“Is he better? Oh, say that he is going to live.”
To all their questions his only answer would be to purse his lips and shake his head doubtfully.
“We can know nothing yet,” was all that he would ever say.
King George of England would have scarcely liked to hear that in one small Puritan town his loyal subjects remembered the date of his coming to the throne only because it happened at the same season as “that dreadful mishap to Mistress Sheffield’s little son, Stephen.” In the history of Hopewell other boys had tumbled from trees, it was quite true, but never had one fallen who was so generally beloved or who lay so long in danger of his life.
At last a day came when the doctor, stumping up the street, told fifty persons at least between the gate and the town square, that:
“God has been good to us, the lad is going to live.” Whereupon the fifty ran with all speed to tell the good news to a hundred more. Rough old Sergeant Branderby came out of the gate, wiping the tears of joy from his eyes with the sleeve of his red coat and saying to every one,
“Have you heard? Have you heard? I did not slay him after all!”
“There was no one ever thought that the fall was through fault of yours,” old dame Allen told him, “and though we loved you little when you came and liked your errand less, we have learned to put up with you for the love you have shown our Stephen. Ay, he will live, it is not so easy to down the Radpath blood!”
Stephen himself, propped up in the four-post bed among the big pillows and covered over with the precious blue and white quilt that had been part of Mistress Radpath’s dowry, felt himself to be a very great person indeed. He was a very pale and thin Stephen, whose knees doubled up when he tried to stand, but whose voice and merry laugh sounded quite the same.
“I know how ill I must have been, since you give me the Orange-Tree quilt,” he said to Alisoun, “but I do not care ever to earn such an honour again. When can I get up and play in the garden, mother?”