Fort Amity | Page 3

He had
imagined it a sepulchral sheet of water, sunk between cavernous woods.
And lo! it lay high in the light of day, broad-rimmed, with the forests
diminishing as they shelved down to its waters. The mountains rimmed
it, amethystine, remote, delicate as carving, as vapours almost
transparent; and within the rim it twinkled like a great cup of
champagne held high in a god's hand--so high that John a Cleeve, who
had been climbing ever since his regiment left Albany, seemed lifted
with all these flashing boats and uniforms upon a platform where men

were heroes, and all great deeds possible, and the mere air laughed in
the veins like wine.
Two heavy flat-boats ploughed alongside of his; deep in the bows and
yawing their sterns ludicrously. They carried a gun apiece, and the
artillerymen had laded them too far forward. To the 46th they were a
sufficiently good joke to last for miles. "Look at them up-tailed ducks
a-searching for worms! Guns? Who wants guns on this trip? Take 'em
home before they sink and the General loses his temper." The crews
grinned back and sweated and tugged, at every third drive drenching
the bowmen with spray, although not a breath of wind rippled the lake's
surface.
The boat ahead of John's carried Elliott the Senior Ensign of the 46th,
with the King's colours--the flag of Union, drooping in stripes of scarlet,
white, and blue. On his right strained a boat's crew of the New York
regiment, with the great patroon, Philip Schuyler himself, erect in the
stern sheets and steering, in blue uniform and three-cornered hat; too
grand a gentleman to recognise our Ensign, although John had danced
the night through in the Schuylers' famous white ball-room on the eve
of marching from Albany, and had flung packets of sweetmeats into the
nursery windows at dawn and awakened three night-gowned little girls
to blow kisses after him as he took his way down the hill from the
Schuyler mansion. That was a month ago. To John it seemed years
since he had left Albany and its straight sidewalks dappled with maple
shade: but the patroon's face was the same, sedately cheerful now as
then when he had moved among his guests with a gracious word for
each and a brow unclouded by the morrow.
Men like Philip Schuyler do not suffer to-morrows to perturb them,
since to them every morrow dawns big with duties, responsibilities,
risks. John caught himself wondering to what that calm face looked
forward, at the lake-end, where the forests slept upon their shadows and
the mountains descended and closed like fairy gates! For John himself
Fame waited beyond those gates. Although in the last three or four
weeks he had endured more actual hardships than in all his life before,
he had enjoyed them thoroughly and felt that they were hardening him

into a man. He understood now why the tales he had read at school in
his Homer and Ovid--tales of Ulysses, of Hercules and Perseus--were
never sorrowful, however severe the heroes' labours. For were they not
undergone in just such a shining atmosphere as this?
His mind ran on these ancient tales, and so, memory reverting to Douai
and the seminary class-room in which he had first construed them, he
began unconsciously to set the lines of an old repetition-lesson to the
stroke of the oars.
Angustam amice pauperiem pati robustus acri militia puer condiscat et
Parthos feroces vexet eques metuendus hasta:
Vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat in rebus . . .
--And so on, with halts and breaks where memory failed him.
Parthos--these would be the Indians--Abenakis, Algonquins, Hurons,
whomsoever Montcalm might have gathered yonder in the woods with
him. Dulce et decorum est--yes, to be sure; in a little while he would be
facing death for his country; but he did not feel in the least like dying.
A sight of Philip Schuyler's face sent him sliding into the next
ode--Justum et tenacem . . . non voltus instantis tyranni. . . . John a
Cleeve would have started had the future opened for an instant and
revealed the face of the tyrant Philip Schuyler was soon to defy: and
Schuyler would have started too.
Then John remembered his cousin's letter, and pulled it from his pocket
again. . . .
"And if Abercromby's your Caesar--which is as much as I'll risk saying
in a letter which may be opened before it reaches you-- why, you have
Howe to clip his parade wig as he's already docked the men's coat-tails.
So here's five pounds on it, and let it be a match--Wolfe against Howe,
and shall J. a C. or R. M. be first in Quebec? And another five pounds,
if you will, on our epaulettes: for I repeat to