The old man at the bow was the first to leap on shore. And, having done so, he fell down upon his knees, reverently pressed his lips upon the stones, and murmured the words:
"Thanks be to God! Thanks be to God!"
Then he stood up beside the boat and held it by the gunwale while the woman and the two other passengers stepped ashore.
Gilbert Oglander paid but small regard to them, little dreaming of the important parts they were destined to play in his life. He only noticed as they passed him that the tall man's otherwise handsome face was marred by an unsightly scar on the right cheek, that the youth seemed to be about sixteen years of age, and that the woman, when she spoke to either of her companions, did so in a foreign tongue.
The youth who had come ashore paused for a moment, tightening his sword-belt, and as he did so he glanced aside at the old man.
"Art going back to the ship, Jacob?" he inquired with seeming carelessness, yet with a look of strange eagerness in his dark eyes as if much depended upon the veteran's answer.
The graybeard slowly shook his head, and the deep-drawn sigh that issued from his lips seemed to Gilbert Oglander to betoken a whole world of past troubles and present gratitude.
"Wherefore should I go back, Master Philip?" said he in a husky voice. "Have I not had enough of the pestilent old hulk, think you? I have done all that was needed of me, I trow; and since, as you well know, I did but engage to work my passage home, there be no wages due to me and we are quits. As to my worldly belongings," he added with a hollow, uneasy laugh as he rested his bony hand upon the leathern bag that hung at his side, "this wallet containeth all my chattels and goods. Ay, all that I am worth in the world. And little enough, you'll be saying, as the sole outcome of all my perils and wanderings. Howbeit," he went on, not heeding that the young man had already passed beyond hearing and was continuing his way up the slip, "there's but small use in complaining. And after all, God hath been truly merciful in that He hath brought me safely back to my dear native land. Sure 'tis worth all my twenty-three years of voyaging to be back once more in Plymouth town and to again set foot on English ground!"
