Chapter 10: The Sloop of War

Robert ate a light breakfast and went out to look at his domain, now unsullied. What a fine, trim, clean island it was! And how desirable to be alone on it, when the Gulf and the Caribbean produced only such visitors as those who had come two nights before! He looked toward the little bay, fearing to see the topmast of the schooner showing its tip over the trees, but the sky there, an unbroken blue, was fouled by no such presence. He was rid of the pirates, and forever he hoped.

It seemed to him that he had passed through an epic time, one of the great periods of his life. He wondered now how he had been able to carry out such a plan, how he had managed to summon up courage and resources enough, and he felt that the good spirits of earth and air and water must have been on his side. They had fought for him and they had won for him the victory.

He shouldered his rifle and strolled through the woods toward the beach. He had never noticed before what a fine forest it was. The trees were not as magnificent as those of the northern wilderness, but they had a beauty very peculiarly their own, and they were his. There was no other claimant to them anywhere in the world.

It was a noble beach too, smooth, sloping, piled with white sand, gleaming now in the sun, and the little frothy waves that ran up it and lapped at his feet, like puppies nibbling, were just the friendliest frothy little waves in the world. But there were the remains of the fire left by the ruffians to defile it, and broken bottles and broken food was scattered about. The litter hurt his eyes so much that he gathered up every fragment, one by one, and threw them into the sea. When the last vestige of the foul invasion was cleared away he felt that he had his lonely, clean island back again, and he was happy.

He strolled up and down the glistening beach, feeling great content. After a while, he threw off his clothes and swam in the invigorating sea, keeping well inside the white line of the breakers, in those waters into which the sharks did not come. When he had sunned himself again on the sand he went to the creek, took his dinghy from the bushes, where it had been so well hidden, and rowed out to sea, partly to feel the spring of the muscles in his arms, and partly to sit off at a distance and look at his island. Surely if one had to be cast away that was the very island on which he would choose to be cast! Not too big! Not too hot! And not too cold! Without savage man or savage beasts, but with plenty of wild cattle for the taking, and good fish in the lakes, and in the seas about it. Plenty of stores of all kinds from the slaver’s schooner, even books to read. So far from being unfortunate, he was one of the lucky. A period of retirement from the companionship of his own kind might be trying on the spirit, but it also meant meditation and mental growth.

His joy over the departure of the pirates was so great and his temperament was such that he felt a mighty revulsion of the spirits. He had a period of extravagant elation. He took off his cap and saluted his island. He made little speeches of glowing compliment to it, he called it the pearl of its kind, the choicest gem of the Gulf or the Caribbean, and, if pirates came again while he was there, he would drive them away once more with the aid of the good spirits.

He rowed back, hid his boat in the old covert among the bushes at the edge of the creek, and, rifle on shoulder, started through the forest toward his peak of observation. On the way, he passed the lake and saw the herd of wild cattle grazing there, the old bull at its head. The big fellow, assured now by use and long immunity, cocked his head on one side and regarded him with a friendly eye. But the bull had a terrible surprise. He heard the sharp ping of a rifle and a fearful yell. Then he saw a figure capering in wild gyrations, and thinking that this human being whom he had learned to trust must have gone mad, he forgot to be angry but was very much frightened. Enemies he could fight, but mad creatures he dreaded, and, bellowing hoarsely to his convoy, as a signal, he took flight, all of them following him, their tails streaming straight out behind them, so fast they ran.

Robert leaped and danced as long as one of them was in sight. When the last streaming tail had disappeared in the bushes he sobered down. He realized that he had given his friend, the bull, a great shock. In a way, he had been guilty of a breach of faith, and he resolved to apologize to him in some fashion the next time they met. Yet he had been so exultant that it was impossible not to show it, and he was only a lad in years.

When he reached the crest of his peak he scanned the sea on all sides. Eagerly as he had looked before for a sail he now looked to see that there was none. Around and around the circle of the horizon his eyes traveled, and when he assured himself that no blur broke the bright line of sea and sky his heart swelled with relief.

In a day or so, his mind became calm and his thoughts grew sober. Then he settled down to his studies. The battle of life occupied only a small portion of his time, and he resolved to put the hours to the best use. He pored much over Shakespeare, the other Elizabethans, and the King James Bible, a copy of which was among the books. It was his intention to become a lawyer, an orator, and if possible a statesman. He knew that he had the gift of speech. His mind was full of thoughts and words always crowded his lips. It was easy enough for him to speak, but he must speak right. The thoughts he wished to utter must be clothed in the right kind of words arranged in the right way, and he resolved that it should be so.

The way in which men thought and the way in which their thoughts were put in the Bible and the great Elizabethans fascinated him. That was the way in which he would try to think, and the way in which he would try to put his thoughts. So he recited the noble passages over and over again, he memorized many of them, and he listened carefully to himself as he spoke them, alike for the sense and the music and power of the words.

It was then perhaps that he formed the great style for which he was so famous after years. His vocabulary became remarkable for its range, flexibility, and power, and he developed the art of selection. His rivals even used to say of him that he always chose the best word. He learned there on the island that language was not given to man merely that he might make a noise, but that he might use it as a great marksman uses a rifle.

Work and studying together filled his days. They kept far from him also any feeling of despair. He had an abiding faith that a ship of the right kind would come in time and take him away. He must not worry about it. It was his task now to fit himself for the return, to prove to his friends when he saw them once more that all the splendid opportunities offered to him on the island had not been wasted.

Almost unconsciously, he began to reason more deeply, to look further into the causes of things, and his mind turned particularly to the present war. The more he thought about it the greater became his conviction that England and the colonies were bound to win. Courage and numbers, resources and tenacity must prevail even over great initial mistakes. Duquesne and Ticonderoga would be brushed away as mere events that had no control over destiny.

He remembered Bigot’s ball in Quebec that Willet and Tayoga had attended. It came before him again almost as vivid as reality. He realized now in the light of greater age and experience how it typified decadence. A power that was rotten at the top, where the brain should be, could never defeat one that was full of youthful ardor and strength, sound through and through, awkward and ill-directed though that strength might be. The young French leaders and their soldiers were valiant, skillful and enduring, they had proved it again and again on sanguinary fields, but they could not prevail when they had to receive orders from a corrupt and reckless court at Versailles, and, above all when they had to look to that court for help that never came.

His reading of the books in the slaver’s chest told him that folly and crime invariably paid the penalty, if not in one way then in another, and he remembered too some of the ancient Greek plays, over which he had toiled under the stern guidance of Master Alexander McLean. Their burden was the certainty of fate. You could never escape, no matter how you writhed, from what you did, and those old writers must have told the truth, else men would not be reading and studying them two thousand years after they were dead. Only truth could last twenty centuries. Bigot, Cadet, Péan, and the others, stealing from France and Canada and spending the money in debauchery, could not be victorious, despite all the valor of Montcalm and St. Luc and De Levis and their comrades.

He remembered, too, the great contrast between Quebec and New York that had struck him when he arrived at the port at the mouth of the Hudson with the hunter and the Onondaga. The French capital in Canada was all of the state; it was its creature. If the state declined, it declined, there was little strength at the roots, little that sprang from the soil, but in New York, which men already forecast as the metropolis of the New World, there was strength everywhere. It might be a sprawling town. There might be no courtliness to equal the courtliness at the heart of Quebec, but there was vigor, vigor everywhere. The people were eager, restless, and curious, always they worked and looked ahead.

He saw all these things very clearly. Silence, loneliness, and distance gave a magnificent perspective. Facts that were obscured when he was near at hand, now stood out sharp and true. His thoughts in this period were often those of a man double his age. His iron health too remained. His was most emphatically the sound mind in the sound body, each helping the other, each stimulating the other to greater growth.

It was a fact, however, that the Onondaga belief, peopling the air and all sorts of inanimate objects with spirits, grew upon him; perhaps it is better to say that it was a feeling rather than a belief. According to Tayoga, the good spirits fought with the bad, and on his island, the good prevailed. They had told him that a ship was coming, and then they had warned him that it would be a ship of pirates. They had shown him how to drive away the ruffians. His inspiration had not been his own, it had come from them and he thankfully acknowledged it.

He told himself now as he went about his island that he heard the good spirits singing among the leaves and he told it to himself so often that he ended by believing it. It was such a pleasant and consoling belief too. He listened to hear them say that he would leave the island when the time was ripe and his imagination was now so extraordinarily vivid that what he expected to hear he heard. The spirits assured him that when the time came to go he would go. They did not tell him exactly when he would go, but that could not be asked. No one must anticipate a complete unveiling of the future. It was sufficient that intimations came out of it now and then.

It was this feeling, amounting to a conviction, that bore him up on a shield of steel. It soothed the natural impatience of his youth and temperament. Why grieve over not going when he knew that he would go? Yet, a long time passed and there was no sail upon the sea, though the fact failed to shake his faith. Often he climbed his peak of observation and studied the circling horizon through the glasses, only to find nothing, but he was never discouraged. There was never any fall of the spirits. No ship showed, but the ship that was coming might even then be on the way. She had left some port, probably one in England, not dreaming that it was a most important destiny and duty of hers to pick up a lone lad cast away on an island in the Gulf or the Caribbean, at least it was most important to him.

Now came a time of storms that seemed to him to portend a change in the seasons. The island was swept by wind and rain, but he liked to be lashed by both. He even went out in the dinghy in storms, though he kept inside the reefs, and fought with wave and undertow and swell, until, pleasantly exhausted, he retreated to the beach, drawing his little boat after him, where he watched the sea, vainly struggling to reach the one who had defied it. It was after such contests that he felt strongest of the spirit, ready to challenge anything.

He plunged deeper and deeper into his studies, striving to understand everything. The intensity of his application was possible only because he was alone. Forced to probe, examine, and ponder, his mind acquired new strength. Many things which otherwise would have been obscure to him became plain. Looking back upon his own eventful life since that meeting with St. Luc and Tandakora in the forest, he was better able to read motives and understand men. The reason why Adrian Van Zoon wished him to vanish must be money because only money could be powerful enough to make such a man risk a terrible crime. Well, he would have a great score to settle with Van Zoon. He did not yet know just how he would settle it, but he did not doubt that the day of reckoning would come.

A cask of oil and several lanterns were among his treasures from the ship, and, making use of them, he frequently read late at night, often with the rain beating hard on walls and roof. Then it seemed to him that his mind was clearest, and he resolved again and again that when he returned to his own he would make full use of what he learned on the island. It seemed to him sometimes that his being cast away was a piece of luck and not a misfortune.

A clear day came, and, taking his rifle, he strolled toward his peak of observation, passing on the way the herd of wild cattle with the old bull at its head. The big fellow looked at him suspiciously, as if fearing that his friend might be suffering from one of his mad spells again. But Robert’s conduct was quite correct. He walked by in a quiet and dignified manner, and, reassured, the bull went back to his task of reducing the visible grass supply.