“I have taken service,” he said, “with the permission of the British Government, under the Czar of Russia, the Great Peter, for such he is indeed. You will remember his labouring as a shipwright in England not many years since, to gain a knowledge of ship-building He is now constructing a large fleet, and he is anxious to secure the services of a number of active and intelligent officers like yourself. What do you say? I can promise you handsome pay, and the command of a line-of-battle ship.”
Deane replied that he must think about it, as he had only lately married a wife, and had no inclination to leave her.
“Oh, you must bring her with you!” was the answer. “You can establish her in the new city the Czar is building on the Neva; and, depend upon it, you will have no long cruises to make. Foreign officers can be found; but he will have a difficulty in making seamen out of his serfs. Free men only are fit to become seamen, in my opinion.”
Captain Deane begged that his friend would give him his address, and should he determine to accept his offer, after he had visited his friends, he would communicate with him. Leaving the unhappy Mistress Pearson with her brother, Deane set forward in a coach with his bride for Norwich. He had fortunately been able to procure the balance of prize-money due to him while he was in London, which amounted to a considerable sum, and he was thus, in spite of his heavy loss in the “Nottingham Galley,” no longer crippled by want of means.
Words can scarcely describe the joy with which Madame de Mertens and her husband received their long-lost daughter. Though she had grown from a young child into a woman, they immediately recognised her, while the trinkets she had preserved prevented them having any doubt about the matter. After spending some time at Norwich, and receiving great kindness from the excellent Mr Gournay and his lady, the young couple repaired to Nottingham.
The loss of the “Nottingham Galley,” however, caused Jack to be more coolly received by his friends than he had anticipated. In vain he tried to explain to them that they should find fault with the elements more than with him for the ill-success of their speculation. He undertook, if it was their wish, to command another galley, and to embark all his property in the enterprise. To this, however, none of them would agree. Yet there were two of his friends who received him in a different manner to the rest—his sister Polly and his sister-in-law Alethea. Prosperity had not improved his brother Jasper, and he appeared to be more bitter than any of the family who suffered from the wreck of the galley. A reconciliation was however at last brought about by cousin Nat and Polly. Jack had been dining at the house of his sister and her husband, where he met Jasper, to whose house in Fletcher-gate he agreed to walk in the evening. On their way, some remarks made by Dr Jasper irritated John Deane, as he considered them unfair and unjust, and angry words were heard by some of the passers-by, uttered by him to his brother. They reached the door together. A flight of stone steps led to it from the street. Unhappily, at this moment the doctor repeated the expressions which had justly offended the captain, who declared that he would not allow himself to be addressed in so injurious a manner. As he spoke he pushed impatiently past his brother, who at that moment stumbled down the steps. The doctor fell; and as Captain Deane stooped to lift him up, to his horror, he found that he was dead! Rumour, with her hundred tongues, forthwith spread the report that the fire-eating captain had killed his brother. The verdict however of the jury who sat to decide the case was, that Dr Jasper Deane had died by the visitation of God. Still Captain Deane was conscious of the angry feelings which had excited his bosom at the moment, and he felt that the mark of Cain was upon his forehead. He could no longer remain at home, and though those who loved him best knew of his innocence, and did their utmost to console him, he determined to leave the country. He accordingly wrote to Captain Bertrand, accepting his offer of a naval command under the Czar of Russia; and in a short time he and Elizabeth sailed for the Baltic. He rendered great assistance in organising the navy of that wonderful man Peter the Great, and after serving with much credit for a few years, he returned to England.
Captain Deane had during this time found a number of friends, and by their means he was soon afterwards appointed English consul at Ostend, where he lived with his wife Elizabeth till they were both advanced in life. As an elderly couple they came back to Nottingham once more, and went to live in the sweet village of Wilford, on the opposite side of the silvery Trent. It was the peaceful green retreat that had beckoned him back to England from many a scene of foreign grandeur, and smiled across many a time of tumult and of battle. He and his wife both loved the Dutch home where they had so long lived, and when he built a house for himself in a thorough English village, he constructed it in the Dutch style, which indeed in his early youth had been the very height of fashion. Next to his own, behind the same trim garden and row of silvery poplars, he built one also for his sister Polly, who was then a widow. Alethea, after the death of her husband, had returned to Harwood Grange with her children, and devoted herself to them, endeavouring so to bring them up that they might love and serve God. She by this time had also gone to her rest; so also had most of those who have been mentioned in the previous history. Mistress Pearson did not live long after her return to England, and she was saved the misery of hearing the tragical death of her husband, who, with all his faults, had at all events loved her. In a desperate action with a Queen’s ship, he with all his crew had been blown up, shortly after Deane had encountered him at the mouth of the Delaware.
The tomb of John Deane, Captain R.N., and of Elizabeth his wife, is to be seen on a little green promontory above the sparkling Trent and near the chancel of the parish church, where sweet strains of music, accompanying the sound of human voices and the murmurs of the river, are wont to mingle in harmonious hymns of prayer and praise. A more fitting spot in which to await in readiness for the last hour of life than Wilford can scarcely be imagined, nor a sweeter place than its church-yard in which the mortal may lie down to rest from toil till summoned by the last trump to rise and put on immortality.