"A print of blood!" said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some sudden spasm in his gripe of it. "Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very strange story that! Pray how was it?" [Endnote: 1.]
"Nay, it is but a very dim legend," answered the schoolmaster: "although there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father's possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is, that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First, originally Papists, but one of them--the second you, our legend says--was of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce and bloody men, of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his mother's character. This son had been one of the earliest Quakers, converted by George Fox; and moreover there had been love between him and a young lady of great beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the eldest son of the house had designed to make his wife. And these brothers, cruel men, caught their innocent brother and kept him in confinement long in his own native home--"
"How?" asked the Doctor. "Why did not he appeal to the laws?"
"Our legend says," replied the schoolmaster, "only that he was kept in a chamber that was forgotten." [Endnote: 2.]
"Very strange that!" quoth the Doctor. "He was sold by his brethren."
The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been a scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the lovely lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest had instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir, and how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home, bleeding as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,--his sense of the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren's hands, and in the holy name of his religion,--his foot, which had been crushed by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been stanched. And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings, and much track of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]