THE DERELICTS
"Born but to banquet and to drain the bowl."
--Homer.
The "Mary Ann" had just returned from a trip to New Orleans, and while
waiting for her cargo lay moored at the foot of Broadway. As the quack
ascended her gang-plank the captain and mate rose to greet him. There
was not on the entire river, where so many extraordinary characters have
been evolved, a more remarkable pair.
The captain was five feet four inches in height, round, ruddy, mellow
and jocund. A complete absence or suppression of moral sense, together
with health as perfect as an animal's, had rendered him insensible to
all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He had never shed a
tear save in excessive laughter, and sorrow had never yet struck a dart
through the armor of fat in which he was sheathed.
The mate was his counterpart and foil. Six feet and three inches tall,
he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his
constitution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in
love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at
forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its
amusements but those of the table, which his poor digestion made more
painful than pleasurable, all of its ambitions but those of getting
money And all friendships but those of the captain, to whom he was
attached like a limpet to a rock.
Such were the leading characteristics of the two worthies who rose from
their deck-stools to meet the doctor as he rolled up the gangway.
"Howdy, doctor?" said the mate, in the peculiar drawling vernacular of
the poor whites of the south, extending a hand as cold and hard as an
anchor.
"Welcome, prince of quacks! For a man who has made so many others walk
the plank with poison drugs, you do it but poorly yourself," cried the
captain, merrily.
"You will d-d-draw your last breath with a joke, as a d-d-drunkard sips
his last drop with a sigh," responded the doctor.
"The captain was born with the corners of his mouth turned up like a
dead man's toes," drawled the lugubrious mate.
"Where is the judge?" asked the doctor, hitting the captain a hearty
slap on the back.
"He will be here a little later," the host replied.
The three boon companions seated themselves by the gunwale of the
vessel, basking in the mellow light of the moon and quaffing the liquor
which a negro brought them.
While they were drinking and recalling the many revels which they had
held together, an hour passed by, and at its close a form was seen
coming leisurely down the sloping bank of the river. It was the justice
of the peace, come to make merry with the husband of the woman he had
just betrayed. Upon that cynical countenance a close observer might have
noted even in the pale light of the moon an expression of sardonic
pleasure when he returned the hearty greetings with which his coming was
hailed.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," he said.
"We have all the b-b-better appetite," responded the doctor.
"If, as the old saw says, the time to eat is when the stomach rings the
bell, I am ready!" the captain piped, in his high-pitched voice.
"Diogenes being asked what time a man ought to eat, responded, 'The
rich, when he is hungry, and the poor, when he has food,'" said the
judge, whose mind threw up old scraps of classical knowledge as the
ocean throws up shells.
"As for hunger, my appetite is sharper than a scythe; but my indigestion
is duller than a whetstone," said the mate, to whom a feast was always
prophetic of subsequent fasting.
"Good digestion waits on appetite; but waits too long, eh?" the judge
replied.
The captain led the way to the cabin. It was a low, dingy room, but
ruddy with the light of a dozen tallow candles. On the table was spread
a feast that would have tempted the palates of the epicures who gathered
about the festive board of the immortal Lucullus. There was neither art
nor display in the accompaniments of the food, but every luxury that an
ample market could supply had been prepared by a cook who could have won
immortality in a Paris restaurant, and the finest whisky that could be
distilled in old Kentucky, the rarest wines that could be imported from
the Rhine or from sunny Italian slopes, were ready to flow.
Four slaves received the banqueters and then took their places behind
the chairs at the table. The captain's face was shining like a full
moon; the doctor's was swarthy, sinister and piratical; the judge's
possessed the dignity of a splendid ruin; the mate's was haunted by an
expression of unsatisfied and insatiable desire. Observing it and
calling the attention of the others, the justice remarked, "Like the old
Romans, we have a skeleton at our table to remind us of death."
"You would look like death yourself if you had to sit staring at these
bounties like a muzzled dog in a market," snarled the mate.
"Be like the dyspeptic who was about to be hanged," said the doctor.
"The sheriff asked him to make his last request. 'I will have a dozen
hot waffles well b-b-buttered; and let there be a _full_ dozen, for I
shall not suffer from the cramps t-t-this time,' says he."
The first few courses of the feast were eaten in almost uninterrupted
silence; but as the keen edge of their appetites became a little dulled,
the tongues of the banqueters were unloosed and a torrent of talk began
to flow, interlarded with oaths and stories of a more than questionable
character. Corks popped from bottles with loud explosions, the darkies
greeted the sallies of wit with boisterous laughter and surreptitiously
emptied the glasses.
The fun grew fast and furious, the thoughts of the revelers flowing in
the usual channels of such feasts. At a certain pitch of this wild
frenzy, a desire for music invariably recurs and so at a signal from the
captain the slaves who performed the functions of deck-hands, waiters or
musicians as the exigencies of the occasion demanded, brought in their
musical instruments and the rafters were soon ringing with their simple
melodies to the accompaniment of banjos and guitars. The deep rich
voices blended harmoniously with the tingle of the stringed instruments
and the clicking of the bones. Plantation songs were followed by revival
hymns, and these by coarse and licentious ditties. At a second stage of
every orgie, desire for the dance is kindled by music, and so, at the
command of their master, two of the slaves began to execute a "double
shuffle."
The clatter and the beating of negro feet to the accompaniment of the
banjo and the bones, and the shouting of the spectators gave vent to the
boisterous emotions of the revelers. Even the melancholy mate caught the
enthusiasm, and for a time at least forgot his misery. Of them all, the
judge alone preserved his gravity. He sat looking unmoved at these wild
antics, and murmured to himself:
"If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall.
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets
Stealing and giving odor."
Nothing could be more horrible than the sight of this gifted man herding
with these beasts. It was like a lion devouring carrion with wolves.
Aside from the pleasure of the palate, his enjoyment of the scene was
derived from the cynical contempt with which he regarded it. Having
descended to the lowest depths of human degradation, he had arrived at a
point where he drew his keenest relish from the inconsistencies, the
absurdities and the sufferings of his fellow-men. In order that he might
behold a scene in which all the elements of the horribly grotesque were
combined, he determined to provoke the egotism and complacency of the
quack to the very highest activity at this moment when his fortunes and
his hopes were being undermined.
After the excitement of the dance had abated, the concluding phase of
all such orgies came in its inevitable sequence, and they began to drink
great bumpers to each other's health. After all had been pledged, the
judge proposed a toast to the "gypsy bride."
The tongue of the quack was loosened in an instant and he poured forth
an extravagant eulogy of her beauty and her devotion.
"If she were mine, I should be on the ragged edge with jealousy every
hour of the day and night," said the judge, as they set their glasses
down.
"Y-y-you'd have reason to! B-b-but I'm a horse of a different c-c-color,
old boy! W-w-women have p-p-preferences," the doctor replied, pulling
out the ends of his mustache and winking at the captain and his mate,
who stupidly nodded their appreciation of the hit.
"When honeysuckles close their petals to hummingbirds, Venus will shut
the door on Adonis," responded the judge, draining his glass and smiling
into its depths.
The quack was too far gone in his cups to comprehend or even to be
curious as to the significance of this sneer and went on sounding his
own virtues and Pepeeta's beauty while the judge provoked him to the
fullest exhibition of his colossal vanity. He took a sinister delight in
drawing him out. It was the pleasure of a cat playing with the mouse,
which it is about to devour, or of savages mocking the man who is about
to run the gauntlet. He exulted in the contrast of this proud man's
present confidence, and the humiliation which awaited him within the
next few hours.
The quack was an easy victim. His career of prosperity had met with but
a single serious interruption and he had so entirely forgotten his
dangerous sickness in his perfect health that he was seldom troubled by
foreboding as to the future. Never had he possessed more confidence of
life than at the very moment when all his hopes, all his confidence,
all his faith, were about to be shattered.
Our misfortunes draw a train of shadows behind them; but they often
project a glowing light before them. Sickness is often preceded by the
most bounding health, failure by unexampled success, misery by
irrepressible emotions of exultation. Too bright a sunshine as well as
too dark a shadow is often the herald of a storm upon the sea of life.
But ebullitions of happiness and confidence did not excite the
apprehension of the quack. Each bumper of wine was followed by a new
outburst of vanity. The captain and the mate had already succumbed to
the potent influence of the liquors which they had been drinking, and
amidst his maudlin speeches the quack's tongue was becoming hopelessly
tangled.
The judge was as sober as at the beginning of the feast and with a smile
upon his lips in which cynicism was incarnate, waited until the doctor
had just begun to snore and then aroused him by another question.
"Who is this paragon of virtue to whom you so confidently trust the
chastity of your wife?"
"This w-w-what?"
"This paragon of virtue--this ice-cold Adonis?"
"Say whatcher mean."
"Who is this pure young man with whom the beautiful Pepeeta is so safe?
What is it you call him, David Crocker?"
"'Tain't his real name."
"What is his real name?"
"D'n I ever t-t-tell you?"
"No."
"Real name's C-C-Corson--David Corson."
"What?" cried the judge, springing to his feet.
"C-C-Corson--I tell you," stuttered the quack, too drunk to notice the
peculiar effect of his announcement.
"What do you know about him?" the judge asked with ill-suppressed
excitement.
"Keep still--wan' go sleep."
"Wake up and tell me what you know about him, I say."
"He' Squaker."
"A Quaker?"
"Yes, Squaker."
"Great heavens!" speaking under his breath and trembling visibly. "What
else do you know?"
"Illegitimate child."
"What?" passing around the table, seizing him by the collar and shaking
him. "Say that again."
"'S true--s' help me! What you c-c-care?"
"How do you know he is an illegitimate child--I say?"
"I know--that's nuf! Sh'tup and lemme g-g-go sleep."
"Tell me, curse you!" shaking him until his teeth rattled.
He was too far gone to answer and fell under the table. The judge kicked
him, and with a muttered curse took up a glass of whisky, and tossing
it down his throat, hurriedly left the cabin, and began to pace the
deck in violent agitation.
This man who had so ruthlessly set a pitfall for his neighbor had
suddenly tumbled into one which retributive justice had dug deep for
himself!
"It must be true," he was saying. "It accounts for the strange feeling I
had toward him when he asked me to help him do that infernal deed. I
could not understand it then, but it is plain enough now. He is my son!
And I have not only transmitted a tainted life to him, but helped to
damn him in its possession! God! what irony! Of course the quack never
knew that I, too, am living under a false name! I wonder if it is too
late to stop him? Yes--it's done, and he is miles away! It's almost
daybreak now! Whewwwh! It's horrible!"
He dashed his clenched fist on the railing of the vessel. While he stood
there, his mind ran back into the past. He lived over again those
passionate days when he had won and betrayed a young, beautiful,
impressionable girl. His heart beat with a swifter stroke as he
remembered the excitement of their hurried flight from her parents, and
the wild joy of their adventurous lives, and then sank again to its
steady, hopeless throb as he recalled her penitence and misery after the
birth of the boy, his consenting to marry her, the ceremony, the respite
from self-reproach, the few happy months, the relapse into old bad
habits, the sobered mother becoming a devout and faithful member of a
Quaker church, his disgust at this, his quarrels with her and finally
his desertion of her. And then the whole subsequent series of adventures
and disasters passed before him--a moving panorama of dishonor and
crime! He paced the deck again; then he paused and leaned over the
gunwale, listening to the water lapping the sides of the vessel. Nothing
could have been more astonishing to him than the sudden activity of his
conscience. It had been so long since he had experienced remorse that he
believed himself incapable of it. But suddenly a fierce and unendurable
pang seized him. To a man who had been long accustomed to feeling
nothing in the contemplation of his deeds, but a dull consciousness of
unworthiness, this sharp and terrible attack of shame and guilt was
startling indeed. He could not understand it. The pain seemed
disproportionate to the sin; but he could not resist the repugnance and
horror with which it filled him! And this is an element in the moral
life with which bad men forget to deal! Because conscience ceases to
remonstrate and remorse to torment, they think the exemption permanent.
They do not know that at any moment, in some unforeseen emergency--this
abused faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life. This elemental
power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated
from the soul than heat from fire! It may smoulder unobserved, but a
breath will fan it into flame! Without it, the soul would cease to be a
soul; its permanent eradication would be equivalent to annihilation! If
conscience can be eliminated, man has nothing to brag of over a
tadpole! We are no more safe from it than from memory! Who can be sure
that what he has forgotten has ceased to survive? The sweet perfume of a
violet may revive a bitter memory dormant for fifty years! At a word, a
look, a glance, conscience--abused, suppressed, despised,
inoperative--may rise in all her majesty and fill the heart with torment
and despair!
This corrupted judge, this faithless lover, this dishonorable parent,
had become accustomed to dull misery; but this fierce onslaught of an
avenging sense of personal unworthiness and dread of divine justice was
more than he could bear. Life had long since lost its charms and he had
more than once seriously contemplated suicide.
"There seems to be no use in trying to beat nature in any other way, and
so I will try the dernier resort," he said aloud. Opening his pocket
knife, he cut a piece of rope from the flagstaff, looked around, found a
heavy bar of iron, and fastened rope and weight together. In one end of
the rope he made a noose, slipped it over his neck, approached the
railing and leaned upon it to reflect. His mind now went back into the
still more remote past; he was a boy again, and at his mother's knee.
Half audibly and half unconsciously, he began murmuring, "Now I lay me
down to sleep, I pray--no--I'll be consistent," he added, with a sigh.
"I have lived without the mummery of prayer, and I will die without
it."
And then by one of those strange freaks of the mind that make people do
the most absurd things at the most sacred times--mourners laugh at
funerals, and soldiers in the thick of battles long for puddings--he
began to say over that old doggerel which he used to repeat when
shivering on the spring-board over the cold waters of the Hudson river:
"One, two, three, the bumble bee,
The rooster crows and away she goes!"
The absurdity of so trivial a memory at such a serious moment excited
his sense of humor, and he smiled.
By this time the violence of his remorse had begun to subside and proved
to be only a fitful, fleeting protest of that abused and neglected moral
sense. Something more terrible than even this discovery of the wrong
done to his own son would have to come. There was plenty of time! Nature
was in no haste! This was only a warning, a little danger signal.
By a short, swift revulsion, his feelings changed from horror to
indifference. "After all, why should I care?" he said. "The boy is
nothing to me, and at any rate he would have gained his end in some
other way. Let him have his fling; I have had mine. If he didn't break
that old impostor's heart, he would probably break a better one! And as
for the gypsy--it's only a question of who and when. What a fool I have
made of myself! Who would believe that such a trifle could give me such
a shock? There is something to live for yet. I must see what sort of a
face the quack makes when he takes his medicine to-morrow."
He threw the iron weight into the water, entered the cabin, took another
drink, smiled contemptuously at the drunken wretches under the table,
crossed the deck, descended the gang-plank and climbed the steep path to
the city.
Against his inheritance from such a nature as this, the young mystic had
to make his life struggle.