THE SLAVE SHIP
By Mary Johnston
SILVER CROSS
1492
CROATAN
THE SLAVE SHIP
THE
SLAVE SHIP
_By_
MARY JOHNSTON
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1924
_Copyright, 1924_,
BY MARY JOHNSTON.
_All rights reserved_
Published November, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE SLAVE SHIP
THE SLAVE SHIP
CHAPTER I
It was after Culloden. Though I, David Scott, was an unimportant person
yet I lay in the Tolbooth, in Edinburgh, with my betters. I was a young
man--twenty-two. I had fought for the Stuarts at Prestonpans, Falkirk
and Culloden, without the least question that I can remember arising in
my mind, that being the politics of my chief and my family and nearer
acquaintance. Now I made as little question that I would not lie there
in irons if I could help it. No, nor be shipped to Barbados or Virginia
if I missed hanging!
I loosened a clamped bit of iron from the wall and turned it into a
file.
It was dark night, a week later, when I got free. Dark and stormy and
chill--in June, I guessed. I lifted the stanchels from the window and
laid them all quietly upon the floor. Then I got through, and it was
narrow indeed, that window, but I was thin enough from little fare
and much misery. Got through and held by my hands for a moment, and
dropped, and I knew that there was deep depth and I might break my legs.
I did not so, but I was sair bruised and shaken, and I thought I heard
all around me whistles and calls, “He’s out! After him!” I crawled
across the narrow, narrow lane to a buttress of Saint Giles and lay
there shivering until I made out that it was only wind and rain and
my own heart pumping in my ears and that my bones were not broken. A
bell struck the middle night. I started up and began to weave around
that church, close to the abutments, skirting the shops built against
the wall. Every half-minute I looked toward Tolbooth. It was a wild
night, with gusts of wind and rain and strange sulphurous lights racing
through the clouds and at moments raising into an eerie quarter-light
Giles above me and that black mass I was leaving, and other tall, grim
houses of Auld Reekie. “A witches’ night!” I thought and wished I had a
broomstick to fly over the Luckenbooths and away. I was ragged and cold
and dizzied with hunger.
A fancied sound made me stand, scarce breathing, against the wall.
The sound proved nothing, but while I stood there I had a vision.
Gone was Edinburgh, gone the witches’ night. I saw and I breathed
and I knew, and yet could give no name nor circumstance, a blue salt
sea that rolled its long waves against a shore of dazzling sand. The
surf was high and strong and white; on the burning sand lay a row of
sharp-prowed, narrow boats; the sand stretched on and was met by palm
trees, I that had never seen palm trees knowing them well enough.
Stretched on and met palm trees, and a great mass of white masonry,
wall and gateway and turret, and a strange kind of keep rising behind,
and over all drooping an English banner. And I knew it and I didn’t
know it, and in a moment it was gone, and this was Edinburgh on a wild
night, and young David Scott, an escaping prisoner, with o’ermuch of
practical matters before him to spend time with visions. Scots folk are
liable to vision. Scots folk are baith the salt of the earth and the
dung of the earth. Scots know the hills of heaven and the pits of hell.
And there is a Debatable Land, but no Scots, I think, stay there long.
Young David Scott was already, I know, on his way across, to the side
of the dark.
This night in the material dark, in the material town, I had a goal
that was no more nor less than Sandy Scott’s small house on the
outskirts. If I could win there Sandy would hide me. I did it, stealing
and stopping and now and then running, through the witches’ night.
Crossing High Street, all the tall houses seemed to flare lights and
shout at me. Later, two men did rise to question me. But, “What are
_ye_ doing out at sic an hour, on sic a night? I’ve an honest
airrand, but I misdoubt yours--an’ I think I hear the Watch!” With
that, they turned quick their heads to listen, and I dived into
Willy’s Wynd, and worked through that into Auld Man’s Wynd, and so
pursued my journey.
An hour before the dawn I was at Sandy Scott’s and threw a clod against
his window. He was a cautious man, but at last he let me in.
“What good will it do you if two are hangit?”
“It isn’t a question of hanging but of slaving in Virginia. I’ve seen
it where I’m put down ‘Young and misguided.’ Let me lie in your barn,
Sandy, and if I’m tracked you can swear you didn’t know it.”
“If my name were Campbell that would pass. But it’s Scott.”
“Aye, I came on that. Let me in, man, let me in!”
For the better part of a week I lay in his small, small loft amid old
hay, and at night the cow munching and sighing below. Sandy brought
me food, and each morn a drop of rum, and at night the news. “They’re
speiring for you!”--“Jock Andrew at the Cannongate tauld me he saw ten
soldiers had seized a laddie, thinkin’ ’twas you.”--“Now they’re saying
a Dutch ship left Leith and you may ha’ swam out to her--and it seems
to me a ship’s the best you can hope--and I wad gae at once!”
But I was not determined. I did not want to go to sea, nor to a foreign
land--not yet! There was a glen that I wanted.
It was dull lying there upon the hay with a little light streaking
through a handsbreadth opening. On the second day I twisted around at a
noise and there, coming up the ladder, was Sandy’s wife, a pale young
woman with a kirk look. “I hae brought you,” she said, “the Book. It
maun be sair lying with naught tae do but picturing gibbets!” With that
she gave me a brown volume and shook her head and descended the ladder.
Well, I had the Book, and there’s no denying that reading made the
time pass. And that is all it did for me then--made the time pass.
I was turning from the light even then, David Scott at twenty-two,
foregathering with ancient, ancient cronies of the cave!
So I lay there and read about King David from the time he watched the
sheep and slew the giant until he died in Jerusalem. There was Jonathan
and the cave of Adullam, and the water that his men brought him, and
Michal, Saul’s daughter, and Abigail and Ahinoam, and Bathsheba the
wife of Uriah, and at the last Abishag the Shunnamite. And then I read
of King Solomon. And I read Ruth and Esther, and Haman’s gibbet made me
see the hugeous gallows in the Grasmarket built for them who had fought
for a Stuart, and the head on the spike atop the Tolbooth, and the legs
and arms of “traitors” nailed above the Leith Port. It darkened while I
saw all that until I could no longer read, and I lay there cold in the
straw and ached for vengeance. Off and on during the night, which was
wakeful, I saw these things, and when I started from dreams I knew that
I had been killing. Hawley first, and then all Hanoverians. They were
against me and thought they were victors; they were making me and mine
suffer, suffer terribly; they were altogether hateful and unworthy to
live! I killed them. Lying awake, panting a little, I still killed. And
as for the Stuart Cause, it was Ours and therefore exquisitely right.
I slept and when again I waked was rid of that frenzy, but felt hard
and dour. Dawn came in coldly, viewed from that strain between boards,
in Sandy Scott’s barn.
Mysie Johnston--that was why I wanted to go west from Edinburgh,
not east to any boat upon the salt, sair sea. Mysie Johnston--Mysie
Johnston.
Saying and feeling that brought me away from the evil anger and the
caked and frozen mood. Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie!
The glen would be green now, and all the birds singing. We would walk
there, and our arms would be about each other. Mysie, Mysie, Mysie,
Mysie, Mysie! _And I will be a better man. And I will be a better
man!_
So I thought, and maybe so I would. But I never saw Mysie Johnston
again--not in the outer world, not in the outer!
For the fourth morning they took me. That very night to come I was to
leave the barn and Sandy, for we thought, poor fools! that the search
was given o’er. A neighbor--and I mistrust that neighbor!--had told
him that a sergeant of Cope’s had told Phemie Nicholson that they had
tracked me to the waterside at Leith.--Sandy had a decent suit for me,
and I would foot it to a laird I knew beyond Melrose, who might give
me a horse and an errand west. For my name now, it was Will Anderson,
a good Whig name. Once in that glen that I kenned I might blithely
hide the summer through. After that it was just possible that the ill
wind that was blowing so fiercely might quiet down. In other words the
_wrong side_ might tire of hanging and drawing and quartering and
sending over seas in irons. So many “mights” and so many “ifs”, and it
all came to naught, and I had Mysie only in dreams, and after a time
the dreams died away.
Well, there I lay in the loft, quiet enough, and to wile the time read
of Daniel in the lions’ den, and about King Belshazzar and the hand
that wrote on the wall--when suddenly there was Sandy’s wife with
a white, white face and world’s end in her voice. “They’re hauding
him--they’re hauding Sandy by the aik tree! Five soldiers--they’re
coming!”
With that she slipped down the ladder, and the next minute I heard her
singing at her work, for all as if there was never but one party in
the world and that God’s party.
“O God, do thou raise up thyself,
The earth to judgment call;
For thou, as thine inheritance,
Shall take the nations all.”
I made a burrow deep in the hay and covered myself and the Book and lay
there stifling with a drumming heart. I remember--I remember! I clasped
that Book, and I cried, _but not aloud_, “O I was reading Ye!
If Ye are, save me now, save me and Mysie! And Ye will not let Sandy
suffer that’s doing a friend’s part. Save! Save!”
But they came into the barn. I heard them below, and one mounted the
ladder. “It’s dusk as sin up here!” Below him said another, “Look
out that he doesn’t dirk you through the hay!” The first, at that,
contented himself with a small trampling that did not bring him where
I lay under the eaves. Presently he spoke. “Time lost to toss all this
stuff aside! Easiest to fire it, and that’s what we’ll do. If he’s here
he’ll come out, and if he isn’t it won’t be Holyrood that’s burnt!”
He went down the ladder. Presently I smelled the brand. I came out.
They had taken away the ladder, so I held by my hands and dropped from
the loft, flame singing now in my ears. The lower room was filled with
smoke; through it I could just see them without the door, waiting for
the tod smoked out. I had no weapon. Out I came, helpless as the tod. I
was big and strong--“Big David Scott”--But what was that against five
armed men? If I turned wolf from tod and sprang at their throats, then
more surely still Hawley’s gallows in the Grasmarket! I walked out of
the barn, hands up.
Oh, waly, waly, waly, Mysie Johnston!
The Tolbooth opened once more and swallowed me. I lay there two months
expecting hanging. To this day I do not know the truth of my escaping
that death. Some influence somewhere, but whose it was I do not know.
Mysie had not the strength. Maybe after all it was God. But lying there
in the dungeon that was for folk like me, for big, strong young men
who broke gaol, I cursed God and was glad his book was burned in that
burning barn.
In August I was taken from prison and marched with five Jacobites,
young and middle-aged men, to Leith and set aboard the brig, _King
William_, bound for Virginia and carrying thither a great parcel of
poor men signed for servants to planters, and we six who had not signed
but who natheless went.