Empire by Edward Cline

were borrowedfrom Jack’s library. He put down his lantern and said, “We forgot to discuss tomorrow’s business.”
    But he saw in Proudlocks’s brief grin that he knew the real reason for the visit, that it was a form of thanks for having saved the evening. Proudlocks said, “I will suggest to Mr. Robins that we start the others in picking the corn. It is ripe. Their stalks should be left to stand, so that the beans on them can ripen. They are not ready yet.” He lit a clay pipe and offered it to Jack, then lit another for himself. They sat and talked about what other plantation tasks needed to be done before the fall.
    After a while, Jack rose to leave. Proudlocks said, “You will quarrel again. You are right, and he is wrong. But I will try to stop you from hurting each other.” He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a picture he had nailed to a wall. It was an engraving of the Ramsay full-length portrait of George the Third, a page he had torn from one of his books. “Him? He will hurt himself.”
    “Why do you keep it?” asked Jack.
    Proudlocks shrugged. “To remind me of this country,” he answered. “When the things you say must happen, do happen, I will take it down. He will no longer worry us. But he is interesting to study. I do not think he is a happy man. He looks like a king, but I can see in his face that he does not believe he is one.”
    Jack nodded. “I am afraid he will try to be one.”
    “Yes. There is that to him.”
    Jack left Proudlocks and walked back to the house. He did not hate Englishmen, or Britons, or even kings. He was merely resolved not to be conquered by them. He did not hate Parliament; he merely feared its kingly powers. When he reached the porch of his house, he sat down and lit his own pipe, and let the quiet and darkness of the night coax from his mind another problem he had never been able to solve.
    One thing he had been unable to put into words was why he thought of himself as complete, why, against all his instincts for privacy, and contrary to his notion of vanity, he still measured men in terms of his own completeness, why he was certain that he was right about it, and why he was certain that this aspect of him always had and always would come between him and the others. He was certain, too, that there were words that would explain the completeness. Perhaps he had read them somewhere, words whose author had struggled to say the same thing, but whose final, precise form had eluded him, too. The problem came to the forefrontof his consciousness only at times like this one, when he was at peace with himself, when he was happy with the conduct and sum of his life, when he chose to rest for a moment and contemplate the pages and chapters of that life. The problem had perplexed him for as long as he could remember, clear back to his youth in Cornwall. It did not perplex him so much as remind him that it was there, waiting to be solved. He was in no hurry to solve it, though, for he knew that the words, once he found them, would simply confirm what he already knew, that everything he had ever done, had been right.
    Sitting alone on the porch steps, under an evening sky brilliant with the dust of uncountable stars, Jack Frake thought of the distance he had traveled since Cornwall. He felt proud of that distance, and of the fact that the boy who had begun that journey would be pleased with the man he had become. The boy would look at him and say to himself, “This is the man I mean to be.” He remembered that boy who, long ago, in a similar state of peace, sat alone before the fireplace of a seaport tavern, the boy who was not a stranger to him, and who still wondered what were the words for the unconquerable thing about himself that set him apart and permitted him a magnanimous certainty.
    The boy who was now a man now wondered why he felt that his serene solitude was right for him, and right for all men, if they could learn to know it and be unafraid of it. Hugh Kenrick