The Maid-At-Arms

Maid-At-Arms, The

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Title: The Maid-At-Arms
Author: Robert W. Chambers
Release Date: May 6, 2004 [EBook #12279]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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