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- rose-tan of his complexion, no pallor could have shown. It would have
taken days of sequestration from the winds and the sun to have brought
about the effacement of that. But the skeleton in the cheek-bone at the
point of its angle was just beginning delicately to be defined under the
warm-tinted skin. In fervid hearts self-contained some brief experiences
devour our human tissue as secret fire in a ship’s hold consumes cotton
in the bale.
But now, lying between the two guns, as nipped in the vice of fate,
Billy’s agony, mainly proceeding from a generous young heart’s virgin
experience of the diabolical incarnate and effective in some men--the
tension of that agony was over now. It survived not the something
healing in the closeted interview with Captain Vere. Without movement he
lay as in a trance, that adolescent expression, previously noted as his,
taking on something akin to the look of a slumbering child in the cradle
when the warm hearth-glow of the still chamber of night plays on the
dimples that at whiles mysteriously form in the cheek, silently coming
and going there. For now and then in the gyved one’s trance, a serene
happy light born of some wandering reminiscence or dream would diffuse
itself over his face, and then wane away only anew to return.
The chaplain coming to see him and finding him thus, and perceiving no
sign that he was conscious of his presence, attentively regarded him for
a space, then slipping aside, withdrew for the time, peradventure
feeling that even he, the minister of Christ, though receiving his
stipend from wars, had no consolation to proffer which could result in a
peace transcending that which he beheld. But in the small hours he came
again. And the prisoner, now awake to his surroundings, noticed his
approach, and civilly, all but cheerfully, welcomed him. But it was to
little purpose that in the interview following the good man sought to
bring Billy Budd to some Godly understanding that he must die, and at
dawn. True, Billy himself freely referred to his death as a thing close
at hand; but it was something in the way that children will refer to
death in general, who yet among their other sports will play a funeral
with hearse and mourners. Not that like children Billy was incapable of
conceiving what death really is. No, but he was wholly without
irrational fear of it, a fear more prevalent in highly civilised
communities than those so-called barbarous ones which in all respects
stand nearer to unadulterate Nature. And, as elsewhere said, a barbarian
Billy radically was; quite as much so (for all the costume) as his
countrymen the British captives, living trophies made to march in the
Roman triumph of Germanicus. Quite as much so as those later barbarians,
young men probably, and picked specimens among the earlier British
converts to Christianity, at least nominally such, and taken to Rome (as
to-day converts from lesser isles of the sea may be taken to London), of
whom the Pope of that time, admiring the strangeness of their personal
beauty, so unlike the Italian stamp, their clear, ruddy complexions and
curled flaxen locks, exclaimed, ‘Angles’ (meaning _English_, the modern
derivative), ‘Angles do you call them? And is it because they look so
like Angels?’ Had it been later in time one would think that the Pope
had in mind Fra Angelico’s seraphs, some of whom, plucking apples in
gardens of Hesperides, have the faint rosebud complexion of the more
beautiful English girls.
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