Captain Zelotes made no attempt to follow the runaway couple. He did take pains to ascertain that they were legally married, but that was all. He left his schooner in charge of the mate at Savannah and journeyed north to South Harniss and his wife. A week he remained at home with her, then returned to the Olive S. and took up his command and its duties as if nothing had happened. But what had happened changed his whole life. He became more taciturn, a trifle less charitable, a little harder and more worldly. Before the catastrophe he had been interested in business success and the making of money chiefly because of his plans for his daughter's future. Now he worked even harder because it helped him to forget. He became sole owner of the Olive S., then of other schooners. People spoke of him as one destined to become a wealthy man.
Jane lived only a few years after her marriage. She died at the birth of her second child, who died with her. Her first, a boy, was born a year after the elopement. She wrote her mother to tell that news and Olive answered the letter. She begged permission of her husband to invite Jane and the baby to visit the old home. At first Zelotes said no, flatly; the girl had made her bed, let her lie in it. But a year later he had so far relented as to give reluctant consent for Jane and the child to come, provided her condemned husband did not accompany them. “If that low-lived Portygee sets foot on my premises, so help me God, I'll kill him!” declared the captain. In his vernacular all foreigners were “Portygees.”
But Jane was as proud and stubborn as he. Where her husband was not welcome she would not go. And a little later she had gone on the longest of all journeys. Speranza did not notify her parents except to send a clipped newspaper account of her death and burial, which arrived a week after the latter had taken place. The news prostrated Olive, who was ill for a month. Captain Zelotes bore it, as he had borne the other great shock, with outward calm and quiet. Yet a year afterward he suddenly announced his determination of giving up the sea and his prosperous and growing shipping business and of spending the rest of his days on the Cape.