But soon his impressionable temperament, catching the influence of the hour, threw off its warlike thoughts and abandoned itself to those gentler associations that could hardly fail to be in the ascendant.
The night was such as is only to be seen in the tropics. Above, like golden lamps, the stars were flaming rather than twinkling in the sky; while low down on the horizon a broad moon, rising from the sea, spread a lustrous path along the gently-heaving waves to the very ship’s side; a path on which myriads of glittering fairies seem to dance and revel, and disappear in changing sparkles of light.
Through all this blaze of beauty, the brigantine glided smoothly and steadily on her course. For several days and nights not a sail had been altered, not a rope shifted, before that soft and balmy breeze. The men had nothing to do but tell each other interminable yarns and smoke. It was the fair side of the medal, the bloom on the fruit, the smooth of the profession, this enchanted voyage over an enchanted sea.
Eugène revelled in its charm, but with his enjoyment was mingled that quiet melancholy so intimately associated with all beauty in those hearts (and how many of them are there!) which treasure up an impossible longing, a dream that can never come to pass. It is a morbid sentiment, no doubt, which can thus extract from the loveliest scenes of nature, and even from the brightest triumphs of art, a strange wild ecstasy of pain, possessing a fascination of its own; but it is a sentiment to which the most generous and the most noble minds are peculiarly susceptible; a sentiment that in itself denotes excessive capability, for the happiness denied or withheld. Were it better for them to be of duller spirit and coarser fibre, callous to the spur, unequal to the effort? Who knows? I think Beaudésir would not willingly have parted with the sensibility from which he experienced so much pain, from the memories on which, at moments like these, under a moonlit sky, he brooded and dwelt so fondly, yet so despondently, to have obtained in exchange the inexhaustible good-humour of Slap-Jack or the imperturbable self-command of Captain George.
Immersed in his own thoughts, he did not observe the latter leave his cabin, walk from sheer habit to the binnacle in order to satisfy himself the brigantine was lying her course, and glance over the side to measure her speed through the water, and he started when the Captain placed his hand familiarly on his shoulder, and jeered him good-humouredly for his preoccupation. These men, whose acquaintance had commenced with important benefits conferred and received on both sides, were now thrown together by circumstances which brought out the finer qualities of both. They had learned thoroughly to depend on each other, and had become fast friends. Perhaps their strongest link was the dissimilarity of their characters. To Beaudésir’s romantic and impressionable temperament there had been, from the first, something very imposing in the vigorous and manly nature of Captain George, and the influence of the latter became stronger day by day, when he proved himself as calm, courageous, and capable on the deck of a privateer as he had appeared in his quarters at Paris, commanding a company of the Royal Guards.