NOTHER day and another night of plunging in a confusing sea, hove-to half the time, cheating wind and tide by miracles of seamanship, found Tros wide-eyed at the helm and the bireme's bow headed at last into the hump-backed waves that guarded the Thames estuary.
There was no land in sight, but there were sea-birds and a hundred other signs that gave Tros the direction; he had run in the dark before a blustering wind, had caught the tide under him at dawn and was making the most of it, sure he was in midstream and as confident as a homing-pigeon of his exact position, well along into the Thames.
It was cold, and the wind bore rain with it that drenched the autumn air and settled into banks of blowing mist through which the watery sun appeared over the stern like dim, discouraged lantern-light. The wind howled through the rigging and the sea swished through the remnants of the basket-work that Tros had rigged around the bireme to make her look larger than she was. The great ungainly ram sploshed in the steep waves like a harpooned monster, and now and then the Britons, down in the hold, screamed from the torture of ill-tended wounds.
Conops relieved Tros at the helm, nodding when told to keep in midtide and to watch for land on the starboard bow. There was a Briton at the mast-head, one of the crew of fishermen who had been brought along to handle the sail; but he was afraid of the souls of the dead gentlemen on deck; and nobody, least of all himself, had any confidence in him. Tros went forward, to lean over the bow and think.
He could not throw off despondency. He began to wonder whether his father had not been right in saying that a man's delight in action was no better than the animals', that his brain was only a mass of instincts magnified, and that the soul was the only part of him worth cultivating.
There lay his father, dead, contented to be dead, with no man's injury to his discredit, having died without regret for unattained ambition, since he had none of the ordinary sort. His father, with all the resources of the Mysteries of Samothrace to count on, had never owned a house; even the stout ship, that Cæsar had ordered burned for the copper she contained, had hardly been his property, though he had built her and commanded her; he had regarded her as a gift to the Lords of Samothrace, at whose behest she had sailed uncharted seas.
But the father had never ached for action as the son did. Tros had the same compelling impulse to uphold the weak and to defy the strong, but he had a more material way of doing it. He could not see the sense of talking, when a blow, well aimed, might break a tyrant's head. Nor was he totally opposed to tyrants; an alert and generously guided tyranny appealed to him as something the world needed: a tyranny that should insist, with force, on freedom.
"Is there anything more tyrannous than truth?" he wondered, watching the waves yield and reappear over the ironshod ram.
Even his father had had to admit that a ship, for instance, could not be managed without despotism. There had never lived a sterner ship's commander than old Perseus; just though he had been and self-controlled, he was a captain who would brook no hesitation in obeying orders. Yet his father had failed, if the loss of his ship at Cæsar's hands, followed by torture and death, were failure.
Not even the Druids of Gaul, for whose encouragement his father had set forth from Samothrace, had gained in the least, as far as Tros could see; and if that was not failure, what was it? Yet his father had seemed quite contented with the outcome, had died appearing to believe his failure was success.
Had he, Tros, not the same right to believe this comparative failure against Cæsar was good fortune in disguise? It was only comparative failure after all. Cæsar had had the worst of it, twice. Once he had wrecked the greater part of Cæsar's fleet and saved Britain from his clutches. Then he had thoroughly worsted Cæsar in the fight at Seine-mouth. His father had never done anything as effective as that.
And yet, he, Tros, was miserable; and his father had died contented. He, Tros, had a chest full of Cæsar's gold, more money than most kings saw in a lifetime; his father had never had money enough to do more than keep a little ship well husbanded.
His father had hardly seemed to suffer when the ship was burned and her good, resourceful crew were beaten to death before his eyes by Cæsar's order: whereas he, Tros, who had not witnessed that cruelty, had writhed at the very thought of it and was sick at heart now because two-score friendly young Britons lay wounded in the hold. Was his father's attitude the right one? Or was his? Or were they both wrong?