The Yeoman Adventurer Part 56

"The time came when you were in danger, and I, in my turn, left my father and rode hard to save you. I am not boasting, you understand, sir. I am merely stating a fact. I rendered service for service, like for like, did I not, sir?"

"You did, madam, and did it splendidly," said I.

"Then, sir, when we meet again," she said, and she was now speaking very clearly and sweetly, looking me full in the eyes, potent in all her beauty and queenliness, "when we meet again, we meet on level terms."

"Are you ready, lad?" called Master Freake.

"Coming, sir!" I cried, almost glad at heart of the escape.

"One moment, Oliver!" said Margaret. "So anxious to be rid of me? Nay, I jest of course! I've a little present for you here, Oliver. It will, I hope, make you think of me at times."

"It will not," I replied, smiling. "It will make me think oftener of you, that's all."

She handed me the box, and we walked up to the boat.

The half-moon was bright in an unclouded sky, and it showed me tears on Margaret's cheeks, as I bent to clasp and kiss her hand. Then I said good-bye to Master Freake and Dot, and was helped into the boat.

So we parted, and I set my face toward the New World. For ten weary months there is nothing to be said that belongs of right and necessity to my story.

Except this: The first thing I did when I was alone in my cabin on the good ship, the "Merchant of London," was to open Margaret's box. It contained a full supply of books wherefrom to learn "the only language one can love in," and on the fly-leaf of a sumptuous "Dante" she had written, "From Margaret to Oliver."

CHAPTER XXV

I SETTLE MY ACCOUNT WITH MY LORD BROCTON

Of how I fared the seas with Jonadab Kilroot, master of the stolid barque, "Merchant of London," I say nothing, or as good as nothing. Master Kilroot was a noisy, bulky man, with a whiff of the tar-barrel ever about him and a heart as stout as a ship's biscuit. He feared G.o.d always, and drubbed his men whenever it was necessary; in his estimation the office of sea-captain was the most important under heaven, and Master John Freake the greatest man on earth.

The ship remained at anchor in Dublin harbour while tailors and tradesmen of all sorts fitted me out, for Master Freake had given me guineas enough for a horse-load. I did very well, for Dublin is a vice-regal city, with a Parliament of its own and reasonable society, so that the modes and fashions are not more than a year or so behind London, which did not matter to a man going to the Americas.

From Dublin I wrote home. I had laid one strict injunction on Margaret.

She was not to go to the Hanyards, or write there, or allow anyone else to do either. I would not suffer her to know, or to run any chance of knowing, about Jack. She was greatly troubled over the matter, but I was so decided that she consented to my demand. It cost me a world of pains to write. I wrote, rewrote, and tore up scores of letters. Finally I merely sent them word that I was going to America to wait till the trouble was blown over, and that I should be with them again as soon as possible. I gave them no address. It was cowardly, but I could not bring myself to it.

The nightmare that haunted me was my going home, home to our Kate, the sweetest sister man ever had, with her young heart wrapped for ever in widow's weeds. I used to dream that I rode up to the yard-gate on Sultan, and every time, in my dream, the Hanyards looked so desolate and woebegone, as if the very barns and byres were mourning for the dear dead lad who had played amongst them, that I pulled Sultan round and spurred him away till he flew like the wind, and I woke up in a cold sweat.

On a Wednesday morning in the middle of February the "Merchant of London"

swung into Boston Harbour on a full tide and was moored fast by the Long Wharf. Master Kilroot hurried me ash.o.r.e to the house of the great Boston merchant, Mr. Peter Faneuil, to whom I carried a letter from Master Freake. It was enough. My friend's protecting arm reached across the Atlantic, and if it were part of my plan to tell at length of my doings in the New World, I should have much to say about this worthy merchant of Boston. He was earnest and a.s.siduous in his kindness, and so far as my exile was pleasant he made it so.

Mr. Faneuil was urgent that I should take up my abode with him, but this I gratefully declined, and he thereon recommended me to lodge with the widow of a ship-captain who had been drowned in his service. So I took lodging with her at her house in Brattles Street, and she made me very comfortable. She had a daughter, a pretty frolic la.s.s of nine, who promoted me uncle the first day, and one negro slave, who was the autocrat of the establishment till my coming put his nose out of joint, as we say in Staffordshire.

Master Kilroot unshipped most of his inward cargo and sailed away for Carolina and Virginia to get rice and tobacco. Then he would come back here to make up his return cargo with dried fish, to be exchanged at Lisbon for wine for England. This was his ordinary round of trade, and a very profitable traffic it was.

When he had left, I settled down to make my exile profitable. By a great slice of luck there was at this time in Boston an Italian, one Signor Zandra, who gave lessons in his native tongue openly and in the art of dancing secretly. The wealth of the town was growing apace; there was a leisured cla.s.s, and, speaking generally, the Bostonians were alert of mind and desirous of knowledge above any other set of men I have ever lived among. In the near-by town of Cambridge there was a vigorous little university with more than a hundred students. Moreover, there was a rising political spirit which gave me a keen interest in the men who breathed the quick vital air of this vigorous new England. In many respects I found myself back in the times of Smite-and-spare-not Wheatman, captain of horse in the army of the Lord-General. The genuine, if somewhat narrow, piety of the Bostoneers reminded me of him, and still more their healthy critical att.i.tude towards rulers in general and kings in particular. They had the old Puritan stuff in them too, for some eight months before they had captured Louisberg from the French, a famous military exploit which the great Lord-General would have gloried in.

My days were all twins to each other. Every morning, after breakfast, I went abroad and always the same way: past the quaint Town House, down King Street, and so on to the Long Wharf to see if a ship had come in from England, and to ask the captain thereof if he had brought a letter for one Oliver Wheatman at Mr. Peter Faneuil's. I got no letter and no news. Then, always a little sad in heart, I strolled back, and looked in at Wilkins'

book-shop, where some of the town notables were always to be found, and where, one May morning, as I was higgling over the purchase of a fine Virgil, I made the acquaintance of a remarkable young gentleman, Mr. Sam Adams, a genius by birth, a maltster by trade, and a politician by choice.

We would discuss books together in Master Wilkins', or slip out to a retired inn called "The Two Palaverers" and discuss politics over a gla.s.s of wine and a pipe of tobacco. I liked him so much that I was afraid to tell him I had been fighting for the Stuarts, and was content to pa.s.s in the role Mr. Faneuil had a.s.signed to me of an ingenuous young English gentleman who had come out to study colonial matters on the spot before entering Parliament. Our talk over, I went on to Signor Zandra's and worked at Italian for two hours. Most days I took him back to my lodging for dinner and read and talked Italian with him for another hour or two.

The rest of the day I gave to reading, exercising, and, thanks to the good merchant, to the best society in Boston.

Occasionally, when I knew for certain that no ship would clear for home for two or three days, I made little shooting journeys inland, but in the main this is how I spent my days, filling them with work and distraction so as not to have idle hours for idler thinking. Spring pa.s.sed, summer came and went, and the leaves were turning from gold to brown when one morning, as I was at breakfast, Mr. Faneuil's man came in with a letter.

It was from Master Freake, summoning me home as all was put right. It contained a few lines from Margaret, written in Italian. A ship was sailing for London that day, and I went on her.

Jonadab Kilroot had found his way across the Atlantic into Boston Harbour much more easily than I was finding mine across London to Master Freake's house in Queen Anne's Gate. It was after nine at night, at which late hour, of course, I did not intend to arouse the inmates, but I meant to find the place so that I could stand outside and imagine Margaret within, perchance dreaming of me. At last I observed that men with torches were clearly being used as guides through this black maze of streets, and I stopped one such and offered him a guinea to do his office for me. He was a lean, shabby, hungry-looking man, who might be forty by the look of him.

He stared vacantly at me for a few seconds, and then hurriedly led the way, holding his link high over his head.

This trouble over, another began, which put me in a towering rage. A gaudy young gentleman b.u.mped into me and, though it was clearly his fault, I apologized and pa.s.sed on, leaving him hopping about on one foot and nursing the other, which I had trodden on. He swore at me worse than a boatswain at a lubber, and but for the exquisite pain I had caused him I should have gone into the matter with him. I found my linkman leaning against a post and laughing heartily.

"Never you mind, sir. He'll not take the wall of you again in a hurry."

"Take the wall?" I said.

"Done on purpose, sir, to pick a quarrel with you. The young sparks do it for a game."

Not much farther on, we met a sedan, with an elegant young lady in it, and an elegant gentleman walking along by her close up to the chains, she being in the roadway. There was ample room for me to pa.s.s between him and the wall, which was also the courteous thing to do; but as soon as my linkman had pa.s.sed him, he shot clean in my way. I gave him all the wall he wanted and more, b.u.mping his head against it till he apologized humbly through his rattling teeth. The lady shrieked viciously at me, and one of her chairmen, my back being turned, pulled out his pole and came to attack me. My man, however, very dexterously pushed the link in his face as he was straddling over the chains, and he dropped the pole and spat and spluttered tremendously. I stepped across to the lady and apologized for detaining her, and then my man and I went on, easy victors.

Arrived at Queen Anne's Gate, another surprise awaited me. Master Freake's windows were ablaze with light, and the door was being held open by a man in handsome livery to admit an exquisite gentleman and a more exquisite lady who had just arrived there in chairs. I gave my man his guinea, and after dousing his link in a great iron extinguisher at the side of the door, he sped happily away. After watching the arrival of three or four more chairs and one carriage, I summoned up all my resolution and gave a feeble rat-tat with the ma.s.sive iron lion's-head which served as knocker.

The man in livery opened to me, and I was inside before he could observe that I was an intruder. True, I was in my best clothes--my Sunday clothes, as I should have called them at home--and they were none so bad; but they had been made in Boston, where fashions ranged on the sober side. Here I looked like a sparrow in a flight of bull-finches.

"Can I see Master Freake?" said I.

"No," said he, with uncompromising promptness.

"Is he at home?"

"No," he retorted.

"This is his house, I think?"

"It is," he a.s.sented.

"Then I suppose all these people are coming to see you--and cook," said I gravely.

The sarcasm might have got through his thick skin perhaps but for the intervention of another liveried gentleman, who briefly a.s.serted that I was "off my head," and proposed a muster of forces to throw me out. My own feeling distinctly was that I was on my head, not off it; but his suggestion interested me, as I do not take readily to being thrown out of anything or anywhere. Luckily, a fresh arrival took their attention off me for a minute or two, and while I was standing aside to admire the lady, who should come statelily down the grand staircase into the hall but Dot Gibson. He too was in livery, but of a grave, genteel sort.

"h.e.l.lo, Dot," said I, accosting him quietly.

It bounced all the gravity out of him. He shook my outstretched hand vigorously, and then apologized for doing so, saying he was so glad to see me. "Jorkins, you great a.s.s," cried he to the first servant, "what do you mean by keeping his honour waiting?"

Jorkins looked apprehensively at Dot and the suggester of violence looked apprehensively at Jorkins; but Dot was too full to bother with them, and went on: "Mr. Freake will be delighted, sir, and so will Miss Waynflete.

They're always talking of you. Come along, sir! Allow me to precede you."

He took me upstairs into the library, and left me there alone. In a few seconds Master Freake burst in on me.

"My dear lad," he cried, wringing my hand heartily, "welcome--a thousand times welcome!"