Strong Hearts | Page 3

they fact or fiction. "If adventitious virtue," I argued, "can spring up from unsuspected seed and without the big roots of character--"
"You think," interrupted Gregory, "there's a fresh chance for me."
"For all the common run of us!" I cried. "Why not? And even if there isn't, hasn't it a beauty and a value? Isn't a rose a rose, on the bush or off? Gold is gold wherever you find it, and the veriest spasm of true virtue, coined into action, is true virtue, and counts. It may not work my nature's whole redemption, but it works that way, and is just so much solid help toward the whole world's uplift." I was young enough then to talk in that manner, and he actually took comfort in my words, confessing that it had been his way to count a good act which was not in character with its doer as something like a dead loss to everybody.
"I'm glad it's not," he said, "for I reckon my ruling motive is always fear."
"Was it fear this evening?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied, "it was. It was fear of a coward's name, and a sort of abject horror of being one."
"Too big a coward inside," I laughed, "to be a big stout coward outside," and he assented.
"Smith," he said, and paused long, "if I were a hard drinker and should try to quit, it wouldn't be courage that would carry me through, but fear; quaking fear of a drunkard's life and a drunkard's death."
I was about to rejoin that the danger was already at his door, but he read the warning accusation in my eye.
"I'm afraid so," he responded. "I had a strange experience once," he presently added, as if reminded of it by what we had last said. "I took a prisoner."
"By the overwhelming power of fear?" I inquired.
"Partly, yes. I saw him before he saw me and I felt that if I didn't take him he'd either take me or shoot me, so I covered him and he surrendered. We were in an old pine clearing grown up with oak bushes."
"Would it have been less strange," I inquired, "if you had been in an old oak clearing grown up with pine bushes?"
"No, he'd have got away just the same."
"What! you didn't bring him in?"
"Only part of the way. Then he broke and ran."
"And you had to shoot him?"
"No, I didn't even shoot at him. I couldn't, Smith; he looked so much like me. It was like seeing my own ghost. All the time I had him something kept saying to me, 'You're your own prisoner--you're your own prisoner.' And--do you know?--that thing comes back to me now every time I get into the least sort of a tight place!"
"I wish it would come to me," I responded. A slave girl brought his coat and our talk remained unfinished until five years after the war.

III
Gregory had been brought up on the shore of Mississippi Sound, a beautiful region fruitful mainly in apathy of character. He was a skilled lover of sail-boats. When we all got back to New Orleans, paroled, and cast about for a living in the various channels "open to gentlemen," he, largely, I think, owing to his timid notion of his worth, went into the rough business of owning and sailing a small, handsome schooner in the "Lake trade," which, you know, includes Mississippi Sound. I married, and for some time he liked much to come and see us--on rainy evenings, when he knew we should be alone. He was in love yet, as he had been when we were fellow-absentees from camp, and with the same girl. But his passion had never presumed to hope, and the girl was of too true a sort ever to thrust hope upon him. What his love lacked in courage it made up in constancy, however, and morning, noon, and night--sometimes midnight too, I venture to say--his all too patient heart had bowed mutely down toward its holy city across the burning sands of his diffidence. When another fellow stepped in and married her, he simply loved on, in the same innocent, dumb, harmless way as before. He gave himself some droll consolations. One of these was a pretty, sloop-rigged sail-boat, trim and swift, on which he lavished the tendernesses he knew he should never bestow upon any living she. He named her Sweetheart; a general term; but he knew that we all knew it meant the mender of his coat. By and by his visits fell off and I met him oftenest on the street. Sometimes we stopped for a moment's sidewalk chat, New Orleans fashion, and I still envied the clear bronze of his fine skin, which the rest of us had soon lost. But after a while certain changes began to