“Sir,” says Aaron, “France, under Napoleon, is fast rebarberizing—retrograding to the darkest ages of intellectual and moral degradation. All that has been seen or heard or felt or read of despotism is freedom and ease compared with that which now dissolves France. The science of tyranny was in its infancy; Napoleon has matured it. In France all the efforts of genius, all the nobler sentiments and finer feelings are depressed and paralyzed. Private faith, personal confidence, the whole train of social virtues are condemned and eradicated. They are crimes. You, sir, with your generous propensities, your chivalrous notions of honor, were you condemned to live within the grasp of that tyrant, would be driven to discard them or be sacrificed as a dangerous subject.”
“What a contrast to England!” cries Bal-gray—“England, free and great!”
“England!” retorts Aaron, with a grimace. “There are friends here whom I love. But for England as mere England, why, then, I hope never to visit it again, once I am free of it, unless at the head of fifty thousand fighting men!”
Balgray sits aghast.—Meanwhile the chance of war between America and England broadens, the cloud in the sky grows blacker. Aaron is all impatience to find a ship for home; war might fence him in for years. At last his hopes are rewarded. The Aurora, outward bound for Boston, is reported lying off Gravesend. The captain says he will land Aaron in Boston for thirty pounds.
And now he is really going; the ship will sail on the morrow. At midnight he takes up his diary:
“It is twelve o’clock—midnight. Having packed up my residue of duds, and stowed my papers in the writing desk, I sit smoking my pipe and contemplating the certainty of escaping from this country. As to my reception in my own country, so far as depends on J. Madison & Co., I expect all the efforts of their implacable malice. This, however, does not give me uneasiness. I shall meet those efforts and repel them. My confidence in my own resources does not permit me to despond or even doubt. The incapacity of J. Madison & Co. for every purpose of public administration, their want of energy and firmness, make it impossible they should stand. They are too feeble and corrupt to hold together long. Mem.: To write to Alston to hold his influence in his State, and not again degrade himself by compromising with rascals and cowards.”
It is in this high vein that Aaron sails away for home, and, thirty-five days later, sits down to beef and potatoes with the pilot and the Auroras captain, in the harbor of Boston. He goes ashore without a shilling, and sells his “Bayle” and “Moreri” to President Kirtland of Harvard for forty dollars. This makes up his passage money for New York. He negotiates with the skipper of a coasting sloop, and nine days later, in the evening’s dusk, he lands at the Battery.
It is the next day. The sun is shining into narrow Stone Street. It lights up the Swartwout parlor where Aaron, home at last, is hearing the news from the stubborn, changeless one—Swartwout of the true, unflagging breed!
“It is precisely four years,” says Aaron, following a conversational lull, “since I left this very room to go aboard the Clarissa for England.”
“Aye! Four years!” repeats the stubborn one, meditatively. “Much water runs under the bridges in four years! It has carried away some of your friends, colonel; but also it has carried away as many of your enemies.”