The east wind, that had turned chillier as sunset drew on, smote bleakly on the hilltops, and in the hollows, where the shadows were creeping through the undergrowth, the warmth had died out of the air. The gathering darkness pressed ever closer upon the fishermen; the sea on their right turned gray and dim; the blue faded from the sky, and the green of the distant headlands of the bay changed to black. Just off the beach point they could dimly make out a dark bulk, where a single speck of light showed--the old ship _Mayflower_.
"They say she'll be hoisting sail for home soon," Giles spoke, as they trudged through the twilight, with a surety that his comrades knew to what he referred.
"So soon as the wind swings round into the west," answered Ned. "Then she'll up sail, and it's 'Eastward, ho!'"
Then presently, in the dusk, Ned began whistling a sorry little tune, unlike those he was wont to sing, very slow and monotonous, with a sudden rising to a high note and as sudden a sinking again, like the sharp indrawing of breath in a sob. "What song is that, Ned?" Miles asked, because he would rather hear Lister talk than whistle that pitiable strain.
"'Tis the Hanging-tune, Miley; the one to which they set the last confessions of men who are condemned to die." He fell to whistling once more and half humming the words:--
"'Fortune, my foe, Why dost thou frown on me?'"
and Miles harked to the tune till it went crying itself through his head.
Next morning it still came back to him keenly,--the walk in the twilight, the look of the distant ship, the woful minor of the Hanging-tune. For the wind was hauling round to westward, and of a sudden Indians and gardening and house-building ceased to be matters that men talked of in the street; instead they spoke of the going of the ship that had borne them from England.
Already she had stayed longer on their shores than any had expected, because of the sickness that had been among her crew. But now, on shore and on ship, the sickness was stayed; just half the settlers lay buried on the bluff, and the crew of the _Mayflower_ mustered in diminished numbers, yet enough survived and in recovered health to work the ship back to England. With the first favoring wind she would set forth upon her voyage; and with that bit of sure information went another, that Master Jones had offered to take home in her any one of the settlers who might wish to go.