“What noise is this? Give me my long sword, ho!”
ROMEO AND JULIET.
The period accorded by the friendship of Charles Hamilton to the
prisoner, for the acceptance or rejection of his offer to become the
means of his escape, had now expired, and the two young friends were
sitting together in the cabin-prison in which Appadocca was confined.
“So you will not consent to put aside your insane notions and escape,
when I place it in your power to do so?” said Charles Hamilton,
dejectedly, and, at the same time, somewhat scornfully, twisting his
whiskers.
“No!” replied Appadocca with much decision.
“Then,” replied the officer, “I shall have nothing farther to do with
you; they may hang you, quarter you, and do, G—d knows what else to you.”
“As for that matter,” answered Appadocca, affecting something like
the same satire as his friend had used, “you may exercise your own
discretion; but is it not a little absurd that, because I am not willing
to sanction the mis-use of the authority which you possess on board
your father’s ship, in your allowing me, who have been brought here a
prisoner, to escape, that I, on that account, should lose your favor, and
cease to be deemed worthy of your notice, even if I should happen to be
hanged, quartered, and done G—d knows what else to?” and Appadocca smiled
good-naturedly.
“This is the second time, Emmanuel, that you have adverted to my
authority on board this ship, and reflected on my conduct in endeavouring
to befriend you: I hope it may be the last. You must recollect that I
am an Englishman, and an English officer, and I consider that I possess
as delicate a sense of honor and as great a knowledge of duty as any
gentleman whosoever.”
“And I,” replied Appadocca, “I am an animal,—sub-kingdom, vertebrata,
genus homo, and species,—‘tropical American;’ naturalists lay my habitat
all over the world, and declare me omnivorous. I do not pride myself on
possessing merely such an indefinite thing as sense of honor, or great
knowledge of duty; but observation has made me acquainted with the
universal laws which nature has imposed upon us in order to secure to us
contentment and happiness; and your wishing to make your station on board
this vessel subservient to my escape is in opposition to one of those
laws, the certain precursor of your own unhappiness, I shall not consent
to it. Speak to me no more on this subject.”
“If, Emmanuel, I had considered that my good faith was concerned in
making an offer of escape to you, you may rely upon it. I should neither
have attempted to lower myself in my own estimation, nor should I
have subjected myself to the animadversion of your nice and exquisite
philosophy. I shall use the same liberty of speech as you have done, and
assume the right of telling you, that His Majesty’s ship, which my father
has the honour to command, was built, fitted out, and sent to sea, for
the purpose of fighting the enemies of England, and not for the purpose
of scavenging for pirates and freebooters: my commission was granted for
the same purpose. I consider, therefore, that this vessel ought not to be
made the lock-up of accused individuals; nor ought my father be obliged
to abet and to assist the malice of hard-hearted planters, or interfere
in the actions of strangely arguing sons—I therefore consider myself
bound by no honour in this affair; and I am, consequently, free to act as
I please. I recognize in you my ancient and respected friend, and I offer
you my assistance to escape. You may accept it or not—this is Saxon.”
Charles Hamilton spoke this with considerable warmth and seriousness.
“Bravely spoken, Charles,” said Appadocca, “and, although part of your
speech may have sounded harsh to ears more unwilling than mine to hear
the truth, still I admire you for it. Why did you not speak out in
this manner before. You may depend upon it, man, it is always better
to express one-self boldly, throw aside expediency, and bring out the
truth, which, though harsh and unpleasant, is, nevertheless, the truth,
and must be told. What is there to be feared? A proper man has nothing
worth keeping, which he should apprehend to lose, save his honour and his
spirit of rectitude. What though interest-seekers quake in their coats
lest their smoothly-varnished opinions should not draw the approbation of
their fastidious patrons: a man, worthy of the name, must follow out the
spirit of his manliness, and that is all. Take the furious bull—society,
by the horns, and though its lurid eyes shine fire upon you, nay, though
it gore you, shout out your truths still higher than its bellowings; and
when its madness-fit is over, your truths shall live, nay, ride it even
as a broken-spirited ass.
“Men of such boldness there have been, who, Lycurgus-like, have exiled
themselves from all to throw their truths into the world. Society may
have branded them, starved them, cursed them, and driven them into
hovels, there to perish and to rot, but they have ever re-risen in their
thoughts, and now their names receive, on the bended knee, the unbounded
veneration of mankind.
“Still I will not accept your proposal.”
“But for G—d’s sake, Emmanuel, speak seriously,” said Hamilton, hastily,
“you surely do not intend to let this obstinacy of yours prevent your
escape;” and the young officer looked anxiously in Appadocca’s face.
It would appear that, notwithstanding the previous refusal of his friend,
he never contemplated but that at the last moment he would avail himself
of his assistance and escape.
“Call me obstinate, as you may,” replied Appadocca, “I shall not accept
your offer.”
“Then is it possible that you seriously refuse to save your life?”
“Not I, by Heaven,” replied Appadocca.
“Then why not adopt my proposal at once?”
“Because my doing so will not only involve a breach of discipline, but
will also compromise your honour,—two sacrifices which we must pronounce
disproportioned, when we consider the very small necessity that demands
them.”
“Do you recollect that death will be your sentence?” eagerly demanded
Charles.
“I do recollect it,” answered Appadocca. “And pray, what is death?”
The latter part of the question was put with such cynical coldness, that
Charles Hamilton found himself unwittingly silenced.
He remained tongue-tied for a few moments, and with the greatest
embarrassment repeated the question of Appadocca. “What is death, you
ask?”
“Ay, what is death, I ask? let your embarrassment repeat the question,”
remarked Appadocca.
“Why, death,” replied the young officer, “death is—is—is the—the highest
of all—of all human punishments—and sufferings.”
“Remarkably fine,” replied Appadocca, with some satire, “remarkably
fine, I once entertained better hopes of you, Charles Hamilton, when you
were at College; but now I find, that like all other persons, you have
thought, that it was necessary to cultivate the intellect, only during
the time when you were at college,—that you were to live in mind, or
rather, according to the dictates of your reason, as long as you were
there; but that as soon as you became emancipated from your scholastic
thraldom, throwing aside convictions, you were to live entirely in body,
merely copying the bad habits of most men, which they self-deludingly
style instincts. You speak and think absolutely like those animals that
are driven above decks there by your orders, and who turn their tobacco
in their cheeks, bellow forth their strange and meaningless oaths, and
pull the ropes, by precisely the same moving power as one of your guns
sends forth its iron and brimstone charge, when fire is applied to
the touch-hole. That distinguishing essential which we, with so much
complaisance, place on ourselves, to divide us from quadrupeds and our
other fellow habitants of this earth—reason, is as much consulted as
the stars. You observe the whole of organized life clinging to the idea
of preservation, that they may continue for a brief period the state
in which they happen to find themselves, and permitting this idea, in
sympathy with the herd of men, to grow unreasoned in you, you fancy
that I, also, should start from death with the same fear, and consent
to depart from the course of conduct which my intellect prescribes to
me, for the mere purpose of avoiding it. You do not consider what really
is life, and less, perhaps, what is death. If millions of men are
content to cultivate a sluggish existence, and shrink from ennobling
enterprizes, in order that they may avoid this bugbear with which they
ignorantly frighten themselves; nay, if they can be worked upon by this
terror to compromise the only imperishable part of our nature—the idea
of self-respect or honour—you must not fancy that I, my dear Charles, am
willing to do so, too!”
“If you are not, I can only say your instincts are ajar,” observed the
young officer, who felt himself again unable to answer Appadocca.
“There, you speak of instincts again: I have no instincts. If you mean
certain ideas which are the necessary fruits of my organization, I shall
observe, that far from their being ajar, they, on the contrary, are the
only ones which are in harmony with whatever we know of nature and of its
author.”
“Hold, Emmanuel, do not go any further, you will be guilty of
irreverence.”
“Irreverence! it is not I who can be guilty of irreverence, it is you,
and the rest of the ignorant world, that are ‘guilty of irreverence;’
for, by surrounding death with the terror you do, and by considering
it the greatest of earth’s afflictions, you effectually depreciate the
goodness and consistency of the maker of all things.”
“In what manner?” inquired the officer.
“Listen to me, and you shall hear. The whole of this globe, you are
aware, is animated. Every object here, from the fibrous and silken
down that flies about, carrying the seed of some gigantic tree, to
the mountains of consolidated rock, is the theatre of life; and that
theatre itself possesses a peculiar animation of its own, or laws of
self-development. The various forms and shapes which people these things,
vary in their periods of existence from centuries to the incalculable and
indivisible points of time, which human ingenuity has hitherto deemed
it idle to note. You have the birds of the desert, the huge animals
whose years are to be counted but by the hundred; you have again the
infinitesimal insect, which comes into existence this moment to depart
the next; so that in the shortest space of time that man can calculate,
nature ushers into life millions of millions of sentient beings, to
sweep them away again with the same rapidity with which they are made.
This earth on which this process takes place has existed, as far as we
can discover with certainty, for several thousands of years, so that
millions of millions of beings have continually perished during every
short moment into which the numberless days of those thousands of years
can possibly be divided. To consider that death is so dreadful as it is
supposed to be, when we find it on such an amazingly extensive scale,
and principally, also, among creatures whose only apparent happiness is
the mere possession of life itself, is to call the Ordainer of these
things cruel—which is untrue, or, as we used to say long ago, ‘reductio
ad absurdum.’ What you choose to convert into the horrible and dreadful,
is only the working of a wise and general law—that of transition: we live
here to-day in one shape, to live to-morrow in a different one. Man has
stupidly shut his eyes to this fact as he has done to many other things,
and pitifully mourns over the action of a universal and useful law.”
“Emmanuel, I am a plain sailor, and do not pretend to deal in niceties
of logical distinction,” replied Charles, “and although it is not my
purpose to continue this very peculiar conversation, still I must ask, if
our death is merely a transition from one state to another, how is it,
that when we have entered into our new condition, we do not retain any
consciousness of our previous existence.”
“The answer is plain enough,” answered Appadocca, “when the harp is
unstrung the sounds depart: when we change from one condition to another,
we necessarily cease to be of the first, else there should be no change
at all: and as our consciousness of that condition was merely a natural
consequence or effect of it, it follows, that when the cause ceases, the
effect must necessarily cease also.”
Appadocca remained silent for a while.
“And as for the ignominy,” he continued, “of a death on the scaffold, for
such a crime as the one which is imputed to me, it is purely ridiculous.
It is not because mankind may be eager to alter, by their vote, the
nature of things, that these things become intrinsically changed.”
Appadocca stopped, apparently expecting Charles Hamilton to speak; but
he, however, was anxiously gazing on the side of the ship, and was
apparently intent on listening to some sound that it seemed he heard.
“Did you hear that?” he at last asked, in a low tone.
“What?”
“Hush!—do you not hear that sound?”
“Hum! Perhaps—I think I do; I think—I—I—hum! I—know it,” answered
Appadocca, while his face brightened up a little.
The officer drew nearer to the side of the ship to listen—Appadocca
remained where he was.
The dull sounds of muffled instruments could now be distinctly heard.
From its direction, it could be easily discovered that these instruments
were applied to the dead light, which had been carefully battened in for
greater security against the prisoner’s escape. The sounds continued, and
the sharp point of a large chisel, with which some individual from the
outside was endeavouring to wrench away part of the cover, was now seen
through the dead light of the ship.
The young officer looked round inquiringly at Appadocca, but met, in the
gaze of that individual, only the coldness that characterised him.
“An attack, an attack!” he cried, and rushed out of the cabin. His
instincts, as he called them, at once belying the ingenious arguments
with which he had lulled his spirit of honor, when his friendship for
Appadocca interposed.
He arrived on deck in time to hear the sharp challenge of the marine on
duty.
“Who is there?” no answer was made to the challenge.
The guard was called out. The marine fired. In return only a derisive
shout arose from a boat that was now moving away in the darkness. One,
two, three volleys were fired in succession, when the angry voice of a
man was heard from the boat.
“Cowards!” he cried, “come after us, and do not expend your ammunition
foolishly.”
It was the voice of Lorenzo.
On hearing the reports of the spies that he had sent on shore, that
faithful officer had formed the plan of carrying Appadocca silently away
from the cabin in which he was confined. For that purpose, he had waited
until the night was far spent, and with a few trusty men had cautiously
approached the man-of-war.
The pirate party came in a boat that was greased all over on the outside,
and which was propelled by muffled oars.
The men were all dressed in black, and wore for the occasion, dark
woollen caps, which were drawn over their heads so as perfectly to
conceal their faces. They had boarded the ship for about half an hour,
and two men were working away vigorously; the blows of the covered mallet
drove their muffled chisels more and more deeply into the chinks of the
dead light.
“Have you nearly got through, Gustave?” inquired Lorenzo, the
enterprising officer of Appadocca.
“Nearly, senor,” answered the man.
“Thanks to Providence,” muttered Lorenzo, “Appadocca will be rescued.”
O disappointment wherefore dost thou exist? The words had scarcely
escaped Lorenzo when a splashing noise was heard near the man-of-war.
The sailors, as is customary with them, when their ship is at anchor, in
order to improve their opportunities, had hung out a fishing line. As
adverse fate would have it, at the very moment when the party of Lorenzo
was about completing a breach in the cabin in which their captain was
confined, a large shark happened to take the bait. Pricked by the hook,
the fish began to swim furiously around the ship, beating about with its
huge tail. The water immediately became covered with foam, and the noise
increased more and more.
“Jump up, Domingo,” said Lorenzo, when he perceived the imminent danger
of discovery which they ran from the noise that the creature was making
in the water, “jump up and cut away that cursed thing.”
But it was too late: attracted by the splashes made by the shark, the
sentinel looked over the bulwarks, and perceived the man that was
just sliding himself down the chains of the man-of-war, after having
dexterously cut away the line by which the fish was caught.
The pirates had no alternative but flight, and they were quickly making
away when the young officer got on deck.
Part of the crew of the large vessel was called out, the boats were
manned, and sent after the mysterious visitors. But it was of no avail:
those who had gone in chase shortly afterwards returned, and reported
that they could discover nothing of the boat.
The circumstance was duly reported to the commander. After much
consideration on such a mysterious adventure, the latter wisely concluded
that the party of the pirate captain were in those waters, and that their
approach to the ship was for the purpose of attempting his rescue.
Further, on examination, marks of the tools were made out on the
deadlight of Appadocca’s cabin. He himself was narrowly questioned, but
he stated with perfect truth, that he knew nothing of the matter.
Orders were then given to weigh anchor at the dawn of the next day.
END OF VOL. I.