The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863

by Henry Morford

She was indeed a little thing, as compared with the steamers which the American had been in the habit of seeing sent away on sea-voyages—very low in hull, rakish in pipe and masts, looming black in the gathering dusk of evening, and her bulwarks seeming so low as to present the same appearance of insecurity against falling overboard that a landsman's eye immediately perceives in a first glance at a pilot-boat. The steam was already well up and hissing from her escape valves, while the black smoke rolled away from her pipe as if it had a mission to cloud the whole port with soot and cinders.

A few words with the Queen's messenger and an introduction to the Captain of the little Emerald followed; and the correspondent of the Mail had not overrated his influence with either, for in ten minutes the lawyer was booked for a passage over, under government auspices. In half an hour more the despatch-boat steamed away; and when the deep dusk of night fell to shut away the Welsh coast, while the half dozen officers and their two passengers were trifling over a very pleasant supper with wines of antediluvian vintage accompanying, the Emerald was well off the Head, tossing about like a cork in the sea that seemed to be every moment growing more and more violent, but making fine weather through it all, flying like a race-horse, and promising, if every thing held, to land the messenger and her other passengers at Kingstown, at very near as early an hour in the morning as those touched the shore who had left Holyhead two hours before by the packet.

The American remained long on the deck, in conversation with the newspaper correspondent, delighted with the cordiality of his manner and the extensive scope of his information, as he had before been with the generosity which supplied himself with a passage over at the moment of disappointment. The Hiberno-Englishman seemed to be equally pleased with his new friend, whom he found all that he had at first believed—a gentleman, and neither pickpocket nor madman. Mr. Fitzmaurice, still a young man and a subordinate, had never been in America, but he had something more than the ordinary newspaper stock of information about countries lying beyond sea, and he had the true journalist's admiration for the young land that has done more for journalism within fifty years than all the other countries of the world through all the ages. He listened with pleasure to the descriptions which the lawyer was equally able and willing to impart, of the modes in which the news-gathering operations of the leading American newspapers were carried on, and especially of the reckless exposures of correspondents on the battle-fields of the great war, which have all the while exhibited so much bravery and so stupendous a spirit of enterprise, combined with a lack of judgment equally injurious and deplorable.

Mr. Fitzmaurice, on his part, resident in London during all the period of our struggle, necessarily present at most of the Parliamentary debates in which the good and ill feeling of Englishmen towards the United States have been shown in such unfavorable proportions—acquainted with most of the leading public men of the kingdom, and with an Irishman's rattle making the conveying of his impressions a thing of equal ease and pleasure,—he had much to say that interested the Philadelphian; and it would have been notable, could he have been fairly behind the curtain as to the character and movements of the other, to mark how the man who during two weeks residence in London had never stepped his foot within the Parliament Houses, could drink in and digest, from another's lips, the story of the debates which he might so easily have heard first-handed with his own ears!

But as the newspaper man could know nothing of this, enough to say that the conversation was a pleasant one, and that hours rolled away unheeded in its continuance, while the little Emerald skimmed over and plunged through the rough waves of the Irish Channel, and while those waves grew heavier, and the sky darker, and the wild south-easter increased every hour in the violence with which it whistled through the scant rigging and sent the caps of the waves whirling and dashing past the adventurous little minnow of the steam-navy, to fall in showers of foamy spray far to leeward.

It was past midnight when the young men, so strangely thrown together, so different in position and pursuit, but so pleasantly agreeing in all the amenities of social intercourse,—began to feel the demands of sleep overmastering the excitement of the situation, left the deck and went below to the berths in the little cramped cabin which had been prepared for them. The Queen's messenger had already retired and was sleeping so soundly in his four-by-seven state-room, with his despatches under his pillow, that nothing less than the going to pieces of the steamer or an order to start on a new journey could possibly have woke him. To such men, ever flying from one port to another, by sea and by land, bearing the lives of individuals and often the welfare of whole peoples in their hands, with no more knowledge of what they bear than has the telegraph wire of the message that thrills along it—to such men, habituated to excitement, hurry and exposure, that excitement really becomes a sort of second nature; and the art of sleeping on the ground, on a board, bolt upright in a chair or even in the saddle, is one of the accomplishments soonest learned and last forgotten. What are storms to them or to that other class to which reference has before been made—the rough Ariels of the newspaper Prospero? Nothing, except they cause hindrance! What is even the deepest personal peril by sea or land? Nothing, except because in putting a sudden period to the existence of the messenger it may interfere with the delivery of his all-important despatches!

So slept the Queen's messenger, and so, after a time, in their narrow berths, slept the American and his new-made friend. Once falling away into slumber, the very motion of the vessel made that slumber more intense and stupefying, old Mother Nature rocking her children somewhat roughly in the "cradle of the deep." And of what dreamed they? Who knows? Perhaps the handsome and vivacious young Anglo-Irishman of the girl whose miniature he had accidentally displayed to the eyes of the other, filling the back case of his watch,—not yet his wife, but to be so some day when talent and energy should bring their recompense and fortune shower her favors a little more liberally upon him. Perhaps the Philadelphia lawyer of wrongs and shames in his native land, of the apparently mad quest which he seemed to be urging, and of possible coming days when all errors should be repaired, and the great stake of his life won beyond a peradventure.

How long the lawyer had slept he knew not, when some change in the motion of the boat produced the same effect on his slumbers that is said to be wrought on the sleeping miller by the stoppage of the splashing water-wheel and the rumbling burr-stones. He had slept amidst the violent motion: he partially woke when there was a momentary cessation of it. In an instant after the vessel seemed to be struck one tremendous blow that sent a shiver through every plate and rivet of her iron hull—through every board and stanchion of her cabin-work. There are men who can remain undisturbed by such a sensation on shipboard, but the American was by no means one of them; and the fumes of sleep, partially dissipated before, rolled away almost as suddenly as morning mists before a brisk north-wester. He was broad awake to feel a hand grasping him by the shoulder, and opened his eyes to see Fitzmaurice standing by the berth and holding the joiner-work with one hand to support himself against the fearful lurches of the vessel, while he had employed the other in arousing the apparently slumbering man.

"Get up and come out at once!" he said, his voice hoarse and agitated.

"What has happened?" asked the American, springing upright in his berth and preparing to leap from it as men will do when such unpleasant announcements are made. He seemed to know, intuitively and without any instruction from the shock which had just startled him, that some marked peril must have sent the journalist down to arouse him in that melodramatic manner.