The Tory Lover 34

The Tory Lover 34

"Poor lad!" he said compassionately. "I think he ’s fell among thieves,

somehow, by t’ looks of him; ’t is an honest face of a young gentleman’s

iver I see. There’s nowt for ’t now but a litter, an’t’ get some grog

down his starved throat. I misdoubt he ’s dead as t’ stones in road ere

we get to Kendal!"

 

"Get him a-horse again!" jeered another man. "If we had some alegar

now, we mought fetch him to! Say, whaar er ye boun’, ye are sae dond out

in reed wescut an’ lace?" and he pushed Wallingford’s limp, heavy body

with an impatient foot; but the prisoner made no answer.

 

 

 

 

*XXVIII*

 

*NEWS AT THE LANDING*

 

"What, have the heralds come,

To tell this quiet shore of victories?—

* * * * *

There is a mother weeping for her son!

Like some lean tree whose fruit has dropt, she gives

Her all, to wither in autumnal woe."

 

 

There were several low buildings to the east of Colonel Hamilton’s

house, where various domestic affairs were established; the last of

these had the large spinning room in the second story, and stood

four-square to the breezes. Here were the wool and flax wheels and the

loom, with all their implements; and here Peggy reigned over her

handmaidens one warm spring afternoon, with something less than her

accustomed severity. She had just been declaring, in a general way,

that the idle clack of foolish tongues distressed her ears more than the

noise of the loom and wheels together.

 

There was an outside stairway, and the coveted seat of the young maids

who were sewing was on the broad doorstep at the stairhead. You could

look up the wide fields to the long row of elms by General Goodwin’s,

and see what might pass by on the Portsmouth road; you could also

command the long green lane that led downhill toward the great house;

also the shipyard, and, beyond that, a long stretch of the river itself.

A young man must be wary in his approach who was not descried afar by

the sentinels of this pretty garrison. On a perfectly silent afternoon

in May, the whole world, clouds and all, appeared to be fast asleep; but

something might happen at any moment, and it behooved Hannah Neal and

Phebe Hodgdon to be on the watch.

 

They sat side by side on the doorstep, each reluctantly top-sewing a new

linen sheet; two other girls were spinning flax within the room, and old

Peggy herself was at the loom, weaving with steady diligence. As she

sat there, treading and reaching at her work, with quick click-clacks of

the shuttle and a fine persistence of awkward energy, she could look

across the river to Madam Wallingford’s house, with its high elms and

rows of shuttered windows. Between her heart and old Susan’s there was

a bond of lifelong friendship; they seldom met, owing to their

respective responsibilities; they even went to different places of

worship on Sunday; but they always took a vast and silent comfort in

watching for each other’s light at night.

 

It was Peggy’s habit to sing softly at her work; once in a while, in her

gentlest mood, she chanted aloud a snatch of some old song. There was

never but one song for a day, to be repeated over and over; and the

better she was pleased with her conditions, the sadder was her strain.

Now and then her old voice, weak and uncertain, but still unexpectedly

beautiful, came back again so clear and true that the chattering girls

themselves were hushed into listening. To-day the peace in her heart was

such that she had been singing over and over, with plaintive cadences, a

most mournful quatrain of ancient lines set to a still more ancient

tune. It must have touched the chords of some inherited memory.

 

"O Death, rock me asleep"

 

sang Peggy dolefully;—

 

"O Death, rock me asleep,

Bring me to quiet rest;

Let pass my weary, guiltless ghost

Out of my care-full breast!"

 

 

The girls had seldom heard their old tyrant forget herself and them so

completely in her singing; they gave each other a sympathetic glance as

she continued; the noisy shuttle subdued itself to the time and tune,

and made a rude accompaniment. One might have the same feeling in

listening to a thrush at nightfall as to such a natural song as this.

At last the poignancy of feeling grew too great for even the singer

herself, and she drew away from the spell of the music, as if she

approached too near the sad reality of its first occasion.

 

"My grandmother was said to have the best voice in these Piscataqua

plantations, when she was young," announced Peggy with the tone of a

friend. "My mother had a pretty voice, too, but ’t was a small voice,

like mine. I ’m good as dumb beside either of them, but there is n’t no

tune I ever heard that I can’t follow in my own head as true as a bird.

This one was a verse my grandmother knew,—some days I think she sings

right on inside of me,—but I forget the story of the song: she knew the

old story of everything." Peggy was modest, but she had held her

audience for once, and knew it.

 

She stopped to tie a careful weaver’s knot in the warp, and adjust some

difficulty of her pattern. Hitty Warren, who was spinning by the door,

trilled out a gay strain, as if by way of relief to the gloom of a song

which, however moving and beautiful, could not fail to make the heart

grow sad.

 

"I have a house and lands in Kent,"

 

protested Hitty’s light young caroling voice,—

 

"And if you ’ll love me, love me now,

Two pence ha’penny is my rent,

And I cannot come every day to woo!"

 

Whereupon Hannah Neal and Phebe, who sang a capital clear second, joined

in with approval and alacrity to sing the chorus:—

 

"Two pence ha’penny is his rent,

And he cannot come every day to woo!"

 

 

They kept it going over and over, like blackbirds, and Peggy clacked her

shuttle in time to this measure, but she did not offer to join them;

perhaps she had felt some dim foreboding that her own song comforted.

The air had suddenly grown full of spring-time calls and cries, as if

there were some subtle disturbance; the birds were in busy flight; and

one could hear faint shouts from the old Vineyard and the neighboring

falls, where men and boys were at the salmon fishing.

 

At last the girls were done singing; they had called no audience out of

the empty green fields. They began to lag in their work, and sat

whispering and chuckling a little about their own affairs. Peggy

stopped the loom and regarded them angrily, but they took no notice.

All four had their heads close together now over a piece of gossip; she

turned on her narrow perch and faced them. Their young hands were idle

in their laps.

 

"Go to your wheel, Hitty Warren, and to your work, the pack of you! I

begretch the time you waste, and the meals you eat in laziness, you

foolish hussies!" cried Peggy, with distinctness. "Look at the house so

short of both sheeting and table gear since the colonel took his great

boatload of what we had in use to send to the army! If it wa’n’t for me

having forethought to hide a couple o’ heaping armfuls of our best

Russian for the canopy beds, we’d been bare enough, and had to content

the gentlefolk with unbleached webs. And all our grand holland sheets,

only in wear four years, and just coming to their softness, all gone now

to be torn in strips for them that’s wounded; all spoilt like common

workhouse stuff for those that never slept out o’ their own clothes. ’T

was a sad waste, but we must work hard now to plenish us," she gravely

reproached them.

 

"Miss Mary is as bad as the Colonel," insisted Hannah Neal, the more

demure of the seamstresses, who had promptly fallen to work again. The

handsome master of the house could do no wrong in the eyes of his

admiring maids. They missed his kind and serious face, eyen if

sometimes he did not speak or look when he passed them at their sewing

or churning.

 

"A man knows nowt o’ linen: he might think a gre’t sheet like this sewed

its whole long self together," said Phebe Hodgdon ruefully, as she

pushed a slow needle through the hard selvages.

 

"To work with ye!" commanded Peggy more firmly. "My eye ’s upon ye!"

And Hitty sighed loud and drearily; the afternoon sun was hot in the

spinning room, and the loom began its incessant noise again.

 

At that moment the girls on the doorstep cheerfully took notice of two

manly figures that were coming quickly along the footpath of the spring

pasture next above the Hamilton lands on the riverside. They stooped to

drink at the spring in the pasture corner, and came on together, until

one of them stood still and gave a loud cry. The two sewing girls

beckoned their friends of the spinning to behold this pleasing sight.

Perhaps some of the lads they knew were on their way from the Upper

Landing to Pound Hill farms; these river footpaths had already won some

of the rights of immemorial usage, and many foot travelers passed by

Hamilton’s to the lower part of the town. A man could go on foot to

Rice’s Ferry through such byways across field and pasture as fast as a

fleet horse could travel by the winding old Portsmouth road.

 

The two hurrying figures were strangers, and they came to the knoll

above the shipyard. They were both waving their hats now, and shouting

to the few old men at work below on the river bank.

 

Peggy was only aware of a daring persistence in idleness, and again

began to chide, just as the eager girls dropped their work and clattered

down the outer stair, and left her bereft of any audience at all. She

hurried to the door in time to see their petticoats flutter away, and

then herself caught sight of the excited messengers. There was a noise

of voices in the distance, and workmen from the wharves and warehouses

were running up the green slopes.

 

"There’s news come!" exclaimed Peggy, forgetting her own weaving as she

stumbled over the pile of new linen on the stair landing, and hurried

after the girls. News was apt to come up the river rather than down,

but there was no time to consider. Some ill might have befallen Colonel

Hamilton himself,—he had been long enough away; and the day before there

had been rumors of great battles to the southward, in New Jersey.

 

The messengers stood side by side with an air of importance.