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THE

MAID-AT-ARMS

A Novel

By

Robert W. Chambers

Illustrated by

Howard Chandler Christy


1902


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 us 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.



CONTENTS

I. THE ROAD TO VARICKS'. II. IN THE HALLWAY. III. COUSINS. IV. SIR
LUPUS. V. A NIGHT AT THE PATROON'S. VI. DAWN. VII. AFTERMATH. VIII.
RIDING THE BOUNDS. IX. HIDDEN FIRE. X. TWO LESSONS. XI. LIGHTS AND
SHADOWS. XII. THE GHOST-RING. XIII. THE MAID-AT-ARMS. XIV. ON DUTY. XV.
THE FALSE-FACES. XVI. ON SCOUT. XVII. THE FLAG. XVIII. ORISKANY. XIX.
THE HOME TRAIL. XX. COCK-CROW. XXI. THE CRISIS. XXII. THE END OF THE
BEGINNING.



ILLUSTRATIONS

"I SAT DOWN HEAVILY IN HOMESICK SOLITUDE".

"YOU'RE MY COUSIN, GEORGE ORMOND, OR I'M THE FATTEST LIAR SOUTH OF
MONTREAL!".

"SHE SUFFERED US TO SALUTE HER HAND".

"NOW LOOSE ME--FOR THE FOREST ENDS!".

"THIS IS THE END, O YOU WISE MEN AND SACHEMS!".

"JACK MOUNT LOOMED A COLOSSAL FIGURE IN HIS BEADED BUCKSKINS".

"INSTANTLY MOUNT TRIPPED THE MAN".

"A STRANGE SHYNESS SEEMED TO HOLD US APART".



THE MAID-AT-ARMS

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 mocking 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!"

He straightened in his stirrups, blue eyes ablaze, face burning under
its heavy mask of tan and dust.

"If I know a man when I see him, I know you," he said. "God save our
country, friend, upon this sweet May day."

"Amen, sir," I replied, tingling. "And God save the King the whole year
round!"

"Yes," he repeated, with a disagreeable laugh, "God save the King; he is
past all human aid now, and headed straight to hell. Friend, let us part
ere we quarrel. You will be with me or against me this day week. I knew
it was a man I addressed, and no tavern-post."

"Yet this brawl with Boston is no affair of mine," I said, troubled.
"Who touches the ancient liberties of Englishmen touches my country,
that is all I know."

"Which country, sir?"

"Greater Britain."

"And when Greater Britain divides?"

"It must not!"

"It has."

I unbound the scarlet handkerchief which I wore for a cap, and held it
between my fingers to dry its sweat in the breeze. Watching it
flutter, I said:

"Friend, in my country we never cross the branch till we come to it, nor
leave the hammock till the river-sands are beneath our feet. No
hunting-shirt is sewed till the bullet has done its errand, nor do men
fish for gray mullet with a hook and line. There is always time to pray
for wisdom."

"Friend," replied Mount, "I wear red quills on my moccasins, you wear
bits of sea-shell. That is all the difference between us. Good-bye.
Varick Manor is the first house four miles ahead."

He wheeled his horse, then, as at a second thought, checked him and
looked back at me.

"You will see queer folk yonder at the patroon's," he said. "You are
accustomed to the manners of your peers; you were bred in that land
where hospitality, courtesy, and deference are shown to equals; where
dignity and graciousness are expected from the elders; where duty and
humility are inbred in the young. So is it with us--except where you are
going. The great patroon families, with their vast estates, their
patents, their feudal systems, have stood supreme here for years. Theirs
is the power of life and death over their retainers; they reign absolute
in their manors, they account only to God for their trusts. And they are
great folk, sir, even yet--these Livingstons, these Van Rensselaers,
these Phillipses, lords of their manors still; Dutch of descent,
polished, courtly, proud, bearing the title of patroon as a noble bears
his coronet."

He raised his hand, smiling. "It is not so with the Varicks. They are
patroons, too, yet kin to the Johnsons, of Johnson Hall and Guy Park,
and kin to the Ormond-Butlers. But they are different from either
Johnson or Butler--vastly different from the Schuylers or the
Livingstons--"

He shrugged his broad shoulders and dropped his hand: "The Varicks are
all mad, sir. Good-bye."

He struck his horse with his soft leather heels; the animal bounded out
into the western road, and his rider swung around once more towards me
with a gesture partly friendly, partly, perhaps, in menace. "Tell Sir
Lupus to go to the devil!" he cried, gayly, and cantered away through
the golden dust.

I sat my horse to watch him; presently, far away on the hill's crest,
the sun caught his rifle and sparkled for a space, then the point of
white fire went out, and there was nothing on the hill-top save the
dust drifting.

Lonelier than I had yet been since that day, three months gone, when I
had set out from our plantation on the shallow Halifax, which the
hammock scarcely separates from the ocean, I gathered bridle with
listless fingers and spoke to my mare. "Isene, we must be moving
eastward--always moving, sweetheart. Come, lass, there's grain somewhere
in this Northern land where you have carried me." And to myself,
muttering aloud as I rode: "A fine name he has given to my cousins the
Varicks, this giant forest-runner, with his boy's face and limbs of
iron! And he was none too cordial concerning the Butlers,
either--cousins, too, but in what degree they must tell me, for I
don't know--"

The road entering the forest, I ceased my prattle by instinct, and again
for the thousandth time I sniffed at odors new to me, and scanned leafy
depths for those familiar trees which stand warden in our Southern
forests. There were pines, but they were not our pines, these feathery,
dark-stemmed trees; there were oaks, but neither our golden water oaks
nor our great, green-and-silver live-oaks. Little, pale flowers bloomed
everywhere, shadows only of our bright blossoms of the South; and the
rare birds I saw were gray and small, and chary of song, as though the
stillness that slept in this Northern forest was a danger not to be
awakened. Loneliness fell on me; my shoulders bent and my head hung
heavily. Isene, my mare, paced the soft forest-road without a sound, so
quietly that the squatting rabbit leaped from between her forelegs, and
the slim, striped, squirrel-like creatures crouched paralyzed as we
passed ere they burst into their shrill chatter of fright or anger, I
know not which.

Had I a night to spend in this wilderness I should not know where to
find a palmetto-fan for a torch, where to seek light-wood for splinter.
It was all new to me; signs read riddles; tracks were sealed books; the
east winds brought rain, where at home they bring heaven's own balm to
us of the Spanish grants on the seaboard