ould be learned whether I carried a verbal
message to my uncle, Mr. Blick. The magistrate to whom he first applied
was one of the Monmouth faction as it happened, so my thumbs escaped;
but I had a narrow escape later, as you shall hear. About an hour after
the ship came to anchor, the cabin-door was opened by a sailor, who
flung in an armful of clothes to me, without speaking a word. They were
mostly not my own clothes; the boots were not mine; my own boots, I
guessed, had been cut to pieces in the letter-hunt. All the clothes
which were mine had had the seams ripped up. All my cartridges had been
taken. About half of my money was gone. The only things untouched were
the weapons in the belt. I laughed to myself to think how little reward
they had had for all their baseness. They had stooped to the methods of
the lowest kind of thieves, yet they had failed. They had not found my
letters. My joy was not very real; I was too wretched for that. Looking
back at it all long after, I think that the hardest thing to bear was
Aurelia's share in the work. I had not thought that Aurelia would join
in tricking me in that way. But while I thought bitterly of her deceit,
I thought of her tears on the balcony in the Dutch city. After all, she
had been driven into it by that big bully of a man. I forgave her when I
thought of him; he was the cause of it all. A brute he must have been to
force her into such an action. Presently the mate came down with orders
to me to leave the ship at once. I asked him for my own clothes; but he
told me sharply to be thankful for what I had, since I'd done no work
to earn them; by work he meant the brainless manual work done by people
like himself. So going on deck I called a boatman, who for twopence put
me ashore on the Kingswear side of the river. He gave me full directions
for finding Mr. Blick's house, telling me that in another five minutes I
should come to it, if I followed my nose. As I started from the
landing place I looked back at the barquentine, where I had had so
many adventures. She was lying at anchor at a little distance from the
Dartmouth landing place, making a fair show, under her flag, in spite of
her jury foretopmast. As I looked, the boatman jogged my elbow, pointing
across the river to the strip of road which edges the stream. "A young
lady waving to you," he said. Sure enough a lady was waving to me. I
supposed that it was Aurelia, asking pardon, trying to show me that we
parted f