“Neither do the persons with whom you are now finding fault understand,” my conscience flashed back at me. “Yet you call them human cooties—criticise their lack of purpose. What do you think you will accomplish, sitting out here with a kitchen-maid? You had better take your own advice to heart—get back where you belong and take care of yourself. You never planned to have Polly Preston become a domestic servant. Go back where you belong.”
Yawning, I rose to my feet. It seemed the sensible thing to do—to tell Mary that I was going for a walk and she must not wait for me. During Easter there was certain to be a number of my acquaintances at the Ardale-Stratton. I had only to register or send my visiting-card to the proprietor to get the best that the hotel had to offer. Telegraphing for my trunks and writing Alice that I had gotten all the first-hand material needed for my novel were simple details.
Before speaking to Mary, and while still yawning, my eyes wandered out to sea. The wind had blown a hole in the mist. Across this opening in the foreground there was steaming a black-gray dreadnought, its three funnels belching black-gray smoke. My country was at war and I had forgotten it!
As the battleship disappeared behind the bank of mist that formed the westerly frame of the picture in the far corner, in the background three slender spars of a schooner-rigged sailing-vessel crept into view. Her hull seemed a black cord above the silvery sea, and her stretch of canvas, low down, appeared hardly larger than my thumbnail.
“The new and the old!” I exclaimed, comparing the majestic power of the dreadnought with the struggling sailing-ship.
Every drop of blood in your veins crossed the Atlantic in a vessel no larger and in all human probabilities no more seaworthy than that schooner, my thoughts ran on. What voyages those must have been! Storms! Shipwrecks! What men and what women!—French Huguenot, English, Welsh, and Scot.
Standing there under the pavilion with my eyes fastened on the struggling ship, I fell to musing about those ancestors of mine—how they had struggled against all the forces of nature to conquer a wilderness inhabited by savages; how, after conquering that wilderness, they had wrenched their new homes free from the mother country. And with a start of amazement I considered their reason, why they had dared all, suffered all—to found a government under which every child might be born free and equal.
Free and equal! What did that mean? What had those wonderful old men and women planned?
I looked down at Mary. And across my mind there swept stories of the man from whom my Welsh strain sprung. After serving as governor of the colony he had enlisted in the Continental army as a private. Though his son-in-law, one generation nearer me, had become one of Washington’s major-generals—a private the old Welshman persisted in remaining to the end of the Revolution.
Hot blood crept up into my face until my cheeks burned and my ears tingled. Who was I, what had I accomplished, that gave me the right to turn up my nose at associating with a kitchen-maid? I slipped back into the seat beside Mary.