“Did we not so of his father?” asked she, with a short laugh. “There be alway that will sing loud hymns to the rising or risen sun. Sageness and wisdom, forsooth! of a lad of twelve years! He may be as sage as he will, but he will not match Dr Stephen Gardiner yet awhile.”
A shudder ran through Isoult Avery at the name of the deviser of the Bloody Statute. But the danger of the Protector was too serious a question to every Gospeller not to be recurred to and prayed against.
“It doth seem to me, Jack,” said Isoult that evening, when the story had been told, “as though the cause of the Gospel should stand or fall with my Lord Protector. What thinkest thou?”
“Sweet wife,” he answered, “if my Lord Protector were the only prop of the Gospel, it had fallen long ago. The prop of the Gospel is not my Lord or thy Lord, but the Lord of the whole earth. His strength is enough to bear it up.”
“I know that, Jack,” she said. “Yet God worketh by means; and my Lord Protector gone, who else is there?”
“Nay, child!” answered Dr Thorpe. “Is God so lately become unable of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham? Shall He, by whose word a nation shall be born in a day, be too weak to strengthen the King, in despite of his tender years, or to raise up another man that shall follow in the wake of my Lord Protector?”
“I know God can do miracles,” said Isoult, somewhat despondingly.
“‘For all but me’—is that thy thought, sweeting?” asked Avery, smiling.
“But where is there a man?” cried Isoult.
“How know I?” said Dr Thorpe. “Some whither in the Indies, it may be. But the Lord shall surely fetch him thence when the time cometh. Prithee, Jack, bid thy friend the Hot Gospeller to dinner, and leave us see if he (that I gather from thy talk to be mighty busy in public matters) can find us a man for the time.”