Rumbold hated the Stuart race; and when he used to hear Madam Lee teaching her little Lawrence to flourish his chubby hands and cry, "God save the king!" an ugly sneer would begin to gather about his lips, though he would hold them fast shut, for the Nether Hall folks were prosperous and well-to-do; and the maltster, if he could avoid it, never quarrelled with money. It was, besides, no easy matter to pick a dispute with this young Lee, who troubled his head so vastly little about the affairs of the nation, and whose whole mind was taken up in the management of his farm.
As to his heart, it was divided between his mother and his old playmate and constant friend Ruth; and though Ruth's play-days were fast ebbing away, and the old games were now frowned upon by her as silly and rompish, Lawrence cared for her every whit as much as ever; and Rumbold perceiving this, thought he saw in it a turn for the serving of his own purposes. And when one day, about the time of this story's opening, the maltster being in one of his gloomier moods, which, indeed, had grown so strangely frequent that he was rarely out of them, chanced to launch forth into one of his tirades against the king and his government, and said that "sooner than see daughter of his, wife of a man who loved a Stuart, be that Stuart Charles or James, or Tom, Dick, or Hal, he would see her in her coffin."
An angry altercation.
"Love!" replied Lee, turning a little pale as the maltster spoke, "is a strong word, Master Rumbold."
"Your father loved the first Charles Stuart," said Rumbold with knitted brows.
"Ay, to the death!" sighed the young man; "but I'll warrant 'tis little enough his present majesty remembers that."
Rumbold looked up quickly, and the dull glitter of his eye brightened into a glance of searching scrutiny as he fixed it on Lawrence. "An ungrateful race always, these Stuarts," he said with a shrug.
"Nay, I say not that," rejoined Lee. "Your poor bedesman may know every scratch and mark upon his little scraped-up hoard; but can your rich trader tell you one from another of his coffered guineas? And king's friends are so. Countless as the grain I sow in my fields."
"To be as soon scattered to the winds, and trod under foot," growled Rumbold. "Put not your trust in princes."
"I'd as lief trust one," smiled Lawrence, who knew his Bible too, "as any other child of man."