And McGovern had watched her come with an ever-changing expression in his eyes. His face, flushed with excitement and victory, had paled. Once he had started as if to run below and hide. There was something familiar in those towering masts and that gleaming white figurehead, and as she sailed on to retake the little Frolic, McGovern was compelled to hold fast to the bitts to prevent himself from falling. The ports were crowded with jeering faces. The quarter-deck rail was lined with laughing officers, in cocked hats and white knee-breeches. Under her stern gallery he read the word Poictiers! From that he glanced up at the main yard arm. Men had swung there at the end of a rope—yes, he had once seen a convulsive, struggling figure black against the sky. Men would swing there again! The maxim that 'a deserter has no defence' recurred to him. He glanced about. Close by was a chain-shot, two nine-pound solid shot connected by a foot of heavy links. Like one afraid of being seen, he skulked across the deck as he had skulked in the days before. He reached the side where part of the bulwarks had been torn away, and crouching there he passed the end of his heavy belt through a link of the chain, and without a sound lurched forward, all huddled up, and struck sideways in the water.
THE SCAPEGOAT
It was a famous dinner party that Captain William Bainbridge, Commander of the Charlestown Navy Yard, gave on the night of the 31st of May, 1813. In those days gentlemen sat long at a table; they knew good wines when they tasted them, and if they drank a great deal at a sitting, they sipped slowly.
The cloth had been removed, and upon the shining mahogany rested two or three cut-glass decanters filled with the best Madeira. Captain Bainbridge sat at the head of the table, in a high-backed oaken chair; he was dressed in a blue uniform coat, with the gold-braided lapels thrown back over his wide chest. In his snow-white shirt frill there nestled a sparkling jewel given to him by the Sultan of Turkey, upon the occasion when Bainbridge had brought the old frigate George Washington into the harbor of Constantinople and there for the first time displayed the flag of the United States.
The candles had burned low in the candelabra, a silence had fallen upon the company; it was evident that something had interrupted the easy flow of wit and conversation. Captain James Lawrence, the guest of the evening, was in full uniform, with epaulets and great gold buttons as big as half-dollars. He sat opposite Captain Bainbridge, with both elbows on the table, cracking walnuts and eating them as if to stave off hunger; his face was flushed, and a frown was on his brow. A young man of not more than twenty, with a gleaming mass of gold braid on his left shoulder, the mark of the lieutenant, had the next seat to him; he was nervously drumming on the table with his finger-nails. Occasionally he would glance from Lawrence to Bainbridge, and then at the two other officers who were sitting there in constrained silence.
Well did they all know how easy it was for the word to be spoken that would fire the smouldering mine, and change what had been a jovial gathering to the prologue of a tragedy. Men had to be careful how they spoke in those days. There could never be any brawling or careless flying of words; courtesy and gallantry limited their power of personal offence; but epithets or implications once given expression could not easily be withdrawn. Men who had been friends and who had fought for the same cause would, with the stilted hat-tipping and snuff-offering fashion of the time, meet one another in the gray of morning under God's sky and do one another to the death.
At last Lawrence spoke.
"Are you not judging me harshly in this matter, sir?" he said. "You say you doubt my caution." His gaze shifted from the brilliant jewel in Bainbridge's breast to the frank, manly face above.
"Your caution; yes, Captain," was the return; "your courage, my dear sir, never."