“Well, then, good luck to Andrew Binnie, and may he come soon home and well home, and sorrow of all kinds keep a day’s sail behind him. And surely he will go back to the boats when he has saved his conscience, for there is never a better sailor and fisher on the North Sea. The men were all saying that when he was so ill.”
“It is the very truth. Andrew can read the sea as well as the minister can read the Book. He never turns his back on it; his boat is always ready to kiss the wind in its teeth. I have been with him when rip! rip! rip! went her canvas; but I hadn’t a single fear, I knew the lad at the helm. I knew he would bring her to her bearings beautifully. He always did, and then how the gallant bit of a creature would shake herself and away like a sea-gull. My Andrew is a son of the sea as all his forbears were. Its salt is in his blood, and when the tide is going with a race and a roar, and the break of the waves and the howl of the wind is like a thousand guns, then Andrew Binnie is in the element he likes best; aye, though his boat be spinning round like a laddie’s top.”
“Well, Janet, I will be going.”
“Mind this, Sabrina, I have told you all to my heart’s keel; and if folks are saying to you that Jamie has given Christina the slip, or that the Binnies are scrimpit for poverty’s sake, or the like of any other ill-natured thing, you will be knowing how to answer them.”
“‘Deed, I will! And I am real glad things are so well with you all, Janet.”
“Well, and like to be better, thank God, as soon as Andrew gets back from foreign parts.”
In the meantime, Andrew, after a pleasant sail, had reached New York. He made many friends on the ship, and in the few days of bad weather usually encountered came to the front, as he always did when winds were blowing and sailor-men had to wear oil skins. The first sight of the New World made him silent. He was too prudent to hazard an opinion about any place so remote and so strange, though he cautiously admitted “the lift was as blue as in Scotland and the sunshine not to speak ill of.” But as his ideas of large towns had been formed upon Edinburgh and Glasgow, he could hardly admire New York. “It looks,” he said to an acquaintance who was showing him the city, “it looks as if it had been built in a hurry;” for he was thinking of the granite streets and piers of Glasgow. “Besides,” he added, “there is no romance or beauty about it; it is all straight lines and squares. Man alive! you should see Edinburgh the sel of it, the castle, and the links, and the bonnie terraces, and the Highland men parading the streets, it is just a bit of poetry made out of builders stones.”
With the information he had received from the mate of the “Circassia,” and his advice and directions, Andrew had little difficulty in locating Jamie Logan. He found his name in the list of seamen sailing a steamer between New York and New Orleans; and this steamer was then lying at her pier on the North River. It was not very hard to obtain permission to interview Jamie, and armed with this authority, he went to the ship one very hot afternoon about four o’clock.
Jamie was at the hold, attending to the unshipping of cargo; and as he lifted himself from the stooping attitude which his work demanded, he saw Andrew Binnie approaching him. He pretended, however, not to see him, and became suddenly very deeply interested in the removal of a certain case of goods. Andrew was quite conscious of the affectation, but he did not blame Jamie; it only made him the more anxious to atone for the wrong he had done. He stepped rapidly forward, and with extended hands said:—
“Jamie Logan, I have come all the way from Scotland to ask you to forgive me. I thought wrong of you, and I said wrong to you, and I am sorry for it. Can you pass it by for Christ’s sake?”