I cleared my throat again. “I think you might be,” I said. “I think you would be, if—”
He came forward quickly; stopped; then stepped close up to me and dropped his hand on my shoulder. “Why—” he said, and there was a thickness in his speech that somehow brought moisture into my own eyes—“why, I’ve been planning—I came here to ask for your —why, yes! I think I would take a passenger for any port this side of hell, or the other side, for that matter, if Captain Nason wished to go there!”
* * *
It was not until the Chasseur was at sea that I told this gallant friend of mine why I had asked him to carry me to Nantes. Then, in his pleasant cabin and across his damask tablecloth, I told him everything, even why the Lively Lady, lying deep within the closure of the waters we traversed, bore upon her prow a figurehead—now, alas! encrusted—that when he saw it had hair the color of rubbed copper and was gowned in shimmering green. I told him, too, how Jeddy Tucker, who had so often fought upon our native shores and upon shipboard, enraged by any word of admiration for John Paul Jones, had contrarily fought the British naval officer in Portsmouth for referring slightingly to that same John Paul Jones.
When I had finished speaking of this strange action of Jeddy’s, Captain Boyle’s eyes danced; then he became graver, looking at me intently. “Splendid!” he said in a low voice. “I think it’s a sign. I think it’s one of the many signs—signs that the great thing is done.”
“What great thing?” I asked.
“The greatest thing in the world for your country and mine,” he answered. “Before we fought England this second time we were not a nation. We were a few millions of individuals, scattered into arguing, backbiting groups—towns and communities and separated jealous states; every man for his own section; every section for itself. Now your Jeddy Tucker fights for the good name of an American hero because he can bear no tarnish put upon a national brightness; and that spirit is everywhere among us, because we’ve found out that we’re America. Not many men know better than you what suffering the war has brought, Captain Nason; but history must say it has done a great task, and that Dartmoor was worth the price. We’re a nation at last.”
XXXIII
THUS Pembroke lay at a dock on the lower end of the Isle Feydou, huge and towering in the pale night mist that drifted down the Loire from the vine-clad hills above it; and I, standing close under her high sides, called softly up to the watch on deck to know whether Cephas Cluff was aboard.
“He might be, an’ again he mightn’t,” the watch drawled. “Depends on who wants him.”
Cephas himself spared me the trouble of answering by appearing above the taffrail, broad of beam against the starlight beyond.
“Come down here,” I said to him. “I want a word with you where we won’t be heard.”
“Land o’ Goshen!” Cephas whispered, staring fixedly at me. “My land o’ Goshen!” He moved quickly and lightly to the companionway and came over the side; then held to my hand with his great rough fist and breathed heavily. “It’s you!” he said. “Where’s the others, Cap’n? Gorry, we been afraid you wouldn’t never come! Aye, we mighty near believed you wouldn’t never come!”
I stood and looked at him, afraid, almost, to ask the questions that boiled in my mind.
He nodded at me. “They’re aboard,” he said. “They been living there. She’s in the captain’s quarters. Jeddy said you’d want it that way.”
“Is she—how is she—”
“Good!” Cephas assured me emphatically. “Food’s a thousand percent better since she came aboard. Ain’t nothing gets by her!”
“Well,” I said, “as soon as we settle with the Latours we’ll clear for Plymouth and pick up the rest of the crew. Captain Boyle’s tending to it for me.”
I ran up the companionway, leaving Cephas breathing heavily behind me, and went aft to the cabin. The door to the captain’s quarters stood ajar, and beyond it I heard voices. I listened, my heart thumping fit to burst.
I recognized Jeddy’s impudent tones. “Box-hauling,” he was saying, “is a piece of seamanship you use to claw off a lee shore, provided you got plenty of hands aboard. Say you’ve reached for a point in a heavy gale and find you ain’t going to make it, account of wind and sea and currents; there ain’t time or room to tack, so you box-haul her. Here she is, coming into this point here. The spoon’s the point and the fork’s the wind.”
“I can see it quite plainly,” a voice said—a soft and husky voice that set the blood to pounding in my head, “and it’s not necessary for you to tip her like that. You know how I’d feel if she were broken.”
“I’ll thank you not to tell me that again, ma’am,” Jeddy replied brusquely. “Now, ma’am, having her in that position, you got to turn quick—turn her on her heel. All right: you clap your helm a-lee, haul up your mainsail, brail up your mizzen and mizzen staysail, square the after yards, let go the fore tack, sheet, bowlines and lee braces— be so kind as to point ’em out, ma’am.”
“Here and here and here,” said the soft and husky voice.
“Correct, ma’am,” Jeddy said. “Then you brace the head yards sharp aback, haul over the weather jib and foretopmast staysail sheets, and she pays round off on her heel—and there you are, ma’am, free of your lee shore and headed for open water. Now, what was it she done to get there, ma’am?”
The soft voice answered him in the tone of an obedient child saying her lessons. “The main and mizzen topsails lying aback gave her stemway, and when the larboard side of her rudder pressed against the water in backing, it helped her head to cast to larboard.”
I opened the door softly and went in. At the long gold-covered table beneath the silver lamps sat Emily and Jeddy, their backs to me and their heads close together over the small bone frigate I had last seen in the dreary market place of Dartmoor Prison. Beyond them rose the rudder case, carved and colored to represent a close-packed stand of bamboos; and because of the swirling in my head at the sight of Emily, the carved green fronds that branched above her seemed to sway and flutter in a silent breeze.
“So there we are,” she said, looking at Jeddy, “free of our lee shore and headed for open water.” Then her eyes descended to the little frigate; her head bowed and her figure drooped. “Headed for clear and open water,” she said sadly. “Ah, if we were! Do you think we ever will be, Jeddy?”
There was a faint growl, and my little white dog Pinky came out from behind the rudder case, walking importantly on his toes, to stand peering doubtfully at me. Emily, seeing him staring beyond her, looked up into one of the paneled mirrors. Her widening eyes met mine. With a fluttering hand she set down the frigate, and even before she turned to me I could see in those dazed, widening eyes of hers all I had ever hoped to have of life.
“Free of our lee shore,” I said unsteadily. “Free of our lee shore, my dear, and headed for clear and open water.”
THE END
AUTHORITIES
On privateering, seamanship, and the War of 1812: ABBOT, WILLIS J., American Merchant Ships & Sailors; BOWDITCH, NATHANIEL, New American Practical Navigator; CHAPELLE, HOWARD IRVTNG, The Baltimore Clipper; CHAPIN, HOWARD M., Privateer Ships & Sailors; CHATTERTON, E. KEBLE, Sailing Ships & Their Story; CHATTERTON, E. KEBLE, Ships & Ways of Other Days; COGGESHALL, GEORGE, History of the Americnn Privateers; DAVIS, CHARLES G., Ships of the Past; ESSEX INSTITUTE, COLLECTIONS OF THE, VOL. II, NO. 2, Private Armed Vessels Belonging to Salem During the War of 1812; ESSEX INSTITUTE, COLLECTIONS OF THE, Jan. 1901, Account of the Private Armed Ship “America” of Salem; JAMESON, JOHN F., Privateering & Piracy in the Colonial Period; JOHNSON, CHARLES H. L., Famous Privateersmen & Adventurers of the Sea; LEVER, DARCY, The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor; MACLAY, EDGAR S., History of American Privateers; MAHAN, Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812; PEABODY, ROBERT E., The Log of the Grand Turks; ROBBINS, ARCHIBALD, Journal of the Loss of the Brig “Commerce"; ROOSEVELT, THEODORE, Naval War of 1812; SCOTT, MICHAEL, Tom Cringle�
�s Log; SHERBURNE, ANDREW, Memoirs; STATHAM, COMMANDER E. P., R.N., Privateers & Privateering.
On Dartmoor Prison, and on conditions in England and France at the end of the Napoleonic Wars: ABELL, FRANCIS, Prisoners of War in Britain, 1756-1815; ANDREWS, CHARLES, The Prisoner’s Memoirs, or Dartmoor Prison; BROEMEL, P. R., Paris & London in 1815; COBB, JOSIAH, A Green Hand’s First Cruise, & Five Months in Dartmoor Prison; HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (edited by), Yam of a Yankee Privateer; LOLIEE, FREDERIC, Prince Talleyrand & His Times; PALMER, BENJAMIN F., Diary of (at Melville Island & Dartmoor); RECORDS OF ARUNDEL PRISONERS, Registry of Prisoners of War (Dartmoor Section), Public Record Office, London; THOMSON, BASIL, The Story of Dartmoor Prison; VALPEY, JOSEPH, JR., Journal of (in Dartmoor Prison); WATERHOUSE, BENJAMIN, Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts ... at Dartmoor.
The descriptions of the Chasseur and the second Lively Lady are based on Model 986 in the Louvre Marine Museum—that of the brigantine La Gazelle, 18 guns, built at Bayonne on the plans of M. Marestier and launched in 1822. Mare-stier studied Baltimore clippers in America for the French navy; and La Gazelle is believed to be the only existing model that accurately reveals the lines of the best Baltimore clipper privateers of the War of 1812.
The author gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of Mr. Booth Tarkington, Mr. Howard Irving Chapelle, Commandant Edward Hubert of the Louvre Marine Museum, Mr. Henry Dawes, secretary to the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Mrs. Marion Cobb Fuller of the Maine State Library, Captain William H. Gould of Kennebunkport, Me., Mr. J. Templeman Coolidge, Mr. Irving R. Wiles, and the Library of Congress.
Maine was in Kenneth Roberts' blood. Arundel was the seaport town originally named in memory of the Earl of Arundel, to whom the British Crown granted rights in a large part of Maine. It later took the name of Kennebunkport, and it is here that Kenneth Roberts' parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and he himself lived. To Berwick and Kittery, not far away, his ancestors had come in 1639, and for the two stormy centuries that followed they were a part of the history of the state. They fought with Washington, they followed Benedict Arnold to Quebec, they manned privateers in the War of 1812. Asked once why he always—nearly always— wrote about Arundel people, Mr. Roberts said, "They're me. they couldn't write, and I can. 1 owe it to 'em."
After graduating from Cornell University, Roberts wrote in a humorous vein for the Boston Post, Life (pre-Luce), and Puck, until the First World War took him to Siberia as a captain in the American Expeditionary Force. After the war, the Saturday Evening Post signed him up as its roving correspondent in Europe and Washington. In 1928 he turned from journalism to writing the historical novels that made him famous.
The best known of Roberts' nine novels are Arundel, Rabble in Arms, Oliver Wiswell, and Northwest Passage, which was made into a 1940 movie starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Young. "Kenneth Roberts established and maintained a reputation throughout his literary career as an author whose books were not only enjoyable to read but were models of historical writing and accuracy," writes Jack Bales in Kenneth Roberts: The Alan and His Works. In 1957, one month before he died, Roberts was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize citation for having "long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American History.''
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