Eight months had passed; March of the year 1759 had come, and a bitterly cold east wind blew up Bugsby's Reach, causing the pennons on countless barges and frigates and brigs, to say nothing of great ships of war lying in that classic piece of water, to stream out like pointing fingers towards where, above all else, there glistened in the wintry afternoon sunlight the cross surmounting St. Paul's. It whistled, too, through the shrouds of a French-built frigate, one that in earlier days would have been spoken of as "a tall, rakehelly bark," a fabric that was beautiful in all her lines, in her yacht-like bows and rounded stern, in her lofty masts, stayed with supreme precision; in her shining afterdeck brasswork, her wheel carved and decorated as though the hands of dead-and-gone Grinling Gibbons might have been at work at it; upon, too, her brass capstan and binnacle. A French frigate pierced also with gun ports below, and bearing for her figurehead the face and bust of a smiling, blue-eyed child, which figurehead represented the name she bore upon her bows, Mignonne.
Yet French as she was, and as any Jack Tar would have informed you in a moment had you not known--after he had run a fierce eye along her shape and marked other things about her as well--there flew above her no flag proclaiming that she was owned by Louis le Bien-aimé (Bien-aimé by countless women, perhaps, but never, surely, by the subjects whom he taxed and ground to the soil they sweated over). For instead, streaming out from her mainmast there flew, because it was war-time and she lay in the King's chief river, the Royal Standard of England; from her foremast, the Anchor of Hope, the flag of the Lord High Admiral; and from her mizzen, the white flag, with the red St. George's cross; also she flew the same flag from her jack-staff.
French though she may have been, none who saw those noble ensigns could doubt what she was now.
In fact, she was a capture, taken by an English ship, which in her turn had once been French--Le Duc d'Acquitaine--and she lay, on this wild, tempestuous March day, off Blackwall and the historic Bugsby's Hole, under the temporary command of Captain Sir Geoffrey Barry. There are ironies in the life of other things besides human beings--in ships, perhaps, more especially than amongst other inanimate creatures--and the Mignonne was an example that such was the case. In her thirty years of existence she had been fighting fiercely on behalf of France against her hereditary foe--England; now she lay in the Thames, serving as a vessel into which were brought scores of impressed men, as well as scores of others who were burning to fight as willing sailors against her former owners.
For at this time there was a hot press wherever men could be found; all along and around the coast of England it was going on; every vessel of war was being stuffed full of Englishmen who, willingly or unwillingly, had to take part in the deeds that were doing and that still had to be done.
Were not privateers and merchantmen being taken daily? Was not Boscawen raging the seas like a devouring lion; Sir Edward Hawke hurling insults at the French fleet in an attempt to bring them to action; Rodney bombarding their coast? Were not those French also swearing that, ere long, their invasion of England should take place, and should be final, decisive, and triumphant?
No wonder, therefore, that sailors were wanted--and found! No wonder that husbands were torn from their wives, and fathers from their children; that men disappeared from their homes and were never more heard of, since, often not more than a month later, they were lying at the bottom of the sea, after having been sunk with their ships in some great naval fight, or, having been slain on board those ships, had next been flung over their sides--legless, armless, headless.
Geoffrey Barry was not alone in the Mignonne. With him, as sharer of that old after-cabin, with its deep stern walk, whereon she sat sometimes for hours regarding all the traffic of the great and busy river, was his wife, sweet Ariadne, who (until the Mignonne's anchor should have been catted and fished, and her canvas sheeted home as she set out on her voyage round England, to distribute the men she had gathered to the various great ships of war in need of them) would remain ever by his side. For she could not tear herself away from him to whom she was but newly wedded; she could not look with aught but tearful apprehension to the moment, the hour that must inevitably come, when, for the last time, she would feel his arms about her and his lips pressed to hers. The hour when he would go forth to distribute those men, and would then, after putting his own ship into fighting trim, join either Rodney, Boscawen, or Hawke, as their Lordships might see fit to direct.
"Oh, Geoff! oh, Geoff!" she cried, as now on this afternoon she sat by his side, their dinner and their dish of tea both over, "oh, Geoff! who that did not love him fondly, madly, would be a sailor's wife? But three months married are we, and the time has come, is close at hand, for us to part. What will become of me?"
"Heart up, sweet one," her husband said in answer, even as, while he spoke, he glanced through the quaint square ports, across which were pulled back the prettily flowered dimity curtains that had adorned the windows of the Mignonne when a French captain had sat in the selfsame cabin, with, perhaps, his own wife by his side. "Heart up, mine own. 'Tis glory, my flag, I go to win. Glory for thee and me. What! shall my Lady Barry give precedence to any in our old Hampshire, where for many a long day the Barrys have ruled the roast. You must be an admiral's wife, sweet; an admiral's wife."
"Alas! 'tis you I want, not rank nor precedence. My poor father died a sailor, and--and--it broke my mother's heart later, I think. So, too, will mine break if now husband follows father."
"Tush, dearest, tush! Your father was a gallant seaman, your mother should have lived long to love his memory. A sailor's wife must be brave. Why! look, now, at Mrs. Pottle. She, too, lost her husband, yet she hath not succumbed. And," discontinuing his bluff heartiness--assumed only to solace his girl-wife, and not truly felt--"I will not be slain. Fortune is not my foe--I know it, feel it--I shall not follow Henry Thorne nor Ezra Pottle. Be cheered, my dear."
But still Ariadne could not be cheered, knowing that he was going from her side, though she made strenuous efforts and smiled wanly through her tears; while she said she would behave as became a seaman's wife. Yet, all the same, she could not refrain from asking him timorously, though hoping all the time that his answer would be in the negative, whether he had yet found all the seamen necessary for the ships he was told off to provision with them.
"Why, see now, Ariadne!" he exclaimed, as he took from an inner cabin his boat-cloak, holding it over his arm as he talked, "they do not come in fast. In honest truth, I do think I have drained all this fair neighbourhood of its men. Down there," and he nodded his head forward, towards the forecastle, "I have a hundred and a ............