"Dicky," she said. "Whatever happens, you and I will be friends always."
"Always," he echoed, taking her hand and ready to search for the mark of the sting. But her eyes were fastened on the water bubbling from the well head.
A branch creaked aloft, and to the right of the well head the hickory bushes rustled and parted.
"So here are the truants!" exclaimed a voice. "Good-morning, Miss
Josselin!"
Chapter II.
MR. SILK.
The Reverend Nahum Silk, B.A., sometime of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, had first arrived in America as a missioner seeking a sphere of labour in General Oglethorpe's new colony of Georgia. He was then (1733-4) a young man, newly admitted to priest's orders, and undergoing what he took to be a crisis of the soul. Sensual natures, such as his, not uncommonly suffer in youth a combustion of religious sentiment. The fervour is short-lived, the flame is expelled by its own blast, and leaves a house swept and garnished, inviting devils.
For the hard fare of Georgia he soon began to seek consolations, and early in the second year of his ministry a sufficiently gross scandal tumbled him out of the little colony. Lacking the grit to return to England and face out his relatives' displeasure, he had drifted northwards to Massachusetts, and there had picked up with a slant of luck. A number of godly and well-to-do citizens of Boston had recently banded themselves into an association for supplying religious opportunities to the seamen frequenting the port, and to the Committee Mr. Silk commended himself by a hail-fellow manner and a shrewdness of speech which, since it showed through a coat of unction, might be supposed to mean shrewdness in grain. Cunning indeed the man could be, for his short ends; but his shrewdness began and ended in a trick of talking, and in the conduct of life he trimmed sail to his appetites.
His business of missioner (or, as he jocosely put it, Chaplain of the Fleet) soon brought him to the notice of Captain Vyell, Collector of Customs, with whom by the same trick of speech (slightly adapted) he managed to ingratiate himself, scenting the flesh-pots. For he belonged to the tribe to whom a patron never comes amiss. Captain Vyell was amused by the man; knew him for a sycophant; but tolerated him at table and promoted him (in Batty Langton's phrase) to be his trencher chaplain. He and Langton took an easy malicious delight, over their wine, in shocking Mr. Silk with their free thought and seeing how "the dog swallowed it."
The dog swallowed his dirty puddings very cleverly, and with just so much show of protest as he felt to be due to his Orders. He had the accent of an English gentleman and enough of the manner to pass muster. But the Collector erred when he said that "Silk was only a beast in his cups," and he erred with a carelessness well-nigh wicked when he made the man Dicky's tutor.