“Hush!” cried Forest. “No profane language.”
“I will not speak to him,” said I, “and--and--he is a beast of the pit.”
Now this fine statement I had come upon in a book of Mr. William Penn’s
my father owned, wherein the governor had denounced one Mr. Muggleton.
Friend Forest laughed merrily. “Thou hast thy standing, lad.” For
Alloway walked sullenly away, not man enough to take more or to confess
defeat. Jack, who was still white, said:
“It is my turn now, and which shall it be?”
“Shade of Fox!” cried Friend Forest. “The war is over. Come, boys,
I must see you well out of this.” And so reassuring us, he went down
Fourth street, and to my home.
My father was in the sitting-room, taking his long-stemmed reed pipe at
his ease. He rose as we followed Friend Forest into the room.
“Well,” he said, “what coil is this?” For we were bloody, and hot with
fight and wrath, and our garments in very sad disorder.
Friend Forest very quietly related our story, and made much of his own
share in the renewal of our battle. To my surprise, my father smiled.
“It seems plain,” he said, “that the lads were not to blame. But how
wilt thou answer to the Meeting, Rupert Forest?”
“To it, to thee, to any man,” said the Quaker.
“It is but a month ago that thy case was before Friends because of thy
having beaten Friend Wain’s man. It will go ill with thee--ill, I fear.”
“And who is to spread it abroad?”
“Not I,” said my father.
“I knew that,” returned the Friend, simply. “I am but a jack-in-the-box
Quaker, John. I am in and out in a moment, and then I go back and
repent.”
“Let us hope so. Go to thy mother, Hugh; and as to thee, John Warder,
wait until I send with thee a note to thy father. There are liquors on
the table, Friend Forest.”
My mother set us in order, and cried a little, and said:
“I am glad he was well beaten. Thou shouldst never fight, my son; but if
thou must, let it be so that thy adversary repent of it. _Mon Dieu! mon
Dieu! j’en ai peur_; the wild Welsh blood of these Wynnes! And thy poor
little nose--how ‘t is swelled!”
Not understanding her exclamations, Jack said as much, but she answered:
“Oh, it is a fashion of speech we French have. I shall never be cured of
it, I fear. This wild blood--what will come of it?” And she seemed--as
Jack writes long after, being more observing than I--as if she were
looking away into the distance of time, thinking of what might come to
pass. She had, indeed, strange insight, and even then, as I knew later,
had her fears and unspoken anxieties. And so, with a plentiful supper,
ended a matter which was, I may say, a critical point in my life.