"Heart up," again said Anne, comforting, yet still resolute. "'Tis but for a week. He will come back, my dear."
Then she led the girl to her bed, and, getting into it herself, took her in her arms and caressed and soothed her.
* * * * * * *
Meanwhile, not more than a mile off from where the two women were, Lewis Granger was himself preparing to begin a new day. It was necessary that here, he who in London had rarely left his bed until the morning was almost gone, should rise early, for he had much business to attend to besides that of trafficking in what he termed his "cattle" business, such as supplying all kinds of vessels with flour and meat and provisions of every sort. He was not actually the owner of this concern which he conducted, but, instead, only the superintendent or manager of it for a very wealthy man whom he had known when he was himself a gentleman--a wealthy man who, having lost his former superintendent and meeting Granger by accident about the time of Bufton's marriage, suggested that, as the latter said his circumstances were low, he should take the position.
"You have been a sailor yourself, you know; you are also an Essex man," this person remarked, as they sat in a coffee-house; "therefore you understand something about the requisites of the sea. And you may make some money. There is, of course, a good percentage, and, in absolute fact, you can grow well-to-do." After which he explained to Granger what his occupation would be.
Whereon he, knowing that, henceforth, even the beggarly keeping which he had received from the man who had once ruined him was certain to come to an end after the latter had been tricked into marrying Anne Pottle, took the position. It would at least be food, he told himself.
And now he was indeed growing well-to-do; in those eight months which had gone by since the day he had parted from Bufton he had been making money fast, both for himself and his master; making money by ways which once he would have scorned and have reviled himself for--by crimping and kidnapping, by hocus-pocussing men and making them drunk, by inducing simpletons to believe they were going to freedom and wealth in Delaware and Virginia and Massachusetts, or in Jamaica or Barbadoes, when in truth they were going to slavery, and as often as not to death. But also helping to fit out ships which, calling on the West African coast, should purchase from one successful tribe of negroes the prisoners they had taken from another they had defeated, and, transporting those who lived--the dead, as well as the sickly ones, being flung over to the sharks--should sell them also into slavery.
He was growing well-to-do, was putting by money, even while he stifled his conscience as to the way in which it was acquired; almost he had begun to forget that he, a gentleman, a King's sailor, with no worse faults originally than those of dissipation and a love for gambling, had been ruined, degraded, disgraced by a scheming scoundrel. And, also, almost was he forgetting that he had sworn to have an awful vengeance on this scoundrel, this man who had deprived him of the woman he loved and had caused her to cast him off. He came nigh to forgetting that his mother died of a broken heart--a heart broken by his ruin and disgrace.
"Ay," he said to himself, as now he dressed in preparation for his day's work, "ay! I had almost forgotten. Almost! And then he must needs find his way here, as full of evil as before. And the bait took--he swallowed it greedily. Anne's sister--I--my mother--the woman I worshipped, are not enough. He is a cormorant of cruelty, and seeks still more victims. Well--there shall be more. His craft and devilish subtlety shall find another. Yet how--how--how is it to be done? I must think."
It was still early, not yet seven o'clock, but because of evil habits which he had contracted of late years, and which he could not now break off, much as he endeavoured to do so, he went to a side table where, taking up a dram bottle--a thing always to his hand now--he drank from it.