The Frozen Pirate Part 9

He shuddered, and extended the pannikin for more liquor. I filled it with two-thirds of brandy and the rest water, and he supped it down as if it had been a thimbleful of wine.

"By the holy cross," cried he, "but this is very wonderful, though. How long have you been here, sir?"

"Three days."

"Three days! and I have been in a stupor all that time--never moving, never breathing?"

"You will have been in a stupor longer than that, I expect," said I.

"What is this month?" he cried.

"July," I replied.

"July--July!" he muttered. "Impossible! Let me see"--he began to count on his fingers--"we fell in with the ice and got locked in November. We had six months of it, I recollect no more. Six months of it, sir; and suppose the stupor came upon me then, the month at which my memory stops would be April. Yet you call this July; that is to say, _four months of oblivion_; impossible!"

"What was the year in which you fell in with the ice?" said I.

"The year?" he exclaimed in a voice deep with the wonder this question raised in him; "the year? Why, man, what year but _seventeen hundred and fifty-three_!"

"Good G.o.d!" cried I, jumping to my feet with terror at a statement I had antic.i.p.ated, though it shocked me as a new and frightful revelation.

"Do you know what year this is?"

He looked at me without answering.

"It is eighteen hundred and one," I cried, and as I said this I recoiled a step, fully expecting him to leap up and exhibit a hundred demonstrations of horror and consternation; for this I am persuaded would have been my posture had any man roused me from a slumber and told me I had been in that condition for eight-and-forty years.

He continued to view me with a very strange and cunning expression in his eyes, the coolness of which was inexpressibly surprising and bewildering and even mortifying; then presently grasping his beard, looked at it; then put his hands to his face and looked at them; then drew out his feet and looked at _them_; then very slowly, but without visible effort, stood up, swaying a little with an air of weakness, and proceeded to feel and strike himself all over, swinging his arms and using his legs; after which he sat down and pulled the clothes over his naked feet, and fixing his eyes on me afresh, said, "What do you say this year is, sir?"

"Eighteen hundred and one," I replied.

"Bah!" said he, and shook his head very knowingly. "No matter; you have been s.h.i.+pwrecked too! Sir, s.h.i.+pwreck shuffles dates as a player does cards, and the best of us will go wrong in famine, loneliness, cold, and peril. Be of good cheer, my friend; all will return to you. Sit, sir, that I may hear your adventures, and I will relate mine."

I saw how it was--he supposed me deranged, a mortifying construction to place upon the language of a man who had restored him to life; yet a few moments' reflection taught me to see the reasonableness of it, for unless he thought me crazy he must conclude I spoke the truth, and it was inconceivable he should believe that he had lain in a frozen condition for eight-and-forty years.

I stirred the fire to make more light and sat down near the furnace. His appearance was very striking. The scar upon his forehead gave a very dark sullen look to his brows; his eyes were small and were half lost in the dusky hollows in which they were set, and I observed an indescribably leering, cunning expression in them, something of which I attributed to the large quant.i.ty of liquor he had swallowed. This contrasted oddly with the respectable aspect he took from his baldness--that is, from the nakedness of his poll, for, as I have before said, his hair fell long and plentifully, in a ring a little above the ears, so that you would have supposed at some late period of his life he had been scalped.

I know not how it was, but I felt no joy in this man's company. For some companion, for some one to speak with, I had yearned again and again with heart-breaking pa.s.sion; and now a living man sat before me, yet I was sensible of no gladness. In truth, I was overawed by him; he frightened me as one risen from the dead. Here was a creature that had entered, as it seemed to me, those black portals from which no man ever returns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard upon fifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly in nature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that it could not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as much oppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, and watching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden, and he had risen and walked.

I have no doubt the disorder my mind was in helped to persuade him that I had not the full possession of my senses. He ran his eye over my figure and then round the cook-room, and said, "I am impatient to learn your story, sir."

"Why, sir," said I, "my story is summed up in what I have already told you." But that he might not be at a loss--for to be sure he had only very newly collected his intellects--I related my adventures at large.

He drew nearer to the furnace whilst I talked, bringing his covering of clothes along with him, and held out his great hands to toast at the fire, all the time observing me with scarce a wink of the eye. Arrived at the end of my tale, I told him how only last night I had dragged his companion on deck, and how he was to have followed but for his posture.

"Ha!" cried he, "you might have caused my flesh to mortify by laying me close to the fire. It would have been better to rub me with snow."

He poked up one foot after the other to count his toes, fearing some had come away with his stockings, and then said, "Well, and how long should I have slept had you not come? Another week! By St. Paul, I might have died. Have you my stockings, sir?"

I gave them to him, and he pulled them over his legs and then drew on his boots and stood up, the coats and wraps tumbling off him as he rose.

"I can stand," says he. "That is good."

But in attempting to take a step he reeled and would have fallen had I not grasped his arm.

"Patience, my friend, patience!" he muttered as if to himself. "I must lie a little longer," and with that he kneeled and then lay along the mattress. He breathed heavily and pointed to the pannikin. I asked him whether he would have wine or brandy; he answered, "Wine," so I melted a draught, which dose, I thought, on top of what he had already taken, would send him to sleep; but instead it quickened his spirits, and with no lack of life in his voice he said, "What is the condition of the vessel?"

I told him that she was still high and dry, adding that during the night some sort of change had happened which I should presently go on deck to remark.

"Think you," says he, "that there is any chance of her ever being liberated?"

I answered, "Yes, but not yet; that is, if the ice in breaking doesn't destroy her. The summer season has yet to come, and we are progressing north; but now that you are with me it will be a question for us to settle, whether we are to wait for the ice to release the schooner or endeavour to effect our escape by other means."

A curious gleam of cunning satisfaction shone in his eyes as he looked at me; he then kept silence for some moments, lost in thought.

"Pray," said I, breaking in upon him, "what s.h.i.+p is this?"

He started, deliberated an instant, and answered, "The _Boca del Dragon_."[2]

[Footnote 2: So in Mr. Rodney's MS.]

"A Spaniard?"

He nodded.

"She was a pirate?" said I.

"How do you know that?" he cried with a sudden fierceness.

"Sir," said I, "I am a British sailor who has used the sea for some years, and know the difference between a handspike and a p.o.o.p-lanthorn.

But what matters? She is a pirate no longer."

He let his eyes fall from my face and gazed round him with the air of one who cannot yet persuade his understanding of the realities of the scene he moves in.

"Tut!" cried he presently, addressing himself, "what matters the truth, as you say? Yes, the _Boca del Dragon_ is a pirate. You have of course rummaged her, and guessed her character by what you found?"

"I met with enough to excite my suspicion," said I. "The s.h.i.+p's company of such a craft as this do not usually go clothed in lace and rich cloaks, and carry watches of this kind," tapping my breast, "in their fobs and handfuls of gold in their pockets."

"Unless----" said he.

"Unless," I answered, "their flag is as black as our prospects."

"You think them black?" cried he, the look of resentment that was darkening his face dying out of it. "The vessel is sound, is not she?"

I replied that she appeared so, but it would be impossible to be sure until she floated.

"The stores?"

"They are plentiful."