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On the other hand, poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable. Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your words, or any humor, but remain literalists, after hearing the music and poetry and rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years.
Young Ribaut, though ignorant of his father's fate, assented with something more than willingness; indeed, his behavior throughout had been stamped with weakness and poltroonery. On the twenty-fifth of September they put to sea in two vessels; and, after a voyage the privations of which were fatal to many of them, they arrived, one party at Rochelle, the other at Swansea, in Wales.
In the mediaeval epics, as in Homer, there is no idea of recourse to a duel between the Over-Lord and his peer. Achilles accuses Agamemnon of drunkenness, greed, and poltroonery. He does not return home, but swears by the sceptre that Agamemnon shall rue his outrecuidance when Hector slays the host. By the law of the age Achilles remains within his right.
In the former case it will be a reverse of fortune, in the latter I might be accused of poltroonery."
Not a word was said of his country-house, or the interrupted meal. These facts were only known after the return of the general officers. As for the Grand Prieur, his poltroonery had been so public, his flight so disgraceful for he had taken troops with him to protect the country-house in which he sought shelter that he could not be pardoned.
The struggle, we will assume, was severe, for he thought so; he thought of going to Dahlia and speaking the word of separation; of going to her family and stating his offence, without personal exculpation; thus masculine in baseness, he was in idea; but poltroonery triumphed, the picture of himself facing his sin and its victims dismayed him, and his struggle ended in his considering as to the fit employment of one thousand pounds in his possession, the remainder of a small legacy, hitherto much cherished.
So long, indeed, as a wife knows her husband's in come accurately, she has a sure means of holding him to his oaths. Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind him.
His father was that General William H. Winder, whose poltroonery at Bladensburg, in 1814, nullified the resistance of the gallant Commodore Barney, and gave Washington to the British. The father was a coward and an incompetent; the son, always cautiously distant from the scene of hostilities, was the tormentor of those whom the fortunes of war, and the arms of brave men threw into his hands.
I assure you that the ideas I have thereupon are not interested, and that what may concern myself affects me very little. A chat with you and your companion would give me much pleasure, but I would not purchase that pleasure by the least poltroonery.
He filled his pockets with five unpoisoned oranges, and the skin of a sixth, and so crept upstairs. His situation was, perhaps, rather novel. With murder in his remorseless heart, he yet hoped against hope, out of his very poltroonery, that murder had not been done. At the girl's door he waited and listened, his face horribly agitated and shining wet. All was silent.
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