Oh, man, but I have cause for my happiness. I have the world before me, good work to do, good money to earn, and her love like a “perpetual sun-shine to make life fair to me.”
Then suddenly his voice changed.
“Ah, but my happiness is not complete. There are two things I want yet. I want my father to come out with me, and I want you, too, my friend.”
“And will your father not go? I heard that they had released him at last from the prison in Scotland, whew they kept him since the year of the break at Antrim. He’s home again.”
“Ay, he’s home, and it’s little cause he has to stay here. They have put a new minister in his place. The Synod, the conscienceless villains, declared it vacant. Castlereagh, through his satellite Black, has corrupted them, too. He’ll preach no more in the old meeting-house, nor sit over his bodes in the old manse. He’s at the Widow Maclure’s now, the woman whose husband was hanged. He’ll not want his bit while I’ve money in my pocket. But I’d like to bring him with me, to give him a better home.”
“And will he not go?”
“He will not. He says he’s too old to go to a new land now; but you’ll help me to persuade him. I think, maybe, if you’d come with me that he’d come, too. And you will come, won’t you?”
Hope shook his head.
“Don’t shake your head at me that way, James Hope. You don’t know what you’re refusing. I can give you work to do out there, and money to earn, and a fine house to live in. It’s a good land, so it is; it’s a land of liberty. We’ve done with the tyrannies of this worn-out old world. A man may speak his mind out there, and think his own thoughts and go his own way. We doff our hats and make our bows to no man living, only to him who shows himself by fine deeds to be our better. It’s the land for you and the land for me, and the land for every man that loves freedom. Will you not come?”
They reached the door of the Maclures’ house and entered. A bright fine burned on the hearth. The Widow Maclure was busy spreading a white cloth on the table. Her eldest girl, a child of twelve years old, stood near at hand with a pile of wooden porridge bowls in her arms. The two other children, holding by their mother’s skirts, followed, smiled on and chidden as they impeded her work, and babbled questions about this or that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth time an inscription written there—