THE MANGROVE CREEK.
I reached the garrison in time for guard-mounting, and the storm
sufficiently explained the cause of my absence from quarters. I had
ample time for thought during the monotony of that day's duty, when
with a guard of twenty rank and file, including my comrade Tom Telfer
(now a corporal), I had charge of various stores, powder, shot and
live shells, which a gang of woolly-headed negroes were hoisting into
the launch of H.M.'s frigate _Adder_, which was still anchored ahead
of the leeward line, about a mile off in the bay, where all the fleet
were preparing for the forthcoming attack upon the isle of Martinique.
During this important duty, which we superintended under a sunshine
so hot that the barrels and bayonets of our firelocks actually grew
warm in our hands, my mind never for a moment ceased reverting to the
pretty villa of Boscobelle, and the beautiful young Frenchwoman who
dwelt in seclusion there.
Wearily I counted the hours till I could return.
Strict orders had been issued against permitting liquor to be given
to soldiers on duty, but so much was I abstracted from all sublunary
matters by the fair image of Eulalie de Rouvigny, and the whole tenor
of my late adventure, that I was quite oblivious of the fact that
some of my comrades were industriously "sucking the monkey," through
the kind ministrations of two or three pretty mulatto girls. This
monkey, was a cocoanut-shell filled with coarse rum, to be sucked at
the end through the orifice, which represents the mouth of an ape. A
discovery of this neglect might have caused me, in those days, to
lose the three stripes from my arm, and to gain three hundred
elsewhere, as intoxication when on duty, and more especially on
foreign service, is a most serious military crime, and severely was
it visited in those old times of the cat and halberds.
I could not conceal from myself, that ruin, misfortune, and the
Revolution had combined to make Madame de Rouvigny somewhat of a
philosopher. Then, circumstanced as we were,--she married to a man
whom she hated, and might never see,--an exile from a country to
which she could never return; I, a Scots Fusilier, bound on a
desperate service, in a torrid clime of fever and death. What secret
impulse made me yield to the folly of being attracted or lured into
an amour with her? What end could it serve?
I could not determine this. I was only eighteen; and at that age one
does not scrutinize too closely. It may be, that I was solely
actuated by the resolution to enjoy life while it lasted; as the
volunteer of a forlorn hope, sells his kit and blanket, or spends his
last sixpence in roistering at the sutler's tent, lest it should
become the prey of the plunderer who overhauls his corpse, or the
pioneer who buries it.
There was no enthusiasm in my heart for Eulalie, because I could not
deem her that which every lover deems his divinity to
be,--perfection. I pitied her friendless condition; her beauty
charmed and her manner won me. That was all. I could scarcely love,
in the purest sense of the term, a woman who had yielded, even under
terror of death, to a wretch, such as she had portrayed Thibaud de
Rouvigny to be. Any regard I felt for her could not be lasting; and
yet, so inconsistent is our nature, that I departed next day to visit
her, quoting, as I left the barracks, the words of Rochefoucault, who
says tritely, somewhere, "There are few people who are not ashamed of
having loved one another _when that love ceases_;" and with this cold
aphorism in my heart, I hastened along the road to Boscobelle.
I found madame in her pretty little drawing-room: at the sight of her
all scruples vanished, and I was vanquished by the charm of her
presence and her beauty.
Previous to reaching the villa there occurred an incident which,
though it seemed almost trivial at that time, was connected with some
very important events.
The heat of the morning was oppressive; repeatedly I fanned my face
with my forage-cap or the leaves of the large plants that grew by the
highway. The cool umbrageous foliage of a thicket lured me to halt,
to fling off my shoulder-belt and sword, and to lie for a time under
the shadow of its intertwisted branches. This thicket clothed the
steep sides of a gully, at the bottom of which rippled a long inlet,
or arm of the sea. It was a lonely spot, haunted only by monkeys
that leaped from tree to tree, and by tortoises that crawled upon the
shelves of weedy rocks far down below me. The steep and volcanic
rifts were covered by wild gourd-vines and those Spanish lemon-trees
which usually grow among rocks and stone. Arching over this watery
avenue, the depth of which made it seem of inky hue, for the leaves
excluded the sky, were the giant date-trees, with their fruit in
spiral clusters, the pale-green cedar, the golden orange, and the
calibash-tree, with its enormous gourds of the brightest yellow.
I had not been many minutes in this sequestered and luxuriant place
before the sounds of voices and of oars fell upon my ear, and then a
long, low, half-decked boat, built like an Indian piragua, with her
mast, yard, and sail laid flat, shot into the mangrove creek. Three
men who were in her laid their oars on board, and by their hands
urged their craft along under the luxuriant foliage and mangroves
which almost concealed the water whereon they floated, and the long,
giant, and wonderful plants that grew upward from the oozy bottom,
and were brushed by the keel as it cleft their wavy masses. As these
three men passed below me, I could perceive that one was an old
negro, the other was attired like a French priest, in a long black
coat and shovel hat. The third, who was well armed with pistols and
cutlass, notwithstanding a black beard, and the addition of a pair of
rings in his ears, I could recognize by his villanous face, his
brawny, bull-shaped neck, and his strange oaths, which stirred a
terrible cord in memory, to be Dick Knuckleduster.
The Indian suddenly gave the piragua a lurch that nearly capsized it.
"Halloo, Quashi, Snowball, or whatever you call yourself!" bellowed
Dick, "d----n your stupid optics! do you mean to send us all to
kingdom-come in this stinking hole, all bilge and green leaves?"
"_Tonnerre de Ciel!_" added the priest fiercely; "mind what you are
about, Monsieur Benoit le Noir, or I'll break every bone in your
black skin!"
The priest I had no doubt was a French emigrant, but his language
made me as doubtful of his sanctity as of his object, which was
evidently a secret one, or why all this studious concealment?
"I do right, massa," urged the old negro.
"How should you know whether you do right or not?" growled the
Frenchman; "what the devil are you?"
"Me your slave, massa," was the submissive and then common reply.
This strangely assorted trio, whose purpose I could not divine,
passed close to me, or at least about twenty feet below my place of
concealment; and, assisted by the weeds and mangroves which they
grasped, dragged their boat further up this watery gulley or chasm in
the rock.
Having no desire to renew my acquaintance with Mr. Knuckleduster,
who, no doubt, had deserted from one of our ships in the bay, as he
and his two companions disappeared under the dwarf mangroves, I
sprang up the bank, reached the highway, and hastened to the villa of
Madame de Rouvigny.