Upon a fine June morning some eight days later, Jowell, in his dingy
office in The Poultry, London, in the narrow alley of sordid houses
hard by the Banking House of Lubbock, received a telegram from the
Admiralty. A moment later the gray-faced Chobley, busy in his little
glass case opening out of the office where the seven pallid clerks
bent over ledgers, was summoned by a strangled shriek that came from
the whistle of the speaking-tube, and entered the Contractor’s private
sanctum. A moment later he rang the bell.
For a dreadful, white-and-blue faced jabbering Something that wore the
clothing of Thompson Jowell had come staggering at the manager, shaking
a slip of flimsy yellow paper; and, jabbering out an unintelligible
word or so, had fallen down in a fit.
“Fetch a doctor from somewhere, will you!” said Chobley to the
sea-green Standish’s pallid successor, as he knelt over the bulky,
stertorously-breathing body that sprawled upon the shabby ink-stained
carpet, fumbling at its shirt-collar stud. He had been enlightened by
a glance at the telegraphic message from Whitehall, and added, working
away:
“There has been bad work at sea. The forage aboard _The British Queen_
worked and took fire--at least, the message says so. Ship was a blazing
hulk in half-an-hour from the outbreak--they took to the boats, such
of ’em as they could get at. A Dundee brig bound for Lisbon picked up
three of ’em--a Southampton-bound barque and a schooner for Port au
Prince, St. Domingo, overhauled the rest. Eighty-nine souls were saved,
twenty-three drowned or burned--including the Veterinary Surgeon and
the Colonel of the Regiment. And all the horses except one--I should
like to know how that one managed to save himself,” said Chobley rather
gruesomely, “from being frizzled with the rest in the after-hold?”
Avid of more horrors, Standish’s successor queried:
“And Mr. Mortimer?”
“Why,” returned the manager, still busying himself about the neck of
the prone, insensible figure, “Mr. Mortimer has been picked up, with
the rest, aboard the ship’s boats. It’s the shock of hearing that his
son was in danger lays the Governor snoring and choking here. For _The
British Queen_ and everything aboard of her was insured--pretty heavily
insured; and there’s no loss to us resulting from the casualty--rather
the reverse!”
Chobley, the leaden-complexioned, meant a great deal the reverse;
and the clerk knew it as he went away for the doctor; and the
manager--having loosened his employer’s collar and cravat, opened the
window to admit what passed in The Poultry for fresh air. And presently
Jowell recovered sufficiently to be hoisted up from the carpet, and got
into his chair; and damn them for calling in the medical man.
He went home early to Hanover Square, and--saying nothing of
his own indisposition--broke the news of Morty’s peril and
deliverance--escape-end first--to his boy’s mother. And then--sending
one of the large powdered footmen for the immense gilt Church Service,
usually borne after him upon Sundays in the country by one of these
privileged menials, as the great man waddled up the aisle of Market
Drowsing Parish Church--he mounted his glasses and read, occasionally
pausing to take off and wipe these aids to vision--the Prayer for Those
at Sea.
His wife, subsequently entering his library, found him thus employed,
and was secretly thankful. It seemed like a first answer to all her
petitions for him. He looked up as she came in, and found no fault with
her red eyes on this occasion, his own being, if possible, redder.
He spoke gently to her, and finding him in this unusual mood, and being
anxious to improve the occasion, she bade him take comfort and be
thankful, for their dear son was under the protection--forbid that I
should quote the words irreverently!--of a Heavenly Father’s Hand.
At which Jowell blew his nose--cocked at quite a subdued angle--and
agreed with her, adding:
“All the same, the boy has got a good ’un Down Here. No man can call me
Ben Blinker at any time, but where my son’s concerned I’m William Wide
Awake, Esquire. As to the hay firing of itself--I don’t believe it! To
palm off hay green, or hay half-cured, upon Her Majesty’s Government’s
Contractors would be a Fraud. People don’t do such things--they ain’t
capable of it!” said Jowell virtuously. “Some drunken sailor dropped
a lighted candle-lantern into the fore-hold, or some trooper smoking
on the sly on stable duty stuck his pipe in amongst the straw and left
it there--and if I had him here,” said Jowell ogreishly, “I’d make him
smoke on the wrong side of his mouth, by Gosh, I would!”
He added: “And you’re a good woman, Maria, by Gosh, you are!” And in
testimony to this excellence he bought her, the very next day, an
immense cameo brooch, representing the triumph of Venus, and set with
many blazing brilliants of great price.
* * * * *
Wounds of the soul, neglects of years, are healed and made as nought
in the belief of men like this man, by a trinket purchased at the
jeweler’s. Disloyalties and treacheries are blotted out--harsh words,
ill-usage and infidelity atoned for. The wives who receive these
gewgaws know sorrowfully well why they are given.
All unsolicited gifts bestowed by men like Jowell are sops to the
shrill-voiced Conscience chiding behind their waistcoats. Thus, the
man gave to his wife because she had so much to forgive; he sent a
draft for a great sum to his son, not only because his own dishonesty
had placed that beloved one in peril, but because he had so greatly
swindled the sons of other men. That half-pint of porter shed upon the
troopers and their wives in the ’tween-decks did them good, perhaps!
But how they paid for it in the end!
Young Mortimer Jowell escaped, not without risk of life, upon that
night of terror. For when columns of stifling smoke lanced through with
yellow flame came pouring up the fore-hatch--and the ineffectual hoses
had ceased to play upon the conflagration--while the burning vessel ran
with lashed helm before the westerly gale to keep the fire forward,
while the boats were being hurried off the skids and launched and
loaded--a big young man in night-shirt and trousers--a young man who
had been knocked senseless by a tackle-block falling from the blazing
mainyard--was being lowered by the Captain of _The British Queen_ into
the last boat of all--when a horizontal, swordlike tongue of flame
licked through the smoke now rolling up the mizzen-hatchway, proving
how fearfully the fire gained below--and the rope was severed by it as
by a saber-stroke--and the half-naked senseless wretch fell into the
raging sea. And would have been drowned undoubtedly, had not a hulking,
red-headed trooper of the Hundredth Lancers, when a dripping head rose
in the yeasty smother close to the boat’s side--reached forth his hand
and grabbed its owner by the scruff, and hauled him so near that other
hands could help to drag him into comparative safety.
And presently, his scattered wits returning, young Morty Jowell became
aware that he was bitter cold. Next, that sea-water was washing over
him; next that he was not on board a ship, but a comparatively small
ship’s boat, dancing like a walnut-shell in the tourney of monstrous
seas. And then--opening his raw and stiffened eyelids--he became
aware that he, half naked, wet and shivering, was one of a crowd of
fellow-creatures, chiefly male, equally unclad, perished and soaking.
And that, as the boat was pitched from ridge to ridge of huge and
watery mountains--there were to be had brief, appalling glimpses of a
burning ship with showers of incandescent fragments falling from her
rigging, and clouds of firefly sparks drifting away to leeward--painted
in hues of rose and apricot, clear dazzling scarlet, peacock blue and
springlike, exquisite apple-green upon the background of pitch-black
tempestuous, rainy night--and that the shrill song of the gale in
their frozen ears was mingled with the roar of the greedy flames that
crunched her bones. And that those dreadful shrieks that ripped and
tore through the other noises were the cries of horses burning in her
after-hold, and men burning on the blazing decks of her.... For the
Captain of the unlucky vessel, the Veterinary Surgeon of the Hundredth
Lancers--twenty troopers and the Colonel--had--the long boat having
been rendered useless--remained on board _The British Queen_.
One other terrific picture was bitten in as with corrosive acid on
Mortimer Jowell’s memory. It was when--her mainmast having fallen with
a tremendous crash, and her ballast having shifted from her unguided,
furious wallowings amidst the liquid mountains--_The British Queen_
canted over with a tremendous list to port.... They saw her decks then
as one sees a stage with a steep rake, all smoking and charring and
crawling with tongues of liquorish fire. Also, they saw, and groaned
aloud with ineffectual pity--for they had but one oar, and, had the
boat been capable of holding another passenger, could not have moved
to the rescue--doomed human beings huddled in her starboard mizzen
channels, that were as yet not burned away.
And they recognized, in less time than one takes to write it, in a
fiery object that burst screaming up upon her after-deck, a maddened
horse, whose mane and tail were on fire, whose legs were flayed and
bleeding, and whose sides and flanks were garnished with blazing
patches of tow.
There was a piteous cry at that sad sight, and a woman swooned. Strange
things had been seen that night, but none more strange and terrible.
How the brute had freed himself from that fiery hell below may not even
be conjectured, but there he was, as I have said....
* * * * *
He pranced down the deck with heraldic, rampant gait, screaming and
snorting; reared, with his bloody forelegs stuck out stiffly, and
leaped into the sea. And a man sprang up in the boat and pointed with
a scorched and naked arm; and yelled out something that was drowned in
the shriek of the gale and the bellowing of the fire. What he yelled
was:
“That’s my horse! I’d know him among a thousand! And, by G----, he’s
swimming. Keep up! Don’t ye give in, my brave old Bluberry!”
He could not have heard, but he did not give in.... He was breathing
yet, with his long neck thrown across the charred and floating wreckage
of the fallen mainmast when the wild gray dawn broke, and the brig
_Maggie o’ Muirhead_ and the St. Domingo schooner overhauled the
red-hot hulk of _The British Queen_.
The Captain and a trooper were rescued, living, from her mizzen
channels, the perishing castaways in the boat were saved. Sailors
are superstitious. Not being desirous of a mutiny in his forecastle,
the master of the _Maggie_ yielded to the pressure brought to bear by
his crew. And they got a bight of a line round Blueberry, and hauled
the horse aboard; dosed him, all limp and sprawling--with tincture of
ginger--kept by the mate for stomachic chills--in hot water; doctored
his burns with linseed oil--and presently he floundered up on those raw
legs of his, and tried to be himself again.
Thenceforth he consorted with the ship’s goat until the _Maggie_
reached Lisbon; and, though he bore the scars of that wild night’s work
all the rest of his life, and the hair, where it grew again upon his
flanks, came white in patches, he lived to carry his master through the
Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and die at the long last of
cold and famine at the Cavalry Camp on the slopes above Kadikoi.
* * * * *
Said Morty, coming up to a red-headed trooper on the forecastle-deck
of the _Maggie_: “Look here! I’ve just found out it was you who saved
my life. And I’m obliged to you--tremenjous!--and though all the
money I’d got was burned on that dam’ ship, my father--Mr. Thompson
Jowell--owner--will give you anything you want! See?”
And the speaker, attired in a cast-off pair of trousers of the master’s
and a pea-jacket lent by the _Maggie o’ Muirhead’s_ second mate--and
wearing a list slipper of the steward’s on his right foot, and a
half-boot contributed by another philanthropist, on the left one--held
out his large hand to his savior with genuine eagerness.
“Blast your father!” said the red-headed trooper, so suddenly and so
savagely that Morty jumped in his odd foot-coverings. “Can he give me
back _my_ boy? And do you think--if I’d been let to have a chance o’
choosing--I’d ha’ put out my hand--knowingly--to save his son? Wait
till next time, that’s all I ha’ got to say!--you wait till next time,
that’s all!”
And Joshua Horrotian turned his back on the heir of his enemy, and
spat over the bulwarks of the forecastle-deck in loathing, and then a
thought occurred to him that brought his head round again.
His wish had been granted. He had lived to see Jowell’s son, half-clad
and penniless, with an old boot on one foot and an old shoe on the
other--asking--and asking vainly for the hand he had denied.
It was merely an odd chance. That experimental curse of Josh’s had had
nothing to do with it. And yet--supposing Some One Above had heard--the
granting of that ill wish had not spared misfortune to the wisher. The
wife and the horse were safe, though; and Corporal and Mrs. Geogehagan
were in one of the boats that had been picked up by the St. Domingo
schooner. One would do well not to grumble at one’s luck, reflected
Joshua Horrotian.