CHAPTER XLVII.
DEVOTION.
"To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his Great Father bends-- Old men and babes, and loving friends, And youths and maidens gay!"
"Farewell! farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou wedding-guest, He prayeth well who loveth well Both man, and bird, and beast!"
Sunday morning in Kingston harbor. The deep-toned bells from cathedral and church were wafted off from the town; the troops at Park Camp marching with easy tread to their chapel; matrons and maidens, with bare heads, fans, and mantillas, going along demurely; portly judges, factors, and planters trudging beside palanquins of their Saxon spouses; negroes in white; Creoles in brown, cigarettes put out for a time; while swinging censers and rolling sound of organs and chants, or prayers and sermons from kirk and pulpits, told how the people were worshiping God according to their several beliefs.
On the calm harbor, too, and in Port Royal, lay the men-of-war, the church pennants taking the place of the ensigns at the peaks, the bells tolling, and the sailors--quiet, clean, and orderly--were attending divine service.
On board the "Monongahela" the great spar-deck was comparatively deserted--all save that officer with his spy-glassing old quarter-master, and the sentries on gangway and forecastle. The ropes, however, were flemished down in concentric coils, the guns without a speck of dust on their shining coats, the capstan polished like an old brass candlestick, and every thing below and aloft in a faultless condition.
As Harry Darcantel came rather languidly over the gangway, and went down to the main deck, where the five hundred sailors in snowy-white mustering clothes were assembled, Commodore Cleveland beckoned to him with his finger as he stood talking at the cabin door to his first lieutenant.
"Hardy, I do not feel well this morning; make my excuses to the chaplain, and go on with the service. Come in, Harry. Orderly, allow no one, not even the servants, to enter the cabin--except Dr. Darcantel, in case he should come on board."
The stiff soldier laid his white-gloved finger on the visor of his hat. Then the chaplain, standing on his flag-draped pulpit at the main-mast, with those five hundred quiet, attentive sailors seated on capstan-bars and match-tubs between the silent cannon, and no sound save his mild, persuasive voice, as he read the sublime service from the good lessons before him. Then, after a short but impressive sermon, adapted to the comprehension of the honest tars around him, with a kindly word, too, for the sagacious officers who commanded them, he closed the holy book and delivered the parting benediction.
As he began, a shore boat, in spite of the warning of the sentry at the gangway, came bows on to the frigate's solid side, and as she went dancing and bobbing back from the recoil of the concussion, a tall, powerful man leaped out of her, and, by a mighty spring, caught the man-ropes of the port gangway, and swung himself through the open port of the gun-deck. Bowing his lofty head with reverential awe as the last solemn words of the benediction were uttered by the chaplain, he joined, in a deep, guttural voice, the word "Amen," and strode on and entered the cabin.
The curtains were closely drawn of the after cabin, even to shut out the first whisper of the young sea-breeze which was fluttering in from Port Royal; and there stood that noble officer, with his strong arm thrown around the gallant youth--the picture of abject woe--talking in his kind, feeling accents, trying to console him, painting the sky bright in the distance, and begging him, by all the love and affection he bore him through so many years, to be a man, and trust to his good conscience and his right arm to cleave his way through the clouds and gloom which surrounded him.
"There, Henry, you are calmer now. Sit down here in my stateroom, and while you think of that fond girl, give a thought to that poor bereaved mother, Madame Rosalie, who loves you for the resemblance she thinks you bear to her little boy, who was murdered by pirates just seventeen years ago off this very island."
"What do you say, Cleveland?" said a voice behind him, with such deep, concentrated energy that the commodore fairly started. "What did you say about a lost child and a Madame Rosalie?"
Paul Darcantel stood there in the softened crimson light, with his sinewy, bony hands upraised, his gaunt breast heaving, with unshorn beard and tangled, grizzly locks, the iron jaw half open, and his dark, terrible eyes gleaming with unearthly fire.
"Speak, Harry Cleveland! For the wife you have lost, speak!"
"My dear, dearest friend, do be calm! Why have you been so long away from me? I wanted you here, but you did not come. Our poor boy has had _his_ first lesson in this world's grief, and I have felt obliged to tell him all--yes, every thing! That the grave he has so often wept over, under the magnolia, does not contain his mother; and that--"
"Merciful God!" said Paul Darcantel, sinking down on his knees, with his hands clasped together, while the first tears for more than twenty years streamed from his agonized eyes. "There is a Providence in it all! That boy is not my son! I saved him from the pirate's grasp, and that woman must be his mother!"
Lower and lower the lofty head bent till it touched the deck, the bony hands clasped tight together, and those eyes--ah! those parched eyes--no longer dry!
"Paul, Paul, what is this I hear? For the love of heaven and those angels who are waiting for us, speak again!"
"My father--my more than father, I am not illegitimate, then! No such shame may cause your boy to blush for his mother?"
While strong and loving arms raised the exhausted man from the deck, and while he becomes once more the same determined Paul Darcantel, and with hand grasped in hand is rapidly recounting unknown years of his existence, let us leave the cabin.