The Grip of Honor: A Story of Paul Jones and the American Revolution by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Author:Cyrus Townsend Brady [Brady, Cyrus Townsend]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-26T22:00:00+00:00

How he got through the night, O'Neill never knew. The court-martial in the morning had taken little time; its sentence, a foregone conclusion, promptly approved by the admiral, had been death by hanging at half after six o'clock that night. He had refused to give any further parole, in the faint hope that something might enable him to escape, and consequently had been heavily ironed and placed in confinement in the space between two of the great guns on the lower gun-deck--the Serapis was a double-banked frigate--on the starboard side. The forethought of Coventry, who had attended him with the solicitude and kindness of a brother, and had pleaded for him unavailingly before the court, had caused a canvas screen to be provided, which enclosed two of the guns, and allowed him to pass his hours undisturbed by the curious gaze of the English seamen. An armed marine stood always as sentry before the screen.

Captain Pearson, a gallant officer, had been kindness itself in all his arrangements, but his orders, which were peremptory, left him no discretion whatever. O'Neill passed his time sitting by the open port, leaning on a gun, gazing out over the water at the gray old castle where he had found his love and met his fate. Many tragedies had been enacted within its walls during long centuries of history--none sadder than his own.

It would have been foolish to say that he had no regrets. No one could think of the possibilities of happiness presented by such a love as that which he was now assured Elizabeth felt for him, without a sense of despair coming over the mind in the knowledge they were not to be enjoyed; but he was a sailor, and generations of heroic ancestors had accustomed him to look death in the face, and smile undaunted at its harsh, forbidding appearance.

"Fortune, Infortune, Fortune " had been the motto of his branch of the red-handed O'Neills; at least that was the punning Latin translation of a Celtic original which meant, "Fortune and misfortune are alike to the strong."

When his friends and acquaintances at the French court, those knights and ladies with whom he had ruffled it so bravely, the young king, his master, his old comrades, the hard fighters on the Richard, her dauntless captain, that brave old man, his father, heard how he died, they would learn that he had met the last grim enemy with the wonted intrepidity of his race. Noblesse oblige! and then having made his peace with God as best he could alone,--he was of a different faith from that of the chaplain of the ship,--he gave himself over to mournful dreams of Elizabeth Howard.

Late in the afternoon his meditations were interrupted by the arrival of Coventry. The poignant unhappiness of the young Englishman was, if anything, greater than that of O'Neill. His engagement to Elizabeth Howard, with whom he had grown up, had been at first more or less a matter

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