When it came to machinery, Ernest found his aunt much more sympathetic
than his usual confidante, Kate Digby. As years went on, the childish
companionship between the children deepened into friendship. They began
to confide to each other their dreams for the future. Kate modelled
herself somewhat on the accounts handed down of a certain ancestress of
hers whose portrait hung in the stairway of her father's house.
The portrait was a copy of one thinly painted and flat looking, done by
an obscure seventeenth century artist. It showed a very young girl
dressed in gray, with a white kerchief folded around her slim neck, and
with her thin little wrists meekly crossed in front. Whether her hair
was abundant or not no one could tell, for an old-womanish cap with
narrow ruffle so covered her head that only a faint blonde aureole could
be seen beneath it. Colorless though this portrait seemed at first
sight, longer study brought out a depth in the clear gray eye, a
firmness in the small pink mouth, which consorted well with the stories
told of this little Puritan's bravery.
One of the youngest of the children entering Massachusetts Bay on
Winthrop's fleet, the little Mercy had been the pet of a Puritan
household. Marrying early, she had gone from her father's comfortable
house in Boston to live in the country forty miles away, a region remote
and almost on the borders of civilization in those days. Not mere rumor
but veritable records have told the story of the fierce attack of the
savages on that secluded dwelling, of the murder of husband and man
servant, of the flight of the wife and little children, and of their
final rescue at the very moment when the Indians had overtaken them,--a
rescue, however, not accomplished until one of the children had been
killed by an arrow, while the mother pierced through the arm, was forced
to drop the gun with which she held off her assailants.
"Just think of her being so brave and shooting like that!" Kate would
say to Ernest. "I admire her more than any of my
great-great-great-grandmothers--whichever of the 'greats' she was. And
then she brought up all her children so beautifully, with almost
nothing to live on, so that every one of them became somebody. I'm
always delighted when people tell me I look like her."
"Well, you don't look like her," said Ernest, truthfully. "If you looked
as flat and fady as that you wouldn't look like much. Besides, I don't
like a woman's shooting and picking off the red-skins the way she did.
Of course," in response to Kate's look of surprise, "it was all right;
she had to save herself and the children; but some way it don't seem the
kind of thing for a woman to do! Now, I like her because she wouldn't
let her oldest son go back to England and have a title. You see, her
husband's father had cast him off for being a Puritan."
"Oh, yes, I know," responded Kate. "But I wish she had let him take the
title. I'd like to be related to a lord."
Kate and Ernest were no longer little children when this particular
conversation took place; but its substance had come up between them
many a time before. Yet Ernest always held to the more democratic
position; and as years went by his acquaintance with Ben Bruce
intensified his democratic feeling. No one recognized more clearly than
Miss Theodora this tendency of Ernest's, and she questioned long whether
she was doing what John would have approved in sending him to a school
where he must mingle with his social inferiors. In John's day public
schools had been different.
An unguarded expression of these feelings of hers one evening at the
Digbys' led to an offer from Stuart Digby to share his son's tutor with
Ernest, that the two boys might prepare for Harvard together. Now, the
idea of a tutor was almost as unpleasant to Miss Theodora as the thought
of the undesirable acquaintances that Ernest might make at a public
school. In the choice between unrepublican aristocracy and simple
democracy she almost inclined to the latter; but Stuart Digby, her
second cousin, had been John's bosom friend, and she could not bring
herself to refuse the well-meant offer. It was Ernest who rebelled.
"I don't want to go to college at all. I hate Latin; I won't waste time
on Greek. I detest that namby-pamby Ralph. All he cares for is to walk
down Beacon Street with the girls. He don't know a force pump from a
steam engine!"
But Miss Theodora, though tearful--for she hated to oppose him--was
firm; and for three years the boy went down the Hill and across the
Garden to recite his lessons with Ralph. Out of school he saw as little
as he could of Ralph. His time was spent chiefly with Ben Bruce. Ben's
father kept a small retail shop somewhere down near Court Street, and
his family lived in a little house at the top of the hill,--a little
house that never had been meant for any but people of limited means.
Yet from the roof of the house there was a view such as no one at the
Back Bay ever dreamed of; for past the sloping streets near by one could
gaze on the river bounded like a lake by marshy low lands and the high
sea walls, which, with the distant hills, the nearer factory chimneys,
even the gray walls of the neighboring County Jail, on a dark day or
bright day, formed a beautiful scene.
There in that little room of Ben's Ernest often opened his heart to his
friend more freely than to his aunt. Ben, considerably Ernest's senior,
had entered the Institute of Technology--in boys' language, "Tech"--soon
after Ernest himself had begun to study with Ralph's tutor, and Ernest
frankly envied his friend's opportunity for studying science.
[Illustration]