“Good,” exclaimed Wentworth, with a proud thrill.
They went on in silence, and presently reached the Soliman. The stevedores were busy lading her, and all was activity on board and on the wharf. Looking about, Harrington presently caught sight of Captain Fisher on the opposite pavement, and at once went over to him. The two joined Wentworth in a couple of minutes, and they all went up the wharf together.
“Now, Captain,” said Harrington, as they walked on, “I am going on to Temple street, and I will be at your house soon. Then you and I will go together for the writ—so wait for me.”
“All right, John,” returned the Captain, who had been previously told by Harrington that Mrs. Eastman was to be disregarded.
Half way up, the Captain stopped and fixed an admiring gaze on a pretty little sail-boat, sloop-rigged, which lay alongside, and which belonged to him.
“Pooty, aint she?” he remarked, ogling his property.
“Yes, indeed,” returned Harrington, “we’ve had many a pleasant sail in her in the old days.”
He sighed vaguely, and they went on, up the busy wharf, and into the noise and bustle of State street. It was the great mercantile street of the city, the old street of solemn memories, the proud street of Sam Adams and Paul Revere, the brave street of the Boston Massacre, the dark street of the rendition of Sims. Over those stones once wet with the sacramental blood of Attucks, under the solemn eye of the morning star, the child of his race, surrounded by sabres, had gone to the vessel a Boston merchant volunteered to take him to his murder. Side by side, amidst the weeds and rubble of traffic, burst the black slaver flower and bloomed the bright historic rose.
The merchants were thick on ’Change as the three companions came up the street, and there was much lifting of hats and fluttering and swarming, which for a moment they could not account for. But presently, as they entered the crowd, they met a figure which explained that decorous commotion, and involuntarily made them start and for a second pause. It was Webster. Not, alas! the dark Hyperion, splendid in statued majesty, of a younger day, when those stern lips thundered the speech of freemen; but him grown old, his leonine and massive features austere and sullen-grim, fire-scarred in swarthy grain with base ambition and battered by the storms of state, yet kingly still in ruin, and with some relic of their former sombre beauty. He lifted his hat to a gentleman as they came up, and for an instant they gazed upon the rugged and malignant grandeur of that imposing countenance, with its vast brow and iron majesty of mouth, and its cavernous and torrid eyes. A moment, and they had gone by. Wentworth looked awed, the Captain’s face was rigid and atwist, and Harrington was blind with tears.
“To meet him at such an hour as this!” he gasped. “He who has done it all! He with the seventh of March upon his face, and you and I and all of us with its shadow on our lives. One speech for freedom then, and the cloud of this anguish and dishonor would have passed away. That speech, half-written in his desk, never spoken, but in its stead the speech for slavery, which has made kidnapping a law. And he, fallen forever, standing there amidst those muck-rake rogues, fallen from all he was, fallen from all he might have been, sunk to herd among the thieves of men! Oh, wreck of wrecks—grief of griefs—ashes and dust and ruin!”