But then I was on my feet, and, facing them both with my head flung
back and my face, I dare say, red and white with wrath, and
demanding hotly what that might be to them, and if my treatment at
the hands of my stepfather and my own mother was not between them
and me, and none else, and, boy as I was, I felt as tall as Captain
Cavendish as I stood there. Captain Cavendish stared a moment and
reddened and frowned, and then his gaunt face widened with his ever
ready laugh which made it passing sweet for a man.
"Tush, lad," he cried out, "and had I known how fit thou were to
fight thy own battles I had not taken up the cudgels for thee, and I
crave thy pardon. I had not perceived that thy sword-arm was grown,
and henceforth thou shall cross with thy adversaries for all me."
Then he laughed again, and I stared at him still grimly but
softened, and he and Mr. Abbot moved on, but the attorney, in
passing, laid his great white hand on my black mane of hair as if he
would bless me, and I shrank away from under it, and when he said in
that voice of his, "'Tis a gallant lad and one to do good service
for his king and country," I would that he had struck me that I
might have justly hit back.
When they had passed back on the turf I lay with my boyish heart in
a rage with the insults, both of pity and of praise, which had been
offered me; for why should pity be offered unless there be the
weakness of betrayal of suffering to warrant it, and why should
there be praise unless there be craving for it, through the weakness
of wronged conceit? Be that as it may, my book no longer interested
me, and finally I rose up and went away after having deposited all
my nuts on the grass in the hope that the little maid might chance
that way and espy them.
It was both a great and a sad day for me when I came to go to
Cambridge, great because of my desire for knowledge and the sight of
the world which has ever been strong within me, and, being so
strong, should have led to more; and sad because of my leaving the
little maid without a chance of seeing her for so long a time. She
was then six years old, and a wonder both in beauty and mind to all
who beheld her. I saw much more of her in those days, for my mother,
whose heart had always been sore for a little girl, was often with
Captain Cavendish's wife, for the sake of the child, though the two
women were not of the best accord one with another. Often would I
notice that my mother caressed the child, with only a side attention
for her mother, though that was well disguised by her soft grace of
manner, which seemed to include all present in a room, and I also
noticed that Madam Rosamond Cavendish's sweet mouth would be set in
a straight line with inward dissent at some remark of the other
woman's.