CHAPTER X.

"THE MIGNONNE."

Eight months had passed; March of the year 1759 had come, and a bitterly cold east wind blew up Bugsby's Reach, causing the pennons on countless barges and frigates and brigs, to say nothing of great ships of war lying in that classic piece of water, to stream out like pointing fingers towards where, above all else, there glistened in the wintry afternoon sunlight the cross surmounting St. Paul's. It whistled, too, through the shrouds of a French-built frigate, one that in earlier days would have been spoken of as "a tall, rakehelly bark," a fabric that was beautiful in all her lines, in her yacht-like bows and rounded stern, in her lofty masts, stayed with supreme precision; in her shining afterdeck brasswork, her wheel carved and decorated as though the hands of dead-and-gone Grinling Gibbons might have been at work at it; upon, too, her brass capstan and binnacle. A French frigate pierced also with gun ports below, and bearing for her figurehead the face and bust of a smiling, blue-eyed child, which figurehead represented the name she bore upon her bows, _Mignonne_.

Yet French as she was, and as any Jack Tar would have informed you in a moment had you not known--after he had run a fierce eye along her shape and marked other things about her as well--there flew above her no flag proclaiming that she was owned by Louis le Bien-aimé (Bien-aimé by countless women, perhaps, but never, surely, by the subjects whom he taxed and ground to the soil they sweated over). For instead, streaming out from her mainmast there flew, because it was war-time and she lay in the King's chief river, the Royal Standard of England; from her foremast, the Anchor of Hope, the flag of the Lord High Admiral; and from her mizzen, the white flag, with the red St. George's cross; also she flew the same flag from her jack-staff.

French though she may have been, none who saw those noble ensigns could doubt what she was now.

In fact, she was a capture, taken by an English ship, which in her turn had once been French--_Le Duc d'Acquitaine_--and she lay, on this wild, tempestuous March day, off Blackwall and the historic Bugsby's Hole, under the temporary command of Captain Sir Geoffrey Barry. There are ironies in the life of other things besides human beings--in ships, perhaps, more especially than amongst other inanimate creatures--and the _Mignonne_ was an example that such was the case. In her thirty years of existence she had been fighting fiercely on behalf of France against her hereditary foe--England; now she lay in the Thames, serving as a vessel into which were brought scores of impressed men, as well as scores of others who were burning to fight as willing sailors against her former owners.

For at this time there was a hot press wherever men could be found; all along and around the coast of England it was going on; every vessel of war was being stuffed full of Englishmen who, willingly or unwillingly, had to take part in the deeds that were doing and that still had to be done.

Were not privateers and merchantmen being taken daily? Was not Boscawen raging the seas like a devouring lion; Sir Edward Hawke hurling insults at the French fleet in an attempt to bring them to action; Rodney bombarding their coast? Were not those French also swearing that, ere long, their invasion of England should take place, and should be final, decisive, and triumphant?

No wonder, therefore, that sailors were wanted--and found! No wonder that husbands were torn from their wives, and fathers from their children; that men disappeared from their homes and were never more heard of, since, often not more than a month later, they were lying at the bottom of the sea, after having been sunk with their ships in some great naval fight, or, having been slain on board those ships, had next been flung over their sides--legless, armless, headless.

Geoffrey Barry was not alone in the _Mignonne_. With him, as sharer of that old after-cabin, with its deep stern walk, whereon she sat sometimes for hours regarding all the traffic of the great and busy river, was his wife, sweet Ariadne, who (until the _Mignonne's_ anchor should have been catted and fished, and her canvas sheeted home as she set out on her voyage round England, to distribute the men she had gathered to the various great ships of war in need of them) would remain ever by his side. For she could not tear herself away from him to whom she was but newly wedded; she could not look with aught but tearful apprehension to the moment, the hour that must inevitably come, when, for the last time, she would feel his arms about her and his lips pressed to hers. The hour when he would go forth to distribute those men, and would then, after putting his own ship into fighting trim, join either Rodney, Boscawen, or Hawke, as their Lordships might see fit to direct.

"Oh, Geoff! oh, Geoff!" she cried, as now on this afternoon she sat by his side, their dinner and their dish of tea both over, "oh, Geoff! who that did not love him fondly, madly, would be a sailor's wife? But three months married are we, and the time has come, is close at hand, for us to part. What will become of me?"

"Heart up, sweet one," her husband said in answer, even as, while he spoke, he glanced through the quaint square ports, across which were pulled back the prettily flowered dimity curtains that had adorned the windows of the _Mignonne_ when a French captain had sat in the selfsame cabin, with, perhaps, his own wife by his side. "Heart up, mine own. 'Tis glory, my flag, I go to win. Glory for thee and me. What! shall my Lady Barry give precedence to any in our old Hampshire, where for many a long day the Barrys have ruled the roast. You must be an admiral's wife, sweet; an admiral's wife."

"Alas! 'tis you I want, not rank nor precedence. My poor father died a sailor, and--and--it broke my mother's heart later, I think. So, too, will mine break if now husband follows father."

"Tush, dearest, tush! Your father was a gallant seaman, your mother should have lived long to love his memory. A sailor's wife must be brave. Why! look, now, at Mrs. Pottle. She, too, lost her husband, yet she hath not succumbed. And," discontinuing his bluff heartiness--assumed only to solace his girl-wife, and not truly felt--"I will not be slain. Fortune is not my foe--I know it, feel it--I shall not follow Henry Thorne nor Ezra Pottle. Be cheered, my dear."

But still Ariadne could not be cheered, knowing that he was going from her side, though she made strenuous efforts and smiled wanly through her tears; while she said she would behave as became a seaman's wife. Yet, all the same, she could not refrain from asking him timorously, though hoping all the time that his answer would be in the negative, whether he had yet found all the seamen necessary for the ships he was told off to provision with them.

"Why, see now, Ariadne!" he exclaimed, as he took from an inner cabin his boat-cloak, holding it over his arm as he talked, "they do not come in fast. In honest truth, I do think I have drained all this fair neighbourhood of its men. Down there," and he nodded his head forward, towards the forecastle, "I have a hundred and a half of old sea-dogs who will fight till the flesh is hacked from off their bones."

Here Ariadne shuddered, while he continued, "God knows, in many cases they have not much left to hack, most of 'em having fought a hundred fights under Lestock, Martin and Knowles, and two even under Vernon. But for others I know not what to do. Drunken swabs are brought to me by the crimps; young boys from citizens' offices offer themselves--ofttimes they have robbed their masters and hope thus to evade the gallows; husbands who are sick of their wives; or, better still, men who would make houses for the women they love. But all of the right sort do not come my way as fast as the King and I would wish."

"Thereby," said Ariadne, "you cannot yet sail. Not yet. Ah!" And beneath her breath she said, "Thank God."

"Thereby," he replied with a smile, understanding well enough her mind, "I cannot yet sail. But, dear heart, it must be soon, whether I have gotten all I want or not. At least, I have some. Yes, it must be, for De la Clue is about, and Conflans broods ever on a descent. We must check them. We must. We must!"

"What do you go to seek now?" Ariadne asked, as, approaching the cabin stairs he summoned his coxswain and bade him call the gig away. "What? More citizens' boys, or--or--" and she laughed a little at the words and blushed, "drunken swabs, as you term them?"

"Not," he answered, "if I can get others, though even those can use a match-tub if their hands shake not too much, and can put their puny weight on to a halyard. But there are others. There is a fellow hard by, ashore, in Jamaica Court, who, I do hear, can find what is wanted. Likewise--and this is better if it can but be accomplished--lying further down the river is a schooner a-filling up with indented servants for our American colonies. There should be pickings there, and _they_ will cost the King nothing. Not a groat."

"Why?" asked Ariadne, open-eyed, "why? Can the King get men without paying the two pounds press-money that you say he gives?"

"He can get these," Geoffrey replied, with a laugh, "if I take them. I, or any other of his officers. Because, you see, these are hocus-pocussed men; fellows who have been made, or found, drunk by the crimps, and sold on board to the master. He has paid for them, and 'tis illegal. Wherefore the King--represented in my person--will set 'em free to serve him. God bless him! His service is better than that in the plantations."

"Is it honest to do this, Geoff?" Ariadne asked, a look of doubt on her young face.

"Honest, my dear! Why, child, there is no spot of honesty in't at all. Honest, i'faith! Is it honest to buy men's bodies as one buys dogs and cattle? honest to drench and drug men with gin, and then fling them aboard as one would fling a side of beef aboard? Nay, 'tis honest to rescue such, to give them a chance of serving King and country; to have a mort of food and rum into them two and three times a day, as much 'baccy as they can smoke, and many a guinea to spend on Sal and Sukie when they get ashore. _That's_ honest, my dear, and what the sky-pilots call 'Christian.'"

"If they ever do get ashore to see Sal and Sukie; if the French do not kill them," said Ariadne.

"Well! come what may, _I_ must get ashore," said Geoffrey, as now he saw his gig tossing on the turbulent waves of the windswept river; "so fare ye well, sweetheart, until to-night. You have that new-fangled novel thing to read, and Anne and her mother are with you, wherefore you will not be dull till bedtime."

Then, changing his blustering, good-natured tone for one more serious as he stooped and kissed her; while noticing again, as he held her in his arms, as he had often noticed before, how slight and delicate a thing his child-wife was, he whispered:

"Oh! my love, my love, how I do worship thee. Sweetheart, will the hours be long till I come back?"

"As ever and always they are," she whispered too, her arms around his neck and her cheek against his. "As ever and always they are."

"You do not regard me as only a rude, rough sailor," he asked now; "one ruthless in his duty? Nor cruel?"

"Nay, nay, never; but as the man of my heart--my only love, my husband."

"So! that is well. Again, farewell till to-night. Farewell, dear one," and, reaching the deck, he grasped the manropes when, entering his gig, he was rowed ashore.

Arrived at Brunswick Stairs, he sent back his boat, giving orders for the coxswain to return in two hours, "For," said he, "I need no accompaniment to-day. What I have to do I can do very well by myself." After which he set out from the river inland towards Stepney, threading, as he did so, some quaint old streets and lanes in which each floor of the houses overlapped the one below it, so that, at last, the top floors almost touched each other. As he progressed he noticed, as often enough he had observed before, with what disfavour he was regarded by all the idlers in the place, including slatternly-looking women leaning against doorposts; rough-looking men who shrunk away, however, directly his eye lighted on them (they, perhaps, thinking that he was appraising their value as "food for the Frenchmen"); and miserable, cadaverous-looking young fellows, some of whom had no hesitation in instantly disappearing into the passages of houses, they being generally those in which they did not happen to live.

For all knew that this stalwart young captain, who wore the undress of the new uniform of the Royal Navy (new now for some ten years); whose sword-handle had a gold knot to it, and whose three-cornered hat had in it a gold cockade, was he who, aided by his myrmidons, tore them away from their wives and mothers to roam the seas as well as to fight, and, probably, be killed by some of Conflans' Frenchmen. They knew him well enough for the captain of the "_Migniong_," as they called his craft, and they hated and feared him in consequence.

"May he be blasted!" said one hideous, blear-eyed old woman as he passed by, she taking no trouble to lower her voice; "he's got my Jenny's man in his cussed fock'sle even now. And she married to George but two months! He've got a young wife of his own--I seen her ashore with him but yesterday--a sweet young thing too. How'd she like it if som-un ravished 'im away from her!"

"Curse him!" said a man, who regarded Geoffrey from behind a blind, he being afraid to show himself, knowing well enough that the captain of the _Mignonne_ would be as like as not to make a mental note of the house if he saw him. "Curse him and his King, too, and all the Lords and Commons. Why should we fight and die for them? They wouldn't do it for us."

And he heard much of their mutterings, knew how he was regarded, and regretted that such should be so. But, he told himself, it was duty. It must be done.