Essential Novelists - Harold Frederic. Frederic Harold
chieftain Corn-Planter—and the next night with Honnikol Herkimer.
This man, I recall, greatly impressed Mr. Cross. We were now in an exclusively German section of the Valley, where no Dutch and very little English was to be heard. Herkimer himself conversed with us in a dialect that must often have puzzled my English friend, though he gravely forbore showing it. I had known Colonel Herkimer all my life; doubtless it was this familiarity with his person and speech which had prevented my recognizing his real merit, for I was not a little surprised when Mr. Cross said to me that night: "Our host is one of the strongest and most sagacious men I have ever encountered in the Colonies; he is worth a thousand of your Butlers or Sir Johns."
It became clear in later years that my friend was right. I remember that I regarded the hospitable Colonel, at breakfast next morning, with a closer and more respectful attention than ever before, but it was not easy to discern any new elements of greatness in his talk.
Herkimer was then a middle-aged, undersized man, very swart and sharp-eyed, and with a quick, almost vehement way of speaking. It took no time at all to discover that he watched the course of politics in the Colonies pretty closely, and was heart and soul on the anti-English side. One thing which he said, in his effort to make my friend understand the difference between his position and the more abstract and educated discontent of New England and Virginia, sticks in my memory.
"We Germans," he said, "are not like the rest. Our fathers and mothers remember their sufferings in the old country, kept ragged and hungry and wretched, in such way as my negroes do not dream of, all that some scoundrel baron might have gilding on his carriage, and that the Elector might enjoy himself in his palace. They were beaten, hanged, robbed of their daughters, worked to death, frozen by the cold in their nakedness, dragged off into the armies to be sold to any prince who could pay for their blood and broken bones. The French who overran the Palatinate were bad enough; the native rulers were even more to be hated. The exiles of our race have not forgotten this; they have told it all to us, their children and grandchildren born here in this Valley. We have made a new home for ourselves over here, and we owe no one but God anything for it. If they try to make here another aristocracy over us, then we will die first before we will submit."
The case for the Mohawk Valley's part in the great revolt has never been more truly stated, I think, than it was thus, by the rough, uneducated, little frontier trader, in his broken English, on that May morning years before the storm broke.
We rode away westward in the full sunshine that morning, in high spirits. The sky was pure blue overhead; the birds carolled from every clump of foliage about us; the scenery, to which Mr. Cross paid much delighted attention, first grew nobly wild and impressive when we skirted the Little Falls—as grand and gloomy in its effect of towering jagged cliffs and foaming cataracts as one of Jacob Ruysdael's pictures—and then softened into a dream of beauty as it spread out before us the smiling, embowered expanses of the German Flatts. Time and time again my companion and I reined up our horses to contemplate the charms of this lovely scene. We had forded the river near Fort Herkimer, where old Hon Yost Herkimer, the father of the Colonel, lived, and were now once more on the north side. From an open knoll I pointed out to my friend, by the apple and pear blossoms whitening the deserted orchards, the site of the Palatines' village where Daisy's father had been killed, fifteen years ago, in the midnight rout and massacre.
"It was over those hills that the French stole in darkness. Back yonder, at the very ford we crossed, her poor mother was trampled under foot and drowned in the frightened throng. It was at the fort there, where we had the buttermilk and Kuchen, that your cousin, Major Cross, found the little girl. I wonder if he ever knew how deeply grateful to him we were—and are."
This brought once more to my mind—where indeed it had often enough before intruded itself—the recollection of young Philip's arrival at the Cedars. For some reason I had disliked to speak of it before, but now I told Mr. Cross of it as we walked our horses along over the rough, muddy road, under the arching roof of thicket.
"I'll be bound Mr. Stewart welcomed him with open arms," said my companion.
"Ay, indeed! No son could have asked a fonder greeting."
"Yes, the lad is very like his mother; that of itself would suffice to warm the old gentleman's heart. You knew he was a suitor for her hand long before Tony Cross ever saw her?"
I didn't know this, but I nodded silently.
"Curious creature she was," mused he, as if to himself. "Selfish, suspicious, swift to offence, jealous of everything and everybody about her—yet with moods when she seemed to all she met the most amiable and delightful of women. She had her fine side, too. She would have given her life gladly for the success of the Jacobites, of that I'm sure. And proud!—no duchess could have carried her head higher."
"You say her son is very like her?"
"As like as two leaves on a twig. Perhaps he has something of his father's Irish openness of manner as well. His father belonged to the younger, what we call the Irish, branch of our family, you know, though it is as English in the matter of blood as I am. We were only second cousins, in point of fact, and his grandfather was set up in Ireland by the bounty of mine. Yet Master Philip condescends to me, patronizes me, as if the case had been reversed."
Mr. Cross did not speak as if he at all resented this, but in a calm, analytical manner, and with a wholly impersonal interest. I have never known another man who was so totally without individual bias, and regarded all persons and things with so little reference to his own feelings. If he had either prejudices or crotchets on any point, I never discovered them. He was, I feel assured, a scrupulously honest and virtuous gentleman, yet he never seemed to hate people who were not so. He was careful not to let them get an advantage over him, but for the rest he studied them and observed their weaknesses and craft, with the same quiet interest he displayed toward worthier objects. A thoroughly equable nature was his—with little capacity for righteous indignation on the one side, and no small tendencies toward envy or peevishness on the other. There was not a wrinkle on his calm countenance, nor any power of angry flashing in his steadfast, wide-apart, gray eyes. But his tongue could cut deep on occasion.
We were now well beyond the last civilized habitation in the Valley of the Mohawk, and we encamped that night above the bank of a little rivulet that crossed the highway some four miles to the east of Fort Stanwix. Tulp and the Dutchman, Barent Coppernol, whom Mr. Cross had brought along, partially unpacked the cart, and set to with their axes. Soon there had been constructed a shelter for us, half canvas, half logs and brush, under a big beech-tree which stood half-way up the western incline from the brook, and canopied with its low boughs a smooth surface of clear ground. We had supper here, and then four huge night-fires were built as an outer wall of defence, and Barent went to sleep, while young Tulp, crouching and crooning by the blaze, began his portion of the dreary watch to keep up the fires.
We lay awake for a long time on our bed of hemlock twigs and brake, well wrapped up, our heads close to the beech-trunk, our knees raised to keep the fierce heat of the flames from our faces. From time to time we heard the barking of the wolves, now distant, now uncomfortably near. When the moon came up, much later, the woods seemed alive with strange vocal noises and ominous rustlings in the leaves and brakes. It was my London companion's first night in the open wilderness; but while he was very acute to note new sounds and inquire their origin, he seemed to be in no degree nervous.
We talked of many things, more particularly, I remember, of what Herkimer had said at breakfast. And it is a very remarkable thing that, as we talked thus of the German merchant-farmer and his politics, we were lying on the very spot where, five years later, I was to behold him sitting, wounded but imperturbable, smoking his pipe and giving orders of battle, under the most hellish rain of bullets from which man ever shrank affrighted. And the tranquil moon above us was to look down again upon this little vale, and turn livid to see its marsh and swale choked with fresh corpses, and its brook rippling red with blood. And the very wolves we heard snapping and baying in the thicket were to raise a ghastly halloo, here among these same echoes, as they feasted on the flesh of my friends and comrades.
We did not guess this fearsome future, but instead lay peacefully, contentedly