"As for that," said he, "the land will soon be not worth the living in. Why, in former times, men spoke of the merry world of England. A merry world? I trow the canting rogues of preachers have left but little merriment in it; and now they would seek to have all in their power, and to flood the land with their whining and psalm-singing, till we shall have no England left us, but only a vast conventicle. Think you that your father hath any sympathy with these? I tell you no; I take it he is an Englishman, and not a conventicle-man. 'Tis no longer the England of our forefathers when men may neither hawk nor hunt, and women are doomed to perdition for worshipping the false idol starch, and the very children be called in from their games of a Sunday afternoon. God-a-mercy, I have had enough of Brother Patience-in-suffering, and his dominion of grace!"
This seemed to Judith a strange reason for his going away, for he had never professed any strong bias one way or the other in these religious dissensions; his chief concern, like that of most of the young men in Stratford, lying rather in the direction of butt-shooting, or wrestling, or having a romp with some of the wenches to the tune of "Packington's Pound."
"Nay, as I hear," said he, "there be some of them in such discontent with the King and the Parliament that they even talk of transplanting themselves beyond seas, like those that went to Holland: 'twere a goodly riddance if the whole gang of the sour-faced hypocrites went, and left to us our own England. And a fair beginning for the new country across the Atlantic—half of them these Puritanical rogues, with their fastings and preachments; and the other half the constable's brats and broken men that such as Hutt are drifting out: a right good beginning, if they but keep from seizing each other by the throat in the end! No matter: we should have our England purged of the double scum!"
"But," said Judith, timidly, "methought you said you were going out with these same desperate men?"
"I can take my life in my hand as well as another," said he gloomily. And then he added: "They be none so desperate, after all. Broken men there may be amongst them, and many against whom fortune would seem to have a spite; perchance their affairs may mend in the new country."
"But your affairs are prosperous," Judith said—though she never once regarded him. "Why should you link yourself with such men as these?"
"One must forth to see the world," said he; and he went on to speak in a gay and reckless fashion of the life that lay before him, and of its possible adventures and hazards and prizes. "And what," said he, "if one were to have good fortune in that far country, and become rich in land, and have good store of corn and fields of tobacco; what if one were to come back in twenty years' time to this same town of Stratford, and set up for the trade of gentleman?"
"Twenty years?" said she, rather breathlessly. "'Tis a long time; you will find changes."
"None that would matter much, methinks," said he, indifferently.
"There be those that will be sorry for your going away," she ventured to say—and she forced herself to think only of Prudence Shawe.