“Something,” said Gilbert Scarlett, “is in the air. Within an hour you will be much wiser than you are now at this moment.”
“It must be of more than ordinary importance,” said Ezra. “For he said on that last night at his house, you remember, that he never wanted to see me or hear of me again.”
“Until you had cleared yourself of mishandling Major Buckstone’s dispatch,” the other reminded him. “Perhaps the chance has now come for you to do that.”
The two parted at the point where Fish Street opened into Prince’s; Scarlett went his way toward the “Jolly Rover,” while Ezra continued along Prince’s until he reached Sun Court.
The boy’s knock brought an immediate answer. The grave-faced man servant showed his pleasure at sight of the youth.
“Your grandfather has been expecting you, Master George,” said he. “I will tell him that you have arrived.”
To be constantly forced to move under false colors was a bitter thing for Ezra. He was a lad who was frankness itself and one who detested methods that smacked of trickery. But to have all in Boston continue to believe him to be his brother George he felt was necessary if he was to aid the colonial cause. There was not a moment of his stay in Boston, during this period, or a time that he answered to his brother’s name, that his honesty and shame did not urge him to proclaim himself. But he stubbornly held this impulse in check.
“If it were a matter of my own,” he frequently told himself, “I could act as I saw fit. But this matter is not my own.”
His grandfather greeted him in his library, a stately room filled with morning sunshine, and furnished after the stiff fashion of that day. Seated at a window with a tall volume upon his knees, was a striking-looking officer, attired in the brilliant uniform of a British general.
“I would not have thought you interested in such things as this, Mr. Prentiss,” this gentleman was saying, not noticing the boy’s entrance. “It denotes rare judgment and taste in the binding. And the book itself is very rare,” with much admiration. “I know of only one other in existence.”
“The gathering of such was a folly of my son’s,” said the old man sternly.
“Folly!” The soldier laughed amusedly. “Well, that’s all to one’s taste, I suppose. But for my part, the more follies of this sort,” nodding toward a great heap of other books which he apparently had already inspected, “a man possesses, the more apt I would be to like him.”