I.

HUDSON RIVER.

"Il reviendra-z à Pâques,
Ou—à la Trinité!"

On a summer's afternoon of the year 1818, in the deep veranda of a house terraced high above the Hudson, a small company stood expectant. Schuylers and Livingstones were there, with others of the great patroon families; one or two in complete black, and all wearing some badge of mourning. Some were young, others well advanced in middle life; but amidst them, and a little apart, reclined a lady to whose story the oldest had listened in his childhood.

She lay back in an invalid chair, with her face set toward the noble river sweeping into view around the base of a wooded bluff, and toward the line of its course beyond, where its hidden waters furrowed the forests to the northward and divided hill from hill. Yet to her eyes the landscape was but a blur, and she saw it only in memory.

For forty-three years she had worn black and a widow's goffered cap. The hair beneath it was thin now, and her body frail and very far on its decline to the grave. On the table at her elbow lay a letter beside a small field-glass, towards which, once and again, she stretched out a hand.

"It is heavy for you, aunt," said her favourite grand-niece, who stood at the back of her chair—a beautiful girl in a white frock, high-waisted and tied with a broad, black sash. "We will tell you when they come in sight."

"I know, my dear; I know. It was only to make sure."

"But you tried yesterday, and with the glass your sight was as good as mine, almost."

"Even so short a while makes a difference, now. You cannot understand that, Janet; you will, some day."

"We will tell you," the girl repeated, "as soon as ever they come in sight; perhaps before. We may see the smoke first between the trees, you know."

"Ay," the old lady answered, and added, "There was no such thing in those days." Her hand went out toward the field-glass again, and rested, trembling a little, on the edge of the table. "I thought— yesterday—that the trees had grown a good deal. They have closed in, and the river is narrower; or perhaps it looks narrower, through a glass."

The men at the far end of the veranda, who had been talking apart while they scanned the upper bends of the river, lowered their voices suddenly. They had heard a throbbing sound to the northward; either the beat of a drum or the panting stroke of a steamboat's paddles.

All waited, with their eyes on the distant woods. By and by a film of dark smoke floated up as through a crevice in the massed tree-tops, lengthened, and spread itself in the sunlight. The throbbing grew louder—the beat of a drum, slow and funereal, with the clank of paddle-wheels filling its pauses. And now—hark!— a band playing the Dead March!

The girl knelt and lifted the glass, ready focused. The failing woman leaned forward, and with fingers that trembled on the tube, directed it where the river swept broadly around the headland.

What did she see? At first an ugly steamboat nosing into view and belching smoke from its long funnel; then a double line of soldiers crowding the deck, and between their lines what seemed at first to be a black mound with a scarlet bar across it. But the mound was the plumed hearse of her husband, and the scarlet bar the striped flag of the country for which he had died—his adopted country, long since invited to her seat among the nations.

The men in the veranda had bared their heads. They heard a bell ring on board the steamboat. Her paddles ceased to rotate, and after a moment began to churn the river with reversed motion, holding the boat against its current. The troops on her deck, standing with reversed arms; the muffled drums; the half-masted flag; all saluted a hero and the widow of a hero.

So, after forty-three years, Richard Montgomery returned to the wife he had left with a promise that, come what might, she should be proud of him.

Proud she was; she, a worn old woman sitting in the shadow of death, proud of a dry skeleton and a handful of dust under a crape pall. And they had parted in the hey-day of youth, young and ardent, with arms passionately loth to untwine.

What did her eyes seek beneath the pall, the plumes, the flag? Be sure she saw him laid there at his manly length, inert, with cheeks only a little paler than they had been as he stood looking down into her eyes a moment before he strode away. In truth, the searchers, opening his grave in Quebec, had found a few bones, and a skull from which, as they lifted it, a musket-ball dropped back into the rotted coffin; these, and a lock of hair, tied with a leathern thong.

They did not bring him ashore to her. Even after forty years his return must be for a moment only; his country still claimed him. The letter beside her was from Governor Clinton, written in courtliest words, telling her of the grave in New York prepared for him beneath the cenotaph set up by Congress many years before.

Again a bell rang sharply, the paddles ceased backing and ploughed forward again. To the sound of muffled drums he passed down the river, and out of her sight for ever.