"I love you for it, granny. Never shall I forget your kindness and
the welcome you gave to the stranger from the night."
She kissed me tenderly.
"I am an old woman, Master Harry," she said, "and I may not live to
see it; but the day will come when you will be no longer a fugitive
from justice. So be not disheartened."
"And how could I be disheartened," I demanded, as I set her down,
"with two friends such as I may boast of?"
There was a mist before my eyes, and I was not sorry when Juggins
broke in upon our farewells.
"Come, come," says he. "You will be unmanning the lad, granny----"
"'Tis to his credit he hath so much sentiment," she returned, wiping
clear her eyes with a shaky hand. "But 'tis time he went, Robert."
"Aye, John Waterman will be waiting us at the Temple Stairs, and we
have little time to spare if we are to get aboard before the other
passengers. This de Veulle would recognize him, I fear, even in his
disguise."
I could not forbear a grimace at the reference to my get-up, a
linsey-woolsey shirt, with homespun jacket and breeches and a bobbed
scratch-wig, the whole designed to give me a rustic appearance, which
there can be no doubt that it did.
"Never mind, Master Harry," admonished Juggins as he clapped an ugly
beaver of ancient style upon my head. "In New York you will rig
yourself in forest-runner's garb, and forget that you ever played the
bumpkin. Give granny a last kiss, and----"
She flew at me, light as a bird; her arms clasped momentarily about
my neck; I felt her kiss on my cheek; and then she was gone from the
room. I may as well say here that I never saw her again, although
many a night as I lay under the stars I was to remember her quaint
ways, her sweet, shrill voice and loving smile.
But I had no opportunity for such thoughts as Juggins and I hurried
through the streets toward the river, where a wherry was awaiting us.
All the way he kept up a running fire of last-minute advice and
instructions.
"Guard well the letters I have given you, the one to Corlaer no less
than those to Governor Burnet and Master Colden. Corlaer, though he
be only a rude, unlettered woodsman, is none the less of importance
in the wilderness country. He hath the confidence of the Indians of
the Six Nations, a mighty tribe, or rather confederacy of tribes,
Master Harry. They were recently but five nations in their league,
but the Tuscaroras, after troubles with the colonists in the
Carolinas, came north several years ago and were accepted at the
Council-Fire at Onondaga."
"Are they friendly to Murray?" I asked as we reached the river and
climbed aboard the wherry.
"Nay, I think not. But you will learn beyond question in New York.
I have writ as strongly as a man may to Governor Burnet, but I would
have you say to him all that you can think of to urge him to a
vigorous course. 'Tis no hour for half-way measures. We must crush
Murray once and for all. If legal measures may not suffice, then let
us go without the bounds of the law."
We came presently to Greenwich reach, and steered a passage through
the river traffic to the side of the _New Venture_, a slovenly craft
of fair burthen, whose loose rope-ends and frazzled rigging
emphasized the confusion on her decks.
Master Abbot, her captain, a melancholy man in a tar-stained coat,
met us at the rail.
"The young man is not sure of himself afloat, and would seek his
berth," said Master Juggins, after the preliminaries had been passed.
"As he pleases," agreed Captain Abbot indifferently "Y'are the first
aboard, lad, and may choose your quarters."
"What choice have I?"
"Why, you may bunk with the second mate or one of the other
passengers. But no," he corrected himself; "I should have said with
one of two of the other passengers. The lady hath a cabin to
herself."
"The lady!" I exclaimed.
Master Juggins pursed his lips in a soundless whistle.
"So you carry a lady," he commented.
"Aye," replied Abbot, lapsing into his customary manner of
indifference, "and a sore nuisance it is, too, although it makes but
one in the cabin."
"Who is she?"
"I know not."
He turned to me.
"And now, young sir, what do you say? Will it be the second mate or
a passenger for companion!"
"The second mate," I said.
He nodded his head, called a seaman to carry my luggage below and
point the way, and walked off.
Master Juggins drew me back to the rail.
"'Tis best I should not wait," he said. "Stay below till you be safe
out of Thames mouth, Master Harry. You should be safe enough now,
but care is a sure precaution."
"I will not forget," I promised.
"And one thing more, lad. Do not stint your wants for money.
Governor Burnet will aid you to draw whatever you may desire through
the bankers in New York. Remember, you spend on my behalf. I would
willingly use all I have to thwart Murray. You will require
trade-goods for the savages, and perhaps equipment for yourself.
Purchase the best. Spend--and spare not."
"You are too kind," I mumbled.
"Say rather your father was too kind. 'Tis little enough I have been
able to do for you--sending you away, an exile, on a mission of
danger. Yet I would have you look upon it as a privilege, if you
will, Master Harry. When all is said and done, we are at war with
France. 'Tis no war of generals and armies and admirals and fleets,
I grant you. But war it is.
"True, there is the Peace of Utrecht, with all its ponderous
provisions sullying so many square inches of white parchment. It
proclaims peace. And nevertheless I say to you that we are at war."
He smote the rail with his hand by way of emphasis.
"What kind of a war?" I asked.
"Why, a war for the right to grow and to flourish, a war for trade.
At other times, mark you, nations clash over questions of honor or
territory. So their statesmen say. Actually there is a question of
trade or merchantry at the bottom of every war that has been fought
since the world began.
"The Romans crushed the Carthaginians--because they wanted another
corner of Africa? Never! Because only by so doing could they make
the Mediterranean a Roman lake and insure its control by their
shipping.
"And so today we are fighting with France for control of the trade of
the Atlantic--and control of the Atlantic trade means control of the
Western Plantations, America. We are fighting, Master Harry, with
laws and tariffs and manufacturing skill and shipping instead of with
men and deadly weapons."
"What is the immediate stake for which we fight?" I questioned,
interested as always when this extraordinary man unloosed himself in
conversation.
"The fur-trade. The country which wins the fur-trade will win
control over the greatest number of savages. And the country which
is so placed, especially if it be England, will win the military
struggle which some day will have to be fought for dominion in
America. So I would have you feel yourself a soldier, a general of
trade, sent out upon a venture of great danger and importance. It
may be, Master Harry, that you carry on your shoulders the future of
England and of nations yet unborn."
He fired me so that I forgot my clumsy garments and outward
character. I felt, I think, as any young knight who rides forth upon
a deed of errantry and adventure.
"All that I can, I will do!" I exclaimed.
"Good. I can not ask more."
He clasped my hand in a wringing grip.
"I see a wherry approaching from up-river. I had best be gone. Good
luck to you, lad, and write as occasion serves."
He went over the side with his lips pursed as if to whistle and a
look of doleful pleasure on his face. Him, too, as it happened, I
was never to see again. In fact, I wonder whether I should not have
leaped over the vessel's side at that moment had I realized how
complete was to be the severance of my life from all that I had known
before.
But I did not know. I walked away from the rail with a light heart,
inspired by Master Juggins' parting words and the vision he had
called up before my eyes. I cast only a casual glance at the
approaching wherry, which was still too far for me to observe whom
she contained.
By the cabin entrance under the poop I found the seaman who had
collected my scanty baggage, and he escorted me down the shallow
stairs into a dark passage, which led to the main cabin, a room at
the stern which ran the width of the ship and was lighted by three
windows. It was mainly occupied by a table and four benches clamped
to the deck. Off the passage itself, opened four doors, two on
either side.
"Where do you berth?" the seaman asked me, pausing at the foot of the
ladder-stairs.
"With the second mate."
He opened the first door on the right-hand, or starboard, side,
revealing a space so tiny that I marveled how two men could force
themselves into it at once. It was so low that I could not stand
upright, so cramped that there was room only for one person outside
the two short, shallow bunks which occupied two-thirds of its area.
"Do all the passengers lodge aft here?" I asked him carelessly as he
disposed of my trappings.
"All save the negro; he is to sleep in the galley behind the
companionway."
When he had gone I curled up in the lower bunk, which the second mate
obviously had surrendered to me, and spent the remainder of the day
in dozing and finishing off the shore-food Granny Juggins had
prepared for my hours of seclusion. I listened long for the other
passengers, but they kept the deck, probably watching the work of
getting under way and taking a last look at the shores of England--as
I should have liked to do myself.
I had not known my country much in recent years, and truth to tell,
she did not seem to care for me. None the less I loved the
emerald-green countryside, the soft sunshine through low-hanging
clouds, even the turgid reek of smoky, crowded old London.
At last I must have dozed, for I was awakened suddenly by the
strangest of sounds--a woman's voice singing. Clear and true, the
soprano notes came through the bulkhead at the foot of my bunk. It
was a song I had never heard before, with a Scots accent to the words
and a wonderful lilting melody that was somehow very sad all the
while it was pretending to merriment. I had never been in
Scotland--except for the sad venture of the '19; and that had left no
pleasant memories, God knows--but the song set me to mourning for the
heather-clad moors and the gray bens and the black lochs which its
words lamented.
I rose from my bunk, and, stealing to the door, set it open, so that
I might hear the better. The passage outside was empty, and the salt
sea-air blew down the open companionway an occasional gust of talk.
But I paid no attention to that.
I was so interested in the song and the singer's voice that I forgot
even to watch the door of the cabin next to mine where she was
singing. And judge to my surprize, as I leaned with my head bowed by
the low lintel and my eyes fixed on the gently heaving deck, when the
singer's door swung open and she stepped into the passage, almost at
my side.
Her surprize, as was but natural, was greater than mine. So we stood
there a moment within a long yard of each other, gazing mutely into
each other's eyes. She was a slim, willowy lass, in a sea-green
cloak that clung to her figure in the slight draft that eddied
through the passage.
Her face, flower-white in the dim light that came down the
companionway, had a sweetness of expression that belied the proud
carriage of her head and an air of hauteur such as I had seen about
the great ladies of King Louis' Court. Her hair was black and all
blown in little wisps that curled at her forehead and neck. Her eyes
were dark, too. Afterward I learned that they were of a dark brown
that became black in moments of anger or excitement.
"I heard you singing," I said.
She turned and made to reënter her cabin. But I raised my hand
involuntarily in a gesture of appeal.
"I am sorry," I went on quickly. "I did not mean to be rude. I--I
could not help it."
She regarded me gravely, evidently puzzled by the incongruousness of
my voice and my plowboy garments.
"You are never Scots, sir!" she answered finally.
"No, but I know Scotland."
A light dawned in her eyes with the words.
"Ah, then you will be knowing the song that I sang! 'Lochaber No
More' 'tis called, and a bitter lament of exiles out of their own
homeland."
"No, I never heard it before--but I have a brother buried on a
hillside far north of Lochaber, in the Clan Donald country."
The sorrow that came into her face was beautiful to see. None but a
person who had Gaelic blood could have sympathized so instantly and
so generously with a stranger's grief.
"That will have been the great sadness upon you," she cried in the
odd way that the Highland Scots have of using English. "Oh, sir,
your woe will have been deep! So far from his own home!"
"Yes," I assented; "and he an exile, too."
In that moment I felt for the last time all the old raging hatred of
the Hanoverian usurper, the hatred that springs from blood spilled
and unavenged; and even though the reason within me stilled the
tempest that memory had stirred, I knew, or something within me knew,
that I never could be happy under the immediate rule of King George.
"An exile!"
She leaned toward me, her eyes like stars.
"You will be one of the Good People!"
I did not answer her, too confused in my wits to know what to say;
and suddenly my confusion spread to her.
"It is wild I am talking, sir!" she exclaimed. "Never heed my words.
Sure, who would be trusting his heart's blood to the stranger that
stepped in his path!"
"I think I would trust mine to you," I answered boldly.