For old Tibbie, the nurse, there was
nothing left but to pawn the family plate and take me, a spoiled lad in
his teens, out to Puritan kin of Boston Town.
On the night my father died he had spoken remorsefully of the past to
the lord bishop at his bedside.
"Tush, man, have a heart," cries his lordship. "Thou'lt see pasch and
yule yet forty year, Stanhope. Tush, man, 'tis thy liver, or a touch
of the gout. Take here a smack of port. Sleep sound, man, sleep
sound."
And my father slept so sound he never wakened more.
So I came to my Uncle Kirke, whose virtues were of the acid sort that
curdles the milk of human kindness.
With him, goodness meant gloom. If the sweet joy of living ever sang
to him in his youth, he shut his ears to the sound as to siren
temptings, and sternly set himself to the fierce delight of being
miserable.
For misery he had reason enough. Having writ a book in which he called
King Charles "a man of blood and everlasting abomination"--whatever
that might mean--Eli Kirke got himself star-chambered. When, in the
language of those times, he was examined "before torture, in torture,
between torture, and after torture"--the torture of the rack and the
thumbkins and the boot--he added to his former testimony that the queen
was a "Babylonish woman, a Potiphar, a Jezebel, a--"
There his mouth was gagged, head and heels roped to the rack, and a
wrench given the pulleys at each end that nigh dismembered his poor,
torn body.
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