Part 23 (1/2)

”d.a.m.nation! No!” growled Philip.

”_If you do not, they shall be thrown after you_!”

It was Daisy who spoke--Daisy, who leaned heavily upon the chair-back to keep erect in the whirling dream of bewilderment which enveloped her. The words when they had been uttered seemed from some other lips than hers.

There was no thought in her mind which they reflected. She was too near upon swooning to think at all.

Only dimly could she afterward recall having left the room, and the memory was solely of the wicked gleam in the serpent eyes of her enemy Rab, and of the sound of papers being torn by her husband, as she, dazed and fainting, managed to creep away and reach her chamber.

The wakeful June sun had been up for an hour or so, intent upon the self-appointed and gratuitous task of heating still more the sultry, motionless morning air, when consciousness returned to Daisy. All about her the silence was profound. As she rose, the fact that she was already dressed scarcely interested her. She noted that the lace and velvet hangings were gone, and that the apartment had been despoiled of much else besides, and gave this hardly a pa.s.sing thought.

Mechanically she took from the wardrobe a hooded cloak, put it about her, and left the room. The hallways were strewn with straw and the litter of packing. Doors of half-denuded rooms hung open. In the corridor below two negroes lay asleep, snoring grotesquely, beside some chests at which they had worked. There was no one to speak to her or bar her pa.s.sage. The door was unbolted. She pa.s.sed listlessly out, and down the path toward the gulf.

It was more like sleep-walking than waking, conscious progress--this melancholy journey. The dry, parched gra.s.s, the leaves depending wilted and sapless, the leaden air, the hot, red globe of dull light hanging before her in the eastern heavens--all seemed a part of the lifeless, hopeless pall which weighed from every point upon her, deadening thought and senses. The difficult descent of the steep western hill, the pa.s.sage across the damp bottom and over the tumbling, shouting waters, the milder ascent, the cooler, smoother forest walk toward the Cedars beyond--these vaguely reflected themselves as stages of the crisis through which she had pa.s.sed: the heart-aching quarrel, the separation, the swoon, and now the approaching rest.

Thus at last she stood before her old home, and opened the familiar gate.

The perfume of the flowers, heavily surcharging the dewless air, seemed to awaken and impress her. There was less order in the garden than before, but the plants and shrubs were of her own setting. A breath of rising zephyr stirred their blossoms as she regarded them in pa.s.sing.

”They nod to me in welcome,” her dry lips murmured.

A low, reverberating mutter of distant thunder came as an echo, and a swifter breeze lifted the flowers again, and brought a whispered greeting from the lilac-leaves cl.u.s.tered thick about her.

The door opened at her approach, and she saw Mr. Stewart standing there on the threshold, awaiting her. It seemed natural enough that he should be up at this hour, and expecting her. She did not note the uncommon whiteness of his face, or the ceaseless twitching of his fallen lips.

”I have come home to you, father,” she said, calmly, wearily.

He gazed at her without seeming to apprehend her meaning.

”I have no longer any other home,” she added.

She saw the pallid face before her turn to wax shot over with green and brazen tints. The old hands stretched out as if to clutch hers--then fell inert.

Something had dropped shapeless, bulky at her feet and she could not see Mr. Stewart. Instead here was a reeling vision of running slaves of a form lifted and borne in, and then nothing but a sinking away of self amid the world-shaking roar of thunder and blazing lightning streaks.

Chapter XXIV.

The Night Attack upon Quebec--And My Share in It.

Of these sad occurrences it was my fortune not to be informed for many months. In some senses this was a beneficent ignorance. Had I known that, under the dear old roof which so long sheltered me, Mr. Stewart was helplessly stricken with paralysis, and poor Daisy lay ill unto death with a brain malady, the knowledge must have gone far to unfit me for the work which was now given into my hands. And it was work of great magnitude and importance.

Close upon the heels of the Bunker Hill intelligence came the news that a Continental army had been organized; that Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton of Virginia had been designated by Congress as its chief, and had started to a.s.sume command at Cambridge; and that our own Philip Schuyler was one of the four officers named at the same time as major-generals. There was great pleasure in Albany over the tidings; the patriot committee began to prepare for earnest action, and our Tory mayor, Abraham Cuyler, sagaciously betook himself off, ascending the Mohawk in a canoe, and making his way to Canada.

Among the first wishes expressed by General Schuyler was one that I should a.s.sist and accompany him, and this, flattering enough in itself, was made delightful by the facts that my friend Peter Gansevoort was named as another aide, and that my kinsman Dr. Teunis was given a professional place in the general's camp family. We three went with him to the headquarters at Cambridge very shortly after, and thenceforward were too steadily engrossed with our novel duties to give much thought to home affairs.

It was, indeed, a full seven months onward from the June of which I have written that my first information concerning the Cedars, and the dear folk within its walls, came to me in a letter from my mother. This letter found me, of all unlikely places in the world, lying in garrison on the frozen bank of the St. Lawrence--behind us the strange, unnatural silence of the northern waste of snow, before us the black, citadel-crowned, fire-spitting rock of Quebec.

Again there presses upon me the temptation to put into this book the story of what I saw there while we were gathering our strength and resolution for the fatal a.s.sault. If I am not altogether proof against its wiles, at least no more shall be told of it than properly belongs here, insomuch as this is the relation of my life's romance.