Guy Livingstone; or, 'Thorough'

by George A. Lawrence

From the episode of Niobe down to the best song in the "Princess," how many beautiful lines have been devoted to those outward and visible signs of sorrow?

Sadder elegiacs, more pathetic threnodies might have been written on the tears that were stifled at their source, either from pride or from physical inability to let them flow. Great regrets, like great schemes, are generally matured in the shade. If I had to choose the tombs where most hopes and affections are buried, I should turn, I think, not to those with the long inscriptions of questionable poetry or blameless Latinity, but to where just the initials and a cross are cut on the single stone.

The philosophical and poetical mourners hardly suffered much more than Guy did during those months, and for long after too, though he was always quite silent on the subject, and would speak cheerfully on others now and then, and though, from the day that he parted with Constance to that of his own death, his eyes were as dry as the skies over the Delta. He used to lie for hours in that state of utter listlessness which gives a reality to the sad old Eastern proverb, "Man is better sitting than standing, lying down than sitting, dead than lying down."

With all this, however, his health improved every day. After the wild life he had led lately, the perfect rest and the clear pure air refreshed him marvelously. It had the effect of coming out of a room heated and laden with smoke into the cool summer morning. His strength, too, had returned almost completely. I found this out at Baiæ.

The guardian of the Cento Camerelle, a big lazzarone, became inordinately abusive. My impression is that he had received about fifteen times his due; but, seeing our yacht in the offing, he conceived the idea that we were princes in our own country, and ought to be robbed in his proportionally. Guy's eyes began to gleam at last, and he made a step toward the offender. I thought he was going to be heavily visited; but Livingstone only lifted him by the throat and held him suspended against the wall, as you may see the children in those parts pin the lizards in a forked stick. Then he let him drop, unhurt, but green with terror. A year ago, a straightforward blow from the shoulder would have settled the business in a shorter time, and worked a strange alteration in good Giuseppe's handsome sunburnt face. But the old hardness of heart was wearing away. I had another proof of this some days later.

We were dropping down out of the Bay of Naples. Though we weighed anchor in early morning, it was past noon before we cleared the Bocca di Capri, for there was hardly wind enough to give the Petrel steerage-way. The smoke from our long Turkish pipes mounted almost straight upward, and lingered over our heads in thin blue curls; yet the sullen, discontented heave and roll in the water were growing heavier every hour. The black tufa cliffs crested with shattered masonry—the foundations of the sty where the Boar of Capreæ wallowed—were just on our starboard quarter, when Riddell, the master, came up to Livingstone. "I think we'd better make all snug, sir," he said. "There's dirty weather to windward, and we haven't too much sea-room." He was an old man-of-war's boatswain, and had had a tussle, in his time, on every sea and ocean in the known world, with every wind that blows. He had rather a contempt for the Mediterranean, esteeming it just one degree above the Cowes Roads, and attaching about as much importance to its vagaries as one might do to the fractiousness of a spoiled child. If he had been caught in the most terrible tempest that ever desolated the shores of the Great Lake, I don't believe he would have called it any thing but "dirty weather." He was too good a sailor, though, not to take all precautions, even if he had been sailing on a piece of ornamental water; and he went quickly forward to give the necessary orders, after getting a nod of assent from Guy.

The latter raised himself lazily on his arm, so as to see all round over the low bulwarks. There was a blue-black bank of cloud rolling up from the southwest. Puffs of wind, with no coolness in them, but dry and uncertain as if stirred by some capricious artificial means, struck the sails without filling them, and drove the Petrel through the water by fits and starts.

"I really believe we are going to have a white squall," Guy remarked, indifferently. "Well, we shall see how the boat behaves. Riddell only spoke just in time."

Suddenly his tone changed, and he said, quickly and decidedly, "Hold on every thing!"

The master turned his weatherwise eye toward the quarter where the danger lay, and frowned. "We're none too soon with it, Mr. Livingstone. If there's a yard too much canvas spread when that reaches us, I won't answer for the spars."