He did not say what pain it would be to leave her for so long, she did not whisper of how her heart stood still at the thought of his going. Each one realised what the other felt, yet each knew that this was the only way and that here was Gerald’s task in life.
“Where will you go?” she asked at last, and waited breathless for the reply that did not come at once.
“The sailors,” he said, “have a name for the path that they steer, marked out by the sun and stars across the trackless sea. They call it the sea road and to them, in time, it becomes as familiar as the housewife’s way to market. And I am of a mind, Clotilde, to break out a new sea road, and a far one, a way that our sailors have never gone before.”
“To Italy?” she asked, her eyes wide with anxiety.
He sat with his hands clasped between his knees and his eyes fixed upon the grass at his feet as though he could not bear to look at the terror and distress in her face.
“Do you not see that I must go?” he pleaded. But still she did not answer.
To China! To that vague unknown land that the old story books and maps called Cathay. Had he said to the moon, it could not have seemed a more dangerous and impossible journey. It was almost exactly two hundred years since Gerald’s ancestor, Robin Radpath, had set sail with Queen Elizabeth’s message to the Chinese Emperor and had never come back. Since that time the land had grown to be only a little less strange; few were the travellers whose tales of adventures there had ever reached America. No ship from New England had gone so far; one or two, indeed, had attempted the voyage and had never been heard of again.
Many were the kinds of goods, spices and ivory, coffee, tea and silk that came from that inaccessible country and from the equally mysterious East Indies, but they came by way of Constantinople, Venice or Portugal, and were transferred to English or American vessels. But to go direct, to have the little, newly-independent country of America hold out a hand to grasp at the trade that had never been attempted save by lands whose commerce was hundreds of years old! What a great idea it was, she thought, and in spite of herself thrilled with pride. How would the people of Hopewell regard Gerald then—after he had undertaken such a venture and carried it to a successful end.