“No, sir, she was not false,” he said. “It was something that she couldn’t help. She would marry me now, if I would let her.”
“Why, then, do you not marry her?” the father asked. “This is probably a fancy, which will pass away; and if she is good and true, she will do her duty by you.”
Dick stared at the priest in an almost indignant astonishment. “What, sir!” he exclaimed, “do you think me mean enough to marry a woman who loves another man? I always feared this, at the bottom of my heart, though I would not own that I did. And it was always true, I suppose, only she did not know it. I made a great mistake. I thought that, if I tried to be good to God and to her, she would love me. But I have been thinking it all over during the last week, and I have found out that we choose by our hearts, not our heads, and that we do not really love a person when we can tell the reason why. I had no right to buy her. She belonged to some one else.” He shivered, looked down a moment, then said huskily, “Yes, Edith was true!” and, dropping his face into his hands, burst into tears.
“My dear son!” Father John said, putting his arm around Dick’s shoulder, “don’t give up so! You have youth, and health, and friends, and a work to do in the world. Don’t let this discourage you. She is only a woman.”
“And I am only a man!” said Dick.
“What about your ship?” the priest asked, after a little while.
Dick raised his face, and controlled himself to speak. “Captain Cary is to take charge of her,” he said. “I couldn’t sail in the Edith Yorke again, sir. I would not trust myself off alone in her, with nothing else to think of, and no escape, unless I jumped into the ocean. It is haunted by her. Every plank, and spar, and rope of that ship is steeped in the thought of her. I have fancied her there, speaking, and laughing, and singing, just as I expected she would some day, and asking me the names of everything. When I used to walk up and down the deck, I’d imagine her beside me. I could see her dress fluttering, and the braid of hair, and two little feet keeping step. Why, sir, it was so real that I would sometimes shorten my steps for her sake. I never neglected my duty for her; but I looked at everything through a little rosy thought of her, and that made hard work pleasant. No, I can never again sail in the Edith Yorke. Have patience with me, father. Recollect, I have to overturn all that was my world, and have not a point to rest my lever on.”
“You a Christian, and say that!” the priest exclaimed. “Where is your faith? Where is your reason?”
Dick started up fiercely, and began to walk the floor. “I cannot bear it! I will not bear it!” he exclaimed. “You preachers, with your reason, that tramples on all feeling, are as bad as the scientists, whose science tramples on all faith. God made the tide, sir, as well as the rock, and the storm as well as the calm, and it is for him to say whether either is a foolishness. People who are wise, when they sit in their safe homes, and hear the wind howling, pity the sailor, and tremble for him; but, when you see a soul among the breakers, you scorn it. I tell you, I will not bear
such scorn! What do you think this loss is to me?” he demanded, stopping before the priest, who sat looking steadfastly at him. “It means that all the brightness and sweetness of life, everything that is dear to human nature, are torn away from me for ever. If I were a dissolute man, I could find a miserable substitute; if I were fickle, I could fill her place; but I am neither. I stand here, twenty-eight years old, and—I call God to witness!—as stainless as when I was an infant in my mother’s arms. It was Edith who kept me so. ‘Only a woman,’ you say; but that may mean more than an angel. She was my guardian angel incarnate. ‘Only a woman;’ but that woman’s shape walked with me through paths that might have led to perdition, and kept me safe. If, in anger, an oath rose in my teeth, I felt her hand on my mouth, and did not utter it. If I was tempted with wine, I remembered her, and pushed the glass away. I can be bloodthirsty, sir, if I am provoked, but many a sailor escaped the lash and irons for her sake. Once I had my hand at a man’s throat, with a mind to wring his vile life out of him, but I thought of her, and let him go. The memory of this is not to be reasoned away. Do you remember, sir, the time when you first thought of your vocation, and sat down to count the costs? When you called up the vision of your life before you, and stripped from it, one after another, wife, children, and home, and all that they mean, did you want any one to preach to you, in that hour, of common sense and reason? Didn’t you feel that you must let nature have way a little while, and didn’t you find it go over you like a wave?”