“This disease is beyond my practice.”
Macbeth, Vi.59.
The second and acting third-lieutenants were on board the prizes--the
purser was busy in his vocation--the doctor ditto Indeed, he and his
mates had more on their hands than they could well manage. The first
lieutenant was engaged on deck, and the master was in his cot, suffering
from a severe contusion; so when got on board the corvette, and dived
into the gunroom in search ol some crumbs of comfort, the deuce a living
soul was there to welcome me, except the gunroom steward, who speedily
produced some cold meat, and asked me if I would take a glass of swizzle.
The food I had no great fancy to, although I had not tasted a morsel
since six o’clock in the morning, and it was now eight in the evening;
but the offer of the grog sounded gratefully in mine ear, and I was about
tackling to a stout rummer of the same, when a smart dandified shaver,
with gay mother-of-pearl buttons on his jacket, as thick set as peas,
presented his tallow chops at the door.
“Captain Transom desires me to say, that he will be glad of your company
in the cabin, Mr Cringle.”
“My compliments--I will wait on him so soon as I have had a snack. We
have had no dinner in the gunroom to-day yet, you know, Mafame.”
“Why, it was in the knowledge of that the Captain sent me, sir. He has
not had any dinner either; but it is now on the table, and he waits for
you.”
I was but little in spirits, and, to say sooth, was fitter for my bed
than society; but the Captain’s advances had been made with so much
kindliness, that I got up, and made a strong endeavour to rouse myself;
and, having made my toilet as well as my slender means admitted, I
followed the Captain’s steward into the cabin.
I started--why, I could not well tell--as the sentry at the door stood to
his arms when I passed in; and, as if I had been actually possessed by
some wandering spirit, who had taken the small liberty of using my
faculties and tongue without my concurrence, I hastily asked the man if
he was an American?--He stared in great astonishment for a short space,
turned his quid--and then rapped out, as angrily as respect for a
commissioned officer would let him,--“No, by ----, sir!”
This startled me as much as the question I had almost unconsciously--and,
I may say, involuntarily--put to the marine had surprised him, and I made
a full stop, and leant back against the door-post. The Captain, who was
walking up and down the cabin, had heard me speak, but without
comprehending the nature of my question, and now recalled me in some
measure to myself, by enquiring if I wanted any thing. I replied,
hurriedly, that I did not.
“Well, Mr Cringle, dinner is ready--so take that chair at the foot of the
table, will you?”
I sat down, mechanically, as it appeared to me--for a strange swimming
dizzy sort of sensation had suddenly overtaken me, accompanied by a
whoreson tingling, as Shakespeare hath it, in my ears. I was unable to
eat a morsel; but I could have drunk the ocean, had it been claret or
vin-de-grave-to both of which I helped myself as largely as good
manners would allow, or a little beyond, mayhap. All this while the
Captain was stowing his cargo with great zeal, and tifting away at the
fluids as became an honest sailor after so long a fast, interlarding his
operations with a civil word to me now and then, without any especial
regard as to the answer I made him, or, indeed, caring greatly whether I
answered him or not.
“Sharp work you must have had, Mr Cringle--should have liked to have been
with you myself. Help yourself, before passing that bottle--zounds, man,
never take a bottle by the bilge--grasp the neck, man, at least in this
fervent climate--thank you. Pity you had not caught the captain though.
What you told me of that man very much interested me, coupled with the
prevailing reports regarding him in the ship--daring dog he must have
been--can’t forget how gallantly he weathered us when we chased him.”
I broke silence for the first time. Indeed, I could scarcely have done
so sooner, even had I chosen it, for the gallant officer was rather
continuous in his yam-spinning. However, he had nearly dined, and was
leaning back, allowing the champaigne to trickle leisurely from a glass
half a yard long, which he had applied to his lips, when I said, “Well,
the imagination does sometimes play one strange tricks--I verily believe
in second sight now, Captain, for at this very instant I am regularly the
fool of my senses,----but pray don’t laugh at me;” and I lay back on my
chair, and pressed my hands over my shut eyes and hot burning temples,
which were now throbbing as if the arteries would have burst.
The Captain, who was evidently much surprised at my abruptness, said
something hurriedly and rather sharply in answer, but I could not for the
life of me mark what it was. I opened my eyes again, and looked towards
the object that had before riveted my attention. It was neither more nor
less than the Captain’s cloak, a plain, unpretending, substantial blue
garment, lined with white, which, on coming below, he had cast carelessly
down on the locker, that ran across the after part of the cabin behind
him. It was about eighteen feet from me, and as there was no light
nearer it than the swinging lamp over the table at which we were seated,
the whole of the cabin thereabouts was thrown considerably into shade.
The cape of the cloak was turned over, showing the white lining, and was
rather bundled as it were into a round heap, about the size of a man’s
head. When first I looked at it, there was a dreamy, glimmering
indistinctness about it that I could not well understand, and I would
have said, had it been possible, that the wrinkles and folds in it were
beginning to be instinct with motion, to creep and crawl as it were. At
all events, the false impression was so strong as to jar my nerves, and
make me shudder with horror. I knew there was no such d--ting, as well
as Macbeth--, but nevertheless it was with an indescribable feeling of
curiosity, dashed with awe, that I stared intently at it, as if
fascinated, while almost unwittingly I made the remark already mentioned.
I had expected that the unaccountable appearance which had excited my
attention so strongly would have vanished with the closing of my eyes;
but it did not, for when I looked at it again, the working and shifting
of the folds of the cloth still continued, and even more distinctly than
before.
“Very extraordinary all this,” I murmured to myself.
“Pray, Mr Cringle, be sociable, man,” said the Captain; “what the deuce
do you see, that you stare over my shoulder in that way? Were a woman
now, I should tremble to look behind me, while you were glaring aft in
that wild, moonstruck sort of fashion.”
“By all that is astonishing,” I exclaimed in great agitation, “if the
folds of the cape have not arranged themselves into the very likeness of
his dying face! Why it is his face, and no fanciful grouping of my
heated brain. Look there, sir--look there--I know it can’t be but there
he lies,--the very features and upper part of the body, lith and limb, as
when he disappeared beneath the water when he was shot dead.”
I felt the boiling blood, that had been rushing through my system like
streams of molten lead, suddenly freeze and coagulate about my heart,
impeding my respiration to a degree that I thought I should have been
suffocated. I had the feeling as if my soul was going to take wing. It
was not fear, nor could I say I was in pain, but it was so utterly unlike
any thing I had ever experienced before, and so indescribable, that I
thought to myself--“this may be death.”
“Why, what a changeable rose you are, Master Cringle,” said Captain
Transom, good-naturedly; “your face was like the north-west moon in a
fog but a minute ago, and now it is as pale as a lily@blue white, I
declare. Why, my man, you must be ill, and seriously too.”
His voice dissipated the hideous chimera--the folds fell, and relapsed
into their own shape, and the cloak was once more a cloak, and nothing
more--I drew a long breath. “Ah, it is gone at last, thank God!”--and
then aware of the strange effect my unaccountable incoherence must have
had on the skipper, I thought to brazen it out by trying the free and
easy line, which was neither more nor less than arrant impertinence in
our relative positions. “Why, I have been heated a little, and amusing
myself with sundry vain imaginings, but allow me to take wine with you,
Captain,” filling a tumbler with vin-de-grave to the brim, as I spoke.
“Success to you, sir--here’s to your speedy promotion--may you soon get a
crack frigate; as for me I intend to be Archbishop of Canterbury, or maid
of honour to the Queen of Sheba, or something in the heathen mythology.”
I drank off the wine, although I had the greatest difficulty in steadying
my trembling hand, and carrying it to my lips; but notwithstanding my
increasing giddiness, and the buzzing in my ears, and swimming of mine
eyes, I noticed the Captain’s face of amazement as he exclaimed, “The boy
is either mad or drunk, by Jupiter!”
I could not stand his searching and angry look, and in turning my eye, it
again fell on the cloak, which now seemed to be stretched out at greater
length, and to be altogether more voluminous than it was before. I was
forcibly struck with this, for I was certain no one had touched it.
“By heavens! it heaves,” I exclaimed, much moved--“how is this? I
never thought to have believed such things,----it stirs again--it takes
the figure of a man--as if it were a pall covering his body. Pray,
Captain Transom, what trick is this?--Is there any thing below that cloak
there?”
“What cloak do you mean?”
“Why, that blue one lying on the locker there--is there any cat or dog in
the cabin? “--and I started on my legs.--“Captain Transom,” I continued,
with great vehemence, “for the love of God tell me what is there below
that cloak.”
He looked surprised beyond all measure.
“Why, Mr Cringle, I cannot for the soul of me comprehend you; indeed I
cannot; but, Mafame, indulge him. See if there be any thing below my
cloak.”
The servant walked to the locker, and lifted up the cape of it, and was
in the act of taking it from the locker, when I impetuously, desired the
man to leave it alone.
“I can’t look on him again,” said I; while the faintishness increased, so
that I could hardly speak. “Don’t move the covering from his face, for
God’s sake--don’t remove it,” and I lay back in my chair, screening my
eyes from the lamp with my hands, and shuddering with an icy chill from
head to foot.
The Captain, who had hitherto maintained the well-bred, patronizing,
although somewhat distant, air of a superior officer to an inferior who
was his guest, addressed me now in an altered tone, and with a brotherly
kindness.
“Mr Cringle, I have some knowledge of you, and I know many of your
friends; so I must take the liberty of an old acquaintance with you.
This day’s work has been a severe one, and your share in it, especially
after your past fatigues, has been very trying, and as I will report it,
I hope it may clap a good spoke in your wheel; but you are overheated,
and have been over-excited; fatigue has broken you down, and I must
really request you will take something warm, and turn in.--Here, Mafame,
get the carpenter’s mate to secure that cleat on the weather-side there,
and sling my spare cot for Mr Cringle. You will be cooler here than in
the gunroom.”
I heard his words without comprehending their meaning. I sat and stared
at him, quite conscious, all the time, of the extreme impropriety, not to
say indecency, of my conduct; but there was a spell on me; I tried to
speak, but could not; and, believing that I was either possessed by some
dumb evil, or struck with palsy, I rose up, bowed to Captain Transom, and
straightway hied me on deck.
I could hear him say to his servant, as I was going up the ladder, “Look
after that young gentleman, Mafame, and send Isaac to the doctor, and bid
him come here now;” and then, in a commiserating tone--“Poor young
fellow, what a pity!”
When I got on deck all was quiet. The cool fresh air had an
instantaneous effect on my shattered nerves, the violent throbbing in my
head ceased, and I began to hug myself with the notion that my distemper,
whatever it might have been, had beaten a retreat.
Suddenly I felt so collected and comfortable, as to be quite alive to the
loveliness of the scene. It was a beautiful moonlight night; such a
night as is nowhere to be seen without the Tropics, and not often within
them. There was just breeze enough to set the sail to sleep, although
not so strong as to prevent their giving a low murmuring flap now and
then, when the corvette rolled a little heavier than usual on the long
swell. There was not a cloud to be seen in the sky, not even a stray
shred of thin fleecy gauzelike vapour, to mark the direction of the upper
current of the air, by its course across the moon’s disk, which was now
at the full, and about half-way up her track in the liquid heavens.
The small twinkling lights from millions of lesser stars, in that part of
the firmament where she hung, round as a silver pot-lid shield I mean,
were swamped in the flood of greenish-white radiance shed by her, and it
was only a few of the first magnitude, with a planet here and there, that
were visible to the naked eye, in the neighbourhood of her crystal bright
globe; but the clear depth, and dark translucent purity of the profound,
when the eye tried to pierce into it at the zenith, where the stars once
more shone and sparkled thick and brightly, beyond the merging influence
of the pale cold orb, no man can describe now----one could, once--but
rest his soul, he is dead and then to look forth far into the night,
across the dark ridge of many a heaving swell of living water--but,
“Thomas Cringle, ahoy where the devil are you cruising to” So, to come
back to my story. I went aft, and mounted the small poop, and looked
towards the aforesaid moon, a glorious resplendent tropical moon, and not
the paper lantern affair hanging in an atmosphere of fog and smoke, about
which your blear-eyed poets haven’t so much. By the by, these gentry
are fond of singing of the blessed sun--were they sailors they would
bless the moon also, and be--to them, in place of writing much
wearisome poetry regarding her blighting propensities. But I have lost
the end of my yarn once more, in the strands of these parentheses. Lord,
what a word to pronounce in the plural!--I can no more get out now, than
a girl’s silk worm from the innermost of a nest of pill boxes, where, to
ride the simile to death at once, I have warped the thread of my story so
round and round me, that I can’t for the life of me unravel it. Very odd
all this. Since I have recovered of this fever, every thing is slack
about me; I can’t set up the shrouds and backstays of my mind, not to
speak of bobstays, if I should die for it. The running rigging is all
right enough, and the canvass is there; but I either can’t set it, or
when I do, I find I have too little ballast, or I get involved amongst
shoals, and white water, and breakers--don’t you hear them roar?--which I
cannot weather, and crooked channels, under some lee-shore, through
which I cannot scrape clear. So down must go the anchor, as at present,
and there--there goes the chain cable, rushing and rumbling through the
hausehole. But I suppose it will be all right by and by, as I get
stronger.
“But rouse thee, Thomas! Where is this end of your yarn, that you are
blameying about?”
“Avast heaving, you swab you--avast--if you had as much calomel in your
corpus as I have at this present speaking--why you would be a lad of more
mettle than I take you for, that is all.--You would have about as much
quicksilver in your stomach, as I have in my purse, and all my silver has
been quick, ever since I remember, like the jests of the gravedigger in
Hamlett--but, as you say, where the devil is the end of this yarn?”
Ah, here it is! so off we go again--and looked forward towards the rising
moon, whose shining wake of glow-worm-coloured light, sparkling in the
small waves, that danced in the gentle wind on the heaving bosom of the
dark blue sea, was right a-head of us, like a river of quicksilver with
its course diminished in the distance to a point, flowing towards us,
from the extreme verge of the horizon, through a rolling sea of ink, with
the waters of which for a time it disdained to blend. Concentrated, and
shining like polished silver afar off--intense and sparkling as it
streamed down nearer, but becoming less and less brilliant as it Widened
in its approach to us, until, like the stream of the great Estuary of the
Magdalena, losing itself in the salt waste of waters, it gradually melted
beneath us and around us into the darkness.
I looked aloft--every object appeared sharply cut out against the dark
firmament, and the swaying of the mast-heads to and fro, as the vessel
rolled, was so steady and slow, that they seemed stationary, while it was
the moon and stars which appeared to vibrate and swing from side to side,
high over head, like the vacillation of the clouds in a theatre, when the
scene is first let down.
The masts, and yards, and standing and running rigging, looked like black
pillars, and bars, and wires of iron, reared against the sky, by some
mighty spirit of the night; and the sails, as the moon shone dimly
through them, were as dark as if they had been tarpawlings. But when I
walked forward and looked aft, what a beauteous change! Now each mast,
with its gently swelling canvass, the higher sails decreasing in size,
until they tapered away nearly to a point, though topsail, topgallant
sail, royal and skysails, showed like towers of snow, and the cordage
like silver threads, while each dark spar seemed to be of ebony, fished
with ivory, as a flood of cold, pale, mild light streamed from the
beauteous planet over the whole stupendous machine, lighting up the sand
white decks, on which the shadows of the men, and of every object that
intercepted the moonbeams, were cast as strongly as if the planks had
been inlaid with jet.
There was nothing moving about the decks. The lookouts, aft, and at the
gangways, sat or stood like statues half bronze, half alabaster. The old
quartermaster, who was cunning the ship, and had perched himself on a
carronade, with his arm leaning on the weather nettings, was equally
motionless. The watch had all disappeared forward, or were stowed out of
sight under the lee of the boats; the first Lieutenant, as if captivated
by the serenity of the scene, was leaning with folded arms on the weather
gangway, looking abroad upon the ocean, and whistling now and then
either for a wind, or for want of thought. The only being who showed
sign of life was the man at the wheel, and he scarcely moved, except now
and then to give her a spoke or two, when the cheep of the tiller-rope,
running through the well-greased leading blocks, would grate on the ear
as a sound of some importance; while in daylight, in the ordinary bustle
of the ship, no one could say he ever heard it.
Three bells!--“Keep a bright look-out there,” sung out the Lieutenant.
“Ay, ay, sir,” from the four look-out men, in a volley.
Then from the weather-gangway, “All’s well” rose shrill into the night
air.
The watchword was echoed by the man on the forecastle, re-echoed by the
lee-gangway look-out, and ending with the response of the man on the
poop. My dream was dissipated--and so was the first lieutenant’s, who
had but little poetry in his composition, honest man.
“Fine night, Mr Cringle. Look aloft, how beautifully set the sails are;
that mizzen-topsail is well cut, eh? Sits well, don’t it? But confound
the lubbers! Boatswain’s mate, call the watch.”
Whi--whew, whi--whew, chirrup, chip, chip--the deck was alive in an
instant, “as bees biz out wi” angry fyke.
“Where is the captain of the mizzen-top?” growled the man in authority.
“Here, sir.”
“Here, sir!--look at the weather-clew of the mizzen-topsail, sir, look
at that sail, sir,--how many turns can you count in that clew, sir?
Spring it, you no--sailor you--spring it, and set the sail again.”
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all this appeared to me at the
time I will remember; but the obnoxious turns were shaken out, and the
sail set again so as to please even the fastidious eye of the Lieutenant,
who, seeing nothing more to find fault with, addressed me once more.
“Have had no grub since morning, Mr Cringle; all the others are away in
the prizes; you are as good as one of us now, only want the order to
join, you know--so will you oblige me, and take charge of the deck, until
I go below and change my clothes, and gobble a bit?”
“Unquestionably,--with much pleasure.”
He forthwith dived, and I walked aft a few steps towards where the old
quartermaster was standing on the gun.
“How is her head, Quartermaster?”
“South-east and by south, sir. If the wind holds, we shall weather
Morant Point, I think, sir.”
“Very like, very like.--What is that glancing backwards and forwards
across the port-hole there, Quartermaster?”
“I told you so, Mafame,” said the man; “what are you skylarking about the
mizen-chains for, man?--Come in, will you, come in.”
The Captain’s caution to his servant flashed on me.
“Come in, my man, and give my respects to the Captain, and tell him that
I am quite well now; the fresh air has perfectly restored me.”
“I will, sir,” said Mafame, half ashamed at being detected in his office
of inspector-general of my actions; but the Doctor, to whom he had been
sent, having now got a leisure moment from his labour in the shambles,
came up and made enquiries as to how I felt.
“Why, Doctor, I thought I was in for a fever half an hour ago, but it is
quite gone off, or nearly so--there, feel my pulse.”--It was regular, and
there was no particular heat of skin.
“Why, I don’t think there is much the matter with you. Mafame, tell the
Captain so; but turn in and take some rest as soon as you can, and I will
see you in the morning--and here,” feeling in his waistcoat pocket, “here
are a couple of capers for you; take them now, will you?” (And he handed
me two blue pills, which I the next moment chucked overboard, to cure
some bilious dolphin of the liver complaint.) I promised to do so
whenever the Lieutenant relieved the deck, which would, I made no
question, be within half an hour.
“Very well, that will do--good-night. I am regularly done up myself,”
quoth the Medico, as he descended to the gunroom.
At this time of night, the prizes were all in a cluster under our lee
quarter, like small icebergs covered with snow, and carrying every rag
they could set. The Gleam was a good way a-stern, as if to whip them
in, and to take care that no stray piccaroon should make a dash at any of
them. They slid noiselessly along like phantoms of the deep, every thing
in the air and in the water was so still--I crossed to the lee side of
the deck to look at them--The Wave, seeing some one on the hammock
nettings, sheered close to, under the Firebrand’s lee quarter, and some
one asked, “Do you want to speak us?” The man’s voice, reflected from the
concave surface of the schooner’s mainsail, had a hollow, echoing sound,
that startled me.
“I should know that voice,” said I to myself, “and the figure steering
the schooner.”
The throbbing in my head and the dizzy feel, which had capsized my
judgment in the cabin, again returned with increased violence--“It was no
deception after all,” thought I, “no cheat of the senses--I now believe
such things are.”
The same voice now called out, “Come away, Tom, come away,” no doubt to
some other seaman on board the little vessel, but my heated fancy did not
so construe it. The col real again overtook me, and I ejaculated, “God
have mercy upon me a sinner!”
“Why don’t you come, Tom?” said the voice once more.
It was Obed’s. At this very instant of time, the Wave forged a-head
into the Firebrand’s shadow, so that her sails, but a moment before white
as wool in the bright moonbeams suffered a sudden eclipse, and became
black as ink.
“His dark spirit is there,” said I, audibly, “and calls me--go I will,
whatever may befall.”
I hailed the schooner, or rather I had only to speak, and that in a low
tone, for she was now close under the counter “Send your boat, for since
you call, I know I must come.”
A small canoe slid off her deck; two ship boys got into it, and pulled
under the starboard mizzen-chains, which entirely concealed them, as
they held on for a moment with a boat-hook in the dark shadow of the
ship. This was done so silently, that neither the lookout on the poop,
who was rather on the weather-side at the moment, nor the man at the lee
gangway, who happened to be looking out forward, heard them, or saw me,
as I slipped down unperceived.
“Pull back again, my lads; quick now, quick.”
In a moment, I was along-side, the next I was on deck, and in this short
space a change had come over the spirit of my dream, for I now was again
conscious that I was on board the Wave with a prize crew. My imagination
had taken another direction.
“Now Mr----, I beg pardon, I forget your name,”--I had never heard it,
“make more sail, and haul out from the fleet for Mancheoneal Bay; I have
despatches for the admiral--So, crack on.”
The midshipman who was in charge of her never for an instant doubted but
that all was right; sail was made, and as the light breeze was the very
thing for the little Wave, she began to snorer through it like smoke.
When she had shot a cable’s length a-head of the Firebrand, we kept away
a point or two, so as to stand more in for the land, and, like most
maniacs, I was inwardly exulting at the success of my manoeuvre, when we
heard the corvette’s bell struck rapidly. Her maintop-sail was suddenly
laid to the mast, whilst a loud voice echoed amongst the sails--“Any one
see hi--in in the waist--anybody see him forward there?”
“No, sir, no.”
“After guard, fire, and let go the life--buoy--lower away the quarter
boats--jolly-boat also.”
We saw the flash, and presently the small blue light of the buoy, blazing
and disappearing, as it rose and fell on the waves, in the corvette’s
wake, sailed away astern, sparkling fitfully, like an ignis fatuus. The
cordage rattled through the davit blocks, as the boats dashed into the
water--the splash of the oars was heard, and presently the twinkle of the
life-buoy was lost in the lurid glare of the blue lights, held aloft in
each boat, where the crews were standing up, looking like spectres by the
ghastly blaze, and anxiously peering about for some sign of the drowning
man.
“A man overboard,” was repeated from one to another of the prize crew.
“Sure enough,” said I.
“Shall we stand back, sir?” said the midshipman.
“To what purpose?--there are enough there without us--no, no; crack on,
we can do no good--carry on, carry on!”
We did so, and I now found severe shooting pains, more racking than the
sharpest rheumatism I had ever suffered, pervading my whole body. They
increased until I suffered the most excruciating agony, as if my bones
had been converted into red-hot tubes of iron, and the marrow in them
had been dried up with fervent heat, and I was obliged to beg that a
hammock might be spread on deck, on which I lay down, pleading great
fatigue and want of sleep as my excuse.
My thirst was unquenchable; the more I drank, the hotter it became. My
tongue, and mouth, and throat, were burning, as if molten lead had been
poured down into my stomach, while the most violent retching came on
every ten minutes. The prize crew, poor fellows, did all they could
once or twice they seemed about standing back to the ship, but, “make
sail, make sail,” was my only cry. They did so, and there I lay without
any thing between me and the wet planks but a thin sailor’s blanket and
the canvass of the hammock, through the livelong night, and with no
covering but a damp boatcloak, raving at times during the hot fits, at
others having my power of utterance frozen up during the cold ones. The
men, once or twice, offered to carry me below, but the idea was horrible
to me.
“No, no--not there--for heaven’s sake not there! If you do take me down,
I am sure I shall see him, and the dead mate--No, no overboard rather,
throw me overboard rather.”
Oh, what would I not have given for the luxury of a flood of tears!--But
the fountains of mine eyes were dried up, and seared as with a red-hot
iron--my skin was parched, and hot, hot, as if every pore had been
hermetically sealed; there was a hell within me and about me as if the
deck on which I lay had been steel at a white heat, and the gushing
blood, as under the action of a force-pump, throbbed through my head,
like it would have burst on my brain--and such a racking, splitting
headache--no language can describe it, and yet ever and anon in the midst
of this raging fire, this furnace at my heart, seven times heated, a
sudden icy shivering chill would shake me, and pierce through and through
me, even when the roasting fever was at the hottest.
At length the day broke on the long, long, moist, steamy night, and once
more the sun rose to bless every thing but me. As the morning wore on,
my torments increased with the heat, and I lay sweltering on deck, in a
furious delirium, held down forcibly by two men, who were relieved by
others every now and then, while I raved about Obed, and Paul, and the
scenes I had witnessed on board during the chase, and in the attack.
None of my rough but kind nurses expected I could have held on till
nightfall; but shortly after sunset I became more collected, and, as I
was afterwards told, whenever any little office was performed for me,
whenever some drink was held to my lips, I would say to the gruff
sunburnt, black-whiskered, square shouldered topman who might be my
Ganymede for the occasion, “Thank you, Mary; Heaven bless your pale face,
Mary; bless you, bless you!”
It seemed my fancy had shaken itself clear of the fearful objects that
had so pertinaciously haunted me before, and occupying itself with
pleasing recollections, had produced a corresponding cahn in the animal;
but the poor fellow to whom I had expressed myself so endearingly, was, I
learned, most awfully put out and dismayed. He twisted and turned his
iron features into all manner of ludicrous combinations, under the
laughter of his mates--“Now, Peter, may I be--but I would rather be
shot at, than hear the poor young gentleman so quiz me in his madness.”
Then again--as I praised his lovely taper fingers--they were more like
bunches of frosted carrots, dipped in a tar-bucket, with the tails snapt
short off, where about an inch thick.
“My taper fingers--oh lord! Now, Peter, I can’t stomach this any longer,
I’ll give you my grog for the next two days, if you will take my spell
here--My taper fingers--murder!”
As the evening closed in we saw the high land of Jamaica, but it was the
following afternoon before we were off the entrance of Mancheoneal Bay.
All this period, although it must have been one of great physical
suffering, has ever, to my ethereal part, remained a dead blank. The
first thing I remember afterwards, was being carried ashore in the dark
in a hammock slung on two oars, so as to form a sort of rude palanquin,
and laid down at a short distance from the overseer’s house where my
troubles had originally commenced. I soon became perfectly sensible and
collected, but I was so weak I could not speak; after resting a little,
the men again lifted me and proceeded. The door of the dining-hall,
which was the back entrance into the overseer’s house, opened flush into
the little garden through which we had come in--there were lights, and
sounds of music, singing, and jovialty within. The farther end of the
room, at the door of which I now rested, opened into the piazza, or open
veranda, which crossed it at right angles, and constituted the front of
the house, forming, with this apartment, a figure somewhat like the
letter T. I stood at the foot of the letter, as it were, and as I looked
towards the piazza, which was gaily lit up, I could see it was crowded
with male and female negroes in their holyday apparel, with their
wholesome clear brown-black skins, not blue-black as they appear in our
cold country, and beautiful white teeth, and sparkling black eyes,
amongst whom were several gumbie-men and flute-players, and John
Canoes, as the negro Jack Pudding is called; the latter distinguishable
by wearing white false faces, and enormous shocks of horsehair, fastened
on to their woolly pates. Their character hovers somewhere between that
of a harlequin and a clown, as they dance about, and thread through the
negro groups, quizzing the women and slapping the men; and at Christmas
time, the grand negro carnival, they don’t confine their practical jokes
to their own colour, but take all manner of comical liberties with the
whites equally with their fellow bondsmen.
The blackamoor visitors had suddenly, to all appearance, broken off their
dancing, and were now clustered behind a rather remarkable group, who
were seated at supper in the dining-room, near to where I stood,
forming, as it were, the foreground in the scene. Mr Fyall himself was
there, and a rosy-gilled, happy-looking man, who I thought I had seen
before; this much I could discern, for the light fell strong on them,
especially on the face of the latter, which shone like a star of the
first magnitude, or a lighthouse in the red gleam--the usual family of
the overseer, the book-keepers that is, and the worthy who had been the
proximate cause of all my sufferings, the overseer himself, were there
too, as if they had been sitting still at table where I saw them now,
ever since I left them three weeks before--at least my fancy did me the
favour to annihilate, for the nonce, all intermediate time between the
point of my departure on the night of the cooper’s funeral, and the
moment when I now revisited them.
I was lifted out of the hammock, and supported to the door between two
seamen. The fresh, nice-looking man before mentioned, Aaron Bang,
Esquire, by name, an incipient planting attorney in the neighbourhood, of
great promise, was in the act of singing a song, for it was during some
holyday-time, which had broken down the stiff observances of a Jamaica
planter’s life. There he sat, lolling back on his chair, with his feet
upon the table, and a cigar, half consumed, in his hand. He had twisted
up his mouth and mirth-provoking nose, which, by an unaccountable
control over some muscle, present in the visage of no other human being,
he made to describe a small circle round the centre of his face, and
slewing his head on one side, he was warbling, ore Yotundo, some
melodious ditty, with infinite complacency, and, to all appearance, to
the great delight of his auditory, when his eyes lighted on me,--he was
petrified in a moment, I seemed to have blasted him,----his warbling
ceased instantaneously, the colour faded from his cheeks, but there he
sat, with open mouth, and in the same attitude as if he still sung, and I
had suddenly become deaf, or as if he and his immediate compotators, and
the group of blackies beyond, had all been on the instant turned to stone
by a slap from one of their own John Canoes. I must have been in truth a
terrible spectacle; my skin was yellow, not as saffron, but as the skin
of a ripe lime; the white of my eyes, to use an Irishism, ditto; my mouth
and lips had festered and broke out, as we say in Scotland; my head was
bound round with a napkin--none of the cleanest, you may swear; my dress
was a pair of dirty duck trowsers, and my shirt, with the boat-cloak
that had been my only counterpane on board of the little vessel, hanging
from my shoulders.
Lazarus himself could scarcely have been a more appalling object, when
the voice of him who spoke as never man spake, said, “Lazarus come
forth.”
I made an unavailing attempt to cross the threshold, but could not. I
was spellbound, or there was an invisible barrier erected against me,
which I could not overleap. The buzzing in my ears, the pain and
throbbing in my head, and racking aches, once more bent me to the earth,
ill and reduced as I was, a relapse, thought I; and I felt my judgment
once more giving way before the sweltering fiend, who had retreated but
for a moment to renew his attacks with still greater fierceness. The
moment he once more entered into me--the instant that I was possessed--I
cannot call it by any other name--an unnatural strength pervaded my
shrunken muscles and emaciated frame, and I stepped boldly into the hall.
While I had stood at the door, listless and feeble as a child, hanging on
the arms of the two topmen, after they had raised me from the hammock,
the whole party had sat silently gazing at me, with their faculties
paralysed with terror. But now, when I stumped into the room like the
marble statue in Don Juan, and glared on them, my eyes sparkling with
unearthly brilliancy under the fierce distemper which had anew thrust its
red hot fingers into my maw, and was at the moment seething my brain in
its hellish caldron, the negroes in the piazza, one and all, men, women,
and children, evanished into the night, and the whole party in the
foreground started to their legs, as if they had been suddenly
galvanized; the table and chairs were overset, and whites and blacks
trundled, and scrambled, and bundled over and over each other, neck and
crop, as if the very devil had come to invite them to dinner in propria
personal horns, tail, and all.
“Duppy come! Duppy come! Massa Tom Cringle ghost stand at for we door;
we all shall dead, oh--we all shall go dead, oh!” bellowed the father of
gods, my old ally Jupiter.
“Guid guide us, that’s an awful sicht!” quod the Scotch bookkeeper.
“By the hockeytt speak if you be a ghost, or I’ll exercise [exorcise] ye
wid this butt of a musket,” quoth the cowboy@an Irishman to be sure,
whose round bullet head was discernible in the human mass, by his black,
twinkling, half-drunken-looking eyes.
“Well-a-day,” groaned another of them, a Welshman, I believe, with a
face as long as my arm, and a drawl worthy of a Methodist parson; “and
what can it be-flesh and blood, it is not--can these dry bones live?”
Ill as I was, however, I could perceive that all this row had now more of
a tipsy frolic in it--whatever it might have had at first--than absolute
fear; for the red-faced visitor, and Mr Fyall, as if half ashamed,
speedily extricated themselves from the chaos of chairs and living
creatures, righted the table, replaced the candles, and having sat down,
looking as grave as judges on the bench, Aaron Bang exclaimed--“I’ll bet
a dozen, it is the poor fellow himself returned on our hands, half-dead
from the rascally treatment he has met with at the hands of these
smuggling thieves!”
“Smugglers, or no,” said Fyall, “you are right for once, my peony rose, I
do believe.”
But Aaron was a leetle staggered, notwithstanding, when I stumped towards
him, as already described, and he shifted back and back as I advanced,
with a most laughable cast of countenance, between jest and earnest,
while Fyall kept shouting to him--“If it be his ghost, try him in Latin,
Mr Bang--speak Latin to him, Aaron Bang--nothing for a ghost like Latin,
it is their mother tongue.”
Bang, who, it seemed, plumed himself on his erudition, forthwith began
“Quae maribus solum tribuunter.” Aaron’s conceit of exorcising a spirit
with the fag-end of an old grammar rule would have tickled me under most
circumstances; but I was far past laughing. I had more need, God help
me, to pray. I made another step. He hitched his chair back. “Bam, Bo,
Rem!” shouted the incipient planting attorney. Another hitch, which
carried him clean out of the supper-room, and across the narrow piazza;
but, in this last movement, he made a regular false step, the two back
feet of his chair dropping over the first step of the front stairs,
whereupon he lost his balance, and toppling over, vanished in a
twinkling, and rolled down half-a-dozen steps, heels over head, until
he lay sprawling on the manger or mule-trough before the door, where the
Ceases are fed under busha’s own eye on all estates--for this excellent
and most cogent reason, that otherwise the maize or guinea-com,
belonging of right to poor mulo, would generally go towards improving the
condition, not of the quadruped, but of the biped quashiet who had charge
of him--and there he lay in a convulsion of laughter.
The two seamen, who supported me between them, were at first so
completely dumfoundered by all this, that they could not speak. At
length, however, Timothy Tailtackle lost his patience, and found his
tongue.
“This may be Jamaica frolic, good gentlemen, and all very comical in its
way; but, d----n me, if it be either gentlemanlike or Christian like, to be
after funning and fuddling, while a fellow creature, and his Majesty’s
commissioned officer to boot, stands before you, all but dead of one of
your blasted fevers.”
The honest fellow’s straightforward appeal, far from giving offence to
the kindhearted people to whom it was made, was not only taken in good
part, but Mr Fyall himself took the lead in setting the whole household
immediately to work, to have me properly cared for. The best room in the
house was given up to me. I was carefully shifted and put to bed; but
during all that night and the following day, I was raving in a furious
fever, so that I had to be forcibly held down in my bed, sometimes for
half an hour at a time.
I say, messmate, have you ever had the yellow fever, the vomito prieto,
black vomit, as the Spaniards call it?--No?--have you ever had a bad
bilious fever then? No bad bilious fever either?--Why, then, you are a
most unfortunate creature; for you have never known what it was to be in
Heaven, nor eke the other place. Oh the delight, the blessedness of the
languor of recovery, when one finds himself in a large airy room, with a
dreamy indistinct recollection of great past suffering, endured in a
small miserable vessel within the tropics, where you have been roasted
one moment by the vertical rays of the sun, and the next annealed hissing
hot by the salt sea spray;--in a broad luxurious bed, some cool sunny
morning, with the fresh sea breeze whistling through the open windows
that look into the piazza, and rustling the folds of the clean wire
gauze musquitto net that serves you for bed-curtains; while beyond you
look forth into the sequestered court-yard, overshadowed by one vast
umbrageous kennip tree, that makes every thing look green and cool and
fresh beneath, and whose branches the rushing wind is rasping cheerily on
the shingles of the roof-and oh, how passing sweet is the lullaby from
the humming of numberless glancing bright-hued flies, of all sorts and
sizes, sparkling among the green leaves like chips of a prism, and the
fitful whirring of the fairy-flitting humming bird, now here, now there,
like winged gems, or living atoms of the rainbow, round which their tiny
wings, moving too quickly to be visible, form little haloes--and the palm
tree at the house-corner is shaking its long hard leaves, making a sound
for all the world like the pattering of rain; and the orange-tree top,
with ripe fruit, and green fruit, and white blossoms, is waving to and
fro flush with the window-sill, dashing the fragrant odour into your
room at every whish; and the double Jessamine is twining up the papaw
(whose fruit, if rubbed on a bull’s hide, immediately converts it into a
tender beef-steak) and absolutely stifling you with sweet perfume; and
then the sangaree old Madeira, two parts of water, no more, and nutmeg
and not a taste out of a thimble, but a rummerful of it, my boy, that
would drown your first-born at his christening, if he slipped into it,
and no stinting in the use of this ocean; on the contrary, the tidy old
brown nurse, or mayhap a buxom young one, at your bedside, with ever and
anon a lettle more panada, (d----n panada, I had forgotten that!) “and den
some more sangaree; it will do massa good, strengthen him tomack”--and,
but I am out of breath, and must lie to for a brief space.
I opened my eyes late in the morning of the second day after landing, and
saw Mr Fyall and the excellent Aaron Bang sitting one on each side of my
bed. Although weak as a sucking infant, I had a strong persuasion on my
mind that all danger was over, and that I was convalescent. I had no
feverish symptom whatsoever, but felt cool and comfortable, with a fine
balmy moisture on my skin; as yet, however, I spoke with great
difficulty.
Aaron noticed this.
“Don’t exert yourself too much, Tom; take it coolly, man, and thank God
that you are now fairly round the corner. Is your head painful?”
“No--why should it?”
Mr Fyall smiled, and I put up my hand--it was all I could do, for my
limbs appeared loaded with lead at the extremities, and when I touched
any part of my frame, with my hand for instance, there was no concurring
sensation conveyed by the nerves of the two parts; sometimes I felt as if
touched by the hand of another; at others, as if I had touched the person
of some one else. When I raised my hand to my forehead, my fingers
instinctively moved to take hold of my hair, for I was in no small degree
proud of some luxuriant brown curls, which the women used to praise.
Alas and alack-a-day! in place of ringlets, glossy with Macassar oil, I
found a cool young tender plantain-leaf bound round my temples.
“What is all this?” said I. “A kale-blade, where my hair used to be!”
“How came this kale-blade here,
And how came it here?”
Sung friend Bang, laughing, for he had great powers of laughter, and I
saw he kept his quizzical face turned towards some object at the head of
the bed, which I could not see.
“You may say that, Aaron--where’s my wig, you rogue, eh?”
“Never mind, Tom,” said Fyall, “your hair will soon grow again, won’t it,
miss?”
“Miss! miss!” and I screwed my neck round, and lo!--“Ah, Mary, and are
you the Delilah who have shorn my locks--you wicked young female lady
you!”
She smiled and nodded to Aaron, who was a deuced favourite with the
ladies, black, brown, and white, (I give the pas to the staple of the
country--hope no offence,) as well as with every one else who ever knew
him.
“How dare you, friend Bang, shave and blister my head, you dog?” said I.
“You cannibal Indian, you have scalped me; you are a regular Mohawk.”
“Never mind, Tom--never mind, my boy,” said he. “Ay, you may blush, Mary
Palma. Cringle there will fight, but he will have ‘Palmam qui meruit
ferat’ for his motto yet, take my word for it.”
The sight of my cousin’s lovely face, and the heavenly music of her
tongue, made me so forgiving, that I could be angry with no one.--At this
moment a nice-looking elderly man slid into the room as noiselessly as a
cat.
“How are you, Lieutenant? Why, you are positively gay this morning!
Preserve me!--why have you taken off the dressing from your head?”
“Preserve me--you may say that, Doctor--why, you seem to have preserved
me, and pickled me after a very remarkable fashion, certainly! Why, man,
do you intend to make a mummy of me, with all your swaddlings? Now, what
is that crackling on my chest? More plantain-leaves, as I live!”
“Only another blister, sir.”
“Only another blister--and my feet--Zounds! what have you been doing with
my feet? The soles are as tender as if I had been bastinadoed.”
“Only cataplasms, sir; mustard and bird-pepper poultices nothing more.”
“Mustard and bird-pepper poultices!--and pray, what is that long fiddle
case supported on two chairs in the piazza!”
“What case?” said the good Doctor, and his eye followed mine. “Oh, my
gun-case. I am a great sportsman, you must know--but draw down that
blind, Mr Bang, if you please, the breeze is too strong.”
“Gun-case! I would rather have taken it for your game-box, Doctor.
However, thanks be to Heaven, you have not bagged me this bout.”
At this moment, I heard a violent scratching and jumping on the roof of
the house, and presently a loud croak, and a strong rushing noise, as of
a large bird taking flight--“What is that, Doctor?”
“The devil,” said he, laughing, “at least your evil genius, Lieutenant,
it is the carrion crows, the large John--Crows, as they are called,
flying away. They have been holding a council of war upon you since
early dawn, expecting (I may tell you, now you are so well) that it might
likely soon turn into a coroner’s inquest.”
“John--Crow!--Coroner’s inquest!--Cool shavers those West India chaps,
after all!” muttered I; and again I lay back, and offered up my heart,
warm thanks to the Almighty, for his great mercy to me a sinner.
My aunt and cousin had been on a visit in the neighbourhood, and overnight
Mr Fyall had kindly sent for them to receive my last sigh, for to all
appearance I was fast going. Oh, the gratitude of my heart, the
tears of joy I wept in my weak blessedness, and the overflowing of heart
that I experienced towards that almighty and ever-merciful Being who had
spared me, and brought me out of my great sickness, to look round on dear
friends, and on the idol of my heart, once more, after all my grievous
sufferings! I took Mary’s hand--I could not raise it for lack of
strength, or I would have kissed it; but, as she leant over me, Fyall
came behind her and gently pressed her sweet lips to mine, while the dear
girl blushed as red as Aaron Bang’s face. By this my aunt herself had
come into the room, and a warm congratulations, and last, although not
least, Timothy Tailtackle made his appearance in the piazza at the
window, with a clean, joyful, well shaven countenance. He grinned,
turned his quid, pulled up his trowsers, smoothed down his hair with his
hand, and gave a sort of half-tipsy shamble, meant for a bow, as he
entered the bedroom.
“You have forereached on Davy this time, sir. Heaven be praised for it!
He was close aboard of you, howsomdever, sir, once or twice.” Then he
bowed round the room again, with a sort of swing or caper, whichever you
choose to call it, as if he had been the party obliged. “Kind folk,
these, sir,” he continued, in what was meant for sotto voce, and for my
ear alone, but it was more like the growling of a mastiff puppy than any
thing else. “Kind folk, sir--bad as their mountebanking looked the first
night, sir--why, Lord bless your honour, may they make a marine of me, if
they han’t set a Bungo to wait on us, Bill and I, that is--and we has
grog more than does us good--and grub, my eye!--only think, sir--Bill and
Timothy Tailtackle waited on by a black Bungo!” and he doubled himself
up, chuckling and hugging himself, with infinite glee.
“All now went merry as a marriage bell.” I was carefully conveyed to
Kingston, where I rallied under my aunt’s hospitable roof, as rapidly
almost as I had sickened, and within a fortnight, all bypast strangeness
explained to my superiors, I at length occupied my berth in the
Firebrand’s gunroom, as third lieutenant of the ship.