Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 14

d.i.c.ky pulled a face. "Well, the Bible's English, anyway," he said resignedly. The sound of a foreign tongue always made him feel pugnacious, and it was ever a question with him how, as a gentleman, to treat a dead language. Death was respectable, but had its own obligations; obligations which Greek and Latin somehow ignored.

The house, known as Sabines, stood high on the slope of the midmost of Boston's three hills, in five acres of ground well set with elms.

Captain Vyell had purchased the site some five years before, and had built himself a retreat away from the traffic that surged about his official residence by the waterside. Of its raucous noises very few-- the rattle of a hawser maybe, or a boatswain's whistle, or the yells of some stentorian pilot--reached to penetrate the belt of elms surrounding the house and its green garth; but the Collector had pierced this woodland with bold vistas through which the eye overlooked Boston harbour with its moving panorama of vessels, the old fort then standing where now stands the Navy Yard, and the broad waters of the Charles sweeping out to the Bay.

For eighteen months he, the master of this demesne, had not set foot within its front gate; not once since the day when on a sudden resolution he had installed Ruth Josselin here, under ward of Miss Quiney, to be visited and instructed in theology, the arts, and the sciences, by such teachers as that unparagoned spinster might, with his approval, select. In practice he left it entirely to her, and Miss Quiney's taste in teachers was of the austerest. What nutriment (one might well have asked) could a young mind extract from the husks of doctrine and of grammar purveyed to Ruth by the Reverend Malachi Hichens, her tutor in the Holy Scriptures and in the languages of Greece and Rome?

The answer is that youth, when youth craves for it, will draw knowledge even from the empty air and drink it through the very pores of the skin.

Mr. Hichens might be dry--inhumanly dry--and his methods repellent; but there were the books, after all, and the books held food for her hunger, wine for her thirst. So too the harpsichord held music, though Miss Quiney's touch upon it was formal and lifeless. . . . In these eighteen months Ruth Josselin had been learning eagerly, teaching herself in a hundred ways and by devices of which she wist not. Yet always she was conscious of the final purpose of this preparation; nay, it possessed her, mastered her. For whatever fate her lord designed her, she would be worthy of it.

He never came. For eighteen months she had not seen him. Was it carelessly or in delicacy that he withheld his face? Or peradventure in displeasure? Her heart would stand still at times, and her face pale with the fear of it. She could not bethink her of having displeased him; but it might well be that he repented of his vast condescension.

Almost without notice, and without any reason given, he had deported her to this house on the hill. . . . Yet, if he repented, why did he continue to wrap her around with kindness? Why had she these good clothes, and food and drink, servants to wait on her, tutors to teach her--everything, in short, but liberty and young companions and his presence that most of all she desired and dreaded?

On the slope to the south-west of the house, in a dingle well screened with willow and hickory, a stream of water gushed from the living rock and had been channelled downhill over a stairway of flat boulders, so that it dropped in a series of miniature cascades before shooting out of sight over the top of a ferny hollow. The spot was a favourite one with d.i.c.ky, for between the pendent willow boughs, as through a frame, it overlooked the shipping and the broad bosom of the Charles. Ruth and he stole away to it, unperceived of Miss Quiney; to a nook close beside the spray of the fall, where on a boulder the girl could sit and read while d.i.c.k wedged his back into a cushion of moss, somewhat higher up the slope, and rec.u.mbent settled himself so as to bring (luxurious young dog!) her face in profile between him and the shining distance.

She had stipulated for silence while she read her lesson over; but he at once began to beg off.

"If you won't let me talk," he grumbled, "the least you can do is to read aloud."

"But it's the Bible," she objected.

"Oh, well, I don't mind. Only choose something interesting. David and Goliath, or that shipwreck in the Acts."

"You don't seem to understand that this is a lesson, and I must read what Mr. Hichens sets. To-day it's about Hagar and Ishmael."

"I seem to forget about them; but fire away, and we'll hope there's a story in it."

Ruth began to read: "_And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking her. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman_. . ."

She read on. Before she ended d.i.c.ky had raised himself to a sitting posture. "The whole business was a dirty shame," he declared.

"This Ishmael was his own son, eh? Then why should he cast out one son more than another?"

"There's a long explanation in the New Testament," said Ruth. "It's by St. Paul; and I dare say that Mr. Hichens too, if he sees anything difficult in it, will say that Ishmael stands for the bond and Isaac for the free, and Abraham had to do it, or the teaching wouldn't come right."

"He can't make out it was fair; nor St. Paul can't neither, not if you read it to him like you did to me," a.s.serted d.i.c.ky.

"But I shall not," answered Ruth after a pause, "and it was rather clever of you to guess."

"Why not?"

"Because it would shock him. I used to find the Bible just as dull as he makes it out: but one day I heard Mr. Langton standing up for it.

Mr. Langton said it was the finest book in the world and the most fascinating, if only you read it in the proper way; and the proper way, he said, is to forget all about its being divided into verses and just take it like any other book. I tried that, and it makes all the difference."

"You mean to say you like it?" asked d.i.c.ky, incredulous.

"I love it. I can't get away from the people in it. They are so splendid, one moment; and, the next, they are just too mean and petty for words; and the queer part of it is, they never see. They tell falsehoods, and they cheat, and the things they do to get into Palestine are simply disgusting--even if they had the shadow of a right there, which they haven't."

"But the land was promised to them."

She had a mind to criticise that promise, but checked her lips.

He was a child, and she would do no violence to the child's mind.

Getting no answer, he considered for a while, and harked back.

"But I don't see," he began, and halted, casting about to express himself. "I don't see why, if you read it like that to yourself, you should read it differently to old Hichens. That's a sort of pretending, you know."

She turned her eyes on him, and they were straight and honest, as always. "Oh," said she, "you are a man, of course!"

Master d.i.c.ky blushed with pleasure.

"Men," she went on, "can go the straight way to get what they wish.

The way is usually hard--it ought to be hard if the man is worth anything--but it is always quite straight and simple, else it is wrong.

Now women have to win through men; which means that they must go round about."

"But old Hichens?"

To herself she might have answered, "He only is allowed to me here.

On whom else can I practise to please? But, alas! I practise for a master who never comes!" Aloud she said, "You are excited to-day, d.i.c.ky. You have something to tell me."

"I should think I had!"

"What is it?"

"It's about Uncle Harry. Dad showed me a letter from him to-day, and he's fought a splendid action down off Grand Bahama. Oh, you must hear!

It seems he'd been beating about in his frigate for close on three months--on and off the islands on the look-out for those Spanish fellows that snap up our fruit-ships. Well, the water on board was beginning to smell; so he ran in through the nor'-west entrance of Providence Channel, anch.o.r.ed just inside, and sent his casks ash.o.r.e to be refilled.

They'd taken in the fresh stock, and the _Venus_ was weighing for sea again almost before the last boatload came alongside.--Can't you see her, the beauty! One anchor lifted, t'other chain shortened in, tops'ls and t'gallants'ls cast off, ready to cant her at the right moment--"

"Is that how they do it?"

"Of course it is. Well just then Uncle Harry spied a boat beating in through the entrance. He had pa.s.sed her outside two days before--one of those small open craft that dodge about groping for sponges--splendid naked fellows, the crews are. She had put about and run back in search of him, and her news was of a Spanish guarda-costa making down towards Havana with three prizes. Think of it! Uncle Harry was off and after them like a greyhound, and at sunrise next morning he sighted them in a bunch. He had the wind of them and the legs of them; there isn't a speedier frigate afloat than the _Venus_--although, he says, she was getting foul with weed: and after being chased for a couple of hours the Spaniard and two of the prizes hauled up and showed fight. Now for it!

. . . He ran past the guarda-costa, drawing her fire, but no great harm done; shot up under the sterns of the two prizes, that were lying not two hundred yards apart; and raked 'em with half-a-broadside apiece--no time, you see, to reload between. It pretty well cleaned every Spaniard off their decks--Why are you putting your hands to your ears!"

"Go on," said Ruth withdrawing them.

"By this, of course, he had lost way and given the guarda-costa the wind of him. But she couldn't reach the _Venus_ for twenty minutes and more, because of the prizes lying helpless right in her way, and in half that time Uncle Harry had filled sail again and was manoeuvring out of danger. Bit by bit he worked around her for the wind'ard berth, got it, bore down again and hammered her for close upon three hours. She fought, he says, like a rat in a sink, and when at last she pulled down her colours the two prizes had patched up somehow and were well off for Havana after the third, that had showed no fight from the beginning.

Quick as lightning he gets his prisoners on board, heads off on the new chase, and by sundown has taken the prizes all three--the third one a timber-ship, full of mahogany . . . That wasn't the end of his luck, either; for the captain of the guarda-costa turned out to be a blackguard that two years ago took a British captain prisoner and cut off his ears, which accounts for his fighting so hard. 'Didn't want to meet me if he could help it,' writes Uncle Harry, and says the man wouldn't haul down the flag till his crew had tied him up with ropes."

"What happened to him?"

"Uncle Harry shipped him off to England. This was from Carolina, where he sailed in with all the four vessels in convoy. And now, guess!

He has refitted there, and is sailing around for Boston, and papa has promised to ask him to take me for a cruise, to see if he can make a sailor of me!"

"But that won't be for years."

"Oh yes, it will. You can join the Navy at any age. They ship you on as a cabin-boy, or sometimes as the Captain's servant; and papa says that for the first cruise Uncle Harry's wife will look after me."

"But"--Ruth opened beautiful eyes of astonishment. "Your Uncle Harry is not married? Why, more than once you have told me that you would never take a wife when you grew up, but be like your uncle and live only for sailing a ship and fighting."

"He is, though. It happened at Carolina, whilst the _Venus_ was refitting; and I believe her father is Governor there, or something of the sort, but I didn't read that part of the letter very carefully.