further, since overseers would not meet at once, and even when they did
there would be time to manifest to Friends a just sense of my errors.
I thanked him, and went my way, making, however, no sign of grace, so
that, on July 4 of this 1776, late in the evening, I received in my
aunt’s presence a letter from Isaac Freeman, clerk of the Meeting,
inclosing a formal minute of the final action of Friends in my case.
“What is that?” said Aunt Gainor, very cheerful over a letter of thanks
to her for having sold at cost to the Committee of Safety the cloth of
Holland and the blankets she had induced my father to buy for her.
She had stored them away for this hour of need, and was now full of
satisfaction because of having made my father the means of clothing the
continental troops.
“Read it aloud. What is it, sir?” I was smiling over what a few years
before would have cost me many a bitter thought.
“Give it me! What is it?” Then she put on a pair of the new spectacles
with wire supports to rest on the ears. “Dr. Franklin gave me these new
inventions, and a great comfort too. I cannot endure bridge glasses;
they leave dents in one’s nose. You have not seen him lately. He was
here to-day. You should see him, Hugh. He was dressed very fine in a
velvet coat with new, shilling buttons, and bless me! but he has got
manners as fine as his ruffles, and that is saying a good deal--Mechlin
of the best. You would not know the man.”
With this she began to look at my letter. “Hoity-toity, sir! this is
a fine setting down for a naughty Quaker.” And she read it aloud in
a strong voice, her head back, and the great promontory of her nose
twitching at the nostrils now and then with supreme contempt:
“‘To HUGH WYNNE: A minute, this Tenth-day of Sixth-month, 1776, from the
monthly Meeting of Friends held at Philadelphia.
“‘Whereas Hugh Wynne hath had his birth and education among Friends,
and, as we believe, hath been convinced of that divine principle which
preserves the followers thereof from a disposition to contend for the
asserting of civil rights in a manner contrary to our peaceful
profession, yet doth not manifest a disposition to make the Meeting a
proper acknowledgment of his outgoings, and hath further declared his
intention to continue his wrong-doing;
“‘Therefore, for the clearing of truth and our society, we give forth our
testimony against such breaches, and can have no unity with him, the said
Hugh Wynne, as a member of our society until he become sensible of his
deviations, and come to a sense of his error, and condemn the same to the
satisfaction of Friends; which is that we, as Christian men, desire.
“‘Signed in, and on behalf of, the Meeting by
“‘ISAAC FREEMAN,
“‘_Clerk_.’
“What insolent nonsense!” cried Miss Wynne. “I hope your father is
satisfied. I assure you I am. You are free at last. Here was James
Warder to-day with a like document to the address of my dear Jack. I was
assured that it was a terrible disgrace. I bade him take snuff and
not be any greater fool than nature had made him. He took my snuff and
sneezed for ten minutes. I think it helped him. One can neither grieve
nor reason when one is sneezing. It is what Dr. Rush calls a moral
alterative. Whenever the man fell to lamenting, I gave him more snuff. I
think it helped him. And so the baa-lambs of Meeting have disowned their
two black sheep. Well, well! I have better news for you. Mr. Carroll
was here just now, with his charming ways. One would think when he
is talking that one is the only woman alive. If I thought the priests
taught him the trick, I would turn papist. You should observe his bow,
Hugh. I thought Mr. Chew’s bow not to be surpassed; but Mr. Carroll--oh,
where was I?”
“Some good news,” I said.
“Yes, yes. He tells me the Congress this evening voted for a Declaration
of Independence.”
“Indeed!” I cried. “So it has come at last. I, too, am free, and it is
time I went away, Aunt Gainor.”
“We will see,” she said. “How can I do without you? and there is your
father too. He is not the man he was, and I do not see, Hugh, how you
can leave him yet.”
It was too true, as my last interview had shown me. He was no longer the
strong, steadily obstinate John Wynne of a year or two back. He was less
decisive, made occasional errors in his accounts, and would sometimes
commit himself to risky ventures. Then Thomas Mason, our clerk, or my
aunt would interfere, and he would protest and yield, having now
by habit a great respect for my aunt’s sagacity, which in fact was
remarkable.
I went back to my work discontented, and pulled this way and that, not
clearly seeing what I ought to do; for how could I leave him as he now
was? My aunt was right.
Next day I heard Captain John Nixon read in the state-house yard the
noble words of the declaration. Only a few hundred were there to hear
it, and its vast consequences few men as yet could apprehend. Miss
Norris told me not long after that she climbed on a barrow and looked
over their garden wall at Fifth street and Chestnut; “and really, Mr.
Wynne, there were not ten decent coats in the crowd.” But this Miss
Norris was a hot Tory, and thought us all an underbred mob, as, I fear,
did most of the proprietary set--the men lacking civil courage to fight
on either side, and amazed that Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Reed, and Mr. Robert
Morris, and the Virginia gentry, should side with demagogues like Adams
and Roger Sherman.
And so time ran on. I fenced, drilled, saw my companions drift away into
war, and knew not how to escape. I can now look back on my dismissal
from Meeting with more regret than it gave my youth. I have never seen
my way to a return to Friends; yet I am still apt to be spoken of as one
of the small number who constitute, with Wetherill and Owen and Clement
Biddle, the society of Friends known as Free Quakers. To discuss why
later I did not claim my place as one of these would lead me to speaking
of spiritual affairs, and this, as I have elsewhere said, I never do
willingly, nor with comfort to myself.
One afternoon in September of this year I was balancing an account when
my father came in and told me that Mason, our clerk, had just had a fall
in the hold of one of our ships. The day after I saw him, and although
his hurts were painful they hardly seemed to justify my father in his
desire that now at last he should take a long rest from work.
This threw all the detail of our affairs as largely into my hands as was
possible with a man like my father. I think he guessed my intention to
leave him for the army, and gladly improved this chance to load me with
needless affairs, and all manner of small perplexities. My aunt was
better--in fact, well; but here was this new trouble. What could I do?
My father declared that the old clerk would soon be able to resume his
place, and meanwhile, he should have no one to help him but me. Now
and then, to my surprise, he made some absurd business venture, and was
impatient if I said a word of remonstrance. Twice I was sent to Maryland
to see after our tobacco plantations. I was in despair, and became
depressed and querulous, seeing no present way, nor any future
likelihood, of escape. My father was well pleased, and even my aunt
seemed to me too well satisfied with the ill turn which fate had done
me. My father was clearly using the poor old clerk’s calamity as an
excuse to keep me busy; nor was it at all like him to employ such
subterfuges. All his life long he had been direct, positive, and
dictatorial; a few years back he would have ordered me to give up all
idea of the army, and would as like as not have punished resistance with
cold-blooded disinheritance. He was visibly and but too clearly changing
from the resolute, uncompromising man he had once been. Was he cunning
enough to know that his weakness was for me a bondage far stronger than
his more vigorous rule had ever been?