THE GROWING TERROR
The sailor is, as all the world knows, a light-hearted, mercurial
creature. Face to face with death in some form or other during every
hour of his life--although, often, the mere presence of death is
neither known nor suspected--he is only too elated and happy when
momentarily without anything to cause him anxiety. Such was the case
now with Captain Pooley, since his beautiful ship was rapidly picking
up all the time she had lost by lack of wind and delays, 'and since,'
as he jovially phrased it, 'all his new passengers were doing well.'
'First and foremost,' he said that evening, as he sat at the head of
his table with Bella in the place of honour on his right hand, his
wife on the left, and Mr. Fagg opposite to him, while his honest,
sunburnt face gleamed rubicund beneath the inch of white under his
hair which his cap had preserved from the sun, 'Bella's young man is
all right. Then Bella's new plaything, the tiger, takes kindly to its
lodgings--though you will have to sell it, my child, directly we get
to Bombay, and distribute the money it fetches among the men. Then
those wretched slaves--even they will eat and drink, won't they,
Fagg?'
'Not much of that, sir,' the second mate answered, who was eating and
drinking pretty well himself, however; 'they don't care to do much of
either. They make a good deal of moaning up in that deck-cabin forward
which you have given them. The woman, however, seems all right. I
suppose the lieutenant has not been able to tell you much about the
dhow yet, Miss Waldron?' he asked, bending forward a little as he
addressed her.
'At present,' she replied, 'we have had little conversation. He says,
however, that he sent me a telegram from Bombay, telling me not to
start as the _Briseus_ was coming down here. He only came-to an hour
ago, however,' she went on, while a ravishing blush swept over her
face, 'and we--we--have had so much to----'
'Spare her, Fagg,' said Pooley, with a laugh, and passing the claret
at the same time. 'Spare her. Suppose you woke up one fine afternoon
and found your sweetheart bending over you in your berth and
whispering all sorts of endearing things in your ears, as well as
kiss----'
'Uncle!' cried Bella, while Mrs. Pooley touched her husband's arm
reprovingly with her forefinger, and Mr. Fagg hid his face behind the
vase of brilliant Cape gooseberries on the table. 'Uncle!' Whereon the
bluff, good-natured sailor desisted, and began to speculate on the
blindness with which the rescued negroes were attacked, and on that
attack being, as he imagined, a recent one. 'They capture these poor
wretches inland,' he went on musingly, 'in the big lake region as
often as not; but, as far as I have ever heard, blindness is not one
of their afflictions. Moreover, these Arab owners and captains
wouldn't buy blind slaves, either for selling farther north, or for
using as sailors in their dhows. Therefore, I take it, this blindness
must have come on them since they were shipped. That's strange, isn't
it?' while, as he spoke, he rose, and went to his neat mahogany
bookcase which was securely fastened to one of the saloon's bulkheads,
and took down the two medical works he possessed--the one dealing with
all general human complaints to which our flesh is heir, and the other
with tropical diseases more especially. Yet neither under the heading
of 'Eye,' nor 'Blindness,' nor 'Optics,' could he find aught that bore
upon the subject; nor, in his book on tropical complaints, could he
discover any information that might enlighten him as to why the four
negroes should be so stricken.
He spoke again, however, after turning over the leaves of these
erudite volumes a second time, saying: 'Fever, I know, sometimes
produces blindness as an after-effect, yet--well, we have all seen
these fellows, and there's no fever in them, I should say. Oh, deuce
take this confusion of tongues!' he exclaimed irritably; 'if it did
not exist we could find out so much from the sufferers themselves.
Bella, our only hope is in you and your patient. If Lieutenant
Bampfyld can't tell us something, we shall never know who these men
and the woman are, where they came from, what is the matter with them,
and to whom the dhow belonged. Can he speak anything but English,
child?'
'He knows some Hindustani,' Bella replied; 'and, I think he said, some
words of Swahili. He has taken up Eastern languages in the Service,
which was one of the reasons for his being appointed to the _Briseus_.
He may be some help. At least he can tell us how he came on board that
horrid ship.'
As she spoke, eight-bells struck on deck, and, as the sound came
through the skylight, both she and Mr. Fagg rose, the girl doing so
because it was the hour at which she intended to visit Gilbert again,
and the latter because it was time to relieve Stephen Charke, who
would now come below to take his supper. For Bella had fixed this hour
for paying her last evening visit to her future husband because she
knew that the second mate would then descend, and she was never now
desirous of being more in his company than necessary.
She therefore left the saloon before Fagg could have relieved Charke,
and, going to the cabin in which Gilbert Bampfyld lay, pushed back the
curtain that hung at the door and went in to him, while observing as
she did so that he was awake and gazing upwards as he lay. And she saw
that he smiled happily on perceiving her, and whispered the word
'Darling' as she advanced to his bedside.
'You are better, dearest,' she said, bending over him and putting her
hand on his forehead, which was cool and moist. 'Much better. Aunt
will come soon with fresh bandages for your poor head, and then you
will have a good night's refreshing sleep. And to-morrow, perhaps, you
will be able to tell us how you came to be in that hideous slaver. Oh,
Bertie!'--for so she often called him--'what a mercy it was that we
found you as we did. And what a miracle that we should have met thus.
Home-keeping and narrow-minded people would say, if they read it all
in a book, that such a thing was unnatural and impossible.'
Their first meeting, their joy at discovering that they had come
together again in this marvellous manner; their rapture when, a few
hours before, Gilbert Bampfyld had emerged from his stupor and
unconsciousness, has not been forgotten, although the description of
it has been omitted. Omitted for the simple reason that most of us
have been, or are, lovers; most of us have known in our time, or know
now--and those are the happy ones!--the sweet, unutterable joy with
which such meetings are welcomed. Who does not remember the sudden,
quickened beat of the heart at some period of their existence, as they
met again the one they loved the best of all in this world; the
creature upon whom their thoughts were for ever dwelling, and from
whom those thoughts, however wandering they had heretofore been, were,
at last, never more to roam! Picture to yourself, therefore, what
rhapsody was Bella's when, forgetting everything else but that she
held her lover to her heart, she wept over his salvation from an
awful, swift, impending death; picture also to yourself the delirious
joy which coursed through Gilbert's now unclouded mind, as he found
himself in her arms--with her--close to her. Picture this, and no
further description is needed of their meeting in that cool, darkened
cabin of the old ship. Imagine for yourself what your own ecstasy
would have been in such or kindred circumstances, and you possess the
knowledge of what theirs was.
'Darling,' he said again now, as she held to his lips a cooling drink
that she had brought into the cabin with her, 'darling, I can tell you
in half-a-dozen sentences or less----'
'No,' she said. 'No; not now. To-morrow, when you have slept----'
'Yes, now. Why, dearest, I am well! I could take the middle watch
to-night if necessary, or--or--do anything that a sailor may be called
on to do. And as for finding me in that dhow, why, it's the simplest
thing on earth--or the waters. Listen. The _Briseus_, as you would
have learnt by that telegram I sent you if you had ever received it,
was suddenly ordered to join the Cape Squadron--dhow-catching. And I
can tell you we were not so very long before the game began, since by
the time we were abreast of Kilwy--which is the southern limit of the
legal slave trade--we fell in with twelve dhows, one of them being our
friend from which I was rescued by your people. And you may depend we
were after them like lightning, while beginning to ply them with shell
and shot from our little gun forward. They scattered, of course,
though some got hit and lay disabled on the water, while I went off in
the whaler with her crew to attack one that seemed badly knocked
about. The one in which I was when found by you.'
'The horror!' exclaimed Bella, with a pretty shudder.
'No, no; don't call her that, because, after all, I owe my life to
her.'
'Well, the angel!' exclaimed Bella now, with sudden change.
'Though I don't altogether know that the captain meant to save me----'
'The wretch! I'm glad he's dead.'
Gilbert laughed at these variations in Bella's mental temperature.
Then he continued.
'They are artful--incredibly artful--in these dhows. They will let our
pinnaces or whalers or any other of the ship's boats come alongside,
then, all of a sudden, they cut their lee halliards, and down comes
their great sail over us, enveloping the boat and all in it, just as
if it was in a net or a bag.'
'Ah!' gasped Bella.
'And that's not all. When you are caught like that, they have another
pleasing little way of firing at you from above through the canvas, so
that you are being shot down while, all the time, you have no chance
of escape.'
'Oh!' exclaimed Bella. 'To think of it! Ah, the wretches.'
'They do, Bella. Fortunately, however, this one couldn't do it, being
disabled, and she had, therefore, come up to the wind with hardly any
way on her. This was all right for us, as I meant to board, so as we
came alongside each other we hooked on to her anchor cable, which was
hanging pretty low down, and we should have got on board, too, only at
that moment the dhow gave a lurch which sent the whaler half-seas
under, and I got a blow on the head which knocked me insensible----'
'Oh, Gilbert! That wound on your head!'
'I suppose so. At any rate, I knew no more about it; and I don't know
anything further, now, since I was insensible till I woke up here this
morning and found you bending over me. However, I'm all right now, or
soon shall be.'
'But how did you come into the dhow you were found in?' Bella asked,
while pouring out, directly afterwards, one question after another.
'And when did it happen--yesterday, or a week ago? And where was the
whaler, and the sailors, and the _Briseus_? And why did they all
desert you? What a nice kind of a captain yours must be, to be sure!'
'My opinion is now,' said Gilbert, 'that the dhow you found me in,
rescued me--picked me up. And I expect our captain--he is a rattling
good skipper, Bella, all the same--heard I was drowned and thinks I've
missed my muster. My cousin Jack will imagine for a month or so--till
we get in to Bombay--that he is the future Lord D'Abernon,' and he
laughed as he thought of how soon Cousin Jack would be undeceived.
'But the dhow we found you in--how did she escape, and why didn't the
_Briseus_ capture her?'
'Some must have got off in the confusion since it was only an hour
from dark. I'm certain to be reported lost when the ship goes into
either Zanzibar or Aden, and---- What's that?' he exclaimed, breaking
off suddenly. 'Surely that's your uncle's voice!'
He recognised it because Captain Pooley had been in to see him after
he recovered his consciousness and had congratulated him on doing so,
as well as on being practically restored, while saying also that he
was delighted at being the means of rescuing him out of the sinking
slaver.
'Yes,' Bella replied, 'that's uncle's voice; and the other is that of
Mr. Charke, the first mate.'
'Listen! What is it he is saying?'
It was perfectly easy to hear what he was saying, since both master
and mate were conversing in the saloon, to which Charke had descended.
And the words which reached their ears, as they fell from the latter's
lips, were: 'Oh, no doubt about it whatever, sir; not the least. The
negress is now as blind as the negroes themselves. She cannot see her
way along the deck, nor any of the signs we have made before her
eyes.'