The royal Americans

Front matter

ROYAL AMEmqASi

MARY HALLOCK^OOTE

R t

Chapter I

At Fort Ontario, owing to the sojourn there of a young English lady, wife of an officer of the Regular troops attached to the garrison, a new-born infant was added to the impedimenta of war, on a certain anxious night of midsummer, 1756.

Concerning this date, colonial history says that at midnight of August the twelfth, Montcalm, having closed the harbor and cut off relief by land, opened his trenches on the little log-walled fort, first to fall of the British outposts at the mouth of the Oswego.

If the subaltern's baby had been a royal heir, expected by a nation, no more drums would have rolled or soldiers mustered or cannon noised its arrival. Indeed, the wise ones said that event had been measurably hastened by the summons of the enemy's guns. But Lieutenant Yelverton remarked that his prompt little daughter evidently knew she had no time for parleying with existence, if she would be born under her country's flag before it struck to the French.

As love had fetched her there, so love was waiting with both hands to cherish her first needs. None of those unnatural sounds of the night assailed the flower-soft ears pressed to the silky head in its swan-skin coverings. But the mother lay and listened to the poimding of the guns, and watched

THE ROYAL AMEEICANS the shapes of men in the torchlight rushing past her window, and forbore to ask for the one she wanted, — not to divide a king's officer from his duty when it needed him most. It had been one of her resolves never to hamper him by her presence there, more than nature's necessities compelled.

Her own work was done and well done, they assured her. (Who " they " might have been, in a place like that, we can only imagine !) Joanna Gourlie, her worthy Scotch maid, said that " seeven pund an' a bittie for a female was nane sae ill." Had it been a man-child more would naturally have been expected. So, the mother might listen and wait, and rest if she could. It was not in his power who had brought her there to give her rest, now — not if her life depended on it. There could be no truce from those shattering guns, while powder and ball were left to put in them.

But by sunset of the following day, the silence came which meant surrender. The lady had her rest. From Fort Oswego brave Colonel Mercer — who had but one day more to live — signaled Ontario's garrison to spike its empty cannon and retire across the river into the shelter of his own walls.

This movement was performed after dark, in great silence and secrecy. " Not a man was lost," — only, the young mother had died in her litter as they lifted her out of the bateau.

We leave it to the period to account for delicate English dames in such places on the eve of a great war in which savages were the fearful weapon used on both sides. There were an hundred and twenty of the " gentle ones," as Deerslayer calls them (and doubtless some were gentle), among the prisoners, when Oswego surrendered, two days later, to Montcalm.

This count included the women of both garrisons and perhaps children, among them the babe of Lieutenant Yelverton in Joanna's faithful arms. The mother — where they buried her, and how, who knows ? She left her spirit, her capacity for hfe and love, and her blood of the ancient franklins, to this child of the Western Wilderness.

Beautiful the New World clothed in the light of Eden must have dawned on these adventurous children who took such proud risks for the sake of being together ! But their happiness was short, and for one at least it may have been hurt a little — since she had married her lover under her father's displeasure and run away with him to America. Those extraordinary, wiUful old fathers were beloved, it seems. They were alive at all events, and life and strong wiUs and huge afPections prone to anger are apt to go together in this world. And when her child was born in the heat of that August night, in a log hut shaken by cannon, did the young mother, as she drifted away from her pain and her confused sense of the world around her, pass in dreams of the home she was never to see again: the old, cool, great-roomed house, in an old walled garden where nightingales sang and roses perfumed the moonlight on the silent paths, or stealing into the waters of a moat that reflected her beams in the time of the Edwards ?

For that sluggish trickle beneath ancestral walls, a dry ditch dug by soldiers and defended by cannon ; for roses and moonlight, the fire-arrows' sudden blossom on the dark and the ring of gun-flashes against the woods where Mont-

THE ROYAL AISIERICANS calm's batteries were speaking ; for songs of nightingales, the roar of the Frenchman's guns and the dreadful salaquois, the death-whoop of his savages swarming at the gunners' backs.

Such contrasts life and love will continue to afford their eager participants, and poets will sing to the end of

days : —

" Come ! let us make love deathless, thou and I, Seeinor that our footing on this earth is brief."

When I\Ir. Edmund Yelverton, within a few hours, became a father, a widower, and a prisoner of war, he had less than four-aud-twenty years to back these rapid experiences ; and his wife was an infant in law when she died. There remained a girl-baby in the arms of a sunburned young Scotch woman, who, as it happened, would have died or done anything else required of her except forsake that unmilitary bundle she carried out of the fort on the niffht of the evacuation.

Here comes into the story a misty if not mythical figure who belongs in it solely on the word of Joanna. No one else concerned, except the unconscious babe, ever saw him, and Joanna could pronounce no more of his name or names in a manner to be recognized than that he was a Lieutenant and a Chevalier "• Honory" ; — the main fact about him being that he could bring unusual things to pass, either through personal magnetism or interest with higher powers.

But first he breaks into the tale by saving her silly bundle from the clutch of an Huron war-chief who was about to do what might have been expected — one of those moments which Frenchmen and English as well, when they bound themselves to these terrible allies, always thought they could avert, but seldom did.

In this case the chevalier was not too late; but he was forced to bargain with his horrid confederate for the innocent trophy on such terms as alliances with savages necessitate. We leave the details of this transaction to Joanna, who told them unfalteringly "to her dying day." Some of them she may have borrowed unconsciously in the course of many retellings. The air was full of such incidents, all very much alike, as savages are, and not easily overdrawn.

She went too far, however, in claiming to have witnessed anything resembling a massacre on the night of August 14. The English mind became distorted by what was done a year later, with no extenuation, at Fort William Henry. No such wholesale atrocities can be set against Montcalm's great name in connection with the fall of Oswego. But if no English prisoners were murdered, how could the young Lieutenant Honore have purchased an Englishman's scalp " fresh" to exchange for the English babe ? (Joanna must answer for this ! ) And why does history tell us that Montcahn gave the order to fire on his Indian friends, if they were doing nothing to warrant so extraordinary and dangerous a step !

It is certain that great gentleness and chivalry were shown in her case : for, while the military prisoners were sent north to Montreal to be exchanged, a confused mass of persons, sick and wounded and non-combatants, who incumbered the boats, were turned back at Fort Frontenac, our intrepid Joanna being amongst them. Had she remained with them undistinguished, great suffering would have been hers, and the babe very likely must have died. But her gallant deliverer had not forgotten to complete his work. Through his instrumentality a nurse was procured for the scarce breathing infant — a woman of the Caughnawagas, the " praying Indians " from the Jesuit colony on the St. Lawrence. Thence, invested with a white flag, with boatmen who were guides and a priest bearing a billet from the Sieur de Montcalm himself, the subaltern's baby went down river, borne as it were on the palms of the hands of its enemies, to the great carrying-place where General Webb had arrived too late to save Oswego, — or anything else, himself excepted.

From here the way is open. We are among our friends of the Long House. At Albany the St. Lawrence woman goes back with the priest, enriched for life according to savage needs, which was done in Yelverton's name by a brother officer at Fort Frederick — to Joanna's peculiar wrath, who always maintained that both woman and priest were spies and paid by the French already.

Colonel Philip Schuyler of the Flats, son of the renowned Quider, remembered well the young lieutenant and his bride, who had dined at his house on the river highway of the armies. Madam Schuyler, in her prime, was too great a personage to need here more than the mention of her name to account for the young father's instant thought of her in his extremity. (What kind and motherly advice she had given his sweet girl, taking her apart, after the fine dinner her husband gave to the officers of the new battalion marching north to their wild little outpost !) She never would have questioned a claim of this nature on personal grounds, but recognized it as one of the simple human exigencies of those cruel times.

The loss of Oswego, moreover, was a blow felt all down the Hudson in every hamlet and farm, for with it fell the last barrier between them and the French, save Fort Johnson and the wavering tribes Sir William might be able to influence.

To the Flats, then, Joanna found her way with the babe of war. Her instructions were to learn from Madam Schuyler if possible some means of communicating with one Adrian Deyo, a Calvinist minister of Huguenot descent, who had married in his student days abroad, Catherine Yelverton, our lieutenant's second cousin, the one woman in the colonies on whom he could base a claim in blood to succor his waif babe. These persons he knew to be in fair circumstances, the dominie's father having been one of twelve patentees, called the Duzine of Nieu Palz, who settled some fifty years earlier a rich tract of land on some creek or "kill" inland and west of the Hudson. But the distance of this village from the Flats, whether north or south, Mr. Yelverton knew no more than any young Englishman knew of the " Dutch " settlements up the river. Everything the English had not themselves planted in the Province they renamed was " Dutch " to them.

The Schuylers were as hospitable to the clergy as to the army. Probably Madam had entertained every dominie of note the classis of Amsterdam had sent out since she became mistress of the Flats. She set Joanna forth in all possible comfort on the last stage of her journey, which ended in a cart-track following blazed trees to the little Dutch-Palatine village on the Wallkill.

The babe so thrust upon him. Dominie Deyo does not mention in his journal of that year until the day he held her at the font, when " there was born anew of water and the Holy Ghost, Catherine Honoree, Infant daughter of Lieut. Yelverton, my wife's cousin, restrained at Montreal a prisoner of war whom God protect : being, the said C. H. (so named for her mother and in memory of her unknown deliverer) the first child of English parents baptized in the Church called by its founders, 1683, I'eglise de Nouveau Palatinat."

The infant's " witnesses " were Catherine Deyo and Madam Schuyler, by proxy ; and on the side of male responsibility, another stranger. Madam's house-chaplain, sent with gifts for the occasion and charged to bring back news of the babe, which she had better means of forwarding to its father than our friends at the Wallkill.

Chapter II

Dominie Deyo stood at his front gate, looking up the village street. At the bridge it made a sharp turn ; his view in that direction was stopped by a wall of forest, a part of the original wilderness of his father's time.

He was dressed plainly as usual, wearing his own irongray hair without powder, yet his appearance bore out a general air of expecting company, emphasized by silk stockings and a remarkably fluted set of ruffles, which looked as if fresh from the iron. In the kitchen-end of the house there was running to and fro, rather more of a stir than the approach of supper-time ordinarily would warrant. A little black boy plucking pigeons in the wood-shed, clad in a large apron, rubbed the down from his nostrils and tried to hear what the women inside were saying.

Mis' Honory not come home yet (Tob knew that of course), and school out this hour and more. And Captain Yelverton's orderly had ridden ahead to announce him, and had gone back to Hoornbeck's tavern to get beds for himself and two privates and the captain's man, and stabling for their horses. The captain was out on a "detail" — what was a detail? And his little daughter, whom he had not seen since two years, " kytin' awa' wi' yon Bassy Dunbar ! Sic a business ! " Mrs. Joanna washed her hands of it. In her opinion that roving jockey was no more a Dunbar than he was a prince. Names were easy palmed off in a country full of Dutch bodies that called a babe's witness at the font a peet-tante /

This of course was Joanna's jealousy of an acquaintance sanctioned by the higher powers, against her judgment and advice. Tob knew that also ; if he had n't — his young eyes would have been opened by Gulie the cook, a lady of his own color, not always pleasant to live with but an ally in the main against one who read the law to them both and spared not the letter.

Three years ago the house lost its own, a sweeter, mistress : — the dominie's beloved Catherine, who gave a mother's love to the babe the " Great War " sent them, till God took her, in the fifth year of that trust and the twelfth of their marriage. She had prayed for a child of her own, and the inscrutable answer to that prayer lay on her cold breast and was buried with her.

The name was put away in the shrinking freshness of that grief. Tentatively, while the household tried the new name on its several tongues, the dominie's ward became Honoree. Joanna in decency submitted, but she complained of the change, when otherwise irritated. It had the effect upon her nerves of the last straw. " A sair come-doon for the puir lassiekie, to be ca'd by a man's name and a Frenchman at that ! "

" She comes, dominie. They are here already," a neighbor trotted up-street to say. " The father has her up before him on his horse. She is smiling, see ? She sits like a trooper. I believe you, he wiU hold her tight now he has got her once more again ! "

It was but half a mile as the village ran following the bend of the creek, from Hoornbeck's tavern at one end to the dominie's house at the other. Honoree's ride was a short one, but a marvelous stroke of joy while it lasted. Her father had overtaken her on the bridge, and said he was her father, and put out his hand and the toe of his boot. Bassy Dunbar had given her a hoist and fixed the pistolholster so it should not jam her knee. There was not much room in front. The captain's arm tightened strong about her — she could feel him breathe and the horse's withers twitch. Of course Bassy had to be left behind. A great sunset broke out from the woods beyond the village, like a burst of cheers. It splashed the road and the horse and riders, and the little knots of people gathering, with flakes of orange and gold.

Bassy found himself one of a group who watched, in this spectacular light, the meeting at the dominie's gate.

Now the little girl is lifted down and the two men grasp hands hard in silence. How pale does our dominie look ! They walk up the cobbled path with the child between them ; it is her father holds her hand.

A good vrow says, knitting her brows against the strong low light : " He ought to thank God : this is the second time he is back with his life and finds his child here the same."

"Where would he find her but where he left her, Anneke ! "

" You know It is bad luck to say that. He might anytime find her dead already."

" More likely he might be married ! A handsome man like him — it is wonderful he stays single eight long years, was n't it?"

Anneke eyed her husband sharply. " I see no wonder in that. But what is a man when God has taken away his wife ! — Did you see how he was powdered, as if he was going to sup with the Governor and Council? What foolishness is that! An hour wasted when he might have been hugging his child."

" The orderly told him she was not come at the house. He says this captain takes always a man with him to curl his hair and clean his boots."

" If he knew his duty that orderly would not talk so much," said Bassy, the English boy, turning red.

The captain's servant clattered by, on his way back to the tavern, leading his master's horse. The western woods had put out their lights of welcome. At the dominie's, doors were shut and windows beamed with candles. There was nothing more to see, but plenty more to talk over in one's own house before bedtime.

Chapter III

By the fire, after supper, Captain Yelverton lifted his daughter to his knee. He held her a little one side, the better to scan her features, with shocks of memory at a likeness he sees growing there. He bends down to ask what it is we whisper ?

She fingers the bullion on his high-collared neck and repeats, " Are you come to take us with you this time, papa r

The emphasis means that last year word was sent to prepare her for a quick journey with her father and Joanna, back to England — home, the captain would have said. Then all went blurred in rumors of war. Pontiac's Conspiracy had broken out. The captain's leave was peremptorily revoked. He passed out of their safe and simple lives into a confused drama of wilderness warfare — that duel to the death between Red man and White, in which the two races at times became one in ferocity, and the virgin continent they strove for was the scene of deeds which even the historian nowadays veils in fine print, in his footnotes and appendices.

After the 51st regiment was disbanded, Yelverton had obtained a company in the 60th Royal Americans. He was on a pressing errand from his colonel to General Gage, who had sent him with further instructions to Albany, pending arrangements for a great summer campaign; Bradstreet cooperating on the Lakes with Bouquet cleaning up the border westward from Carlisle.

His words on public matters went over the child's head while she renewed her acquaintance with her father's person ; from his strong, soft hands, slightly hairy below the middle joint, half hid in lace that flowed out of a great gold-braided cuff, to the solid curves of his lips and the " fighting chin " which shared with a high-bridged nose the honors of the profile. Add a warm blue eye, with corners full of sweetness.

He was considered one of the finest officers in the colonial service at the time. A pretty lady told his daughter so, a few months later.

In a voice that she knew was meant for her, he said he had stopped in the village, where his fellow had shaved him that he might kiss his little girl. He did so, once more — carefully, as if not used to the ceremony on so small a scale. To her guardian he commented on the freedom every one spoke of who was lately come from England, in the manners both of men and women of the highest fashion.

" I am not sure but you are preserving over here better samples in your colonial society of what an English lady used to be. 'T is amazing how the point of view changes when you are the father of a girl. But for a few worldly reasons, I should be inclined to keep her here — make her a little Colonial, first and last. How think you, sir ? "

The dominie believed in not shirking any portion of one's natural inheritance. " Character can be formed only through manifold tests. Some she will encounter here, but not all, nor perhaps the most searching."

Captain Yelverton answered nothing to this. He passed the back of one finger over the soft cheek nearest him.

"And so you call her Honoree — my little English Catherine ! Strangely the fates have handled thee ! Born in the American wilderness ; captured by the French ; saved by a Frenchman — a good one, God bless him ! Suckled by a savage ; aided by the Dutch ; sheltered and trained and cherished, — must I take off my hat again to France, dominie ? or do you call yourself — "

" I am a son of the Protestant religion and a loyal subject of King George," the dominie answered quietly.

Both men were smiling. They exchanged the warmest glances.

" We must not forget Joanna's large share in this concomity of nations," said the elder.

" Have no fear, sir ! The Scotch thistle will find means to make her presence known. It is an ill weed to crowd. Have you so found it, dominie ? "

" Nay, I have no complaint. Those who dwell under one roof can have few disguises ; Joanna hath not been able to hide that under her prickles she wears a heart."

" My little one tells me she was up in a tree in the hanging wood and saw her father's red coat down the road — and came running ' to see the soldiers.' She was not climbing trees, or playing with big boys when I saw her last. Have we not shaken out a reef in our discipline?'-'

" I think we are the better for it," the dominie replied. " Our good Joan was right. She had need to be more with other children."

" Do you call that strapping lad who was with her a child ? "

" Bassy Dunbar may be perhaps thirteen. I do not know that his age is against him as company for a child. I think he has a good clean mind."

" What persons of sorts have you around you here ? " the captain inquired somewhat restively.

" We are of many sorts, my dear captain, chiefly remarkable to ourselves and our neighbors."

The captain smiled. But after his little girl was gone to bed, he recurred with evident intention to the subject of her friendships. " Dunbar," he said, " is a good name in some parts of the world. Has this ' Bassy ' anything by chance that belongs to it? "

" He has himself," the dominie replied, " and a father who answers indifferently to the title — still, Isaac might be worse. He might have been like his own father I "

" You don't appear to lay much stress on blood in the rising generation ? "

" But, my dear sir, it takes more than one kind of blood to make a generation. Bassy's male progenitors have abundantly served the purpose of warnings. The examples come down in the female line."

" I thought you had been all Dutch and Palatine and Huguenot, in this valley ? "

" Our decalogue-breakers are more often English," the dominie twinkled. " Nor is the Greathead grant in the valley. 'T is difficult to say where it is, or is not ! The present incumbent will not let the parchment out of her hands ; the old records are in New York. It was a gift of Charles the Second to a Major Greathead, for some such service as may buy the love of kings. The major fought under Cromwell : it may have been the reward of a turncoat."

" There was a Greathead who sold out his non-conformist friends in the Farnley Wood Plot. That I believe is history. But I thought we were speaking of Dunbars ? "

" Dunbar was the maiden name of Bassy's grandmother. Jeremy Greathead gave her his, in marriage ; but as he tad given it to another woman before her, the gift did not hold in law."

'"I said in my haste all men are liars,' " the captain interposed with some flippancy.

" Jeremy truly had no difficulty that way. It was not, though, his peculiar vice. He had others that led up to it. Jerry was a sort of home-made pirate when he came over here to subdue his father's lands. He married — as he drank wine or ate his dinner. The woman desired a ceremony of some sort. He gave her her wish, and it happened to be legal. It never incommoded him. He went back to England on a visit, about the beginning of Queen Anne. There, in his native village of Morley , he saw this goodly maid not half his years — Rose Dunbar. He married her, in his way ; — perhaps it was meant to be a better way this time, but the result was the same — for her. He brought her over here to live, with a paid-off household in his back lands. There were two women he had to deal with. The supplanted wife he had got under his thumb completely ; but her grown-up daughter Alison — she was his own child ! She kept her part of the bargain till a son was born (Isaac, the father of Bassy), and now she thought she might raise her price. She paid the young mother a visit — choosing her time. But Rose Dunbar had no wish to buy anything. She took her babe, and nothing more that was Jeremy's, and went up to Albany to see Dominie Schaats. From him she learned the very truth of her position. It was said the old man, after dealing her this blow, helped her to her freedom — covered her concealment from him who woidd have searched her out.

" Jeremy never saw his lost ones again. He died intestate ; the unloved daughter who broke up his home stands seized to-day of all he left. Stands, do I say ! Alison keeps her bed these eleven years — no worse afflicted, I believe, than by sloth and spleen. A pair of knavish old servants spread tales about her and feed her superstitious mind. They make their profit out of her decline. Latterly, Isaac, who calls himself the Defrauded, hangs about the place. His good, brave mother would not trust him with the proofs of his paternity till she was beyond Jeremy's power. — He has been very busy in the matter since her death. He conjectures a will cutting off Alison in favor of his mother and himself. The servants have whispered him that the dame lies in her great oak bed across the door of her father's safe-vault, to guard what she keeps there hid."

" Does the man do nothing for a living ? Does he live upon this half-sister he is trying to oust ? "

" No, no. He does many things — not anything steadily. At his best he traces up old boundary-marks and makes surveys for Mr. Croghan, Sir William's deputy. That is since the Golden Act ' for the better collecting of quitrents.' At his poorest we have him mousing about here, writing me letters to point out what quarrels shall ensue on the dame's decease if she name not him as her heir. He sits by her bed for hours, hoping to pluck from her rambling talk some admission to support his theory. But that will is an obsession. Jeremy would have put his will in safer hands than Alison's had he made one to disinherit her. To be sure, his death was sudden — "

" I should think the danger of future litigation might be real enough."

" It is. There are no greater nuisances in settling up a country than these old derelict grants that lie unforested, to rip up later titles that are floated over them in ignorance. Now I have told you a long tale about persons you will never think of again — "