WHEN A WITCH IS YOUNG
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_WHEN A WITCH_
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❦ _IS YOUNG_ ❦
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_A Historical Novel_
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B y 4 — 1 9 — 6 9
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[Illustration]
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_R. F. FENNO & COMPANY_
9 AND 11 EAST 16TH STREET, New York
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1901
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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1901
By R. F. FENNO & COMPANY
In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington
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CONTENTS.
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PART I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Le Roi est Mort 9
II. A Friendship of Chance 14
III. The Germ of a Passion 22
PART II.
I. A Rover and his Retinue 27
II. An Ungodly Performance 36
III. ’Twixt Cup and Lip 45
IV. The Opening of a Vista 53
V. A Weighty Confidence 62
VI. Pan’s Brother and the Nymph 71
VII. The Meeting in the Greenwood 78
VIII. Paying the Fiddler 86
IX. A Matter of State 94
X. To Foil a Spy 100
XI. Dangerous Tributes 105
XII. Hours that Grow Dark 110
XIII. A Kiss Deferred 121
XIV. Overtures from the Enemy 133
XV. Love’s Inviting Light 140
XVI. Garde’s Lonely Vigil 149
XVII. A Night Attack 153
XVIII. The Glint of Treasure 160
XIX. Mutiny 164
XX. Garde’s Extremity 171
XXI. Randolph’s Courtship 180
XXII. David’s Coercion 187
XXIII. Goody’s Boy 193
XXIV. A Greenwood Meeting 200
XXV. Love’s Traps for Confessions 213
XXVI. A Holiday Ended 221
XXVII. In Boston Town 228
XXVIII. Love’s Garden 234
XXIX. The Enemy in Power 243
XXX. A Fight at the Tavern 249
XXXI. A Refugee 255
XXXII. A Foster Parent 260
XXXIII. Repudiated Silver 269
XXXIV. Lodgings for the Retinue 275
XXXV. Garde Obtains the Jail Keys 280
XXXVI. Garde’s Ordeal 287
XXXVII. Rats in the Armory 296
XXXVIII. Love’s Long Good-by 303
XXXIX. Mutations 308
XL. Golden Oysters 314
XLI. Fate’s Devious Ways 319
XLII. Little Ruses and Waiting 327
PART III.
I. A Topic at Court 335
II. Illness in the Family 342
III. Foiled Purposes 345
IV. Making History 350
V. Old Acquaintances 357
VI. Juggling with Fire 362
VII. A Beef-eater Passes 368
VIII. A Woman Scorned 371
IX. Revelations 382
X. After Six Years 392
XI. A Blow in the Dark 398
XII. Adam's Nurse 403
XIII. Goody in the Toils 407
XIV. Garde’s Subterfuge 414
XV. The Midnight Trial 425
XVI. The Gauntlet Run 436
XVII. Bewitched 442
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WHEN A WITCH IS YOUNG.
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PART I.
CHAPTER I.
LE ROI EST MORT.
THE first, the last—the only King the Americans ever had, was dead. It
was the 13th day of August, in the year 1676. The human emotions of the
Puritan people of Massachusetts tugged at the shackles of a long
repression and broke them asunder, in the seemly town of Plymouth. King
Philip, the mighty Sachem of the Wampanoag Indians, had been slain. His
warriors were scattered and slaughtered. His war was ended.
Through the streets of Plymouth poured a vast throng of people. Men,
women and children, they ran and walked, surrounding a buff-colored army
that filled the thoroughfares like a turgid flood. This was the regiment
which Captain Benjamin Church had led to the final camp of King Philip,
in the swamps at Mt. Hope and Pocasset, where the last scene in the
sanguinary drama had been enacted.
Here was a troop of sixty horse, with officers. They were well mounted,
caparisoned with glittering back, breast and headpiece, and armed with
clanking sword, shouldered carbine, and great pistols, that flopped at
the waist. Behind them were foot-soldiers, brown Puritans—stern,
mirth-denying, lusty at fighting. Some of these bore no weapon other
than a pike. Another frequently had upon him sword, pistol and carbine.
Above the heads of these men on foot waved a thin forest of pike-staves,
on the tips of which bright steel threw back the dazzling rays of the
sun. There was clatter of scabbards on the pavement, thud and thud of
hoofs and feet in the roadway, and above all, shouts of men and gabble
of children.
There were hordes on either side of this human flood, pushing and
crowding to gain the front of the column, while a similar aggregation
hung back upon the flank of the regiment, hooting, craning necks and
racing to keep pace with the steady, long strides of the soldiers. This
division of interest was caused by the two counter attractions of the
pageant. Thus at the front, a red Indian was leading the march with a
wild, half-dancing step, while he contorted his body weirdly for the
purpose of displaying to all beholders the ghastly proof of victory—the
head of the great King Philip. This Indian ally might have stood for the
mockery of a drum-major, heading a march of doom.
The spectators, racing, crowding, following, took a crazed delight in
beholding this gory head. Love, anger, joy, the daily emotions of man,
were habitually so repressed by these serious people that now it seemed
as if they reveled as in an orgie of shuddering and gasping, to give
vent to their pent-up natures. They laughed, they skipped on nimble
feet, they sang praises. The young men and women snatched the occasion,
with its looseness of deportment, to look unbridled feelings into one
another’s eyes.
The other attraction, in the rear, was a captive, a mere boy, as white
as any in the multitude, and paler than the palest. Tall and lithe as he
was, his age was scarcely a whit above fourteen. He was dressed as an
Indian; he bore himself like a sullen brave. At his side was old
Annawon, the last of King Philip’s councilors, who, having surrendered
under a promise of “good quarter” was even now being led to his
execution.
The interest centered, however, in the boy. Through the stoicism which
he labored to hold as a mask upon his face, the signs of anguish played
like an undercurrent. In all the throng he had but a single friend, the
Red-man with whom he was marching. He looked about at the pitiless
embankment of faces. Near him a score of nimble boys were running, a
frantic desire to strike him depicted in their eyes. Further away a tall
man was moving, perforce, with the tide. On his shoulder he bore a
little Puritan maiden, who might have been crushed had he placed her on
her feet. She was looking at the boy-captive with eyes that seemed a
deeper brown for their very compassion. She clung to the man who held
her, with a tense little fist. Her other tiny hand was pressed upon her
cheek till all about each small finger was white, in the bonny
apple-blush of her color. It seemed as if she must cry out to the young
prisoner, in sympathy.
While the boy was gazing back his answer to the child—a quiver in
consequence almost loosening his lip—an urchin near him abruptly cast a
stone that struck him smartly in the side. With a panther-like motion
the captive launched himself upon his assailant and bore him to earth in
a second. The old councillor, Annawon, spoke some soft, quick word at
which the lad in buckskin immediately abandoned his overthrown
antagonist and regained his place in the march. His eyes blinked
swiftly, but in vain, for tears, of anger and pain, forced their way
between his lids and so to his cheeks, when he dashed them swiftly away
on his sleeve.
The foot-soldiers scurried forward and closed in about their dangerous
charge. The bawling youths of Plymouth seemed to multiply by magic. But
their opportunities for committing further mischief were presently
destroyed. The pageant was passing Plymouth jail. An officer hustled ten
of his men about the boy-prisoner and wedged them through the press of
people toward this place of gloom. Above the clamor then rose a voice,
and in the Indian tongue the boy-captive heard the words:
“Farewell, Little-Standing-Panther.”
It was old Annawon, who had divined that there would be no other parting
with the lad, who was the only creature which the war had left on earth
for him to love.
The boy cried: “Farewell,” and the passage through the people closed
behind him.
Those who looked beheld old Annawon smile faintly and sadly. It was the
only expression which had played across his face since his surrender,
and there was never another.
Through nearly every street the glad procession wound. At length, the
head of the butchered King Philip was thrust upon an iron stake, which
was planted deeply in the ground. Governor Winslow then requested that
the people disperse to their several homes.
The night at length came down—night the beneficent, that cloaks the
tokens of men’s barbarisms. Then the moon arose, casting a pale, cold
light, lest remorse lose her way. What a passionless calm settled upon
the sleeping village!
At last, with a tread as silent as that of death itself, an active
figure crept from shadow to shadow, in the streets which the moon had
silver-plated. The lone human being came to the square wherein was
planted the stake with the moon-softened head upon it. The visitor was
the white boy-captive, dressed in his Indian toggery. He had escaped
from the jail.
In the moonlight he came forward slowly. He halted and extended his arms
toward the stake with its motionless burden. He approached in reverence,
murmuring brokenly in the Indian tongue:
“Metacomet—Metacomet,——my foster-father,——I have come.”
He knelt upon the ground and clasping the cold iron stake in his arms,
he sobbed and sobbed, as if his heart would break.
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CHAPTER II.
A FRIENDSHIP OF CHANCE.
THROUGH the gray mist of Plymouth’s dawn there came a sound of
footsteps, and then a murmur of melodious humming, somewhat controlled
and yet too sturdy and joyous to be readily accounted for in the strict
Puritan village. Presently, looming out of the uncertain light, appeared
the roughly-hewn figure of a young man of five and twenty. He was
singing to himself, as he hastened with big strides through the deserted
streets.
On the point of passing the place where the gibbeted head of King Philip
made a rude exclamation point in the calm of gray Plymouth, the early
riser suddenly noted the curled-up form of a human being on the ground,
his arm loosely bent about the iron stake, his head resting loosely
against it, his eyes fast closed in the sleep of exhaustion. The man
started slightly, halted and ceased his singing.
He blinked his eyes for a moment, shifted his feet uneasily and rubbed
stoutly at his jaw, as he gazed in perplexity at the picture before him.
He then tip-toed as if to go on, quietly, about his own business. He
glanced at the head, then back to the boy, from whose lips, in his
sleep, a little moan escaped. The visitor noted the traces where tears
had channeled down the lad’s pale cheeks. There was something
unescapable in the attitude of the bare golden head against the stake.
The man stopped and laid his big hand gently on the half-curled locks.
Instantly the boy awoke, leaped to his feet and fell down again, from
sheer stiffness, staring at the man with eyes somewhat wild. He arose
again at once, more steadily, overcoming the cramps in his muscles
doggedly, never ceasing for a second to watch the man who had waked him.
“I give you good morrow,” said the man. “It seems to me you have need of
a friend, since you have clearly lost one that you much esteemed.”
There was persuasion and honesty in the stranger’s warm-blue eyes, good
nature in his broad, smooth face and a large capacity for affection
denoted in his somewhat sensuous mouth. Such a look of friendship and
utter sincerity as he bestowed on the startled and defiant boy before
him could not have been easily counterfeited. The youthful know
sincerity by intuition.
“Who are you?” said the boy, his voice hoarse and weakened. “What would
anybody want with me?”
“My name is William Phipps,” said the stranger, simply. “I am a
ship-builder of Boston. If you have no better friend, perhaps I would do
till you can find one. I am on my way to Boston now. If you need a
friend and would like to leave Plymouth, you may come with me, unless
you feel you cannot trust any one about this village.” He paused a
moment and then added, “I think you must be the boy I heard of, Adam
Rust, brought in with the captured Indians.”
“My name is Adam Rust,” the boy admitted. “I have no friends left. If
you have been helping to kill the Wampanoags I would rather not try to
be your friend. But I know I would like you and I should be glad to go
to Boston, or any place away from here.” In the daylight he could not
bear to look up at the head above him.
“I have been too busy to fight,” said William Phipps, employing the same
excuse he had used for friends with recruiting proclivities. “And I have
been too happy,” he added, as if involuntarily. “So, you see, there is
no reason why I should not be your friend. Have you had any breakfast?”
He put out his hand to shake.
“No,” said Adam. He lost his hand in the big fist which Phipps
presented, and restrained himself from crying by making a mighty effort.
He had gone without eating for two days, but he said nothing about it.
“Then,” said Phipps heartily, “the sooner we start the better. We can
get something hot on the brig.”
He began his long striding again. Adam hesitated a moment. He looked up
at the features above him, his heart gushing full of emotion.
Some inarticulate farewell, in the Indian tongue, he breathed through
his quivering lips. His eyes grew dimmed. He fancied he saw a smile of
farewell and of encouragement play intangibly on those still, saddened
lineaments, and so he held forth his arms for a second and then turned
away to join his new-found protector.
William Phipps, having thought the boy to be following more closely than
he was, stopped to let him catch up. Thus he noted the look of anguish
with which the lad was leaving that grim remnant of King Philip behind.
Phipps was one of Nature’s “motherly men”—hardly ever more numerous than
rocs’ eggs on the earth. He felt his heart go forth to Adam Rust.
Therefore it was that he looked down in the boy’s face, time after time,
as they walked along together. Thus they came to the water-front and
wharves, at the end of one of which the brig “Captain Spencer” was
swinging.
“This ship belongs to me and I made her,” said Phipps, with candid pride
in his achievement. “You shall see that she sails right merrily.”
They went aboard. A few sailors scrubbing down the deck, barefooted and
with sleeves at elbow, now abandoned their task temporarily, at the
command of the mate, who had seen his captain coming, to hoist sail and
let go the hawsers. The chuckle in the blocks, as the sailors heaved and
hauled at the ropes, gave Adam Rust a pleasure he had never before
experienced.
Breakfast being not yet prepared for service, Phipps conducted his
foundling about the craft for a look at her beauties. When Adam had
putted the muzzle of the brig’s gun and felt the weight of a naked sword
in his fist, in the armory, the buoyancy of his youth put new color in
his cheeks and a sparkle in his eyes. He was a bright-natural,
companionable lad, who grew friendly and smiled his way into one’s
affections rapidly, but naturally. When he and Phipps had come up again
to the deck, after breakfast, they felt as if they had always been
friends.
The brig was under way. Shorewards the gray old Atlantic was wrinkled
under the fretful annoyance of a brisk, salty breeze. The ship was
slipping prettily up the coast, with stately courtesies to the stern
rocks that stood like guardians to the land.
“I think we shall find you were born for a sailor, Adam,” said the
master of the craft. “I can give you my word it is more joy and life to
sail a ship than to make one. And some day——” but he halted. The modest
boasts, with which he warmed the heart of his well-beloved wife, were a
bit too sacred for repetition, even to a boy so winning. “But,” he
concluded, “perhaps you would like to tell me something of yourself.”
Thus encouraged Adam related his story. He was the son of John Rust, a
chivalrous gentleman, an affectionate husband and a serious man, with a
light heart and a ready wit. John Rust had been the friend of the
Indians and the mediator between them and the whites until the sheer
perfidy of the Puritans had rendered him hopeless of retaining the
confidence of the Red men, when he had abandoned the office. Adam’s
mother had been dead for something more than four years. Afflicted by
his sense of loss, John Rust had become a strange man, a restless soul
hopelessly searching for that other self, as knights of old once sought
the holy grail.
He went forth alone into the trackless wilderness that led endlessly
into the west. Although the father and son had been knit together in
their affections by long talks, long ranges together in the forests and
by the lessons which the man had imparted, yet when John Rust had gone
on his unearthly quest, he could not bear the thought of taking young
Adam with him into the wilds.
He had therefore left the boy with his friends, the lad’s natural
guardians, the honorable nation of Wampanoags. “Keep him here, teach him
of your wisdom, make him one of your young warriors,” he had said when
he went, “so that when I return I may know him for his worth.”
King Philip, the mighty Sachem of the tribe, had thereafter been as a
foster-father to the boy. For more than two years the Red-man had
believed John Rust to have found his final lodge, and this was the
truth. And perhaps he had also found his holy grail. He perished alone
in the trackless forest. Adam had learned his wood-lore of his red
brothers. He was stout, lithe, wiry and nimble. He rode a horse like the
torso of a centaur. He was a bit of a boaster, in a frank and healthy
way.
King Philip’s war, ascribed, as to causes, to “the passion of the
English for territory; their confidence that God had opened up America
for their exclusive occupancy; their contempt for the Indians and their
utter disregard for their rights,” had come inexorably upon the
Wampanoags. In its vortex of action, movement, success and failure at
last for the Indians, Adam Rust had been whirled along with Metacomet.
He had never been permitted by King Philip to fight against his “white
brothers,” but he had assisted to plan for the safety of the old men,
women and children, in procuring game and in constructing shelters. He
had learned to love these silently suffering people with all his heart.
The fights, the hardships, the doom, coming inevitably upon the hopeless
Wampanoags, had made the boy a man, in some of the innermost recesses of
a heart’s suffering. He had seen the last sad remnants of the
Wampanoags, the Pocassets and the Narragansetts scatter, to perish in
the dismal swamps. He had witnessed the death of King Philip, brought
upon him by a treacherous fellow Red-man. And then he had marched in
that grim procession.
Adam made no attempt to convey an idea of the magnitude of his loss. It
would not have been possible. There is something in human nature which
can never be convinced that death has utterly stilled a beloved voice
and quenched the fire of the soul showing through a pair of eyes
endeared by companionship. This in Adam made him feel, even as he told
his tale to William Phipps, that he was somehow deserting his faithful
friends.
Bareheaded on the sun-lit deck as he told his story, lithe in his
gestures, splendidly scornful when he imitated the great chieftains of
the tribes, and then like a young Viking as at last he finished his
narrative and looked far and wide on the sparkling sea, in joyousness at
the newer chapter which seemed to open to the very horizons themselves
before him, Adam awakened the lusty youth and daring in William Phipps
and the dreams of a world’s career always present in his brain.
The man’s eyes sparkled, as he spun the wheel that guided the brig,
bounding beneath their feet. A restlessness seized upon the spirit in
his breast.
“Adam,” he said, “do you like this ship?”
“Yes!—oh, it makes me feel like shouting!” the boy exclaimed. “I wish I
could straddle it, like a horse, and make it go faster and wilder, ’way
off there—and everywhere! Oh, don’t it make you breathe!”
“Then,” said Phipps, repressing his own love of such a madness as Adam
had voiced, “let us go for a long sail together. I have long had in mind
a voyage for trading to Hispaniola. If you would like to go with me, I
will get the brig ready in a week.”
For his answer young Adam leaped as if he would spur the ship in the
ribs and ride her to the end of the earth forthwith.
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CHAPTER III.
THE GERM OF A PASSION.
A BONNIE little Puritan maid, Mistress Garde Merrill, stood in the open
doorway at her home, fervently hugging her kitten. The sunlight seemed
almost like beaten gold, so tangibly did it lay upon the house, the
vines that climbed the wall, and the garden full of old-fashioned
flowers.
A few leaves, which had escaped from the trees, in a longing to extend
their field of romping, were being whirled about in a brisk zephyr that
spun in a corner. A sense of warmth and fragrance made all the world
seem wantoning in its own loveliness.
Little Garde, watching the frolic of the leaves, and thinking them
pretty elves and fairies, dancing, presently looked up into the solemn
visage of a passing citizen, who had paused at the gate.
“Mistress Merrill,” he said, gravely, after a moment’s inspection of the
bright, enchanting little face, “your eyes have not the Puritan spirit
of meekness.” Thereupon he departed on his way, sadly shaking his head.
Garde’s eyes, in all truth, were dancing right joyously; and dancing was
not accounted a Puritan devotion. Such brown, light-ensnaring eyes could
not, however, constrain themselves to melancholy. No more could the
apple-red of her smooth, round cheeks retreat from the ardor of the sun.
As for her hair, like strands on strands of spun mahogany, no power on
earth could have disentangled its nets wherein the rays of golden light
had meshed and intermeshed themselves. In her brightness of color, with
her black and white kitten on her arm, the child was a dainty little
human jewel.
She was watching a bee and a butterfly when a shadow fell again into the
yard, among the flowers, at the entrance. Garde felt her attention drawn
and centered at once. She found herself looking not so much at a
bareheaded boy, as fairly into the depths of his very blue and steadfast
eyes.
The visitor stood there with his hands clasping two of the pickets of
which the gate was fashioned. He had seen everything in the garden at
one glance, but he was looking at Garde. His eyes began laughingly, then
seriously, but always frankly, to ask a favor.
“I prithee come in,” said Garde, as one a little struck with wonder.
The boy came in. Garde met him in the path and gave him her kitten. He
took it, apparently because she gave it, and not because he was
inordinately fond of cats. It seemed to Garde that she knew this boy,
and yet he had on a suit that suggested a young sailor, and she had
never made the acquaintance of any sailors whatsoever. If he would only
look elsewhere than at her face, she thought, perhaps she could
remember.
“See them,” she said, and she pointed to where the leaves were once more
capering in the corner.
The boy looked, but his gaze would swing back to its North, which it
found in two brown eyes.
“I saw you that day in Plymouth,” he said. “And I got out of their old
jail, and I didn’t see anybody else that looked kind or nice among all
those people.”
“Oh!” said Garde, suddenly remembering everything, “oh, you were—that
boy marching with the old Indian. I was so sorry. And I am so glad that
you got away. I am real glad you came to see me. Grandfather and I were
down there for a visit—so I saw you. Oh dear me!” She looked at her
young visitor with eyes open wide by amazement. It seemed almost too
much to believe that the very boy she had seen and so pitied and liked,
in that terrible procession at Plymouth, should actually be standing
here before her in her grandfather’s garden! “Oh dear me!” she presently
said again.
“I hate Plymouth!” said the boy, “but I like Boston.”
“I am so glad,” said Garde. “Will you tell me your name? Mine is Garde
Merrill.”
The boy said: “My name is Adam Rust.”
“I was named for all my aunts,” the maid imparted, as if eager to set a
troublesome matter straight at once, “Gertrude, Abigail, Rosella,
Dorothy and Elizabeth. The first letters of their names spell G-A-R-D-E,
Garde.”
Her visitor was rendered speechless for a moment. “Metacomet and all the
Indians used to call me Little-Standing-Panther,” he then said,
boyishly, not to be outdone in the matter of names.
“Metacomet—King Philip? Oh, then you are the boy that used to live with
the Indians, and that was how they got you!” gasped the little maid.
“Grandfather told auntie all about it. Oh, I wish I could live with the
Indians! I am very, very sorry they got you! But I am glad you came to
see me.”
Adam flushed with innocent and modest pride, thus to impress his small
admirer, who was named so formidably. He thought that nothing so
pleasant had ever happened in all his life.
“It is too sad to live with Indians,” he answered. A mist seemed to
obscure the light in his eyes and to cast a shadow between them and the
sweet face at which he was looking with frank admiration. The cloud
passed, however, as clouds will in the summer, and his gaze was again
one of illuminated smiles. “I am a sailor now,” he said, with a little
boast in his voice. “To-morrow morning we are going to start for
Hispaniola.”
“Oh dear me!” said Garde, in sheer despair of an adequate expression of
her many emotions. Then she added contritely: “I mustn’t say ‘Oh dear
me!’ but—oh dear—I wish I might.”
“I shan’t mind,” said Adam.
“I wish I could go to Hispaniola, too,” said Garde, honestly. “I hate to
be kept here as quiet as a clock that doesn’t go. I suppose you couldn’t
take me? Let’s sit down with the kitten and think it over together.”
“I don’t think we could take any girls,” said Adam, seating himself at
her side on the porch, “but I could bring you back something when I
come.”
“Oh, let’s talk all about what we would rather have most,” Garde
responded.
So their fingers mingled in the fur of the kitten and they talked of
fabulous things with which the West Indies were reported to abound. His
golden hair, and her hair so darkly red, made the picture in the
sunlight a thing complete in its brightness and beauty. The wind floated
a few stray filaments, richly red as mahogany, from the masses on
Garde’s pretty brow, across to the ringlets on Adam’s temple. To and
fro, over these delicate copper wires, stretched for its purpose, the
sweet love that comes first to a lad and a maid, danced with electrical
activity.
“If you are going to-morrow,” said Garde, “you must see all the flowers
and everything now.” She therefore took him by the hand and led him
about the garden, first she, then he, and then she once more carrying
the kitten.
They were still in the midst of their explorations of the garden, which
required that each part should be visited several times, when the gate
opened and in walked Garde’s tall, stern-looking grandfather.
David Donner rubbed his eyes in amazement, hardly believing that his
senses could actually be recording a picture of his granddaughter, hand
in hand with some utter stranger of a boy, in his own precincts. He came
quickly toward the pair, making a sound that came within an ell of being
a shout.
Garde looked up in sudden affright. Adam regarded the visitor calmly and
without emotion. Having first dropped the young sailor’s hand, Garde now
resolutely screwed her little warm fingers back into the boy’s fist.
“Grandfather,” she said boldly, “I shall sail to-morrow for Hispaniola.”
David Donner, at this, was so suddenly filled with steam pressure, which
he felt constrained to repress, that his eyes nearly popped out of their
sockets.
“Go away, boy,” he said to Adam. “Mistress Merrill, your conduct is
quite uncalled for.”
Having divined that his sister had deserted her post and gone, as was
her wont, to the nearest neighbor’s, for a snack of gossip, he glared at
Adam, swooped down upon Garde and caught her up in his arms abruptly,
kitten and all.
Her hold on Adam’s hand being rudely wrenched asunder, Garde felt her
heart break incontinently. She began to weep without restraint, in fact,
furiously. She also kicked, and was also deporting herself when the door
was slammed behind the forms of herself, her kitten and her grandfather,
a moment later.
Adam looked once where she had gone. His face had assumed a stolidity
which he was far from feeling. He walked to the gate and went away,
without once turning to look back at the house.
Mistress Garde, confronted by David Donner at close quarters, soon
regained her maidenly composure and wept surreptitiously on the stomach
of the kitten. At length she looked up in defiance at the silent old
man.
“I have changed the name of my kitten,” she said. “His name is
Little-Standing-Panther!”
Her grandfather, to whom this outbreak seemed something of an indication
of mental disorder, on her part, stared at the child dumbly. Not without
some justification for her deductions, Garde thought him quelled. In a
spirit of reckless defiance, and likewise to give some vent to her
feelings, she suddenly threw her arms about the bedewed kitten, on its
pillow, pressed her face against its fur and said to it, fervently:
“Little-Standing-Panther, I love you, and love you and love you!”
Grandfather Donner looked up in alarm. “Tut, tut, my child,” said he,
“love is a passion.”
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PART II.
CHAPTER I.
A ROVER AND HIS RETINUE.
His only gold was in his hair;
He had no silver hoard;
But steel he had, enow to spare—
In his thews and in his sword!
TOWARD the close of a glorious day in September, 1683, William Phipps
beheld a smart brig nose her way up the harbor of Boston, and drop in
her anchor in the field of water wherein his ship-yard thrust its toes.
A small boat then presently put forth and made straight for the
ship-yard landing, where three men calmly alighted, throwing ashore a
small heap of shabby-genteel-looking baggage.
Somewhat annoyed, thus to have his precincts employed by any Tom, Dick
and Harry of chance, Phipps stepped from between the ribs of a ship’s
skeleton, which was being daily articulated, and strode toward the
intruders. Then a rumble, which ought to have been a shout, broke from
his lips, about the same second that a roar of joy appeared to leap out
of the foremost of the strangers, who had landed and who were coming
boldly forward.
William Phipps and the leader of the invading trio then rushed hotly
together and collided, giving each other a bear-like hug from which the
ship-builder presently extricated himself at a thought of how he might
be shocking all or any good Puritans who might chance to be witnessing
the scene.
“Well, shatter my hilt! and God bless you! if it isn’t your same old
beloved self!” said the stranger, heartily.
“My boy! Bless your eyes, Adam, I never thought to see you again!” said
bluff William Phipps. “You big young rascal! You full-rigged ship! Where
have you come from? What do you mean by making me swear myself into
purgatory at your carelessness in getting yourself killed? You
twenty-gun frigate—you—you big——”
He left off for very constraint, for his throat blocked up, despite his
most heroic efforts. He and Adam Rust began to roar with laughter, the
tears in their eyes needing some excuse. Meantime the two companions who
had come with the young rover, stood gazing about them, in patience, and
likewise looking in wonder on the two men before them.
There was reason enough to look, for Adam and Phipps were a pair to
command attention. It seemed as if a founder had used the big
ship-builder as a pattern on which to refine his art in casting the
younger man. Adam’s back was a trifle narrower; his chest was a bit
wider; he was trimmer at the waist, neater at the thigh, longer-armed.
His hands were smaller, just as his movements were quicker and lighter.
Although Adam’s hair crowned him with tawny ringlets of gold, while that
of Phipps was browner, and though the young fellow wore a small
mustache, in contrast, to the smooth-shaved face of his friend, it might
yet be said that the two men looked alike. Both were bronzed by weather,
both had steadfast eyes with the same frank expression, the same blue
tint and the same integrity about them.
In their dress the two men differed. William Phipps, whatsoever he might
indulge himself in doing when away on the sea, conformed to the
dark-brown simplicity of the Puritans when in Boston. Adam, on the other
hand, wore a brown velvet coat which, though at present somewhat faded
and moulting, had once been fine feathers in England. His waistcoat had
been of royal purple, before its nap fled before the onslaughts of the
clothes-brush, while his breeches were of a time-tanned forest green
which disappeared into the maw of his wide-topped leather boots. He wore
at his hip a veteran blade of steel, in a scabbard as battered as the
outer gate of a stronghold. When not in his fighting fist, the hilt of
this weapon contented itself with caresses from his softer hand, the
left.
The two men having shaken hands for the third time, and having looked
each other over from head to foot, and laughed and asked each other a
dozen questions, to which neither had returned any answers, Adam
suddenly remembered his comrades, waiting in the background. He turned
to them now, not without affection.
“Here, Pike and Halberd,” he said, “you must meet my third father,
Captain William Phipps, a noble man to whom you will owe allegiance all
your miserable lives. William, these are my beef-eaters. Don’t ask me
where I got them. They are neither out of jail nor heaven. But they have
let me save their lives and feed them and clothe them, and they are
valiant, faithful rascals. To know them is to love them, and not to know
them is to be snubbed by Satan. They have been my double shadow for a
year, sharing my prosperous condition like two peers of the realm.”
The beef-eaters grinned as they exchanged salutations with Phipps. Pike
was a short individual, inclined to be fat, even when on the slimmest of
rations. The pupils of his eyes were like two suns that had risen above
the horizon of his lower lids, only to obscure themselves under the
cloud-like lids above. Their expression, especially when he gazed upward
into Adam’s face, was something too appealingly saint-like and
beseeching for anything mortal to possess. Halberd was a ladder of a man
up which everything, save success, had clambered to paint expressions on
his face, which was grave and melancholy to the verge of the ludicrous.
He had two little bunches of muscle, each of which stuck out like half a
walnut, at the corners of his jaws, where they had grown and developed
as a result of his clamping his molars together, in a determination to
do or to be something which had, apparently, never as yet transpired.
The two looked about as much like beef-eaters as a mouse looks like a
man-eater. They were ragged, where not fantastic, in their apparel; they
were obviously fitter for a feast than a fight, for the sea had depleted
both of their hoardings of vigor and courage.
“Sire,” said Halberd, theatrically, “we have had nothing but good
reports of you for a year.” Whether he placed his hand on his heart or
his stomach, as he said this, and what he meant to convey as his
meaning, could never be wholly clear.
“We shall be honored to fight for you, if need arise,” said Pike, who
panted somewhat, on all occasions, “while there is a breath in our
bodies.”
“It is a privilege to know you both,” said Phipps, whose gravity was as
dry as tinder.
“Any friend of the Sachem’s is a friend of ours,” responded Halberd. He
said this grandly and made a profound bow.
“The ‘Sachem’?” repeated Phipps, and he looked at Adam, inquiringly.
Adam had the grace to blush a trifle, thus to be caught in one of the
harmless little boasts in which he had indulged himself, over sea. “Just
a foolish habit the two have gotten into,” he murmured.
“Ah,” said William Phipps. “Well, then, Sachem, it will soon be growing
dark, you had best come home with me to dinner.”
Involuntarily Adam turned about to look at the beef-eaters. Their eyes
had abruptly taken on a preternatural brightness at the word dinner.
“I have much to ask you and much to tell you,” Phipps added. “And the
goodwife would exact this honor if she knew you were come.”
The invitation did not include Adam’s retinue. He swallowed, as if the
delicious odors of one of Goodwife Phipp’s dinners were about to escape
him.
“Well,” he said, “the honors are all the other way about, but—the fact
is—a previous engagement—I—I have promised a rousing hot din—I have
accepted an invitation to dine with the beef-eaters, at the Crow and
Arrow.”
The ship-builder knew all about those “rousing hot dinners” of cold
eel-pie, potatoes and mustard, for which the Crow and Arrow tavern was
not exactly famous. He looked at Adam, to whom as their sachem the
beef-eaters appealed with their eyes, like two faithful animals. Adam
was regarding the pair silently, a faint smile of cheer and camaraderie
on his face.
“But—but my invitation included our friends,” Phipps hastened to say.
“Come, come, the tavern can wait till to-morrow. Gentlemen, you will
certainly not disappoint me.”
“’Tis well spoken that the tavern can wait,” said Pike.
“To disappoint the friend of the Sachem would be a grievous thing,” said
Halberd. “Let the galled tavern sweat with impatience.”
They would all have started away together at once, had not Phipps noted
the heap of baggage, left untidily upon his landing when the travelers
arrived.
“Well,” said he, “Adam, you know the way to the house, suppose you and
your friends carry your worldly goods to the tavern, engage your
apartments, and then follow me on. I, in the meantime, can hasten home
to apprise the wife that you are coming, with the beef-eaters, and she
can therefore make due preparations in honor of the event.”
“This is good sense,” said Adam. “Go along, or we shall be there before
you.”
Phipps, with a half dozen backward looks at his guests and their shabby
chattels, made his way out of the ship-yard without further delay. Adam
and his retinue gripped three or four parcels apiece and started, with
clank of sword, and in some discomfort, for the Crow and Arrow.
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