A Pirate of the Caribbees Part 15

"Nonsense, monsieur," I returned. "Surely you cannot suppose I would be so ungrateful as to permit any such thing. I am a British officer, and should, of course, make a point of seeing that, in such a case, you were held exempt from capture. My representations would be quite sufficient to secure that for you."

"Well, monsieur, we will see, we will see," answered Lemaitre; and therewith he took the empty soup bowl from my hand, and retired from the cabin, slamming the door, as usual, behind him.

For the next three days I continued to occupy my bunk, my strength returning slowly; but on the fourth I made s.h.i.+ft, with Lemaitre's a.s.sistance, to get into my clothes, and crawl on deck; and from that moment my progress toward recovery was rapid. Meanwhile, the "hazing"

of which I have spoken continued at regular intervals, day and night, and I soon ascertained that the individual responsible for it was none other than the Francois who so kindly suggested that I should be hove overboard to the sharks. This fellow was evidently a born bully; he never opened his mouth to deliver an order without abusing and insulting the men, and as often as not the abuse was accentuated with blows, the sounds of which, and the accompanying cries of the men, I could distinctly hear in my cabin. That, however, was hardly the worst of it; for I soon discovered that Lemaitre, the skipper of this precious craft in which such doings were permitted, was a drunkard; for every night, at about nine o'clock, I used to hear him come below, and order out the rum and water; after which he and Francois, or the second mate,--according to whose watch below it happened to be,--would sit for about an hour, drinking one against the other, until the language of both became incoherent, when the pair of them would stagger and stumble off to their respective staterooms.

This was my first experience of a slaver, and a most unpleasant experience it was. The vessel herself,--a schooner of one hundred and twenty tons register,--although superbly modelled, a magnificent sea- boat, and sailing like a witch, was rendered uncomfortable in the extreme as an abode by her filthy condition. Cleanliness seemed to be regarded by Lemaitre as a wholly unnecessary luxury, with the result that no effort was made to keep in check the steady acc.u.mulation of dirt from day to day, much less to remove that which already existed. Even the daily was.h.i.+ng down of the decks--which, with the British sailor, has a.s.sumed the importance and imperative character of a religious function--was deemed superfluous. Nor were the crew any more careful as to their own condition or that of their clothing. It is a fact that during the whole period of my sojourn on board _La belle Jeannette_ I never saw one of her people attempt to wash himself or any article of clothing; and, as a natural result of this steadfast disregard of the most elementary principles of cleanliness, the little hooker simply swarmed with vermin.

But, bad as it was, this was not the worst. The crew, from Lemaitre downward, were a low, brutal, quarrelsome gang, always wrangling together, and frequently fighting; while, as I have already mentioned, the one predominating idea of Francois, the chief mate, was that they could only be kept in order by constantly and impartially rope's-ending them all round. Possibly he may have been right; at all events, I found it far easier to excuse his behaviour after I had seen the crew than I had before.

All this time Lemaitre had been behaving toward me with a rough, clumsy, off-hand kindness that his personal appearance would have led no one to expect, and which, try as I would, I could not bring myself to regard as genuine, because, through it all, there seemed now and then to rise to the surface an underflow of repressed malignity, not p.r.o.nounced enough to be certain about, yet sufficiently distinct to provoke in me a vague sensation of uneasiness and distrust. To put the matter concisely, although Lemaitre was by no means effusive in his expressions of good- will toward me, and although there was a certain perfunctory quality in such attentions as he showed me, there was with it all a curious subtle something, so intangible that I found it utterly impossible to define or describe it, which yet impressed me with the feeling that it was all unreal, a.s.sumed, a mockery and a pretence; though _why_ it should be so, I could not for the life of me divine.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

A DOUBLE TRAGEDY.

I had been up and about for a full week, and had during that period observed in Lemaitre's manner toward me not only a steadily decreasing solicitude for my welfare--which was perhaps only natural, now that my health was rapidly improving--but also a growing disposition to sneer and gibe at me, covert at first but more p.r.o.nounced and unmistakable with every recurring day, that strongly tended to confirm the singular suspicion I have endeavoured to bring home to the mind of the reader in the preceding chapter. Then one night an incident occurred that in a moment explained everything, and revealed to me the unpleasant fact that, so far as my enemy Morillo was concerned, I was still in as great danger as when on board the felucca, although in the present case the danger was perhaps a trifle more remote.

I have already mentioned Lemaitre's habit of drinking himself into a state of intoxication every night. This habit, and the obscene language that the man seemed to revel in when in such a condition, was so disgusting to me that not the least-prized advantage afforded by my convalescence was the ability to remain on deck until the nightly saturnalia was at an end and Lemaitre and his companion had retired to their cabins. On the particular night, however, of which I am about to speak, a slight recurrent touch of fever caused me to slip quietly below and turn in before the orgy began; not that I expected to get to sleep, but simply because I believed the warmth and dryness of my bunk would be better for me than the damp night air on deck.

Punctually at nine o'clock Lemaitre and his chief mate came noisily clattering down the companion ladder, gla.s.ses and a bottle of rum were produced, and the carouse began. It had not progressed very far before it became apparent to me, as I lay there in my hot bunk, tossing restlessly, that Lemaitre was in an unusually excited and quarrelsome condition, and that Francois, the chief mate, was rapidly approaching a similar condition as he gulped down tumbler after tumbler of liquor.

They were always argumentative and contradictory when drinking together, but to-night they were unusually so. At length Francois made some remark as to the extraordinary good fortune they had met with on this particular voyage, in having come so far without falling in with a British cruiser; at which Lemaitre laughed scornfully declaring that there was not a British cruiser afloat that could catch _La belle Jeannette_; and that, even if it were otherwise, he should have no fear of them this voyage. "For," said he, "have we not a guarantee of safety in the presence of that simple fool Courtenay on board? Have we not saved his life by rescuing him from the raft? And do you suppose they would reward our humanity, ha, ha! by making a prize of the schooner?

Not they! If there is one thing those a.s.ses of British pride themselves upon more than another it is their chivalrous sense of honour--a sentiment, my child, that they would not outrage for the value of fifty such schooners as this. All the same," he added, with an inflection of deep cunning in his voice, "I do not want to meet with a British cruiser at close enough quarters to be compelled to hand the dear Courtenay over to his countrymen; oh no!"

"Why not?" demanded Francois; "what advantage is it to you to keep him on board? Is it because you are so fond of his company? Pah! if you had eyes in your head, you would see that, despite his grat.i.tude to you for saving his life, he despises you. What do you mean to do with him?

Are you going to turn him adrift among the negroes when we arrive upon the coast? I never could understand why you insisted upon saving him at all."

"No?" queried Lemaitre, with a sneering laugh. "Ah, that is because you are a fool, Francois, _mon enfant_, a more arrant fool even than the dear Courtenay himself. Do you suppose I did it out of pity for his condition, or because I love the British? No. I will tell you why, idiot. It is because he will fetch a good five hundred dollars at least in the slave-market at Havana."

"So _that_ is what you intend to do with him, is it?" retorted Francois.

"Well, Lemaitre, I always knew you for an a.s.s, but, unless you had told me so with your own lips, I would never have believed you to be such an a.s.s as to sell a man for five hundred dollars when you can just as easily get a thousand for him. Yet you call me fool and idiot! Pah, you sicken me!"

"Oh, I sicken you, do I?" growled Lemaitre, by this time well advanced toward intoxication. "Take care what you are saying, my friend, or I shall be apt to sicken you so thoroughly that you will be fit for nothing but a toss over the lee bulwarks. No doubt it is I who am the fool, and you who are the clever one; but I should like to hear by what means you would propose to get a thousand dollars for the fellow. True, he is young and stalwart, and will be in prime condition by the time that we get back to Havana,--I will see to that,--but I have known better men than he sold for less than five hundred dollars; ay, _white_ men too, not negroes."

"Did I not say you are an a.s.s?" retorted Francois. "Who talks of selling him at Havana? You, not I. Do you not know who this Courtenay is, then? I will tell you, most wise and n.o.ble captain. He is the youth who attacked and destroyed Morillo's settlement at Cariacou,--I remember the name perfectly well,--and I was told at Havana, by one who ought to know, that Morillo had given it out among his friends that he would pay one thousand dollars to anyone who should bring Courtenay to him alive. And that is not all, either. You know what Morillo is; he has declared a feud against this miserable, meddlesome Englishman, and not only will he gladly pay a thousand dollars for the privilege of wreaking his vengeance upon him, but the man who delivers your friend Courtenay into his hands will be free to sail the seas without molestation from Morillo as long as he lives. What think you of that, Captain Lemaitre?"

"Is this true?" demanded Lemaitre. "Ay," answered Francois, "as true as that you and I are sitting here in this cabin."

"Why did you not tell me of this before, Francois, my friend?" asked Lemaitre, in a wheedling tone.

"Why did I not tell you before?" echoed Francois. "Ask rather why I tell you now, and I will answer that it is because I am such a fool that I cannot keep a good thing to myself when I have it. Sac-r-r-re! what need was there for me to make you as wise as myself, eh? However, I am not going to let you have this choice little bit of information for nothing. I have told you how to make a clear five hundred dollars over and above what you could have earned without the information I have been idiot enough to give you, and you must pay me half the amount; do you understand?"

"Ay, I understand," answered Lemaitre, with a sudden return to his former sneering, aggressive manner; "but I should like to know--just for the satisfaction of my curiosity--how you propose to compel me to pay you that two hundred and fifty dollars that you talk about."

"Why, easily enough," snarled Francois, with sudden fury, as he realised that Lemaitre intended to evade the extortion if he could. "If you do not pay me immediately after receiving the reward from Morillo, I will denounce you to him. I will say that you intended to have yielded up your prisoner to the British, in order that you might curry favour with them and secure immunity from capture by them; and that you would never have given him up to Morillo at all but for my threats. And I suppose you know what that will mean for you, eh?"

"Oh, so that is what you would do, is it, my friend?" returned Lemaitre, with a harsh laugh. "Well, well, it will be time enough for you to threaten when I refuse to pay you the two hundred and fifty dollars.

Until then, there is no need for us to quarrel; so fill up your gla.s.s, Francois, and let us drink to the health of the dear Courtenay, who, after all, was quite worth picking up off the raft, don't you think?"

Then followed a gurgling sound as the two topers filled their gla.s.ses.

A gulping and smacking of lips, succeeded by a banging of the empty tumblers upon the table, came clearly to me through the latticed upper panel of my door; and then certain staggering sounds, as the two struggled to their feet, were followed by Lemaitre thickly bidding his companion good-night, as the pair reeled and stumbled away to their respective berths.

I slept badly that night, the fever, with the intelligence I had just acquired, combining to make me restless and wakeful; but after tossing from side to side, until about two bells in the morning watch, I gradually sank into a troubled sleep, from which I was startled by a sudden outbreak of loud, excited shouts, succeeded by a sound of fierce scuffling, accompanied by a volley of oaths and exclamations, the stamp of feet, a heavy fall, a rush of footsteps up the companion ladder, and a sudden, heavy splash alongside. Then followed a terrific outcry on deck, with the hurrying rush of feet on the planking overhead, the furious slatting of canvas as the schooner shot into the wind, more excited shouts, ending in a sort of groaning mingled with e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of dismay, a sudden silence, and then a terrific jabbering, suggestive of the idea that all hands had incontinently taken leave of their senses.

I sprang out of my bunk and hurriedly proceeded to dress, rus.h.i.+ng on deck bare-footed to see what was the matter; and as I emerged from the companion-way I saw all hands gathered aft, most of them staring hard over the taffrail, while one man was busily engaged in binding up the left arm of the second mate.

"Hillo, Monsieur Charpentier!" I exclaimed, "what is the matter? Has anything happened?"

"Happened, monsieur? I should think so!" exclaimed the second mate, turning to me a white and ghastly face; "a most awful thing has happened. When I went below just now to call Francois I was unable to make him hear, although I called several times and knocked ever so hard at his door. So I ventured to turn the door handle and enter his cabin, and what do you think I saw, monsieur? Why, poor Francois lying dead in his bunk, his clothes soaked with blood, and a great gaping wound in his breast, right over his heart! I was so horrified, monsieur, that I scarcely knew what to do; but, collecting myself with a mighty effort, I went to call the captain; and when I reached his cabin I found the door wide open and Monsieur Lemaitre crouched in a corner of it, with a great bloodstained knife in his hand, his eyes glaring, and his lips mumbling and muttering I know not what. I saw that there was something wrong with him, monsieur,--I believed he had gone mad,--and I was about to turn away and call for help; but he saw me, and, before I was aware, sprang upon me, seizing me with one hand by the throat while with the other he aimed blow after blow at me with his terrible knife. I defended myself as well as I could, monsieur, fighting bravely for my life; but what can one do against a madman? The captain seemed to possess the strength of twenty men; he forced me irresistibly back against the bulkhead, and then drove his knife through my arm.

Believing that he had killed me, I relaxed my hold upon him; whereupon he hurled me to the deck, sprang over my fallen body, and bounded up on deck, _and from thence overboard_! And now they tell me, monsieur, that he had scarcely struck the water when a shark rose, seized him, and dragged him under! See, monsieur, look astern! He is gone; there is nothing to be seen of him! What shall we do? oh, mon Dieu, what shall we do?"

"Are you _quite sure_ that the captain was seized by a shark?" I demanded, looking round from one to another of the men, who had now turned their faces inboard and stood staring alternately at Charpentier and myself.

"Oh yes, monsieur," excitedly replied half a dozen of them all together, "we all saw it; it was a monster. And," continued one of them, "the captain had scarcely risen to the surface after his plunge overboard when the shark seized him by the middle and dragged him under. We all saw the blood dyeing the water,--did we not, s.h.i.+pmates?--but the captain never uttered a cry; just threw up his arms and vanished. Is not that it, my friends?"

"Yes, yes," they all exclaimed again, "that is it. Jules describes it exactly as it occurred."

"Then," said I, "it seems to me, Monsieur Charpentier, that, Captain Lemaitre and the mate being dead, nothing remains but for you to take command and navigate the schooner to her destination."

"But, monsieur, I cannot do that, for, unhappily, I am not a navigator,"

replied Charpentier, wringing his hands.

"Do you mean to say that you know _nothing whatever_ about navigation!"

demanded I.

"Alas, no, monsieur! nothing whatever," was the reply.

"And is there no one else among you who can navigate the schooner?"

asked I.

The men looked at each other, shaking their heads and muttering, "Not I"; and finally Charpentier exclaimed, "You see, monsieur, there is not one of us who can navigate. What is to be done? _You_, monsieur, are an officer--at least so I understood Francois to say; perhaps you could--"

"Well," demanded I, seeing that the fellow hesitated, "perhaps I could-- what?"

"Pardon, monsieur," exclaimed he, "I was in hopes that, considering the difficulty we are placed in by this most lamentable tragedy, you would kindly take command and navigate the schooner."

"I see," remarked I. "Well," I continued, "if such is the wish of you all, I have no objection to do as you wish. But--understand me--I will only consent to navigate the schooner back to the West Indies; I will not undertake the trouble and responsibility of carrying the s.h.i.+p to her destination and s.h.i.+pping a cargo. I disapprove, on principle, of slave- trading, which I consider an iniquitous traffic, and I will have nothing to do with it; but, if you are willing, I will navigate the s.h.i.+p back to Port Royal,--guaranteeing you immunity from capture upon our arrival, in consideration of the rescue and succour that you have afforded me,--and, when there, you will have no difficulty in procuring someone who will navigate the schooner from thence to Havana or any other port that you may choose to go to. Just talk it over among yourselves, and let me know what you decide on doing."

I could see that my proposal was not at all to Charpentier's liking, or, indeed, to the liking of any of the crew; but I cared not for that. I was quite determined to have nothing whatever to do with the kidnapping of any unfortunate blacks; and in the end they were obliged to give way, although Charpentier tried hard to dissuade me from my resolution; the result being, that immediately after I had ascertained our position at noon, we wore round and shaped a course for Martinique, that island being in a direct line with Jamaica. At first I was rather apprehensive that the disappointment of the men at so unprofitable a result of the voyage would cause them to be troublesome; but it did not. The question of turning back having once been settled, they all seemed to take the matter very philosophically, the fact that they were now relieved of the mate's tyranny perhaps reconciling them to such disappointment as they might otherwise have felt.

I need not dwell upon the return voyage, which was singularly uneventful; suffice it to say that, favoured with fine weather and a fair wind all the way, we made an exceptionally smart run across the Atlantic, entering Port Royal harbour on the morning of the twenty- second day after bearing up, and eleven weeks to a day from the date of my abduction by Dominguez.

My sudden reappearance created quite a sensation among the dockyard people, my disappearance having been involved in so much mystery that all sorts of surmises had been indulged in to account for it. Some were of opinion that I had fallen overboard into the harbour, and had found a secure hiding-place in the maw of a shark; but there were others who, happening to have been present when I was summoned from Mammy Wilkinson's hotel upon my supposit.i.tious errand of help and rescue to young Lindsay, at once mentioned the circ.u.mstance, with the result that a very strong suspicion of foul play was aroused. My friend and patron, the admiral, was especially concerned upon my account, even going to the length of offering a reward of fifty pounds for such intelligence as should lead to my discovery; but it resulted in nothing, those worthies, Caesar and Peter, perhaps being too much afraid to utter a word of what they knew. Then there occurred more frigate actions, resulting in so heavy a pressure of work, that n.o.body seemed to have any time to think about the mysterious disappearance of a somewhat obscure young lieutenant. But now that I had unexpectedly turned up again, safe and sound, I was overwhelmed with congratulations, while the admiral sent a party of police to the house to which I had been conveyed, with instructions that the two negroes were to be at once found and arrested.

The house, however, proved to be empty when the police made their domiciliary visit; and, as for the negroes, their whereabouts was never discovered. Possibly the excitement of my reappearance, and the talk to which it gave rise, alarmed them and caused them to beat a hasty retreat to some other island.

To my great joy, I discovered that the _Diane_ was not yet recommissioned, the repairs and alterations to her having been greatly delayed by the more pressing work of repairing the frigates, while the admiral--in the hope that I might still turn up, and with that extreme kindness that had marked all his treatment of me--had determined not to give the command of her to anyone else until she should be absolutely ready for sea. I therefore at once stepped into my former position, and lost no time in getting as many men to work upon her as could be spared.