by Howard Pyle
“It is well,” said Mistress Huntoon to herself, watching her; “she sleeps and she smiles. Youth will do the rest.” After bending an instant over the sleeper she left her and slipped down the staircase into the hall. Romney was walking up and down. At the foot of the stairway he met his mother and kissed her hand, as had been his custom from babyhood. They crossed the hall and sat down side by side on the wide settle before the fire.
Then a silence fell between them.
“Alas,” thought the mother, “when did ever my boy find it hard to speak with me before?”
“She suspects something,” thought her son.
This was not the truth; she did not suspect, she knew.
“Tell me now of all that hath befallen thee since ever The Lady Betty touched at St. Mary’s.”
“Nay, tell me first if thou, like my father, hast forgiven the loss of the dear old boat.”
“Speak not of the loss of a boat though it had held half our fortune when thy life was in the scale. Oh, my son, my son!”
The mother covered her face with her hands and fell to weeping, not so much, to tell the truth, because her son might have been lost to her, as because he had been.
Romney, shrewd as he thought himself, never dreamed of what was passing in her mind.
“Now then, little Mother, cheer up! What’s the use of weeping when thou hast me here safe and sound? As for my adventures, they have in truth been many and wonderful. To begin at the beginning, I found St. Mary’s mightily dull till I did make acquaintance with Mistress Neville and her niece who is with us here.”
“Neville, so that is her name?”
“Why, of course, Neville, — Peggy Neville,” Romney said the name slowly as if it were music in his ears. “‘T was at their house, Mother, I met Governor Brent, and he did make particular inquiry for my father, and said the fame of his courage and wisdom was spread beyond the boundaries of Virginia.”
This was a good feint on the boy’s part and drew his mother’s attention for the moment.
“Said he so indeed? Why, ’twas right civilly spoke. I trust thou didst return what courtesy thou couldst to the Governor.”
“Yes, and no. I did him some small favors; but in the end I robbed him of his prisoner.”
“Romney!”
“Ay, that did I, and would do it again. The man was falsely accused.”
“Accused of what?”
“Murder.”
Elizabeth Huntoon’s face fell. She dearly loved the atmosphere of respectability, and had no mind to be mixed up with a felony. Her son paid little heed to her expression.
“Oh, but ’twas shrewdly planned, — Peggy and I—”
“Peggy!”
Romney could have bitten his tongue out. The mischief was done. He halted, stammered, and finally resolved to throw himself on his mother’s mercy, which he might better have done in the beginning.
“Yes, Peggy! — the sweetest name for the sweetest girl in the colonies. When thou dost know her better, Mother, thou wilt say so too.”
“Thou dost not seem to have needed long knowledge to find it out; but thou must needs remember that all thou hast told me of her so far is that she is sister to a murderer.”
“Mother!” cried Romney, flinging off his mother’s hand and jumping up to pace the floor.
“It was thou who didst say the word.”
“Not I. Am I like to speak such a foul falsehood of the man I honor most in the world, next to my father! I said accused of murder, — a mighty different thing, as any but a woman would know.”
It is a great relief to a man to vent upon the sex a charge which courtesy and respect forbid his laying at the door of the individual.
“Perhaps it will be set down to the curiosity of my sex if I venture to ask whom this high-souled gentleman is supposed to have put out of the way.”
God gave sarcasm to woman in place of sinewy fists. Poor Romney felt his heart pommelled, but being in the right and knowing it, he kept his temper.
“I’ll tell thee as if thou hadst asked more kindly.”
The shot told, for it was deserved.
“Sir Christopher Neville was accused of killing a Jesuit priest, — one of those who dwell at St. Inigo’s. The evidence against him was strong, and Giles Brent credited it, though he had great liking for Neville. But his sister is much under the influence of ‘those of the Hill,’ as the Jesuits are called, and thou thyself, Mother, dost know how much that order is to be trusted.”
Cleverly aimed again, Romney! He knew that his mother had come to the greatest griefs of her life through the machinations of a follower of St. Ignatius; already she weakened a little, though her face did not betray it.
“But why was it necessary that thou shouldst be caught in the toils? Neither deed nor charge was any affair of thine. What was it all to thee?”
“What was it to my father when thou wert in trouble yonder in James City?”
Elizabeth Huntoon trembled.
“Oh, Romney, is it gone so far, in one little fortnight? Remember thy father had known and loved me for years.”
“Pshaw!” said Romney, striding up and down faster than ever, crowding his hands deep into the pockets of his jerkin. “Is there any calendar of love with directions, ‘On such a day a man may take a liking, after so many days he may admire, at the end of a month, or three, or six, he may give rein to his fancy, and when a year is out he may love, — that is, if his mother gives consent’?”
The lad was growing angry, and therefore letting down his guard. Trust a woman for seeing the advantage and using it! Elizabeth poked her little red boots out to the fire and looked at them as if they interested her more than anything in the world. Then as though the question were the most natural and casual one she asked, —
“When are you to marry?”
It was at once the cruellest and the kindest thing she could have said. A huge sob rose in the boy’s throat and choked him. Then he threw himself on his knees and buried his head in his mother’s lap, crying, —
“Don’t! Don’t! She does not love me!”
“Ask her!”
“I have asked her.”
Let those who can, explain the workings of a woman’s mind. Perhaps they can tell why Elizabeth Huntoon, who five minutes before had set her face like a flint against this love affair, of a sudden whiffed about like a weather-cock and was set for it as if she had planned it herself from the beginning. All she said was, —
“Then why did she ask thy help?”
“She did not; I offered it, — nay, forced it upon her; and for her brother she would do anything. It’s my belief he is the only human being she does truly love.”
“All the better. Love for a brother never yet blocked the way to any other. But, hark! I hear her stirring. Belike she will be able to come down for supper. Go thou, and don thy scarlet sash and the falling band with lace edge. Oh, and don’t forget the lace cuffs and the gold lacings.”
“Mother, dost take thy son for a baby or a popinjay?”
“Neither, but for the dullard he is, not to know that dress makes as much difference in men as in women. Why, who knows but I would have had thy father a year earlier, had he paid more heed to his attire! Go! Go! — Suppose thou hadst never come!” Here words failed her, and she caught her son to her heart, cried over him a moment, and then pushed him toward the stairs.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE EMERALD TAG
WITH THE DIGNITY of absolute self-renunciation Elinor took up the cramped, new existence in the little cottage at St. Mary’s. To Cecil it was but a play, this strange life in the tiny rooms, where the great four-post bed seemed an elephant in a toy house, and the head on the carved chest appeared to be perpetually grinning at the incongruity of its surroundings. What cared the child for narrow quarters, while in the evenings he could lie as of old before the fire, and in sunny spring days could wander through the village streets, now loitering on the wharf to watch the lumber loading for the new house at Cecil Point and anon pausing at
the smithy for a talk with the blacksmith as he hammered at his anvil?
For the first time in his life the boy was learning the meaning of democracy. The best gift money can offer its owners is the aloofness afforded by wide acres, and the servants who act as buffers to the multitude; but the eternal laws of compensation hold here as everywhere, and this aristocratic seclusion is bought at the expense of the feeling of kinship and sympathy with the average man.
Elinor realized this, and it reconciled her to much that was trying in her new lot. She felt that her own life was at an end, the last page turned, and finis written on that day when Giles Brent met her on the river path at St. Gabriel’s and told her that the waters had closed over the head of Christopher Neville. On that day hope fell dead; but duty lives on after hope has died, and then there was always Cecil.
On him she lavished all her pent-up love, all the unsatisfied ambition of her heart. For him she planned and worked. He was to be Lord of the Manor, then Councillor, then perhaps in the far-off days Governor of the Province, and always an honor to the Calvert name. Already men were at work building the house at Cecil Point, and the wood-chopper’s axe rang merrily among the giant trees that must fall to clear the fields and make them ready for their burden of wheat and maize and tobacco.
The superintendence of all this, combined with the keeping of the little house at St. Mary’s, filled Elinor’s days so full that she had scant time for grieving; but when Cecil was in bed and asleep, and Elinor sat by the fire alone with memory, then, indeed, the struggle was a bitter one, and often her head was bowed upon the table and the candle-light shone upon a figure shaken by a storm of tears and sobs. Yet each time, after the storm and stress came peace, as she betook herself to her closet and her beads. In nothing has the Catholic faith a stronger hold on men’s hearts than in the tie its creed furnishes between the living and the dead, in the belief that the prayers of those who kneel before the altar do still reach forth to help and succor those who lie beneath the pavements of the church.
Elinor, too, had her private liturgy addressed to Christopher, which she recited as the bells tolled the hours of devotion. At matins she said, —
“May the coming day grant me opportunity to serve thee and honor thy name!”
At prime: “May thine innocence dawn upon those who doubt thee as the glory of the morning rises on the world of shadows!”
At vespers: “So ends another day which did separate thee and me.”
And at complines: “I lay me down to sleep. May our souls meet in the world of dreams here and the world of spirits hereafter!”
Elinor never spoke to Father White of Neville, for she knew full well that to the priest he was accursed as a heretic if not as a murderer, and she felt that she could only talk of him with one who held him as she did.
Often in these lonely days did her heart yearn toward Peggy, who was known at St. Mary’s to have been rescued from the ketch and to have made her home with the Huntoons; but something within her, whether pride or penance, forbade. She remembered the scorn in Peggy’s voice as she reproached her with her doubts of Christopher, and she felt how idle it would be now to try to persuade the girl that her faith was as strong as her own. Some day, she told herself, when her prayer had been answered, her struggles rewarded, and she had shown forth Christopher’s innocence to the world, then she would write in tender triumph and bid Peggy come to her and be her little sister for life.
The chief comfort of all to her troubled soul lay in this task she had set herself as her life-work, — the proving to the world of Neville’s innocence. Baffled at every turn, she never gave up, but followed every hint of a clue and rejoiced to find here and there men and women who believed in Neville as earnestly as she.
Of all these friends in need, one was more helpful, more comforting, more sustaining than all the rest. Margaret Brent was like a granite cliff against which the waves beat mightily, but could not prevail. Had her nature sharp peaks, crevasses, and unsunned slopes? In times of storm one thought not of these, but of the rock’s protection and the solid barrier against the fury of the tempest. The very bluntness of her shrewd comments on Elinor’s conduct of life held a certain tonic. The people who help us most are those who make light of our achievements, and have faith in our possibilities.
As Elinor compared Margaret with her sister Mary, she felt how unenlightened her former judgments had been. Mary Brent’s virtues were for times of sunshine. Hospitality, tranquillity, pious observances, marked her placid progress through the world; but when the final test came, it laid bare under these qualities narrowness of mind and bigotry of soul and that hardness which sometimes underlies suavity. Her white eyelids, with their light lashes, never quivered as she pronounced Neville guilty and bade Elinor renounce him and his memory. Elinor would not? Then they were best apart, and she would not undertake to dissuade her cousin from her plan of taking up her abode at Cecil Point. When she bade Cecil good-bye, a brief spasm seemed to tear her heart; but it passed, leaving the face as unruffled as ever, and it was with a feeling of relief that Elinor turned from her to the wilderness.
At first sight the cottage at St. Mary’s had seemed impossible for one of Elinor Calvert’s birth and upbringing; but outward things had no power to trouble her now, and she set to work with a certain sense of pleasurable independence to brighten the little house for Cecil’s sake.
Her chief helper was Bride, an old nurse of Cecil’s who had come to the new land with her boy and who now proved herself as reliable in the kitchen as in the nursery. She was a picturesque figure enough in her short stuff gown with bright stockings and heavy shoes, a white kerchief folded above her checked apron, and a ruffled cap covering her gray hair.
Her only wish was to serve her mistress, her only joy to prepare good things for Cecil to eat, her only terror fear of these strange blacks whom people seemed to take into their houses as if they were human beings like the white folk, instead of uncanny creatures of whom any deviltry might be expected.
“Do ye think, Master Cecil, the black would come off if ye touched one?” she asked.
“I know not; I never tried. Come here, Lysander! There, stand still while I rub you with this white cloth. See, Bride, the cloth is not black, no more than if you rubbed it on a black cow or any other beast.”
“Ay, it’s beasts they are, and not men at all, and it’s none of them I be wanting about my kitchen. Let them bring water from the well and leave it at the door, and then be off out of my sight before one of them casts the evil eye on me. And the females are worse than the males; they’re like black witches.”
“Bride!”
“Ay, my bairn!”
“Ye remember the murder of Father Mohl?”
“Am I like to forget it?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking ’twas not like a man to kill a priest like that. Do you think it might have been a black witch that was riding through the forest on a broomstick, and did it with a witch knife, — you know they have them that they copy from real ones.”
“What’s this talk of witches and witch knives?” It was Ralph Ingle who spoke. He stood leaning against the door, his hair falling light against his suit of huntsman’s green with leather trimmings, in his hands a string of wild ducks.
“Oh, Master Ingle!” cried Cecil, jumping up and down and clapping his hands, “you have been shooting again and when, oh, when will you take me with you as you did promise?”
“When Mistress Neville grants her gracious permission; and, Cecil, do you think ever you could gain her consent to another thing?”
“What thing?”
“To her accepting me as a tenant at Cecil Point.”
Cecil shook his yellow curls and set his mouth in droll imitation of his mother’s determined look.
“Cannot be! Mother says we shall never have a tenant at the Point.”
“Not till the sea gives up its dead,” said Elinor, coming to the door and laying her arm about Cecil’s shoulder.
&nbs
p; At Mistress Calvert’s approach Ingle bent forward with that unconscious deference which is the most subtle flattery, as though the soul stood at attention before its superior.
“Say no more, I pray you,” said Elinor, “though I know you do speak but out of kindness and deep thoughtfulness for me. You have been hunting,” she added, striving to turn the conversation.
“Ay, and have brought the spoils to lay at your feet,” adding under his breath, “where my heart still lies.”
Elinor colored and shook her head, but, feeling that refusal were ungracious, she took the ducks from his hand, stroked the plumage, and bade Cecil carry them to Bride.
Ingle watched Cecil disappear with the birds over his arm, then he leaned across the door near Elinor.
“You are more beautiful than ever,” he said.
“I have outgrown the age of flatteries, Master Ingle. Beauty belongs to youth and joy, and both have left me forever.”
“One type of beauty belongs to these. At St. Gabriel’s yonder you were beautiful like a great lady of the court. To-day you are beautiful like the Blessed Virgin.”
“Hush! You speak something akin to blasphemy.”
“Nay, not a whit. Did not the old masters paint Our Lady from the women around them, and none so fair as you?”
“A pretty model for a sacred figure I should make, with my homespun apron and a bunch of keys in my hand.”
“They might be the keys of Heaven if the hand were in mine.”
“Master Ingle, I have told you more than once that I could listen to no such talk from you.”
“Your word is law,” said Ingle, bowing low. Then with a swift turn of the tide of talk, “I must tell you how narrow an escape these ducks had from becoming food for some dirty red man instead of lying in state on your table. I shot them on the river a day or two since. Father White asked me to go with him as interpreter on a mission among the Patuxents. We took a boat and two chests, one containing clothing along with bread and butter and cheese and corn, and another containing bottles of wine for the eucharist and holy water for baptism. But in the night the savages broke into the tent where that dolt of a servant slept, and stole the sacramental wine and our chest of clothing and all the food save one pat of butter and a cheese-cake.