“I have often seen children sailing such ships,” said the soldier, “and never see them without thinking, as many others do, how like they are to human lives. Some upset, some sink, some drift back and forth hugging the shore, while others spread their sails and put bravely forth to sea.”
He pointed to where the little fleet of wind-tossed ships had scattered wide. Many of them had suffered mishap, even as the Sergeant had said, some had disappeared and some still clung to the shore. But Peter’s boat, the vessel of Stephen’s fashioning, had caught the wind and was skimming away toward the harbour’s mouth. The red of the dropping sun coloured its tiny white sails, its long shadow stretched across the green waters making it seem greater than it was, as with steady prow it bore away, bound, it seemed, for Spain or France or some magic country that no man knew.
The rough old soldier’s hand closed tight on Stephen’s.
“Whatever comes to you, boy,” he said; “whatever life brings to you of pain or disappointment or sorrow, of one thing I am certain. What your future will be, I may not know, for presently I will go back to England and we may never meet again. But whether your days are to be dark or bright ones, whether time is to bring you good or ill, of this I am sure, that the world will have need of you some day, and the ship that you launch will carry far.”
CHAPTER XI
FAIR MAIDS OF FRANCE
In the end the old doctor was neither wholly right nor wholly wrong. Stephen was never again the square, sturdy lad that he had been before his terrible illness, but none the less he grew through an active boyhood and became a busy, useful man. If it ever was a bitter pain to him to see other boys swim and run and climb in a way that he could never do again, no one had known of it save perhaps his mother, or his good friend Sergeant Branderby who had so long ago returned to England. His hopes of being a soldier or a sailor were destroyed forever in that single moment when he slipped from the pine tree branch; instead he became a lawyer and made so brilliant a record that he should have had small time to grieve over vanished dreams.
While he was still little more than a boy he became the most honoured member of the Hopewell community; long before his hair was grey he began to be spoken of as one of the great men of the Colony. What Master Simon had been to his own little town, Stephen was beginning to be to all New England. Governors and King’s officers sought his advice, merchants and ship-masters and labouring men of every kind and degree laid their perplexities before him. That he was esteemed the wisest man in all Massachusetts was denied by no one save Stephen himself. With honest sincerity he laughed at all allusions to his greatness and thought of himself only as a humble man of law.
“If I have had good fortune,” he used to say, “it is because of the shoemaker’s luck-penny. If people come to me it is only because they know that I am a hampered fellow and cannot well go to them. It is kindness of heart and that alone that brings a portion of the great world past my doors.”
It was a strange and motley procession that went in and out of the great house, for half of his guests were dressed in frieze and homespun, while the other half came clad in satins and velvets and gold-laced scarlet coats.