From Kingdom to Colony
thicket behind you."
He turned to send a keen glance into the clump of bushes and vines
growing some dozen yards closer to the road he had just left; and there
he caught a glimpse of pale blue--like female raiment--showing amid the
foliage.
Wheeling his horse quickly, he rode toward it; and what he now saw was
a tall, blonde girl of eighteen or thereabouts, who arose slowly from
where she had been hiding, and came forward with a dignity that savored
of defiance, although there seemed to be a smile lurking in the corners
of her mouth.
Her gypsy hat hung by its blue ribbons on one white rounded arm, bared
to the elbow, as the fashion of her sleeve left it. The neck of her
pale blue gown was low cut; but a small cape of the same material was
over it,--crossed, fichu-wise, on her bosom, and then carried under the
arms, to be knotted at the back.
Her round white throat rose out of the sheer blue drapery in fine,
strong lines, to support a regal head, crowned with a glory of pale
brown hair, now bared to the sun, and glinting as though golden
sparkles were caught in its silky meshes.
As she approached, the rider held up his horse, and sat motionless,
staring at her, while a merry peal of laughter, silvery as chiming
bells, broke from sixteen-year-old Dorothy.
"Mary Broughton!" the young man exclaimed at length, as he looked
wonderingly at the fair-haired girl.
She paused a yard away and swept him a mocking courtesy as she
said,--and her musical voice was of the quality we are told is "good in
woman,"--"Aye; at your service, Master John Devereux."
"Then you have been with our madcap here?" he asked, now finding his
tongue more readily.
"All the afternoon--an it please you, sir," she replied in the same
tone of playful irony.
"It does please me," he said, now with a smile, "for it was much better
than had Dot been alone, as I supposed at first. But think you it is
safe for you two girls to come wandering over here by yourselves?" And
in the look of his dark eyes, in the very tone of his voice, there was
something different,--more caressing than had been found even for his
small sister, who had now drawn close to them.
Mary Broughton slipped her arm through Dorothy's, and the mockery left
her face.
"I suppose not," she answered frankly. "But, to tell the truth, I had
not thought of such a thing until you mentioned it. We've not met a
soul, save Hugh Knollys, who was riding into the inn yard as we came
from Moll Pitcher's."
"And so you have been to consult Moll's oracle?" the young man said
banteringly.
The white lids fell over the honest blue eyes that had been looking
straight up into his own. The girl seemed greatly embarrassed, and her
color deepened, while Dorothy only giggled, and slyly pinched the arm
upon which her slender fingers were resting.
Mary gave her a quick glance of reproof. Then she raised her eyes and
said hesitatingly, "We heard she was down from Lynn, on a visit to her
father."
"You girls are bewitched with Moll Pitcher and her prophecies," he
exclaimed with a laugh.
"Ah--but she tells such wonderful things," began Dorothy, impetuously.
But Mary Broughton laid a small white hand over the red lips and
glanced warningly at her companion.
"What did she tell?" the young man asked. But now Dorothy only smiled,
and shook her head.
"Come, Dorothy," Mary said, "we had best get back to the boat." And
she turned to go; but the younger girl hung back.
"Are you going to a meeting at the inn, Jack?" she inquired, looking at
her brother.
"Little girls must not ask questions," he answered, yet smiling at her
lovingly. "But do you hasten to the boat, and get home, Dot, you and
Mary. It troubles me that you should be about here. Hurry home,
now,--there's a good little girl." But he looked at both of them as he
spoke.
"Shall you be home by evening?" his sister asked, keeping her face
toward him as she backed away, obliged to move in the direction of the
beach; for Mary, still holding her arm, was walking along.
He nodded and smiled; then riding back to the highway, wheeled his
horse and stopped to watch the two figures making their hurried way
across the marsh. But his eyes rested longest upon one of them, tall
and regal, her blonde head showing golden in the waning light, the
vivid green of the marshes and the deep purple of the sea making a
defining background for the beauty of the woman to whom John Devereux
had given his lifelong love.
CHAPTER III
"Oh, Mary, there is Johnnie Strings!" exclaimed Dorothy, as they drew
near shore, where lay the rowboat, beached on the sand, with Leet, the
faithful old darkey, sitting close by, awaiting the pleasure of his
adored young mistress.
Near him a little girl of seven was gathering pebbles, her heavy blonde
braids touching the tawny sand whenever she stooped in her search. And
crouched by his grandfather Leet was the boy Pashar, looking like an
animated inkspot upon the brightness all about. His white eyeballs and
teeth showed sharply by contrast with their onyx-like settings, as he
sat with his thick lips agape, literally drinking in the words of the
redoubtable Johnnie Strings, a wiry, sharp-faced little man, whose
garments resembled the dry, faded tints of the autumn woods.
Johnnie, with his pedler's pack, stored with a seemingly unlimited
variety of wares, was a well-known and welcome visitor to every
housewife in town. He lived when at home (which was rarely) in a
hut-like abode up among the rocks of Skinner's Head; and the highway
between Boston and Gloucester was tramped by him many times during the
year.
He owned a raw-boned nag of milk-white hue, and rejoicing in the name
of Lavinia Amelia; and these two, with a yellow cur, constituted the
entire _menage_ of the Strings household.
Johnnie, like Topsy, must have "just growed," for aught anyone ever
knew of a parent Strings. The one item of information possessed by his
acquaintances was that his name was not Johnnie Strings at all, but
"Stand-fast-on-high Stringer,"--an indication that he must have
received his baptism at Puritanical hands.
Either "Stand-fast-on-high" became more unregenerate as his infancy was
left behind, or else his associates had no great taste for Biblical
terms as applied to every-day use; for his real name had long since
become vulgarized to the common earthiness of "Johnnie," and "Stringer"
had been reduced to "Strings."
He now sat upon his pack--a smaller one than he usually carried--and
was saying to Leet, "Now that there be so cantankerous a lot o' them
pesky King's soldiers 'bout us, there's no sayin' what day or night
they won't overrun the hull country, from the Governor's house at
Salem, clean over here to the sea; an' every man will be wise, that
owns cattle, to sleep with one eye an' ear open, an' a gun within
reach."
"What are you saying, Johnnie Strings?" called out Dorothy, as she and
Mary came up. "Are you trying to frighten old Leet into fits?"
The little pedler sprang to his feet and snatched off his battered
wreck of a hat, showing a scant lot of carroty hair, gathered tightly
into a rusty black ribbon at the nape of his weather-beaten neck.
"Only sayin' God's truth, sweet mistress," he answered, bowing and
scraping with elaborate politeness. "I've just come from over Salem
way; an' yesterday evenin' ye could scarcely see the ground for the red
spots that covered it. There were three ship-loads came in yesterday,
to add to the ungodly lot o' soldiers already there."
Mary looked troubled, but Dorothy only laughed. And little 'Bitha,
abandoning her search for shells and pebbles, pressed closely against
her cousin, looking up out of a pair of frightened eyes, blue as
forget-me-nots, as she asked, "Does Johnnie say the soldiers are coming
after us, Dot?"
Dorothy checked herself in what she was about to say, and bent to
reassure the little one, putting an arm about her neck to draw the
golden head still closer to her.
"What are they come down from Boston for, Johnnie?" Mary asked; "do you
know?"
He cocked his head aslant, and resumed his hat, screwing up one eye in
a fashion most impudent in any man but himself, as he looked at her
with a cunning leer. Then he said: "There's no harm to come from 'em
yet. But soldiers be a lawless lot, if they get turned loose to look
after we folk 'bout the coast here, as is like to be the case now. An'
so I was just meanin' to hint to ye that 'twould be as well to stop
nigher home, after this day."
Old Leet, who had listened with a stolid face to all this, was now
pushing the boat into the water, while Pashar stood gaping at the
pedler, until ordered gruffly by his grandsire to stand ready to hold
the craft.
"Have you knowledge that they are coming down here?" inquired Mary,
speaking more insistently than before.
"We-l-l, yes, I have," he admitted with a drawl, and was about to add
something more, when Dorothy, who had deposited 'Bitha in the boat, and
was now getting in to take her own place in the stern, said to him,
"Come with us, Johnnie, and we'll take you home, as we pass quite close
to your"--hesitating a second--"your house."
"No, thank ye, mistress," he replied, grinning proudly at the dignity
she had bestowed upon his humble abode. "I've that will take me up to
Dame Chine, at the Fountain Inn, an' I should be there this very
minute, an' not chatterin' here. But I was tired, an' when I came
along an' saw old Leet, sat down to rest a bit."
"When are you intending to fetch that pink ribbon you promised me weeks
ago, and the lace for Aunt Lettice?" demanded Dorothy, as Mary
Broughton stepped over the intervening seats, past Leet, at the oars,
with small 'Bitha alongside him, and took her place beside her friend.
"I've both in my pack, up at the hut; I'll bring 'em to the house this
week, ye may depend on it," answered Johnnie, as Pashar pushed off the
boat, springing nimbly in as the keel left the sand.
"If you do not, I'll never buy another thing from you so long as I
live," the girl called back, with a wilful toss of her head, as Leet
pulled away with strong, rapid strokes.
"'T is all wrong for two pretty ones like them to be roamin' 'round in
such fashion," said Johnnie to himself, as he stooped to take up his
pack. Then suddenly, as if remembering something, he turned to the
shore and called out, "Shall ye find Master John at home, think ye,
Mistress Dorothy?"
Her voice came back silvery clear over the distance of water lying
between them. "No; he is up at the Fountain Inn."
"Ah, as I thought," the pedler muttered, with a meaning smile. "I'll
just be in the nick o' time."
"What think you it all means, Mary?" Dorothy asked, the two sitting
close together in the boat.
"What _all_ means?" echoed Mary, in an absent-minded way, her head
turned toward the shore they were leaving, where on the higher land the
far-away windows of the Fountain Inn were showing like glimmering stars
in the light of the setting sun.
"Why," Dorothy explained, smiling at Mary's abstraction, "all these
soldiers coming down here? And Johnnie acts and talks as if he could
tell something important, if he chose."
"You know, Dot, we are like to have serious trouble,--perhaps a war
with the mother country."
"And all because of a parcel of old tea!" exclaimed Dorothy, with great
scorn.
Mary now turned her face in the direction the boat was going, and
smiled faintly. "The tea is really what has brought matters to a
head," she said. "But there is more in it than that alone, from what
I've heard my father say. And there is much about it that we girls
cannot rightly understand, or talk about very wisely. Only, I hope
there will be no war. War is such a terrible thing," she added with a