That, for nearly three months, had been the sum of knowledge....
Soft-voiced in the room behind him, not moving now with the bounce and ease of a year ago, Kate Dobson was saying: "Do you go and sleep now, Master Reuben. I'll bide with him the rest of the night."
"Did you sleep enough yourself?"
"Well enough. Ah, the doctor!" she said, and smiled at his finger tips pressed on her fat wrist. The message from her elderly heart was slow and sound. Once or twice Reuben had detected a fluttering in it; tonight he found nothing out of the way except that variability of pace which Mr. Welland described as not unnatural. Kate accepted this sort of thing as a game to be played with the tenderness of maternal indulgence. Yet again it might be that when she was alone with herself, thinking perhaps of Reuben Cory in the here-and-now and not so much of the twelve-year-old boy who once collapsed in her arms at the end of a long journey, she knew better.
Reuben's hand sought the sampler that hung by the door in line with Mr. Kenny's vision, touching the truth of the dark leaves, the fine-stitched perfection of the slanting letters: Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori. Kate had not been able to finish it until after the old man was struck down. Mr. Kenny could see it there, had held it, groped at it with the right hand, smiled in his distorted fashion, mumbling blurred sounds of pleasure and thanks. It seemed to Reuben that for this labor of years she ought to have received his elaborate courtly declamation mingled with airy nonsense and a pat on the rump; she never would. She was not wholly satisfied with the sampler even now: she said some of the ivy leaves were too big in contrast to the letters. Omnia vincit amor—but love is a wider region than was spoken of in the Eclogues. Reuben wandered downstairs with no desire to sleep, and closed the front door behind him and walked out alone into the mist....
Remembering Deerfield. Mist lay there sometimes in the early mornings of the end of winter or the beginning of spring, over the low ground by the river, or within the palisade, until a strengthening sun dissolved it away from the brave small houses, the training field, the little dooryard gardens; and Mother liked gray mornings, but Jesse Plum said they worsened the Pain in his Back, and Father looked on them mildly as no worse, no better than others-because, said Joseph Cory, every day was a new-minted shilling to be spent as reasonably as one might....
Remembering—one sometimes winces at the scar of a minor wound—a house where the judgments of the Lord were true and righteous altogether.
Remembering a narrow gray face advancing in the snow:—If I had died then, who would walk in this fog in this year's May? Mm-yas—a might-have-been universe for each event that might have been. Should I reach out to that maple, the cosmos will wag one way; another if I do not. Notice, gentlemen, the astonishing power of Reuben Cory! Philosophy, I vow Mr. Hibbs would enjoy it in all solemnity, bless the man, but likely it'll slip my mind before I see him again. A boy ties a string to a pulled milk-tooth and keeps it a while in his pocket, then somehow loses it....
Remembering a midsummer evening—July, the windless heat a burden of fever; lightning, too distant to be heard, startling the black sky over Cambridge or some farther place in the northwest—and the coming of a messenger on a lathered horse to Mr. Kenny's house. Good news comes often quietly, arriving like dawn; bad news like a rabid beast leaping for the throat. That horseman was merely gentle Sam Tench, the clerk who had labored so long and dustily in Mr. Kenny's countinghouse that he seemed like an outgrowth of his three-legged stool, but scrambling down from a sweaty horse and panting his news on the doorstep, he was Fate, if you like, since the word he bore came direct from Her Majesty's frigate Dread, newly arrived at Boston for provisions and sundry errands of state and war.
On a morning in early July, in open waters west of the Bermudas, the Dread had picked up one Pieter Van Anda, single survivor of the sloop Schouven out of Amsterdam, who had clung all night to the smashed fragment of a mast. The Schouven had been attacked by a fast ketch flying no flag, boarded, plundered, her captain and most of her crew butchered in a rapid engagement where no quarter was given—but later, before the sloop was set afire, the mad captain of the ketch had harangued, even pleaded with the three who still lived, to throw in their lot with him, for he was bound to the other side of the world as soon as he could acquire two or three other vessels as good as his own, and was in need of good men. The sloop was worthless except for her provisions and so must be burned, but would they not go with him? One consented; the other and Van Anda, then expecting nothing worse than being set adrift, would not; they were thrown into the sea. This, the tall, sweet-voiced, black-haired captain told them—they being crushed against the rail of the sloop by four men who seemed not mad but merely rabble of the baser sort, pirates—this was an evil thing he did and he knew it, but the end he served was beyond their understanding, and could he allow them to bear witness to his acts before the time was ripe? Perhaps the sea would be kind, at any rate he must do as his inner voice commanded and could do no other. As he told them this, he rubbed a copper coin, and his blue eyes spread into black, burning into them. "And since I cannot be trusting you now, Mother of God, the time's past for any change of heart, and so God keep you, gentlemen"—and the sea (said Van Anda) in its most furious mood was surely kinder than such a man.