Suburban Sketches eBook

was; that he had shown his ideas and practices of life to be those of a second mate, nor more nor less, without the gloss of regret or the pretenses to refinement that might be pleasing to the supposed philanthropist with whom he had fallen in.  Captain Gooding was of course a true portrait; and there was nothing in Jonathan Tinker’s statement of the relations of a second mate to his superiors and his inferiors which did not agree perfectly with what the contributor had just read in “Two Years before the Mast,”—­a book which had possibly cast its glamour upon the adventure.  He admired also the just and perfectly characteristic air of grief in the bereaved husband and father,—­those occasional escapes from the sense of loss into a brief hilarity and forgetfulness, and those relapses into the hovering gloom, which every one has observed in this poor, crazy human nature when oppressed by sorrow, and which it would have been hard to simulate.  But, above all, he exulted in that supreme stroke of the imagination given by the second mate when, at parting, he said he believed he would go down and sleep on board the vessel.  In view of this, the State’s Prison theory almost appeared a malign and foolish scandal.

Yet even if this theory were correct, was the second mate wholly answerable for beginning his life again with the imposture he had practiced?  The contributor had either so fallen in love with the literary advantages of his forlorn deceiver that he would see no moral obliquity in him, or he had touched a subtler verity at last in pondering the affair.  It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a pathos which, though very different from that of its first aspect, was hardly less tragical.  Knowing with what coldness, or, at the best, uncandor, he (representing Society in its attitude toward convicted Error) would have met the fact had it been owned to him at first, he had not virtue enough to condemn the illusory stranger, who must have been helpless to make at once evident any repentance he felt or good purpose he cherished.  Was it not one of the saddest consequences of the man’s past,—­a dark necessity of misdoing,—­ that, even with the best will in the world to retrieve himself, his first endeavor must involve a wrong?  Might he not, indeed, be considered a martyr, in some sort, to his own admirable impulses?  I can see clearly enough where the contributor was astray in this reasoning, but I can also understand how one accustomed to value realities only as they resembled fables should be won with such pensive sophistry; and I can certainly sympathize with his feeling that the mariner’s failure to reappear according to appointment added its final and most agreeable charm to the whole affair, and completed the mystery from which the man emerged and which swallowed him up again.

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