Mendouca turned and bestowed upon the boats yet another long scrutinising glance; and then said, with his eyes still fixed upon them--
"I do not agree with you. I think they are quite as near to us as they are to the brig; and if they keep on and the squall bursts before they reach the brig, they will have to pull against it, and may perhaps not fetch her after all, whereas if I recall them, and they are overtaken before they reach us, they will have the wind all in their favour instead of dead against them."
"That is very true," I a.s.sented. "It appears to me, however, that the whole question hinges upon the point whether they are nearer to us or to the brig; and in my opinion they are much nearer to the latter."
For fully another minute Mendouca continued to watch the boats; then he suddenly exclaimed--
"I shall recall them. Clear away the bow gun there, and fire it with a blank cartridge; and, Pedro, get out the recall signal, and stand by to run it up to the main-truck at the flash of the gun."
The signal was made, the boom of the gun seeming to echo with a hollow, long-drawn-out reverberation between sea and sky; and within a minute the boats, with seeming reluctance, had turned and were pulling back to the brigantine.
Meanwhile the heavens had continued to darken, until, by the time that the boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every st.i.tch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables" lengths--or somewhat less than half-a-mile--of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, I saw the sky suddenly break along the horizon just above them, the clouds appearing as though rent violently apart for a length of some ten or twelve degrees of arc, while the rent was filled with a strong yet misty glare of coppery-yellow light, in the very centre of which the brig stood out sharply-defined, and as black as a shape cut out of silhouette paper.
"Here it comes, at last!" I exclaimed; and as the words pa.s.sed my lips I felt a spot of rain upon my face, and in another instant down it came, a regular deluge, but only for about half a minute, when it ceased abruptly, and, looking toward the brig, I saw a long line of white foam sweeping down towards her.
"G.o.d help those poor, unhappy blacks!" I cried. "If that craft"s spars and rigging happen to be good she will turn the turtle with them, and probably not one of them will escape!"
"It is a just punishment upon them for rising against the crew,"
exclaimed Mendouca savagely; "but if I had only succeeded in laying hands upon them I would have inflicted a worse punishment upon them than drowning. I would have--ah! look at that! Now the squall strikes her, and over she goes. Taken flat aback, by heaven!"
It was as Mendouca had said; the brig when struck by the squall happened to be lying head on to it, and her topmasts bent like reeds ere they yielded to the pressure, and snapped short off by the caps. Then, gathering stern-way, she paid off until she was nearly broadside on to us, and we could see that her stern was becoming more and more depressed as it was forced against the comparatively stubborn and unyielding water, while her bow was raised proportionally high in the air. Foot by foot, and second by second, her stern sank deeper and deeper into the water until the latter was flush with her taffrail, and then, with the aid of a telescope, I saw it go foaming and boiling in upon her deck, driving the dense crowd of negroes forward foot by foot. By this time her forefoot was raised clear out of the water, and, enveloped in mist and spray though she was, I could see the bright, gla.s.sy glare of the sky beyond and below it. For a second she remained thus; then her bow rose still higher in the air, and, with a long sliding plunge, she disappeared stern foremost.
"Gone to the bottom, every mother"s _son of them_--as they richly deserved!" exclaimed Mendouca, with a savage curse. "And if those loafing vagabonds of mine don"t bestir themselves they will follow in double-quick time! What do you think, Dugdale? Shall we be able to save them?"
I shook my head. "I would not give very much for their chance," I replied. "It is a pity that you recalled them, I think. They would have had time to reach the brig, and could at least have got her before the wind, even had they no time to do more."
"Yes," he a.s.sented; "as it happened, they could. But how was a man to know that the squall was going to hold off so long, and then burst at the most unfortunate moment possible?"
All this, it must be understood, had happened in a very much shorter time than it has taken to tell of it, and the squall had not reached as far as the boats when the brig disappeared; while, as for us, we were lying motionless in a still stagnant atmosphere, with our starboard broadside presented fair to the approaching squall. But as the last words left Mendouca"s lips the squall swooped down upon the boats, and in an instant they were lost sight of in a smother of mist and spray, while the roar of the approaching squall, that had come to us at first as a faint low murmur, grew deeper and hoa.r.s.er, and more deadly menacing in its overpowering volume of tone. Then the air suddenly grew damp, with a distinct taste of salt in it; the roar increased to a deafening bellow, and with a fierce, yelling shriek the squall burst upon us, and the brigantine bowed beneath the stroke until her lee rail was buried, and the water foamed in on deck from the cat-head to the main-rigging.
I thought for a moment that she, too, was going to turn turtle with us, and I believe she would, had the staysail stood; but luckily at the very moment when it seemed all up with us, the sheet parted with a report that sounded even above the yell of the gale; there was a concussion as though the ship had struck something solid, and with a single flap the sail split in ribbons and blew clean out of the bolt-ropes. Meanwhile Mendouca had sprung to the wheel and lent his strength to the efforts of the helmsman to put it hard up, and, after hanging irresolute for a moment, as _though undecided whether to capsize_ or not, the _Francesca_ gathered way, and in obedience to the helm gradually paid off until she was dead before it, when she suddenly righted and began to scud like a terrified thing. The boats were of course left far behind; and I made up my mind that we should never see them again.
The squall was as sharp a thing of its kind as I had ever beheld, and it was _fully_ three-quarters of an hour before it became possible to bring the ship to the wind again, which Mendouca did the moment that he could with safety. The wind continued quite fresh for another half-hour after the squall had blown itself out, and then it dwindled away to a very paltry breeze again, the clouds cleared away, the sun re-appeared and shone with a heat that was almost overpowering, and the weather became brilliantly fine again; much too fine, indeed, for Mendouca"s purpose, he being anxious to get back again as quickly as possible to the spot where he had been obliged to abandon his boats, a lingering hope possessing him that perchance they might have outlived the squall, and that he might recover his men. I may perhaps be doing the man an injustice in saying so much, but I firmly believe that this desire on his part was prompted, not by any feeling of humanity or regard for the men, but simply because the loss of so many out of his ship"s company would leave him very short-handed, and seriously embarra.s.s him until he could obtain others to fill their places; and I formed this opinion from the fact that his many expressions of regret at being blown away from his boats were every one of them coupled with a petulant repet.i.tion of the remark that his hands would be completely tied should he fail to recover their crews. So persistently did he hang upon this phase of the mishap, that at length I ventured to ask him whether there were none of them that he would be sorry to lose for their own sakes, apart from any question of inconvenience; in reply to which he stated, with a brutal laugh, that they were, one and all, a lazy set of worthless rascals, of whom he should have rid himself in any case on his arrival in Havana.
However, be his motive what it might, he cracked, on every st.i.tch of canvas that the brigantine would bear, as soon as the strength of the squall had sufficiently abated to permit of his bringing her to the wind, making sail from time to time as the wind further dwindled, until he had her under everything that would draw, from the trucks down. To add to his anxiety, it was about two bells in the first dog-watch before he could bring the ship to the wind, and he feared, not without reason, that it would be dark before he could work back near enough to the spot at which we had left the boats, to see them again--always supposing, of course, that they still floated. However, he did everything that a seaman could do, sending a hand aloft to the royal-yard to keep a look-out as soon as the ship had been got upon a wind, and making short boards to windward--the first one of a quarter of an hour"s duration, and the others of half-an-hour each, so as to thoroughly cover the ground previously pa.s.sed over--as long as the daylight lasted. But when, all too soon, the sun went down in a blaze of golden and crimson and purple splendour, no sign of the boats had been seen; Mendouca, therefore, worked out a calculation of the distance run by the brigantine from the spot where the squall first struck her, subtracted from it the distance that the boats would probably traverse in the same time, and having worked up to this spot as nearly as he could calculate, he hove-to for the night, with a bright lantern at his main-truck, firing signal rockets at intervals of a quarter of an hour, and wearing the ship round on the other tack every two hours. The night was brilliantly star-lit, but without a moon, still there was light enough upon the water to have revealed the boats at a distance of half-a-mile, while the weather was so fine that a shout raised at twice that distance to windward of the ship might have been heard on board her above the soft sigh of the night wind, and the gentle lap of the water along the bends; moreover, apart from the rockets fired, she might have been plainly seen against the sky at a distance of fully three miles from the boats, while her progress through the water was so slow that they could have pulled alongside her without difficulty; when, therefore, midnight arrived without any news of them, I gave them up for lost, and turned in. Not so Mendouca, he would not give them up; moreover, he refused to leave the deck--declaring that now he had lost his two mates he had n.o.body on board that he could trust in charge--preferring to have a mattress laid for him upon the skylight bench, where he s.n.a.t.c.hed catnaps between the intervals of wearing the ship round.
However, the matter was cleared up shortly after sunrise next morning, when Mendouca again sent a hand aloft to look round, for the fellow had only got as far as the foretop when he reported two objects that looked like the boats, about five miles to leeward; adding, that if they _were_ the boats, they were capsized. The topsail was accordingly filled, and the ship kept away, when, after about an hour"s run, first one boat and then the other was found, the first being capsized, while the second was full of water and floating with the gunwale awash. One drowned seaman was found under the capsized boat, but the rest were nowhere to be seen.
Both boats were easily secured, and found to be undamaged; and several of the oars and loose bottom-boards were also recovered, being found floating at no great distance from the boats. The drowned seaman, I may as well mention, was not brought on board, but instead of this a boat was sent away with a canvas bag containing three nine-pound shot, which they secured to the poor wretch"s ankles, and so sunk him.
Mendouca now, in no very amiable mood, resumed his course toward the coast; and that same afternoon--having meanwhile been engaged apparently in a tolerably successful effort to recover his temper--approached me with a proposal that he should tell me the story of his life, to which I of course cheerfully a.s.sented.
I will not inflict upon the reader the tale that he told me, because it has no direct bearing upon this present history; suffice it to say, that I now learned with some astonishment that he was a born Englishman, and that, moreover, he had begun his career in the British navy, from which--if his story were strictly true, as I afterwards had the opportunity of learning was the case--he had been ousted by a quite unusual piece of tyranny, and a most singular and deplorable miscarriage of justice. It was the latter, I gathered, even more than the former, that had soured him, and warped everything that was good out of his character; for it appeared that he had a keen sense of justice, and a very exalted idea of it; he had undoubtedly been most cruelly ill-used-- he had in fact been adjudged guilty of a crime that he had never committed--and this appeared to have utterly ruined the character of a man who might otherwise have been an ornament to the service, distorted all his views of right and wrong, and filled him to the brim with a wild, unreasoning, insatiable desire for vengeance.
This much for the man"s story, which, however, I soon found had been told me with a purpose; that purpose being nothing less than the inducing of me to join him and take the place of his lost chief mate, whereby--according to his showing--I might speedily become a rich man.
Had the proposal come before I had heard his story I should have resented it as an insult, but the recital to which he had treated me, and the sentiments expressed during its narration, convinced me that his sense of honour had been so completely warped that he could see no disgrace in the abandonment of a service and a country capable of treating any other man--myself, for instance, as he carefully pointed out--as he had been treated; I therefore contented myself with a simple refusal, coupled with an a.s.surance that such a step would be wholly discordant with my sense of right and wrong, utterly irreconcilable, to my conscience, and not at all in accord with my views. I had expected him to be furiously angry at my refusal, but to my great surprise he was not; on the contrary, he frankly admitted that he had been fully prepared for a refusal--at first--but that he still believed my views might alter upon more mature reflection.
"Meanwhile," said he, "you see how I am situated; I have lost both my officers, and have no one on board but yourself in the least capable of taking their places. I saved your life--or spared it, which comes to the same thing--and I now ask you to make me the only return in your power by a.s.sisting me in my difficulty."
"Before I give you any answer to that," said I, "I must ask you to explicitly define and accurately set forth the nature of the a.s.sistance that you desire me to render."
"Certainly," said Mendouca. "All that I ask of you at present is to relieve me by taking charge of a watch, and a.s.sisting me to navigate the ship. With regard to the latter, I consider myself capable of taking the ship anywhere, and have as much confidence in myself as a man ought to have; but "to err is human," and it increases one"s confidence, and confers a feeling of security, to have some one to check one"s calculations. And as to the watch, unless you will consent to keep one for me, I shall be compelled to keep the deck night and day. Now, it is no great thing that I am asking of you _in return for your life_; will you do it?"
"Give me half-an-hour to consider the matter, and you shall then have my reply," said I.
"So be it," he answered. And then the matter ended, for the moment.
It was a question that I found it by no means easy to decide. Here was I, an officer in the service of a country pledged to do its utmost to suppress the abominable slave-traffic, actually invited to a.s.sist in the navigation of a ship avowedly engaged not only in that traffic but-- according to the acknowledgment of her captain--also in, at least, occasional acts of piracy! What was I to do? On the one hand, I was fully determined to do nothing that could be construed into even the semblance of tacit acquiescence in Mendouca"s lawless vocation; while, on the other, I undoubtedly owed my life to the man, and therefore shrank from the idea of behaving in a manner that might appear churlish.
Moreover, it appeared to me that by rendering the trifling service demanded of me, I should find myself in a position to very greatly ameliorate in many ways the condition of the unhappy blacks down in the dark, noisome hold. The end of it all was, therefore, that at the expiration of the half-hour I had determined--perhaps weakly and foolishly--to accede to Mendouca"s request. I accordingly went to him and said--
"Senor Mendouca, I have considered your request, and have decided to accede to it upon certain conditions."
"Name them," answered Mendouca.
"They are these," said I. "First, that my services shall be strictly confined to the keeping of a watch and the checking of your astronomical observations. Secondly, that you undertake to perpetrate no act of piracy while I am on board. And, thirdly, that you will allow me to leave your ship upon the first occasion that we happen to encounter a sail of a nationality friendly to Great Britain."
"Is that _all_?" demanded Mendouca. "By my faith, but you appear to attach a somewhat high value to your services, senor midshipman! I spared your life; yet that does not appear to be a sufficient reason why you should afford me the small amount of help I require without hedging your consent about with ridiculous and impossible restrictions! I am surprised that, while you were about it, you did not also stipulate that I should abandon the slave-trade while the ship is honoured by your presence! I am obliged to you, Senor Dugdale, for your condescension in giving your distinguished consideration at all to my request, but your terms are too high; I can do better without your help than with it, if it is to be bought at the price of such restraint as you demand."
And he turned his back upon me and walked over to the other side of the deck.
Presently he turned and re-crossed the deck to my side, and remarked, in English--
"Look here, Dugdale, don"t be a fool! In coupling your consent to help me with those restrictions, you doubtless suspected me of an intention to involve you in some of those acts that you deem unlawful, and then to renew my proposal that you should join me. Well, if you did you were not so very far from the truth; I confess that I _do_ wish you to join me. I have somehow taken a fancy to you, despite those old-fashioned and absurd notions of yours about conscience, and duty, and the like.
Why, if you would only put them away from you it would be the making of you, and you would be just the sort of fellow that I want; you are pluck all through, and, once free from the trammels of the thing that you call conscience, you would stick at nothing, and with you as my right hand I should feel myself free to undertake deeds that I have only dared to _dream_ of thus far, while, with our views brought into accord, we should be as brothers to each other. I am ambitious, Dugdale, and I tell you that if you will join me we _can_ and _will_ revive the glories of the old buccaneering days and make ourselves feared and reverenced all over the globe; we will be sea-kings, you and I. What need is there for hesitation in the matter? Nay"--and he held up his hand as he saw that I was about to speak--"do not inflict upon me those musty plat.i.tudes about _conscience_ and _duty_ that I have heard so often in the old days, and that have been made the excuse for so many acts of gross tyranny and injustice that my gorge rises in loathing whenever I hear them mentioned. What _is_ conscience? The inward monitor that points out your duty to G.o.d and restrains--or tries to restrain--you from doing wrong, you will perhaps say. Well, let us accept that as an answer. I will then ask you another question. Do you really believe in the existence of the Being you call G.o.d? No, I am sure you do not; you cannot, my dear fellow, and remain consistent. For what is our conception of G.o.d? or, rather, what is the picture of Him that our ghostly advisers and teachers have drawn of Him? Are we not a.s.sured that He is the personification and quintessence of Justice, and Love, and Mercy? Very well. Then, if such a Being really exists, would the tyranny, the injustice, the cruelty, and the suffering that have afflicted poor humanity, from Adam down to ourselves, have been permitted? Certainly not! Therefore I unhesitatingly say that He cannot exist, and that the belief in Him is a mere idle, foolish superst.i.tion, unworthy of entertainment by intelligent, reasonable, and reasoning beings. And if there is no G.o.d, whence do we derive our conception of duty? I tell you, Dugdale, there is no such thing as duty save to one"s self; the duty of protecting, and providing for, and avenging one"s self, as I am doing, and as you may do if you choose to join me."
"Have you finished?" I asked, as he paused and looked eagerly into my face. "Very well, then; I will answer in a few words, if facts were as you so confidently state them to be, I might possibly be induced to cast in my lot with yours; but, fortunately for humanity, they are not so, and I must therefore most emphatically decline."
"Then I presume," said he, with a sneer, "you still believe in the existence of G.o.d, and His power to work His will here on earth?"
"Certainly," I answered, without hesitation.
"Do you believe that He is more potent than I am!"
"I really must decline to answer so absurd a question," said I, and turned away to leave him.
"Stop!" he thundered, his eyes suddenly blazing with demoniac fury.
"Answer me, yes or no, _if you are not afraid_! If your faith in Him is as perfect as you would have me believe, answer me!"
I hesitated for a moment--I confess it with shame--for I felt convinced that in the man"s present mood a reply in the affirmative would a.s.suredly provoke him to some dreadful act in proof of the contrary; the hesitation was but momentary, however, and, that moment past, I replied--
"Yes; I believe Him to be omnipotent, both on earth and in heaven."
It was as I had expected--my reply had provoked him to murder; for as the words left my lips he, for the second time, drew his pistol from his belt, c.o.c.ked it, and deliberately pressed the muzzle of the barrel to my temple, exclaiming, as he did so--
"Very well. Then let us see whether He has the power to save you from my bullet!"
And, glaring like a madman straight into my eyes, he held it there while one might perhaps have slowly counted ten, and then pulled the trigger.
There was a sharp click and a little shower of sparks as the flint-lock fell, and--that was all.
"Missed fire, by all the furies!" he exclaimed, dashing the weapon violently to the deck, _where it instantly exploded_. "Well, you have proved your faith, at all events, and have escaped with your life by the mere accident of my pistol having missed fire, and there is an end of it for the present. Here, take my hand; you are a plucky young dog and no mistake, but you did wrong to provoke me; take my advice and don"t do it again, lest worse befall you."