It was not much of a speech that Captain Calderwood made, however.
He had only done his duty, he said, as nobody knew better than the seafaring folk of Portie, every one of whom would have done the same in his place, if they had seen the same reason. He was glad to be safe home again with his ship and cargo, and not a life lost, and he was proud of the welcome they were giving him—for there was no place like Portie to him, and no folk like the folk of Portie whom he had known all his life.
That was all. But George made a speech, and said just enough and no more—“as he ay does,” his proud father thought as he listened.
Still standing with his hand on his friend’s shoulder he said a few words about what Captain Calderwood had done. He could not tell them the story, because he had heard nothing as yet, more than the rest. But he knew as well as if he had been told, how all things had been ordered on board of the “Ben Nevis,” both before the storm and after it, because he knew Captain Calderwood.
He had done his duty. That was all. But he need not tell the men of Portie—the Saugsters and the Cairnies, the Smiths and the Watts, the Bruces and the Barnets, who had had sailors among their kin longer ago than the oldest of them could mind—what duty meant to a sailor.
It meant to him, whiles, what heroism meant to other folk. It meant courage to face danger, patience undying through want and weariness and waiting, cheerful endurance through wakeful nights and toilsome days, and long banishment from friends and home.
It meant to the master, a power to command himself, as well as his men; it meant skill and will, and wisdom to act, and strength to bear up under the terrible responsibility of holding in his hand other men’s lives, no one but him coming between them and God.
To the men it meant obedience, entire and unquestioning, sometimes, alas! to unreasonable commands—to tyranny to which, in the hands of evil men, unrestrained power might easily degenerate. It meant to all and each—to master and to man—a taking his life in his hand—a daily and nightly facing of death—ay, and of suffering death. It might mean that to some of their own, now far away. It might have meant that to Captain Calderwood, for instead of coming home with ship and cargo safe and with not a life lost, he might have given his own life in doing his duty, as his father had done before him, and his grandfather, as all the men of Portie knew.
“And is he less a hero to us to-day because he has only done his duty? And if instead of having him here among us to-day—to fill with joy and pride every sailor’s heart in Portie—there had come to us from the sea, first a vague and awful rumour of danger and loss, and then one or other of the tokens that have come to some here—a spar, a broken piece of the ship, a word or two written beneath the very eyes and touch of death—would he not have been a hero to us then? And all the more, that having no thought of what men’s eyes might see in his deeds, or men’s tongues tell of them, he had lived through the violence of the tempest, and through the lingering days of peril that followed, only to do his duty?”
It was here that George’s speech ought to have come to an end. It was at this point that his father thought he had said “just enough and no more.” And it was here also that Willie shrugged his shoulders under the hand that still rested lovingly on them as he muttered,—