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These included Colonel Theodorick Bland and his cavalry who fought at Brandywine in 1777 and Charleston in 1780; General William Woodford, the victor at Great Bridge, who commanded Virginia Continentals fighting at Brandywine and Germantown in 1777, and Monmouth in 1778, was captured at Charleston in 1780 and died in a New York prison that December; Colonel William Washington and his cavalry who fought in nearly all the battles in southern campaigns; Colonel Peter Muhlenberg, who raised the German Regiment from the Valley and Piedmont around his Woodstock home and commanded them with distinction at Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point, and later led Virginia militia against Cornwallis in 1781; and the gallant Colonel Edward Porterfield, who died with many of his troops, called "Porterfield's Virginians" at Camden.
Good-natured women understand each other even when divided by the line of topographical fashion, and our hostess had quickly mastered the main facts: Mrs. Allen's visit in the morning in Merrimac Avenue to talk of Mrs. Porterfield at last being ready.
She said nothing more, she only looked in front of her; but her very quietness made me want to say something suggestive of sympathy and service. I was unable to think what to say some things seemed too wide of the mark and others too importunate. At last, unexpectedly, she appeared to give me my chance. Irrelevantly, abruptly she broke out: 'Didn't you tell me that you knew Mr. Porterfield?
Porterfield, dumped them on a pair of glittering brass scales and sent them home to your kitchen invitingly laid out in a flat wicker basket.
Porterfield?" "Yes, that's the worst of it." I kept making her stare. "The worst of it?" "He's so good there's no fault to be found with him. Otherwise she'd have thrown it all up. It has dragged on since she was eighteen: she became engaged to him before he went abroad to study.
'That is if it's the same one. It seemed to me it would be silly to say nothing more; so I added 'My Mr. Porterfield was called David. 'Well, so is ours. 'Ours' struck me as clever. 'I suppose I shall see him again if he is to meet you at Liverpool, I continued. 'Well, it will be bad if he doesn't. It was too soon for me to have the idea that it would be bad if he did: that only came later.
Porterfield seemed to think they wouldn't wait long, once she was there: they would have it right over at the American consul's. Mrs. Allen had said it would perhaps be better still to go and see Mrs. Nettlepoint beforehand, that day, to tell her what they wanted: then they wouldn't seem to spring it on her just as she was leaving.
I was going to reply that it wasn't odd if you knew Mr. Porterfield, but I reflected that that perhaps only made it odder. I told my companion briefly who he was that I had met him in the old Paris days, when I believed for a fleeting hour that I could learn to paint, when I lived with the jeunesse des ecoles; and her comment on this was simply: "Well, he had better have come out for her!"
At Liverpool, at the dock, when we had touched, twenty people came on board and I had already made out Mr. Porterfield at a distance. He used to be lean, he had grown almost fat. The interval between us diminished he was on the plank and then on the deck with the jostling officers of the customs all too soon for my equanimity.
The hour approached of my meeting with Edgerton; and then I felt that Edgerton was not the only criminal. Mrs. Porterfield just then brought in some warm tea and placed it on the table at the bed head. After a few moments delay, she left us alone together. The eyes of my wife were averted. The vial of prussic acid stood on the same table with the tea.
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