“Margaret, it is painful to think I can never thank those who have shown you kindness. Your acquaintances and mine must be separate. Unless, indeed, I run the chances of a court-martial, or unless you and my father would come to Spain.” He threw out this last suggestion as a kind of feeler; and then suddenly made the plunge. “You don’t know how I wish you would. I have a good position—the chance of a better,” continued he, reddening like a girl. “That Dolores Barbour that I was telling you of, Margaret—I only wish you knew her; I am sure you would like—no, love is the right word, like is so poor—you would love her, father, if you knew her. She is not eighteen; but if she is in the same mind another year, she is to be my wife. Mr. Barbour won’t let us call it an engagement. But if you would come you would find friends everywhere, besides Dolores. Think of it, father. Margaret be on my side.”
“No—no more removals for me,” said Mr. Hale. “One has cost me my wife. No more removals in this life. She will be here; and here will I stay out my appointed time.”
“Oh, Frederick,” said Margaret, “tell us more about her. I never thought of this; but I am so glad. You will have some one to love and care for you out there. Tell us all about it.”
“In the first place, she is a Roman Catholic. That’s the only objection I anticipated. But my father’s change of opinion—nay, Margaret, don’t sigh.”
Margaret had reason to sigh a little more before the conversation ended. Frederick himself was Roman Catholic in fact, though not in profession as yet. This was, then, the reason why his sympathy in her extreme distress at her father’s leaving the church had been so faintly expressed in his letters. She had thought it was the carelessness of a sailor; but the truth was, that even then he was himself inclined to give up the form of religion into which had been baptized, only that his opinions were tending in exactly the opposite direction to those of his father. How much love had to do with this change not even Frederick himself could have told. Margaret gave up talking about this branch of the subject at last; and, returning to the fact of the engagement, she began to consider it in some fresh light.
“But for her sake, Fred, you surely will try and clear yourself of the exaggerated charges brought against you, even if the charge of mutiny itself be true. If there were to be a court-martial, and you could find your witnesses, you might, at any rate, show your disobedience to authority was because that authority was unworthily exercised.”
Mr. Hale roused himself up to listen to his son’s answer.
“In the first place, Margaret, who is to hunt up my witnesses? All of them are sailors, drafted off to other ships, except those whose evidence would go for very little, as they took part or sympathised in the affair. In the next place allow me to tell you, you don’t know what a court-martial is, and consider it as an assembly where justice is administered, instead of what it really is—a court where authority weighs nine-tenths in the balance, and evidence forms only the other tenth. In such cases, evidence itself can hardly escape being influenced by the prestige of authority.”
“But is it not worth trying, to see how much evidence might be discovered and arrayed on your behalf? At present, all those who knew you formerly, believe you guilty without any shadow of excuse. You have never tried to justify yourself, and we have never known where to seek for proofs of your justification. Now, for Miss Barbour’s sake, make your conduct as clear as you can in the eye of the world. She may not care for it; she has, I am sure, that trust in you that we all have; but you ought not to let her ally herself to one under such a serious charge, without showing the world exactly how it is you stand. You disobeyed authority—that was bad; but to have stood by, without word or act, while the authority was brutally used, would have been infinitely worse. People know what you did; but not the motives that elevate it out of a crime into an heroic protection of the weak. For Dolores’ sake, they ought to know.”
“But how must I make them know? I am not sufficiently sure of the purity and justice of those who would be my judges, to give myself up to a court-martial, even if I could bring a whole array of truth-speaking witnesses. I can’t send a bell-man about, to cry aloud and proclaim in the streets what you are pleased to call my heroism. No one would read a pamphlet of self-justification so long after the deed, even if I put one out.”