As this conversation went on, the mates had walked aft, and were close behind Isabella, who stood by the companion-way, while the governor, and his lady, who was not far behind him in corporeal dimensions, were accomplishing their descent into the lower regions.
"That rascally soldier," said Morton, "wants nothing but a tail to make him a full-rigged monkey, and that lovely girl is about to be sacrificed to him."
"Poor girl!" said Coffin; "it's bad enough to marry a sojer, any how; but to marry such a critter as that is going it a little too fine."
Poor Isabella, who had heard and properly understood every syllable of their conversation, was exceedingly affected. She had heard a person, whose appearance and manners approached her beau ideal of a gentleman, expressing, in warm and energetic language, the liveliest compassion for her, and guessing (for she could not imagine how he could know with certainty) her exact situation, and manifesting an apparently sincere and hearty interest towards her. Although her uncle had forborne to trouble her upon that hateful subject, after he had first proposed it, she knew his disposition too well to regard the reprieve as an abandonment of his original design.
As she turned away to conceal her emotion from her cousins, her streaming eyes encountered those of Morton. The young seaman was shocked and alarmed at her tears, though he had not the most distant suspicion that she had understood a word that had been said. Her beauty had first attracted his notice—it was so un-Spanish, and so nearly resembling that of New England ladies; the pensive expression of her countenance had excited a lively interest and curiosity towards her; but her tears, the evidence of that "secret grief" that the heart, and only the heart, knoweth, had called up all the sympathies of his heart.
I believe there are few men, who deserve the name, that are proof against a woman's tears, and there are few such men, who, when they perceive a woman, especially a young and beautiful one, oppressed with grief, anxiety, or distress, do not feel an irresistible impulse to assist and relieve her.
It may be objected that I have made my hero fall in love at first sight. To this I answer that I cannot spare time to lead him step by step through all the crooks and turns of the bewitching passion; secondly, love is not like the consumption; people do not go gradually into it by a beaten road, every foot of which is marked and designated by its appropriate and peculiar symptoms. "Nemo est repente vitiosus," says Juvenal—nobody becomes completely depraved all at once; very true, but folks certainly do, to my certain knowledge, fall in love all at once, and that is doubtless the reason why they are said to fall in love. Love is like the Asiatic cholera; a man is suddenly laid flat on his back, with all the marked and violent symptoms, when he thought all the while he was in perfect health. "Love," says Corporal Trim, "is exactly like war in this, that a soldier, though he has escaped three weeks complete o' Saturday night, may nevertheless be shot through the heart on Sunday morning." In the third place, a man, who for two or three years has seen nothing in the female form more attractive than the copper-colored beauties of Asia, the South Sea Islands, and the whole western coast of America, or the ebony fair ones of Africa, is most astonishingly susceptible when once more restored to the society of ladies of his own complexion, and of more refinement than those we have mentioned. I have had the ineffable pleasure of testing the truth of this theory more than a dozen times in my own person. If any gentleman doubts the fact, I can only advise him to banish himself from female society, in a man-of-war or whaleman, for three or four years. If he does not fall in love fifty times a month, when he returns, he is either more or less than human, and, in either case, I should wish to remain a stranger to him.
The whole party were now "under hatches," and examining the wonders of a whaleman's cabin. Morton had attached himself to Isabella, and, as he spoke the Spanish language fluently, and, what was more to the purpose, was impelled by an irresistible feeling to entertain and amuse her, soon drew her into conversation, and was astonished and delighted with her good sense. He had visited different parts of South America before, and had seen enough of the women to perceive that they were excessively ignorant, superstitious, and vulgar. He was therefore not a little surprised to perceive in Isabella's conversation marks of a cultivated and polished understanding.
The rest of the party had gone into the steerage to examine some of those curious specimens of whalebone work, in the fabrication of which whalemen employ so much patience and time, during their long and often unsuccessful voyages. As Isabella and Morton stood together by the cabin table, the lady opened a bible that was lying there, and seemed for a moment or two engaged in reading it.
"Do you understand that?" said the seaman, still speaking Spanish.