“And when there is fighting overhead?”
“I am used to it now; I quaked for fear during the first engagement, but never since.—I am used to such peril, and—I am your daughter,” she said; “I love it.”
“But how if he should fall?”
“I should die with him.”
“And your children?”
“They are children of the sea and of danger; they share the life of their parents. We have but one life, and we do not flinch from it. We have but one life, our names are written on the same page of the book of Fate, one skiff bears us and our fortunes, and we know it.”
“Do you so love him that he is more to you than all beside?”
“All beside?” echoed she. “Let us leave that mystery alone. Yet stay! there is this dear little one—well, this too is he,” and straining Abel to her in a tight clasp, she set eager kisses on his cheeks and hair.
“But I can never forget that he has just drowned nine men!” exclaimed the General.
“There was no help for it, doubtless,” she said, “for he is generous and humane. He sheds as little blood as may be, and only in the interests of the little world which he defends, and the sacred cause for which he is fighting. Talk to him about anything that seems to you to be wrong, and he will convince you, you will see.”
“There was that crime of his,” muttered the General to himself.
“But how if that crime was a virtue?” she asked, with cold dignity. “How if man’s justice had failed to avenge a great wrong?”
“But a private revenge!” exclaimed her father.
“But what is hell,” she cried, “but a revenge through all eternity for the wrong done in a little day?”
“Ah! you are lost! He has bewitched and perverted you. You are talking wildly.”
“Stay with us one day, father, and if you will but listen to him, and see him, you will love him.”
“Hélène, France lies only a few leagues away,” he said gravely.
Hélène trembled; then she went to the porthole and pointed to the savannas of green water spreading far and wide.
“There lies my country,” she said, tapping the carpet with her foot.
“But are you not coming with me to see your mother and your sister and brothers?”
“Oh! yes,” she cried, with tears in her voice, “if he is willing, if he will come with me.”
“So,” the General said sternly, “you have neither country nor kin now, Hélène?”
“I am his wife,” she answered proudly, and there was something very noble in her tone. “This is the first happiness in seven years that has not come to me through him,” she said—then, as she caught her father’s hand and kissed it—“and this is the first word of reproach that I have heard.”
“And your conscience?”
“My conscience; he is my conscience!” she cried, trembling from head to foot. “Here he is! Even in the thick of a fight I can tell his footstep among all the others on deck,” she cried.
A sudden crimson flushed her cheeks and glowed in her features, her eyes lighted up, her complexion changed to velvet whiteness, there was joy and love in every fibre, in the blue veins, in the unconscious trembling of her whole frame. That quiver of the sensitive plant softened the General.
It was as she had said. The captain came in, sat down in an easy-chair, took up his oldest boy, and began to play with him. There was a moment’s silence, for the General’s deep musing had grown vague and dreamy, and the daintily furnished cabin and the playing children seemed like a nest of halcyons, floating on the waves, between sky and sea, safe in the protection of this man who steered his way amid the perils of war and tempest, as other heads of household guide those in their care among the hazards of common life. He gazed admiringly at Hélène—a dreamlike vision of some sea goddess, gracious in her loveliness, rich in happiness; all the treasures about her grown poor in comparison with the wealth of her nature, paling before the brightness of her eyes, the indefinable romance expressed in her and her surroundings.
The strangeness of the situation took the General by surprise; the ideas of ordinary life were thrown into confusion by this lofty passion and reasoning. Chill and narrow social conventions faded away before this picture. All these things the old soldier felt, and saw no less how impossible it was that his daughter should give up so wide a life, a life so variously rich, filled to the full with such passionate love. And Hélène had tasted danger without shrinking; how could she return to the pretty stage, the superficial circumscribed life of society?
It was the captain who broke the silence at last.
“Am I in the way?” he asked, looking at his wife.
“No,” said the General, answering for her. “Hélène has told me all. I see that she is lost to us—”
“No,” the captain put in quickly; “in a few years’ time the statute of limitations will allow me to go back to France. When the conscience is clear, and a man has broken the law in obedience to—” he stopped short, as if scorning to justify himself.
“How can you commit new murders, such as I have seen with my own eyes, without remorse?”
“We had no provisions,” the privateer captain retorted calmly.
“But if you had set the
