White Fire Part 18

At last he closed his watch with a snap, stooped to the gun, and with a roar and a rattling crash, and a blasphemous scatteration below, the foretopmast shared the devastation of the mainmast.

"Now we have them right as a trivet," said Cathie, "and they'll begin to understand where they are."

They understood, and five minutes later the boat shoved off again, bringing the spoils of war, such part of them, at all events, as they chose to surrender--some thirty muskets, as many cutla.s.ses, and half a dozen revolvers.

"Now," said Blair, to the downcast captain of the _Blackbirder_, through Stuart, "you will stop here. We shall tow you back to the islands. When your cargo is discharged, you will be at liberty to go.

If you ever return on this errand, you will find us waiting for you.

Now, captain," to Cathie, and, at a sign from the captain, one of the white whale-boats dropped to the water, and half a dozen men jumped into her, carrying the coil of a stout hawser, which ran out over the stern of the _Torch_ and was secured amids.h.i.+ps.

The _Torch_ herself swung into line ahead of the other, and the big steel gun swung slowly round till her muzzle grinned threateningly round each side of the mainmast.

"Tell those men to get back, Stuart, and say the captain waits with us," and the brig's boat pushed sulkily off. "Now, Stuart, you come with me, and Matti. We will take revolvers, though we shall not need them."

Matti s.h.i.+vered into the boat, and Stuart and Blair followed with four Torches carrying Winchesters, and pulled to the brig and climbed up among the truculent crew, every man of which had his knife at his back and hands that itched to get using it.

Blair called for the mate and told him curtly what he had already told the captain, and added some special instructions for his own benefit.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Blair called for the mate and told him curtly what he had already told the captain.]

"First, make fast that hawser!"

They did it to the satisfaction of the Torches, and at a call from Blair the _Torch_ started slowly ahead, the hawser tightened, and every solid thrust of the blades in the blue water cut an upward step in the life of the Dark Islands.

"Now, understand! There will be a hand on that rope night and day. If there is any tampering with it you will hear from us. This mess"--pointing to the dismantled masts--"you will not touch till we reach the islands. Now I am going to inspect your cargo. How often do you feed them?"

"Twice a day."

"Some of us will come across each time and see it done. I hold you responsible. If they suffer, you will suffer. Understand? Now lead the way! You"--to Stuart and the four Torches--"please keep your eyes about you while I go below. Matti, you come with me."

A grating, through which came a most horrible smell, was hauled up, and the three went down into the inferno, and felt sick before their feet quitted the ladder. For the mate was sick at this unexpected turn of fortune, and Blair and Matti came near to physical sickness with the stench.

Blair clung to the side of the ladder and gazed mistily round. There was little light, but the dimness seemed to come not so much from lack of light as from superfluity of nastiness of every possible description and human misery indescribable. The feel of the place was like a hot breath from the pit. It closed silently upon one like the hand of a crawling death. It dimmed the eyes, and choked the throat, and lay like a weight on the heart.

To breathe it seemed death, yet three hundred miserables breathed it and lived, and by degrees his eyes discerned them and never lost the sight.

A great confused tangle of brown limbs and bodies, many entirely naked, a forest of shock heads, a hypnotising mult.i.tude of dark eyes all focussed on him, and all pitted with sparks of light from the opened hatch--mostly men, a few women, no children--short panting breaths, sighs, groans, the dull rattle of chains.

"Have they been fed to-day?" gasped Blair, and pointed to his mouth.

The mate nodded.

Blair went two steps up the ladder and called to Stuart.

"Tell them to feed and water these poor things instantly. Now, Matti, ask them in all the tongues you know if there is any headman or chief among them. And say we mean them well."

Matti tried them without success in two or three dialects, but at last hit upon one that evoked responsive movements in some of those nearest the light. He felt his way, and at last got a word in answer, the meaning of which he understood.

Here a couple of men came down the ladder carrying baskets of what looked like dog-biscuits, which they commenced handing round, one to each prisoner, and the latter sprang to the limits of their tethers for them, and s.n.a.t.c.hed and worried them like dogs that had not been fed for a week. Blair looked at the mate, but the mate looked elsewhere.

It took a long time and many renewals to supply them all; but Blair would not move till it was done, nor until every one had had a drink of water. Then the interrupted conversation was resumed.

Yes, there was a chief there, and Blair ordered the mate to release the man and bring him forward. He came without eagerness, a tall, brown, well-built man of middle age, with a gloomy, but not absolutely forbidding face, pinched just now, perhaps with hunger, perhaps with despair. Experience had taught him to expect nothing but evil at the hands of white men.

But even his dull misery could not but perceive a difference between this clean, white-clad white man and those he had become accustomed to, and he gazed at Blair with a note of sullen inquiry.

"You are a chief?" asked Blair, through Matti.

"I am a king," he said, answering Blair, and bestowing no look on Matti, who, he perceived, was only a voice. And there was that in his tone and manner which carried conviction in spite of the misery of his condition.

"We have come to set you free and to take you back to the island."

And when the words beat through Matti's attempt at his dialect and got into his brain, it was as though an electric shock had galvanised him suddenly into new life.

"Free?--the island?" he stammered, and stared, still doubting. "All?"

he asked.

"Yes, all," and he turned and told the news to the rest in quick, clipping words, and after a moment's amazed silence a shout went up, and the fetid hole was filled with a deafening buzz of talk.

It was only after anxious consideration of the point that Blair had decided to tell them the good news. He grudged every lost soul there.

He would not lose one. There might be some given over to utter despair, and there is no tonic like hope.

"You will come with us," said Blair, to the discrowned king.

The man looked back into the gloom, and then again at Blair, and spoke eagerly.

"He says one of his wives is there," said Matti. "She shall come also."

The man pointed her out, the mate released her, and they climbed to the blessed upper air, all a-tremble with eagerness.

"Now, understand!" said Blair to the mate, through Stuart, so that all could hear him: "when your cargo is discharged, you will be at liberty to go where you will. If you attempt any treachery, we will blow you to pieces. If you ever return to the Dark Islands, you do so at your own peril," and he saw his guests into the boat and followed them.

The woman was young and not uncomely, but subdued and apparently somewhat dazed still at these sudden reverses of fortune. Neither spoke a word as the _Torch_ slowed down for them to come aboard, but the man's eyes roved to and fro in ceaseless questioning, and he seemed to arrive at an intelligent understanding of matters. The long steel gun claimed his attention the moment he reached the deck, and from his instant glance across at the shattered hamper of the brig he evidently a.s.sociated the two things.

Their only visible clothing was a native mat wrapped round the waist and falling nearly to the feet, and the very first thing to do was to cleanse them of the visible results of their 'tween-decks imprisonment.

Blair led the man down to the men's bathroom, and turned on the taps and filled the bath before his astonished eyes. He showed him also the use of soap, by was.h.i.+ng his own hands, and left him to complete his toilet. He could not, however, forbear listening outside to hear how he got on, and was rewarded at first by a long silence, then by several tentative turnings on and off of the wonderful taps. Then a slight splas.h.i.+ng suggested an experiment with the soap; and finally grunts of satisfaction and much wallowing told of savage man's enjoyment of the amenities of civilisation, and the return to his natural cleanliness.

When he had had time to wash himself several times over, Blair knocked on the door and went in, and found his guest lying full length under water, with only his brown nose showing, and evidently feeling very much better.

He sat up and gurgled some words expressive of his feelings, and was mightily astonished at the sudden disappearance of the water when the plug was pulled up. He wanted to fill the bath again at once to see it run out again, and Blair let him engineer a final sluice for himself.

He was a much pleasanter companion after his wash. His fine brown skin shone under the unusual treatment of a towel, and his hair stuck out from his head like a twirling mop. He was about to a.s.sume his dirty mat again, but Blair hauled out some clean towels, tied one round him like a loin-cloth, draped another from his hips as he had worn his mat, and threw another over his shoulders, and the man was dressed as he had never been dressed in his life before. The towels happened to have broad red bands along the edges, and moreover had fringes, and their wearer was as proud of them as any Piccadilly dandy of his newest thing in spring suits.

Somewhat similar doings had been in course in the ladies' quarters, but, thanks to Aunt Jannet Harvey's very determined, but equally mistaken, good intentions, the results were less happy.

Aunt Jannet believed firmly that decency as well as cleanliness were first steps towards G.o.dliness, and she was too recent an arrival in the equatorials, and perhaps also too conservative in her own ideas, to understand that decency of attire is after all purely matter of custom.

To her, a girl dressed, or undressed, only in a ridi fringe which clung precariously to her hips and fell half-way to her knee, was practically unclothed. She did not know that it was death for a man to touch that scant, precarious garment. Strange anomaly of the cannibal isles--a dangling fringe of smoked coco-nut fibre a more stringent safeguard than the mult.i.tudinous garments of civilisation! When Aunt Jannet did learn that fact she thought considerably, and thereafter took a somewhat wider view of things.

Meanwhile, in the mistaken goodness of her heart, she had insisted on arraying the newcomer in garments of her own, the most visible of which was a light print dress, in which the poor creature looked almost as uncomfortable as she felt.