CHAPTER XXVIII

REBECCA AND I FALL OUT

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

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

"Ramsay!"

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

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

"Now--exactly on the minute!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is M. Radisson back?" she asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A message to me?"

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

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

"A woman, of course!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hortense has told me."

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

"Yes," says Rebecca, with downcast lids.

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca rose stiffly, her little lily face all aflame.

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

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

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

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

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

There I cut in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Were the courtiers about?" I asked.

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

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

"Hah--let them work!"

"Did you see _her_?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

But Radisson only laughs.

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

M. de Radisson utters another loud laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who?" asked Radisson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M. Radisson rose and led the way out.

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