To roam the seas for months, storm-beaten and tempest-tossed, chilled to the bone with cold at one moment, burnt black by the sun at others; without food sometimes, and sometimes without drink--such has often been the lot of the English seamen in voyages and war-time, and so it was now in "The Wonderful Year," the year 1759.
Only with, perhaps, more added miseries and discomforts during the present hostilities than had been present in earlier times, since, in those days of the past, our enemy--our one great and implacable enemy, with whom it seemed almost that God created us to strive--had ever sought us as eagerly as we sought him. Yet, now, all appeared changed. The more we sought him the more he evaded us; upon the open sea we could never bring him--or very rarely bring him--to battle with us; and, vaunt as he might his determination to crush us, to invade our land, to sink us into a third-rate Power, yet, when we put forth to seek him, he was never to be found. Instead his fleets were in harbour and his ships far up inland rivers; the sight of our topsails was sufficient to cause his own to instantly disappear beneath the horizon. Yet that, at this period, there had been innumerable encounters was still true. Had not Boscawen shattered De la Clue off Cape Lagos, Pocock defeated the French in the East Indies, and countless ships of war and frigates been captured by us? But still the great action--the one that was to be decisive--seemed as far off as ever when "The Wonderful Year" was drawing to its close, and when, after many returns to English ports, Sir Edward Hawke once more put to sea from Torbay, on November 14th, to find, if possible, the great fleet of Conflans, which was known to be lurking somewhere in the neighbourhood of Belleisle.
November, 1759! a month of terrible storm and stress--yet, what is storm or stress to the seaman bent on finding his foe and vanquishing him?--a month when tempest after tempest howled across the seas, when days broke late and nights came early, when land-fogs and sea-fogs enveloped all for hours, so that inaction was forced to prevail. Yet, through all those furies of the elements the gallant fleet went forth, the Royal George (she flying proudly the Admiral's flag) leading twenty-three ships of the line and many frigates and bomb-ketches. It went forth, to be joined later by numerous other vessels, including amongst them the Mignonne, under the command of Captain Sir Geoffrey Barry.
On board the old French capture was Lewis Granger, too, again a sailor, though not yet again an officer; that, Geoffrey said, would come--after the war was over.
"After the war is over," Granger would repeat to himself; while sometimes he would repeat the words aloud as the captain uttered them, "After the war is over."
Then he would turn away, saluting his superior if with him, or uttering some muttered ejaculation if alone.
He was not all unhappy now; the work which he had been allowed to resume occupied him sufficiently to distract his memories, and, for the rest, he had fallen easily into his duties. Moreover, he was better situated than he might have hoped to be. Their Lordships had made no objection to his being borne on the books of the Mignonne after hearing her captain's story of the man's innocence, more especially as that captain was one whose destiny seemed of great promise; and so Granger had gone on board the frigate ere she sailed from the Thames. Though that was months ago now--months spent, as told above, in scouring the seas, in hardships, and sometimes disaster. But, during those months, an accident had placed Lewis Granger in an even better position than that which he had at first assumed.
The master-gunner had been killed in a conflict between the Mignonne and a French corvette, which the former was chasing, and Granger had stepped into his shoes. And, though such promotion was not much to one who had once worn the uniform of a commissioned officer, yet it was something. It gave him a cabin to himself where he could brood and meditate--as he did too often!--it enabled him to take his meals alone and be alone. And so, with his various duties, his charge of the ordnance and ordnance stores, his long hours devoted to the instruction of the raw hands who as yet scarcely understood the gunnery exercises, and a thousand other matters, he passed those months away. Passed them thus--and in forgetting, or, rather, in striving to forget.
For he could not forget. That was the curse laid on him and beneath which he had to bow.
"If I could do that," he would say to himself, again and again; and most often when he lay awake for hours in his berth--"if I could do that. If, at last, her sweet, innocent face, her braided chestnut hair, the look of love that never failed to greet me as I drew near, might vanish for ever from my memory! If, too, I could think that she also forgets--then--some day, I might obtain peace. But--I know it!--she no more forgets than I."
Stubbornly, doggedly, as it ever is when a man wrestles with himself, so he wrestled now. And it was all of no avail. It was useless! But one woman had ever dawned a star above his existence; the woman who--star-like!--had fallen away from him for ever.
"Such love should never have been," he would continue musing, "never have been, or, coming into my life, should have stayed always with me. Other men knew better what to do than I--could fool women, for a pastime, into loving them, could lead them on to madness and then grow weary and fling them contemptuously aside. And I despised such men. Do I despise them now?"
But only a moment later he would find his own answer to his own question, and would whisper to himself, "Yes. Even as it is, ours was the fonder, better love."
Keeping much to himself--as much as could be in a ship of war full of action, and chasing sometimes a vessel of the enemy's that hove in sight, or fleeing on others from two or three of their ships with which it would have been madness to risk an encounter--he went about his duties, performing each and all as though he lived for them alone; as though, too, his frame was impervious to fatigue or the burden of a rough, hard life. With Sir Geoffrey he could hold but little communion--that, considering the different positions each was now filling, would have been impossible!--though sometimes they could be together in the captain's cabin for a short time. And then the latter would say words to the other of approbation and approval, as well as comfort, which, had it not been that all his future was blank and hopeless, must have cheered him. But, because such was the case, those words could not do so, and murmuring again, as he had murmured so often, "It is too late," he would withdraw to his solitude.
Yet, now, every day brought it more home to those in the English fleet that, at last, the great conflict was drawing near. Before they had been two days out of Torbay on this their last putting to sea, a French bilander had been captured, from which the Admiral obtained some news of Conflans, while, on the morning of the 17th, th............