HIS LAST COMMAND
On the hill back of the Point, embowered on three sides in the trees,
which had been cut away in front to afford a fair view of the ship,
the Point itself, and the open waters of the lake beyond, stood an old
white house facing the water, with a long covered porch, high-pillared
and lofty, extending across its entire front. Old, yet young compared
to the ship. Overlooking the ship, on a platform on the very brow of
the hill, a long, old-fashioned six-pound gun was mounted on a naval
carriage. Back of the gun rose a tall flag-staff, and from the top
fluttered night and day a small blue flag with two stars, the ensign
of a rear-admiral. There were no masts or spars upon the ship below
the hill, of course, but aft from the mouldering taffrail a staff had
been erected, and from it flew the stars and stripes, for during the
last half of her existence the ship had rejoiced in a crew and a
captain!
Some twenty-five years since a quaint old naval officer had taken
up his abode at the house on the hill. With him had come a young
sailor, who, disdaining the house, had slung his hammock aboard the
ship,--finding a place between decks which, after a few repairs, would
shelter him from the storms. When the old officer came, he hoisted at
the mast which was at once erected in the yard the broad blue pennant
of a commodore, and it was only after Farragut had made his splendid
passage up the Mississippi, and awakened the quiet shores of the
Father of Waters with the thunder of his guns, so that the title of
commodore became too small for him, that the old veteran had been
promoted with other veterans--and with Farragut himself--to the rank
of rear-admiral, recently established,--certainly a rank entirely in
consonance with his merit at least.
The old man had been practically forgotten, lost sight of, in the
glory accruing to the newer names among the Civil War heroes; yet he
had been among the foremost in that great galaxy of sailors who had
made the navy of the United States so formidable in the War of 1812.
Old men of the town, whose memories as children ran back beyond even
the life of the ship, recalled having seen, in those busy, unforgotten
days of 1814-15, many uniforms like to the quaint old dress which the
admiral sometimes wore on occasions of ceremony; and there were some
yet living who remembered the day when the news came that the mighty
_Constitution_ had added to her record the last and most brilliant of
her victories in the capture of the frigates _Cyane_ and _Levant_. The
man who had made the capture--who, when his wife had asked him to
bring her a British frigate for a present when he set forth upon the
cruise, had answered that he would bring her two, and who had done
it--was the man who had been stationed in the white house on the hill
to watch over the old ship.
The battles and storms, the trials and cares, the sorrows and troubles
of eighty-five years had beat upon that white head; and though he was
now bent and broken, though he tottered as he paced up and down the
porch after the habit of the quarter-deck, though his eye was dim
indeed and his natural force greatly abated, he was still master of
himself. When the Civil War broke out his brave old soul had yearned
to be upon a heaving deck once more, he had craved to hear the roar of
guns from the mighty batteries beneath his feet, to feel again the
kiss of the salt wind upon his tanned and weather-beaten cheek. He
had longed in the deadly struggle of '61-'65 to strike another blow
for the old flag he had done so much to make formidable and respected
on the sea; but it was not to be. Superannuated, old, laid up in
ordinary, he quietly watched over the rotting ship which was his last
command.
In some strange way, with a sailor's superstition, as the years had
passed, as he had grown feebler and the ship had grown older, he bound
up his own term of life with that of the vessel. While it stood he
should live, when it fell should come his end. He watched and waited.
When the night threatened to be wild and stormy, the report of the
evening gun with which Captain Barry invariably saluted the flag ere
he struck it would seem to him the sounding of his death-knell. When
the tempest howled around the old house, he could hear, in fancy,
above its wild screaming the crashing of the timbers of the ship
falling in shapeless ruins on the mouldering ways. In the morning,
after such a night, he would rise and creep to the door, totter out on
the porch with the aid of his cane, and peer down on the ship. Some
portion of it might have been swept away, perhaps, but if it still
stood he would feel that he had a respite for another day.
Many a tall vessel had he commanded, many a gallant frigate or great
ship-of-the-line he had driven through the tempestuous seas. Upon some
of them, as on the _Constitution_, he had won eternal fame, yet never
had he loved a vessel as his heart had gone out to the rotting mass of
this incompleted ship.
He did not dream, when he came there twenty-five years before--an old
man then--that either he or the ship would last so long; yet there
they both stood; older, weaker, feebler, more broken, and breaking
with every passing hour, but still a ship and still a captain.
During the years of their association the admiral had unconsciously
invested the ship with a personality of its own. It seemed human to
him. He dreamed about it when he slept. He was never so happy as when
awake he sat and watched it. He talked to it like a friend when they
were alone. Sometimes he reached his old trembling hand out to it in
a caressing gesture. He had long since grown too feeble to go down
to it; he could only look upon it from afar. Yet he understood its
longing, its dissatisfaction, its despair. A certain sympathy grew up
between them. He loved it as it had been a woman. He would fain have
kissed its keel.
Yet the devotion the admiral felt for the ship was scarcely greater
than that which had sprung up in the heart of the old sailor who lived
aboard it.
Old John Barry had been a quartermaster on the _Constitution_, and had
followed the fortunes of his captain from ship to ship, from shore to
shore, until he died. After that the duty of looking after the captain
devolved upon his son, young John Barry; and when the commodore had
been ordered to Ship House Point, more with the intention of providing
him with a congenial home for his declining years than for any other
purpose, young John Barry had followed him.
Young John Barry he was no longer. He was fifty years old now, and,
like the admiral, had unconsciously made the life of the ship stand
for his own life as well. The witchery of disappointment and regret,
pregnant in every timber, bore hard upon him also. He had been a gay,
dashing, buoyant, happy-go-lucky jack-tar in his day; but, living
alone on that great old ship, some of the melancholy, some of the
dissatisfaction, some of the longing, some of the futile desire which
fairly reeked from every plank had entered his own rough and rugged
soul.
The bitter wind had sung through the timbers of the ship too many
tales of might-have-been, as he lay in his hammock night after
night, not to have left its impression upon him. He became a
silent, taciturn, grave old man. Of huge bulk and massive build,
his appearance suggested the ship-of-the-line,--strength in age,
power in decay. He loved the ship in his way even as the admiral
did.
Risking his life in the process, he climbed all over it, marking with
skilful eyes and pained heart the slow process of disintegration. He
did not kiss it,--kisses were foreign to his nature, he knew nothing
of them,--but he laid his great hands caressingly upon the giant
frames, he pressed his cheek against the mighty prow, he stretched
himself with open arms upon the bleaching deck, as if he would embrace
the ship.
When the storms beat upon it in the night, he sometimes made his way
forward and stood upon the forecastle fronting the gale, and as the
wind swept over him and the ship quivered and shook and vibrated under
the tempestuous attack, he fancied that he felt the deck heave as it
might under the motion of the uptossed wave.
He dreamed that the ship quivered in the long rush of the salt seas.
Then the rain beat upon him unheeded. Wrapped in his great-coat in
winter, he even disdained the driving snow, and as he stood by the
weather cathead, from which no anchor had ever depended, and peered
out into the whirling darkness, he seemed to hear the roar of a
breaker ahead!
The ship was his own, his property. The loss of a single plank, the
giving way of a single bolt, was like the loss of a part of himself.
With it he lived, with it he would die. Alone he passed his nights in
the hollow of that echo of the past. Sometimes he felt half mad in the
rotting vessel; yet nothing could have separated him from the ship.
The little children of the adjacent village feared him, although he
had never harmed any of them, and was as gentle as a mother in his
infrequent dealings with them all; but he was so silent, so grave, so
grim, so weird in some way, that they instinctively avoided him. Their
light laughter was stifled, their childish play was quieted when
Captain Barry--so they called him--passed by. He never noticed it, or,
if he did, he gave no sign. Indeed, his heart was so wrapped up in a
few things that he marked nothing else.
The old admiral, whom he watched over and cared for with the fidelity
of a dog,--nay, I should say of a sailor,--was the earliest object of
his affections. To look after him was a duty which had become the
habit of his life. He cherished him in his heart along with the ship.
When the others had gone to their rest, he often climbed up on the
quarter-deck, if the night were still, and sat late in the evening
staring at the lights in the house on the hill until they went out,
musing in his quaint way on the situation. When the days were calm he
thought first of the admiral, in stormy times first of the ship. But
above both ship and captain in his secret heart there was another who
completed the strange quartet on Ship House Point,--a woman.
Above duty and habit there is always a woman.