still until the colors slowly and gracefully floated down.
One of the most beautiful of sights is the fall of a flag, when it comes down by your own hand and betokens no surrender. The declining banner lingers in the evening air with sweet reluctance until it finally drops into waiting hands with a touch like a caress.
"You see, we keep up the customs of the service as near as we can, sir. How is the ship, Barry?" the admiral asked, as the old sailor delivered his report, as he had done the evening before and on all the evenings of their long sojourn on Ship House Point.
"I have a fond fancy, Mr. Revere," resumed the veteran, after the termination of the customary conversation with the sailor, "that the ship and I will sail into the final harbor together. Both of us are old and worn out, laid up in ordinary, waiting for the end. But let us go into the house. The night air grows chill for me. Emily shall sing to us, and then I shall bid you good-night."
The girl's sweet, low voice, although unaccompanied, makes rare music in the old room. The admiral sits with his eyes closed, a smile upon his lips, beating the time upon the arm of his chair with his withered fingers. The songs the girl sings are of the music of the past; the words, those the admiral heard when he was a boy. Now it is a rollicking sea-chorus which bubbles from her young lips, now it is a sweet old ballad that his wife sang in the long ago time. His head nods, and he says, softly, under his breath, half in time with the rhythm, —
"Ay, just so. When I was a boy, so many years ago!"
Revere listens entranced, though possibly he had arrived at such a state that he would have listened entranced if she had sung badly, – which she did not. Her voice, though untrained, was delightful. It had the naturalness of bird notes, the freshness of youth, and the purity that charms the world. The airs were half-forgotten things, lingering familiarly in his memory. He may have heard them when he was a baby in his mother's arms, and she from her mother, and so on down through the long line of ancient ancestry maternal.
The sweetest songs, are they not the oldest? Have not the peasants of Sicily been singing the music of "Home, Sweet Home," for a thousand years?
And so the young man listens and loves, the old man listens and dreams, and the girl sings as never before, for this time she knows that a young heart beats in harmony with her voice. Alas for the old! he has had his day. Compelling youth enters and displaces him. Emily sings not merely for the past, but with thoughts reaching out into the future. When she stops, fain to be persuaded, Revere entreats her to continue, he begs for more. She knows not how to refuse, indeed does not wish to do so, so she sings on and on.
The admiral sleeps, but what of that? Youth listens, and by and by, as she strikes something that he knows, in a fresh, hearty tenor voice he ventures to join with her. In the harmony of their voices they almost see a prophecy of the future harmony of their lives.
Many a time has she sung to the admiral and the old sailor, but never quite as to-night. And Captain Barry has not been there. The heavy oaken chair, which he made himself from the timbers of the ship, which stands by the door, and which, in its rude strength, its severe plainness, somehow suggests the man, is empty. To the admiral she has sung like a voice from the past, to Barry her music has been like that of an angel in heaven, to Revere it is the voice of the woman he loves. But to-night, although he hears the music, Captain Barry will not come in. He stands on the porch, peering through the blinds. Unskilled as he is in the reading of character, unaccustomed to the observation of faces, there is no mistaking, even in the sailor's mind, the look in the eyes of Revere.
The young man sits opposite Emily, listening to her, watching her, drinking in the sweetness of the melody and the beauty of her face; the light that is in his eye is the light of a love that has come, not as the oak grows from the tiny seed, slowly developing through the ages, and spreading and bourgeoning until it fills the landscape, but the glory of a passion that has burst upon him with the suddenness of a tempest, and one that promises to be as irresistible in its onset. And Barry sees it all, divines, knows, feels, and in the light of another love recognizes at last his own futile passion. The revelation of hopelessness in the light of hope, of despair in the glow of success.
Never had the Bostonian been brought in contact with a personality quite like that of Emily. More beautiful girls, measured by the canons, he had seen, possibly; wiser in the world's ways, better trained, more accustomed to the usages of society, undoubtedly; but never one so sweet, so innocent, so fresh, so unspoiled, so lovely, and so lovable. As frank as she was beautiful, as brave as she was innocent, as pure as she was strong. There was no use denying it; he could not disguise it; he had loved her from the moment when, standing on the wreck, he saw her steering the skiff in the storm, with her fair hair blown out by the breeze and her face turned up toward him, full of encouragement and entreaty.
And Barry knew it now.
As a young sailor, Revere had flirted and frolicked with many girls, he had been staidly engaged to another for a long time, but not until that day had he really loved any one. As for the girl, she had taken him at his face value; and while it would hardly be just to say that she entirely reciprocated his feeling, yet it was easy to see whither her heart tended and what the end of the acquaintance would be unless something checked the course of the growing interest she felt in the young man.
Could Barry check it? He yearned to try. And all these things were plain to the old sailor. He suddenly found himself dowered with an unwonted ability to reason, to see, to read beneath the surface. 'Twas love's enlightening touch; hopeless, uncoveting, yet jealous love, that opened his eyes. Love blinds? Ay, but he enlightens, too.
Barry's glance through the window ranged from the dozing admiral to the adoring young man, and paused over the face, exalted, of the young woman. His breath came hard as he gazed, his heart rose in his throat and tried to suffocate him. He clinched his hands, closed his teeth – a dangerous man, there, under the moonlight. He cursed the gay young lieutenant under his breath, as Adam might have cursed the serpent who gave him, through the woman, of that tree of knowledge that opened his eyes and turned his paradise into a hell.
CHAPTER X
Facing World-Old Problems
When the lights in the house were all out, and they had all gone to their rest or their restlessness, to their dreams or their oblivion, the sailor returned to his ship. Lighting his lantern, that hung in the sheltered corner aft where he slung his hammock, he pulled from the breast of his shirt a little bundle of water-stained papers. One was a long, official-looking envelope, bearing the stamp of the Navy Department, and evidently containing an order or an important communication. Barry had often seen such envelopes addressed to the admiral. The others, if he could judge from the outside, were private letters, and the envelopes bore, he thought, a woman's handwriting. He arrived at this last conclusion instinctively, for he was without familiarity with such things; he had scarcely ever received a letter in his fifty years of life.
He had found them that morning on the shore by the landing, where they had fallen from the pocket of Revere's coat the night before. Instead of handing them to the young man, he had retained them; moved by what idea that they might be of value to him some day, who could say?
The envelopes had all been opened, and nothing prevented him from examining the contents. He was but a rude sailor; the niceties and refinements of other ranks of life were not for him, yet he hesitated to read the documents. Two or three times he half drew one of the letters from its envelope only to thrust it resolutely back. Miss Emily would not have read them, nor the admiral either; that he knew. Finally he gathered up the handful, put them in the locker near where he stood, and turned the key. He would not read them, but he would not return them, either.
Ah, Barry, 'tis not alone hesitant woman who loses!
He had won a partial advantage, the
