CHAPTER XIII
It was morning when Elizabeth came again to the terrace above the water battery overlooking the harbor. She had passed a night of sleepless agony, and her pallid face, with its haggard expression, the great black circles under the eyes,--for her grief had been too deep for tears,--gave outward evidence of her breaking heart. She had besought the admiral again and again to stay the execution of her lover, urging every plea that the most desperate mind could suggest; she had implored his mercy and pity upon every ground, and upon his inexorable refusal had begged that he might be reprieved for a few hours, and that she might at least be allowed to see him before he died. Touched by her sorrow, at first the old man had been inclined to grant this petition, and had scribbled a line on his official paper, giving the desired permission; but before he signed and sealed it, he changed his mind, and deemed it best to refuse,--more merciful to her, in fact.
It really wrung his heart to be unable to extend clemency to this young man. He repented him of the temptation he had thrown in his way. The nobility with which O'Neill had refused and rejected the chance of life which had been offered him, the simplicity with which he had given up everything for honor, impressed him more than ever. He was sick at heart at the grief of his ward, whom he truly loved, and the broken, despairing face of his son, since he had learned that Elizabeth loved O'Neill, haunted him. He wished that the Irishman had never come across his path, though he could not but admire his honor, his grace, and his courage. He was bitterly sorry that he had ever attempted to influence the man; he had an uncomfortable and growing suspicion that his plans had brought nothing but trouble to every one. Breaking away from the presence of Elizabeth, whose anguished face was a living reproach to him, he finally secluded himself in his office and refused to see her again.
So the day, like yesterday, wore away; but, oh, how differently! The girl never knew how she passed the hours. She wandered restlessly up and down the terrace, her eyes strained upon the sea. The garrison, who idolized her to a man, had been apprised by the sergeant of what had happened, and, to a man, they were upon her side. The men would never forget the picture she made, as they watched her pacing to and fro, ceaselessly gazing at the white ship in the harbor,--her lover's prison, his scaffold even.
The sense of impotent helplessness with which she was compelled to face the situation, the knowledge that O'Neill was doomed absolutely, that there was nothing that she could do or say which would alter the decision, was terrible. She had been accustomed to have her will, and like most women loved it. Now she had to stand by in the bright sunlight with all the strength of life and youth and love in her veins and in his, and see her lover choked to death--hanged like a dog--at the black yard-arm of that great ship yonder.
And for what? Womanlike, she put aside every thought of him but that he had dared death itself only to see her, to be in her presence again! Oh, how splendid, how handsome, how noble he had been in the great hall, when he had refused her rather than to take her as the reward of treachery! and now he was to become a lifeless lump of clay, alive to her only as a memory, a recollection--how cruel! She could not, she would not, stand it. She racked her brain over and over. Was there nothing? No--
It was late in the afternoon. Her maid had not been able to drag her from the terrace whence she had a view of the ship on which her lover was to be executed,--murdered, she said. As she gazed upon it, she noticed two men climbing nimbly up the black shrouds about the foremast. When they reached the foreyard, they ran out on the yard-arm. One of them carried something. A rope was dragging from it. In obedience to an imperious command, her maid ran and fetched her a glass. One look through it showed her--she was a sailor's ward--that they were rigging a whip on the yard-arm, they were securing there a girt-line block through which a rope was rove, leading to the top and thence to the deck. She divined at once its hideous purpose. The hour! The hour! Had it grown so late? Was it so near, so near? Was there a God in that blue heaven bending above her head? Could such things be?
A sick feeling came over her heart, and she would have fainted but for a sudden inspiration. Again she seized the telescope,--an unusually strong one, by the way,--and raising it to her eyes with unsteady hand, eagerly swept the sea off in the direction of Flamborough Head, rising faintly down to the southward, a long distance away. For a long time her nervous, trembling hands could not get that part of the horizon in focus. She finally knelt down and rested the tube upon the parapet, breathing a prayer as she did so, and looked again.
Ah! At last she had it, and there swept into the field of vision three gleams of white on the skyline, proclaiming, even to her unpractised eye, the sails of ships! What had that indomitable man said to her last night in the hall?
"Delay the execution for at least six hours, and I will save him!" He was not one to promise lightly. She would try again. The telescope fell with a crash at her feet.
She would make one more appeal to the admiral; it was late, but there might yet be time. On the instant she turned, leaving the startled maid, and ran like a fleet-footed fawn along the terrace, down the stone steps through the water battery, through the bailey, into the inner court, down the long passage, and into the great hall of the night before, where the admiral was usually to be found at this hour. She dashed impetuously into the room, crying,--
"The admiral, quick! where is he?"
"Ships has been reported down at Bridlin'ton Bay,--furrin ships, yer Leddyship," replied the old sergeant, who happened to be there alone, "an' his Ludship took horse about half-past twelve o'clock to go down there."
Failure! Her last hope gone! She sank down into the chair. Reaction had come; she was fainting, helpless, dying. It was over! The sergeant started toward her, his face full of pity. She was sitting in the admiral's chair, by the great table. Her glance fell listlessly upon it. At the moment another idea flashed into her mind. Desperate, foolish, nevertheless, she would try it--try anything; this, at least, was action. She started to her feet again on the instant, instinct with life.
"Leave me at once, and see that no one interrupts me; I wish to be alone," she said imperiously to the astonished sergeant, who bowed respectfully and withdrew. A half an hour later she came hurriedly out of the room, white-faced, drawn, nerved up to desperate endeavor.
How he got through the night, O'Neill never knew. The court-martial in the morning had taken little time; its sentence, a foregone conclusion, promptly approved by the admiral, had been death by hanging at half after six o'clock that night. He had refused to give any further parole, in the faint hope that something might enable him to escape, and consequently had been heavily ironed and placed in confinement in the space between two of the great guns on the lower gun-deck--the Serapis was a double-banked frigate--on the starboard side. The forethought of Coventry, who had attended him with the solicitude and kindness of a brother, and had pleaded for him unavailingly before the court, had caused a canvas screen to be provided, which enclosed two of the guns, and allowed him to pass his hours undisturbed by the curious gaze of the English seamen. An armed marine stood always as sentry before the screen.
Captain Pearson, a gallant officer, had been kindness itself in all his arrangements, but his orders, which were peremptory, left him no discretion whatever. O'Neill passed his time sitting by the open port, leaning on a gun, gazing out over the water at the gray old castle where he had found his love and met his fate. Many tragedies had been enacted within its walls during long centuries of history--none sadder than his own.
It would have been foolish to say that he had no regrets. No one could think of the possibilities of happiness presented by such a love as that which he was now assured Elizabeth felt for him, without a sense of despair coming over the mind in the knowledge they were not to be enjoyed; but he was a sailor, and generations of heroic ancestors had accustomed him to look death in the face, and smile undaunted at its harsh, forbidding appearance.
"Fortune, Infortune, Fortune" had been the motto of his branch of the red-handed O'Neills; at least that was the punning Latin translation of a Celtic original which meant, "Fortune and misfortune are alike to the strong."
When his friends and acquaintances at the French court, those knights and ladies with whom he had ruffled it so bravely, the young king, his master, his old comrades, the hard fighters on the Richard, her dauntless captain, that brave old man, his father, heard how he died, they would learn that he had met the last grim enemy with the wonted intrepidity of his race. Noblesse oblige! and then having made his peace with God as best he could alone,--he was of a different faith from that of the chaplain of the ship,--he gave himself over to mournful dreams of Elizabeth Howard.
Late in the afternoon his meditations were interrupted by the arrival of Coventry. The poignant unhappiness of the young Englishman was, if anything, greater than that of O'Neill. His engagement to Elizabeth Howard, with whom he had grown up, had been at first more or less a matter of convenience, and he had never entirely realized the hold she had taken upon his heart, until he heard her--in the arms of O'Neill--make that frantic avowal of her overwhelming passion. Men frequently do not know the value of what they have--until they lose it.
Coventry's heart had been surcharged with love and devotion to this woman, and because his life had glided on evenly he had not known how full of love it was until he had been so shaken that it had overflowed. He would, he thought, cheerfully have taken the other's place, sentence of death and all, could he hear but once before he died the ringing accents of such a sublime confession--and for himself. His love for the woman of his choice was of the most exalted character, and might well, were merit or fitness alone to be considered in such a case, have claimed her own deepest feelings in return.
When Elizabeth had appealed to him to intervene, with a magnanimity as rare as it was noble, he had subordinated his happiness to her own, and had endeavored to procure a mitigation of the punishment imposed upon his rival, though he knew his success would throw his promised wife into the arms of O'Neill. He had not done this without a terrible struggle,--it was a gray-faced, broken man who looked upon the world of to-day, in place of the smiling youth of the night before,--but he had done it. He felt that the sacrifice would cost him his life, and for that he was truly glad, yet he had offered it freely, generously, and nobly. He had not hesitated to do so, for with him the happiness of Elizabeth Howard was the paramount passion.
If she did not love him, he could at least show her what love truly meant in its highest sense; give her a lesson in love like to the lesson in honor that other man had exhibited last night. For her he stood ready to give up everything; his own future he did not allow to weigh a moment in the balance beside hers.
There was something grandly sublime in this utter abnegation of self, so simply done for another's happiness. Coventry had been a Christian after a rather better fashion, perhaps, than most young men of his time; his associations with the sweet, pure girl he loved had kept him so. All his people for generations had been Churchmen; this seemed to him to be the right thing to do, the thing demanded of a gentleman; the greatest Gentleman of them all, who had shown His breeding on a Cross, had set the example of self-sacrifice. A sentence quoted by the chaplain in the service a few days before, which had struck his fancy, ran in his head; he had a good memory.
"I will very gladly spend and be spent for you; though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved."
Yes, that was it.
At the first moment, when he found last night that his pleadings were of no avail, and that O'Neill was doomed to die, his heart had leaped in his breast at the thought that his rival would be removed; but he had crushed the thought as unworthy a gentleman of his high ideals; and there had come to him, in addition, a consciousness that to a love like Elizabeth Howard's the death of a beloved would make no change. Such passions come but once in a lifetime, and when they arrive they are as eternal as the stars. He had given her up, and she belonged, in life or death, to another. A glance at his own anguished heart enabled him to feel for her. Time would not soften a blow to a nature like to hers.
In the execution of O'Neill, Coventry saw the death-warrant of Elizabeth. He had passed the day racking his brain and thinking of some way to delay the execution, but without avail. He would have stopped at nothing to save them both. In despair he had come to consult with his rival.