Читать книгу Rivers Parting - Shirley Barker - Страница 5

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John slept away that night in his narrow flock bed under the eaves at Old Thorny, restless with dreams that were almost too sweet for him to bear; and stumbling downstairs in the red daybreak, he cursed himself for being so slow to make up his mind, for not having brought Joan home half a year ago. His household was ahead of him at the board, Hob and Kit trying to tease the brindled mastiffs with a bone they’d already gutted the marrow from, but Watch ignored them, thumping his tail to welcome his master, and Warn, heavy with pups, drooped one wrinkled eyelid insolently toward the young fieldhands. Bet ladled up pease porridge at the fire, and Gilly, the dairymaid, handed round the bread and ale. John sat down at table’s head, petted the dogs, and greeted everybody a little shortly, for he was still sleepy. He stared across the smoky hall at a rusted suit of armor collapsed on a hook against the stillroom door. He’d never known it moved, much less worn, but it seemed to belong there, like the bunches of dried herbs spraying down from the hewn rafters, the iron spit by the hearth, or the blue tapestry wall cloth his mother wove, and he guessed he’d leave it there for his time.

“Down in East Country they’ll eat measled hogs,” old Jankyn, the shepherd, was telling Rob, “though we won’t here. If a hot wash don’t better the beast, I’d kill him and sell him for Norfolk.”

Rob shifted his creaking legs to the side of the bench away from the table and bent to cinch the leather band he always wore where the Spanish round shot had shattered his calf muscles. He straightened up, grunting.

“Don’t know ’tis measled,” he said. “Shouldn’t be, for it’s had plenty red ochre and no green acorns. Bet’ll look at it this morning, and Bet’d cure death itself. It’s a gift them has sometimes, who hasn’t much else in life.”

The three men turned silently to look at the woman, who was now swinging the crane from the fire and coming forward for her own meal. Bet had a skin like a last year’s quince and a shape like a hop pole, a tongue sharp as old cider, but soft hands when the cows were calving. She kept the best kitchen garden in Thurgarton Hundred, but she couldn’t keep her sweetheart, not after he’d got a look at that red-haired wench up in Papplewick who married him and then killed him, part with bad temper and part with bad cooking. Bet had taken service then with John’s mother, who was just breeding him, and she’d been there ever since. “Promised Mis’ Cecily on her death bed,” she would sometimes boast wryly, “young master John’d never lack a hot dinner nor a clean shirtband. An’ he hasn’t, has he?”

Wonder how she’ll take to Joan, he thought as he watched her. Two women between them could ruin any man’s house if they had a mind to it.

Jankyn stood up, drying his beard on his sleeve. “The lads are spoke to go with me today, Johnny. We’re scroudging brambles off Colwick sheep common, and all the farmers that use it be sending aid.”

“I remember, man. Told you last week we’d plan on it. Past threshing and too soon to butcher; jakes and chimney’s cleaned, and fresh straw all over. They’d go idle here.”

“Done plowing?”

“All but headlands—which I can do—and that little field up the Chase.”

“What are you going to seed it to, Johnny?” Rob wanted to know. “It’s lain fallow two year.”

“I know, but it’s poor land. I think maybe drink corn.”

Hob and Kit began to cheer. “Hurray for drink corn! What? Wheat in the house and no barley?”

“Come on, lads,” growled Jankyn, “we’ll be last men at Common.” He shoved the oak door open and they followed him into the yard.

Rob got to his feet, then sat down again. John watched him anxiously. He knew how the leg pained the older man, but he knew it pained him worse to feel he was useless, to sit hunched in the kitchen while the work of the farm went on without him. “Look, Rob,” he said, “take your time about it, but there’s harness to mend in the barn if you can get down there.”

“Now that I can do for ye, lad.” Rob’s face brightened and he fastened his jacket.

Bet climbed on a three-legged stool to hang the bacon flitch away. “Johnny,” she said, “I think ’fore Gilly gets to churning we better have her take the hogs to the wood and let ’em get another bellyful of mast, if we’re to slit their gullets next week. I’m going to gather sloes to dry against the flux—and look at that hog the pother’s over.”

“Sounds good sense. You folk could run Old Thorny without me sure.”

“We could run heaven without God,” she answered tartly, “but it wouldn’t be the same. Gilly! Gone to put a ribbon in her hair, likely. Please the pigs, it will. Gilly! Here, you.” She set a platter of broken meat between the dogs.

John stood up from the table, drew on his leather mittens, and went outdoors. As he stepped over the fieldstone sill, he felt a shudder go all through him, a shudder that did not come from the tang of the mild air. For a moment he thought he must be sick, and he had better go back and take a swallow of the brandy Squire sent around last year when his heir came of age. Then he shook his head. It’ll wear off, he thought. He crossed the packed turf of the farmyard, scored with hoofs and hobnails, and stopped by the barn door to take a look at the weather. Gray sky, come soft and low enough to put your finger into, and after a red sunrise—that would mean rain before dark. A flight of rooks in caw went beating south over the Trent, and the sight of them, even the sight of the familiar plowland lying all about him, seemed to make him feel worse.

No man can tell, he thought, the last time he goes afoot across his threshold, the last kiss he gives his girl. He remembered young men’s buryings he’d gone to. Jack Collin, a great runner, won the races on the Green at last year’s Lammas, and Jack got a little cut at hogsticking that left him swollen, black, and dead within the week. Tom Hedges was touched with the sun last summer, haying in the nether field, and went to lie down in the shade, and never stood up again. And others, like Rob, you couldn’t kill with a cannon ball. He, John, didn’t really ail; his heart just seemed to be strange and wandering a little in its beat. He’d heard that could happen to a man because of trouble in love, but he had no trouble in love, for he loved Joan, and Joan was as certain to him as night and day. No. His sickness was something else. It couldn’t be that talk he’d heard last night at the Bull’s Head. It wasn’t that.

He stepped into the barn through the slit door at the side, and stood a moment, smelling dung and clean clover hay, getting used to the dimness of it, the wooden arcs of the low bays, the full mows bulging overhead. Here waited the chain plow and the swing plow, the cradles, and scythes, and flails, all the useful friends he knew as well as the palm of his own hand that fitted to them. Jankyn’s sheep shears and reddle and marking iron lay neatly on the bench under the high window. Trust Jankyn to leave everything right—not like the lads. Here they’d gone piling the hop poles on the threshing floor, when they ought to know enough to put them in the hovel by the barley ricks. He kicked the stripped rods with bits of dry vine still clinging to them, and walked on to Meg’s stall in the third bay. All the other beasts were grazing, he’d kept her here for his purpose—but maybe he wouldn’t plow the little field today, after all, maybe he’d just spade headland. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. Meg whinnied, and he slapped her roan flank, but he went on past her, stepped around the wains, and took shovel and mattock.

Outside again, he turned between the helms full of sheaves for winter threshing and looked into the hog pen where Rob’s sick beast lay. It didn’t look so well, did it? No healthy creature’d lie in its own muck. Bet would probably know a dose for it. He walked on, up through the sloping crab orchard, and out on the open land beyond the trees. It was a little field, half blown-dust and half bramble roots, but it was the first field he’d ever set the plow to as a boy, and he loved it for that. It would never feed cattle or sheep, it would never grow good corn, but if he let it go fallow another year, more than Rob would ask where his wits were at. He stood there, in the red-brown, crumbled earth of it, with his back to Sherwood, and looked about him in the mild, gray air. Below him stood the house, red sandstone with thatch curved all over, like a beehive curving down; squat chimney, stemlike, in the middle; windows small and wide apart, framed with oak. East of it, and larger, loomed the stone barn and its cluster of ricks and hovels. He could see Bet in a blue cloak, peering into the hog pen. To the south lay the gardens: herbs, flowers, and kitchen plants, no blooms nor fruit now, all a welter of brown stalks and late leaves, red-purple, dull orange, and dark, undying green. And circling round three sides, east, south, and west, lay the fields—his fields—barley, pease, wheat, and fallow, bounded with quickset and holly hedge. Now what more could a man be after in this life, he thought, and as he thought it, a wind began to blow, a strong wind out of the west, that stirred no leaf in Gamwell Chase, no drift of smoke from the farmhouse chimney, but swept the man and left him shaking, like an aspen in a water meadow.

It was a wind that said come and not go, a wind that you knew had blown more than a thousand miles and tossed acres of thick boughs and salt washes of sea on its way to find you. It poured into you like the spring eagre pouring into Trent and gave your limbs at once a weakness and a strength they had never had before; sought out the soul wherever it hides in a man’s body, and spoke to it with the voice of God. Not the prim, cadenced voice he uses to talk Latin in the churches, but the voice that speaks within a man when death moves on his household, or in the hour before the women call out to him to come and name his son. The voice, awful and mighty, yet with something of your father’s voice in it. The voice that says, “This is as it shall be for you. There is no other way.” And that is good, for it is doubt, not certainty, that confounds a man forever.

And part of the strength in the strange wind’s blowing was this: that you knew, as well as if you could see the others, how you were not alone. How men all over England were shaken with the same wind, too, as it passed among the salt nets hung up in the Devon fishing towns, or crossed over the castled hills of the Welsh border, or swooped between the spires and tiled roofs by London Wall. A country squire, dwelling by Fleet Ditch midden and homesick for the Suffolk hedgerows felt it, and went home and sold land and made plans for shipping westward. A young wife by the reedy weirs in Lincoln felt it, and left off scribbling verses to pack her books and linen in chests that were said to be proof against sea water. The come-all wind from the great west blew on England, bare wold and market town, and cleft the generation that peopled it that autumn. Those who felt it were to go and those who did not were to stay, and there was no appeal from the doom of it. It blew strong and slow, as became a wind that had ten years blowing ahead of it. It struck John Scarlock, and stirred, and filled him, and raised him up, as high as a man can be raised on this earth without leaving it, and then it dropped him, like an empty haw, down on his knees on the thorny furrow.

After a few moments he climbed to his feet, awkward as Punch in the poppet show at Goose Fair, and plodded down the slope to the house, no purpose in his mind, only surprise at where his feet were taking him. The ground fell away below the east wall, and a little opening, just big enough for a man to crawl through, led into the root cellar. At the back of the root cellar, for safety, stood the great chest, and John found his fingers springing its catch in a way that none but the heir to the farm would know. First he drew out a smaller chest full of coins, and part of them he counted into his pockets, a part he put back. Then he took out a gray-yellow, crooked thing, the crumpled horn of a milch cow. He held it in his hand for a long moment. Then he dropped it back in the chest.

Inside the horn lay curled the parchment that said Old Thorny belonged to Scarlocks. John’s father had been a little wandering in his Robin Hood stories, but he was sure enough of how the land had come to them. “We had it from Peverells, and they had it from Doomsday Book. Earl William gave it to the Scarlock of his time because of the young wife he had....”

“Needn’t tell any more,” John had cried in disgust, and begun to whistle, “Cuckholds all a-row.”

“Shut your noise, boy. ’Twasn’t like that at all. Earl William’s wife were a poor creature with a sickly heir at the breast she couldn’t feed. But Scarlock’s wife took it and fed it—no lack o’ milk there. So we’d the choice of Colwick farms to pay for it—for the rent of twelve drops of woman’s milk a year.”

“How do you go about paying that?”

“You don’t, now. Been no one to pay it to, more years than I ever heard of. Sometimes I think what if some coxcomb should come by and say he was Peverell and claim all the years’ back rent. ’Twould keep a deal of wenches working.”

The memory brought a smile over the set mask of John’s face. He shut the parchment back in the chest and crawled out of the cellar, easing his heavy pockets through the gap. Whatever he came by in New Hampshire he’d have to take for himself. Papers from Doomsday Book wouldn’t help him there.

Bet and Rob stood by the hog pen as he came up to them. He could think now, not of what he had to do, but of how he must go about doing it.

“Oh—er—Rob,” he said, clearing his throat. “I got to go away from here for a while—I guess.”

Rob looked at him, a groove in his russet forehead, his gentle brown eyes blinking soberly. Bet stood still as a hitching post.

“What for, Johnny? Running from trouble?”

“No. Not that. Running to trouble, more like.”

“Not like I done? You don’t mean the war’s gone wrong? Be them Spanish bastards off the Hoe again?”

John looked down into the pen. The hog was on its feet, he noticed, gnawing a fat, yellow root, probably Bet’s medicine. He’d never know now whether it got well or not. He’d not have to worry about how to plant the little field.

“No. Not a war. I don’t know why I’m going ... except I have to.”

“I know.” Rob spat into the straw between his bulbous feet. “Same as I felt when Frobisher come by. He’d been up north to Finningly where he bought land after, and he stopped in the Bull’s Head at supper time. It was a better house then, with none of the knaves Jack Gambrell has there. I’d gone in town for a mug of ale, but you couldn’t sit an’ keep on drinking once you’d listened to him—not if you was six feet of muscle, like you be now and I was then. Well, I listened, and I was back—a cripple on Old Thorny within the year. He said the dons had took to sea and was going to make war on England, mostly on the forests of her, because that’s where the ship timber came from, and if there ever was one thing could make a don cry out for Christsake and a hail to Mary, ’twas an English ship with English men aboard her. He said they meant to burn our woods down and Dean was to be first. I thought quick of Sherwood, and if the others go, why what’s to save it? Trees there grew out of the same land as I did. Times I’d gone among ’em and put out my hand to the bark, and felt it like another hand to mine. And ships, and ships, and ships, has sailed out of Sherwood. Half of her’s gone to sea and rotted there!” His tone changed sharply. “But that was in my time, and my time’s done. Where be ye going, lad?”

“New Hampshire.”

“You mean Hampshire down on the Channel?”

“No. Not there. In the plantations.”

“Ye better stay home.”

“I know I better, but I’m not going to. Listen. I took fourth part of what was in the chest. Half part is for you and the land.”

“And t’other fourth?”

“T’other fourth’s for Joan Sweetapple at the Bull’s Head ... when she comes to you and says she wants it.”

“Oh, no! Pay off your tavern wench yourself, Johnny.”

“You’re down the wrong furrow, Rob. I mean to marry her, and if she has a child it’s mine and you’re to treat it so.”

“You’re wise to know so much.”

“And as soon as I can I’ll send for her.”

“You’re going to settle there? Then what’s for an heir to Old Thorny?”

The two men looked at each other, brown, lean-jawed, heavy-browed. John saw the scrolling lines in the old face, and for every line there he knew there would be one in his own some day ... if he lived long enough. He spoke with a good cheer he did not feel.

“Don’t worry, Rob. The land’ll raise one up. It never failed us yet. I’ll have boys a-plenty, and I’ll send you one of them.”

Their hands gripped, then fell apart.

“Good-bye, man.”

“Good-bye.”

John looked once up the Chase, at the tangling thickets and high wood beyond. Now he would never meet Old Will under the gnarled boughs in timeless moonlight. He did not look at the house and fields, nor at Rob and Bet. He squared his shoulders and walked off toward Nottingham.

The old pair looked after him.

“I was to sea once,” said Robin sadly. “I sailed with Frobisher ...”

“Yes,” answered Bet, “so I ha’ heard.”

“And there I met with a Swedish sailorman, white-haired and thick, weaned on salt water. He used to tell about small beasts he knew at home, like rats, they were. ‘Lemons,’ I think was the name.”

“ ‘Lemons’ is yellow quinces like that grows among the heathen. You can buy them in Thursday Market.”

“You have got the name wrong, woman, but no matter. Anyways, these beasts live in the uplands, and now and then they come together, thousands of ’em, and run full cry down valleys and town-lands like a hunt going over. Walls, an’ cities, an’ men can’t stop ’em, till they’ve done what they’re supposed to do, and that’s to plunge into salt sea an’ die. The why of it’s only because they has to. Seems like Johnny’s gone the way them creatures go.”

“He’ll not be back,” said Bet. “I know—none better—the look in a man’s eyes when he’s not coming back. Oh, Rob, let’s go and see if there’s help in Squire’s brandy.”

He turned to look at her and saw with surprise that tears were running down her face like rain down the bole of a gnarled apple tree in the spring. He cleared his own throat harshly, guiding her back across the yard. The cowshed door flapped in the risen wind. Suddenly, inside the house, the great throats of Watch and Warn lifted up their ancient note of wailing for the dead.

FROM BREW HOUSE YARD

Joan’s eyes burned dark with horror and she clenched her brown hands together, crushing the mopcloth between them till stale foam oozed out of it and dripped down her crimson skirt that she was usually so careful of. The reek of malt suddenly sickened her as it never had before. Aside a little, Walter Neal stood by, smiling, not cruel, not the man to delay himself too long for a barmaid’s sorrow.

“Johnny,” she said very low and quiet, “I—I didn’t think you’d go away from me.”

John heaved his shoulders restlessly. He knew she did not understand, and he could not explain all that had happened to him since this time yesterday, for he did not understand it himself. Maybe he never would. “Sherwood’s a field coppice beside the woods I’m going to,” Walter Neal had said, and he knew that he wanted to stand under those great trees and wonder at them. He had looked around Old Thorny and seen it was good, and maybe when a man sees he has shaped one thing well he feels bound to shape another like it. Maybe what he really wanted was to make all that wild riverside, Piscataqua, as tame and blooming as Trent valley. He would be inquiring into his reasons all the rest of his life, probably. And one thing he could never tell her, Joan, who believed only in the colors her quick eyes could see, in the substance of oak, and wool, and living flesh that she could put sure fingers on. She could never understand a blowing wind that did not rattle dead leaves or bend the chimney smoke. Such winds never blew on Joan. But what should he say to her? He remembered Ned Trigg’s urging. If she were Ned’s daughter, she might see Ned’s reasons.

“We’ll have a manor, Joan,” he said, feeling soiled and mean, knowing he did not want a manor.

She did not look at him, not daring to. “Old Thorny were good enough for a workhouse girl,” she said. There were matters she’d not be the one to speak of: love, and promises, and their holly wedding last night under the beech tree. She would jump through a hoop if he held it. She would never chide him or tell him what to do. But she could not understand.

He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. All right, if she felt like that. It would be a long time before he could talk to her again about it, not till he had her at home abed in the house he’d build by Piscataqua—a house to look like Old Thorny.

“I’m going, anyway. Half of what’s mine I left with Rob, and he knows it’s for you when you want it. And you’ll be coming to me.”

“Will I?”

“Did I ever lie to you?”

His gaze went into hers, speaking with such deep intimacy that she had to accept and believe. “Yes ... we’ll be together again ... in good time ... but no more now for a while. I promise you we shall be together. Parson in church may lie to you; maybe stars at night over Gamwell Chase will lie. But you can believe me when I tell you this.”

“Go on, then, Johnny,” she said, twisting her mopcloth. “I’ll be here when you want me.”

John took a step toward her, then drew back and turned to Walter Neal.

“So ... now?” he said.

Neal smiled and motioned to the open door.

The two men stepped out of the Bull’s Head into the street. Joan sank down on the settle and put her head in her lap. First their voices died away beyond the bow window, then the beat of hoofs rang fainter and fainter, dying too. A thin, seeping rain began to fall on Brew House Yard, where it seemed to her the sun would never shine again.

As John rode with Captain Neal over the brick causeway that spanned the crocus meadows reaching south to Trent, he did not look back, but the captain turned somberly. He saw the ramparts of the old town that remembered the Danes and Lion Heart, and the square castle and spired churches where a doughty sheriff must have worshiped before he went off to Sherwood to do his duty and be carried home with a cracked pate. The man beside him belonged to all that, and it belonged to him, safe and sure in possession. Then he thought about a slate-colored, houseless coast, dripping and low in the water; of salt swamp rimmed with hemlock trees, thrusting their gaunt roots like the feet of old men into tidal mud; of black-green wood stretching under the northern lights, unbounded and alien, full of unknown terror. And worst of all, in that country, when a man’s spirit in extremity cried out for the comforting presences of the well-remembered dead, it would cry in vain.

“John,” he said impulsively to the man riding beside him, “ ’fore God, I think you better go back. ’Fore God, I think it’s not fit for me to meddle so far with a man’s destiny.”

John rode with his head down, but his low answer carried. “If it hadn’t been you, it would have been another,” he said soberly. “I was meant to go.”

But Walter Neal shook his head. He often boasted that he had never believed in God after the bloody welter of his first battle, but he had been a child in the old faith. He made the sign of the Cross and muttered to the rainy wind, “Mary forgive me ... now and at the hour of my death.”

FROM PORTSMOUTH IN HAMPSHIRE

John Mason, the portly merchant, sat back from his writing table and smiled as he poured out two glasses of choice Madeira. He was a man of achievement; he had been governor of Newfoundland, and he had written a sonnet, the one readily and well, the other with much labor. Not old, but old enough to sit peacefully in a warm room and plan adventures for other men, he settled back on the turkey cushions and gave his attention to his companion, who was reading aloud from a legal paper. December twilight thickened beyond the panes, blurring the gables across Portsmouth high street, and a maidservant moved in the room now, lighting up the silver sconces. Fire crackled on the hearth, and a tortoise-colored cat padded down the crimson carpet, rubbing against Mason’s velvet knee and croaking softly. Up the stairwell drifted the thin, uncertain music his wife, Ann, was learning to make on her new virginals.

“What was that again, Walter? It sounded so fine. Let me hear it over.”

Walter Neal turned back a page and read, skipping and choosing. “The Laconia Company ... one body corporate and perpetual. Soil, ground, havens, ports, rivers, royal mines of gold and silver, pearls, precious stones, woods, quarries, marshes, waters, fishings, huntings, hawkings, fowlings, commodities, hereditaments, together with all prerogatives, jurisdictions, royalties, privileges, franchises and prehiminences ... to Captain John Mason and his heirs and assigns ... now and forever ... to be governed as he sees fit....’ ”

Mason took another swallow of wine. “Fine—again! And the limits to my power?”

Neal looked down mockingly at the page before him.

“You must govern according to the known laws of England.”

“Well, I don’t know of better ones. Ordered Newfoundland like that and made money. Anything else?”

“You can’t give it away to any foreign prince.”

Both men laughed. Neal reached for his glass. As he looked into the merchant’s face, the pleasant fatuousness dropped away from it, like a mask laid aside, and a young man eyed him back again, sharp, keen, honest.

“All right, Walter. So much for precious stones and hereditaments. Now what’s really there?”

“I’ve never seen it, sir.”

“I know you haven’t, but you’re thicker than three abed with one who has. What does your friend John Smith tell you?”

“He says in his book that there is good land behind the crags.”

John Mason poured out more Madeira.

“Never mind his book, or his map either. What does he say of it over a glass?”

“Says the time of year makes a difference on it. Cherries may grow in Kent, but you’ll find none there at Christmas.”

“Can’t you speak plainer than with proverbs, Walter?”

“He said he’d promise no gold mines.”

“Or leave a kiss within the cup ...”

chimed a girl’s voice at the virginals, high and clear. Mason’s eyes lighted. He’d forgotten his married daughter Tufton was coming for supper. Then he turned back to his captain.

“What else? Devil, it’s like drawing your teeth, man.”

All right, thought Neal, let him have it. Let him take his money out if he wants to. There’ll always be wars abroad I can get my bread by. He lowered his empty glass to the carved stand at his elbow and fixed his eyes on a tapestry against the far wall.

“He said he had seen land more fertile, but it will nourish man. He also said he never got a shilling out of it but what cost him a pound, and for himself he wouldn’t own a foot of it.”

Somewhere in the house supper was cooking. Neal could smell the fragrance of roast goose and herbs he did not know names for. The virginals were still.

Mason spoke broodingly. “All that means is this: we must put away fine schemes for my province of New Hampshire. It will not be a Spanish Potosi flowing silver. But I want my manor there—a hall built and fields cleared. And I want what the other adventurers want—my money back and more. Fish and furs should do it, and we look to you to find the Laconia Country within the year and start running the beaver off the great lakes there.”

“I wish I could get you to think about ship timber.”

“You’ve been Bedlam-mad about trees ever since the King let you go into the New Forest and sell off those rotted oaks to pay your company. I doubt we can better Riga fir anyway. No, it’s the cod and the beaver I look to for our return from there.”

“And those vineyards you were talking about last time I was here?”

“Now I’m not so sure about the vineyards as I was. I thought to plant both black and white muscadine, but John Scarlock says it’s scarce warm enough for them in England, and—he’s not so chary with truth as you are, Walter—he says he hears it about the docks that all America’s a frozen swamp.”

Walter Neal smiled and his eyes glowed deeply.

“So you’re listening to John Scarlock now? I told you he was a lad to watch.”

“I don’t know that I grant you that. He’s useful in stocking the ship, and he has that about him that should you put him down on a bare rock he’d be able to scratch a living there—but so would most yeomen. I do not find him so out of common. Couldn’t go from here to shire’s edge without meeting twenty like him.”

“Nor could you. That’s the glory of him, sir, and the glory of King’s England—the men who are not out of common. Why, I could go out on the downs and pick up a lump of sod, frozen over for winter now, but all alive with roots and quick to come again in March—furze, gorse, rosemary, what you will—pick it up and carry it across the sea and set it into the shale and clay between the great pines of Piscataqua. It would be a richer land for putting the old and the new together.”

“That I see, but damme if I see the point you’re making.”

“The point’s John Scarlock. Wherever we take him, there we take England. There we take a great, solid, root-gnarly lump of English earth to build into our new country. Do you see it now? I treasure him for all that he is and the wise use we can put him to.”

“There we take England,” mused John Mason into his ruddy glass. “Yes. We take all you say when we take John. But we take something else you have not reckoned with. Something that I am not sure of. Will he always yield kindly to our wise use, do you think?”

Wind blew up from the freezing harbor, rattled at the casements.

“Last night I had a dream, and in it I was stone-blind. Stone-blind, and made to sit and sign my name forever on leaves I could not read!”

Neal drew down the corners of his mouth. “I would not like to dream that,” he said.

“But I think now that perhaps it was less a dream than truth. We set our names at the bottom of all kinds of high schemes without ever knowing quite what they’ll come to, or what will come of them that can change the world. In my dream I was afraid, Walter.”

Neal made no answer, and after a moment his host stood up. “There’ll be supper downstairs,” he said, and then added, staring into the lighted gables across the street, “Well, come March or April, the ship’ll be ready for you, and the goods, and the men. Take England, if you will. You can’t very well go without her, since there’s something in every man of the land where he was bred, more in some than in others. But know what it is you’re taking. I love it too, but it’s a stubborn country, bitter and unruly, and its course you cannot always predict. If you doubt my word, go up to Whitehall, and ask King Charles about it.”