The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea by James Fenimore Cooper (best e books to read txt) 📗

truth; but you saw him not on that fearful night, when he carried us through the shoals! and you could not witness the calm courage with which he guided the ship into those very channels again, while the confusion of battle was among us!”

“I heard the dreadful din! And I can easily imagine the horrid scene,” returned his wife, her recollections chasing the color from her cheeks even at that distance of time; “but what of him? is his name mentioned in those papers? Ah! they are English prints! you called his name Gray, If I remember?”

“That is the name he bore with us! He was a man who had formed romantic notions of glory, and wished everything concealed in which he acted a part that he thought would not contribute to his renown.”

“Can there have been any connection between him and Alice Dunscombe?” said Cecilia, dropping her work in her lap, in a thoughtful manner. “She met him alone, at her own urgent request, the night Katherine and myself saw you in your confinement, and even then my cousin whispered that they were acquainted! The letter I received yesterday from Alice was sealed with black, and I was pained with the melancholy, though gentle manner, in which she wrote of passing from this world into another!”

Griffith glanced his eye at his wife with a look of sudden Intelligence, and then answered, like one who began to see with the advantages of a clearer atmosphere:

“Cecilia, your conjecture is surely true! Fifty things rushed to my mind at that one surmise—his acquaintance with that particular spot—his early life—his expedition—his knowledge of the abbey, all confirm it! He, altogether, was indeed a man of marked character!”

“Why has he not been among us,” asked Cecilia; “he appeared devoted to our cause?”

“His devotion to America proceeded from desire of distinction, his ruling passion, and perhaps a little also from resentment at some injustice which he claimed to have suffered from his own countrymen. He was a man, and not therefore without foibles—among which may have been reckoned the estimation of his own acts but they were most daring, and deserving of praise! neither did he at all merit the obloquy that he received from his enemies. His love of liberty may be more questionable; for if he commenced his deeds in the cause of these free States, they terminated in the service of a despot! He is now dead—but had he lived in times and under circumstances when his consummate knowledge of his profession, his cool, deliberate, and even desperate courage, could have been exercised in a regular and well-supported navy, and had the habits of his youth better qualified him to have borne, meekly, the honors he acquired in his age, he would have left behind him no name in its lists that would have descended to the latest posterity of his adopted countrymen with greater renown!”

“Why, Griffith,” exclaimed Cecilia, in a little surprise, “you are zealous in his cause! Who was he?”

“A man who held a promise of secrecy while living, which is not at all released by his death. It is enough to know that he was greatly instrumental in procuring our sudden union, and that our happiness might have been wrecked in the voyage of life had we not met the unknown Pilot of the German Ocean.”

Perceiving her husband to rise, and carefully collect the papers in a bundle, before he left the room, Cecilia made no further remark at the time, nor was the subject ever revived between them.