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.
 

                                      XXI

If in vain the good chaplain sought to impress the young barbarian with ideas of
death akin to those conveyed in the skull, dial, and cross-bones on old
tombstones; equally futile to all appearance were his efforts to bring home to
him the thought of salvation and a Saviour. Billy listened, but less out of awe
or reverence, perhaps, than from a certain natural politeness; doubtless at
bottom regarding all that in much the same way that most mariners of his class
take any discourse, abstract or out of the common tone of the workaday world.
And this sailor way of taking clerical discourse is not wholly unlike the way in
which the pioneer of Christianity, full of transcendent miracles, was received
long ago on tropic isles by any superior savage so called - a Tahitian, say, of
Captain Cook's time or shortly after that time. Out of natural courtesy he
received but did not appreciate. It was like a gift placed in the palm of an
outstretched hand upon which the fingers do not close.
    But the Indomitable's chaplain was a discreet man possessing the good sense
of a good heart. So he insisted not on his vocation here. At the instance of
Captain Vere, a lieutenant had apprised him of pretty much everything as to
Billy; and since he felt that innocence was even a better thing than religion
wherewith to go to judgment, he reluctantly withdrew; but in his emotion not
without first performing an act strange enough in an Englishman, and under the
circumstances yet more so in any regular priest. Stooping over, he kissed on the
fair cheek his fellow-man, a felon in martial law, one who, though in the
confines of death, he felt he could never convert to a dogma; nor for all that
did he fear for his future.
    Marvel not that having been made acquainted with the young sailor's
essential innocence, the worthy man lifted not a finger to avert the doom of
such a martyr