I sat before the furnace extremely dejected, whilst the Frenchman snored on his mattress. I could no longer flatter myself that the explosions had made the impression I had expected on the ice, and my mind was utterly at a loss. How to deliver myself from this horrible situation I could not imagine. As to the treasure, why, if the chests had all been filled with gold, they might have gone to the bottom there and then for me, so utterly insignificant did their value seem as against the pricelessness of liberty and the joy of deliverance. Had I been alone I should have had a stouter heart, I dare say, for then I should have been able to do as I pleased; but now I was associated with a bloody-minded rogue whose soul was in the treasure, and who was certain to oppose any plan I might propose for the construction of a boat or raft out of the material that formed the schooner. The sole ray of hope that gleamed upon me broke out of the belief that this island was going north, and that when we had come to the height of the summer in these seas, the wasting of the coast or the dislocation of the northern mass would release us.
Yet this was but poor comfort too; it threatened a terrible long spell of waiting, with perhaps disappointment in the end, and months of enforced association with a wretch with whom I should have to live in fear of my life.
When I was getting supper Tassard awoke, quitted his mattress, and came to his bench.
“Has anything happened whilst I slept?” said he.
“Nothing,” I answered.
“The ice shows no signs of giving?”
“I see none,” said I.
“Well,” cried he, with a sarcastic sneer, “have you any more fine schemes?”
“’Tis your turn now,” I replied. “Try your hand. If you fail, I promise you I shall not be disappointed.”
“But you English sailors,” said he, wagging his head and regarding me with a great deal of wildness in his eye, “speak of yourselves as the finest seamen in the world. Justify the maritime reputation of your nation by showing me how we are to escape with the schooner from the ice.”
“Mr. Tassard,” said I, approaching him and looking him full in the face, “I would advise you to sweeten your temper and change your tone. I have borne myself very moderately towards you, submitted to your insults with patience, and have done you some kindness. I am not afraid of you. On the contrary, I look upon you as a swaggering bully and a hoary villain. Do you understand me? I am a desperate man in a desperate situation. But if I don’t fear death, depend upon it, I don’t fear you—and I take God to witness that if you do not use me with the civility I have a right to expect, I will kill you.”
My temper had given way; I meant every word I spoke, and my air and sincerity rendered my speech very formidable. I approached him by another stride; he started up, as I thought, to seize me, but in reality to recoil, and this he did so effectually as to tumble over his bench, and down he fell, striking his bald head so hard that he lay for several minutes motionless.
I stood over him till he chose to sit erect, which he presently did, rubbing his poll and looking at me with an air of mingled bewilderment and fear.
“This is scurvy usage to give a shipmate in distress,” said he. “’Od’s life, man! I had thought there was some sense of humour in you. Your hand, Mr. Rodney; I feel dazed.”
I helped him to rise, and he then sat down in a somewhat rickety manner, rubbing his eyes. It might have been fancy, it might have been the illusion of the furnace light combined with the venerable appearance his long hair and naked pate gave him, but methought in those few minutes he had grown to look twenty years older.
“Never concern yourself about my humour, Mr. Tassard,” said I, preserving my determined air and coming close to him again. “How is it to stand between us? I leave the choice to you. If you will treat me civilly you’ll not find me wanting in every disposition to render our miserable state tolerable; but if you insult me, use me injuriously, and act the pirate over me, who am an honest man, by God, Mr. Tassard, I will kill you.”
He stooped away from me, and raised his hand in a posture as if to fend me off, and cried in a whining manner, “I lost my head—this gunpowder business hath been a hellish disappointment, look you, Mr. Rodney. Come! We will drink a can to our future amity!”
I answered coldly that I wanted no more wine and bade him beware of me, that he had gone far enough, that our hideous condition had filled my soul with desperation and misery, and that I would not have my life on this frozen schooner made more abominable than it was by his swagger, lies, and insults, and I added in a loud voice and in a menacing manner that death had no terrors for me, and that I would dispatch him with as little fear as I should meet my doom, whatever shape it took.
I marched on deck, not a little astounded by the cowardice of the old rascal, and very well pleased with the marked impression my bearing and language had produced on him. Not that I supposed for a moment that my bold comportment would save me from his knife or his pistol when he should think proper to make away with me. No. All I reckoned upon was cowing him into a civiller posture of mind, and checking his aggressions and insolence. As to his murdering me, I was very sure he would not attempt such an act whilst we remained imprisoned. Loneliness would have more horrors for him than for me; and though my machinery of mines had apparently failed, he was shrewd enough, despite his rage of disappointment, to understand that more was to be done by two men than by one, and that between us something might be attempted which would be impracticable by a simple pair of hands, and particularly old hands, such as his.
I stayed but a minute or two on deck. Such was the cold that I do not know I had ever felt it more biting and bitter. The sound of foaming waters filled the wind, and the wind itself was blowing fairly strong, in gusts that screamed in the frozen rigging or in blasts that had the deep echo of the thunder-claps of the splitting ice. The clouds were numerous and dark with the shadow of the night; and the swiftness of their motion as they sailed up out of the south-west quarter was illustrated by the leaping of the few bright stars from one dusky edge to another.
I returned below and sat down. The Frenchman asked me no questions. He had his can in the oven and his death’s head in his great hand, and puffed out clouds of smoke of the colour of his beard, and indeed in the candle and fire light looked like a figure of old Time with his long nose and bald head. I addressed one or two civil remarks to him, which he answered in a subdued manner, discovering no resentment whatever that I could trace in his eyes or the expression of his countenance; and being wishful to show that I bore no malice I talked of pirates and their usages, and asked him if the Boca del Dragon fought under the red or black flag.
“Why, the black flag, certainly,” said he; “but if we met with resistance, it was our custom to haul it down and hoist the red flag, to let our opponents know we should give no quarter.”
“Where is your flag locker?” said I.
“In my berth,” he answered.
“I should like to see the black flag,” I exclaimed: “’tis the one piece of bunting, I believe, I have never viewed.”
“I’ll fetch it,” said he, and taking the lanthorn went aft very quietly, but with a certain stagger in his walk, which I should have put down to the wine if it was not that his behaviour was free from all symptoms of ebriation. The change in him surprised me, but not so greatly as you might suppose; indeed, it excited my suspicions rather than my wonder. Fear worked in him unquestionably, but what I seemed to see best was some malignant design which he hoped to conceal by an air of conciliation and a quality of respectful bonhomie.
He came back with a flag in his hand, and we spread it between us; it was black, with a yellow skull grinning in the middle, over this an hourglass, and beneath a cross-bones.
“What consternation has this signal caused and does still cause!” said I, surveying it, whilst a hundred fancies of the barbarous scenes it hadflown over, the miserable cries for mercy that had swept up past it to the ear of God, crowded into my mind. “I think, Mr. Tassard,” said
I, “that our first step, should we ever find ourselves afloat in this ship, must be to commit this and all other flags of a like kind on board to the deep. There is evidence in this piece of drapery to hang an angel.”
He let fall his ends of the flag and sat down suddenly.
“Yes,” he answered, sending a curious rolling glance around the cook-room and at the same time bringing his hand to the back of his head, “this is evidence to dangle even an honester man than you, sir. All flags but the ensign we resolve to sail under must go—all flags, and all the wearing apparel, and—and—but”—here he muttered a curse—”we are fixed—there is to be no sailing.”
He shook his head and covered his eyes. His manner was strange, and the stranger for his quietude.
I said to him, “Are you ill?”
He looked up sharply and cried vehemently, “No, no!” then stretched his lips in a very ghastly grin and turned to take the can from the oven, but his hand missed it, and he appeared to grope as if he were blind, though he looked at the can all the time. Then he catched it and brought it to his mouth, but trembled so much that he spilt as much as he drank, and after putting the can back sat shaking his beard and stroking the wet off it, methought, in a very mechanical lunatic way.
I thought to myself, “Is this behaviour some stratagem of his? What device can such a bearing hide? If he is acting, he plays his part well.”
I rolled the black flag into a bundle and flung it into a corner, and, resuming my seat and my pipe, continued, more for civility’s sake than because of any particular interest I took in the subject, to ask him questions about the customs and habits of pirates.
“I believe,” said I, “the buccaneers are so resolute in having clear ships that they have neither beds nor seats on board.”
“The English,” he answered, speaking slowly and letting his pipe droop whilst he spoke with his eyes fixed on deck, “not the Spanish. ’Tis the custom of most English pirates to eat and sleep upon the decks for the sake of a clear ship, as you say. The Spaniard loves comfort—you may observe his fancy in this ship.”
“How is the plunder partitioned?” I asked.
“Everything is put into the common chest, as we call it, and brought to the mast and sold by auction—Strange!” he cried, breaking off and putting his hand to his brow. “I find my speech difficult. Do you notice I halt and utter thickly?”
I replied, No; his voice seemed to be the same as hitherto.
“Yet I feel ill. Holy Mother of God, what is this feeling coming upon me? O Jesus, how faint and dark!”
He half rose from his bench, but sat again, trembling as if the palsy had seized him, and I noticed his head dotted with beads of sweat. He had drunk so much wine and spirits throughout the day that a dram would have been of no use to him.
I said, “I expect it will be the blow on the back of your head, when you fell just now, that has produced this feeling of giddiness. Let me help you to lie down” (for his mattress was on deck); “the sensation will pass, I don’t doubt.”
If he heard he did not heed me, but fell a-muttering and crying to himself. And now I did certainly remark a quality in his voice that was new to my ear; it was not, as he had said, a labour or thickness of utterance, but a dryness and parchedness of old age, with many breaks from high to low notes, and a lean noise of dribbling threading every word. He sweated and talked and muttered, but this was from sheer terror; he did not swoon, but sat with a stoop, often pressing his brows and gazing about him like one whose senses are all abroad.
“Gracious Mother of all angels!” he exclaimed, crossing himself several times, but with a feeble, most agitated hand, and speaking in French and English, and sometimes interjecting an invocation in Italian or Spanish, though I give you what he said in my own tongue; “surely I am dying. O Lord, how frightful to die! O holy Virgin, be merciful to me. I shall go to hell—O Jesu, I am past forgiveness—for the love of heaven, Mr. Rodney, some brandy! Oh that some saint would interpose for me! Only a few years longer—grant me a few years longer—I beseech for time that I may repent!” and he extended one quivering hand for the brandy (of which a draught stood melted in the oven) and made the sign of the cross upon his breast with the other, whilst he continued to whine out in his cracked pipes the wildest appeals for mercy, saying a vast deal that I durst not venture to set down, so plentiful and awful were his clamours for time that he might repent, though he never lapsed into blasphemy, but on the contrary discovered an agony of religious horror.
I was much astonished and puzzled by this illness that had come upon him, for, though he talked of darkness and faintness and of dying, he continued to sit up on his bench and to take pulls at the can of brandy I had handed to him. It might be, indeed, that a sudden faintness had terrified him nearly out of his senses with a prospect of approaching death; but that would not account for the peculiar note and appearance of age that had entered his figure, face, and voice. Then an extraordinary fancy occurred to me: Had the whole weight of the unhappy wretch’s years suddenly descended upon him? Or, if not wholly arrived, might not these indications in him mark the first stages of a gradually increasing pressure? The heat, the vivacity, the fierceness, spirits, and temper of the life I had been instrumental in restoring to him probably illustrated his character as it was eight-and-forty years since; that had flourished artificially from the moment of his awakening down to the present hour; but now the hand of Time was upon this man, whose age was above an hundred. He might be decaying and wasting, even as he sat there, into such an intellectual condition and physical aspect as he would possess and submit had he come without a break into his present age.
I was fascinated by the mystery of his vitality, and breathlessly watched him as if I expected to witness some harlequin change in his face and mark the transformation of his polished brow into the lean austerity of wrinkles. His voice sank into a mere whisper at last, and then, ceasing to speak altogether, he dropped his chin on to his bosom and began to sway from side to side, catching himself from falling with several paralytic starts, but without lifting his head or opening his eyes that I could see, and manifesting every symptom of extreme drowsiness.
I got up and laid my hand on his shoulder, on which he turned his face and viewed me with one eye closed, the other scarce open.
“How are you feeling now?” said I.
“Sleepy, very sleepy,” he answered.
“I’ll put your mattress into your hammock,” said I, “and the best thing you can do is to go and turn in properly and get a long night’s rest, and tomorrow morning you’ll feel yourself as hearty as ever.”
He mumbled some answer which I interpreted to signify “Very well!” so I shouldered his mattress and slung a lanthorn in his cabin, and then returned to help him to bed. He sat reeling on the bench, his chin on his breast, catching himself up as before with little sharp terrified recoveries, and I was forced to put my hand on him again to make him understand I had come back. He then made as if to rise, but trembled so violently that he sank down again with a groan, and I was obliged to put my whole strength to the lifting of him to get him on to his legs. He leaned heavily upon me, breathing hard, stooping very much and trembling. When we got to his cabin I perceived that he would never be able to climb into his hammock, nor had I the power to hoist a man of his bulk so high. To end the perplexity I cut the hammock down and laid it on the deck, and covering him with a heap of clothes, unslung the lanthorn, wished him good-night, closed the door, and returned to the furnace.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE ICE BREAKS AWAY
It was not yet eight o’clock. I was restless in my mind, under a great surprise, and was not sleepy. I filled a pipe, made me a little pannikin of punch, and sat down before the fire to think. If ever I had suspected the accuracy of my conjecture that the Frenchman’s sudden astonishing indisposition was the effect of his extreme age coming upon him and breaking down the artificial vitality with which he had bristled into life under my hands, I must hav
e found fifty signs to set my misgivings at rest in his drowsiness, nodding, bowed form, weakness, his tottering and trembling, and other features of his latest behaviour. If I was right, then I had reason to be thankful to Almighty God for this unparalleled and most happy dispensation, for now I should have nothing to fear from the old rogue’s vindictiveness and horrid greed. Supposing him to be no more than a hundred, the infirmities of five score years would stand between him and me, and protect me as effectually as his death. I had nothing to dread from a man who could scarce stand, whose palsied hand could scarce clasp a knife, whose evil tongue could scarce articulate the terrors of his soul or the horrors of his recollection.
The wonder of it all was so great it filled me with admiration and astonishment. Had he been dead and come to life again, as Lazarus, or one of those bodies which arose during the time our Lord hung upon the cross, then, questionless, he must have picked up the chain of his life at the link which death had broken, and continued his natural walk into age and decay (though interrupted by a thousand years of the sepulchre) as if his life had been without this black hiatus, and he was proceeding steadily and humanly from the cradle. But collecting that the vital spark could never have been extinguished in him, I understood that time, which has absolute control over life, still knew him as its prey during all those forty-eight years in which he had lain frozen; that it had seized him now and suddenly, and pinned upon his back the full burden of his lustres. This I say, I believed; but the morrow, of course, would give me further proof.
Well, ’twas a happy and gracious deliverance for me. He could do me no hurt; the scythe had sheared his talons, and all without occasioning my conscience the least uneasiness whatever: whereas, but for this interposition, I did truly and solemnly believe that it must have come to my having had to slay him that I might preserve my own life.
Thus I sat for an hour smoking and wetting my lips with the punch, whilst the fire burned low, so exulting in the thought of my escape from the treacherous villain I had recovered from the grave, and in the feeling that I might now be able to go to rest, to move here and there, to act as I pleased without being haunted and terrified by the shadow of his foul intent, that I hardly gave my mind for a moment to the situation of the schooner nor to the barren consequences of my fine scheme of mines.
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 279
