Then presently, in the dusk, Ned began whistling a sorry little tune, unlike those he was wont to sing, very slow and monotonous, with a sudden rising to a high note and as sudden a sinking again, like the sharp indrawing of breath in a sob. "What song is that, Ned?" Miles asked, because he would rather hear Lister talk than whistle that pitiable strain.
"'Tis the Hanging-tune, Miley; the one to which they set the last confessions of men who are condemned to die." He fell to whistling once more and half humming the words:—
"'Fortune, my foe,
Why dost thou frown on me?'"
and Miles harked to the tune till it went crying itself through his head.
Next morning it still came back to him keenly,—the walk in the twilight, the look of the distant ship, the woful minor of the Hanging-tune. For the wind was hauling round to westward, and of a sudden Indians and gardening and house-building ceased to be matters that men talked of in the street; instead they spoke of the going of the ship that had borne them from England.
Already she had stayed longer on their shores than any had expected, because of the sickness that had been among her crew. But now, on shore and on ship, the sickness was stayed; just half the settlers lay buried on the bluff, and the crew of the Mayflower mustered in diminished numbers, yet enough survived and in recovered health to work the ship back to England. With the first favoring wind she would set forth upon her voyage; and with that bit of sure information went another, that Master Jones had offered to take home in her any one of the settlers who might wish to go.
"Right generous of him, is't not?" Ned Lister spoke bitterly to Miles. "Who does he think is going with him? The Elder and the Governor and Master Bradford, all the chiefs, if they showed their faces in England, they'd be clapped up in prison. And the lesser men, or even our great Master Hopkins here, they've ventured all their substance in this plantation. If they go back, they must starve or beg in London streets, and 'tis as easy and pleasant to starve here. There's none in the settlement I know of has the wish to go home, save myself, and I cannot go, because I've sold my time to Hopkins, the more fool I!"
"Why did you ever come hither, if you hate it so?" Miles questioned.
"Because a penny fell wrong side up," Ned answered. "I woke up in London one fine morning, with no shirt to my back and but one penny in my pocket. 'It's either 'list for the wars, or get me into a new country and start afresh,' I said, so I tossed up the penny,—heads Bohemia, tails America. It fell tails; so I sold Stephen Hopkins my three years' time in return for my passage over. And a precious fool I was! Faith, I'd liefer dig ditches in England than play even at governor here. And so soon as my time's out!"
Miles listened soberly, but with no sympathy; he did not understand why a tall, grown fellow like Ned should think on home with such longing. He did not care himself; he had come to New Plymouth to live, and he looked forward to the departure of the Mayflower as a novel happening in the round of everyday occurrences.