by Howard Pyle
“You were in love once?”
“Ay, that I was, as deep as you or any other fool.”
“Was the girl English?”
“Ay, and a tall, straight, handsome girl as ever you saw, in those days, — far handsomer than her sister, who is and always was a weakling, with no more expression than a basin of hasty pudding.”
“She is living, then?”
For answer Ingle pointed with his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Kent Fort.
“Here, in Maryland?”
Ingle lurched half way across the table, and putting his hand to the side of his mouth whispered a name.
“No!” exclaimed Huntoon.
“Ay!” then jealously, “Perhaps you think she’s too good for me?”
Huntoon thought it prudent to evade the question by another.
“Did you ever tell your love?”
“I tried to, and more than once, but I could never get her to listen. Curse the pride of those Brents!”
“They are proud,” Huntoon assented.
“Ay, and Margaret proudest of all. Why, when I wrote her she sent back the letter, saying she could not read it for the spelling, and that I would be the better for a twelvemonth more of schooling. And when I spoke to her she bade me shut my mouth. And when I held her wrist and would make her listen, she said I was no gentleman.”
“But how were you on the road to a bishop’s see? Not surely by writing of misspelled letters and holding of ladies’ hands against their wills.”
“No, but in spite of it, for I had influence and the Archbishop was a friend of my father’s, and I had his promise of preferment, which was good for its face value in those days, and I might have risen to anything; but when Margaret Brent cast scorn at me like that it maddened me — and what was she to hold herself above me? What are the Calverts themselves? Why, Leonard Calvert’s grandfather was a grazier, and Leonard himself was a dolt when we were at school together.”
Huntoon, not seeing exactly what answer was expected, wisely attempted none, but made a feint of helping himself from the jug at his elbow, and then shoved it across the table. Ingle shook it and finding it still heavy, set it down with a contented thump.
“Bide you there, my beauty!” he said jovially, “till I’m ready for you. I’ll have you yet. Yes, and Margaret Brent too, for all her fine-lady airs. Who ever heard of the Brents till they sprang up like mushrooms in this new world? While the Ingles — my grandfather did oft tell me how all England took its name from them.”
“Faith!” said Huntoon to himself, “your spelling is not much improved since the days when you wrote Mistress Brent.” Aloud he said, “And did the disappointment drive you out of England, the country named after your forefathers?”
“It did,” answered Ingle, with a hiccough, and fell into drunken weeping, “but perhaps I might have lost my head if I’d tarried, so maybe ’tis all for the best, and the life o’ the sea is a merry one; but I’ve never forgotten nor forgiven, and for Margaret Brent’s sake I’ve sworn an oath to make a hell of Maryland to all her kith and kin.”
With this Ingle came to himself a little and feared the confidences he was making this stranger in his cups might have gone too far, so he burst into tipsy laughter and shook the jug, which was made of leather, and then poured its contents to the last dregs into his silver-rimmed skull, and finally waving it above his head burst out singing, —
“‘Oh, a leather bottel we know is good,
Far better than glasses or cans of wood.
And what do you say to the silver flagons fine?
Oh, they shall have no praise of mine,
But I wish in Heaven his soul may dwell
That first devised the leather bottel!’
Huzza for the leather bottel! and huzza for the wine in it! Wine and woman they’re a fine pair; I’ll sing you a song about them — hic!”
Huntoon looked anxiously toward the door behind which Peggy was sitting, and he saw with satisfaction that the carousing Captain had promised more than he could perform, for when he started to sing his voice failed him, his arm fell at his side, and the whole man collapsed in a heap beneath the table.
“At last,” murmured Huntoon, gratefully, “I think he can be trusted to stay where he is till morning,” and escaping from the close cabin with its foul-smelling lantern he made his way to the deck.
The fog was gone, and the night stainlessly, brilliantly, radiantly clear. The stars twinkled a frosty greeting to him. The deep, dark blue of the sky calmed and soothed him. He took a dozen turns up and down the deck, then he went below, and stretching himself out before the door of Peggy’s cabin fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER XVII. ROMNEY
IT WAS ON the afternoon of the day after the collision with The Lady Betty that The Reformation rounded the last headland that shut Romney from the view. The river ran cobalt blue between its brown banks, bare but for the patches of snow that lay here and there in unsunned hollows. The sky arched above far and clear, save where a group of fleecy clouds bunched together like a flock of white sheep on the horizon.
The sunlight fell full on the western front of Romney as it stood in stalwart bulk against the black forest behind it, its wings outspread on either side like some wild bird sheltering its young. A stout stockade enclosed house and grounds, and ended on either side of the little wharf running out into the river.
In the doorway of the house stood a woman, her hand raised to shelter her eyes as she scanned the river to the southward. Mistress Huntoon was still beautiful, though the radiance of youth was gone. The pencilled eyebrow and the transparent curve of the delicate nostril, the lambent flame in the eyes, yet remained, and, above all, that indefinable attraction which hovers about some women from the cradle to the grave.
Just now she shivered a little as though she had been standing and looking long. Then she drew closer about her the cloak of gray paduasoy lined with yellow and held by carved clasps of polished marcasite.
“Will he never come?” she murmured. “’Tis nigh a week since he was to have reached home, and I cannot help worrying, for all his father laughs and bids me put away womanish fears and remember that the boy is well-nigh come to man’s estate and better able than either of us to look after himself. Ah, what’s that beyond the headland? A sail, a sail, Humphrey! Do you hear? a sail in the river! It must be Romney’s, though it looks over large for The Lady Betty.”
Her eager words brought her husband to her side, buttoning his doublet close as he shut the door behind him.
“Poor, poor little mother!” he said, as he laid a comforting arm about her shoulder, “we cannot let the lad go beyond the length of her apron string again, if she is to lead me such a life as this of last week. Why, we have had him die of seven separate deaths already. Let me see,” and he began counting soberly on his fingers: “first, drowned in Chesapeake Bay; second, caught by pirates and carried off to the Bermudas; third, languishing in prison, for taking the part of Virginia in one of Master Claiborne’s skirmishes between commonwealth and palatinate; fourth, stabbed in the streets of St. Mary’s on a dark night and robbed of his gold; fifth, shot in a duel brought on by his hot temper ‘so like his father’s;’ sixth, frozen to death on some lonely Maryland road; or last and worst of all, dead in love with some designing maid, wife, or widow there at St. Mary’s and wholly forgetful of his duty to thee and me — ay, sweetheart?”
“Hush, Humphrey! Cease thy jesting and tell me is that The Lady Betty, or is it not?”
“Why, no, as I make out, ’tis too large for the ketch, deeper built, and with a prow more fit to buffet ocean waves. ’Tis more likely a merchant packet plying a regular trade with James City or St. Mary’s; but come, let us signal her from the wharf and perhaps we may get some news of Romney.”
The wind was blowing cold as they reached the dock, and Huntoon wrapped the gray cloak close about his wife, as they seated themselves under the shelter of a pile of logs to watch the app
roaching vessel.
“Dost thou remember, Betty, the day I set sail from James City in The Red Fox?”
“Ay, that I do, and I watching thee from the window of the Carys’ cottage, with my heart in my throat.”
“And I that disappointed I could have cried like a schoolboy, because thou camest not to see me off.”
“I dared not.”
“If I could only have known that!”
“Poor fool, too dull to ask what thou wast aching to know!”
“Ay, poor fool indeed, and much needless trouble my dulness and diffidence together brought upon me, and on thee too; but in the end all came out right, and I sometimes think we could not have loved each other so well but for all the trials we went through.”
For all answer Elizabeth Huntoon slipped her hand into her husband’s.
“Yet such inconsistent creatures are we, I own I would not our boy should suffer as I did.”
“Never fear; Romney is a lad of spirit, and will never lose a girl for lack of asking.”
“Ay, but asking and getting are two different things. There was Captain Spellman. He wooed thee with as much spirit as any woman could wish.”
“The presuming coxcomb!”
“There it is. What is a poor man to do, when asking is presumption, and not asking is dulness?”
“Do? Why, hold his tongue and use his eyes, to be sure.”
“But, Betty, thou wert never twice alike.”
“So shouldst thou have changed too. When I was hot, thou shouldst have been cold. When I was cold, thou shouldst have turned to a furnace.”
“Who loves, fears. I played the fool; but, Betty, ’twas the fool who won. Pray Heaven Romney meets as kind a fate.”
“But, Humphrey, what can be keeping him?”
“The old refrain; I have heard that question so often I could answer it in my sleep. Thy boy is safe and sound, and will give a good account of his absence, I’ll be bound.”
For all his light treatment of his wife’s terrors, Master Huntoon had his own fears for his son’s safety, and realized better than she could the many forms of danger and temptations that beset a home-bred youth, setting out to do business or battle with the world. It was with a glad leap of the heart and a curious catch in his throat that he recognized the stalwart figure by the gunwale as the packet drew near the wharf, though a moment later he realized that something must have gone wrong with the ketch.
“All’s well, Father,” cried Romney; which meant, “There’s the devil to pay; but I’m alive.”
Before the ship had made fast her first hawser, the boy was over its side and in his mother’s arms, with one hand held fast in his father’s, pouring forth a torrent of words so bewildering that his father finally clapped his hand over his son’s mouth, saying, —
“Softly, thou headlong stripling, or thou wilt split our ears in the effort to hear, and our heads trying to take all in. Now let me put the questions, and do thou say ‘ay’ or ‘no,’ and as little more as the grace of God lets thee hold thy tongue for. Now, thou didst load at St. Mary’s?”
“Ay, sir.”
“And cleared in safety?”
“Ay.”
“And stopped at St. Gabriel’s Manor?”
“Ay.”
“What for?”
“How can I say ‘ay’ or ‘no’ to that?”
“Then explain more at length; but briefly.”
“Prithee let that stand. Suffice it to say a man — a friend of mine — was in mortal peril, and his sister and I resolved to save him.”
“Sister! Ah, I begin to see a light. Is she with you?”
“Ay, and I have promised her a welcome from thee and my mother fit to heal her sore heart.”
“Well, well, we’ll come to that later. Now what befell the ketch?”
“Why, the fog befell us first, and then Dick Ingle befell us, and then the devil befell us; but here we are in spite of all three; and, Mother, thou wilt be good to her, wilt thou not?”
The crisis had come to Elizabeth Huntoon, as it comes to every mother — gradually to some, suddenly to others — when she realizes that her supreme place is gone forever. Henceforth, for her, affection and esteem and a comfortable suite of dowager apartments in her child’s heart; but the absolute sway, the power, the firstness at an end.
The blood surged back from Mistress Huntoon’s face, leaving it gray, and for the first time with the touch of age upon it, so that one could know how she would look as an old woman.
“Yes; I will be good. Where is she?” The lips formed the words which sounded cold and formal in her own ears; but she saw with a new pang that her son had no leisure for noting subtle shades of tone or meaning in her voice.
“Here, Mother, here!” he exclaimed, turning to where his father was already assisting Peggy Neville from the deck to the wharf. Now, had Peggy been rosy and dimpling and happy as she was a fortnight ago, and as she must needs have been to arrest the wandering fancy of Romney Huntoon, his mother would have greeted her with as much coolness as Virginia hospitality permitted; but seeing a pale, tearful little face, weary and woe-begone, peeping out from the brown curls, the older woman felt her heart touched by a keen remembrance of herself as a young girl, a stranger in a strange land; and waiting no words of presentation, she made one of her swift, characteristic strides toward Peggy, and folding her arms close about her, kissed her on both cheeks.
“Poor child!” she said in her low caressing voice; “thou art fair tired out and sadly in need of rest. Come with me to the little white chamber next mine; there shalt thou bathe thy face with fresh water and rest thy weary body in a warm bed.”
“But my brother — he is very ill—”
“Leave him to my husband, who is counted the best physician in Virginia. He and Romney can do more for him than thou or I. Romney, receive our guests and do what is needful for their comfort! I will join thee shortly in the hall.”
“Captain Ingle, will you come ashore and try the quality of Romney cheer?” said Humphrey Huntoon, as his son stood looking like one dazed after the women on the path.
“I thank you; but my time is short, and I must have speech with Master Claiborne, who is staying further up the river.”
“Perhaps on your return you will stop and let me try to repay—” began Huntoon, courteously; but the thought of The Lady Betty’s goods stored in The Reformation’s hold pricked Ingle’s conscience.
“I am already repaid,” he answered stiffly, “and there is no call for thanks on either side. Here, you men! Lift Sir Christopher Neville over the railing there. Three of you go to this side; three to that. So! easy there. One — two — three! Now lift!”
To give the devil his due, no man had such a gift as Richard Ingle for giving orders.
It was scarcely quarter of an hour after The Reformation touched the wharf before she was away again, leaving four of her passengers and the crew of The Lady Betty on the wharf. When she was well out in the river, Ingle ordered a salute of five guns, and then bade his men give three cheers for the Mistress Peggy Neville, the handsomest girl that ever trod the deck of a vessel.
“Here’s to her!” he cried himself, “and may she have the luck to marry a buccaneer when yonder stripling is dead and gone!”
Peggy smiled a watery, tearful smile as she heard the five guns. How little, she thought, had she imagined under what circumstances that salute would be fired when Captain Ingle lightly promised it at St. Mary’s!
But her hostess would give her no time for thought. She led her swiftly up the winding stair to the little white bedroom, and in a trice she had set black Dinah at work heating the sheets with the great brass warming-pan. Susan was fetching water hot and cold, and she herself was loosening the lacings with which Peggy’s own numb fingers fumbled in vain.
All the while she kept her eyes upon the wharf which lay below the window. Already a litter had been improvised of boards that lay on the wharf; four men lifted the figure over the ship’s si
de and laid it down gently. Then the litter was raised and borne toward the house, Romney and his father walking on either side. Once or twice the figure struggled and flung its arms wildly above its head. So violent did the struggles become that at length Master Huntoon drew a phial from his jerkin, and pouring out some drops forced them between the prostrate man’s lips. The head fell back, and quiet settled on the limbs so suddenly that Mistress Huntoon uttered an involuntary exclamation of terror.
Peggy caught her anxiety in a moment.
“What are they doing? Where is he? Oh, not — not dead!”
“Why, no, foolish child,” answered Lady Betty, ready to pinch herself for her ill-timed outcry. “Look for thyself. See, they are bearing him up the walk, and they will have him undressed and put to bed in no time. Go thou to rest likewise! I promise to bring thee tidings, should there be need of thee in the sick room, and meanwhile let me sing thee a little song that my mother sang to me in the old country, and I again to Romney here in his babyhood.”
Mistress Huntoon watched Peggy closely as she spoke Romney’s name, but no answering blush marked her words. The girl was so utterly worn out that she scarcely took any heed of what was passing around her, but sank upon the bed, closed her eyes, and dropped into sweet slumber to the sound of a tender, preoccupied crooning of the old refrain, — the same that Romney had hummed to himself on the hillside path at St. Mary’s, —
“Heigh-ho! whether or no,
Kiss me once before you go
Under the trees where the pippins grow.”
In her dreams it seemed to Peggy that she was standing on a ladder in an English orchard. Romney was shaking the tree and for every apple that fell claiming a kiss, while she from her vantage ground of the ladder pelted him with the red apples instead.
The dream brought a smile to the pale young lips.