GRACE PHILIPVERRILL MIGHELS LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA TV Hearts of Grace GARDE APPEARED LIKE THE VERY SPIRIT OF THE FOREST Page 78 HEARTS of GRACE BY PHILIP VERRILL MIGHELS AUTHOR OP "The Furnace of Gold," "Thurley Ruxton," and "As It Was in the Beginning" New York Desmond FitzGerald, Inc. Copyright, 1918 By DESMOND FITZGERALD, INC. AUTHOR'S NOTE. SEVERAL years ago there was published anonymously " When a Witch Is Young." This is a revision of the same story. - CONTENTS. PART I. CHAPTER PAOK I. LeRoiestMort 9 II. A Friendship of Chance 14 III. The Germ of a Passion 22 PART II. I. A Rover and his Retinue 27 II. An Ungodly Performance 36 III. Twixt Cup and Lip 45 IV. The Opening of a Vista 53 V. A Weighty Confidence 62 VI. Pan's Brother and the Nymph 71 VII. The Meeting in the Greenwood 78 VIII. Paying the Fiddler 86 IX. A Matter of State 94 X. To Foil a Spy 100 XI. Dangerous Tributes 105 XII. Hours that Grow Dark 110 XIII. A Kiss Deferred 121 XIV. Overtures from the Enemy 133 XV. Love's Inviting Light 140 iii iv Contents. CHAPTER PAGE XVI. Garde's Lonely Vigil 149 XVII. A Night Attack 153 XVIII. The Glint of Treasure 160 XIX. Mutiny 164 XX. Garde's Extremity 171 XXI. Randolph's Courtship 180 XXII. David's Coercion 187 XXIII. Goody's Boy 193 XXIV. A Greenwood Meeting 200 XXV. Love's Traps for Confessions 213 XXVI. A Holiday Ended 221 XXVII. In Boston Town 228 XXVIII. Love's Garden 234 XXIX. The Enemy in Power 243 XXX. A Light at the Tavern 249 XXXI. ARefugee 255 XXXII. A Foster Parent 260 XXXIII. Repudiated Silver 269 XXXIV. Lodgings for the Retinue 275 XXXV. Garde Obtains the Jail Keys 280 XXXVI. Garde's Ordeal 287 XXXVII. Rats in the Armory 296 XXXVIII. Love's Long Good-by 303 XXXIX. Mutations 308 XL. Golden Oysters 314 XLI. Fate's Devious Ways 319 XLII. Little Ruses and Waiting 327 PART III. I. A Topic at Court 885 II. Illness in the Family 342 Contents. v CHAPTER PAGK III. Foiled Purposes 345 IV. Making History 350 V. Old Acquaintances 357 VI. Juggling with Fire 362 VII. A Beef-eater Passes 368 VIII. A Woman Scorned 371 IX. Revelations 382 X. After Six Years 392 XI. A Blow in the Dark 398 XII. Adam's Nurse , ... 403 XIII. Goody in the Toils ' 407 XIV. Garde's Subterfuge 414 XV. The Midnight Trial 425 XVL The Gauntlet Run 436 XVII. Bewitched.. ,. 443 Hearts of Grace HEARTS OF GRACE PART I. CHAPTER I. LE ROI EST MORT. THE first, the last the only King the Americans ever had, was dead. King Philip, the mighty Sachem of the Wampanoag Indians, had been slain. His warriors were slaughtered or scattered. The war was ended. It was the 13th day of August, in the year 1676. The seemly town of Plymouth was in an uproar. The human emotions of the Puritan people of Massachu setts had tugged at the shackles of a long restraint and had broken them asunder. Men, women and children, they surged through the streets, acclaiming a buff-colored army that filled the thoroughfares like a turgid flood. They were the forces which Captain Benjamin Church had led to the camp of King Philip, in the swamps of Mount Hope and Pocasset, where the final scene of the gory drama had been enacted. Armed with clanking swords, shouldered carbines, and with great pistols flopping at the waist, rode a troop of sixty horsemen, caparisoned in glittering 9 io Hearts of Grace. back, breast and head pieces. Behind them tramped a long column of foot-soldiers; brown Puritans stern, mirth-denying, lusty at fighting. Above their heads swayed a thin forest of pikestaves, the sunbeams glinting from their steel tips. There was clinking of metal on metal, thud and clatter of hoofs and feet upon the paved streets, rattle of arms; and, above all, the shouts of the townsmen mingled with the shrill treble of gabbling women and children. At the forefront of this motley procession, like a mockery of a drum-major, heading a march of doom, walked an Indian ally. At intervals he leaped, and contorted his body weirdly, for the purpose of the better calling to the attention of the rabble the ghastly proof of victory that he bore the head of the great King Philip. Racing, crowding, surging, the townsfolk made no secret of their ghoulish delight in beholding this gory object. Love, anger, joy, hate the daily emotions of mankind the world over were so habitually re pressed by these serious people that, as a vent to their pent-up natures, they seemed to give themselves wholly to an orgy of gasping, shuddering, and unholy gloat ing. They laughed, they skipped on nimble feet, they sang praises hysterically to the God who had deliv ered their enemy into their hands. In the frenzy that had swept like a fire through the chaff of their shriveled emotions, all bonds of deportment loosened, and the young men and women seized the occasion to look unbridled feelings into one another's eyes. About the extreme rear of the procession another crowd had gathered. The people hooted, pushed, Le Roi est Mort. n craned their necks, and raced to keep pace with the steady, long strides of the soldiers. Interest centered upon two captives, marching together between the ranks of a loosely-formed guard of pike-men. One was a mere boy, white as any in the multitude, and paler than the palest. The other was an Indian ; noble of feature and dignified in his bearing. He was old Annawon, the last of King Philip's councilors; who, having surrendered under promise of " good quar ter," was even now being led to his death. The greater attraction, however, seemed to be the boy. Tall and lithe he was, though his age could scarcely be a whit above fourteen. Though white, he was dressed as an Indian, and bore himself like a sullen brave. Through the stoicism, which he labored to hold as a mask upon his face, the signs of anguish played, as a strong under-current betrays itself from beneath the surface of still waters. In all the multi tude he had but a single friend the Red-man with whom he was marching. He gazed stolidly at the crowding, pitiless faces. Near him a score of nimble boys were running, a frantic desire to strike him show ing in their eyes. Then, into the press behind these vicious urchins, towering head high over the human tide, a man strode. Perched upon his shoulder, safe from the crush and jostling of the rabble, he bore a little Puritan maiden, whose brown eyes rested upon the boy captive with an expression of tenderest com passion. She clung to her huge protector with a tense little fist, while her other hand was pressed upon her cheek till all about each tiny finger was white, in the bonny apple-blush of her color. It seemed as though 12 Hearts of Grace. she must cry her sympathy aloud to the young pris oner. The boy raised his eyes, and saw the look. Sweet as a gleam of God's sunshine in the darkness of a dungeon ; grateful as a cool spring in a burning desert; seemed the little flower face, moving above the shifting masks of brutality and hate. With his eyes upon it, he strode more manfully along. The boy was still gazing back his answer to the child, when an urchin, bolder than his fellows, hurled a stone that struck him smartly in the side. With a panther-like motion he turned, and breaking through his loosely-formed escort, hurled himself upon his assailant and bore him to the ground. And then, above the tumult which arose, came the voice of the old councilor, Annawon, who was marching to his death. It was a soft, quick word, in the Indian tongue, but it sufficed. The lad in buckskin released his overthrown antagonist, and darted back to his place in the ranks. His eyes blinked swiftly, but in vain, for tears of rage and pain forced their way between his eyelids, and made dark furrows adown his dusty cheeks. Angrily he wiped them away upon his sleeve. When he looked once more at the place where the little Puritan girl had smiled from the big man's shoulder, she was gone. Foot-soldiers closed in about their dangerous charge. The bawling youths of Plymouth seemed to multiply, as though by magic. But their opportunities for committing further mischief were past, for the pageant was passing the gray jail building; and the escort, wedging their way through the press of people, forced him towards the gloomy entrance. Again, above Le Roi est Mort. 13 the clamor, there rose a voice, and in the Indian tongue the young captive heard the words: 11 Farewell, Little-Standing-Panther/ 7 It was old Annawon, who had divined that there would be no other parting with the lad who was the only creature which the war had left for him to love. " Farewell," and again: " Farewell," cried the boy. And the grim gates of the prison-house clanged shut behind him. *** ******* Night closed down night the beneficent, that shrouds the evidences of mankind's barbarities. Long since, the people, at the request of Governor Winslow, had dispersed to their several homes. The head of the butchered King Philip had been impaled upon a stake, and planted on the public square. The moon arose, casting a pale, cold light, and a passionless calm brooded upon the sleeping village. At length, with a tread as silent as that of death itself, an active figure crept from shadow to shadow, adown the streets which the night had silver-plated, till it came to the square where was planted the stake with the moon-softened head upon it. The lone visitor was the white boy-captive, still dressed in his Indian toggery. He had eluded the tired jail guards. He espied that which he sought, and came forward slowly; then halted, and extended his arms towards the stake with its motionless burden. Again he ad vanced reverently, murmuring brokenly in the Indian tongue : " Metacomet Metacomet , my foster father, I have come." CHAPTER II. A FRIENDSHIP OF CHANCE. THROUGH the gray mist of Plymouth's dawn there came a sound of footsteps, and then a murmur of melo dious humming, somewhat controlled and yet too sturdy and joyous to be readily accounted for in the strict Puritan village. Presently, looming out of the uncertain light, appeared the roughly-hewn figure of a young man of five and twenty. He was singing to him self, as he hastened with big strides through the deserted streets. On the point of passing the place where the gibbeted head of King Philip made a rude exclamation point in the calm of gray Plymouth, the early riser suddenly noted the curled-up form of a human being on the ground, one arm loosely bent about the iron stake, his head resting against it, and his eyes fast closed in the sleep of exhaustion. The man started slightly, halted and ceased his singing. He blinked, shifted his feet uneasily and rubbed stoutly at his jaw, as he gazed in perplexity at the picture before him. He then tiptoed as if to go on, quietly, about his own business. He glanced at the head, then back to the boy, from whose lips, in his sleep, a little moan escaped. The visitor noted the traces where tears had channeled down 14 A Friendship of Chance. 15 the lad's pale cheeks. There was something unescap- able in the attitude of the bare golden head against the stake. The man stopped and laid his big hand gently on the half-curled locks. Instantly the boy awoke, leaped to his feet and fell down again, from sheer stiffness, staring at the man with eyes somewhat wild. He arose again at once, more steadily, overcoming the cramps in his muscles doggedly, never ceasing for a second to watch the man who had waked him. " I give you good morrow," said the man. " It seems to me you have need of a friend, since you have clearly lost one that you much esteemed/' There was persuasion and honesty in the stranger's warm-blue eyes, good nature in his broad, smooth face and a large capacity for affection denoted in his some what sensuous mouth. Such a look of friendship and utter sincerity as he bestowed on the startled and defi ant boy before him could not have been easily counter feited. The youthful know sincerity by intuition. " Who are you ? " said the boy, his voice hoarse and weakened. " What would anybody want with me ? " " My name is William Phipps," said the stranger, simply. " I am a ship-builder of Boston. If you have no better friend, perhaps I would do till you can find one. I am on my way to Boston now. If you need a friend and would like to leave Plymouth, you may come with me, unless you feel you cannot trust any one about this village." He paused a moment and then added, " I think you must be the boy I heard of, Adam Bust, brought in with the captured Indians." "My name is Adam Kust," the boy admitted. "I 16 Hearts of Grace have no friends left. If you have been helping to kill the Wampanoags I would rather not try to be your friend. But I know I would like you and I should be glad to go to Boston, or any place away from here." In the daylight he could not bear to look up at the head above him. "I have been too busy to fight," said William Phipps, employing the same excuse he had used for friends with recruiting proclivities. " And I have been too happy," he added, as if involuntarily. ' ' So, you see, there is no reason why I should not be your friend. Have you had any breakfast ? " He put out his hand to shake. " No," said Adam. He lost his hand in the big fist which Phipps presented, and restrained himself from crying by making a mighty effort. He had gone with out eating for two days, but he said nothing about it. " Then," said Phipps heartily, " the sooner we start the better. We can get something hot on the brig." He began his long striding again. Adam hesitated a moment. He looked up at the features above him, his heart gushing full of emotion. Some inarticulate farewell, in the Indian tongne, he breathed through his quivering lips. His eyes grew dimmed. He fancied he saw a smile of farewell and of encouragement play intangibly on those still, saddened lineaments, and so he held forth his arms for a second and then turned away to join his new-found protector. William Phipps, having thought the boy to be follow ing more closely than he was, stopped to let him catch up. Thus he noted the look of anguish with which the lad was leaving that grim remnant of King Philip behind. Phipps was one of Nature's " motherly men " A Friendship of Chance. 17 hardly ever more numerous than rocs' eggs on the earth. He felt his heart go forth to Adam Rust. There fore it was that he looked down in the boy's face, time after time, as they walked along together. Thus they came to the water-front and wharves, at the end of one of which the brig " Captain Spencer *' was swinging. "This ship belongs to me and I made her/' said Phipps, with candid pride in his achievement. " You shall see that she sails right merrily." They went aboard. A few sailors scrubbing down the deck, barefooted and with sleeves at elbow, now abandoned their task temporarily, at the command of the mate, who had seen his captain coming, to hoist sail and let go the hawsers. The chuckle in the blocks, as the sailors heaved and hauled at the ropes, gave Adam Rust a pleasure he had never before experienced. Breakfast being not yet prepared for service, Phipps conducted his foundling about the craft for a look at her beauties. When Adam had patted the muzzle of the brig's gun and felt the weight of a naked sword in his fist, in the armory, the buoyancy of his youth put new color in his cheeks and a sparkle in his eyes. He was a bright-natured, companionable lad, who grew friendly and smiled his way into one's affections rapidly, but naturally. When he and Phipps had come up again to the deck, after breakfast, they felt as if they had always been friends. The brig was under way. Shorewards the gray old Atlantic was wrinkled under the fretful annoyance of a brisk, salty breeze. The ship was slipping prettily up the coast, with stately courtesies to the stern rocks that stood like guardians to the land. i8 Hearts of Grace " I think we shall find yon were born for a sailor, Adam," said the master of the craft. "I can give you my word it is more joy and life to sail a ship than to make one. And someday "but he halted. The modest boasts, with which he warmed the heart of his well beloved wife, were a bit too sacred for repetition, even to a boy so winning. " But," he concluded, " per haps you would like to tell me something of yourself." Thus encouraged Adam related his story. He was the son of John Kust, a chivalrous gentleman, an affec tionate husband and a serious man, with a light heart and a ready wit. John Kust had been the friend of the Indians and the mediator between them and the whites until the sheer perfidy of the Puritans had rendered him hopeless of retaining the confidence of the Bed-men, when he had abandoned the office. Adam's mother had been dead for something more than four years. Af flicted by his sense of loss, John Eust had become a strange man, a restless soul hopelessly searching for that other self, as knights of old once sought the holy grail. He went forth alone into the trackless wilderness that led endlessly into the west. Although the father and son had been knit together in their affections by long talks, long ranges together in the forests and by the lessons which the man had imparted, yet when John Kust had gone on his unearthly quest, he could not bear the thought of taking young Adam with him into the wilds. He had therefore left the boy with his friends, the lad's natural guardians, the honorable nation of Wam- panoags. " Keep him here, teach him of your wisdom, A Friendship of Chance. 19 make him one of your young warriors," he had said when he went, " so that when I return I may know him for his worth." King Philip, the mighty Sachem of the tribe, had thereafter been as a foster-father to the boy. For more than two years the Eed-man had believed John Eust to have found his final lodge, and this was the truth. And perhaps he had also found his holy grail. He perished alone in the trackless forest. Adam had learned his wood-lore of his red brothers. He was stout, lithe, wiry and nimble. He rode a horse like the torso of a centaur. He was a bit of a boaster, in a frank and healthy way. King Philip's war, ascribed, as to causes, to " the passion of the English for territory ; their confidence that God had opened up America for their exclusive occupancy ; their contempt for the Indians and their utter disregard for their rights," had come inexorably upon the Wampanoags. In its vortex of action, move ment, success and failure at last for the Indians, Adam Rust had been whirled along with Metacomet. He had never been permitted by King Philip to fight against his ' ( white brothers," but he had assisted to plan for the safety of the old men, women and children, in procur ing game and in constructing shelters. He had learned to love these silently suffering people with all his heart. The fights, the hardships, the doom, coming inevitably upon the hopeless Wampanoags, had made the boy a man, in some of the innermost recesses of a heart's suf fering. He had seen the last sad remnants of the Wampanoags, the Pocassets and the Narragansetts scatter, to perish in the dismal swamps. He had wit- 2O Hearts of Grace nessed the death of King Philip, brought upon him by a treacherous fellow Red-man. And then he had marched in that grim procession. Adam made no attempt to convey an idea of the mag nitude of his loss. It would not have been possible. There is something in human nature which can never be convinced that death has utterly stilled a beloved voice and quenched the fire of the soul showing through a pair of eyes endeared by companionship. This in Adam made him feel, even as he told his tale to William Phipps, that he was somehow deserting his faithful friends. Bareheaded on the sun-lit deck as he told his story, lithe in his gestures, splendidly scornful when he imi tated the great chieftains of the tribes, and then like a young Viking as at last he finished his narrative and looked far and wide on the sparkling sea, in joyousness at the newer chapter which seemed to open to the very horizons themselves before him, Adam awakened the lusty youth and daring in William Phipps and the dreams of a world's career always present in his brain. The man's eyes sparkled, as he spun the wheel that guided the brig, bounding beneath their feet. A rest lessness seized upon the spirit in his breast. " Adam," he said, "do you like this ship ?" << Yes ! oh, it makes me feel like shouting ! " the boy exclaimed. ef I wish I could straddle it, like a horse, and make it go faster and wilder, 'way off there and everywhere ! Oh, don't it make you breathe ! " " Then," said Phipps, repressing his own love of such a madness as Adam had voiced, " let us go for along sail together. I have long had in mind a voyage for trad- A Friendship of Chance. 21 ing to Hispaniola. If you would like to go with me, I will get the brig ready in a week." For his answer young Adam leaped as if he would spur the ship in the ribs and ride her to the end of the earth forthwith. CHAPTER III. THE GERM OF A PASSION. A BONNIE little Puritan maid, Mistress Garde Mer rill, stood in the open doorway at her home, fervently hugging her kitten. The sunlight seemed almost like beaten gold, so tangibly did it lay upon the house, the vines that climbed the wall, and the garden full of old- fashioned flowers. A few leaves, which had escaped from the trees, in a longing to extend their field of romping, were being whirled about in a brisk zephyr that spun in a corner. A sense of warmth and fragrance made all the world seem wantoning in its own loveliness. Little Garde, watching the frolic of the leaves, and thinking them pretty elves and fairies, dancing, pres ently looked up into the solemn visage of a passing citizen, who had paused at the gate. " Mistress Merrill," he said, gravely, after a moment's inspection of the bright, enchanting little face, "your eyes have not the Puritan spirit of meekness/' There upon he departed on his way, sadly shaking his head. Garde's eyes, in all truth, were dancing right joy ously ; and dancing was not accounted a Puritan de votion. Such brown, light-ensnaring eyes could not, 22 The Germ of a Passion. 23 however, constrain themselves to melancholy. ^0 more could the apple-red of her smooth, round cheeks retreat from the ardor of the sun. As for her hair, like strands on strands of spun mahogany, no power on earth could have disentangled its nets wherein the rays of golden light had meshed and intermeshed them selves. In her brightness of color, with her black and white kitten on her arm, the child was a dainty little human jewel. She was watching a bee and a butterfly when a shadow fell again into the yard, among the flowers, at the ex- trance. Garde felt her attention drawn and centered at once. She found herself looking not so much at a bareheaded boy, as fairly into the depths of his very blue and steadfast eyes. The visitor stood there with his hands clasping two of the pickets of which the gate was fashioned. He had seen everything in the garden at one glance, but he was looking at Garde. His eyes began laughingly, then seriously, but always frankly, to ask a favor. " I prithee come in," said Garde, as one a little struck with wonder. The boy came in. Garde met him in the path and gave him her kitten. He took it, apparently because she gave it, and not because he was inordinately fond of cats. It seemed to Garde that she knew this boy, and yet he had on a suit that suggested a young sailor, and she had never made the acquaintance of any sail ors whatsoever. If he would only look elsewhere than at her face, she thought, perhaps she could remember. " See them," she said, and she pointed to where the leaves were once more capering in the corner. 24 Hearts of Grace The boy looked, but his gaze would swing back to its North, which it found in two brown eyes. "I saw you that day in Plymouth," he said. "And I got out of their old jail, and I didn't see anybody else that looked kind or nice among all those people." " Oh ! " said Garde, suddenly remembering every thing, " oh, you were that boy marching with the old Indian. I was so sorry. And I am so glad that you got away. I am glad you came to see me. Grand father and I were down there for a visit so I saw you. Oh dear me ! " She looked at her young visitor with eyes open wide by amazement. It seemed almost too much to believe that the very boy she had seen and so pitied and liked, in that terrible procession at Plymouth, should actually be standing here before her in her grandfather's garden ! " Oh dear me ! " she presently said again. "I hate Plymouth!" said the boy, "but I like Boston." "I am so glad," said Garde. "Will you tell me your name ? Mine is Garde Merrill." The boy said : "My name is Adam Bust." " I was named for all my aunts," the maid imparted, as if eager to set a troublesome matter straight at once, " Gertrude, Abigail, Rosella, Dorothy and Elizabeth. The first letters of their names spell G-A-R-D-E, Garde." Her visitor was rendered speechless for a moment. "Metacomet and all the Indians used to call me Little- Standing-Panther," he then said, boyishly, not to be outdone in the matter of names. " Metacomet King Philip ? Oh, then you are the The Germ of a Passion. 25 boy that used to live with the Indians, and that was how they got you ! " gasped the little maid. " Grand father told auntie all about it. Oh, I wish I could live with the Indians ! I am very, very sorry they got you I' 9 But I am glad you came to see me." Adam flushed with innocent and modest pride, thus to impress his small admirer, who was named so for midably. He thought that nothing so pleasant had ever happened in all his life. " It is too sad to live with Indians," he answered. A mist seemed to obscure the light in his eyes and to cast a shadow between them and the sweet face at which he was looking with frank admiration. The cloud passed, however, as clouds will in the summer, and his gaze was again one of illuminated smiles. " I am a sailor now," he said, with a little boast in his voice. " To-morrow morning we are going to start for Hispaniola." " Oh dear me ! " said Garde, in sheer despair of an adequate expression of her many emotions. Then she added contritely : " I mustn't say ' Oh dear me ! ' but oh dear I wish I might." "I shan't mind," said Adam. " I wish I could go to Hispaniola, too," said Garde, honestly. " I hate to be kept here as quiet as a clock that doesn't go. I suppose you couldn't take me ? Let's sit down with the kitten and think it over together." "I don't think we could take any girls," said Adam, seating himself at her side on the porch, " but I could bring yon back something when I come." " Oh, let's talk all about what we would rather have most," Garde responded. 26 Hearts of Grace So their fingers mingled in the fur of the kitten and they talked of fabulous things with which the West Indies were reported to abound. His golden hair, and her hair so darkly red, made the picture in the sunlight a thing complete in its brightness and beauty. The wind floated a few stray filaments, richly red as mahog any, from the masses on Garde's pretty brow, across to the ringlets on Adam's temple. To and fro, over these delicate copper wires, stretched for its purpose, the sweet love that comes first to a lad and a maid, danced with electrical activity. "If you are going to-morrow," said Garde, "you must see all the flowers and everything now." She there fore took him by the hand and led him about the gar den, first she, then he, and then she once more carrying the kitten. They were still in the midst of their explorations of the garden, which required that each part should be visited several times, when the gate opened and in walked Garde's tall, stern-looking grandfather. David Donner rubbed his eyes in amazement, hardly believing that his senses could actually be recording a picture of his granddaughter, hand in hand with some utter stranger of a boy, in his own precincts. He came quickly toward the pair, making a sound that came within an ell of being a shout. Garde looked up in sudden affright. Adam regarded the visitor calmly and without emotion. Having first dropped the young sailor's hand, Garde now resolutely screwed her little warm fingers back into the boy's fist. "Grandfather," she said boldly, "I shall sail to morrow for Hispaniola." The Germ of a Passion. 27 David Dormer, at this, was so suddenly filled with steam pressure, which he felt constrained to repress, that his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. " Go away, boy," he said to Adam. " Mistress Mer rill, your conduct is quite uncalled for." Having divined that his sister had deserted her post and gone, as was her wont, to the nearest neighbor's, for a snack of gossip, he glared at Adam, swooped down upon Garde and caught her up in his arms abruptly, kitten and all. Her hold on Adam's hand being rudely wrenched asunder, Garde felt her heart break incontinently. She began to weep without restraint, in fact, furiously. She also kicked, and was also deporting herself when the door was slammed behind the forms of herself, her kit ten and her grandfather, a moment later. Adam looked once where she had gone. His face had assumed a stolidity which he was far from feeling. He walked to the gate and went away, without once turn ing to look back at the house. Mistress Garde, confronted by David Donner at close quarters, soon regained her maidenly composure and wept surreptitiously on the stomach of the kitten. At length she looked up in defiance at the silent old man. "I have changed the name of my kitten," she said. " His name is Little-Standing-Panther ! " Her grandfather, to whom this outbreak seemed something of an indication of mental disorder, on her part, stared at the child dumbly. Not without some justification for her deductions, Garde thought him quelled. In a spirit of reckless defiance, and likewise to give some vent to her feelings, she suddenly threw 28 Hearts of Grace her arms about the bedewed kitten, on its pillow, pressed her face against its fur and said to it, fervently: " Little-Standing-Panther, I love you, and love you and love you ! " Grandfather Donner looked up in alarm. " Tut, tut, my child," said he, " love is a passion." PART II. CHAPTER I. A ROVER AND HIS RETINUE. His only gold was in his hair ; He had no silver hoard ; But steel he had, enow to spare In his thews and in his sword ! TOWARD the close of a glorious day in September, 1683, William Phipps beheld a smart brig nose her way up the harbor of Boston, and drop in her anchor in the field of water wherein his ship-yard thrust its toes. A small boat then presently put forth and made straight for the ship-yard landing, where three men calmly alighted, throwing ashore a small heap of shabby-gen teel-looking baggage. Somewhat annoyed, thus to have his precincts em ployed by any Tom, Dick and Harry of chance, Phipps stepped from between the ribs of a ship's skeleton, which was being daily articulated, and strode toward the intruders. Then a rumble, which ought to have been a shout, broke from his lips, about the same second that a roar of joy appeared to leap out of the foremost of the strangers, who had landed and who were coming boldly forward. 29 3O Hearts of Grace William Phipps and the leader of the invading trio then rushed hotly together and collided, giving each other a bear-like hug from which the ship-builder pres ently extricated himself at a thought of how he might be shocking all or any good Puritans who might chance to be witnessing the scene. " Well, shatter my hilt ! and God bless you ! if it isn't your same old beloved self ! " said the stranger, heartily. " My boy ! Bless your eyes, Adam, I never thought to see you again ! " said bluff William Phipps. "You big young rascal ! You full-rigged ship ! Where have you come from ? What do you mean by making me swear myself into purgatory at your carelessness in get ting yourself killed ? You twenty-gun frigate you you big " He left off for very constraint, for his throat blocked up, despite his most heroic efforts. He and Adam Rust began to roar with laughter, the tears in their eyes needing some excuse. Meantime the two com panions who had come with the young rover, stood gazing about them, in patience, and likewise looking in wonder on the two men before them. There was reason enough to look, for Adam and Phipps were a pair to command attention. It seemed as if a founder had used the big ship-builder as a pat tern on which to refine his art in casting the younger man. Adam's back was a trifle narrower ; his chest was a bit wider ; he was trimmer at the waist, neater at the thigh, longer-armed. His hands were smaller, just as his movements were quicker and lighter. Although Adam's hair crowned him with tawny A Rover and his Retinue. 31 ringlets of gold, while that of Phipps was browner, and though the young fellow wore a small mustache, in contrast, to the smooth-shaved face of his friend, it might yet be said that the two men looked alike. Both had steadfast eyes with the same frank expression, the same blue tint and the same integrity about them. In their dress the two men differed. William Phipps, whatsoever he might indulge himself in doing when away on the sea, conformed to the dark-brown sim plicity of the Puritans when in Boston. Adam, on the other hand, wore a brown velvet coat, with long green sleeves; which, though at present somewhat faded and moulting, had once been fine feathers in England. His shirt still showed evidences of having been adorned with a profusion of ruffles; while his breeches of deep forest green, disappeared at the knee into the maw of his wide-topped leather boots. He wore at his hip a veteran blade of steel, in a scabbard as battered as the outer gate of a strong hold. When not in his fighting fist, the hilt of this weapon contented itself with caresses from his softer hand, the left. The two men having shaken hands for the third time, and having looked each other over from head to foot, and laughed and asked each other a dozen questions, to which neither had returned any answers, Adam sud denly remembered his comrades, waiting in the back ground. He turned to them now, not without affec tion. ' ' Here, Pike and Halberd," he said, " you must meet my third father, Captain William Phipps, a noble man to whom you will owe allegiance all your miserable 3 2 Hearts of Grace lives. William, these are my beef-eaters. Don't ask me where I got them. They are neither out of jail nor heaven. But they have let me save their lives and feed them and clothe them, and they are valiant, faithful rascals. To know them is to love them, and not to know them is to be snubbed by Satan. They have been my double shadow for a year, sharing my prosperous condition like two peers of the realm." The beef-eaters grinned as they exchanged saluta tions with Phipps. Pike was a short individual, in clined to be fat, even when on the slimmest of rations. The pupils of his eyes were like two suns that had risen above the horizon of his lower lids, only to obscure themselves under the cloud-like lids above. Their ex pression, especially when he gazed upward into Adam's face, was something too appealingly saint-like and be seeching for anything mortal to possess. Halberd was a ladder of a man up which everything, save success, had clambered to paint expressions on his face, which was grave and melancholy to the verge of the ludicrous. He had two little bunches of muscle, each of which stuck out like half a walnut, at the corners of his jaws, where they had grown and developed as a result of his clamping his molars together, in a determination to do or to be something which had, apparently, never as yet transpired. The two looked about as much like beef-eaters as a mouse looks like a man-eater. They were ragged, where not fantastic, in their apparel ; they were ob viously fitter for a feast than a fight, for the sea had depleted both of their hoardings of vigor and courage. "Sire," said Halberd, theatrically, "we have had A Rover and his Retinue. 33 nothing but good reports of you for a year." Whether he placed his hand on his heart or his stomach, as he said this, and what he meant to convey as his meaning, could never be wholly clear. " We shall be honored to fight for you, if need arise," said Pike, who panted somewhat, on all occasions, " while there is a breath in our bodies." "It is a privilege to know you both," said Phipps, whose gravity was as dry as tinder. "Any friend of the Sachem's is a friend of ours," responded Halberd. He said this grandly and made a profound bow. " The ' Sachem ' ? " repeated Phipps, and he looked at Adam, inquiringly. Adam had the grace to blush a trifle, thus to be caught in one of the harmless little boasts in which he had indulged himself, over sea. " Just a foolish habit the two have gotten into," he murmured. " Ah," said William Phipps. " Well, then, Sachem, it will soon be growing dark, you had best come home with me to dinner." Involuntarily Adam turned about to look at the beef eaters. Their eyes had abruptly taken on a preter natural brightness at the word dinner. "I have much to ask you and much to tell you," Phipps added. " And the good wife would exact this honor if she knew you were come." The invitation did not include Adam's retinue. He swallowed, as if the delicious odors of one of Goodwife Phipp's dinners were about to escape him. " Well," he said, " the honors are all the other way about, but the fact is a previous engagement I I 3 34 Hearts of Grace have promised a rousing hot din I have accepted an invitation to dine with the beef-eaters, at the Crow and Arrow." The ship builder-knew all about those " rousing hot dinners " of cold eel-pie, potatoes and mustard, for which the Crow and Arrow tavern was not exactly famous. He looked at Adam, to whom as their sachem the beef -eaters appealed with their eyes, like two faithful animals. Adam was regarding the pair silently, a faint smile of cheer and camaraderie on his face. " But but my invitation included our friends," Phipps hastened to say. " Come, come, the tavern can wait till to-morrow. Gentlemen, you will certainly not disappoint me." " 'Tis well spoken that the tavern can wait," said Pike. " To disappoint the friend of the Sachem would be a grievous thing," said Halberd. " Let the galled tavern sweat with impatience." They would all have started away together at once, had not Phipps noted the heap of baggage, left un tidily upon his landing when the travelers arrived. "Well," said he, " Adam, you know the way to the house, suppose you and your friends carry your worldly goods to the tavern, engage your apartments, and then follow me on. I, in the meantime, can hasten home to apprise the wife that you are coming, with the beef eaters, and she can therefore make due preparations in honor of the event." " This is good sense," said Adam. " Go along, or we shall be there before you." Phipps, with a half dozen backward looks at his A Rover and his Retinue. 35 guests and their shabby chattels, made his way out of the ship-yard without further delay. Adam and his retinue gripped three or four parcels apiece and started, with clank of sword, and in some discomfort, for the Crow and Arrow. CHAPTER II. AN" UNGODLY PERFORMANCE. ADAM RUST knew the Crow and Arrow more by that repute which had traveled back to England, through the medium of young stalwarts and sailors, than he did from personal acquaintance with its charms. He had seen the place frequently enough, when first he came to Boston with William Phipps, but the town had ex panded much since then and bore an air of unfamili- arity. The young man and his beef-eaters therefore wandered somewhat from their course. Being overladen and dressed out of the ordinary fashion, the trio soon found themselves attracting attention, particularly from certain of the youths of the quarter and the rough characters incidental to shipping and the neighborhood thereof. Adam was carrying a long box, somewhat decrepit with age. It swung against his legs and struck an occasional post, or a corner, held insecurely as it was by his little finger only, which was passed through a brass handle. In this manner, and with a growing cluster of curious persons beginning to follow on behind, the party were in sight of the tavern at last, when this long box of Adam's abruptly opened and spilled out a richly dark ened old violin. 36 An Ungodly Performance. 37 With a short exclamation of impatience, Adam halted and dropped his other bundles. Over these tall Halberd fell, with a great clatter of weapons, tin box and shaken bones. Adam fended him off from the violin, snatched it np and scrutinized it with the eager concern which a mother might bestow upon a delicate child. He found jt uninjured, but, as it might have been smashed, he clung to it fondly, reluctant to place it again in its treacherous case. Naturally the downfall of Halberd had delighted the gamin and the sailors following. These formed a cluster about the party, and their numbers drew addi tional spectators rapidly. A number of seafaring men shoved stoutly forward, their eyes glistening at sight of the musical instrument. " I say, give us something, then, on that there red boy ! " demanded one of the men, as healthy a looking rascal as ever drew breath. " You look a bonny lad, come on there's a good nn," said another. "Battle her guts," said a third. "We ain't heard the like of a fiddle since we came to this town of preachers." Adam looked quietly about him. He knew most of the fellows about in the rude circle for rough English rovers who would love him if he played, or knock him and his belongings playfully into the street if he refused. He was not accustomed to churlishness ; moreover, he felt particularly in the mood for playing. The ruddy sunset, the warm breath of the passing day, the very taste of American air, seemed lusty and joyous, despite the rigid Puritanical spirit of the mirth-denying people 38 Hearts of Grace of the colony. He took up the bow, twanged the strings, tightened two that had become laggard, and jumped into the middle of a rollicking composition that seemed to bubble up out of the body of the violin and tumble off into the crowd in a species of mad delight. Had the instrument been a spirit of wine, richly dark red as old port, and rendered alive by the frolicking bow, it could not have thrown off more merry snatches of melody's mirth. It chuckled, it caught its breath, like a fat old monk at his laughing, it broke out in guffaws of hilarity, till not a soul in the audience could keep his feet seemly beneath him. The sailors danced, boldly, though clumsily. Their iaces beamed with innocent drunkenness, for drunk they were, with what seemed like the fumes and taste of this wine of sound. They had been denied it so long that it went to their heads at the first draught. Across the street, issuing quietly and, he hoped, un observed, from a door that led into the tavern, a Puritan father now appeared, wiping his mouth as a man has no occasion for doing unless he had recently dipped his upper lip into a mug. He suddenly halted, at the sound of music from over the way. He frowned at the now somewhat dense assemblage of boys and citizens surrounding Adam Eust, and worked up a mask of severity on his face from which it had been temporarily absent. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, and then, realizing that he might not be heard at this distance from them, moved a rod toward his fellow-beings and took a stand in the street. At this moment an ominous snap resounded above both the playing and its accompaniment of scuffling feet An Ungodly Performance. 39 and gruff explosions of enjoyment and hearty apprecia tion. Instantly Adam ceased playing. He had felt a string writhe beneath his fingers. The man in the road way grasped at the moment instantly, to raise his voice. "Begone, disperse, you vagabonds!" he said. " What is the meaning of this ungodly performance ? Disperse, I say, you are bedeviled by this shameless disciple of Satan ! " Adam, intent on his violin, which he found had not broken but had merely slipped a string, heard this tirade, naturally, as did all the others. A few boys sneaked immediately about the cluster of men and sped away, as if from some terrible wrath to come. "Who is yon sufferer for melancholy ? " said Adam, looking carelessly at the would-be interrupter. Then suddenly a gleam came into his eye, as he recognized in the man one of the harsh hypocrites who had been among the few zealots who had imprisoned him, years before. " Halberd," he added, "fetch the gentleman forward. Methinks he fain would dance and make merry among us." His opening question had been hailed with snorts of amusement ; his proposal ignited all the roguishness in ihe crowd. Halberd, nothing loth to add his quota to the general fun, strode forward at once, way being made by the admiring throng, and he bowed profoundly before the bridling admonisher in the street. Then without warning, he scampered nimbly to the rear of the man of severity, took him by the collar and the slack of his knickerbockers and hustled him precipitately into the gathering. Adam began to play at once. The spectators gathered 4O Hearts of Grace about the astonished and indignant person of severity, thirsty for fun. " You evidently wanted to dance, therefore by all means commence/' said Adam. " You are a veritable limb of Satan! " said the man. " You shall be reported for this unseemly " " Halberd," interrupted Adam, " the gentleman is as shy and timid as your veriest girl. Could you not persuade him to dance ? " " I was born for persuasion," said Halberd. There upon he drew from his belt a pistol, most formidable, whether loaded or not, and pushed its metal lips against the neck of the hedged-in Puritan, whom he continued to restrain by the collar. " Make merry for this goodly company by doing a few dainty steps," he requested. The crowd pushed in closer and roared with delight. Some one among them knocked the reluctant dancer's knees forward. He almost fell down. " He's beginning ! " cried Adam, and he went for his fiddle with the bow as if he were fencing with a dozen pirates. " Dance ! " commanded Halberd, " dance ! " Terpsichore's victim was not a man of sand. Drops of perspiration oozed out on his forehead. A look of abject fear drove the mask of severity from his face. He jumped up and down ridiculously, his knees knock ing together for his castanets. "Faster ! " cried Adam, fiddling like a madman. " Faster ! " echoed Halberd, with his pistol-muzzle nosing in the dancer's ribs. The man jumped higher, but not faster ; he was too An Ungodly Performance. 41 weakened by cowardice. The sailors joined in. They could not keep their feet on the ground. The con tagion spread. Pike and Halberd joined the hopping. The offending admonisher looked about at them in a frenzy of despair, afraid of who might be witnessing his exhibition. He was a sorry dancer, for he was so eager to please that he flopped his arms deliriously, as if to convince his beholders of his willingness to make himself as entertaining as possible. When he suddenly collapsed and fell down, Adam ceased playing. The crowd settled on the pavement and applauded. " For shame, good friend," said Adam, solemnly, "now that I observe your garb, I am shocked and amazed at your conduct. Friends, let us go to the tav ern and report this gentleman's unseemly behavior. In payment for the fiddling, you may fetch my bales of goods and merchandise." He waved to his shabby bag gage and led the way to the Crow and Arrow, which had long before disgorged nearly all of its company, and its landlord, to add to the audience in the street. Flinging up his only piece of gold, the young rover ordered refreshment for all who crowded into the tavern, and while they were drinking, he dragged the beef-eaters, with all the " bales of merchandise," away to the meager apartments provided above stairs in the sorry hostelry. In the darkness of the hall, he ran heavily against some one who was just on the point of quitting a room. The innocent person was bowled endways. " Confound your impudence ! " said the voice of a man. "Why don't you look where you are going ? " 42 Hearts of Grace "I couldn't see for fools in the way," retorted Adam. "I am no king, requiring you to fall before me." " I can't see your face, but I can see that you are an arrant knave," said the other hotly. " You never could have had a proper drubbing, or you would be less reckless of your speech ! " " I have always been pitted to fight with bragging rascals of about your size and ability with a weapon, else I might have been drubbed," Adam flung back, laying his hand on his sword as he spoke. ( ' It shames my steel to think of engaging a ten-pin ! " " By all tokens, sir, you are blind, as well as idiotic, to walk into death so heedlessly. Be good enough to follow me into the yard." " Oh, fie on a death that flees and entreats me to follow," was Adam's answer. " I rolled you once in this hall ; I can do so again. Halberd Pike, candles to place at the head and feet of death ! " The beef-eaters, having reached the apartments ap pointed for their use, had heard the disturbance in the hall, and expecting trouble, had already lighted the candles. With three of these they now came forth. The hall would have been light enough had it been in communication with the outside world and the twi light, but as it was, it was nearly dark. " I grieve for your mother," sneered the stranger, whose sword could be heard backing out of its scab bard. " You must be young to be so spendthrift of your life." " On the contrary, you will find what a miser I am, even as to the drops of my blood," said Adam. " No one ever yet accused the Sachem " An Ungodly Performance. 43 " The Sachem ! " interrupted the other voice. Halberd, who had sheltered the candle he bore with his hand, now threw its light on the face of the man near by him. " Shatter my hilt ! " exclaimed young Rust, " Wainsworth ! " " Odds walruses !" said the man addressed as Wainsworth, " what a pretty pair of fools we are. By gad, Adam, to think I wouldn't know you by your voice ! " Adam had leaped forward, while his sword was diving back into its sheath. He caught Wainsworth by the hand and all but wrung it off. " Bless your old soul," he said, (< why didn't you say who you were ? " " I was kept busy listening to you telling me who and what I was," Wainsworth assured him, good- naturedly. " I never heard so much truth in all my life/' " I never thought to be so incontinently found out myself," Adam confessed contritely. " But as long as I have found you, I feel as good as if I had fought a good fight and wiped my blade. Indeed, Henry, I am tremendously glad to see you. How did you get here ? When did you come ? What a blundering fool I was ! " " Come in, come in to my castle/' said Wainsworth, turning back to the apartment he had been quitting when knocked over. " Bring in your friends. You shall all share in my dinner. I'm a ship, burdened with news for cargo to be unloaded. Come in here ; we'll talk all night." " But I am due at a dinner already, with my beef- 44 Hearts of Grace eaters," said Bust. " I have been delayed past all reason now, but " " You weren't delayed by our duel of words, I trust?" " No, no, but I have kept our host waiting, never theless. I shall be back before the night's worn through, however, and then I am yours till breath fails me." " Haste away then, Sachem Bust, for the sooner you are gone the sooner I shall see you returned ; and I shall consume myself with impatience till I can tell you of the sweetest plight mortal man ever got himself tangled in. I've got to tell you, for no one else on earth would answer. Begone, then. Good-by, and hasten back." Adam bade him au revoir, for he felt that already William Phipps must be thinking him sadly remiss and ungracious. Preparations as to evening dress were soon completed. They consisted in a brisk wash of face and hands for the trio, not one of the party being endowed with a second suit of clothing. Thus they were upon the road, walking soberly, though diligently, toward the Captain's residence, before the twilight had begun to fade. CHAPTER III. 'TWIXT CUP AND LIP. WITH appetites still further whetted by their various diversions, the comrades were hardly made happier when Adam found that once more the many years' growth of Boston town confused him. It was some thing of a walk to the Phipps' domicile from the Crow and Arrow the best one could do. With devious wind ings added, it became the next thing to provoking. " Aha, at last I know where we are," said Adam, finally. " These streets are as bad as London's. But ten minutes more and we shall be at the board." " If this is not so," said Halberd, gravely, with a memory of seeing Adam part with the last money which they possessed, " it would be a kindness to let us lie down and perish here." " This is a most unlikely-looking street," added Pike, dolefully. ' "Not at all, I " A Woman Scorned. 375 " Well, let us say that I am ungallant, since we are to be frank," said Rust. " I will even admit that I am ungallant." "Good," said Suffle. "That's what I thought I mean, you know " " Yes, I know what you mean. Proceed." " "Well, I feel very much relieved. You are a decent sort, Rust a deucedly decent sort. Now I am very fond of Lady Margaret. I have learned to be, you know. My uncle requires me to marry her, don't you see, or be cut off with a brass farthing. So I have learned to be deucedly fond of her, you know." " Very reasonable and like a man," said Adam. " Yes, I fancy so myself. I am coming to the point." " Then there is a point ? " " Oh dear me, yes. You see, as you don't care for Lady Margaret, that way, and I do " " Why then, to be sure, take her and let me give you my blessing," Rust interrupted. " I will do this with all my heart." "Thanks, old chap, but that is not quite the point," Suffle assured him. " The fact of the matter is, she rather likes you, Rust, you know. I'm bound to admit she does, though God knows why, and we are two sensible men, you know, and that is what I wanted to talk about." "You do me too great an honor," Adam assured him. " But what would you have me do ? " " Why that's just the point. Of course I wouldn't like to ask you to clear out of the country " "Don't let modesty stand in your way, my 376 Hearts of Grace dear Suffle. This favor would be nothing a mere trifle." " Oh no, now, I wouldn't permit it," said Suffle, magnanimously. " But you are such a deucedly clever fellow, don't you know, that I thought you might be able to devise something, something to well, you know." " Yes, oh yes," said Adam, pulling calmly at his long golden mustache. He meditated for a moment and idly picked up a dice-box, placed in readiness for the evening's play upon the table. "Do you ever fripper away your time with these ? If you do, perhaps we might arrange a little harmless device without much trouble." At one of the doors, the figure of Lady Margaret appeared and disappeared as Suffle expressed his eager ness to know what the plan in Adam's head might be. Although she had glided swiftly from room to room in search of Rust, Lady Margaret had frowned when she saw him in company with her fiancS, and petulantly beating her fan in her fragrant little palm, she had gone back around toward a secondary entrance, in which a heavy curtain hung. She was vaguely won dering what the two could find to talk about together, and to what extent they were gambling, that they went at the dice thus early. She now met Sir William Phipps, Governor-elect of New England, who had finally arrived and who was scanning the gathering company for a sight of Adam Rust. " Oh, how well you are looking, Sir William," she cried to Phipps, delightedly. A Woman Scorned. 377 " I am looking for a friend," said the captain, with his customary bluntness. "But thank you, Lady Margaret, thank you, heartily." " If you are looking for a friend, why, look over my head ? " she said to him, prettily. " Oh, you dear Co lonial Governors are such delightfully honest people. We all have to like you, really." "I have found some honest men in England," said the Captain, with conviction. " The Puritans are growing numerous among your people." Lady Margaret laughed, spontaneously enough. " And what about our women ? " she said. " Do you find them at all well, charming ? " " Some are as bold as a pirate," he said, without in tending anything personal. He could see many ropes and clusters of jewels, gleaming from afar. " And some of them must have plundered many a good ship of her treasure," he added. ' ' If I don't put about and do some cruising, I shall never speak that boy to-night." He bowed, somewhat jerkily, and sauntered off. Lady Margaret continued on her way around toward that curtained door, on the other side of which she had seen Bust and Suffle with the dice. William Phipps spent no further time in conversing with the women, beyond a word as he passed, so that finally he came to the gambling apartment, where he found his protege. Knitting his brows for a second, in an ill-concealed annoyance, to see Adam Rust en gaged in such a pursuit as this, he stood there in the doorway, hoping to catch Adam's eye and so to ad monish him silently for indulging even a moment's whim at this vice. 378 Hearts of Grace " One thousand more," said Adam, somewhat hotly. Sir William pricked up his ears in amazement. " Lost again !" Rust exclaimed. "The devil is in the dice ! " His back was toward the curtained door. There was a mirror, however, directly across the room. Watching the glass he presently beheld the reflection of a movement, where the tapestry swayed behind him. " Three thousand now, or nothing ! " he added, desperately. The dice rattled out of the box in the silence that followed. "It's luck," said Suffle, scooping up the dice to throw again. "It's sorcery ! " exlaimed the rover, in evident heat. " Come, sir, I'have two thousand left. I'll stake it all on a single throw ! " Phipps would have interfered, had it been in any place but a private house, where the scandal would spread so swiftly. He twitched in nervousness, as he gripped the cane with which he would have liked to knock the dice-box endways. The throw was completed. " I'm done ! " said Rust. " I've nothing more to stake ! " " Oh, come," said Suffle, tauntingly, " play your sword, your surely yon must have something you prize. What, no resources ? Must we cease the play so soon ? " " My sword ? No ! " said Adam, with temper. " But stay; since you speak so slightingly of my sword, I have one more stake to offer." a By all means name it and play." A Woman Scorned. 379 "My stake, sir, is the Lady Margaret," Adam growled at him, angrily. "Betrothed to you, she loves me more. Come, sir, stake me a thousand against my chances to win her and take her away from you, heart and soul. A thousand, sir, and if you can win it your field shall be open, you shall hear nor fear no more from me ! " "By my faith," said Suffle, rising, as Adam had done, " you hold this lady lightly, that you prattle of her name like this. Better I should run you through, for an arrant knave." " Bah ! " said Rust, " you think more of your win nings than you do of your lady. You hesitate and scold over a paltry thousand. Stake it, man, or by my troth I shall tell her what valuation you put upon her worth." Lady Margaret's face appeared for a second at the curtain. It was white with rage. " You insult this lady with your monstrous prop osition," cried Suffle. " And you insult her worse, with your parsimony ! n came the swift retort. "It is calumny for you to say she loves you ! n Suffle growled. "Yet stake me, sir, or you shall see me get her and laugh at your stinginess," Rust flung at him banter- ingly. " Come, sir, one more moment and I withdraw the offer." " Done ! " said Suffle, " for by 'sdeath, my fortune shall prove you a liar ! Throw the dice." Adam threw and counted. " My luck has changed at last," he said, in triumph. 380 Hearts of Grace " We shall see," retorted Suffie, and flinging the dice he sat down and roared with laughter. "Lost!" said Adam, tragically. "So be it. To the devil with you, sir ; and I wish you joy of your winnings." He strode from the table, met Sir William Phipps at the door, winked at him merrily and so drew him out in the hall. " What's this ? What's this ? " said the Governor, excitedly. ' ' I come here to see you, with news on my tongue, and find you like this ! " "Tush, William," said Adam, laughing boyishly, and as cool as a fish. " I was betting in farthings. I must have lost a hundred. Did yon think the luck was all with Suffle ? " " But, sir, this this lady ? " "There is more than one way to cure a woman of a heart's distemper," said the young man, cheerfully. " Lady Margaret was just there, behind the curtain. But this is wasting time. What is your news ? " Phipps looked at him in wonder, for a moment, then shaking his head, sadly, he presently drew his hand down across his face, to his double chin, as if to wipe out a smile, which had come out of his eyes and traveled all over his countenance. " Adam," he said, " they have made me Governor of the colony, and I want you to go home with me to Boston." Adam said nothing, for a moment, then he answered : "Let's get out of this. I want some fresher air to think it over in." They were soon walking out at the gate, arm in arm. A Woman Scorned. 381 The air was not only fresh, it was bitter cold. When they turned to go down the street, Adam having first looked about, without seeing what he sought, old Hal berd issued from a niche, where he had been dancing to keep himself warm, and followed along behind his master. " Well, now that you have thought it over," said Phipps, at last, " what do you say ? " Adam had thought it over, from a thousand stand points. The magnet at Boston had drawn him and drawn him so long that he felt his whole soul was al ready across the Atlantic. Why fight his longing any further ? Why not at least go home, look the prop osition in the face and perhaps be disillusionized ? " I'm your man," he said, as if to catch himself be fore he should alter his mind. " When are you sail- ing?" CHAPTER IX. REVELATIONS. WHEN the Andros government came to an end, Edward Randolph had languished in jail for a brief time only. The Puritans were chiefly angered at his master, whom they had finally put aboard a ship and sent away from the country. Thus the more mischievous spirit, and author of many of their wrongs, escaped to work his malignant will upon them for years. Randolph was so crafty, so insidious, and willing to remain so in the background, that until it was quite too late to redeem their position, the Puritans failed even to suspect him of the monstrous iniquities he in duced them to commit upon one another. The witch craft persecutions, which he fastened upon them, had not originated in his brain, fertile as that organ was for the growth of things diabolical. He got his cue from England, where thousands of persons perished, at the stake and otherwise, convicted on fantastic testimony of practising arts that were black and mysterious. Randolph, realizing that Boston had been made too warm for active operations, began his work in Salem. That center offered him exceptional opportunities. The growth of the dread disease was appalling. His- 382 Revelations. 383 tory which would convey an adequate idea of this criminal fanaticism should be bound in charred human skin. Boston was duly afflicted with the scourge. Ran dolph then returned, quietly, and so manipulated his work and his dupes, from behind his own scenes, that scores of old women where charged with and convicted of witchcraft, in Randolph's hope of wreaking his vengeance thus on whatsoever old woman it might have been who had told Garde Merrill of his affair with Hester Hodder. Having never been able to ascertain that this person was Goody Dune, he was sweeping his net in all waters, to make sure of his prey, in the same merciless spirit that Herod slew all the male infants, to accomplish his terrible purpose. When Governor Phipps, with Adam Rust and Increase Mather, arrived at Boston, in the frigate " Nonsuch," in May, 1692, the prisons were crowded full of witches, for the smell of whose burning or rotting flesh scores of fanatical maniacs were clamoring. All Massachusetts had known that William Phipps, the Governor who had risen so mightily from the ranks of the working men among them, was coming. The name of the lane wherein his house had been built was altered to Charter street, in his honor ; the citi zens beat their drums ; the disciples of gladness in the stomach arranged for a banquet ; the hordes marched in joy and with pomp and Puritan splendor, which lacked nothing in ceremony, as Sir William was con ducted to his house and then to the public dinner. Even the fanatics waxed enthusiastic and developed symptoms of being yet more greatly pursued and be- 384 Hearts of Grace witched by the witches whose incarceration they had already procured. In the madness, confusion and excess of glee, two persons were more inwardly stirred than all the others, not by the arrival of William Phipps, but by that of Adam Rust. One was Garde, to whose ears and heart the story of Adam's return came swiftly flying. The other was Edward Randolph, who saw an opportunity for deviltry for which he had waited so long that he had almost despaired of ever tasting its bitter-sweet. With his own eyes he beheld Adam Rust, and he grinned. At the end of that long, fatiguing day, Rust retired to the privacy of his tavern apartments, secured hap hazard, during one of the moments less filled than the others with pressing events. Here he sat him down for the purpose of thinking. He wondered why he had come to Boston again, and what he would do, now that at last he lived under the same sky with Garde, hearing the same sounds she was hearing, breathing the same fragrance of the Spring that stole to her. Should he try to see her? Perhaps. But to speak to her no, he thought he could make no advance in this direction. But he could learn whether she had mar ried, as of course she must have done, long before, and then well, something in him ought to be satisfied that something which had urged him so inexorably to return and to make this moment possible. In the midst of his reveries, he heard a knock upon his door. It was poor old Halberd, doubtless, who had been so forlorn and so ill on the ocean. He had left him asleep, but, no matter, he would be glad to see him, privacy of thought notwithstanding. Revelations. 385 " Come in," he said. " Come in." The door opened, not as Halberd was wont to per form an act so simple, and Adam was conscious that a stranger had intruded upon him. He looked up, winked his eyes and looked more intently, as if abso lutely incredulous that he was awake and sane. His visitor was Edward Randolph. " Mr. Rust, I am glad to see you again in Boston," said the man, coming forward in a tentative manner and smiling by sheer force of effort. " You didn't expect me, but I have taken this early opportunity of calling, to say I know what a great wrong I did you in the past, and to make what reparation I can." " The devil could do no more," said Adam, looking him over calmly. " And I doubt if the devil ever had your impertinence." "You do me wrong," Randolph assured him, meekly. " I could do no less than to come here and tender what apologies I may, and to do you a small favor. I was grossly misled, concerning your worth and your courage, by spiteful persons who had, as I now understand, some personal grudge." " As I knew but two men in the town, when first I had the honor of appraising you for a rascal," said Adam, " your tale pleases me but indifferently well. As for favors, I have none to ask of you, and none to grant." " Yet, if only in a Christian spirit," the fellow in sisted, " you must permit me to beg your pardon for my errors of the past. I have long regretted my griev ous mistake of judgment, and for that long I have 386 Hearts of Grace desired an opportunity of showing my mortification and doing you the one kindness in my power." " In the spirit of the Christian crusaders," said Bust, ' ' I feel that I could deny you little. You would do well, sir, to retire in good order while my indispo sition to throw you through the window is still upon me." " But, my dear Mr. Eust, you don't know what an injury you are doing to yourself," the visitor went on. " If you knew how cruelly we were both wronged, almost at the same time and by the same person, you would listen, if only for that one compassion." " I have been wronged in Boston," Adam agreed, ominously, " and shatter my hilt if I know why I hesi tate to redress myself while I may. " " But I did you no wrong to your heart, sir. Our injuries were both of the heart," Randolph reiterated, persistently. "Look, sir, I had a heart, six years ago, and I felt it cruelly trampled under foot the same foot that trampled upon yours, and here " " Beware ! " Adam growled. ' ' I shall cut out your tongue, for little more. Begone, sir, and thank your God at every step you take, that you still live if you value your life at all ; and this I am driven to doubt." " Here, here ! " replied Randolph, nervously, and with shaking fingers he drew from his pocket a packet of paper folded in the form of a letter. ' ' You will never believe me till I show you this. But I lay my heart open I expose my wounds, to prove how you wrong me. Read it, read it the letter she sent me and then I shall be willing to bide by your answer." Adam could not fail to be impressed by the man's Revelations. 387 tenacity of purpose. Being a just man, he had a faint suspicion dart through his head that, after all, the man might not have known what he was doing when he committed all his fiendish acts, years before. There had never been any sufficient reason for what he had done, that Adam knew. He took the letter, briefly to see what it was the fellow meant and wanted. He began to read, and then to feel that the man had obviously undergone some trial, severe and not readily to be forgotten. It was Garde's own letter to himself he was reading. "She sent me that and then broke my heart after," said Randolph, speaking in a low, emotional voice, while Adam looked at the letter. " As if she had not shattered my life sufficiently before." "I'm sorry for you," said Eust, after a moment. " Here, I don't care to pry into your letter. Take it, and go in peace." " But read it, read it. You don't know who wrote it," said Randolph, who was white with excitement. " I shouldn't have come to you here with my mortify ing apologies, if there had not been a bond between us." Adam gave him a look, as of one baffled by an in scrutable mystery. He could not comprehend his visitor's meaning. Then suddenly a flush leaped into his face, as he remembered something he had heard in those by-gone days, when he walked with that youth, whose very name he could not recall, from Plymouth to Boston. He read the letter again with a new interest, a terri ble interest. He had gone away from Garde sent 388 Hearts of Grace away with a stab in his heart, from which he had never been able to recover. He had thonght at first she sent him away as a renegade, a fugitive from pseud o- justice, whom to have loved openly would be a disgrace. He had thought then that perhaps she loved Wainsworth, or even this Randolph. He had thought till he nearly went crazy, for circumstances had compelled him to flee from Boston for his life, and therefore to flee from all explanations which might have been made. Garde having released him from jail, he had been driven to think she believed him innocent. She had said she could do no less. Then he had been left no belief to stand on but that of her loving some one else more than she did himself. She had admitted that something had happened. Cornered thus, he had found the case hopeless, and thoughts of return to Boston then had seemed to him madness. This letter, now in his hand, confirmed all those more terrible thoughts and beliefs. She had done some wrong to Randolph, too, as she here confessed in her letter. She had believed some infamous story against him, and now prayed his forgiveness. And what, in God's name, had she then added to this first wrong to the man, that Randolph now was so bitter ? Terribly stirred, he raced his glance over the pages and so to the little quaintly affectionate ending. Then he read her signature, " Garde John Rosella." John Rosella ! the name of that youth ! She ! Garde ! He felt he should suddenly go mad. That boy he had so learned to love had been Garde ! She had written this letter she had signed that name, which meant so Revelations. 389 much to him and to her, and so little to any one else ! He made a strange little sound, and then he began to read the letter over again, from the first, letting every word, every syllable, sink into his soul with its comfort and its fragrance of love. He forgot that Randolph stood there before him. He was oblivious of everything. He was on that highroad again. He was standing with Garde in the garden at midnight, her kisses still warm on his lips. " You see there is a bond between us," said Ran dolph. Adam ceased reading, galvanically. But for a second he did not raise his eyes. He folded the letter and held it in his hand. He arose to his feet and slowly moved between Randolph and the door. " There is a bond between us," he agreed, speaking with nice deliberation. " It is something more than a bond. It's a tie of blood and bone and suffering." " I thought you would see it," said Randolph. " This was all I came to tell you, this, and my sense of having done you wrong." " Oh yes, I see it," said Adam, turning the key in the lock and putting it calmly in his pocket, " I see it all clearly. By the way, sir, who is John Rosella, if I may ask ? " Randolph had become pale. His eyes were growing wild. He had watched Rust lock the door with quak ing dread. "John Rosella?" he repeated, with a sickening sense of having overlooked something important, which he had thought an insignificant trifle ; " why, that is 390 Hearts of Grace merely the her middle names. Her full name is Garde John Kosella Merrill." " I trust you are gentleman enough to fight," said Rust, placing the letter in his pocket, "for I shall tell you, sir, that yon are a liar, a scoundrel, a murderous blackguard." Walking up to the staring wretch, calmly, Adam slapped his face till the blow resounded in the room and Halberd came hastening to the door to know what could be the matter. " I rang the bell," said Rust, who opened the door with great deliberation. " Bring a sword for one. The gentleman wishes to fight." "What do you mean, sir?" said the trembling coward. "Give me back my letter. I shall leave this place at once ! " " Will you jump through the window ? " Adam inquired, with mock concern. " Don't call that letter yours again, or I may not let you off with a mere killing." Halberd came with his sword. Adam drew his own good blade from the battered scabbard he had always retained, and looked at the edge and the point, criti cally. " I refuse to fight you ! " said Randolph, who had once seen that terrible length of steel at play. " I demand to be released from this place ! " Rust went up and slapped him again. " Get up just manhood enough to raise that sword," Adam implored. " Take it and strike any sort of a foul blow at me one of your foulest do ! you dog." The craven tried to make a run at the door. Adam Revelations. 391 pushed him back and kicked him again toward the center of the room. " This is murder ! I refuse to fight with such a villain ! " cried the fellow. " Let me out, or I shall call for help." " You wouldn't dare to let anybody know you are in town," said Rust, contemptuously. " Howl, do howl, and let me tell the public what you are. Halberd, alas, there is no manhood in it. Therefore fetch me the whip I saw in your apartments, for a sad bit of business." To all of Randolph's protests and wild chatterings of fear and hatred, Rust was deaf. He took the whip, which Halberd presently brought, and proceeded to cut Randolph across the face, the legs, the shoulders and the hands till the craven smarted with a score of purple welts. "Halberd, you may clean your boots afterward," Adam said at last. (f Be good enough to kick the dog from the room." Halberd placed but two of his aids to departure, and then, Rust opening the door, the craven flew madly out and away, a maniac in appearance, an assassin in his state of mind. CHAPTER X. AFTER SIX YEARS. AT Grandther Donner's house, Garde had passed the day with her heart -so fluttering between hope and fear that she was all unstrung by the time the evening arrived. She could bear it no longer, then, and with a shawl on her head she started out to go to the Soams ' to learn what she might of the many events of the hour. In the garden she paused. The stillness, the calm, the redolence of Spring, burgeoning into maidenly summer, brought back to her mind that similar time, six long years before, when she and Adam had met here among the flowers, for that brief time of joy. The fire of love, kept so sacred by the vestal virgin spirit of her nature, burned upward in her cheeks, as warm, as ardent as ever, after these years of her lonely vigil. But would he ever stand there again, in the garden ? Would he ever more clasp her hands on the pickets of the gate ? Or would he now prove disdainful, proud of his friendship with the new Governor, aloof and silent, as he had been since she sent him her letter ? No matter what might be, she so hungered to hear some word of his coming, some meager description of 392 After Six Years. 393 how he looked, some mere hearsay of how he bore himself, that it seemed as if she must consume herself with impatience on her way to her uncle's. In the dusk which was swiftly descending on the face of the world, she closed the gate behind her and started along the road, her face so pale and yet so eager, in her yearning, that it was almost luminous. She was presently conscious that some one, dimly visi ble, ahead, was rapidly approaching. She drew her shawl a little more closely about her face and quickened her footsteps, the sooner to pass this pedestrian. A metallic tinkle came to her ears and made her heart give an extra bound, she knew not why. It had simply sounded like a scabbard, beating its small accompaniment to sturdy strides. She looked up, timidly, to see who it was that carried a sword into such a quiet part of Boston. Then she halted and suddenly placed her hand out, to the near-by fence, for a moment's support. The man was almost passing her by, whore she stood. He halted. He made some odd little sound, and then he remained there, looking upon her, his hand coming involuntarily up to his heart. Garde looked up in his face, without fear, but not without sadness, wistfully with the inquiry of six long years in her steadfast eyes. (( Garde," said Adam, in a voice she barely heard, " Garde I have come home. I never got your letter till to-night." She could not answer, for a moment. "I have been waiting," she then said, and striving to hold her lips from trembling, she let two great tears 394 Hearts of Grace trickle slowly across her face as she still looked up in his eyes. There was nothing he could say. He read her whole story of faithfulness and of suffering, her epic of a love that could not die, in that one long look. Slowly he went up to her and taking her face in his hands he kissed away the tears from her cheeks. He put her head gently against his breast and let her cry. She still held to the fence, as if she dared not too suddenly lean on his love, without which she had learned to live so long. But gradually, as he held her there, saying nothing, but softly kissing her hair and the one little hand he had taken in his own, her arms crept upward about his shoulders and her heart beat against his, in a peace surpassing anything of earth. " My Garde," he finally began to whisper, over and over again, "my own Garde my darling, precious Garde." " Oh, this may all be wrong, Adam," she answered him, after a time. " I don't understand it. We don't know what has happened, in all these years. Oh, how did you happen to come ? " " You drew me, sweetheart," he said, in a voice made tremulous with emotion. " I have had no peace till now. I have loved you so ! I have dreamed of you so ! But I never knew till to-night, when I got your letter." " You never got it till to-night ? Oh Adam," she said. "Oh, Adam, I have been so punished for the wrong I did. Oh, you can never, never forgive me ! " "There, there, sweetheart," he said to her sooth ingly, letting her cry out the sobs she had stifled so After Six Years. 395 vainly. " Forgive you, dear ? You had no need to ask for forgiveness you who came to me there in that jail you, whose sweet little motherly spirit so provided for my poor old beef-eaters, when they were hungry and fleeing for their lives. Dearest, I don't see how you did it, when I was a hunted renegade, a fugitive, with doubled infamies piled upon my head. Oh, forgive me, dear, that ever I doubted my own little mate." "No, I should never have believed them not all the world ! " she protested. " My Adam. My Adam." With his strong arm about her, and her head leaned in confidence and love on his shouldor, he led her back to the garden, at once the scene of their joys and tragedies. He enthroned her on the steps of the porch, where as a child she had been enthroned, when he as her boy- lover had sat, as now, at her feet and listened to the dainty caresses of her voice. Only now he held her hand in his and placed it on his cheek and kissed it fondly, as he listened and told her of how he had come at last to receive the letter. At this she was frightened. She wanted to cradle his head upon her bosom, now, and hold forth a hand to shield him from danger. She felt that the perils for them both were clustered about his fearless head and that hers was the right to protect. " Oh, please be careful, Adam, dear," she implored. "That man is a terrible man. Oh, I wish you had let him go. Yon will be careful, dear. You must be careful, and watchful, every moment." 396 Hearts of Grace His reply was a kiss and a boyish laugh. Now that he had her once more, he said, and now that nothing should ever part them again, his world was complete, and there were no dangers, nor evils, nor sorrows. Then he begged her to tell him of the years that had passed. He petted her fondly, as she spoke of her long, long wait. She seemed to him thrice more beautiful, in the calm and dignity of her womanhood, which had laid not so much as a faded petal on her beauty and her endless youth. He exchanged a history of heart-aches, matching with one of his own every pang she had ever endured. There was something ecstatic, now, in the light of their new-found rapture, in recounting those long days of sadness and despair. Every pain thus rehearsed drew them the closer, till their love took on a sacred- ness, as if suffering and constancy had wedded them long before. Like parents who have buried the children they loved, they were made subdued and yet more truly fervent, more absolute in the divine passion which held them heart to heart. And so, at last, when Garde was sure that Adam ought to go, they walked hand in hand to the gate together. " Sweetheart, let me go outside, for a moment," said Adam, quickly shutting the barrier between them. "Now, with your two dear hands in mine, it is just as it was six years ago. The night is the same, your beauty is the same, our hearts and love are the same as before, and nothing has ever come between us except this gate." He kissed her hands and her sweet face, as he had done on that other happy night. After Six Years. 397 " And we can open the gate," said Garde, in a little croon of delight. Adam laughed, like the boy he was. He flung open the gate and went inside and took her in his arms, kissing her upon the lips, rapturously, time after time. " Oh Garde, I love you so ! " he said. " I love you ! I adore you, my own little mate ! " " I could have waited fifty years," she answered him, nestling close and patting his hand as she held it, in excess of joy, to her heart. " Oh Adam ! My Adam ! " CHAPTER XL A BLOW IN" THE DARK. THE rover, so lost in exalted happiness that he hardly knew where he was going, when at length he said his final good night to Garde, was not aware that the faith ful old Halberd finally fell into his tracks behind him and followed him off toward the tavern. Immensely relieved again to see his master, whom he had not been able to locate before, the old beef eater was soon convinced that Adam was in a mood the like of which had not appeared in the family for many a day. He therefore glided silently after the dreamer, a rod or so to the rear, waiting until Adarn should turn about, as was his wont, to bid him walk at his side. But to-night the Sachem was so thoroughly engrossed with his love and his forming plans, that he completely forgot to think of his lorn retinue, and therefore the beef-eater felt more alone and sad than usual. There was nothing in Boston, save Adam, with which he could associate any thoughts of jollier days. There was nothing but Adam left in the world, to which to devote the great fund of affection and devotion in his simple breast. But he was making no complaint, not even to him self. Whatever the Sachem did was right. Nothing that Adam could have done would have driven him 398 A Blow in the Dark. 399 away, nor have altered his love by so much as one jot. All he desired was the privilege of loving his master, at whose heels he would have followed, though the path led to Hell itself, and this with never so much as a question, nor a murmur of hesitation. The moon had been silvering the roofs of the houses for some time, and Adam and Halberd wended their way, in their short procession, through the deserted business streets of the town. Masses of shadow lay upon the sidewalk, where Adam was striding buoyantly along. Within fifteen feet of him, and between him and Adam, suddenly Halberd heard a sound that made him halt where he stood. Three figures, their faces masked with black cloth, ran out from a deep doorway, where they had crowded back, for concealment, and darted upon the rover, walking unconsciously onward. " Sachem ! Sachem ! " cried the beef-eater, wildly. He darted forward, in time to see Adam turn to re ceive a stab in the neck and a blow on the head that sent him to earth before he could even so much as raise a hand to ward off his murderous assailants. Dragging his sword from his scabbard as he ran, old Halberd leaped frantically into the midst of the three asassins, ready to battle against any odds conceivable, in this the climax-moment of his loyalty. He struck but a single blow, which fell upon one of the bludgeons held by the masked ruffians. He screamed out his terrible tocsin of anguish and rage. Then a blow from behind him crushed in his skull and he fell across the master he had striven to serve, a corpse. 4oo Hearts of Grace Waiting for nothing further, the three figures sped away, down the street, dived into the darkness of an alley and were gone, past all finding, when a few star tled citizens opened their windows or doors and looked out on the street to see what the awful cries of Halberd had betokened. "I see something down on the sidewalk," said the voice of one of the men. " The lantern, wife, the lantern ! " "What is it ? What is it ?" called another, from across the way. And others answering, that they knew not what it meant, or that it had sounded like some terrible deed being done, there were presently half a dozen awed men coming forth, when their neighbor appeared at his door with his light. The black, still heap which had been seen from a window smote them all with horror. A dark stream, from which the light was suggestively reflected, already trickled to the gutter. They lifted Halberd from the second prostrate form and found that Adam was swiftly bleeding to death from a ghastly wound in the neck, from which the life-fluid was leaping out in gushes. " Turn him over, turn him over ! " commanded the man with the lantern. " Run to my house and ask the wife for everything to tie up an artery ban dages, too ! " He knelt down in the red stream. Digging his fingers into the gaping, red mouth of the wound, he clutched upon the severed artery with a skill at once brutal and sure. The gushes ceased, almost entirely. A Blow in the Dark. 401 Adam's face, already deathly white, had been turned upward. " Saints preserve us ! " said one of the citizens. " It's the bosom friend of the Governor ! " "Then we know where to take him, if he doesn't die in spite of me," said the skilful surgeon who had pounced upon the wound. "Look to the other man and see if he too, is bleeding." One of the other men had already loosened the col lar about old Halberd's neck. Another came to assist him. " He's bleeding a little, from the back of his head," said he. " Lord ! He's dead ! " The doctor's wife came running to the place herself, with her husband's case in which he had a score of cunning tools and the needs of his craft. The good woman pushed the men aside and with an assurance and a courage almost totally unknown in her sex, at the time, in such a case as this, bent down above the wounded man and lent to her husband the nimble fingers and the quick comprehension without which he might easily have failed to prevent that deadly loss of blood. As it was, Eust was at the door of death. The turn he had made, when Halberd called out in alarm, had saved him from inevitable death. The steel driven so viciously into his neck, would have severed the jugular vein completely had he turned the fraction of a second less soon than he did, or an inch less far. The blow on his temple had glanced, so that half the power, which in the case of Halberd had crushed in the skull instantly, had been lost, nevertheless it 26 402 Hearts of Grace had served to render him wholly unconscious. There fore, two hours later, when brave little Mrs. Phipps got him laid in a clean, sweet couch, he looked like death, and his heart-beat was feeble and faintly flut tering between mere life and the Great Stillness. CHAPTER XII. ADAM'S NURSE. the intelligence of the almost unparalleled crime spread with terror and awe in its wake through Boston, in the morning, Garde heard it like a knell a fatality almost to have been expected, when she and Adam had been at last so happy. She did not faint. Not even a moan escaped her lips. She turned white and remained white. "Grandther," she said to the old man who owed his restoration to health and almost complete soundness of mind to her ministrations, " I am betrothed to this friend of our new Governor's. I shall go to attend him." She left her grandfather staring at her in wonder, and with only her shawl on her head, she went to the " fair brick house " which William Phipps had built for his wife at the corner of Salem and Charter streets in the town. "I am betrothed to Adam Rust," she repeated, simply. st I have come to attend him." As if poor Garde had not already, in six years of waiting and hoping and vain regrets, sufficiently suf fered for a moment's lack of faith in her lover, the an guish now came upon her in a flood tide. Adam no sooner recovered a heart-beat strong enough to give 403 404 Hearts of Grace promise of renewed steadiness, than he lapsed from his unconscious condition into one of delirium. Had Garde been wholly in ignorance of his past and his life of many tragedies, she would have been doomed to learn of all of it now. He lived it all over, a hun dred times, and told of it, brokenly, excitedly, at times with sallies of witty sentences, but for the most part in the sighs with which his life had filled his heart to over flowing, but to which he had never before given utter ance. She knew now what the boy had suffered when King Philip, the Sachem of the Wampanoags, was slain, with the people of his nation. She felt the pangs he had felt when, on first returning to Boston, he had be lieved himself supplanted in Garde's affections by his friend Henry Wainsworth. She heard him croon to the little Narragansett child, as he limped again through the forest. And then she sounded the depths of a man's despair when the whole world and the woman he loves drive him forth, abased. Yet much as she suffered with him in this long re hearsal of his heartaches, there was still one little con solation to her soul. The one name only that he spoke, and spoke again and again, in murmurs of love and in heart-cries of agony, was Garde. Having acquired her skill in the harsh school where her grandfather's illness had been the master, Garde could almost have rejoiced in this reparation she was making to Adam for what she had contributed to his pangs in the past, had it not been that his hovering so at the edge of death frightened all other emotions than Adam's Nurse. 405 alarm from her breast. Nevertheless she believed he would live. He could not die, she insisted to herself, while she gave him a love so vast and so sustaining. This feeling was fairly an instinct. And the truth in which it was grounded came struggling to the fore, one morning, when Adam opened his eyes, after his first refreshing sleep, and laughed at her gayly, if a little weakly, to see her there, bending down above him. "John Rosella," he said, "I have been dreaming of you the sweetest boy that ever lived." "Oh, Adam/' said Garde, suddenly crimsoning. " Oh now you you mustn't talk. You must go back to sleep at once." Adam was drowsy, despite himself. " I remember every word we said," he murmured, " and every look of your sweet sweet face." And then he fell again into peaceful slumber. Arrived so far as this toward recovery, he made rapid progress. Healthy and wholesome as he was, sound, from habits of clean, right living, he mended almost too fast, according to Garde's ideas of con valescence, for she feared he would rise in revolt, over soon, and do himself an injury by abandoning care and comfort before she could pronounce him quite himself. In reality there had been but little more than his loss of blood to contend with, save that his state of mind had engendered a fever, as a result of all he had un dergone, so that when this latter was allayed and the wound in his neck was healing with astonishing rapidity, his strength came back to his muscles and limbs by leaps and bounds. Therefore, despite her 406 Hearts of Grace solicitude, Garde was soon happy to see him again on his feet and making his way about the house, his face a little wan and white, but the twinkle in his eye as merry as the light in a jewel. He could furnish no accurate or reliable information as to whom his murderous assailants had been. He could only conjecture that Eandolph had been at the bottom of the affair, from motives of vengeance. This was the truth. But the disappearance of Eandolph from Boston was reckoned so variously, as having taken place anywhere from two days to three years before, that nothing could be reliably determined. Moreover, it sufficed for Adam and Garde that they were here, in the land of the living, together, and though it made the rover feel sad to think of the loss of his last beef -eater, the faithful old Halberd. CHAPTER XIII. GOODY IN THE TOILS. THE worthy Puritan citizens of Boston f6ted Gov ernor Phipps in one breath and asked him to make concessions of his powers to his council in the next. They worked themselves weary with enthusiasm over his advent and then they wore him out with exactions, with their epidemic of persecuting witches and with the faults they found with his methods of life and government. Sir William had not been long in his new harness, when he was heard to wish he again had his broadax in hand and were building a ship of less dimensions than one of state. A little of his old love for his call ing and the men it had gathered about him was expressed in a dinner which he gave to ship-carpenters, -from whose ranks he was proud to have risen, as he told them and told the world. He had a hasty temper, as a result of having been so long a captain on the sea, accustomed to absolute obedience at the word of command. Yet his squalls of anger were soon blown over, leaving him merry, honest and lovable as before. Unfortunately Governor Phipps was largely under the influence of increase Mather and his son, the Reverend Cotton Mather, who were both as mad fanat ics on the topic of religion and withcraft as one could 407 408 Hearts of Grace have found in a day's walk. The influence over Phipps had been gained by the elder Mather in England, where he and Sir William were so long asso ciated in their efforts to right their colony and its charter. Witchcraft persecutions, having fairly run amuck in England, Increase Mather had enjoyed exceptional op portunities for observing the various phenomena de veloped by this dreadful disease. He arrived in Boston after Eandolph had succeeded far beyond the dreams of his own malice in starting the madness on its terri ble career. The field offered an attraction not to be withstood, by either of the Mathers. They were soon fairly gorging themselves on the wonders of the invisi ble world, testimonies and barbarous punishments. Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton was an active figure in all this lamentable business. Phipps was dragged into the maelstrom bodily. He pitied the frightened wretches in the prisons and secretly instructed his jailers to be remiss in their duties of chaining, ironing and otherwise inflicting needless punishment on these helpless mortals. The more effectually and quietly to turn the fear ful tide, so appallingly engulfing the minds of the wrought-up populace, Phipps organized a court of Oyer and Terminer, wherein he sat himself, with seven magistrates, to try the wretched old women, dragged screaming to the farcical examinations. At these trials, devilish children swore away the lives of fellow- creatures, abandoned alike by their kind and by their God. In this court of his own making, William Phipps was slowly and surely putting a stop to the mania, for Goody in the Toils. 409 the horrors of some of the executions sent a thrill of fright and dread through the whole of Boston. Exercising his power of pardoning, and then expend ing his own money to assist them to flee from the state, William Phipps saved so many defenseless women that he fairly broke the fabric of the awful mania in twain. Early after his arrival, however, he was called away to Plymouth. No sooner was his back turned than the zealots pounced, tooth and nail, upon a new crop of witches and hailed them before the court, on trial for their lives, in haste before the Gov ernor should return to work his leniency upon them. Thus it came about that Garde, having exhausted the small supply of simples possessed by herself and Goodwife Phipps, went to Goody Dune's and there witnessed the work of a witch-hunting mob. It was a warm, summery morning, fit jewel for the year's diadem of things beautiful. Cries, yells, of pre tended fear, and harsh, discordant prayers, screamed into the air, assailed Garde's ears before she could yet see the little flower-surrounded hut where Goody lived. She felt a sudden misgiving strike through her heart as she hastened onward. She came upon the scene in a moment. Nearly fifty men and boys, with a sprinkling of mere girls and one or two women, were storming the small stronghold of the old wise woman, who had done so much for those afflicted by ailments and troubles. Indeed in the crowd there were many citizens who had blessed her name and the wisdom by which she had mended their bodily woes. But all now were mad with excitement. Some were purposely frothing at the mouth. A dozen. 410 Hearts of Grace leaped frantically about, declaring they were being pinched and bitten by the demons that Goody was actuating to malice. Young boys slily put nails and pins in their mouths and then spat them forth, to show what evils were then and there being perpetrated upon them. The tidy little garden was trampled to pitiable wreckage of flowers and vines. The house was being boldly entered by a few lusty knaves, with Psalms Higgler and Isaiah Pinchbecker in their midst. Sounds of wild beating, upon the pans and kettles inside, made half the assembled people turn pale with self-induced fear, which they loved to experience. Suddenly Goody's old black cat came bounding forth. The men, boys and women fell down in affright, screaming that the devil was upon them. To add to their horror and superstitious dismay, the jackdaw, Hex, came flying out. He perched for a moment on the ridge and then circled once or twice about the house. He was wounded, for the ruffians in the cottage had beaten him savagely, with sticks and whips. He was bedraggled ; for they had thrown water upon him. His feathers were all awry. He was altogether a sorry spectacle. " B-u-h-h -it's cold," called the bird. " Fools, fools, fools ! " and flapping his ragged wings so that they clapped against his sides as he flew, he started straight for the woods and was soon out of sight. If the witch-hunters had been smitten with delight ful fear before, they were appalled by this terrible bird. They fell down upon their knees and wept and prayed and made a thousand and one mysterious signs Goody in the Toils. 411 by which evil could be averted. Those who knew in their hearts that the whole thing, up to this, had been humbug and fraud, now quaked with a fear that was genuine. The devil himself had said some horrible, unthinkable rigmarole which would doubtless cast a spell upon them such as they would never be rid of again in their lives. Their children would be born with fishes' tails, with asses' legs, with seven heads. Above the wails of anguish, which arose on the air, came the shouts of the captors of Goody Dune. They were now seen dragging her forth with hooks, which were supposed to insulate the operator from the evils which a witch could otherwise pronounce upon her enemies with dire and withering effect. And then it was seen what the shouting of triumph was. Each of the captors bore a Bible in his hand from which he read, haphazard, at the top of his voice as he walked, thus disinfecting himself, or fumigating him self, as it were, to prevent him from catching the evil which was hovering about the witch, like an aureole of dangerous microbes of the devil's own breeding. No sooner did old Goody's well-known form appear than the fanatics in the garden fled in a panic for the gate, howling and wailing their prayers more loudly than before, but pushing and jostling one another and falling endways, as they tried to run and to look be hind them at the same time. They must see every thing, whatever the cost. The men were seen to be armed with pitchforks. There is nothing in the way of a weapon which your devil so abhors as a pitchfork, in the hands of any one save himself. 412 Hearts of Grace This noisy, mad procession moved in great disorder out into the highway, where Garde had paused, dis mayed and concerned for Goody. She saw the wise old woman walking calmly along with her captors, for Goody, unlike the witches of lesser wisdom, knew too much to cry out wild protests against this infamy, and so to convict herself of uttering curses, spells and blasphemies on the public roads. She looked about her, at men and women she had relieved of pains, and at children whose early ailments she had exorcised with her simples. They were all now possessed of the devil, in good faith, for the mad capers they cut to show that Goody was all potent to produce the most fiendish and heinous results upon them could only have been invented out of the sheer deviltry which is one of the component parts of the human animal. Helpless, terrified by these maniacs about her, Garde could only lean against the fence and hold her place while the running, neck-twisting people went by. " Oh, poor dear Goody," she murmured to herself, involuntarily. The old wise woman looked across the bank of bob bing heads about her and half smiled, in a weary, hope less manner that sent a pang straight to Garde's heart. She knew that Goody was saying, " Never mind me, dear," and this only made it all the more unendur able. Goody had been hustled by in a moment. The dust arose from the scurrying feet. The hobble-de-hoy pageant went rapidly toward/the town, its numbers being momentarily augumented, as fresh persons heard the Goody in the Toils. 413 disturbance rising and coming near, on the summer air, and joined the throng. Unwilling to let her friend be conveyed thus away without her even knowing where she was now to be taken, Garde followed the last of the stragglers, and so saw the crowd become a mob, in the more populous streets of the town, and finally beheld Goody hurried to one of the prisons and shut out of sight behind the doors. The jail was tho one into which, six years before, Adam Bust had been so infamously thrown. CHAPTER XIV. NEARLY as strong and well as ever, Adam Rust heard Garde's excited and desperate tale of Goody's capture with an indignation which far outran her own. He failed to realize, at first, the full import of Goody's position. Then, as Garde made him understand the almost inevitable execution, staring this old woman- friend in the face, at the end of a trial from which Truth would fly moaning, with her hands to her ears, the rover would have buckled on his sword and gone to batter down the jail to set the old wise-woman free, had his sweetheart not restrained him with all her powers of dissuasion. " Oh, we have got to be far more clever than that," she said. ' ( We have got to get her out of there quietly so quietly that we can get her away a long way off, before the awful crowds shall find it out. Help me to do this. Help me to get her out cunningly, or we shall fail and to-night it will all be too late." " Couldn't the Governor pardon her out ? " said Adam. " Why has he gone away at such a time ? Here, couldn't Mrs. Phipps write a pardon ? We could take it to the jailer, and try him. If he then refused to release our friend, we could try with a little gold in his hand. Mrs. Phipps Mrs. Phipps," he called to the Captain's wife. 414 Garde's Subterfuge. 415 The plump little woman would have done anything on earth for Adam her boy and for Garde, whom she loved no less, but she shook her head at this new proposal. The potentialities of the position in which William's sudden elevation had placed her still gave her a little fright to contemplate. She knew nothing of the powers of a Governor, still less of those of a Governor's wife. " I would be glad to do this thing, dear Adam, "she said, ' ( for your sake, or Garde's, or even for old Goody herself, but can I ? Would I dare ? I fear you hardly know the temper of these people on this question of witches. They are mad." " Try it," said Adam. " We can do no less than to give it a trial. The jailer will know of no reason for limiting the Governor's prerogatives, nor even those of his good wife. Write what I shall dictate, and let us make the attempt. A bit of boldness is often as good as an army." Never able to resist when Adam begged or even sug gested, Goodwife Phipps wrote, as he directed, one of the most sweeping and imperious pardons ever reduced to cold language. This being duly sanded, and ap proved, Eust folded it up and placed it safely in his pocket. "Now then, John Rosella," he said to Garde, who blushed prettily, in spite of her many conflicting emo tions, " even supposing this works its charm, we have only then made a good beginning. I must have a horse on which to convey old Goody out of the reach of harm, when they find she has slipped between their fingers. And the horse must be my own. No more 4*6 Hearts of Grace borrowed horses will do for me. Therefore content your mind, sweetheart, while I go forth to make my needed purchases." He kissed her, while Goodwife Phipps bustled off importantly about her duties, and reassuring her that all should yet be well for Goody, he went out into the glorious sunlight, and felt his old-time vigor spring forward from the warmth and the joyousness of Nature to meet him. But the matter of finding a horse in Boston was not one to be disposed of lightly. He hunted far and wide, for of those which were offered for sale, many were old, a few were lame and others were vicious. These latter he would have liked, for himself, since they challenged him, their spirit against his, but foregoing the pleasant anticipation of a battle royal, he rejected offers right and left, until he had used up the morning completely, and at length felt obliged to be satisfied with a somewhat undersized bay, who nevertheless seemed strong and otherwise fit for the business in hand. Garde in the meantime had grown nervous with im patience, afraid as she was, of one of those swift, in human trials of Goody which so often were the sub terfuges of the fanatics for rushing a person pre- condemned, to the death from which there was no escape. " I have thought the matter over calmly," said Adam, who knew nothing of real calmness in a moment of dar ing, "and I feel certain we shall double our chances of success by waiting till dark, or near it, when the jailer might be persuaded to think we could get her away un- Garde's Subterfuge. 417 noticed by the rabble, and so might consent to the plan, when otherwise he would think he must refuse. There was reason in this, as Garde could see. Making Adam promise to take a rest, before the time should be ripe for their enterprise, she went home to David Donner, to set things to rights, and otherwise to keep abreast of her little housewifely duties. She found the old man excited, by a call which had come for his services, at noon. One of the seven magistrates who sat in the court of Oyer and Terminer, to try the witches, had fallen ill. David had been requested to assume his place. At this wholly unexpected news, Garde felt her heart leap with a sudden rejoicing. If the worst came, Goody would have at least one friend at the trial, to whose words of wisdom the Council had so frequently listened. She ran to the old man and gave him a kiss. " Oh, I am so glad, dear Grandther," she said. " They know how wise you are and jnst ! " "Thankee, child, thankee," said the white-haired old man, smiling with the pleasure which the whole transaction had excited in his hungering breast. " They recognize me a little at last." Yet so eager had the girl become, and so frightened of what the results were almost certain to be, if Goody ever came to her trial, during the absence of Governor Phipps, that she and Adam were hastening off to the jail the moment the twilight began to descend on the town. "Jailer Weaver owes me some little favor," she said as they came to the place, " and he really owes a great 2 7 41 8 Hearts of Grace deal to Goody." Her voice was shaking, her teeth felt inclined to chatter, so excited was all this business making her feel. Vivid recollections of those terrible moments in which she had come to see Mrs. Weaver and then had hovered about the prison, to liberate Adam, made her cling to his arm in terror of what they were now about to attempt. Adam himself, wondering if the jailer would by any chance remember his face, and the break he and the poor old beef-eaters had made, had the boldness and the love of adventure come surging up in his heart, till he petted the hilt of his sword with a clenching fist. They entered at the door of that portion of the prison building where the Weavers made their resi dence, as this would excite no suspicion on the part of the few pedestrians in the street. The nature of their business being partially secret, they chose to interview the jailer in the room which answered for his parlor. Weaver was a man who constantly raised and lowered his eyebrows a habit he had gained through years of alternately scowling at his guests and then looking puzzled or surprised that, being so innocent as they always were, they should still be brought to such a place. He listened to Adam's flowery and courtly ad dress, in which he announced the advent of Goody's pardon, with at least a hundred of these eyebrow con tortions. " But the Governor never pardons before a trial/' he said. " Else, how should he know but what he Garde's Subterfuge. 419 was pardoning a very guilty person indeed ? If he had pardoned her, or if he will pardon her, after the trial, I shall be glad to give her freedom, poor soul. But you see she hasn't even been tried, and moreover this pardon comes from the Governor's good lady." Garde's heart sank. The man was so unanswerably logical. " But, my good man," said Adam, " I tell you this would be the Governor's pleasure. And the Governor stands in the shoes of the King, in matters of grave importance. Now call in any one and ask if I am not the Governor's friend his secretary, indeed." " I know your face," said Weaver, who remembered Adam well enough, as a former guest of the house, but who chose to say nothing on delicate subjects. " I saw you with Sir William the day he landed. Oh, aye, you are his friend, I know that well. But " "Good!" Adam interrupted. "Then, the Gov ernor who stands, mind you, in the King's shoes, in this matter, is away. I, being his friend, for the mo ment take his place. Therefore I stand in the King's shoes myself, and I desire this woman's pardon ! Bring forth your ink, and I shall add my signature to the document, in the King's name." Weaver was bewildered. This reasoning was as clear as a bell, yet he knew what the angry mobs would soon be demanding from his stronghold. " But but there can be no pardon, as I said, till after trial," he stammered. " What ! " said Bust striding back and forth, while Garde looked on and trembled, "do you refuse to obey your King ? " 420 Hearts of Grace " Oh, sir, alas, no," said the jailer. " But what can I do?" "Do? Do? My friend, do you value your daily bread ? Do you wish to retain your office ? Or shall the Governor grant your dismissal ? " This was touching the man on a spot where he could endure no pressure. He quailed, for he found himself between the devil as represented by the fanatical spirit of the mob and the deep sea into which the loss of his place would plunge him at once. " Oh, don't turn me out ! " he begged, convinced well enough of Adam's power with the Governor. " I would do anything to please you, sir, and I have done much already to please the Governor. I am an old man, sir, and we have saved nothing, and we know no other trade, and many people hate us. There would be no place for me and mine. Do not turn us away for this." " I don't wish to turn you away," said Adam. " I merely ask you to release this woman." "She has never done any harm," put in Garde. " She has been very good to your wife and you. Surely you could spare her this." " I would, Miss, I would," said the wretched man. "I am sick to death of this terrible craze of witches, but what can I do ? If I do not release her, I shall lose my place and starve. If I do let her go, I shall have all the mobs down upon me, when they find there is no witch for trial. How can I show them a paper, instead of a prisoner ? My life might pay the for feit." Garde's Subterfuge. 421 " Oh, Adam, this is terrible," said Garde. " What can we do ? " " After trial, you can surely get her pardoned," the man insisted. " You have the power. You can save her then." " Oh, they will never wait ! " cried the girl. " They may try her to-night, and find her guilty and hang her the first thing in the morning ! " Weaver turned pale. He knew that what she said might in all probability be true. " But I cannot give them a bit of paper instead of a prisoner," he repeated. " If you will bring me some one else, who will vouch for the mob's respect of your pardon, as you vouch for the Governor " " We've got to have her," interrupted Adam. " You can say she escaped, by her power of witchcraft. Re lease her, or look your last on these cheerful walls." " Oh, but, Adam," said Garde, " why should we make such misery and trouble for one person for two per sons, indeed with Mrs. Weaver in trying to save another ? I like these good people. They are very kind to their prisoners. They have spent much of their own money to give them little comforts. Can we not think of some other way, as good as this, to get poor Goody out and do no harm to innocent people ? " Weaver was ready to break into tears. He started to repeat, " Bring me some one to " " Oh ! Oh, I know ! I know what to do ! " cried Garde, interrupting. " All yon need is some one else to blame, when they find she is gone ! It would never be your fault if some one took her place. It would be a trick on you, when they found it out. I'll take her 422 Hearts of Grace place. I'll take her place, because when they find out they are starting to try only me, they will have to laugh it off as a joke. And Grandther is one of the magistrates appointed to-day so they will have to let me go and Goody will be far away, by then and no one will get into trouble ! " " No one could blame me nor they wouldn't," said Weaver, slowly, "but as for you, Miss " " Then we can do it ! " Garde broke in, a little wildly. " Oh, hurry ! we might be too late. You can put me wherever Goody is, and I can change clothes with her, and then, Adam " " Yes, but " started Adam. " Oh, let me, dear. I shan't mind it a bit. And in the morning it will all be over, and Goody will be safe, and no one harmed and there is no other way. And I want to ! Oh, Goody has been like a mother to me ! I must do it. Please don't say anything more. Mr. Weaver, take me to Goody now ! " " You brave little woman ! " said Adam, his own courage leaping to greet this intrepid spirit in his sweetheart. " I believe you can do it ! We shall win ! " Come back as early as you can," said Garde, on whom a thought of the lonely part of the business was suddenly impressed. " It won't seem long. And when it is over, I shall feel so glad I could do a little thing for Goody. We must hurry. Every moment may be precious ! " " But, lassie " the jailer tried to insist once more, yOU " " Please don't talk any more," said Garde. " Take Garde's Subteafuge. 423 me to her now. And when somebody looking like me comes back, let her go out by Mrs. Weaver's door with Mr. Rust." " Yes, I, but " "In the King's name, no more talk," interrupted Adam. Then he turned to Garde. " You won't be timid, little mate ? " he said. " I shall not be gone past midnight at the most." " I shall be so glad to think I am leaving Goody in your strong, dear hands," said Garde, with a smile of love in her eyes. " Good-by, dear, good night, till the morning." She kissed him, and smiling at him bravely, followed the jailer, who saw that his place in the jail depended now on compliance with Adam's and Garde's demand. The tremulous pressure of her little hand in his re mained with Adam when she had gone. He wondered if he were doing well, thus to let his sweetheart assume poor Goody's place. Then his own boldness of spirit rebuked him and he laughed at the imaginary scene of the magistrates, when they should finally discover their trial to be nothing but a farce. Weaver meantime took a candle in his hand and led the way down the corridor of the prison. Garde hesitated when she saw him descending the steps. "Why where is she ?" she asked, timidly. "In the dungeon, lass," said the jailer. "I was over sorry, but it could not be helped. We are full everywhere else. But I shall leave you the light, and anything you like for comfort. Only, if you hear any one coming, blow out the candle straightway, or I shall be in a peck of troubles." 424 Hearts of Grace Quelling her sense of terror, and thinking of Goody, alone in that darkness, with such dreadful fates awaiting her reappearance among the people, she promised herself again it would soon be over, and so followed resolutely down into the hole where Adam had once been locked, in those long-past days of despair. CHAPTER XV. THE MIDNIGHT TRIAL. GOODY DUNE was a frightened and pitiable spectacle, with her age and the terrors of the dungeon and com ing execution upon her. She struggled in an effort to maintain a show of composure, at sight of Garde and the jailer. Nevertheless she would not, at first, listen to a word of the plan of substitution, to get her away from the prison. When at last she had fairly overridden Goody's ob jections, and had made her complete the exchange of garments, Garde kissed her with all the affection of a daughter, and sent her forth to Adam's protection. She then heard the lock in the dungeon-door shoot squeakingly into place with a little thrill of fear, which nothing human and womanly could have escaped. She listened to the footfalls receding down the cor ridor, and then the utter silence of the place began to make itself ring in her ears. She looked about her, by the aid of the flickering light which the tallow dip was furnishing, at the barren walls, the shadows, and the heap of straw in the corner. At all this she gave a little shiver of dread. All the excitement which had buoyed her up to make this moment possible escaped from her rapidly. 425 426 Hearts of Grace She began to think how Goody must have felt, till her moment of deliverance came. Then she thought of what Adam had endured when, lame, hungry, exhausted and defamed, he had been thrown with violence into this horrible hole, from which he could have had no thought of being rescued. She took the candle in hand and went in search of the tiny window, down through which she had dropped him the keys. When she saw it, she gave a little shudder, to note how small it was, and how it per mitted no light to enter the place. Keturning then to a paper, filled with bread and butter, pie, cake and cold meat, which Weaver had fetched her, while she and Goody had been exchanging garments, she tried to eat a little, to occupy her time and her thoughts. But she could only take a sip of the milk, which stood beside the paper, and a nibble at the bread. To eat, while in her present state of mind, was out of the question. The stillness seemed to increase. She felt little creeps of chill running down her shoulders. What a terrible thing it would be to have no hope of leaving this fearful cellar ! Suppose anything should happen to Adam, to prevent him from returning ! How long would it be till morning ? Surely she must have been there nearly an hour already. She clasped her hands, that were cold as ice. She almost wished she had not tried this solution of the difficulty. Then she remembered the wise old woman, who had made her neighbors' children her own care as she had no sons nor daughters of her own and who had been sister, mother and friend to Hester Hodder, and guardian The Midnight Trial. 427 angel, teacher and kindly spirit over herself. This made her calmer, for a time, and again courageous. When once more the dread of the place and the ringing silence and the doubts that seemed to lurk in the shadows, came stealing back, she thought of Adam, rehearsing every incident in every time they had ever met. And thus she lingered long over that walk from Plymouth to Boston. In the midst of sweet reveries which really did much to dissipate her qualms and chills, she heard someone walking heavily along in the corridor above her. Swiftly calling to mind what the jailer had said about the light, she blew it out and stood trembling with nervousness, waiting for the door to open before her. But the sounds of heavy boots on the upper floor presently halted. Then they retreated. She breathed more freely. And then she suddenly felt the dark ness all about her. Fear that some one had been about to enter had, for the moment, made her oblivious of the curtain of gloom which closed in so thickly when she blew out the candle. Now, when she realized that she could not again ignite that wick, a horror spread through her, till she closed her eyes and sank on the floor in despair. The time that passed was interminable. She had not thought of how terrible the dungeon would be without the candle. She could almost have screamed, thus to be so deprived of the kindly light which had made the place comparatively cheerful. But she pulled up her resolution once again, thinking how 428 Hearts of Grace Goody and Adam had endured nothing but darkness, and with no hope of succor such as she could see illu minating her hours of dread. Midnight came at last and found Garde unstrung. When the tramp of many feet rang above her, at last, she welcomed the thought that some one was near. She hoped it was morning and that Adam had re turned. But then she heard a jangle of keys, and footfalls on the steps leading down to where she was, and her heart stood still. In the natural consternation which the hour, the darkness and the suspense had brought upon her, she hastily hid her head and face in Goody's shawl, and bending over, to represent the older woman, she tremblingly saw the door swing open and heard the jailer command her to come forth. With her heart beating violently and her knees quaking beneath her, Garde came out, relieved in some ways to flee from that awful hole of darkness, but frightened, when she saw the array of stern-faced men, who had come, as she instantly comprehended, to take her away to a trial. There was not one among the five or six men that she knew. She remembered the faces of Pinchbecker and Higgler, having seen them in the morning, when Goody was taken, but the others were witnesses that Kandolph had sent from Salem, experts in swearing away the lives of witches. They too had been present at the capture of Goody. Undetected as she was, Garde was surrounded by this sinister group of men, and was marched away, out of the jail, into the sweet summer's night air, and The Midnight Trial. 429 so down a deserted street, to a building she had never entered before in her life. Hardly had the prison been left behind when Adam Rust, swiftly returning, after having readily provided for the safe escape of Goody Dune, came galloping into Boston, his brain on fire with a scheme of boldness. He had made up his mind to ride straight to the prison, demand admittance, compel the jailer to deliver Garde up at once, carry her straight to a parson's, marry his sweetheart forthwith, and then take her off to New Amsterdam. Weaver could blame the rescue of the witch to him and be welcome. He could even permit Adam to tie him and gag him, to make the story more complete, but submit he should, or Rust would know the reason. His wild ride had begotten the scheme in his adventure-hungry mind. He knew the residence of the parson who had married Henry Wainsworth and Prudence Soam, the week before he and Phipps had returned to Massachu setts, for Garde had told him all the particulars, time after time having marriage in her own sweet thought, as indeed she should. He therefore went first to this parson's, knocked hotly on the door, to get him out of bed, and bade him be prepared to perform the cere mony within the hour. The parson had readily agreed, being a man amenable to sense and to the luster of gold in the palm, where fore Adam had gone swiftly off to work the tour de force on which all else depended. He arrived at the jail when Garde had been gone for fifteen minutes. Here he learned with amazement of the midnight trial to which slie had been so summarily led. 430 Hearts of Grace Trembling like a leaf, Garde was conducted into a chamber adjoining the room wherein the dread magis trates were sitting, with their minds already convinced that this was a case so flagrant that to permit the witch to live through the night would be to impair the heavenly heritage of every soul in Boston. Here the girl was left, in charge of Gallows and two other ruffianly brutes, whose immunity from the evil powers of witches had been thoroughly established in former cases. In the meantime her accusers had gone before the magistrates, ahead of herself, to relate the unspeakable things of which Goody Dune had been guilty. Shaking, not daring to look up, nor to utter a sound, Garde had tried to summon the courage to throw off the whole disguise, laugh at her captors and declare who she was, but before she should arrive in the pres ence of Grandther Donner, who would protect her and verify her story, at least as to who she was, she could not possibly make the attempt. Terribly wrought upon by the suspense of waiting to be summoned before that stern tribunal of injustice, Garde began to think of the anger which these unmirth- f ul men might show, when she revealed the joke before their astounded eyes. She swayed, weakly, almost ready to swoon, so great became her alarm. She could hear the high voices of Psalms Higgler and Isaiah Pinchbecker, penetrating through the door. They were giving their testimony, in which they had been so well coached by Edward Eandolph, who was even now in there among the witnesses, disguised, and keeping as much as possible in the background. The Midnight Trial. 431 The door presently opened and Garde was bidden to enter. Her heart pounded with tumultuous strokes in her breast. She could barely put one foot before the other. She caught at the door-frame to prop herself up as she entered the dimly-lighted, shadow-haunted room. Then her gaze leaped swiftly up where the magis trates were sitting. She saw strangers only men she knew in the town, but not David Donner. She felt she should faint, when one of the men turned about, and she recognized her grandfather, looking feverish, wild- eyed and hardly sane. This was why she had not known him sooner. "Oh, Grandther!" she suddenly cried. "It's I! It's Garde ! Oh, save me ! Oh, take me home ! " She flung off Goody's shawl, and darting forward ran to her grandfather's side and threw her arms like a child about his neck, where she sobbed hysterically and laughed and begged him to take her away. The court was smitten with astonishment from which, no one could, for the moment, recover. Randolph had pressed quickly forward. But he now retired again into the shadow. " What's this ? What's this ?" demanded the chief of the magistrates, sternly. "What business is this ? What does this mean ? Where is ' " Witchcraft ! A young witch ! Cheated ! We are cheated ! The young witch has cheated us of the old witch ! " cried Pinch becker, shrilly. " My child! My child! " said David Donner. " This is no witch, fellow-magistrates and friends." (< She has cheated us of the old witch ! " repeated 43 2 Hearts of Grace Pinchbecker wildly. " She has daily consorted with a notorious witch. She has aided a witch to escape. She is a witch herself ! We know them thus ! She is a dangerous witch ! She is a terrible young witch ! " " How comes this ? " said the chief again, excitedly. His associates also demanded to know how this busi ness came to be possible, and what was its meaning. The room was filled with the shrill cries of the men de nouncing Garde more stridently than before, and with the exclamations of astonishment and shouts to know what had become of the witch they had come there to try. During all this confusion, Garde was clinging to her grandfather and begging him to take her home. " Have the girl stand forth," commanded the chief magistrate. ' ' We must know how this business has happened." Three of the men laid hold of Garde and took her from her wondering grandfather's side. She regained her composure by making a mighty effort. " Goody Dune was no witch ! " she cried. " You all know what a good, kind woman she has been among you for years till this madness came upon us ! She is a good woman and I love her, for all she has done. She is not a witch you know she is not a witch ! " The witnesses, who knew all the ways in which witches were to be detected, raised their voices at once, in protest. " Order in the Court ! " commanded the magistrate. " Young woman, have you connived to let this Goody Dune escape ? " " She was no witch ! " repeated Garde, courageously now. " I knew you would try to send her to the -gal- The Midnight Trial. 433 lows. I knew she was fore-condemned ! I could do no less and you men could have done no less, had you been less mad ! " " Blasphemy ! " cried Higgler. " She is convicted out of her own mouth ! " " When a witch is young/' cried Pinchbecker, " she can work ten times more awful evils and arts ! " One of the magistrates spoke : " No woman ever yet was beautiful and clever both at one time. If she be the one, she cannot be the other. This young woman, being both, is clearly a witch ! " " She's a witch worse than the other ! " screamed another of the witnesses. " Condemn her ! Condemn her ! " " Oh, Grandther," cried Garde, " take me away from these terrible men ! " Randolph now came sneaking forth, out of the shadow. " This is that same young woman," he cried, " who lost the colony its charter ! " " The charter ! " screamed David Donner, instantly a maniac. " The charter ! She lost us the charter ! Witch ! The charter ! Condemn her ! Kill her ! The charter ! She ! She ! She ! Kill her ! Where is she ? The charter ! The charter ! The charter ! " With his two bony, palsied hands raised high above his head, like fearful talons, with his white hair awry over his brow, with his eyes blazing with maniacal fire, the old man had suddenly stood up and now he came staggering forward, screaming in a blood-chilling voice and making snch an apparition of horror that the men fell backward from his path. 2& 434 Hearts of Grace " Oh Grandther ! Grandther !" cried Garde, hold ing forth her arms and going toward him, to catch him as she saw him come stumbling toward her. "Witch !" screamed the old man shrilly. "Kill her ! Kill her ! I never coerced her ! The charter ! Witch ! Witch ! The charter ! " He suddenly choked. He clutched at his heart in a wild, spasmodic manner, and with froth bursting from his lips, he fell headlong to the floor and was dead. "She has killed him !" cried Higgler. "She has killed him with her hellish power ! " " Witch ! A murderous young witch ! " " Condemn her ! Condemn her ! " came in a terri ble chorus. " To the gallows ! Hale her to the gallows ! " Kan- dolph added from the rear. The man called Gallows thought this referred to him. He grinned. He and the two brutes who had handled many defenseless witches before, came toward the girl, who stood as if petrified, her hand pressed against her heart in dumb anguish. Suddenly the door was thrown open and in there came Governor Phipps, cane in hand, periwig adjusted, cloak of office on his shoulders. He was blowing his nose as he entered, so that no one saw his face plainly, yet all knew the tall, commanding figure and the dress. " What, a trial, at night, and without me ? " he roared, in a towering rage, which many present had already learned to fear. (t Is this your province, you magistrates, assembled to deal out justice ? Do you heckle a defenseless woman like this ? Disperse ! the whole of you, instantly. I command it ! If you have The Midnight Trial. 435 condemned, I pardon. The prisoner will leave the court with me ! " The men, craven that they were, he could deceive, but Garde knew the voice, the gait, the bearing of her lover. She sprang to his side with a little cry of gladness and clung to him wildly, as his strong arm swung boldly about her waist. She could hardly more than stand, so tremendous had been the stress of her fearful emotions. Scorning to expend further scolding or shaming upon them, and comprehending that delay had no part in his game, Adam turned his back on the slinking com pany and strode away, half supporting Garde, who hung so limply in his hold. Randolph, baffled, afraid to reveal himself by de nouncing the imposture which he had been only a second behind Garde in detecting, stole close to his henchmen and whispered the truth in their ears. Higgler and Pinchbecker, conscious of the blood of Adam on their hands, felt their knees knock suddenly together. The man must be the very devil himself. CHAPTER XVI. THE GAUNTLET RUN. WITH his bride up behind him on his horse, the rover spurred swiftly away from the parson's, still within the hour, in which he had promised to return to his wedding. Unafraid of whatsoever the world, before or behind, might contain, while her lover-husband lived at her side, Garde felt a sense of exhilaration, at leaving Boston, such as she had never known in all her life. With her grandfather dead and Goody no longer at the little cottage on the skirts of town, she had no ties remaining, save those at the houses of Soam and Phipps. And what were these, when weighed in the balance against Adam Rust her Adam, her mighty lord? Trembling and clinging as she was, he had carried her off. Gladly she had gone to the parson's. Her heart now rejoiced, as he told her that Massachusetts was behind them forever. For its people, with their harsh, mirthless lives of austerity and fanaticism, she had only love enough to give them her pity. But her life was life indeed, when, ever and anon, Adam halted the horse, lest she fear a fall, and twisted about to give her a kiss and a chuckle of love and to tell of the way he had cheated the mob and the court of their witches. 436 The Gauntlet Run. 437 "Make no doubt of it, you are a witch one of the sweetest, cleverest, bravest, most adorable little witches that ever lived," he said, "and I love you and love you for it, my darling wife ! " They had left the town early in the morning. By break of day they were not so far from Boston as Adam could have wished. The horse had been wearied by carrying double, when he conveyed Goody Dune to a place of safety, so that the old woman could subse quently join himself and Garde in New Amsterdam, and therefore he had halted the animal humanely, from time to time, as the load under which the good beast was now working was not a trifle. Having avoided the main road, for the greater part of the remaining hours of darkness, Adam deemed it safe at last to return to the highway, as he thought it unlikely they had been pursued under any circum stances. Thus the sun came up as they were quietly jogging along toward a copse of trees through which the road went winding with many an invitation of beauty to beckon them on. Crossing a noisy little brook, the rover permitted the horse to stop for a drink. Not to be wasting the pre cious time, Adam turned himself half way around in the saddle, as he had done so frequently before, and gave his bride a fair morning salute. He had then barely ridden the horse a rod from the stream, when, without the slightest warning, the figure of Gallows, mounted on a great black steed, suddenly broke from cover among the trees and bore down upon them. The great hulk, sword in hand, made a quick dash 43 8 Hearts of Grace toward the defenceless two, and slashed at Garde with all his fearful might. Jerking his horse nearly out of the road, Adam swung from the line of the brute's cowardly stroke, yet before he could do aught to prevent it, Gallows righted, flung out his leaden fist and dragged the girl fairly off from her seat, till she struck on the back of her head, among the rocks of the road, and lay there unconscious, and almost beneath the tread of the horse's prancing feet. Then the monster spurred at his horse and turning him back, rode to drive him madly over the prostrate form in the dust. Making a short, sharp cry of anger, Adam whipped out his sword and dashed upon the murderous butcher before he could get within fifteen feet of Garde, where she lay in the sunlight. Gallows had plenty of time to see him coming. The two met in a tremendous collision of steel on steel that sounded a clangor through the woods and sent the two swords flying from their owners' grips. Disarmed, the pair thudded together in a swift and hot embrace, sawing their horses close in, the more firmly and straight erect to hold their seats. " You be a fool and I be the fool-killer ! " roared Gallows, hoarsely. He tugged with his giant strength, to drag Adam fairly across to his own big saddle, where he could either break his back or beat him to death with the butt of a pistol, which he was trying to draw with the hand that held the reins. Slipping his wrist under the chin and his hand around to the fellow's massive shoulder, Adam tilted The Gauntlet Run. 439 back the heavy head with a force so great that Gallows was glad to release his hold, else he would surely have toppled from his perch. The horses leaped a little apart. Back their riders jerked them. Again the two big human forms shot to gether, and clung in a fierce embrace, like two massive chunks of iron, welded together by their impact. Once more Gallows used his great brute strength, while Rust employed his wit and got his same terrible lever age on the monster's neck. For a moment Gallows fought to try to break the hold, and to drag his opponent headlong from his horse, by kicking Adam's animal stoutly in the flank. But Adam was inflicting such an agony upon him as he could not endure. They broke away, only to rush for the third time, back to this giant wrestling. " The fool will never learn. I shall kill him yet \" cried Rust to himself, for he went for Gallows's neck as before and got it again in his hold. He threw a tremendous strength into the struggle. Gallows let out a bellow. Releasing the reins, he threw both his arms about his foe and deliberately fell from his seat, with the intention of crushing Rust beneath his weight, on the ground. Adam's turn in the air was the work of the expert wrestler. The horses shied nervously away. The two were up on their feet and telescoped ab ruptly in one compact, struggling mass, as if two mal leable statues of heroic size had suddenly been bent and intertwisted together. With his ox-like force Gallows began to force Adam backward. Adam let him expend himself in this 44 Hearts of Grace manner for a moment. He then discovered the great hulk's design. He meant to force the rover to where Garde was still lying, and so to trample upon her till the life should be stamped and ground from her help less form. Randolph had sent him to commit this final infamy. The rage that leaped up in Adam's breast was a ter rible thing. He feinted to drop as if in exhaustion. Gallows loosened his hold to snatch a better one, at once. In that second Adam dealt him a blow in the stomach that all but felled him where he stood. Before he could straighten to recover, Rust was upon him like a tiger. Getting around the great brute's side, he threw both hands around the short, thick neck and twisted himself into position so that he and Gal lows were placed nearly back to back. Then with one* movement he lifted at the man's whole weight, with the monster's head as a lever, hauled fiercely backward. Into the action he threw such a mighty rush of strength that Gallows was hoisted bodily off the ground, for a second, and then his neck gave forth a tremendous snap and was broken so fearfully that one of the jagged ends of a vertebra stabbed outward through the flesh, and dripped with red. The whole dead weight of the fellow's carcass rested for a second on Rust's back and shoulder, and then Adam let him fall to the ground, where, like a slain hog, he rolled heavily over and moved no more. Panting, fierce-eyed, ready to slay him again, Adam stood above the body for a moment, his jaws set, his fists clenched hard in the rage still upon him. Then he heard a little moan, and turning about saw Gauntlet Run. 441 Garde, attempfr' jin g ^ ra j se herself upward, in the road. He ran to ner instantly and propped her up on his knee. '' Deadest, dearest/' he said, "are you badly hurt ? Gardo, i e t me help you. Don't look don't look ther*e. It's all right. Here, let me get you back to &; shade." He took her up tenderly in his arms and carried her -out of the road to a near-by bank of moss. Here he sat her down, mtk her back to a tree, and ran to fill his hat with "water from the stream. The two Ifrorses, having stopped to take a supplement ary drink, aitti a nibble at the grass, were easily caught. The rover secured them both and tied them quickly to a basK, with the dragging reins. Then back to Garde he nram "with the water. '"Oh, thank you, dear," she said, "I don't think I mm. hurt. But with the fright, and the fall, I think ^ must have fainted." " Thank God ! " said Adam, as she drank from his hat and smiled in his face, a little faintly, but with an infinite love in her two brown eyes. " Thank God, for this delivery. There will be no more trouble. I feel it ! I know it. At last we have run the gaunt let." CHAPTER XVII. BEWITCHED. IN his tidy little honse in New Amsterdam, Adam sat reading a letter from Governor William Phipps, written at Boston. "I forgyve you y r merrie empersonashun and all ye other things alsoe, save y e going away without goode- bye," he read, "but let it pass. I w d write to say God Blesse you bothe. And as I have never known such a goode blade as y re in fight, I w d offer you to make you my commander of ye forces to goe in war against ye French, where they do threat to harasse our peeple as of yore " Adam halted here and looked up at the battered old sword on the wall. His thought went truant, to his helpmate, away for a few minutes' walk to Goody Dune's. He shook his head at the Governor's generous offer. " Well, well, William," he said aloud, "I don't know. I don't know what may be the matter, but no more fighting for me, old comrade. I think it must be that I am bewitched." THE END. 442 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW RENEWED BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE RECALL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS Book Slip-Series 458 N9 890253 co ro J 1. Mawchuett Hi tl. Kdghels, Philip witch is young. Mr H s! P