Chapter XXVI

The crew of the _Ethan Allen_ saw Jeff’s stand and were upheld by it; but to none of these did it have a gleam of the meaning known to the girl who watched from the door of the pilot house. To Molly, it was significant beyond her power to tell. It was veritably an answer to her prayers.

Why she did not know. She felt in her heart that she was nothing to this man. Conduct as a rule counts more with women than abstract principle; yet this upholding of principle on the part of Jeff had personal meaning for her—and perhaps that was why it was so dear.

Captain Lennox was also made aware of Jeff’s decision; and it possibly had a large influence on his conduct. From his place in the longboat he saw the young Southerner leap to the deck, procure a rifle, and immediately return to the bridge. It was true that here he made a good target for the enemy guns, but it was also an advantageous lookout for a marksman.

It did not occur to him to take his place on the line. In this moment Jeff remembered that he was an officer; and now at the eve of battle he instinctively leaped to the superior position. Over and above this, it was wholly characteristic of the gallant Rebel major to do more than he asked of his men; and to expose himself freely to fire if by so doing he could benefit his cause.

This was simply an instinct with him, a personal trait that appeared rather frequently in the brave Southern army. It was not mere bravado, vainglorious and reckless, because it was always done in the excitement of battle, in moments when he was least self-conscious; nor was it foolish indifference to danger. He was a fighting man, this Sharp. He had the natural zest for battle that has been the curse of the Northern races; and it was not in him to keep under cover. True, such conduct as he now showed results, in prolonged wars, in a tragic shortage of officer material, but it also wins battles—and before now it has held in check for four long years a superior enemy force. Men fight better when their leader is in front of them, rather than behind. Because he was a born soldier, Sharp knew this fact with an inner knowledge; and he acted upon it without hesitation or any sort of deliberation. Perhaps here was seen the explanation why born soldiers do not survive a long and bitter war; and by the same token showing war’s most unnatural cruelty in that it kills those who love it and spares the sluggish and the dull.

Such conduct not only inspires the men who follow, but also lessens the resistance of the enemy. On this present occasion Jeff’s gallantry had tangible influence on Lennox and his men. The fact suddenly went home to these brave Britishers that the Yankees meant serious and certain business. A man does not so expose himself to fire unless his heart is in the battle with him, and therefore a dangerous foe. Their British guns might bowl him over, but these old soldiers—veterans of the Sepoy Rebellion and the Crimean wars—felt sure he would not pass out alone. If this showed the attitude of the men of the _Ethan Allen_ it might pay to proceed with care.

There were other considerations which helped shape Lennox’s course. He knew that if the Yankees actually showed fight, it would be next to impossible to board the deck from the longboat. It might also have been true that he was a certain unsavory sort that is warlike and tyrannical in the presence of the humble and the poor, but fawning and subservient to the great, although such types do not as a rule command British ships. There was no mistaking Jeff’s rank as he stood erect on the bridge. If the Jack tars were too far to see his face, his bold nostrils, flashing eyes, and clear high forehead above which his curly hair was brushed back, at least they could tell something from his garb. Jeff believed in suitable clothes, and he knew how to wear them. While wrong done to a humble ship captain might never arise to plague him, perhaps Lennox feared the consequences of molesting some one rich and great. It was entirely possible that he was playing his own game rather than acting on orders from the Company, intending to pocket the profit accruing therefrom; and he feared official investigation in case the report of his activities got back to headquarters. Finally, there remained the possibility that the cargo contained nothing of great value. He was risking his life and the lives of his men on a blind chance.

In any event, Captain Lennox changed his mind. He gave the command to resume rowing, and without crossing the danger line Skinner had drawn, to return to their ship.

“We’ll get you yet, you freebooters,” he told them cordially, as the longboat moved farther off.

The effect on the deck of the _Ethan Allen_ was electric. The hard gleam in Captain Skinner’s sea-blue eyes instantly softened and changed to a very pleasant light of happiness—for indeed, he knew that almost incomparable happiness of a crisis past, a great disaster warded off. Being the master and aware of that fact—never forgotten by skippers of an older school—he did not take part in the hilarity on the deck, but he beamed down upon it as a father beams on his children’s play. His men, stand-up fighters when the occasion arose, had a very human and natural dislike for whistling bullets, and now they showed their delight at their escape. They did not call insulting remarks to the British, because they held them in the respect due a worthy foe, but they pranced and they danced, they gave imitations of Lennox’s actions and accents, and finally they joined hands with the rapturous Molly and did an extemporaneous dance that should have been recorded for posterity.

The tall man who had stood exposed on the bridge neither joined in the frolic nor shared in Captain Skinner’s unspoken delight. So silent he stood, seemingly so self-absorbed, that at last some of the joy-mad sailors stopped their dance to look at him. His cheeks were even more white than in the moment of greatest danger. He looked like one just wakened from sleep; and indeed that which he had just done seemed more like a dream than fact.

He now realized that he had borne arms under the Stars and Stripes! He had taken the side of his foes against the South’s great friend, the incomparable Monarchy to which he had proposed to pledge allegiance. In a moment of hysteria and madness he had renounced his own cause!

Was he made of no stronger stuff than this? He was remorseful and embittered; and what was worse, he felt disillusioned and cheapened. He had known a great pride, Jeff Sharp; and he was born of proud people. No one could deny that. No one could ever question the intense and magnificent patriotism that had upheld so long the Confederate armies in the war just gone. When he had seen evidences of what he thought to be backsliding on the part of the Southern people—a tendency to forgive and forget, and the beginnings of a new loyalty to the Union now that their fervent sectionalism had begun to pass away—he was angered and revolted. What could he say now? He had thrown down the torch he had held high. His life had been consecrated, he thought, to the Lost Cause; that Cause had been his staff and his altar, and for its sake he had been willing to endure poverty, exile to a foreign land, martyrdom if necessary. He had lived by it, and it had given his life aim and purpose. It was true that many of the old Southern slogans, such as those concerning State rights, had lately seemed rather unimportant; yet he had still known what had seemed a deathless loyalty to the idea of a noble aristocracy, sustained by slavery, and he had felt only contempt for a people’s government. In a moment of crisis he had disavowed all that he held dear.

What was the explanation? Why, in the fierce crisis of the moment just gone, had these on the deck seemed his own people, rather than the foe; what madness had made them his own kinsmen? Why was it that when the guns pointed he forgot his leaning toward England and looked upon them as enemies? Since he firmly refused to believe that such a course could possibly be right—since he held that forgiveness was a sin and that union with a foe was never justified—he could think of but two possible explanations for his behavior. One was that he had been the victim of mob hysteria; the other—which hurt him to consider—that there was a fatal flaw in his character and he was never the steadfast man he had believed himself to be.

He dreaded to see Molly climbing the steps to the bridge to speak to him. He felt that to be praised for what he deemed treason was almost more than he could bear. Sometimes he felt that this girl knew his thoughts almost before he was himself aware of them; but to-day she had no glimpse of his mood. “It was just wonderful,” she told him. The hushed tone with which she spoke gave her trite words imponderable meaning.

He had never seen this gay, capable girl so moved. In his images of her she was always close to laughter; and it was amazing to see her so grave, even though she was at the same time visibly exalted. Her eyes alone moved him to wonder; strangely large now, they were, and brimming with light that seemed no part of the light of the sea and the sky. It must have been close kin to the white radiance, real as any phenomena Jeff had ever seen, in the girlish face.

“I can never tell you how much it meant to me, and to us all,” she went on, smiling gravely. “It was the finest thing I ever saw.”

But so lost was he in bitterness and self-anger that he looked at her unmoved. The warm luster of her eyes could not thaw the ice of his heart. His own gaze was cold, almost hateful, and his lip curled in a smile of scorn. “I’m a fool,” he answered.

Puzzled, but still not daring to guess at the truth, Molly shook her head. “Maybe we’re all fools, sometimes, willing to risk our lives just for a dream; but it’s a wonderful kind of folly.” The girl was visibly inspired. “It’s the kind of folly that will lift the people up from darkness.”

“I’m worse than a fool. I’m a traitor to my own side,” he told her bitterly. “The people!” he echoed with infinite scorn. “I hate the people. It was the mob, the mob-idea that destroyed all I loved!”

“I am of the people,” she told him, her eyes never leaving his. “I’m just one of the mob.”

“And a patriot of a mob-ruled government! I wish I had never heard of it or its people.”

The girl did not misunderstand. It might be that his wild words were mostly boyish frenzy and extravagance; yet they showed certain truths. The cut would not have been so deep had he merely renounced the nation that she held so dear—she was a woman before she was a patriot—but he had not been kind enough to exclude her. He wished he had never heard of the Republic or its people, he said; and this was the same as wishing he had never heard of her.

She turned away and walked very bravely down the steps and across the deck. She stopped and spoke, smiling, to a group of the crew. She watched, for an instant, the slowly moving shore line, seemingly absorbed in its dim and mysterious beauty. But at last she went to her stateroom, shut the door and closed the port, so that no ray of light might come in and read what was written on her face.