Heralds of Empire Part 46

"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 blus.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sacre. 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 ma.s.sive 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 ladys.h.i.+p 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 amba.s.sador 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?"