"I beg your pardon."
"_Me_--Orlando B. Sturge. Yes, sir, if it be any consolation to you, know that I, Orlando B. Sturge, of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, am your temporary partner in adversity, your co-mate and brother in exile, with the added indignity of handcuffs; and all by an error which would be absurd if it weren"t so infernally serious."
"There has been some horrible mistake."
"A mistake, sir, for which these caitiffs shall pay dearly,"
Mr. Sturge promised in his deepest tragedy voice.
"A Justice of the Peace!"
"Eh?"
"With a Major"s commission!"
"Pardon, I think you must be confusing me with some other person.
Orlando B. Sturge is my name, sir, and familiar--as I may say without vanity--wherever the Thespian art is honoured. But yesterday the darling of the public; and now, in the words of our national bard:"
""--Now lies he here, And none so poor to do him reverence."
"You are familiar with the works of Shakespeare, sir? Your speech, if you will allow me to say so, suggests a respectable education."
"I have dipped into them," answered the Major inattentively, absorbed in his own woes.
"My consolation is, this will get into the newspapers; and then let these ignorant ruffians beware!"
"The newspapers! G.o.d forbid!" The Major shuddered.
"Ha?" Mr. Sturge drew back in dark surprise. ""Tis the language of delirium. He raves. What ho, without there!" he called aloud.
"What the devil"s up?" responded a voice from the darkness behind the Major"s head. It belonged to a marine standing sentry outside a spare sail which shut off the _Vesuvius"s_ sick bay from the rest of the lower deck.
"A surgeon, quick! Here"s a man awake and delirious."
"All right. You needn"t kick up such a row, need you?" growled the marine.
"Like Nero, I am an angler in a lake of darkness. You have handcuffed me, moreover, so that even if this accursed sty contains a bell-rope--which is improbable--I am debarred from using it.
A light, there, and a surgeon, I say!"
The marine let fall the sail flap and withdrew, grumbling.
But apparently Mr. Sturge"s mode of giving an order, being unlike anything in his experience, had impressed him; for by and by a faint ray illumined the dirty whitewashed beams over the Major"s hammock, and four persons squeezed themselves into the sick bay--the marine holding a lantern and guiding the ship"s surgeon, who was followed in turn by our friends Mr. Jope and Mr. Bill Adams.
The _Vesuvius_ bomb, measuring but a little more than ninety feet over all, with a beam of some twenty-seven feet, and carrying seventy odd men and boys, with six long six-pounder guns and a couple of heavy mortars, could spare but scanty room for hospital accommodation. At a pinch, a dozen hammocks could be slung in the den which the marine"s lantern revealed; but how a dozen sick men could recover there, and how the surgeon could move between the hammocks to perform his ministrations, were mysteries happily left unsolved. As it was, the two invalids and their visitors crowded the place to suffocation.
"Delirious, you say?" hemmed the surgeon, a bald little man with a twinkling eye, an unshaven chin and a very greasy shirt frill.
"Well, well, give me your pulse, my friend. Better a blister on the neck than a round shot at your feet, hey? I near upon gave you up when they brought you aboard--upon my word I did." The Major groaned. "You seemed a humane man, sir," he answered feebly.
"Spare me your blisters and get me put ash.o.r.e, for pity"s sake!"
The doctor shook his head. "My good fellow, we weighed an hour ago with a fresh northerly breeze. I haven"t been on deck, but by the cant of her we must be clear of the Sound already and hauling up for Portsmouth."
"On your peril you detain me, sir! I"ll have your fool of a captain broken for this--cashiered, sir--kicked out of the service, by Heaven! I am a Justice of the Peace, I tell you!"
"And _coram_," put in Mr. Sturge, "and _custalorum_. He"ll make a Star-Chamber matter of it. . . . The poor fellow"s raving, I tell you. A curse on your inhumanity! But I can wait for my revenge at Portsmouth. Approach, fellows, and knock off those gyves."
"Justice of the Peace!" echoed Ben Jope, paying no attention whatever to Mr. Sturge, but turning on Bill Adams with round, wondering eyes.
"I _told_ you he was something out o" the common. And you ain"t had no more sense than to knock him over the head with a cutla.s.s!"
"I did not," protested Bill Adams. "He took it accidental, you being otherwise engaged; an" I stuck to the creatur", thinkin" as how you _wanted_ him."
"But _why_ should I want him?"
"d.a.m.ned if I know. If it comes to that"--Bill Adams jerked a thumb towards the hammock containing Mr. Sturge--"what d"ye want _him_ for?"
"Oh, _him_?" answered Mr. Jope with a grin. "In a gale off Pernambuco--"
"What on earth are you two talking about?" asked the surgeon, who had seated himself on the deck and, with the lantern between his feet, was busily preparing a blister.
"Beggin" your pardon, sir, but you haven"t been on deck yet?
You haven"t _seen_ the ducks we brought aboard last night?"
"My good man, can I be in two places at once? I have been up all night with Mr. Wapshott, and the devil of a time he"s given me.
When they brought me this poor fellow, I hadn"t time to do more than order him into hammock--indeed I hadn"t. Now, then"--he stood on his feet again and addressed the marine--"fetch me a basin of water and I"ll bathe his head."
"Is Mr. Wapshott bad, sir?" asked Ben Jope.
"H"m," the surgeon hesitated. "Well, I don"t mind admitting to you that he was very bad indeed; but about six bells I got a draught to take effect, and he has been sleeping ever since."
"And you didn"t see the Captain brought aboard, sir?"
"I did not. "Brought," you say?"
Ben Jope nodded his head, and for a moment or two watched in silence the sponging of our Major"s scalp. "I"ve known this here ship in the variousest kinds o" weathers," he announced at length, with quiet conviction, "but they was fool"s-play one and all compared with what"s ahead of us."
"If it comes to that again," put in Bill Adams, "I don"t see but this here Justice o" the Peace is the plum o" the whole bunch. Maybe"--he turned to his friend--"you ain"t never seen a Justice o" the Peace?
I hev"."
"W"y," asked Ben Jope, "what"s there peculiar about "em?"
"I got committed by one some years ago," Mr. Adams answered, with a grave effort of memory. "At a place called Farnham, it was, a way inland up the Portsmouth Road. Me and the landlord of a public there came to words, by reason he called his house "The Admiral Howe," but on his signboard was the face of a different man altogether. Whereby I asked him why he done so. Whereby he said the painter didn"t know How. Whereby I knocked him down, and he called in the constables and swore he"d meant it for a joke; and they took me afore a Justice; and the Justice said he wouldn"t yield to n.o.body in his respect for our Navy, but here was a case he must put his foot down, and if necessary with an iron hand; and gave me seven days. Which I mention because I couldn"t pay the fine, having no more than a few coppers besides what I stood up in, and was then on my way home from the wreck of the _Duck Sammy_ brig, which went ash.o.r.e on the back of the Wight.
But if you ask me what was peculiar about the man, he was called Bart.--Sir Samuel Brooks Bart.--and lived in a fine house as big as Greenwich Hospital, with a gold watch-chain across his belly you could have moored a pinnace by, and gold in his pockets correspondin". Whereby I larned ever since to know my betters when ash.o.r.e, and behave myself lowly and give "em a wide berth. But this isn"t one, nor the beginnings of one, for I took the liberty to s"arch his pockets."
"Indeed, sir," our hero appealed to the surgeon, "my name is Hymen-- Major Solomon Hymen--of Troy, in Cornwall. On inquiry you will find that I am actually Chief Magistrate of that borough. Nay, I implore you--"
The surgeon, having bathed the wound and bound it with three strips of plaster, took up the blister, and was on the point of applying it, using persuasions indeed, but with the air of one who would take no denial, when a terrible outcry at once arrested him and drowned the Major"s protestations.
The cry--it sounded like the roar of a wounded bull--came from the deck overhead. Its echoes sounded the very bowels of the ship; but at the first note of it Ben Jope had clutched Bill Adams by the arm.
"He"s seen "em!" he gasped. "Run, doctor, run--there"s a dear soul-- or he"ll be doin" murder!"
"Seen what?"