CHAPTER I

WHAT ARE KING-KILLERS?

My father—peace to his soul!—had been of those who thronged London streets with wine tubs to drink the restored king's health on bended knee; but he, poor gentleman, departed this life before his monarch could restore a wasted patrimony. For old Tibbie, the nurse, there was nothing left but to pawn the family plate and take me, a spoiled lad in his teens, out to Puritan kin of Boston Town.

On the night my father died he had spoken remorsefully of the past to the lord bishop at his bedside.

"Tush, man, have a heart," cries his lordship. "Thou'lt see pasch and yule yet forty year, Stanhope. Tush, man, 'tis thy liver, or a touch of the gout. Take here a smack of port. Sleep sound, man, sleep sound."

And my father slept so sound he never wakened more.

So I came to my Uncle Kirke, whose virtues were of the acid sort that curdles the milk of human kindness.

With him, goodness meant gloom. If the sweet joy of living ever sang to him in his youth, he shut his ears to the sound as to siren temptings, and sternly set himself to the fierce delight of being miserable.

For misery he had reason enough. Having writ a book in which he called King Charles "a man of blood and everlasting abomination"—whatever that might mean—Eli Kirke got himself star-chambered. When, in the language of those times, he was examined "before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture"—the torture of the rack and the thumbkins and the boot—he added to his former testimony that the queen was a "Babylonish woman, a Potiphar, a Jezebel, a—"

There his mouth was gagged, head and heels roped to the rack, and a wrench given the pulleys at each end that nigh dismembered his poor, torn body. And what words, think you, came quick on top of his first sharp outcry?

"Wisdom is justified of her children! The wicked shall he pull down and the humble shall he exalt!"

And when you come to think of it, Charles Stuart lost his head on the block five years from that day.

When Eli Kirke left jail to take ship for Boston Town both ears had been cropped. On his forehead the letters S L—seditious libeler—were branded deep, though not so deep as the bitterness burned into his soul.

There comes before me a picture of my landing, showing as clearly as it were threescore years ago that soft, summer night, the harbour waters molten gold in a harvest moon, a waiting group of figures grim above the quay. No firing of muskets and drinking of flagons and ringing of bells to welcome us, for each ship brought out court minions to whip Boston into line with the Restoration—as hungry a lot of rascals as ever gathered to pick fresh bones.

Old Tibbie had pranked me out in brave finery: the close-cut, black-velvet waistcoat that young royalists then wore; a scarlet doublet, flaming enough to set the turkey yard afire; the silken hose and big shoe-buckles late introduced from France by the king; and a beaver hat with plumes a-nodding like my lady's fan. My curls, I mind, tumbled forward thicker than those foppish French perukes.

"There is thy Uncle Kirke," whispers Nurse Tibbie. "Pay thy best devoirs, Master Ramsay," and she pushes me to the fore of those crowding up the docks.

A thin, pale man with a scarred face silently permitted me to salute four limp fingers. His eyes swept me with chill disapproval. My hat clapped on a deal faster than it had come off, for you must know we unhatted in those days with a grand, slow bow.

"Thy Aunt Ruth," says Tibbie, nudging me; for had I stood from that day to this, I was bound that cold man should speak first.

To my aunt the beaver came off in its grandest flourish. The pressure of a dutiful kiss touched my forehead, and I minded the passion kisses of a dead mother.

Those errant curls blew out in the wind.

"Ramsay Stanhope," begins my uncle sourly, "what do you with uncropped hair and the foolish trappings of vanity?"

As I live, those were the first words he uttered to me.

"I perceive silken garters," says he, clearing his throat and lowering his glance down my person. "Many a good man hath exchanged silk for hemp, my fine gentleman!"

"An the hemp hold like silk, 'twere a fair exchange, sir," I returned; though I knew very well he referred to those men who had died for the cause.

"Ramsay," says he, pointing one lank fore-finger at me, "Ramsay, draw your neck out of that collar; for the vanities of the wicked are a yoke leading captive the foolish!"

Now, my collar was point-de-vice of prime quality over black velvet. My uncle's welcome was more than a vain lad could stomach; and what youth of his first teens hath not a vanity hidden about him somewhere?

"Thou shalt not put the horse and the ass under the same yoke, sir," said I, drawing myself up far as ever high heels would lift.

He looked dazed for a minute. Then he told me that he spake concerning my spiritual blindness, his compassions being moved to show me the error of my way.

At that, old nurse must needs take fire.

"Lord save a lad from the likes o' sich compassions! Sure, sir, an the good Lord makes pretty hair grow, 'twere casting pearls before swine to shave his head like a cannon-ball"—this with a look at my uncle's crown—"or to dress a proper little gentleman like a ragged flibbergibbet."

"Tibbie, hold your tongue!" I order.

"Silence were fitter for fools and children," says Eli Kirke loftily.

There comes a time when every life must choose whether to laugh or weep over trivial pains, and when a cut may be broken on the foil of that glancing mirth which the good Creator gave mankind to keep our race from going mad. It came to me on the night of my arrival on the wharves of Boston Town.

We lumbered up through the straggling village in one of those clumsy coaches that had late become the terror of foot-passengers in London crowds. My aunt pointed with a pride that was colonial to the fine light which the towns-people had erected on Beacon Hill; and told me pretty legends of Rattlesnake Hill that fired the desire to explore those inland dangers. I noticed that the rubble-faced houses showed lanterns in iron clamps above most of the doorways. My kinsman's house stood on the verge of the wilds-rough stone below, timbered plaster above, with a circle of bay windows midway, like an umbrella. High windows were safer in case of attack from savages, Aunt Ruth explained; and I mentally set to scaling rope ladders in and out of those windows.

We drew up before the front garden and entered by a turnstile with flying arms. Many a ride have little Rebecca Stocking, of the court-house, and Ben Gillam, the captain's son, and Jack Battle, the sailor lad, had, perched on that turnstile, while I ran pushing and jumping on, as the arms flew creaking round.

The home-coming was not auspicious. Yet I thought no resentment against my uncle. I realized too well how the bloody revenge of the royalists was turning the hearts of England to stone. One morning I recall, when my poor father lay a-bed of the gout and there came a roar through London streets as of a burst ocean dike. Before Tibbie could say no, I had snatched up a cap and was off.

God spare me another such sight! In all my wild wanderings have I never seen savages do worse.

Through the streets of London before the shoutings of a rabble rout was whipped an old, white-haired man. In front of him rumbled a cart; in the cart, the axeman, laving wet hands; at the axeman's feet, the head of a regicide—all to intimidate that old, white-haired man, fearlessly erect, singing a psalm. When they reached the shambles, know you what they did? Go read the old court records and learn what that sentence meant when a man's body was cast into fire before his living eyes! All the while, watching from a window were the princes 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." The pier ran to deep water. At the far end I spoke.

"Not another word against Hortense and Jack! Promise me!"

His back was to the water, mine to the shore. He would have promised readily enough, I think, if the other monkeys had not followed—Rebecca with big tear-drops on both cheeks, Hortense quivering with wrath, Jack flushed, half shy and half shamed to be championed by a girl.

"Come, Ben; 'fore I count three, promise——"

But he lugged at me. I dodged. With a splash that doused us four, Ben went headlong into the sea. The uplift of the waves caught him. He threw back his arms with a cry. Then he sank like lead.

The sailor son of the famous captain could not swim. Rebecca's eyes nigh jumped from her head with fright. Hortense grew white to the lips and shouted for that lout of a blackamoor sound asleep on the sand.

Before I could get my doublet off to dive, Jack Battle was cleaving air like a leaping fish, and the waters closed over his heels.

Bethink you, who are not withered into forgetfulness of your own merry youth, whether our hearts stopped beating then!

But up comes that water-dog of a Jack gripping Ben by the scruff of the neck; and when by our united strength we had hauled them both on the pier, little Mistress Hortense was the one to roll Gillam on his stomach and bid us "Quick! Stand him on his head and pour the water out!"

From that day Hortense was Jack's slave, Jack was mine, and Ben was a pampered hero because he never told and took the punishment like a man. But there was never a word more slurring Hortense's unknown origin and Jack's strange wrist marks.

[1] Young Stanhope's informant had evidently mixed tradition with fact. Radisson was fined for going overland to Hudson Bay without the governor's permission, the fine to build a fort at Three Rivers. Eli Kirke's kinswoman was a daughter of Sir John Kirke, of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company.—Author.

CHAPTER II

I RESCUE AND AM RESCUED

So the happy childhood days sped on, a swift stream past flowered banks. Ben went off to sail the north sea in Captain Gillam's ship. M. Picot, the French doctor, brought a governess from Paris for Hortense, so that we saw little of our playmate, and Jack Battle continued to live like a hunted rat at the docks.

My uncle and Rebecca's father, who were beginning to dabble in the fur trade, had jointly hired a peripatetic dominie to give us youngsters lessons in Bible history and the three R's. At noon hour I initiated Rebecca into all the thrilling dangers of Indian warfare, and many a time have we had wild escapes from imaginary savages by scaling a rope ladder of my own making up to the high nursery window. By-and-bye, when school was in and the dominie dozed, I would lower that timid little whiffet of a Puritan maid out through the window to the turnstile. Then I would ride her round till our heads whirled. If Jack Battle came along, Rebecca would jump down primly and run in, for Jack was unknown in the meeting-house, and the meeting-house was Rebecca's measure of the whole world.

One day Jack lingered. He was carrying something tenderly in a red cambric handkerchief.

"Where is Mistress Hortense?" he asked sheepishly.

"That silly French woman keeps her caged like a squirrel."

Little Jack began tittering and giggling.

"Why—that's what I have here," he explained, slipping a bundle of soft fur in my hand.

"It's tame! It's for Hortense," said he.

"Why don't you take it to her, Jack?"

"Take it to her?" reiterated he in a daze. "As long as she gets it, what does it matter who takes it?"

With that, he was off across the marshy commons, leaving the squirrel in my hand.

Forgetting lessons, I ran to M. Picot's house. That governess answered the knocker.

"From Jack Battle to Mistress Hortense!"

And I proffered the squirrel.

Though she smirked a world of thanks, she would not take it. Then Hortense came dancing down the hall.

"Am I not grown tall?" she asked, mischievously shaking her curls.

"No," said I, looking down to her feet cased in those high slippers French ladies then wore, "'tis your heels!"

And we all laughed. Catching sight of the squirrel, Hortense snatched it up with caresses against her neck, and the French governess sputtered out something of which I knew only the word "beau."

"Jack is no beau, mademoiselle," said I loftily. "Pah! He's a wharf lad."

I had thought Hortense would die in fits.

"Mademoiselle means the squirrel, Ramsay," she said, choking, her handkerchief to her lips. "Tell Jack thanks, with my love," she called, floating back up the stairs.

And the governess set to laughing in the pleasant French way that shakes all over and has no spite. Emboldened, I asked why Hortense could not play with us any more. Hortense, she explained, was become too big to prank on the commons.

"Faith, mademoiselle," said I ruefully, "an she mayn't play war on the commons, what may she play?"

"Beau!" teases mademoiselle, perking her lips saucily; and she shut the door in my face.

It seemed a silly answer enough, but it put a notion in a lad's head. I would try it on Rebecca.

When I re-entered the window, the dominie still slept. Rebecca, the demure monkey, bent over her lesson book as innocently as though there were no turnstiles.

"Rebecca," I whispered, leaning across the bench, "you are big enough to have a—what? Guess."

"Go away, Ramsay Stanhope!" snapped Rebecca, grown mighty good of a sudden, with glance fast on her white stomacher.

"O-ho! Crosspatch," thought I; and from no other motive than transgressing the forbidden, I reached across to distract the attentive goodness of the prim little baggage; but—an iron grip lifted me bodily from the bench.

It was Eli Kirke, wry-faced, tight-lipped. He had seen all! This was the secret of Mistress Rebecca's new-found diligence. No syllable was uttered, but it was the awfullest silence that ever a lad heard. I was lifted rather than led upstairs and left a prisoner in locked room with naught to do but gnaw my conscience and gaze at the woods skirting the crests of the inland hills.

Those rats in the attic grew noisier, and presently sounds a mighty hallooing outside, with a blowing of hunting-horns and baying of hounds. What ado was this in Boston, where men were only hunters of souls and chasers of devils? The rats fell to sudden quiet, and from the yells of the rabble crowd I could make out only "King-killers! King-killers!" These were no Puritans shouting, but the blackguard sailors and hirelings of the English squadron set loose to hunt down the refugees. The shouting became a roar. Then in burst Eli Kirke's front door. The house was suddenly filled with swearings enough to cram his blasphemy box to the brim. There was a trampling of feet on the stairs, followed by the crashing of overturned furniture, and the rabble had rushed up with neither let nor hindrance and were searching every room.

Who had turned informer on my uncle? Was I not the only royalist in the house? Would suspicion fall on me? But questions were put to flight by a thunderous rapping on the door. It gave as it had been cardboard, and in tumbled a dozen ruffians with gold-lace doublets, cockades and clanking swords.

Behind peered Eli Kirke, pale with fear, his eyes asking mine if I knew. True as eyes can speak, mine told him that I knew as well as he.

"Body o' me! What-a-deuce? Only a little fighting sparrow of a royalist!" cried a swaggering colt of a fellow in officer's uniform.

"No one here, lad?" demanded a second.

And I saw Eli Kirke close his eyes as in prayer.

"Sir," said I, drawing myself up on my heels, "I don't understand you. I—am here."

They bellowed a laugh and were tumbling over one another in their haste up the attic stairs. Then my blood went cold with fear, for the memory of that poor old man going to the shambles of London flashed back.

A window lifted and fell in the attic gable. With a rush I had slammed the door and was craning out full length from the window-sill. Against the lattice timber-work of the plastered wall below the attic window clung a figure in Geneva cloak, with portmanteau under arm. It was the man who had supped so late with Eli Kirke.

"Sir," I whispered, fearing to startle him from perilous footing, "let me hold your portmanteau. Jump to the slant roof below."

For a second his face went ashy, but he tossed me the bag, gained the shed roof at a leap, snatched back the case, and with a "Lord bless thee, child!" was down and away.

The spurred boots of the searchers clanked on the stairs. A blowing of horns! They were all to horse and off as fast as the hounds coursed away. The deep, far baying of the dogs, now loud, now low, as the trail ran away or the wind blew clear, told where the chase led inland. If the fugitive but hid till the dogs passed he was safe enough; but of a sudden came the hoarse, furious barkings that signal hot scent.

What had happened was plain.

The poor wretch had crossed the road and given the hounds clew. The baying came nearer. He had discovered his mistake and was trying to regain the house.

Balaam stood saddled to carry Eli Kirke to the docks. 'Twas a wan hope, but in a twinkling I was riding like wind for the barking behind the hill. A white-faced man broke from the brush at crazy pace.

"God ha' mercy, sir," I cried, leaping off; "to horse and away! Ride up the brook bed to throw the hounds off."

I saw him in saddle, struck Balaam's flank a blow that set pace for a gallop, turned, and—for a second time that day was lifted from the ground.

"Pardieu! Clean done!" says a low voice. "'Tis a pretty trick!"

And I felt myself set up before a rider.

"To save thee from the hounds," says the voice.

Scarce knowing whether I dreamed, I looked over my shoulder to see one who was neither royalist nor Puritan—a thin, swarth man, tall and straight as an Indian, bare-shaven and scarred from war, with long, wiry hair and black eyes full of sparks.

The pack came on in a whirl to lose scent at the stream, and my rescuer headed our horse away from the rabble, doffing his beaver familiarly to the officers galloping past.

"Ha!" called one, reining his horse to its haunches, "did that snivelling knave pass this way?"

"Do you mean this little gentleman?"

The officer galloped off. "Keep an eye open, Radisson," he shouted over his shoulder.

"'Twere better shut," says M. Radisson softly; and at his name my blood pricked to a jump.

Here was he of whom Ben Gillam told, the half-wild Frenchman, who had married the royalist kinswoman of Eli Kirke; the hero of Spanish fights and Turkish wars; the bold explorer of the north sea, who brought back such wealth from an unknown land, governors and merchant princes were spying his heels like pirates a treasure ship.

"'Tis more sport hunting than being hunted," he remarked, with an air of quiet reminiscence.

His suit was fine-tanned, cream buckskin, garnished with gold braid like any courtier's, with a deep collar of otter. Unmindful of manners, I would have turned again to stare, but he bade me guide the horse back to my home.

"Lest the hunters ask questions," he explained. "And what," he demanded, "what doth a little cavalier in a Puritan hotbed?"

"I am even where God hath been pleased to set me, sir."

"'Twas a ticklish place he set thee when I came up."

"By your leave, sir, 'tis a higher place than I ever thought to know."

M. Radisson laughed a low, mellow laugh, and, vowing I should be a court gallant, put me down before Eli Kirke's turnstile.

My uncle came stalking forth, his lips pale with rage. He had blazed out ere I could explain one word.

"Have I put bread in thy mouth, Ramsay Stanhope, that thou shouldst turn traitor? Viper and imp of Satan!" he shouted, shaking his clinched fist in my face. "Was it not enough that thou wert utterly bound in iniquity without persecuting the Lord's anointed?"

I took a breath.

"Where is Balaam?" he demanded, seizing me roughly.

"Sir," said I, "for leaving the room without leave, I pray you to flog me as I deserve. As for the horse, he is safe and I hope far away under the gentleman I helped down from the attic."

His face fell a-blank. M. Radisson dismounted laughing.

"Nay, nay, Eli Kirke, I protest 'twas to the lad's credit. 'Twas this way, kinsman," and he told all, with many a strange-sounding, foreign expression that must have put the Puritan's nose out of joint, for Eli Kirke began blowing like a trumpet.

Then out comes Aunt Ruth to insist that M. Radisson share a haunch of venison at our noonday meal.

And how I wish I could tell you of that dinner, and of all that M. Radisson talked; of captivity among Iroquois and imprisonment in Spain and wars in Turkey; of his voyage over land and lake to a far north sea, and of the conspiracy among merchant princes of Quebec to ruin him. By-and-bye Rebecca Stocking's father came in, and the three sat talking plans for the northern trade till M. Radisson let drop that the English commissioners were keen to join the enterprise. Then the two Puritans would have naught to do with it.

Long ago, as you know, we dined at midday; but so swiftly had the hour flown with M. Radisson's tales of daring that Tibbie was already lighting candles when we rose from the dinner table.

"And now," cried M. Radisson, lifting a stirrup-cup of home-brewed October, "health to the little gentleman who saved a life to-day! Health to mine host! And a cup fathoms deep to his luck when Ramsay sails yon sea!"

"He might do worse," said Eli Kirke grimly.

And the words come back like the echo of a prophecy.

I would have escaped my uncle, but he waylaid me in the dark at the foot of the stairs.

"Ramsay," said he gently.

"Sir?" said I, wondering if flint could melt.

"'The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace!'"

CHAPTER III

TOUCHING WITCHCRAFT

That interrupted lesson with Rebecca finished my schooling. I was set to learning the mysteries of accounts in Eli Kirke's warehouse.

"How goes the keeping of accounts, Ramsay?" he questioned soon after I had been in tutelage.

I had always intended to try my fortune in the English court when I came of age, and the air of the counting-house ill suited a royalist's health.

"Why, sir," I made answer, picking my words not to trip his displeasure, "I get as much as I can—and I give as little as I can; and those be all the accounts that ever I intend to keep."

Aunt Ruth looked up from her spinning-wheel in a way that had become an alarm signal. Eli Kirke glanced dubiously to the blasphemy box, as though my words were actionable. There was no sound but the drone of the loom till I slipped from the room. Then they both began to talk. Soon after came transfer from the counting-house to the fur trade. That took me through the shadowy forests from town to town, and when I returned my old comrades seemed shot of a sudden from youth to manhood.

There was Ben Gillam, a giff-gaffing blade home from the north sea, so topful of spray that salt water spilled over at every word.

"Split me fore and aft," exclaims Ben, "if I sail not a ship of my own next year! I'll take the boat without commission. Stocking and my father have made an offer," he hinted darkly. "I'll go without commission!"

"And risk being strangled for't, if the French governor catch you."

"Body o' me!" flouts Ben, ripping out a peck of oaths that had cost dear and meant a day in the stocks if the elders heard, "who's going to inform when my father sails the only other ship in the bay? Devil sink my soul to the bottom of the sea if I don't take a boat to Hudson Bay under the French governor's nose!"

"A boat of your own," I laughed. "What for, Ben?"

"For the same as your Prince Rupert, Prince Robber, took his. Go out light as a cork, come back loaded with Spanish gold to the water-line." Ben paused to take a pinch of snuff and display his new embroidered waist-coat.

"Look you at the wealth in the beaver trade," he added. "M. Radisson went home with George Carteret not worth a curse, formed the Fur Company, and came back from Hudson Bay with pelts packed to the quarter-deck. Devil sink me! but they say, after the fur sale, the gentlemen adventurers had to haul the gold through London streets with carts! Bread o' grace, Ramsay, have half an eye for your own purse!" he urged. "There is a life for a man o' spirit! Why don't you join the beaver trade, Ramsay?"

Why not, indeed? 'Twas that or turn cut-purse and road-lifter for a youth of birth without means in those days.

Of Jack Battle I saw less. He shipped with the fishing boats in the summer and cruised with any vagrant craft for the winter. When he came ashore he was as small and eel-like and shy and awkward as ever, with the same dumb fidelity in his eyes.

And what a snowy maid had Rebecca become! Sitting behind her spinning-wheel, with her dainty fingers darting in the sunlight, she seemed the pink and whitest thing that ever grew, with a look on her face of apple-blossoms in June; but the sly wench had grown mighty demure with me. When I laughed over that ending to our last lesson, she must affect an air of injury. 'Twas neither her fault nor mine, I declare, coaxing back her good-humour; 'twas the fault of the face. I wanted to see where the white began and the pink ended. Then Rebecca, with cheeks a-bloom under the hiding of her bonnet, quickens steps to the meeting-house; but as a matter of course we walk home together, for behind march the older folk, staidly discoursing of doctrine.

"Rebecca," I say, "you did not take your eyes off the preacher for one minute."

"How do you know, Ramsay?" retorts Rebecca, turning her face away with a dimple trembling in her chin, albeit it was the Sabbath.

"That preacher is too handsome to be sound in his doctrine, Rebecca."

Then she grows so mighty prim she must ask which heading of the sermon pleases me best.

"I liked the last," I declare; and with that, we are at the turnstile.

Hortense became a vision of something lost, a type of what I had known when great ladies came to our country hall. M. Picot himself took her on the grand tour of the Continent. How much we had been hoping to see more of her I did not realize till she came back and we saw less.

Once I encountered M. Picot and his ward on the wharf. Her curls were more wayward than of old and her large eyes more lustrous, full of deep, new lights, dark like the flash of a black diamond. Her form appeared slender against the long, flowing mantilla shot with gold like any grand dame's. She wore a white beaver with plumes sweeping down on her curls. Indeed, little Hortense seemed altogether such a great lady that I held back, though she was looking straight towards me.

"Give you good-e'en, Ramsay," salutes M. Picot, a small, thin man with pointed beard, eyebrows of a fierce curlicue, and an expression under half-shut lids like cat's eyes in the dark. "Give you good-e'en! Can you guess who this is?"

As if any one could forget Hortense! But I did not say so. Instead, I begged leave to welcome her back by saluting the tips of her gloved fingers. She asked me if I minded that drowning of Ben long ago. Then she wanted to know of Jack.

"I hear you are fur trading, Ramsay?" remarks M. Picot with the inflection of a question.

I told him somewhat of the trade, and he broke out in almost the same words as Ben Gillam. 'Twas the life for a gentleman of spirit. Why didn't I join the beaver trade of Hudson Bay? And did I know of any secret league between Captain Zachariah Gillam and Mr. Stocking to trade without commission?

"Ah, Hillary," he sighed, "had we been beaver trading like Radisson instead of pounding pestles, we might have had little Hortense restored."

"Restored!" thought I. And M. Picot must have seen my surprise, for he drew back to his shell like a pricked snail. Observing that the wind was chill, he bade me an icy good-night.

I had no desire to pry into M. Picot's secrets, but I could not help knowing that he had unbended to me because he was interested in the fur trade. From that 'twas but a step to the guess that he had come to New England to amass wealth to restore Mistress Hortense. Restore her to what? There I pulled up sharp. 'Twas none of my affair; and yet, in spite of resolves, it daily became more of my affair. Do what I would, spending part of every day with Rebecca, that image of lustrous eyes under the white beaver, the plume nodding above the curls, the slender figure outlined against the gold-shot mantilla, became a haunting memory. Countless times I blotted out that mental picture with a sweep of common sense. "She was a pert miss, with her head full of French nonsense and a nose held too high in air." Then a memory of the eyes under the beaver, and fancy was at it again spinning cobwebs in moonshine.

M. Picot kept more aloof than formerly, and was as heartily hated for it as the little minds of a little place ever hate those apart.

Occasionally, in the forest far back from the settlement, I caught a flying glimpse of Lincoln green; and Hortense went through the woods, hard as her Irish hunter could gallop, followed by the blackamoor, churning up and down on a blowing nag. Once I had the good luck to restore a dropped gauntlet before the blackamoor could come. With eyes alight she threw me a flashing thanks and was off, a sunbeam through the forest shades; and something was thumping under a velvet waistcoat faster than the greyhound's pace. A moment later, back came the hound in springy stretches, with the riders at full gallop.

Her whip fell, but this time she did not turn.

But when I carried the whip to the doctor's house that night, M. Picot received it with scant grace!

Whispers—gall-midges among evil tongues—were raising a buzz that boded ill for the doctor. France had paid spies among the English, some said. Deliverance Dobbins, a frumpish, fizgig of a maid, ever complaining of bodily ills though her chuffy cheeks were red as pippins, reported that one day when she had gone for simples she had seen strange, dead things in the jars of M. Picot's dispensary. At this I laughed as Rebecca told it me, and old Tibbie winked behind the little Puritan maid's head; for my father, like the princes, had known that love of the new sciences which became a passion among gentlemen. Had I not noticed the mole on the French doctor's cheek? Rebecca asked. I had: what of it?

"The crops have been blighted," says Rebecca; though what connection that had with M. Picot's mole, I could not see.

"Deliverance Dobbins oft hath racking pains," says Rebecca, with that air of injury which became her demure dimples so well.

"Drat that Deliverance Dobbins for a low-bred mongrel mischief-maker!" cries old Tibbie from the pantry door.

"Tibbie," I order, "hold your tongue and drop an angel in the blasphemy box."

"'Twas good coin wasted," the old nurse vowed; but I must needs put some curb on her royalist tongue, which was ever running a-riot in that Puritan household.

It was an accident, in the end, that threw me across M. Picot's path. I had gone to have him bind up a splintered wrist, and he invited me to stay for a round of piquet. I, having only one hand, must beg Mistress Hortense to sort the cards for me.

She sat so near that I could not see her. You may guess I lost every game.

"Tut! tut! Hillary dear, 'tis a poor helper Ramsay gained when he asked your hand. Pish! pish!" he added, seeing our faces crimson; "come away," and he carried me off to the dispensary, as though his preserved reptiles would be more interesting than Hortense.

With an indifference a trifle too marked, he brought me round to the fur trade and wanted to know whether I would be willing to risk trading without a license, on shares with a partner.

"Quick wealth that way, Ramsay, an you have courage to go to the north. An it were not for Hortense, I'd hire that young rapscallion of a Gillam to take me north."

I caught his drift, and had to tell him that I meant to try my fortune in the English court.

But he paid small heed to what I said, gazing absently at the creatures in the jars.

"'Twould be devilish dangerous for a girl," he muttered, pulling fiercely at his mustache.

"Do you mean the court, sir?" I asked.

"Aye," returned the doctor with a dry laugh that meant the opposite of his words. "An you incline to the court, learn the tricks o' the foils, or rogues will slit both purse and throat."

And all the while he was smiling as though my going to the court were an odd notion.

"If I could but find a master," I lamented.

"Come to me of an evening," says M. Picot. "I'll teach you, and you can tell me of the fur trade."

You may be sure I went as often as ever I could. M. Picot took me upstairs to a sort of hunting room. It had a great many ponderous oak pieces carved after the Flemish pattern and a few little bandy-legged chairs and gilded tables with courtly scenes painted on top, which he said Mistress Hortense had brought back as of the latest French fashion. The blackamoor drew close the iron shutters; for, though those in the world must know the ways of the world, worldling practices were a sad offence to New England. Shoving the furnishings aside, M. Picot picked from the armory rack two slim foils resembling Spanish rapiers and prepared to give me my lesson. Carte and tierce, low carte and flanconnade, he taught me with many a ringing clash of steel till beads were dripping from our brows like rain-drops.

"Bravo!" shouted M. Picot in a pause. "Are you son o' the Stanhope that fought on the king's side?"

I said that I was.

"I knew the rascal that got the estate from the king," says M. Picot, with a curious look from Hortense to me; and he told me of Blood, the freebooter, who stole the king's crown but won royal favour by his bravado and entered court service for the doing of deeds that bore not the light of day.

Nightly I went to the French doctor's house, and I learned every wicked trick of thrust and parry that M. Picot knew. Once when I bungled a foul lunge, which M. Picot said was a habit of the infamous Blood, his weapon touched my chest, and Mistress Hortense uttered a sharp cry.

"What—what—what!" exclaims M. Picot, whirling on her.

"'Twas so real," murmurs Hortense, biting her lip.

After that she sat still enough. Then the steel was exchanged for cards; and when I lost too steadily M. Picot broke out: "Pish, boy, your luck fails here! Hillary, child, go practise thy songs on the spinet."

Or: "Hortense, go mull us a smack o' wine!"

Or: "Ha, ha, little witch! Up yet? Late hours make old ladies."

And Hortense must go off, so that I never saw her alone but once. 'Twas the night before I was to leave for the trade.

The blackamoor appeared to say that Deliverance Dobbins was "a-goin' in fits" on the dispensary floor.

"Faith, doctor," said I, "she used to have dumps on our turnstile."

"Yes," laughed Hortense, "small wonder she had dumps on that turnstile! Ramsay used to tilt her backward."

M. Picot hastened away, laughing. Hortense was in a great carved high-back chair with clumsy, wooden cupids floundering all about the tall head-rest. Her face was alight in soft-hued crimson flaming from an Arabian cresset stuck in sockets against the Flemish cabinet.

"A child's trick," began Hortense, catching at the shafts of light.

"I often think of those old days on the beach."

"So do I," said Hortense.

"I wish they could come back."

"So do I," smiled Hortense. Then, as if to check more: "I suppose, Ramsay, you would want to drown us all—Ben and Jack and Rebecca and me."

"And I suppose you would want to stand us all on our heads," I retorted.

Then we both laughed, and Hortense demanded if I had as much skill with the lyre as with the sword. She had heard that I was much given to chanting vain airs and wanton songs, she said.

And this is what I sang, with a heart that knocked to the notes of the old madrigal like the precentor's tuning-fork to a meeting-house psalm:

"Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting,
Which, clad in damask mantles, deck the arbours,
And then behold your lips where sweet love harbours,
My eyes perplex me with a double doubting,
Whether the roses be your lips, or your lips the roses."

Barely had I finished when Mistress Hortense seats herself at the spinet, and, changing the words to suit her saucy fancy, trills off that ballad but newly writ by one of our English courtiers:

"Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because--_Rebecca's_--fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
'Cause _Rebecca's_ rosier are?"

"Hortense!" I protested.

"Be _he_ fairer than the day
Or the _June-field coils of hay_;
If _he_ be not so to me,
What care I how _fine_ he be?"

There was such merriment in the dark-lashed eyes, I defy Eli Kirke himself to have taken offence; and so, like many another youth, I was all too ready to be the pipe on which a dainty lady played her stops. As the song faded to the last tinkling notes of the spinet her fingers took to touching low, tuneless melodies like thoughts creeping into thoughts, or perfume of flowers in the dark. The melting airs slipped into silence, and Hortense shut her eyes, "to get the memory of it," she said. I thought she meant some new-fangled tune.

"This is memory enough for me," said I.

"Oh?" asked Hortense, and she uncovered all the blaze of the dark lights hid in those eyes.

"Faith, Hortense," I answered, like a moth gone giddy in flame, "your naughty music wakes echoes of what souls must hear in paradise."

"Then it isn't naughty," said Hortense, beginning to play fiercely, striking false notes and discords and things.

"Hortense," said I.

"No—Ramsay!" cried Hortense, jangling harder than ever.

"But—yes!—Hortense——"

And in bustled M. Picot, hastier than need, methought.

"What, Hillary? Not a-bed yet, child? Ha!—crow's-feet under eyes to-morrow! Bed, little baggage! Forget not thy prayers! Pish! Pish! Good-night! Good-night!"

That is the way an older man takes it.

"Now, devil fly away with that prying wench of a Deliverance Dobbins!" ejaculated M. Picot, stamping about. "Oh, I'll cure her fanciful fits! Pish! Pish! That frump and her fits! Bad blood, Ramsay; low-bred, low-bred! 'Tis ever the way of her kind to blab of aches and stuffed stomachs that were well if left empty. An she come prying into my chemicals, taking fits when she's caught, I'll mix her a pill o' Deliverance!" And M. Picot laughed heartily at his own joke.

The next morning I was off to the trade. Though I hardly acknowledged the reason to myself, any youth can guess why I made excuse to come back soon. As I rode up, Rebecca stood at our gate. She had no smile. Had I not been thinking of another, I had noticed the sadness of her face; but when she moved back a pace, I flung out some foolishness about a gate being no bar if one had a mind to jump. Then she brought me sharp to my senses as I sprang to the ground.

"Ramsay," she exclaimed, "M. Picot and Mistress Hortense are in jail charged with sorcery! M. Picot is like to be hanged! An they do not confess, they may be set in the bilboes and whipped. There is talk of putting Mistress Hortense to the test."

"The test!"

'Twas as if a great weight struck away power to think, for the test meant neither more nor less than torture till confession were wrung from agony. The night went black and Rebecca's voice came as from some far place.

"Ramsay, you are hurting—you are crushing my hands!"

Poor child, she was crying; and the words I would have said stuck fast behind sealed lips. She seemed to understand, for she went on:

"Deliverance Dobbins saw strange things in his house. She went to spy. He hath crazed her intellectuals. She hath dumb fits."

Now I understood. This trouble was the result of M. Picot's threat; but little Rebecca's voice was tinkling on like a bell in a dome.

"My father hath the key to their ward. My father saith there is like to be trouble if they do not confess—"

"Confess!" I broke out. "Confess what? If they confess the lie they will be burned for witchcraft. And if they refuse to confess, they will be hanged for not telling the lie. Pretty justice! And your holy men fined one fellow a hundred pounds for calling their justices a pack of jackasses——"

"Sentence is to be pronounced to-morrow after communion," said Rebecca.

"After communion?" I could say no more. On that of all days for tyranny's crime!

God forgive me for despairing of mankind that night. I thought freedom had been won in the Commonwealth war, but that was only freedom of body. A greater strife was to wage for freedom of soul.

CHAPTER IV

REBECCA AND JACK BATTLE CONSPIRE

'Twas cockcrow when I left pacing the shore where we had so often played in childhood; and through the darkness came the howl of M. Picot's hound, scratching outside the prison gate.

As well reason with maniacs as fanatics, say I, for they hide as much folly under the mask of conscience as ever court fool wore 'neath painted face. There was Mr. Stocking, as well-meaning a man as trod earth, obdurate beyond persuasion against poor M. Picot under his charge. Might I not speak to the French doctor through the bars of his window? By no means, Mr. Stocking assured. If once the great door were unlocked, who could tell what black arts a sorcerer might use?

"Look you, Ramsay lad," says he, "I've had this brass key made against his witchcraft, and I do not trust it to the hands of the jailer."

Then, I fear, I pleaded too keenly; for, suspecting collusion with M. Picot, the warden of the court-house grew frigid and bade me ask Eli Kirke's opinion on witchcraft.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,'" rasped Eli Kirke, his stern eyes ablaze from an inner fire. "'A man' also, or woman, that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.' Think you M. Picot burns incense to the serpent in his jars for the healing of mankind?" he demanded fiercely.

"Yes," said I, "'tis for the healing of mankind by experimentation with chemicals. Knowledge of God nor chemicals springs full grown from man's head, Uncle Eli. Both must be learned. That is all the meaning of his jars and crucibles. He is only trying to learn what laws God ordained among materials. And when M. Picot makes mistakes, it is the same as when the Church makes mistakes and learns wisdom by blunders."

Eli Kirke blinked his eyes as though my monstrous pleadings dazed him.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,'" he cried doggedly. "Do the Scriptures lie, Ramsay Stanhope? Tell me that?"

"No," said I. "The Scriptures condemn liars, and the man who pretends witchcraft is a liar. There's no such thing. That is why the Scriptures command burning." I paused. He made no answer, and I pleaded on.

"But M. Picot denies witchcraft, and you would burn him for not lying."

Never think to gain a stubborn antagonist by partial concession. M. Radisson used to say if you give an enemy an inch he will claim an ell. 'Twas so with Eli Kirke, for he leaped to his feet in a fine frenzy and bade me cease juggling Holy Writ.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,'" he shouted. "'Tis abomination! It shall utterly be put away from you! Because of this hidden iniquity the colony hath fallen on evil days. Let it perish root and branch!"

But Tibbie breaks in upon his declamation by throwing wide the library door, and in marches a line of pale-faced ascetics, rigid of jaw, cold of eye, and exalted with that gloomy fervour which counts burning life's highest joy. Among them was the famous witch-hanger of after years, a mere youth then, but about his lips the hard lines of a spiritual zeal scarce differing from pride.

"God was awakening the churches by marvellous signs," said one, extending a lank, cold hand to salute Eli Kirke.

"Have we not wrestled mightily for signs and wonders?" demanded another with jaw of steel. And one description of the generation seeking signs was all but off the tip of my tongue.

"Some aver there be no witches—so fearfully hath error gone abroad," lamented young Mather, keen to be heard then, as he always was. "Brethren, toleration would make a kingdom of chaos, a Sodom, a Gomorrah, a Babylon!"

Faith, it needed no horoscope to forecast that young divine's dark future!

I stood it as long as I could, with palms itching to knock their solemn heads together like so many bowling balls; but when one cadaverous-faced fellow, whose sanctity had gone bilious from lack of sunshine, whined out against "the saucy miss," meaning thereby Mistress Hortense, and another prayed Heaven through his nose that his daughter might "lie in her grave ere she minced her steps with such dissoluteness of hair and unseemly broideries and bright colours, showing the lightness of her mind," and a third averred that "a cucking-stool would teach a maid to walk more shamefacedly," I whirled upon them in a fury that had disinherited me from Eli Kirke's graces ere I spake ten words.

"Sirs," said I, "your slatternly wenches may be dead ere they match Mistress Hortense! As for wearing light colours, the devil himself is painted black. Let them who are doing shameful acts to the innocent walk shamefacedly! For shame, sirs, to cloak malice and jealousy of M. Picot under religion! New England will remember this blot against you and curse you for it! An you listen to Deliverance Dobbins's lies, what hinders any lying wench sending good men to the scaffold?"

At first they listened agape, but now the hot blood rushed to their faces.

"Hold thy tongue, lad!" roared Eli Kirke. Then, as if to atone for that violence: "The Lord rebuke thee," he added solemnly.

And I flung from the house dumb with impotent rage.

My thoughts were as the snatched sleep of a sick man's dreams. Again the hideous nightmare of the old martyr at the shambles; but now the shambles were in the New World and the martyr was M. Picot. Something cold touched my hand through the dark, and there crouched M. Picot's hound, whining for its master. Automatically I followed across the commons to the court-house square. It stopped at the prison gate, sniffing and whining and begging in. Poor dog! What could I do? I tried to coax it away, but it lay at the wall like a stone.

Of the long service in the new-built meeting-house I remember very little. Beat of drums, not bells, called to church in those days, and the beat was to me as a funeral march. The pale face of the preacher in the high pulpit overtowering us all was alight with stern zeal. The elders, sitting in a row below the pulpit facing us, listened to the fierce diatribe against the dark arts with looks of approbation that boded ill for M. Picot; and at every fresh fusillade of texts to bolster his argument, the line of deacons below the elders glanced back at the preacher approvingly. Rebecca sat on that side of the congregation assigned to the women with a dumb look of sympathy on the sweet hooded face. The prisoners were not present. At the end of the service the preacher paused; and there fell a great hush in which men scarce breathed, for sentence was to be pronounced. But the preacher only announced that before handing the case to the civil court of oyer and terminer for judgment, the elders wished to hold it in meditation for another day.

The singing of the dismissal psalm began and a smothered cry seemed to break from Rebecca's pew. Then the preacher had raised his hands above bowed heads. The service was over. The people crowded solemnly out, and I was left alone in the gathering darkness—alone with the ghosts of youth's illusions mocking from the gloom. Religion, then, did not always mean right! There were tyrants of souls as well as tyrants of sword. Prayers were uttered that were fitter for hearing in hell than in Heaven. Good men could deceive themselves into crime cloaking spiritual malice, sect jealousy, race hatred with an unctuous text. Here, in New England, where men had come for freedom, was tyranny masking in the guise of religion. Preachers as jealous of the power slipping from their hands as ever was primate of England! A poor gentleman hounded to his death because he practised the sciences! Millions of victims all the world over burned for witchcraft, sacrificed to a Moloch of superstition in the name of a Christ who came to let in the light of knowledge on all superstition!

Could I have found a wilderness where was no human face, I think I had fled to it that night. And, indeed, when you come to think of my breaking with Eli Kirke, 'twas the witch trial that drove me to the wilderness.

There was yet a respite. But the Church still dominated the civil courts, and a transfer of the case meant that the Church would throw the onus of executing sentence on those lay figures who were the puppets of a Pharisaical oligarchy.

There was no time to appeal to England. There was no chance of sudden rescue. New England had not the stuff of which mobs are made.

I thought of appealing to the mercy of the judges; but what mercy had Eli Kirke received at the hands of royalists that he should be merciful to them?

I thought of firing the prison; but the walls were stone, and the night wet, and the outcome doubtful.

I thought of the cell window; but if there had been any hope that way, M. Picot had worked an escape.

Bowing my head to think—to pray—to imprecate, I lost all sense of time and place. Some one had slipped quietly into the dark of the church. I felt rather than saw a nearing presence. But I paid no heed, for despair blotted out all thought. Whoever it was came feeling a way down the dark aisle.

Then hot tears fell upon my hands. In the gloom there paused a childlike figure.

"Rebecca!"

She panted out a wordless cry. Then she came closer and laid a hand on my arm. She was struggling to subdue sobs. The question came in a shivering breath.

"Is Hortense—so dear?"

"So dear, Rebecca."

"She must be wondrous happy, Ramsay." A tumult of effort. "If I could only take her place——"

"Take her place, Rebecca?"

"My father hath the key—if—if—if I took her place, she might go free."

"Take her place, child! What folly is this—dear, kind Rebecca? Would 't be any better to send you to the rope than Hortense? No—no—dear child!"

At that her agitation abated, and she puzzled as if to say more.

"Dear Rebecca," said I, comforting her as I would a sister, "dear child, run home. Forget not little Hortense in thy prayers."

May the angel of forgiveness spread a broader mantle across our blunders than our sins, but could I have said worse?

"I have cooked dainties with my own hands. I have sent her cakes every day," sobbed Rebecca.

"Go home now, Rebecca," I begged.

But she stood silent.

"Rebecca—what is it?"

"You have not been to see me for a year, Ramsay."

I could scarce believe my ears.

"My father is away to-night. Will you not come?"

"But, Rebecca——"

"I have never asked a thing of you before."

"But, Rebecca——"

"Will you come for Hortense's sake?" she interrupted, with a little sharp, hard, falsetto note in her baby voice.

"Rebecca," I demanded, "what do you mean?"

But she snapped back like the peevish child that she was: "An you come not when I ask you, you may stay!" And she had gone.

What was she trying to say with her dark hints and overnice scruples of a Puritan conscience? And was not that Jack Battle greeting her outside in the dark?

I tore after Rebecca at such speed that I had cannoned into open arms before I saw a hulking form across the way.

"Fall-back—fall-edge!" roared Jack, closing his arms about me. "'Tis Ramsay himself, with a sword like a butcher's cleaver and a wit like a broadaxe!"

"Have you not heard, Jack?"

"Heard! Ship ahoy!" cried Jack. "Split me to the chin like a cod! Stood I not abaft of you all day long, packed like a herring in a pickle! 'Twas a pretty kettle of fish in your Noah's ark to-day! 'Tis all along o' goodness gone stale from too much salt," says Jack.

I told him of little Rebecca, and asked what he made of it. He said he made of it that fools didn't love in the right place—which was not to the point, whatever Jack thought of Rebecca. Linking his arm through mine, he headed me about.

"Captain Gillam, Ben's father, sails for England at sunrise," vouched Jack.

"What has that to do with Mistress Hortense?" I returned testily.

"'Tis a swift ship to sail in."

"To sail in, Jack Battle?"—I caught at the hope. "Out with your plan, man!"

"And be hanged for it," snaps Jack, falling silent.

We were opposite the prison. He pointed to a light behind the bars.

"They are the only prisoners," he said. "They must be in there."

"One could pass a note through those bars with a long pole," I observed, gazing over the yard wall.

"Or a key," answered Jack.

He paused before Rebecca's house to the left of the prison.

"Ramsay," inquired Jack quizzically, "do you happen to have heard who has the keys?"

"Rebecca's father is warden."

"And Rebecca's father is from home to-night," says he, facing me squarely to the lantern above the door.

How did he know that? Then I remembered the voices outside the church.

"Jack—what did Rebecca mean——"

"Not to be hanged," interrupts Jack. "'Tis all along o' having too much conscience, Ramsay. They must either lie like a Dutchman and be damned, or tell the truth and be hanged. Now, ship ahoy," says he, "to the quarterdeck!" and he flung me forcibly up the steps.

Rebecca, herself, red-eyed and reserved, threw wide the door. She motioned me to a bench seat opposite the fireplace and fastened her gaze above the mantel till mine followed there too. A bunch of keys hung from an iron rack.

"What are those, Rebecca?"

"The largest is for the gate," says she with the panic of conscience running from fire. "The brass one unlocks the great door, and—and—the—M. Picot's cell unbolts," she stammered.

"May I examine them, Rebecca?"

"I will even draw you a pint of cider," says Rebecca evasively, with great trepidation, "but come back soon," she called, tripping off to the wine-cellar door.

Snatching the keys, I was down the steps at a leap.

"The large one for the gate, Jack! The brass one for the big door, and the cell unbolts!"

"Ease your helm, sonny!" says Jack, catching the bunch from my clasp. "Fall-back—fall-edge!" he laughed in that awful mockery of the axeman's block. "Fall-back—fall-edge! If there's any hacking of necks, mine is thicker than yours! I'll run the risks. Do you wait here in shadow."

And he darted away. The gate creaked as it gave.

Then I waited for what seemed eternity.

A night-watchman shuffled along with swinging lantern, calling out: "What ho? What ho?" Townsfolks rode through the streets with a clatter of the chairmen's feet; but no words were bandied by the fellows, for a Sabbath hush lay over the night. A great hackney-coach nigh mired in mud as it lumbered through mid-road. And M. Picot's hound came sniffing hungrily to me.

A glare of light shot aslant the dark. Softly the door of Rebecca's house opened. A frail figure was silhouetted against the light. The wick above snuffed out. The figure drew in without a single look, leaving the door ajar. But an hour ago, the iron righteousness of bigots had filled my soul with revolt. Now the sight of that little Puritan maid brought prayers to my lips and a Te Deum to my soul.

The prison gate swung open again with rusty protest. Two hooded figures slipped through the dark. Jack Battle had locked the gate and the keys were in my hand.

"Take them back," he gurgled out with school-lad glee. "'Twill be a pretty to-do of witchcraft to-morrow when they find a cell empty. Go hire passage to England in Captain Gillam's boat!"

"Captain Gillam's boat?"

"Yes, or Master Ben's pirate-ship of the north, if she's there," and he had dashed off in the dark.

When Rebecca appeared above the cellar-way with a flagon that reamed to a beaded top, the keys were back on the wall.

"I was overlong," panted Rebecca, with eyes averted as of old to the folds of her white stomacher. "'Twas a stubborn bung and hard to draw."

"Dear little cheat! God bless you!—and bless you!—and bless you, Rebecca!" I cried.

At which the poor child took fright.

"It—it—it was not all a lie, Ramsay," she stammered. "The bung was hard—and—and—and I didn't hasten——"

"Dear comrade—good-bye, forever!" I called from the dark-of the step.

"Forever?" asked the faint voice of a forlorn figure black in the doorway.

Dear, snowy, self-sacrificing spirit—'tis my clearest memory of her with the thin, grieved voice coming through the dark.

I ran to the wharf hard as ever heels nerved by fear and joy and triumph and love could carry me. The passage I easily engaged from the ship's mate, who dinned into my unlistening ears full account of the north sea, whither Captain Gillam was to go for the Fur Company, and whither, too, Master Ben was keen to sail, "a pirateer, along o' his own risk and gain," explained the mate with a wink, "pirateer or privateer, call 'em what you will, Mister; the Susan with white sails in Boston Town, and Le Bon GarÇon with sails black as the devil himself up in Quebec, ha—ha—and I'll give ye odds on it, Mister, the devil himself don't catch Master Ben! Why, bless you, gentlemen, who's to jail 'im here for droppin' Spanish gold in his own hold and poachin' furs on the king's preserve o' the north sea, when Stocking, the warden, 'imself owns 'alf the Susan and Cap'en Gillam, 'is father, is master o' the king's ship?"

"They do say," he babbled on, "now that Radisson, the French jack-a-boots, hath given the slip to the King's Company, he sails from Quebec in ship o' his own. If him and Ben and the Capiten meet—oh, there'll be times! There'll be times!"

And "times" there were sure enough; but of that I had then small care and shook the loquacious rascal off so that he left me in peace.

First came the servants, trundling cart-loads of cases, which passed unnoticed; for the town bell had tolled the close of Sabbath, and Monday shipping had begun.

The cusp of a watery moon faded in the gray dawn streaks of a muffled sky, and at last came the chairmen, with Jack running alert.

From the chairs stepped the blackamoor, painted as white as paste. Then a New Amsterdam gentleman slipped out from the curtains, followed by his page-boy and servants.

"Jack," I asked, "where is Hortense?"

The page glanced from under curls.

"Dear Jack," she whispered, standing high on her heels nigh as tall as the sailor lad. And poor Jack Battle, not knowing how to play down, stood blushing, cap in hand, till she laughed a queer little laugh and, bidding him good-bye, told him to remember that she had the squirrel stuffed.

To me she said no word. Her hand touched mine quick farewell. The long lashes lifted.

There was a look on her face.

I ask no greater joy in Paradise than memory of that look.

---

One lone, gray star hung over the masthead. The ship careened across the billows till star and mast-top met.

Jack fetched a deep sigh.

"There be work for sailors in England," he said.

In a flash I thought that I knew what he had meant by fools not loving in the right place.

"That were folly, Jack! She hath her station!"

Jack Battle pointed to the fading steel point above the vanishing masthead.

"Doth looking hurt yon star?" asks Jack.

"Nay; but looking may strain the eyes; and the arrows of longing come back void."

He answered nothing, and we lingered heavy hearted till the sun came up over the pillowed waves turning the tumbling waters to molten gold.

Between us and the fan-like rays behind the glossy billows—was no ship.

Hortense was safe!

There was an end-all to undared hopes.

CHAPTER V

M. RADISSON AGAIN

"Good-bye to you, Ramsay," said Jack abruptly.

"Where to, Jack?" I asked, bestirring myself. I could no more go back to Eli Kirke.

But little Jack Battle was squirming his wooden clogs into the sand as he used to dig his toes, and he answered not a word.

"'Tis early yet for the Grand Banks, Jack. Ben Gillam's ship keeled mast over hull from being ice-logged last spring. The spars were solid with frozen sleet from the crosstrees to the crow's nest. Your dories would be ice-logged for a month yet."

"It—it—it aren't the Grand Banks no more," stammered Jack.

His manner arrested me. The honest blue eyes were shifting and his toes at work in the sand.

"There be gold on the high seas for the taking," vouched Jack. "An your fine gentlemen grow rich that way, why mayn't I?"

"Jack," I warned, thinking of Ben Gillam's craft rigged with sails of as many colours as Joseph's coat, "Jack—is it a pirate-ship?"

"No," laughed the sailor lad sheepishly, "'tis a pirateer," meaning thereby a privateer, which was the same thing in those days.

"Have a care of your pirateers—privateers, Jack," said I, speaking plain. "A gentleman would be run through the gullet with a clean rapier, but you—you—would be strangled by sentence of court or sold to the Barbadoes."

"Not if the warden o' the court owns half the ship," protested Jack, smiling queerly under his shaggy brows.

"Oh—ho!" said I, thinking of Rebecca's father, and beginning to understand who supplied money for Ben Gillam's ventures.

"I'm tired o' being a kick-a-toe and fisticuff to everybody. Now, if I'd been rich and had a ship, I might 'a' sailed for M. Picot."

"Or Mistress Hortense," I added, which brought red spots to the sailor lad's cheeks.

Off he went unanswering, leaving me at gaze across an unbroken sea with a heart heavy as lead.

"Poor fellow! He will get over it," said I.

"Another hath need o' the same medicine," came a voice.

I wheeled, expecting arrest.

A tall, wiry man, with coal-black hair and deep-set eyes and a scar across his swarth skin, smiled pleasantly down at me.

"Now that you have them safely off," said he, still smiling, "better begone yourself."

"I'll thank you for your advice when I ask it, sir," said I, suspicious of the press-gang infesting that port. Involuntarily I caught at my empty sword-belt.

"Permit me," proffered the gentleman, with a broader smile, handing out his own rapier.

"Sir," said I, "your pardon, but the press-gang have been busy of late."

"And the sheriffs may be busy to-day," he laughed. "Black arts don't open stone walls, Ramsay."

And he sent the blade clanking home to its scabbard. His surtout falling open revealed a waistcoat of buckskin. I searched his face.

"M. de Radisson!"

"My hero of rescues," and he offered his hand. "And my quondam nephew," he added, laughing; for his wife was a Kirke of the English branch, and my aunt was married to Eli.

"Eli Kirke cannot know you are here, sir—"

"Eli Kirke need not know," emphasized Radisson dryly.

And remembering bits of rumour about M. Radisson deserting the English Fur Company, I hastened to add: "Eli Kirke shall not know!"

"Your wits jump quick enough sometimes," said he. "Now tell me, whose is she, and what value do you set on her?"

I was speechless with surprise. However wild a life M. Radisson led, his title of nobility was from a king who awarded patents to gentlemen only.

"We neither call our women 'she' nor give them market value," I retorted.

Thereupon M. de Radisson falls in such fits of laughter, I had thought he must split his baldrick.

"Pardieu!" he laughed, wiping the tears away with a tangled lace thing fit for a dandy, "Pardieu! 'Tis not your girl-page? 'Tis the ship o' that hangdog of a New England captain!"

The thing came in a jiffy. Sieur Radisson, having deserted the English Fur Company, was setting up for himself. He was spying the strength of his rivals for the north sea.

"You praised my wit. I have but given you a sample."

Then I told him all I knew of the ship, and M. de Radisson laughed again till he was like to weep.

"How is she called?" he asked.

"The Prince Rupert," said I.

"Ha! Then the same crew of gentlemen's scullions and courtiers' valets stuffing the lockers full o' trash to trade on their master's account. A pretty cheat for the Company!"

The end of it was, M. Radisson invited me to join his ships. "A beaver-skin for a needle, Ramsay! Twenty otter for an awl! Wealth for a merchant prince," he urged.

But no sooner had I grasped at this easy way out of difficulty than the Frenchman interrupts: "Hold back, man! Do you know the risk?"

"No—nor care one rush!"

"Governor Frontenac demands half of the furs for a license to trade, but M. de la Barre, who comes to take his place, is a friend of La Chesnaye's, and La Chesnaye owns our ships——"

"And you go without a license?"

"And the galleys for life——"

"If you're caught," said I.

"Pardieu!" he laughed, "yes—if we're caught!"

"I'd as lief go to the galleys for fur-trading as the scaffold for witchcraft," said I.

With that our bargain was sealed.

a shop from front to rear, over a score of garden walls, and out again from rear to front, so that we gave the slip to all those officers now running for the scene of the broil.

"Egad's life," cried M. de Radisson, laughing and laughing, "'tis the narrowest escape I've ever had! Pardieu—to escape the north sea and drown in dish-water! Lord—to beat devils and be snuffed out by a wench in petticoats! 'Tis the martyrdom of heroes! What a tale for the court!"

And he laughed and laughed again till I must needs call a chair to get him away from onlookers. In the shop of a draper a thought struck him.

"Egad, lad, that young blade was Blood!"

"So he told you."

"Did he? Son of the Blood who stole the crown ten years ago, and got your own Stanhope lands in reward from the king!"

What memories were his words bringing back?—M. Picot in the hunting-room telling me of Blood, the freebooter and swordsman. And that brings me to the real reason for our plundering the linen-drapers' shops before presenting ourselves at Sir John Kirke's mansion in Drury Lane, where gentlemen with one eye cocked on the doings of the nobility in the west and the other keen for city trade were wont to live in those days.

For six years M. Radisson had not seen Mistress Mary Kirke—as his wife styled herself after he broke from the English—and I had not heard one word of Hortense for nigh as many months. Say what you will of the dandified dolls who wasted half a day before the looking-glass in the reign of Charles Stuart, there are times when the bravest of men had best look twice in the glass ere he set himself to the task of conquering fair eyes. We did not drag our linen through a scent bath nor loll all morning in the hands of a man milliner charged with the duty of turning us into showmen's dummies—as was the way of young sparks in that age. But that was how I came to buy yon monstrous wig costing forty guineas and weighing ten pounds and coming half-way to a man's waist. And you may set it down to M. Radisson's credit that he went with his wiry hair flying wild as a lion's mane. Nothing I could say would make him exchange his Indian moccasins for the high-heeled pumps with a buckle at the instep.

"I suppose," he had conceded grudgingly, "we must have a brat to carry swords and cloaks for us, or we'll be taken for some o' your cheap-jack hucksters parading latest fashions," and he bade our host of the Star and Garter have some lad searched out for us by the time we should be coming home from Sir John Kirke's that night.

A mighty personage with fat chops and ruddy cheeks and rounded waistcoat and padded calves received us at the door of Sir John Kirke's house in Drury Lane. Sir John was not yet back from the Exchange, this grand fellow loftily informed us at the entrance to the house. A glance told him that we had neither page-boy nor private carriage; and he half-shut the door in our faces.

"Now the devil take this thing for a half-baked, back-stairs, second-hand kitchen gentleman," hissed M. Radisson, pushing in. "Here, my fine fellow," says he with a largesse of vails his purse could ill afford, "here, you sauce-pans, go tell Madame Radisson her husband is here!"

I have always held that the vulgar like insolence nigh as well as silver; and Sieur Radisson's air sent the feet of the kitchen steward pattering. "Confound him!" muttered Radisson, as we both went stumbling over footstools into the dark of Sir John's great drawing-room, "Confound him! An a man treats a man as a man in these stuffed match-boxes o' towns, looking man as a man on the level square in the eye, he only gets himself slapped in the face for it! An there's to be any slapping in the face, be the first to do it, boy! A man's a man by the measure of his stature in the wilderness. Here, 'tis by the measure of his clothes——"

But a great rustling of flounced petticoats down the hallway broke in on his speech, and a little lady had jumped at me with a cry of "Pierre, Pierre!" when M. Radisson's long arms caught her from her feet.

"You don't even remember what your own husband looked like," said he. "Ah, Mary, Mary—don't dear me! I'm only dear when the court takes me up! But, egad," says he, setting her down on her feet, "you may wager these pretty ringlets of yours, I'm mighty dear for the gilded crew this time!"

Madame Radisson said she was glad of it; for when Pierre was rich they could take a fine house in the West End like my Lord So-and-So; but in the next breath she begged him not to call the Royalists a gilded crew.

"And who is this?" she asked, turning to me as the servants brought in candles.

"Egad, and you might have asked that before you tried to kiss him! You always did have a pretty choice, Mary! I knew it when you took me! That," says he, pointing to me, "that is the kite's tail!"

"But for convenience' sake, perhaps the kite's tail may have a name," retorts Madame Radisson.

"To be sure—to be sure—Stanhope, a young Royalist kinsman of yours."

"Royalist?" reiterates Mary Kirke with a world of meaning to the high-keyed question, "then my welcome was no mistake! Welcome waits Royalists here," and she gave me her hand to kiss just as an elderly woman with monster white ringlets all about her face and bejewelled fingers and bare shoulders and flowing draperies swept into the room, followed by a serving-maid and a page-boy. With the aid of two men, her daughter, a serving-maid, and the page, it took her all of five minutes by the clock to get herself seated. But when her slippered feet were on a Persian rug and the displaced ringlets of her monster wig adjusted by the waiting abigail and smelling-salts put on a marquetry table nearby and the folds of the gown righted by the page-boy, Lady Kirke extended a hand to receive our compliments. I mind she called Radisson her "dear, sweet savage," and bade him have a care not to squeeze the stones of her rings into the flesh of her fingers.

"As if any man would want to squeeze such a ragbag o' tawdry finery and milliners' tinsel," said Radisson afterward to me.

I, being younger, was "a dear, bold fellow," with a tap of her fan to the words and a look over the top of it like to have come from some saucy jade of sixteen.

After which the serving-maid must hand the smelling-salts and the page-boy haste to stroke out her train.

"Egad," says Radisson when my lady had informed us that Sir John would await Sieur Radisson's coming at the Fur Company's offices, "egad, there'll be no getting Ramsay away till he sees some one else!"

"And who is that?" simpers Lady Kirke, languishing behind her fan.

"Who, indeed, but the little maid we sent from the north sea."

"La," cries Lady Kirke with a sudden livening, "an you always do as well for us all, we can forgive you, Pierre! The courtiers have cried her up and cried her up, till your pretty savage of the north sea is like to become the first lady of the land! Sir John comes home with your letter to me—boy, the smelling-salts!—so!—and I say to him, 'Sir John, take the story to His Royal Highness!' Good lack, Pierre, no sooner hath the Duke of York heard the tale than off he goes with it to King Charles! His Majesty hath an eye for a pretty baggage. Oh, I promise you, Pierre, you have done finely for us all!"

And the lady must simper and smirk and tap Pierre Radisson with her fan, with a glimmer of ill-meaning through her winks and nods that might have brought the blush to a woman's cheeks in Commonwealth days.

"Madame," cried Pierre Radisson with his eyes ablaze, "that sweet child came to no harm or wrong among our wilderness of savages! An she come to harm in a Christian court, by Heaven, somebody'll answer me for't!"

"Lackaday! Hoighty-toighty, Pierre! How you stamp! The black-eyed monkey hath been named maid of honour to Queen Catherine! How much better could we have done for her?"

"Maid of honour to the lonely queen?" says Radisson. "That is well!"

"She is ward of the court till a husband be found for her," continues Lady Kirke.

"There will be plenty willing to be found," says Pierre Radisson, looking me wondrous straight in the eye.

"Not so sure—not so sure, Pierre! We catch no glimpse of her nowadays; but they say young Lieutenant Blood o' the Tower shadows the court wherever she is——"

"A well-dressed young man?" adds Radisson, winking at me.

"And carries himself with a grand air," amplifies my lady, puffing out her chest, "but then, Pierre, when it comes to the point, your pretty wench hath no dower—no property——"

"Heaven be praised for that!" burst from my lips.

At which there was a sudden silence, followed by sudden laughter to my confusion.

"And so Master Stanhope came seeking the bird that had flown," twitted Radisson's mother-in-law. "Faugh—faugh—to have had the bird in his hand and to let it go! But—ta-ta!" she laughed, tapping my arm with her fan, "some one else is here who keeps asking and asking for Master Stanhope. Boy," she ordered, "tell thy master's guest to come down!"

Two seconds later entered little Rebecca of Boston Town. Blushing pink as apple-blossoms, dressed demurely as of old, with her glances playing a shy hide-and-seek under the downcast lids, she seemed as alien to the artificial grandeur about her as meadow violets to the tawdry splendour of a flower-dyer's shop.

"Fie, fie, sly ladybird," called out Sir John's wife, "here are friends of yours!"

At sight of us, she uttered a little gasp of pleasure.

"So—so—so joysome to see Boston folk," she stammered.

"Fie, fie!" laughed Lady Kirke. "Doth Boston air bring red so quick to all faces?"

"If they be not painted too deep," said Pierre Radisson loud and distinct. And I doubt not the coquettish old dame blushed red, though the depth of paint hid it from our eyes; for she held her tongue long enough for me to lead Rebecca to an alcove window.

Some men are born to jump in sudden-made gaps. Such an one was Pierre Radisson; for he set himself between his wife and Lady Kirke, where he kept them achattering so fast they had no time to note little Rebecca's unmasked confusion.

"This is an unexpected pleasure, Rebecca!"

She glanced up as if to question me.

"Your fine gallants have so many fine speeches——"

"Have you been here long?"

"A month. My father came to see about the furs that Ben Gillam lost in the bay," explains Rebecca.

"Oh!" said I, vouching no more.

"The ship was sent back," continues Rebecca, all innocent of the nature of her father's venture, "and my father hopes that King Charles may get the French to return the value of the furs."

"Oh!"

There was a little silence. The other tongues prattled louder. Rebecca leaned towards me.

"Have you seen her?" she asked.

"Who?"

She gave an impetuous little shake of her head. "You know," she said.

"Well?" I asked.

"She hath taken me through all the grand places, Ramsay; through Whitehall and Hampton Court and the Tower! She hath come to see me every week!"

I said nothing.

"To-morrow she goes to Oxford with the queen. She is not happy, Ramsay. She says she feels like a caged bird. Ramsay, why did she love that north land where the wicked Frenchman took her?"

"I don't know, Rebecca. She once said it was strong and pure and free."

"Did you see her oft, Ramsay?"

"No, Rebecca; only at dinner on Sundays."

"And—and—all the officers were there on the Sabbath?"

"All the officers were there!"

She sat silent, eyes downcast, thinking.

"Ramsay?"

"Well?"

"Hortense will be marrying some grand courtier."

"May he be worthy of her."

"I think many ask her."

"And what does Mistress Hortense say?"

"I think," answers Rebecca meditatively, "from the quantity of love-verse writ, she must keep saying—No."

Then Lady Kirke turns to bid us all go to the Duke's Theatre, where the king's suite would appear that night. Rebecca, of course, would not go. Her father would be expecting her when he came home, she said. So Pierre Radisson and I escorted Lady Kirke and her daughter to the play, riding in one of those ponderous coaches, with four belaced footmen clinging behind and postillions before. At the entrance to the playhouse was a great concourse of crowding people, masked ladies, courtiers with pages carrying torches for the return after dark, merchants with linkmen, work folk with lanterns, noblemen elbowing tradesmen from the wall, tradesmen elbowing mechanics; all pushing and jostling and cracking their jokes with a freedom of speech that would have cost dear in Boston Town. The beaux, I mind, had ready-writ love-verses sticking out of pockets thick as bailiffs' yellow papers; so that a gallant could have stocked his own munitions by picking up the missives dropped at the feet of disdainfuls. Of the play, I recall nothing but that some favourite of the king, Mary Davies, or the famous Nell, or some such an one, danced a monstrous bold jig. Indeed, our grand people, taking their cue from the courtiers' boxes, affected a mighty contempt for the play, except when a naughty jade on the boards stepped high, or blew a kiss to some dandy among the noted folk. For aught I could make out, they did not come to hear, but to be heard; the ladies chattering and ogling; the gallants stalking from box to box and pit to gallery, waving their scented handkerchiefs, striking a pose where the greater part of the audience could see the flash of beringed fingers, or taking a pinch of snuff with a snap of the lid to call attention to its gold-work and naked goddesses.

"Drat these tradespeople, kinsman!" says Lady Kirke, as a fat townsman and his wife pushed past us, "drat these tradespeople!" says she as we were taking our place in one of the boxes, "'tis monstrous gracious of the king to come among them at all!"

Methought her memory of Sir John's career had been suddenly clipped short; but Pierre Radisson only smiled solemnly. Some jokes, like dessert, are best taken cold, not hot.

Then there was a craning of necks; and the king's party came in, His Majesty grown sallow with years but gay and nonchalant as ever, with Barillon, the French ambassador, on one side and Her Grace of Portsmouth on the other. Behind came the whole court; the Duchess of Cleveland, whom our wits were beginning to call "a perennial," because she held her power with the king and her lovers increased with age; statesmen hanging upon her for a look or a smile that might lead the way to the king's ear; Sir George Jeffreys, the judge, whose name was to become England's infamy; Queen Catherine of Braganza, keeping up hollow mirth with those whose presence was insult; the Duke of York, soberer than his royal brother, the king, since Monmouth's menace to the succession; and a host of hangers-on ready to swear away England's liberties for a licking of the crumbs that fell from royal lips.

Then the hum of the playhouse seemed as the beating of the north sea; for Lady Kirke was whispering, "There! There! There she is!" and Hortense was entering one of the royal boxes accompanied by a foreign-looking, elderly woman, and that young Lieutenant Blood, whom we had encountered earlier in the day.

"The countess from Portugal—Her Majesty's friend," murmurs Lady Kirke. "Ah, Pierre, you have done finely for us all!"

And there oozed over my Lady Kirke's countenance as fine a satisfaction as ever radiated from the face of a sweating cook.

"How?" asks Pierre Radisson, pursing his lips.

"Sir John hath dined twice with His Royal Highness——"

"The Duke is Governor of the Company, and Sir John is a director."

"Ta-ta, now there you go, Pierre!" smirks my lady. "An your pretty baggage had not such a saucy way with the men—why—who can tell——"

"Madame," interrupted Pierre Radisson, "God forbid! There be many lords amaking in strange ways, but we of the wilderness only count honour worth when it's won honourably."

But Lady Kirke bare heard the rebuke. She was all eyes for the royal box. "La, now, Pierre," she cries, "see! The king hath recognised you!" She lurched forward into fuller view of onlookers as she spoke. "Wella-day! Good lack! Pierre Radisson, I do believe!—Yes!—See!—His Majesty is sending for you!"

And a page in royal colours appeared to say that the king commanded Pierre Radisson to present himself in the royal box. With his wiry hair wild as it had ever been on the north sea, off he went, all unconscious of the contemptuous looks from courtier and dandy at his strange, half-savage dress. And presently Pierre Radisson is seated in the king's presence, chatting unabashed, the cynosure of all eyes. At the stir, Hortense had turned towards us. For a moment the listless hauteur gave place to a scarce hidden start. Then the pallid face had looked indifferently away.

"The huzzy!" mutters Lady Kirke. "She might 'a' bowed in sight of the whole house! Hoighty-toighty! We shall see, an the little moth so easily blinded by court glare is not singed for its vanity! Ungrateful baggage! See how she sits, not deigning to listen one word of all the young lieutenant is saying! Mary?"

"Yes——"

"You mind I told her—I warned the saucy miss to give more heed to the men—to remember what it might mean to us——"

"Yes," adds Madame Radisson, "and she said she hated the court——"

"Faugh!" laughs Lady Kirke, fussing and fuming and shifting her place like a peacock with ruffled plumage, "pride before the fall—I'll warrant, you men spoiled her in the north! Very fine, forsooth, when a pauper wench from no one knows where may slight the first ladies of the land!"

"Madame," said I, "you are missing the play!"

"Master Stanhope," said she, "the play must be marvellous moving! Where is your colour of a moment ago?"

I had no response to her railing. It was as if that look of Hortense had come from across the chasm that separated the old order from the new. In the wilderness she was in distress, I her helper. Here she was of the court and I—a common trader. Such fools does pride make of us, and so prone are we to doubt another's faith!

"One slight was enough," Lady Kirke was vowing with a toss of her head; and we none of us gave another look to the royal boxes that night, though all about the wits were cracking their jokes against M. Radisson's "Medusa locks," or "the king's idol, with feet of clay and face of brass," thereby meaning M. Radisson's moccasins and swarth skin. At the door we were awaiting M. Radisson's return when the royal company came out. I turned suddenly and met Hortense's eyes blazing with a hauteur that forbade recognition. Beside her in lover-like pose lolled that milliners' dummy whom we had seen humbled in the morning.

Then, promising to rejoin Pierre Radisson at the Fur Company's offices, I made my adieux to the Kirkes and flung out among those wild revellers who scoured London streets of a dark night.

[1] The old expression which the law compelled before throwing slops in mid-street.

CHAPTER XXV

JACK BATTLE AGAIN

The higher one's hopes mount the farther they have to fall; and I, who had mounted to stars with Hortense, was pushed to the gutter by the king's dragoons making way for the royal equipage. There was a crackling of whips among the king's postillions. A yeoman thrust the crowd back with his pike. The carriages rolled past. The flash of a linkman's torch revealed Hortense sitting languid and scornful between the foreign countess and that milliner's dummy of a lieutenant. Then the royal carriages were lost in the darkness, and the streets thronged by a rabble of singing, shouting, hilarious revellers.

Different generations have different ways of taking their pleasure, and the youth of King Charles's day were alternately bullies on the street and dandies at the feet of my lady disdainful. At the approach of the shouting, night-watchmen threw down their lanterns and took to their heels. Street-sweeps tossed their brooms in mid-road with cries of "The Scowerers! The Scowerers!" Hucksters fled into the dark of side lanes. Shopkeepers shot their door-bolts. Householders blew out lights. Fruit-venders made off without their baskets, and small urchins shrieked the alarm of "Baby-eaters! Baby-eaters!"

One sturdy watch, I mind, stood his guard, laying about with a stout pike in a way that broke our fine revellers' heads like soft pumpkins; but him they stood upon his crown in some goodwife's rain-barrel with his lantern tied to his heels. At the rush of the rabble for shelves of cakes and pies, one shopman levelled his blunderbuss. That brought shouts of "A sweat! A sweat!" In a twinkling the rascals were about him. A sword pricked from behind. The fellow jumped. Another prick, and yet another, till the good man was dancing such a jig the sweat rolled from his fat jowls and he roared out promise to feast the whole rout. A peddler of small images had lingered to see the sport, and enough of it he had, I promise you; for they dumped him into his wicker basket and trundled it through the gutter till the peddler and his little white saints were black as chimney-sweeps. Nor did our merry blades play their pranks on poor folk alone. At Will's Coffee House, where sat Dryden and other mighty quidnuncs spinning their poetry and politics over full cups, before mine host got his doors barred our fellows had charged in, seized one of the great wits and set him singing Gammer Gurton's Needle, till the gentlemen were glad to put down pennies for the company to drink healths.

By this I had enough of your gentleman bully's brawling, and I gave the fellows the slip to meet Pierre Radisson at the General Council of Hudson's Bay Adventurers to be held in John Horth's offices in Broad Street. Our gentlemen adventurers were mighty jealous of their secrets in those days. I think they imagined their great game-preserve a kind of Spanish gold-mine safer hidden from public ken, and they held their meetings with an air of mystery that pirates might have worn. For my part, I do not believe there were French spies hanging round Horth's office for knowledge of the Fur Company's doings, though the doorkeeper, who gave me a chair in the anteroom, reported that a strange-looking fellow with a wife as from foreign parts had been asking for me all that day, and refused to leave till he had learned the address of my lodgings.

"'Ave ye taken the hoath of hallegiance, sir?" asked the porter.

"I was born in England," said I dryly.

"Your renegade of a French savage is atakin' the hoath now," confided the porter, jerking his thumb towards the inner door. "They do say as 'ow it is for love of Mary Kirke and not the English—"

"Your renegade of a French—who?" I asked sharply, thinking it ill omen to hear a flunkey of the English Company speaking lightly of our leader.

But at the question the fellow went glum with a tipping and bowing and begging of pardon. Then the councillors began to come: Arlington and Ashley of the court, one of those Carterets, who had been on the Boston Commission long ago and first induced M. Radisson to go to England, and at last His Royal Highness the Duke of York, deep in conversation with my kinsman, Sir John Kirke.

"It can do no harm to employ him for one trip," Sir John was saying.

"He hath taken the oath?" asks His Royal Highness.

"He is taking it to-night; but," laughs Sir John, "we thought he was a good Englishman once before."

"Your company used him ill. You must keep him from going over to the French again."

"Till he undo the evil he has done—till he capture back all that he took from us—then," says Sir John cautiously, "then we must consider whether it be politic to keep a gamester in the company."

"Anyway," adds His Highness, "France will not take him back."

And the door closed on the councillors while I awaited Radisson in the anteroom. A moment later Pierre Radisson came out with eyes alight and face elate.

"I've signed to sail in three days," he announced. "Do you go with me or no?"

Two memories came back: one of a face between a westering sun and a golden sea, and I hesitated; the other, of a cold, pallid, disdainful look from the royal box.

"I go."

And entering the council chamber, I signed the papers without one glance at the terms. Gentlemen sat all about the long table, and at the head was the governor of the company—the Duke of York, talking freely with M. de Radisson.

My Lord Ashley would know if anything but furs grew in that wild New World.

"Furs?" says M. Radisson. "Sir, mark my words, 'tis a world that grows empires—also men," with an emphasis which those court dandies could not understand.

But the wise gentlemen only smiled at M. Radisson's warmth.

"If it grew good soldiers for our wars—" begins one military gentleman.

"Aye," flashes back M. Radisson ironically, "if it grows men for your wars and your butchery and your shambles! Mark my words: it is a land that grows men good for more than killing," and he smiles half in bitterness.

"'Tis a prodigious expensive land in diplomacy when men like you are let loose in it," remarks Arlington.

His Royal Highness rose to take his leave.

"You will present a full report to His Majesty at Oxford," he orders M. Radisson in parting.

Then the council dispersed.

"Oxford," says M. Radisson, as we picked our way home through the dark streets; "an I go to meet the king at Oxford, you will see a hornets' nest of jealousy about my ears."

I did not tell him of the double work implied in Sir John's words with the prince, for Sir John Kirke was Pierre Radisson's father-in-law. At the door of the Star and Garter mine host calls out that a strange-looking fellow wearing a grizzled beard and with a wife as from foreign parts had been waiting all afternoon for me in my rooms.

"From foreign parts!" repeats M. Radisson, getting into a chair to go to Sir John's house in Drury Lane. "If they're French spies, send them right about, Ramsay! We've stopped gamestering!"

"We have; but perhaps the others haven't."

"Let them game," laughs M. Radisson scornfully, as the chair moved off. Not knowing what to expect I ran up-stairs to my room. At the door I paused. That morning I had gone from the house light-hearted. Now interest had died from life. I had but one wish, to reach that wilderness of swift conflict, where thought has no time for regret. The door was ajar. A coal fire burned on the hearth. Sitting on the floor were two figures with backs towards me, a ragged, bearded man and a woman with a shawl over her head. What fools does hope make of us! I had almost called out Hortense's name when the noise of the closing door caught their hearing. I was in the north again; an Indian girl was on her knees clinging to my feet, sobbing out incoherent gratitude; a pair of arms were belabouring my shoulders; and a voice was saying with broken gurgles of joy: "Ship ahoy, there! Ease your helm! Don't heave all your ballast overboard!"—a clapping of hands on my back—"Port your helm! Ease her up! All sheets in the wind and the storms'l aflutter! Ha-ha!" with a wringing and a wringing like to wrench my hands off—"Anchor out! Haul away! Home with her… !"

"Jack Battle!"

It was all I could say.

There he was, grizzled and bronzed and weather-worn, laughing with joy and thrashing his arms about as if to belabour me again.

"But who is this, Jack?"

I lifted the Indian woman from her knees. It was the girl my blow had saved that morning long ago.

"Who—what is this?"

"My wife," Says Jack, swinging his arms afresh and proud as a prince.

"Your wife?… Where… who married you?"

"There warn't no parson," says Jack, "that is, there warn't no parson nearer nor three thousand leagues and more. And say," adds Jack, "I s'pose there was marryin' afore there could be parsons! She saved my life. She hain't no folks. I hain't no folks. She got away that morning o' the massacre—she see them take us captive—she gets a white pelt to hide her agen the snow—she come, she do all them cold miles and lets me loose when the braves ain't watching… she risks her life to save my life—she don't belong to nobody. I don't belong to nobody. There waren't no parson, but we're married tight… and—and—let not man put asunder," says Jack.

For full five minutes there was not a word.

The east was trying to understand the west!

"Amen, Jack," said I. "God bless you—you are a man!"

"We mean to get a parson and have it done straight yet," explained Jack, "but I wanted you to stand by me——"

"Faith, Jack, you've done it pretty thorough without any help——"

"Yes, but folks won't understand," pleaded Jack, "and—and—I'd do as much for you—I wanted you to stand by me and tell me where to say 'yes' when the parson reads the words——"

"All right—I shall," I promised, laughing.

If only Hortense could know all this! That is the sorrow of rifted lives—the dark between, on each side the thoughts that yearn.

"And—and," Jack was stammering on, "I thought, perhaps, Mistress Rebecca 'd be willing to stand by Mizza," nodding to the young squaw, "that is, if you asked Rebecca," pleaded Jack.

"We'll see," said I.

For the New England conscience was something to reckon with!

"How did you come here?" I asked.

"Mizza snared rabbits and I stole back my musket when we ran away and did some shooting long as powder lasted——"

"And then?"

"And then we used bow and arrow. We hid in the bush till the hostiles quit cruisin'; but the spring storms caught us when we started for the coast. I s'pose I'm a better sailor on water than land, for split me for a herring if my eyes didn't go blind from snow! We hove to in the woods again, Mizza snaring rabbit and building a lodge and keepin' fire agoin' and carin' for me as if I deserved it. There I lay water-logged, odd's man—blind as a mole till the spring thaws came. Then Mizza an' me built a raft; for sez I to Miz, though she didn't understand: 'Miz,' sez I, 'water don't flow uphill! If we rig up a craft, that river'll carry us to the bay!' But she only gets down on the ground the way she did with you and puts my foot on her neck. Lordy," laughs Jack, "s'pose I don't know what a foot on a neck feels like? I sez: 'Miz, if you ever do that again, I'll throw you overboard!' Then the backwash came so strong from the bay, we had to wait till the floods settled. While we swung at anchorman, what d'y' think happened? I taught Miz English. Soon as ever she knew words enough I told her if I was a captain I'd want a mate! She didn't catch the wind o' that, lad, till we were navigating our raft downstream agen the ice-jam. Ship ahoy, you know, the ice was like to nip us, and lackin' a life-belt I put me arm round her waist! Ease your helm! Port—a little! Haul away! But she understood—when she saw me save her from the jam before I saved myself."

And Jack Battle stood away arm's length from his Indian wife and laughed his pride.

"And by the time we'd got to the bay you'd gone, but Jean Groseillers sent us to the English ship that came out expecting to find Governor Brigdar at Nelson. We shipped with the company boat, and here we be."

"And what are you going to do?"

"Oh, I get work enough on the docks to pay for Mizza's lessons—"

"Lessons?"

"Yes—she's learning sewin' and readin' from the nuns, and as soon as she's baptized we're going to be married regular."

"Oh!" A sigh of relief escaped me. "Then you'll not need Rebecca for six months or so?"

"No; but you'll ask her?" pleaded Jack.

"If I'm here."

As they were going out Jack slipped back from the hallway to the fireplace, leaving Mizza outside.

"Ramsay?"

"Yes?"

"You think—it's—it's—all right?"

"What?"

"What I done about a mate?"

"Right?" I reiterated. "Here's my hand to you—blessing on the voyage, Captain Jack Battle!"

"Ah," smiled Jack, "you've been to the wilderness—you understand! Other folks don't! That is the way it happens out there!"

He lingered as of old when there was more to come.

"Ramsay?"

"Sail away, captain!"

"Have you seen Hortense?" he asked, looking straight at me.

"Um—yes—no—that is—I have and I haven't."

"Why haven't you?"

"Because having become a grand lady, her ladyship didn't choose to see me."

Jack Battle turned on his heel and swore a seaman's oath. "That—that's a lie," said he.

"Very well—it's a lie, but this is what happened," and I told him of the scene in the theatre. Jack pulled a puzzled face, looking askance as he listened.

"Why didn't you go round to her box, the way M. Radisson did to the king's?"

"You forget I am only a trader!"

"Pah," says Jack, "that is nothing!"

"You forget that Lieutenant Blood might have objected to my visit," and I told him of Blood.

"But how was Mistress Hortense to know that?"

Wounded pride hugs its misery, and I answered nothing.

At the door he stopped. "You go along with Radisson to Oxford," he called. "The court will be there."

CHAPTER XXVI

AT OXFORD

Rioting through London streets or playing second in M. Radisson's games of empire, it was possible to forget her, but not in Oxford with the court retinue all about and the hedgerows abloom and spring-time in the air. M. Radisson had gone to present his reports to the king. With a vague belief that chance might work some miracle, I accompanied M. Radisson till we encountered the first belaced fellow of the King's Guard. 'Twas outside the porter's lodge of the grand house where the king had been pleased to breakfast that morning.

"And what might this young man want?" demanded the fellow, with lordly belligerence, letting M. Radisson pass without question.

Your colonial hero will face the desperate chance of death; but not the smug arrogance of a beliveried flunkey.

"Wait here," says M. Radisson to me, forgetful of Hortense now that his own end was won.

And I struck through the copse-wood, telling myself that chance makes grim sport. Ah, well, the toughening of the wilderness is not to be undone by fickle fingers, however dainty, nor a strong life blown out by a girl's caprice! Riders went clanking past. I did not turn. Let those that honoured dishonour doff hats to that company of loose women and dissolute men! Hortense was welcome to the womanish men and the mannish women, to her dandified lieutenant and foreign adventuresses and grand ambassadors, who bought English honour with the smiles of evil women. Coming to a high stone wall, I saw two riders galloping across the open field for the copse wood.

"A very good place to break foolish necks," thought I; for the riders were coming straight towards me, and a deep ditch ran along the other side of the wall.

To clear the wall and then the ditch would be easy enough; but to clear the ditch and then the wall required as pretty a piece of foolhardy horsemanship as hunters could find. Out of sheer curiosity to see the end I slackened my walk. A woman in green was leading the pace. The man behind was shouting "Don't try it! Don't try it! Ride round the end! Wait! Wait!" But the woman came on as if her horse had the bit. Then all my mighty, cool stoicism began thumping like a smith's forge. The woman was Hortense, with that daring look on her face I had seen come to it in the north land; and her escort, young Lieutenant Blood, with terror as plainly writ on his fan-shaped elbows and pounding gait as if his horse were galloping to perdition.

"Don't jump! Head about, Mistress Hillary!" cried the lieutenant.

But Hortense's lips tightened, the rein tightened, there was that lifting bound into air when horse and rider are one—the quick paying-out of the rein—the long, stretching leap—the backward brace—and the wall had been cleared. But Blood's horse balked the jump, nigh sending him head over into the moat, and seizing the bit, carried its cursing rider down the slope of the field. In vain the lieutenant beat it about the head and dug the spurs deep. The beast sidled off each time he headed it up, or plunged at the water's edge till Mistress Hortense cried out: "Oh—please! I cannot see you risk yourself on that beast! Oh—please won't you ride farther down where I can get back!"

"Ho—away, then," calls Blood, mighty glad of that way out of his predicament, "but don't try the wall here again, Mistress Hillary! I protest 'tis not safe for you! Ho—away, then! I race you to the end of the wall!"

And off he gallops, never looking back, keen to clear the wall and meet my lady half-way up. Hortense sat erect, reining her horse and smiling at me.

"And so you would go away without seeing me," she said, "and I must needs ride you down at the risk of the lieutenant's neck."

"'Tis the way of the proud with the humble," I laughed back; but the laugh had no mirth.

Her face went grave. She sat gazing at me with that straight, honest look of the wilderness which neither lies nor seeks a lie.

"Your horse is champing to be off, Hortense!"

"Yes—and if you looked you might see that I am keeping him from going off."

I smiled at the poor jest as a court conceit.

"Or perhaps, if you tried, you might help me to hold him," says Hortense, never taking her search from my face.

"And defraud the lieutenant," said I.

"Ah!" says Hortense, looking away. "Are you jealous of anything so small?"

I took hold of the bit and quieted the horse. Hortense laughed.

"Were you so mighty proud the other night that you could not come to see a humble ward of the court?" she asked.

"I am only a poor trader now!"

"Ah," says Hortense, questioning my face again, "I had thought you were only a poor trader before! Was that the only reason?"

"To be sure, Hortense, the lieutenant would not have welcomed me—he might have told his fellow to turn me out and made confusion."

And I related M. Radisson's morning encounter with Lieutenant Blood, whereat Mistress Hortense uttered such merry peals of laughter I had thought the chapel-bells were chiming.

"Ramsay!" she cried impetuously, "I hate this life—why did you all send me to it?"

"Hate it! Why——?"

"Why?" reiterated Hortense. "Why, when a king, who is too busy to sign death-reprieves, may spend the night hunting a single moth from room to room of the palace? Why, when ladies of the court dress in men's clothes to run the streets with the Scowerers? Why, when a duchess must take me every morning to a milliner's shop, where she meets her lover, who is a rope-walker? Why, when our sailors starve unpaid and gold enough lies on the basset-table of a Sunday night to feed the army? Ah, yes!" says Hortense, "why do I hate this life? Why must you and Madame Radisson and Lady Kirke all push me here?"

"Hortense," I broke in, "you were a ward of the crown! What else was there for us to do?"

"Ah, yes!" says Hortense, "what else? You kept your promise, and a ward of the crown must marry whom the king names—"

"Marry?"

"Or—or go to a nunnery abroad."

"A nunnery?"

"Ah, yes!" mocks Hortense, "what else is there to do?"

And at that comes Blood crashing through the brush.

"Here, fellow, hands off that bridle!"

"The horse became restless. This gentleman held him for me till you came."

"Gad's life!" cries the lieutenant, dismounting. "Let's see?" And he examines the girths with a great show of concern. "A nasty tumble," says he, as if Hortense had been rolled on. "All sound, Mistress Hillary! Egad! You must not ride such a wild beast! I protest, such risks are too desperate!" And he casts up the whites of his eyes at Mistress Hortense, laying his hand on his heart. "When did you feel him getting away from you?"

"At the wall," says Hortense.

The lieutenant vaulted to his saddle.

"Here, fellow!"

He had tossed me a gold-piece. They were off. I lifted the coin, balanced it on my thumb, and flipped it ringing against the wall. When I looked up, Hortense was laughing back over her shoulder.

On May 17th we sailed from Gravesend in the Happy Return, two ships accompanying us for Hudson Bay, and a convoy of the Royal Marine coming as far as the north of Scotland to stand off Dutch highwaymen and Spanish pirates.

But I made the news of Jack Battle's marriage the occasion of a letter to one of the queen's maids of honour.

'Twas as fair sailing under English colours as you could wish till Pierre Radisson had undone all the mischief that he had worked against the Fur Company in Hudson Bay. Pierre Radisson sits with a pipe in his mouth and his long legs stretched clear across the cabin-table, spinning yarns of wild doings in savage lands, and Governor Phipps, of the Hudson's Bay Company, listens with eyes a trifle too sleepily watchful, methinks, for the Frenchman's good. A summer sea kept us course all the way to the northern bay, and sometimes Pierre Radisson would fling out of the cabin, marching up and down the deck muttering, "Pah! Tis tame adventuring! Takes a dish o' spray to salt the freshness out o' men! Tis the roaring forties put nerve in a man's marrow! Soft days are your Delilah's that shave away men's strength! Toughen your fighters, Captain Gazer! Toughen your fighters!"

And once, when M. Radisson had passed beyond hearing, the governor turns with a sleepy laugh to the captain.

"A pox on the rantipole!" says he. "May the sharks test the nerve of his marrow after he's captured back the forts!"

In the bay great ice-drift stopped our way, and Pierre Radisson's impatience took fire.

"What a deuce, Captain Gazer!" he cries. "How long do you intend to squat here anchored to an ice-pan?"

A spark shot from the governor's sleepy eyes, and Captain Gazer swallowed words twice before he answered.

"Till the ice opens a way," says he.

"Opens a way!" repeats Radisson. "Man alive, why don't you carve a way?"

"Carve a way yourself, Radisson," says the governor contemptuously.

That was let enough for Pierre Radisson. He had the sailors lowering jolly-boats in a jiffy; and off seven of us went, round the ice-pans, ploughing, cutting, portaging a way till we had crossed the obstruction and were pulling for the French fort with the spars of three Company boats far in the offing.

I detained the English sailors at the river-front till M. Radisson had entered the fort and won young Jean Groseillers to the change of masters. Before the Fur Company's ships came, the English flag was flying above the fort and Fort Bourbon had become Fort Nelson.

"I bid you welcome to the French Habitation," bows Radisson, throwing wide the gates to the English governor.

"Hm!" returns Phipps, "how many beaver-skins are there in store?"

M. Radisson looked at the governor. "You must ask my tradespeople that," he answers; and he stood aside for them all to pass.

"Your English mind thinks only of the gain," he said to me.

"And your French mind?" I asked.

"The game and not the winnings," said he.

No sooner were the winnings safe—twenty thousand beaver-skins stowed away in three ships' holds—than Pierre Radisson's foes unmasked. The morning of our departure Governor Phipps marched all our Frenchmen aboard like captives of war.

"Sir," expostulated M. de Radisson, "before they gave up the fort I promised these men they should remain in the bay."

Governor Phipps's sleepy eyes of a sudden waked wide.

"Aye," he taunted, "with Frenchmen holding our fort, a pretty trick you could play us when the fancy took you!"

M. Radisson said not a word. He pulled free a gantlet and strode forward, but the doughty governor hastily scuttled down the ship's ladder and put a boat's length of water between him and Pierre Radisson's challenge.

The gig-boat pulled away. Our ship had raised anchor. Radisson leaned over the deck-rail and laughed.

"Egad, Phipps," he shouted, "a man may not fight cowards, but he can cudgel them! An I have to wait for you on the River Styx, I'll punish you for making me break promise to these good fellows!"

"Promise—and when did promise o' yours hold good, Pierre Radisson?"

The Frenchman turned with a bitter laugh.

"A giant is big enough to be hit—a giant is easy to fight," says he, "but egad, these pigmies crawl all over you and sting to death before they are visible to the naked eye!"

And as the Happy Return wore ship for open sea he stood moodily silent with eyes towards the shore where Governor Phipps's gig-boat had moored before Fort Nelson.

Then, speaking more to himself than to Jean and me, his lips curled with a hard scorn.

"The Happy Return!" says he. "Pardieu! 'tis a happy return to beat devils and then have all your own little lies come roosting home like imps that filch the victory! They don't trust me because I won by trickery! Egad! is a slaughter better than a game? An a man wins, who a devil gives a rush for the winnings? 'Tis the fight and the game—pah!—not the thing won! Storm and cold, man and beast, powers o' darkness and devil, knaves and fools and his own sins—aye, that's the scratch!—The man and the beast and the dark and the devil, he can breast 'em all with a bold front! But knaves and fools and his own sins, pah!—death grubs!—hatching and nesting in a man's bosom till they wake to sting him! Flesh-worms—vampires—blood-suckers—spun out o' a man's own tissue to sap his life!"

He rapped his pistol impatiently against the deck-rail, stalked past us, then turned.

"Lads," says he, "if you don't want gall in your wine and a grub in your victory, a' God's name keep your own counsel and play the game fair and square and aboveboard."

And though his speech worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we read some sense in his mixed metaphors.

On all that voyage home he never once crossed words with the English officers, but took his share of hardship with the French prisoners.

"I mayn't go back to France. They think they have me cornered and in their power," he would say, gnawing at his finger-ends and gazing into space.

Once, after long reverie, he sprang up from a gun-waist where he had been sitting and uttered a scornful laugh.

"Cornered? Hah! We shall see! I snap my fingers in their faces."

Thereafter his mood brightened perceptibly, and he was the first to put foot ashore when we came to anchor in British port. There were yet four hours before the post-chaise left for London, and the English crew made the most of the time by flocking to the ale-houses. M. Radisson drew Jean and me apart.

"We'll beat our detractors yet," he said. "If news of this capture be carried to the king and the Duke of York[1] before the shareholders spread false reports, we are safe. If His Royal Highness favour us, the Company must fall in line or lose their charter!"

And he bade us hire three of the fleetest saddle-horses to be found. While the English crew were yet brawling in the taverns, we were to horse and away. Our horse's feet rang on the cobblestones with the echo of steel and the sparks flashed from M. Radisson's eyes. A wharfmaster rushed into mid-road to stop us, but M. Radisson rode him down. A uniformed constable called out to know what we were about.

"Our business!" shouts M. Radisson, and we are off.

Country franklins got their wains out of our way with mighty confusion, and coaches drew aside for us to pass, and roadside brats scampered off with a scream of freebooters; but M. Radisson only laughed.

"This is living," said he. "Give your nag rein, Jean! Whip and spur! Ramsay! Whip and spur! Nothing's won but at cost of a sting! Throw off those jack-boots, Jean! They're a handicap! Loose your holsters, lad! An any highwaymen come at us to-day I'll send him a short way to a place where he'll stay! Whip up! Whip up!"

"What have you under your arm?" cries Jean breathlessly.

"Rare furs for the king," calls Radisson.

Then the wind is in our hair, and thatched cots race off in a blur on either side; plodding workmen stand to stare and are gone; open fields give place to forest, forest to village, village to bare heath; and still we race on.

---

Midnight found us pounding through the dark of London streets for Cheapside, where lived Mr. Young, a director of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was favourable to Pierre Radisson.

"Halloo! Halloo!" shouts Radisson, beating his pistol-butt on the door.

A candle and a nightcap emerge from the upper window.

"Who's there?" demands a voice.

"It's Radisson, Mr. Young!"

"Radisson! In the name o' the fiends—where from?"

"Oh, we've just run across the way from Hudson Bay!" says Radisson.

And the good man presently appears at the door with a candle in one hand and a bludgeon in the other.

"In the name o' the fiends, when did you arrive, man?" exclaims Mr. Young, hailing us inside.

"Two minutes ago by the clock," laughs Radisson, looking at the timepiece in the hall. "Two minutes and a half ago," says he, following our host to the library.

"How many beaver-skins?" asks the Englishman, setting down his candle.

The Frenchman smiles.

"Twenty thousand beaver—skins and as many more of other sorts!"

The Englishman sits down to pencil out how much that will total at ten shillings each; and Pierre Radisson winks at us.

"The winnings again," says he.

"Twenty thousand pounds!" cries our host, springing up.

"Aye," says Pierre Radisson, "twenty thousand pounds' worth o' fur without a pound of shot or the trade of a nail-head for them. The French had these furs in store ready for us!"

Mr. Young lifts his candle so that the light falls on Radisson's bronzed face. He stands staring as if to make sure we are no wraiths.

"Twenty thousand pounds," says he, slowly extending his right hand to Pierre Radisson. "Radisson, man, welcome!"

The Frenchman bows with an ironical laugh.

"Twenty thousand pounds' worth o' welcome, sir!"

But the director of the Fur Company rambles on unheeding.

"These be great news for the king and His Royal Highness," says he.

"Aye, and as I have some rare furs for them both, why not let us bear the news to them ourselves?" asks Radisson.

"That you shall," cries Mr. Young; and he led us up-stairs, where we might refresh ourselves for the honour of presentation to His Majesty next day.

[1] The Duke of York became Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company after Prince Rupert's death, and the Company's charter was a royal favour direct from the king.

CHAPTER XXVIII

REBECCA AND I FALL OUT

M. Radisson had carried his rare furs to the king, and I was at Sir John Kirke's door to report the return of her husband to Madame Radisson. The same grand personage with sleek jowls and padded calves opened the door in the gingerly fashion of his office. This time he ushered me quick enough into the dark reception-room.

As I entered, two figures jumped from the shadow of a tapestried alcove with gasps of fright.

"Ramsay!"

It was Rebecca, the prim monkey, blushing a deal more than her innocence warranted, with a solemn-countenanced gentleman of the cloth scowling from behind.

"When—when—did you come?" she asked, all in a pretty flutter that set her dimples atrembling; and she forgot to give me welcome.

"Now—exactly on the minute!"

"Why—why—didn't you give us warning?" stammered Rebecca, putting out one shy hand.

At that I laughed outright; but it was as much the fashion for gentlemen of the cloth to affect a mighty solemnity in those days as it was for the laity to let out an oath at every other word, and the young divine only frowned sourly at my levity.

"If—if—if you'd only given us warning," interrupts Rebecca.

"Faith, Rebecca, an you talk of warning, I'll begin to think you needed it——"

"To give you welcome," explains Rebecca. Then recovering herself, she begs, with a pretty bobbing courtesy, to make me known to the Reverend Adam Kittridge.

The Reverend Kittridge shakes hands with an air as he would sound my doctrine on the spot, and Rebecca hastens to add that I am "a very—old—old friend."

"Not so very old, Rebecca, not so very long ago since you and I read over the same lesson-books. Do you mind the copy-heads on the writing-books?

"'Heaven to find. The Bible mind. In Adam's fall we sinn'ed all. Adam lived a lonely life until he got himself a wife.'"

But at that last, which was not to be found among the head-lines of Boston's old copy-books, little Rebecca looked like to drop, and with a frightened gesture begged us to be seated, which we all accomplished with a perceptible stiffening of the young gentleman's joints.

"Is M. Radisson back?" she asks.

"He reached England yesterday. He bade me say that he will be here after he meets the shareholders. He goes to present furs to the king this morning."

"That will please Lady Kirke," says the young gentleman.

"Some one else is back in England," exclaims Rebecca, with the air of news. "Ben Gillam is here."

"O-ho! Has he seen the Company?"

"He and Governor Brigdar have been among M. Radisson's enemies. Young Captain Gillam says there's a sailor-lad working on the docks here can give evidence against M. Radisson."

"Can you guess who that sailor-lad is, Rebecca?"

"It is not—no—it is not Jack?" she asks.

"Jack it is, Rebecca. That reminds me, Jack sent a message to you!"

"A message to me?"

"Yes—you know he's married—he married last year when he was in the north."

"Married?" cries Rebecca, throwing up her hands and like to faint from surprise. "Married in the north? Why—who—who married him, Ramsay?"

"A woman, of course!"

"But—" Rebecca was blushing furiously, "but—I mean—was there a chaplain? Had you a preacher? And—and was not Mistress Hortense the only woman——?"

"No—child—there were thousands of women—native women——"

"Squaws!" exclaims the prim little Puritan maid, with a red spot burning on each cheek. "Do you mean that Jack Battle has married a squaw?" and she rose indignantly.

"No—I mean a woman! Now, Rebecca, will you sit down till I tell you all about it?"

"Sir," interjects the young gentleman of the cloth, "I protest there are things that a maid ought not to hear!"

"Then, sir, have a care that you say none of them under cloak of religion! Honi soit qui mal y pense! The mind that thinketh no evil taketh no evil."

Then I turned to Rebecca, standing with a startled look in her eyes.

"Rebecca, Madame Radisson has told you how Jack was left to be tortured by the Indians?"

"Hortense has told me."

"And how he risked his life to save an Indian girl's life?"

"Yes," says Rebecca, with downcast lids.

"That Indian girl came and untied Jack's bonds the night of the massacre. They escaped together. When he went snow-blind, Mizza hunted and snared for him and kept him. Her people were all dead; she could not go back to her tribe—if Jack had left her in the north, the hostiles would have killed her. Jack brought her home with him——"

"He ought to have put her in a house of correction," snapped Rebecca.

"Rebecca! Why would he put her in a house of correction? What had she done that she ought not to have done? She had saved his life. He had saved hers, and he married her."

"There was no minister," said Rebecca, with a tightening of her childish dimpled mouth and a reddening of her cheeks and a little indignant toss of the chin.

"Rebecca! How could they get a minister a thousand leagues away from any church? They will get one now——"

Rebecca rose stiffly, her little lily face all aflame.

"My father saith much evil cometh of this—it is sin—he ought not to have married her; and—and—it is very wrong of you to be telling me this—" she stammered angrily, with her little hands clasped tight across the white stomacher.

"Very unfit," comes from that young gentleman of the cloth.

We were all three standing, and I make no doubt my own face went as red as theirs, for the taunt bit home. That inference of evil where no evil was, made an angrier man than was my wont. The two moved towards the door. I put myself across their way.

"Rebecca, you do yourself wrong! You are measuring other people's deeds with too short a yardstick, little woman, and the wrong is in your own mind, not theirs."

"I—I—don't know what you mean!" cried Rebecca obstinately, with a break in her voice that ought to have warned; but her next words provoked afresh. "It was wicked!—it was sinful!"—with an angry stamp—"it was shameful of Jack Battle to marry an Indian girl——"

There I cut in.

"Was it?" I asked. "Young woman, let me tell you a bald truth! When a white man marries an Indian, the union is as honourable as your own would be. It is when the white man does not marry the Indian that there is shame; and the shame is to the white man, not the Indian——!"

Sure, one might let an innocent bundle of swans' down and baby cheeks have its foibles without laying rough hands upon them!

The next,—little Rebecca cries out that I've insulted her, is in floods of tears, and marches off on the young gentleman's arm.

Comes a clatter of slippered heels on the hall floor and in bustles my Lady Kirke, bejewelled and befrilled and beflounced till I had thought no mortal might bend in such massive casings of starch.

"La," she pants, "good lack!—Wellaway! My fine savage! Welladay! What a pretty mischief have you been working? Proposals are amaking at the foot of the stairs. O—lud! The preacher was akissing that little Puritan maid as I came by! Good lack, what will Sir John say?"

And my lady laughs and laughs till I look to see the tears stain the rouge of her cheeks.

"O-lud," she laughs, "I'm like to die! He tried to kiss the baggage! And the little saint jumps back so quick that he hit her ear by mistake! La," she laughs, "I'm like to die!"

I'd a mind to tell her ladyship that a loosening of her stays might prolong life, but I didn't. Instead, I delivered the message from Pierre Radisson and took myself off a mighty mad man; for youth can be angry, indeed. And the cause of the anger was the same as fretteth the Old World and New to-day. Rebecca was measuring Jack by old standards. I was measuring Rebecca by new standards. And the measuring of the old by the new and the new by the old teareth love to tatters.

Pierre Radisson I met at the entrance to the Fur Company's offices in Broad Street. His steps were of one on steel springs and his eyes afire with victory.

"We've beaten them," he muttered to me. "His Majesty favours us! His Majesty accepted the furs and would have us at Whitehall to-morrow night to give account of our doings. An they try to trick me out of reward I'll have them to the foot o' the throne!"

But of Pierre Radisson's intrigue against his detractors I was not thinking at all.

"Were the courtiers about?" I asked.

"Egad! yes; Palmer and Buckingham and Ashley leering at Her Grace of Portsmouth, with Cleveland looking daggers at the new favourite, and the French ambassador shaking his sides with laughter to see the women at battle. His Royal Highness, the Duke of York, got us access to present the furs. Egad, Ramsay, I am a rough man, but it seemed prodigious strange to see a king giving audience in the apartments of the French woman, and great men leering for a smile from that huzzy! The king lolls on a Persian couch with a litter of spaniel puppies on one side and the French woman on the other. And what do you think that black-eyed jade asks when I present the furs and tell of our captured Frenchmen? To have her own countrymen sold to the Barbadoes so that she may have the money for her gaming-table! Egad, I spiked that pretty plan by saying the Frenchmen were sending her a present of furs, too! To-morrow night we go to Whitehall to entertain His Majesty with our doings! We need not fear enemies in the Company now!"

"I'm not so sure of that," said I. "The Gillams have been working against you here, and so has Brigdar."

"Hah—let them work!"

"Did you see her?" I asked.

"Her?" questions Radisson absently. "Pardieu, there are so many hers about the court now with no she-saint among them! Which do you mean?"

The naming of Hortense after such speech was impossible. Without more mention of the court, we entered the Company's office, where sat the councillors in session around a long table. No one rose to welcome him who had brought such wealth on the Happy Return; and the reason was not far to seek. The post-chaise had arrived with Pierre Radisson's detractors, and allied with them were the Gillams and Governor Brigdar.

Pierre Radisson advanced undaunted and sat down. Black looks greeted his coming, and the deputy-governor, who was taking the Duke of York's place, rose to suggest that "Mr. Brigdar, wrongfully dispossessed of the fort on the bay by one Frenchman known as Radisson, be restored as governor of those parts."

A grim smile went from face to face at Pierre Radisson's expense.

"Better withdraw, man, better withdraw," whispers Sir John Kirke, his father-in-law.

But Radisson only laughs.

Then one rises to ask by what authority the Frenchman, Radisson, had gone to report matters to the king instead of leaving that to the shareholders.

M. de Radisson utters another loud laugh.

Comes a knocking, and there appears at the door Colonel Blood, father of the young lieutenant, with a message from the king.

"Gentlemen," announces the freebooter, "His Majesty hath bespoke dinner for the Fur Company at the Lion. His Royal Highness, the Duke of York, hath ordered Madeira for the councillors' refreshment, and now awaits your coming!"

For the third time M. Radisson laughs aloud with a triumph of insolence.

"Come, gentlemen," says he, "I've countered. Let us be going. His Royal Highness awaits us across the way."

Blood stood twirling his mustaches and tapping his sword-handle impatiently. He was as swarth and straight and dauntless as Pierre Radisson, with a sinister daring in his eyes that might have put the seal to any act.

"Egad's life!" he exclaimed, "do fur-traders keep royalty awaiting?"

And our irate gentleman must needs haste across to the Lion, where awaited the Company Governor, the Duke of York, with all the merry young blades of the court. King Charles's reign was a time of license, you have been told. What that meant you would have known if you had seen the Fur Company at dinner. Blood, Senior, I mind, had a drinking-match against Sir George Jeffreys, the judge; and I risk not my word on how much those two rascals put away. The judge it was who went under mahogany first, though Colonel Blood scarce had wit enough left to count the winnings of his wager. Young Lieutenant Blood stood up on his chair and bawled out some monstrous bad-writ verse to "a fair-dark lady"—whatever that meant—"who was as cold as ice and combustible as gunpowder." Healths were drunk to His Majesty King Charles, to His Royal Highness the Duke of York, to our councillors of the Company, to our governors of the fur-posts, and to the captains. Then the Duke of York himself lifted the cup to Pierre Radisson's honour; whereat the young courtiers raised such a cheering, the grim silence of Pierre Radisson's detractors passed unnoticed. After the Duke of York had withdrawn, our riotous sparks threw off all restraint. On bended knee they drank to that fair evil woman whom King Louis had sent to ensnare King Charles. Odds were offered on how long her power with the king would last. Then followed toasts to a list of second-rate names, dancing girls and French milliners, who kept place of assignation for the dissolute crew, and maids of honour, who were no maids of honour, but adventuresses in the pay of great men to advance their interest with the king, and riffraff women whose names history hath done well to forget. To these toasts Colonel Blood and Pierre Radisson and I sat with inverted glasses.

While the inn was ringing to the shouts of the revellers, the freebooter leaned across to Pierre Radisson.

"Gad's name if they like you," he mumbled drunkenly.

"Who?" asked Radisson.

"Fur Company," explained Blood. "They hate you! So they do me! But if the king favours you, they've got to have you," and he laughed to himself.

"That's the way with me," he whispered in drunken confidence to M. Radisson. "What a deuce?" he asked, turning drowsily to the table. "What's my boy doing?"

Young Lieutenant Blood was to his feet holding a reaming glass high as his head.

"Gentlemen, I give you the sweet savage!" he cried, "the Diana of the snows—a thistle like a rose—ice that burns—a pauper that spurns—"

"Curse me if he doesn't mean that saucy wench late come from your north fort," interrupted the father.

My hands were itching to throw a glass in the face of father or son, but Pierre Radisson restrained me.

"More to be done sometimes by doing nothing," he whispered.

The young fellows were on their knees draining bumpers; but Colonel Blood was rambling again.

"He gives 'em that saucy brat, does he? Gad's me, I'd give her to perdition for twopenny-worth o' rat poison! Look you, Radisson, 'tis what I did once; but she's come back! Curse me, I could 'a' done it neater and cheaper myself—twopenny-worth o' poison would do it, Picot said; but gad's me, I paid him a hundred guineas, and here she's come back again!"

"Blood… Colonel Blood," M. Picot had repeated at his death.

I had sprung up. Again M. Radisson held me back.

"How long ago was that, Colonel Blood?" he asked softly.

"Come twenty year this day s'ennight," mutters the freebooter. "'Twas before I entered court service. Her father had four o' my fellows gibbeted at Charing Cross, Gad's me, I swore he'd sweat for it! She was Osmond's only child—squalling brat coming with nurse over Hounslow Heath. 'Sdeath—I see it yet! Postillions yelled like stuck pigs, nurses kicked over in coach dead away. When they waked up, curse me, but the French poisoner had the brat! Curse me, I'd done better to finish her myself. Picot ran away and wrote letters—letters—letters, till I had to threaten to slit his throat, 'pon my soul, I had! And now she must marry the boy——"

"Why?" put in Radisson, with cold indifference and half-listening air.

"Gad's life, can't you see?" asked the knave. "Osmond's dead, the boy's lands are hers—the French doctor may 'a' told somebody," and Colonel Blood of His Majesty's service slid under the table with the judge.

M. Radisson rose and led the way out.

"You'd like to cudgel him," he said. "Come with me to Whitehall instead!"

CHAPTER XXIX

THE KING'S PLEASURE

My Lady Kirke was all agog.

Pierre Radisson was her "dear sweet savage," and "naughty spark," and "bold, bad beau," and "devilish fellow," and "lovely wretch!"

"La, Pierre," she cries, with a tap of her fan, "anybody can go to the king's levee! But, dear heart!" she trills, with a sidelong ogle. "Ta!—ta! naughty devil!—to think of our sweet savage going to Whitehall of an evening! Lud, Mary, I'll wager you, Her Grace of Portsmouth hath laid eyes on him——"

"The Lord forbid!" ejaculates Pierre Radisson.

"Hoighty-toighty! Now! there you go, my saucy spark! Good lack! An the king's women laid eyes on any other man, 'twould turn his head and be his fortune! Naughty fellow!" she warns, with a flirt of her fan. "We shall watch you! Ta-ta, don't tell me no! Oh, we know this gÂitÉ de coeur! You'll presently be intime o' Portsmouth and Cleveland and all o' them!"

"Madame," groans Pierre Radisson, "swear, if you will! But as you love me, don't abuse the French tongue!"

At which she gave him a slap with her fan.

"An I were not so young," she simpers, "I'd cuff your ears, you saucy Pierre!"

"So young!" mutters Pierre Radisson, with grim looks at her powdered locks. "Egad's life, so is the bud on a century plant young," and he turns to his wife.

But my Lady Kirke was blush-proof.

"Don't forget to pay special compliments to the favourites," she calls, as we set out for Whitehall; and she must run to the door in a flutter and ask if Pierre Radisson has any love-verse ready writ, in case of an amour with one of the court ladies.

"No," says Radisson, "but here are unpaid tailor bills! 'Tis as good as your billets-doux! I'll kiss 'em just as hard!"

"So!" cries Lady Kirke, bobbing a courtesy and blowing a kiss from her finger-tips as we rolled away in Sir John's coach.

"The old flirt-o'-tail," blurted Radisson, "you could pack her brains in a hazel-nut; but 'twould turn the stomach of a grub!"

---

'Twas not the Whitehall you know to-day, which is but a remnant of the grand old pile that stretched all the way from the river front to the inner park. Before the fires, Whitehall was a city of palaces reaching far into St. James, with a fleet of royal barges at float below the river stairs. From Scotland Yard to Bridge Street the royal ensign blew to the wind above tower and parapet and battlement. I mind under the archway that spanned little Whitehall Street M. Radisson dismissed our coachman.

"How shall we bring up the matter of Hortense?" I asked.

"Trust me," said Radisson. "The gods of chance!"

"Will you petition the king direct?"

"Egad—no! Never petition a selfish man direct, or you'll get a No! Bring him round to the generous, so that he may take all credit for it himself! Do you hold back among the on-lookers till I've told our story o' the north! 'Tis not a state occasion! Egad, there'll be court wenches aplenty ready to take up with a likely looking man! Have a word with Hortense if you can! Let me but get the king's ear—" And Radisson laughed with a confidence, methought, nothing on earth could shake.

Then we were passed from the sentinel doing duty at the gate to the king's guards, and from the guards to orderlies, and from orderlies to fellows in royal colours, who led us from an ante-room to that glorious gallery of art where it pleased the king to take his pleasure that night.

It was not a state occasion, as Radisson said; but for a moment I think the glitter in which those jaded voluptuaries burned out their moth-lives blinded even the clear vision of Pierre Radisson. The great gallery was thronged with graceful courtiers and stately dowagers and gaily attired page-boys and fair ladies with a beauty of youth on their features and the satiety of age in their look. My Lord Preston, I mind, was costumed in purple velvet with trimming of pearls such as a girl might wear. Young Blood moved from group to group to show his white velvets sparkling with diamonds. One of the Sidneys was there playing at hazard with my Lady Castlemaine for a monstrous pile of gold on the table, which some onlookers whispered made up three thousand guineas. As I watched my lady lost; but in spite of that, she coiled her bare arm around the gold as if to hold the winnings back.

"And indeed," I heard her say, with a pout, "I've a mind to prove your love! I've a mind not to pay!"

At which young Sidney kisses her finger-tips and bids her pay the debt in favours; for the way to the king was through the influence of Castlemaine or Portsmouth or other of the dissolute crew.

Round other tables sat men and women, old and young, playing away estate and fortune and honour at tick-tack or ombre or basset. One noble lord was so old that he could not see to game, and must needs have his valet by to tell him how the dice came up. On the walls hung the works of Vandyke and Correggio and Raphael and Rubens; but the pure faces of art's creation looked down on statesmen bending low to the beck of adventuresses, old men pawning a noble name for the leer of a Portsmouth, and women vying for the glance of a jaded king.

At the far end of the apartment was a page-boy dressed as Cupid, singing love-songs. In the group of listeners lolled the languid king. Portsmouth sat near, fanning the passion of a poor young fool, who hung about her like a moth; but Charles was not a lover to be spurred. As Portsmouth played her ruse the more openly a contemptuous smile flitted over the proud, dark face of the king, and he only fondled his lap-dog with indifferent heed for all those flatterers and foot-lickers and curry-favours hovering round royalty.

Barillon, the French ambassador, pricked up his ears, I can tell you, when Chaffinch, the king's man, came back with word that His Majesty was ready to hear M. Radisson.

"Now, lad, move about and keep your eyes open and your mouth shut!" whispers M. Radisson as he left me.

Barillon would have followed to the king's group, but His Majesty looked up with a quiet insolence that sent the ambassador to another circle. Then a page-boy touched my arm.

"Master Stanhope?" he questioned.

"Yes," said I.

"Come this way," and he led to a tapestried corner, where sat the queen and her ladies.

Mistress Hortense stood behind the royal chair.

Queen Catherine extended her hand for my salute.

"Her Majesty is pleased to ask what has become of the sailor-lad and his bride," said Hortense.

"Hath the little Puritan helped to get them married right?" asked the queen, with the soft trill of a foreign tongue.

"Your Majesty," said I, "the little Puritan holds back."

"It is as you thought," said Queen Catherine, looking over her shoulder to Hortense.

"Would another bridesmaid do?" asked the queen.

Laughing looks passed among the ladies.

"If the bridesmaid were Mistress Hillary, Your Majesty," I began.

"Hortense hath been to see them."

I might have guessed. It was like Hortense to seek the lonely pair.

"Here is the king. We must ask his advice," said the queen.

At the king's entrance all fell back and I managed to whisper to Hortense what we had learned the night before.

"Here are news," smiled His Majesty. "Your maid of the north is Osmond's daughter! The lands young Lieutenant Blood wants are hers!"

At that were more looks among the ladies.

"And faith, the lieutenant asks for her as well as the lands," said the king.

Hortense had turned very white and moved a little forward.

"We may not disturb our loyal subject's possession. What does Osmond's daughter say?" questioned the king.

Then Hortense took her fate in her hands.

"Your Majesty," she said, "if Osmond's daughter did not want the lands, it would not be necessary to disturb the lieutenant."

"And who would find a husband for a portionless bride?" asked King Charles.

"May it please Your Majesty," began Hortense; but the words trembled unspoken on her lips.

There was a flutter among the ladies. The queen turned and rose. A half-startled look of comprehension came to her face. And out stepped Mistress Hortense from the group behind.

"Your Majesties," she stammered, "I do not want the lands——"

"Nor the lieutenant," laughed the king.

"Your Majesties," she said. She could say no more.

But with the swift intuition of the lonely woman's loveless heart, Queen Catherine read in my face what a poor trader might not speak. She reached her hand to me, and when I would have saluted it like any dutiful subject, she took my hand in hers and placed Hortense's hand in mine.

Then there was a great laughing and hand-shaking and protesting, with the courtiers thronging round.

"Ha, Radisson," Barillon was saying, "you not only steal our forts—you must rifle the court and run off with the queen's maid!"

"And there will be two marriages at the sailor's wedding," said the queen.

It was Hortense's caprice that both marriages be deferred till we reached Boston Town, where she must needs seek out the old Puritan divine whom I had helped to escape so many years ago.

Before I lay down my pen, I would that I could leave with you a picture of M. Radisson, the indomitable, the victorious, the dauntless, living in opulence and peace!

But my last memory of him, as our ship sheered away for Boston Town, is of a grave man standing on the quay denouncing princes' promises and gazing into space.

M. Radisson lived to serve the Fur Company for many a year as history tells; but his service was as the flight of a great eagle, harried by a multitude of meaner birds.

---

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