THE MEETING AND MOURNING.
"Moan! moan, ye dying gales!
The saddest of your tales
Is not so sad as life!
Nor have you e'er began
A theme so wild as man,
Or with such sorrow rife.
"Then, when the gale is sighing,
And when the leaves are dying,
And when the song is o'er,
Oh! let us think of those
Whose lives are lost in woes--
Whose cup of grief runs o'er!"
The afternoon following the night when the foregoing events transpired,
the "Martha Blunt" sailed slowly along the sandy tongue of land which
separates Port Royal from Kingston, and dropped anchor in the harbor. As
the cable rumbled out with a grating sound through the hawse-hole, and
the crew aloft were furling the sails, a large, gayly-painted barge,
pulled by a dozen blacks shaded by a striped awning, shot swiftly
alongside. Jabbering were those darkies, and clapping their hands, and
shouting joyously. A rope was immediately thrown from the gangway of the
brig, and a tall, handsome man, with a broad Panama hat, loose white
jacket and trowsers, sprang with a bound up the side, and leaped on
deck.
Captain Blunt stood there to receive him. A broad white bandage was
passed around his head, and the tears trickled slowly down his bronzed
and honest cheeks. Just beyond him, under the shade of the awning, lay
Banou, stretched out at full length on a mattress; while Ben, the
helmsman, was kneeling beside him, fanning his hot and fevered face with
his tarpaulin. A yard or two beyond, on a broad plank resting on
trestles, lay the mate, Mr. Binks, cold and rigid in the grasp of death,
with the union jack folded modestly over his corpse. The black breathed
heavily and in pain; but when he caught sight of the gentleman as he
stepped on deck, a deathly blue pallor came over his countenance, and,
closing his eyes, the hot salt tears started in great drops from the
lids.
"My God! captain," said the gentleman, with a bewildering stare, "what's
all this? What has happened?"
The old skipper merely made a motion with his hand toward the cabin,
and, leaning painfully against the rail, wept like a child. The
gentleman's blood forsook his cheeks, and, with his knees knocking
together, he staggered like a drunken man toward the cabin door. A few
minutes later he emerged, bearing in his arms the sobbing, drooping form
of his wife. Starting from his close embrace for a moment as he bore her
to the gangway, she gave one shuddering, terrified, searching gaze over
the blue water to seaward, and then, with a wailing cry of agony, that
would have shaken the hardest heart, she fell sobbing again into her
husband's arms.
The voices and joyous shrieks of the negroes in the barge alongside
subsided into low moaning groans; four or five came up, and carefully
lowered Banou down; then all got into the boat, and she moved mournfully
away toward the shore.