Heralds of Empire | Page 4

and their shameless ones.
Ah, yes! God wot, I understood Eli Kirke's bitterness!
But the beginning was not auspicious, and my best intentions presaged worse. For instance, one morning my uncle was sounding my convictions--he was ever sounding other people's convictions--"touching the divine right of kings." Thinking to give strength to contempt for that doctrine, I applied to it one forcible word I had oft heard used by gentlemen of the cloth. Had I shot a gun across the table, the effect could not have been worse. The serving maid fell all of a heap against the pantry door. Old Tibbie yelped out with laughter, and then nigh choked. Aunt Ruth glanced from me to Eli Kirke with a timid look in her eye; but Eli Kirke gazed stolidly into my soul as he would read whether I scoffed or no.
Thereafter he nailed up a little box to receive fines for blasphemy.
"To be plucked as a brand from the burning," I hear him say, fetching a mighty sigh. But sweet, calm Aunt Ruth, stitching at some spotless kerchief, intercedes.
"Let us be thankful the lad hath come to us."
"Bound fast in cords of vanity," deplores Uncle Kirke.
"But all things are possible," Aunt Ruth softly interposes.
"All things are possible," concedes Eli Kirke grudgingly, "but thou knowest, Ruth, all things are not probable!"
And I, knowing my uncle loved an argument as dearly as merry gentlemen love a glass, slip away leg-bail for the docks, where sits Ben Gillam among the spars spinning sailor yarns to Jack Battle, of the great north sea, whither his father goes for the fur trade; or of M. Radisson, the half-wild Frenchman, who married an English kinswoman of Eli Kirke's and went where never man went and came back with so many pelts that the Quebec governor wanted to build a fortress of beaver fur; [1] or of the English squadron, rocking to the harbour tide, fresh from winning the Dutch of Manhattan, and ready to subdue malcontents of Boston Town. Then Jack Battle, the sailor lad from no one knows where, living no one knows how, digs his bare toes into the sand and asks under his breath if we have heard about king-killers.
"What are king-killers?" demands young Gillam.
I discreetly hold my tongue; for a gentleman who supped late with my uncle one night has strangely disappeared, and the rats in the attic have grown boldly loud.
"What are king-killers?" asks Gillam.
"Them as sent Charles I to his death," explains Jack. "They do say," he whispers fearfully, "one o' them is hid hereabouts now! The king's commission hath ordered to have hounds and Indians run him down."
"Pah!" says Gillam, making little of what he had not known, "hounds are only for run-aways," this with a sneering look at odd marks round Jack's wrists.
"I am no slave!" vows Jack in crestfallen tones.
"Who said 'slave'?" laughs Gillam triumphantly. "My father saith he is a runaway rat from the Barbadoes," adds Ben to me.
With the fear of a hunted animal under his shaggy brows, little Jack tries to read how much is guess.
"I am no slave, Ben Gillam," he flings back at hazard; but his voice is thin from fright.
"My father saith some planter hath lost ten pound on thee, little slavie," continues Ben.
"Pah! Ten pound for such a scrub! He's not worth six! Look at the marks on his arms, Ramsay"--catching the sailor roughly by the wrist. "He can say what he likes. He knows chains."
Little Jack jerked free and ran along the sands as hard as his bare feet could carry him. Then I turned to Ben, who had always bullied us both. Dropping the solemn "thou's" which our elders still used, I let him have plain "you's."
"You--you--mean coward! I've a mind to knock you into the sea!"
"Grow bigger first, little billycock," taunts Ben.
By the next day I was big enough.
Mistress Hortense Hillary was down on the beach with M. Picot's blackamoor, who dogged her heels wherever she went; and presently comes Rebecca Stocking to shovel sand too. Then Ben must show what a big fellow he is by kicking over the little maid's cart-load.
"Stop that!" commands Jack Battle, springing of a sudden from the beach.
For an instant, Ben was taken aback.
Then the insolence that provokes its own punishment broke forth.
"Go play with your equals, jack-pudding! Jailbirds who ape their betters are strangled up in Quebec," and he kicked down Rebecca's pile too.
Rebecca's doll-blue eyes spilled over with tears, but Mistress Hortense was the high-mettled, high-stepping little dame. She fairly stamped her wrath, and to Jack's amaze took him by the hand and marched off with the hauteur of an empress.
Then Ben must call out something about M. Picot, the French doctor, not being what he ought, and little Hortense having no mother.
"Ben," said I quietly, "come out on the pier."