IV.
When it came to machinery, Ernest found his aunt much more sympathetic than his usual confidante, Kate Digby. As years went on, the childish companionship between the children deepened into friendship. They began to confide to each other their dreams for the future. Kate modelled herself somewhat on the accounts handed down of a certain ancestress of hers whose portrait hung in the stairway of her father's house.
The portrait was a copy of one thinly painted and flat looking, done by an obscure seventeenth century artist. It showed a very young girl dressed in gray, with a white kerchief folded around her slim neck, and with her thin little wrists meekly crossed in front. Whether her hair was abundant or not no one could tell, for an old-womanish cap with narrow ruffle so covered her head that only a faint blonde aureole could be seen beneath it. Colorless though this portrait seemed at first sight, longer study brought out a depth in the clear gray eye, a firmness in the small pink mouth, which consorted well with the stories told of this little Puritan's bravery.
One of the youngest of the children entering Massachusetts Bay on Winthrop's fleet, the little Mercy had been the pet of a Puritan household. Marrying early, she had gone from her father's comfortable house in Boston to live in the country forty miles away, a region remote and almost on the borders of civilization in those days. Not mere rumor but veritable records have told the story of the fierce attack of the savages on that secluded dwelling, of the murder of husband and man servant, of the flight of the wife and little children, and of their final rescue at the very moment when the Indians had overtaken them,—a rescue, however, not accomplished until one of the children had been killed by an arrow, while the mother pierced through the arm, was forced to drop the gun with which she held off her assailants.
"Just think of her being so brave and shooting like that!" Kate would say to Ernest. "I admire her more than any of my great-great-great-grandmothers—whichever of the 'greats' she was. And then she brought up all her children so beautifully, with almost nothing to live on, so that every one of them became somebody. I'm always delighted when people tell me I look like her."
"Well, you don't look like her," said Ernest, truthfully. "If you looked as flat and fady as that you wouldn't look like much. Besides, I don't like a woman's shooting and picking off the red-skins the way she did. Of course," in response to Kate's look of surprise, "it was all right; she had to save herself and the children; but some way it don't seem the kind of thing for a woman to do! Now, I like her because she wouldn't let her oldest son go back to England and have a title. You see, her husband's father had cast him off for being a Puritan."
"Oh, yes, I know," responded Kate. "But I wish she had let him take the title. I'd like to be related to a lord."
Kate and Ernest were no longer little children when this particular conversation took place; but its substance had come up between them many a time before. Yet Ernest always held to the more democratic position; and as years went by his acquaintance with Ben Bruce intensified his democratic feeling. No one recognized more clearly than Miss Theodora this tendency of Ernest's, and she questioned long whether she was doing what John would have approved in sending him to a school where he must mingle with his social inferiors. In John's day public schools had been different.