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.