The Linwoods

by Catharine Maria Sedgwick

  As Mr. Ruthven rode away, “There goes,” said General Washington, “as true-hearted a man as ever breathed. We were born on neighbouring plantations. Our fathers and grandfathers were friends. Our hearts were cemented in our youth, or at least in my youth, for he is much my elder, but his 107is a heart always fusible. Poor man, he has had much ill-luck in life; but the worst, and the worst, let me tell you, my young friend, that can befall any man, was an ill-starred marriage. His wife is the daughter of a good-for-nothing Frenchman; bad blood, Mr. Lee. The children show the cross—I beg Miss Charlotte’s pardon, she is a nice girl, fair Virginia stock; but Miss Helen is—very like her mother. The son I do not know; but his fighting against his country is primâ facie evidence against him.”

  The conversation then diverged to other topics. There was in Eliot that union of good sense, keen intelligence, manliness, and modesty, that excited Washington’s esteem, and drew him out; and Eliot had the happiness, for a half hour, of hearing him whom of all men he most honoured, talk freely, and of assuring himself that this great man did not, as was sometimes said of him,

  “A wilful stillness entertain,

  With purpose to be dress’d in an opinion

  Of wisdom;”

  but that his taciturnity was the result of profound thought, anxiously employed on the most serious subjects.

  Late in the afternoon of the same day, Linwood received a note from Helen Ruthven, enclosing one to General Washington, of which, after entreating him to deliver it immediately, she thus explained the purport. “It contains a simple request to your mighty commander-in-chief, to permit me to visit my brother on board his vessel. I know that Washington’s heart is as hard as Pharaoh’s, and as unrelenting as Brutus’s; still it is not, it cannot be in man to refuse such a request to the daughter of an old friend. Do, dear, kind Linwood, urge it for me, and win the everlasting gratitude of your unworthy but always devoted friend, Helen Ruthven.”

  108“Urge it!” exclaimed Linwood, as he finished the note, “urge General Washington! I should as soon think of urging the sun to go backward or forward; but I’ll present it for you, my ‘devoted friend, Helen,’ and in merely doing that my heart will be in my mouth.”

  He obtained an audience. General Washington read the note, and turning to Linwood, asked him if he knew its purport.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Linwood, “and I cannot,” he ventured to add, “but hope you will find it fitting to gratify a desire so natural.”

  “Perfectly natural; Miss Ruthven tells me she has not seen her brother for four years.” Linwood felt his honest blood rush to his face at this flat falsehood from his friend Helen. Washington perceived the suffusion and misinterpreted it. “You think it a hard case, Mr. Linwood; it is so, but there are many hard cases in this unnatural war. It grieves me to refuse Helen Ruthven—the child of my good friend.” He passed his eye again over the note, and there was an expression of displeasure and contempt in his curling lip as he read such expressions as the following: “I cannot be disappointed, for I am addressing one who unites all virtues, whose mercy even surpasses his justice.”—“I write on my knees to him who is the minister of Providence, dispensing good and evil, light and blessing, with a word.” General Washington threw down the note, saying, “Miss Ruthven should remember that flattery corrupts the giver as well as the receiver. I have no choice in this matter. We have an inflexible rule prohibiting all intercourse with the enemy.”

  He then wrote a concise reply, which Linwood sent to the lady in a blank envelope.

  “Ah!” thought Helen Ruthven, as she opened it, “this would not have been blank three weeks ago, mais n’importe. Mr. Herbert Linwood, you may run free now; I have nobler 109prey in my toils.” She unsealed General Washington’s note, and after glancing her eye over it, she tore it into fragments and dispersed it to the winds, exclaiming, “I’ll risk my life to carry my point; and if I do, I’ll humble you, and have a glorious revenge!”

  She spent a sleepless night in contriving, revolving, and dismissing plans on which, as she fancied, the destiny of the nation hung, and, what was far more important in her eyes, Helen Ruthven’s destiny. She at last adopted the boldest that had occurred, and which, from being the boldest, best suited her dauntless temper.

  The next morning, Tuesday, with her mother’s aid and applause, she effected her preparations; and having fortunately learned, during her residence on the river, to row and manage a boat, she embarked alone in a little skiff, and stealing out of a nook near the glen, she rowed into the current and dropped down the river. She did not expect to escape observation, for though the encampment did not command a view of the Hudson, there were sentinels posted at points that overlooked it, and batteries that commanded its passage. But rightly calculating on the general humanity that governed our people, she had no apprehensions they would fire on a defenceless woman, and very little fear that they would think it worth while to pursue her, to prevent that which she dared to do before their eyes and in the face of day.

  Her calculations proved just. The sentinels levelled their guns at her, in token not to proceed; and she in return dropped her head, raised her hands deprecatingly, and passed on unmolested.

  At a short distance below the Point there is a remarkable spot, scooped out by nature in the rocky bank, always beautiful, and now a consecrated shrine—a “Mecca of the mind.” On the memorable morning of Miss Ruthven’s enterprise, the welcome beams of the spring sun, as he rose in the heavens, 110casting behind him a soft veil of light clouds, shone on the gray rocks, freshening herbage, and still disrobed trees of this lovely recess. From crevices in the perpendicular rocks that wall up the table-land above, hung a sylvan canopy; cedars, studded with their blue berries, wild raspberries, and wild rose-bushes; and each moist and sunny nook was gemmed with violets and wild geraniums. The harmonies of nature’s orchestra were the only and the fitting sounds in this seclusion: the early wooing of the birds; the water from the fountains of the heights, that, filtering through the rocks, dropped from ledge to ledge with the regularity of a water-clock; the ripple of the waves as they broke on the rocky points of the shore, or softly kissed its pebbly margin; and the voice of the tiny stream, that, gliding down a dark, deep, and almost hidden channel in the rocks, disappeared, and welled up again in the centre of the turfy slope, stole over it, and trickled down the lower ledge of granite to the river. Tradition has named this little green shelf on the rocks “Kosciusko’s Garden;” but as no traces have been discovered of any other than nature’s plantings, it was probably merely his favourite retreat, and as such is a monument of his taste and love of nature.

  The spring is now enclosed in a marble basin, and inscribed with his name who then lay extended beside it: Kosciusko, the patriot of his own country, the friend of ours, the philanthropist of all, the enemy only of those aliens from the human family who are the tyrants of their kind. An unopen book lay beside him, while, gazing up through the willows that drooped over the fountain, he perused that surpassing book of nature, informed by the spirit and written by the finger of God—a Book of revelations of his wisdom, and power, and goodness.

  Suddenly his musings were disturbed by approaching footsteps; and looking up, he saw Linwood and Eliot winding down the steep pathway between the piled rocks. He had 111scarcely exchanged salutations with them, when the little boat in which Helen Ruthven was embarked shot out from behind the dark ledge that bounded their upward view of the river. They sprang forward to the very edge of the sloping ground. Helen Ruthven would most gladly have escaped their observation, but that she perceived was impossible; and making the very best of her dilemma, she tossed her head exultingly, and waved her handkerchief. The young men instinctively returned her greeting. “A gallant creature, by Heaven!” exclaimed the Pole; “God speed you, my girl!” And when Linwood told him who she was, and her enterprise, so far as he thought fit to disclose it, he reiterated, “Again then, I say, God speed her! The sweetest affections of nature should be free as
this gushing rill, that the rocks and the earth can’t keep back; I am glad when they throw off the shackles imposed by the cruel but inevitable laws of war.” They continued to gaze after the boat till it turned and disappeared with the river in its winding passage through the mountains.

  On Wednesday morning it appeared that the sloop-of-war had changed her position, and approached as nearly to West Point as was possible without coming within the range of its guns. “I am convinced,” said Linwood to Eliot, taking up the thread of conversation where they had dropped it the day before, “I am convinced there is a plot brewing.”

  “I am apprehensive of it too. Our obvious duty, Linwood, is to go to General Washington, and tell him all we know of the Ruthvens.”

  “My service to you!—no, he is the wariest of human beings, and has grounds enough for suspicion without our prompting. Can’t he put this and that together—the old man’s pressing invitation, Helen’s flight, and the movement of the vessel?”

  “Ah, if his suspicions were excited, as ours are, by previous circumstances, these would suffice; but he has entire 112confidence in his old friend; he is uninformed of the strong tory predilections of the whole family; and, though he does not like Helen Ruthven, he has no conception of what we have tolerable proof, that she has the talents of a regular bred French intriguer. Besides, as the fact of your having seen those men at the glen proves the practicability of their visiting it again, the general should certainly be apprized of it.”

  “No, Eliot, I’ll not consent to it—this is my game, and I must control it. It is a violation of the Arab bread-and-salt rule, to communicate that which was obtained by our friendly intimacy at the glen.”

  “I think you are wrong, Linwood; it is a case where an inferior obligation should yield to a superior one.”

  “I don’t comprehend your metaphysical reasoning, Eliot; I govern myself by the obligations I feel.”

  “By the dictates of your conscience, my dear fellow? so do I; therefore I shall go immediately to the general, with or without you.”

  “Not with me—no, I’ll not tell him what I know, that’s flat; and as to being questioned and cross-questioned by him, heavens and earth! when he but bends his awful brow upon me, I feel as if my heart were turning inside out. No, I’ll not go near him. Why can’t we write an anonymous letter?”

  “I do not like anonymous letters—my course appears plain to me, so good morning to you.”

  “One moment, Eliot—remember, not a word of what I saw through the window at the glen.”

  “Certainly not, if you insist.” Eliot then went to the general’s markee, and was told he would see him in two hours. Eliot returned at the precise moment, and was admitted. “You are punctual, Mr. Lee,” said the commander, “and I thank you for it. A young man should be as exact in military life as the play requires the lover to be! ‘he should not break a part of the thousandth part of a minute.’ Your business, sir?”

  113Eliot was beginning to disclose it, when they were interrupted by a servant, who handed General Washington a note. A single involuntary glance at the superscription assured Eliot it was from Linwood. General Washington opened it, and looked first for the signature, as one naturally does at receiving a letter in an unknown hand. “Anonymous!” he said; and refolding without reading a word of it, he lighted it in a candle, still burning on the desk where he had been sealing letters, and suffered it to consume; saying, “This is the way I now serve all anonymous letters, Mr. Lee. Men in public life are liable to receive many such communications, and to have their minds disturbed, and sometimes poisoned, by them. They are the resort of the cowardly or the malignant. An honest man will sustain by his name what he thinks proper to communicate.”

  “There is no rule of universal application to the versatile mind of man,” thought Eliot, and his heart burned to justify his friend; when the general reminding him they had no time to lose, he proceeded concisely to state his apprehensions and their grounds. Washington listened to him without interruption, but not without an appalling change of countenance. “I have heard you through, Mr. Lee,” he said; “your apprehensions are perhaps natural; at any rate, I thank you for frankly communicating them to me; but, be assured, your suspicions have no foundation. Do you think such vile treachery could be plotted by a Virginian, my neighbour, my friend of thirty years, my father’s friend, when all the grievous trials of this war have not produced a single traitor? No, no, Mr. Lee, I would venture my life—my country, on the cast of Ruthven’s integrity. If I do not lightly give my confidence, I do not lightly withdraw it; and once withdrawn it is never restored.”

  Eliot left Washington’s presence, half convinced himself that his suspicions were unfounded. It never occurred to Washington or to Eliot that there might be a conspiracy 114without Mr. Ruthven being a party to it, and the supposition that he was so invalidated all the evidences of a plot.

  In the afternoon Kisel asked leave to avail himself of a permit which Eliot had obtained for him, to go on the opposite side of the river to a little brook, whence he had often brought a mess of trout for the officers’ table; for our friend Kisel was skilled in the craft of angling, and might have served Cruikshank for an illustration of Johnson’s definition of the word, “a fishing-rod, with a bait at one end and a fool at the other;” but happily, as it proved, our fool had some “subtlety in his simplicity.” Eliot gave him the permission, with directions to row up to the glen when he returned, and await him there.

  Eliot determined to go to the glen, and station himself on the margin of the river, where, in case (a chance that seemed to him at least possible) of the approach of an enemy’s boat, he should descry it in time to give Washington warning. He went in search of Linwood, to ask him to accompany him; but Linwood was nowhere to be found. He deliberated whether to communicate his apprehensions to some other officer. The confidence the general had manifested had nearly dissipated his apprehensions, and he feared to do what might appear like officiousness, or like a distrust of Washington’s prudence; that virtue, which, to remain, as it then was, the bulwark of his country’s safety, must continue unsuspected.

  Eliot in his anxiety had reached the glen while it was yet daylight; and, careful to escape observation, he stole along the little strip of pebbly beach where a mimic bay sets in, and seated himself on a pile of rocks, the extreme point of a hill that descends abruptly to the Hudson. Here the river, hemmed in by the curvatures of the mountains, has the appearance of a lake; for the passage is so narrow and winding through which it forces its way, that the eye scarcely detects it. Eliot for a while forgot the tediousness of his watch in 115looking around him. The mountains at the entrance of the Hudson into the highlands, which stand like giant sentinels jealously guarding the narrow portal, appeared, whence he saw them, like a magnificent framework to a beautiful picture. An April shower had just passed over, and the mist was rolling away like the soft folds of a curtain from the village of Newburgh, which looked like the abode of all “country contentments,” as the setting sun shone cheerily on its gentle slopes and white houses, contrasting it with the stern features of the mountains. Far in the distance, the Catskills, belted by clouds, appeared as if their blue heads were suspended in the atmosphere and mingling with the sky, from which an eye familiar with their beautiful outline could alone distinguish them. But the foreground of his picture was most interesting to Eliot; and as his eye again fell on the little glen sleeping in the silvery arms of the rills between which it lies—“can this place,” he thought, “so steeped in nature’s loveliness, so enshrined in her temple, be the abode of treachery! It has been of heartlessness, coquetry, duplicity—ah, there is no power in nature, in the outward world, to convert the bad—blessings it has; blessings manifold, for the good.”

  The spirit of man, alone in nature’s solitudes, is an instrument which she manages at will; and Eliot, in his deepening seriousness and anxiety, felt himself answering to her changing aspect. The young foliage of the well-wooded little knoll t
hat rises over the glen had looked fresh and feathery, and as bright as an infant awaking to happy consciousness; but as the sun withdrew its beams, it appeared as dreary as if it had parted from a smiling friend. And when the last gleams of day had stolen up the side of the Crow’s Nest, shot over the summit of Break-neck, flushed the clouds and disappeared, and the wavy lines and natural terraces beyond Cold Spring, and the mass of rocks and pines of Constitution Island, were wrapped in sad-coloured uniform, Eliot shrunk from the influence 116of the general desolateness, and became impatient of his voluntary watch.

  One after another the kindly-beaming homelights shot forth from hill and valley, and Eliot’s eye catching that which flashed from Mr. Ruthven’s window, he determined on a reconnoitre; and passing in front of the house he saw Washington and his host seated at a table, served with wine and nuts, but none of those tropical luxuries that had been manifestly brought to the glen by the stranger-guests from the sloop-of-war. Eliot’s heart gladdened at seeing the friends enjoying one of those smooth and delicious passages that sometimes vary the ruggedest path of life. That expression of repelling and immoveable gravity, that look of tension (with him the bow was always strained) that characterized Washington’s face, had vanished like a cloud; and it now serenely reflected the social affections (bright and gentle spirits!) that, for the time, mastered his perplexing cares. He was retracing the period of his boyhood; a period, however cloudy in its passage, always bright when surveyed over the shoulder. He recalled his first field-sports, in which Ruthven had been his companion and teacher; and they laughingly reviewed many an accident by flood and field. “No wonder,” thought Eliot, as in passing he glanced at Ruthven’s honest, jocund face; “no wonder Washington would not distrust him!”