A small canoe slid off her deck; two shipboys got into it, and pulled under the starboard mizen-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 look-out 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 alongside, 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 snore through it like smoke. When she had shot a cable’s length ahead 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 main-topsail was suddenly laid to the mast, whilst a loud voice echoed amongst the sails—”Any one see him in the waist—anybody see him forward there?”
“No, sir, no.”
“Afterguard, 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 beat, 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 anything 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 boat-cloak, 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—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 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 as 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 light, and once more the sun rose to bless everything 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 I 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, sun-burnt, black-whiskered, square-shouldered top-man, 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 calm 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 all inch thick, only—
“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 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 joviality within. The farther end of the room, at the door of which I now rested, opened into the piazza, or open verandah, 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 wore, 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 holiday 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 colo
ur, 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 holiday-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 face, and, slewing his head on one side, he was warbling, ore rotundo, 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 trousers, 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 cauldron, 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 galvanised; 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 persona, 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 awfu’ sicht?” quoth the Scotch bookkeeper.
“By the hockey, speak if you be a ghost, or I’ll exercise” [exorcise] “ye with 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— “Quæ maribus solum tribuuntur.” 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 manager or mule-trough before the door, where the beastesses are fed under busha’s own eye on all estates—for this excellent and most cogent reason, that otherwise the maize or guinea-corn, belonging of right to poor mulo, would generally go towards improving the condition, not of the quadruped, but of the biped quashie 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 gentleman-like 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 kind-hearted 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 had bilious fever, then?—No bad bilious fever either? Why, then, you are a most unfortunate creature; for you have never known what it is 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 musquito net that serves you for bed-curtains; while beyond you look forth into the sequestered courtyard, overshadowed by one vast umbrageous kennip-tree, that makes everything 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 he 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 windowsill, 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 rammer-full 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 “leetle more panada,” (d——n panada, I had forgotten that!) “and den some more sangaree; it will do massa good, trenthen him tomack”—and—but I am out of breath, and must lie to for a brief space.
Tom Cringle's Log Page 28