Part 26 (2/2)
”When the soldiers shall break in, as nothing can long withstand such engines as they have brought to bear, slip you forth, Mr. Denis, and ascend immediately to a small retired chamber above the stair where my ward lies, Mistress Avenon. Lay your modesty aside for this once, and enter. If she wake not, so much the better; as 'tis better she should know nothing. But I am a fool! for who may sleep on such a night of h.e.l.l? Anywise enter, and I will answer for it, she will not repulse you as she did yon Malpas, the brave la.s.s!
”She hath in keeping a certain jar of mine, Denis, a toy, that nevertheless I set some value on; this I would have you privily convey to the house where the Chinese inhabited--I make no question but you know where it stands. Do this, my dear nephew, and I shall confess myself every way bound to serve you when I shall come to be enfranchised of this place; for I myself may not undertake the bearing off of this jar (it stands in a little cupboard by the bed, Denis, now I think on't), my dress being not such, as wearing it, I might hope to escape challenge of the guard, but with you, Denis, 'twill be a mere frolick adventure.” He laid his mouth close to my ear. ”Besides, there is the la.s.s Idonia...”
What more he might have added, I know not, for his beastly greed in so safeguarding his wealth, and that at my risk, who had delivered him, sickened me in such sort as I could no longer abide to hear it, but left him, and going straightway forward into the screaming press about the door, struck out a path for myself through the midst of them. At the same moment the hammering without in one peal ended; the half of a wall fell in, and through the breach thus made came a wavering and intermittent light.
Unspeakably astonished, I gazed about me, upon the dead and writhing bodies that lay at my feet thus uncertainly illumined, and upon my uncle, huddled up in his torn silken robe. But when I had averted my eyes with a shudder to the breach in the wall, I saw a sight I may neither forget nor endure the remembrance of; for it seemed to me that there entered in by that way a figure--inhuman tall, black visaged, and of a most cruel aspect. Perhaps for the s.p.a.ce of a man's counting ten, he leaned forward through the aperture, regarding us all in that ghostly dimness, and then, with an equal suddenness, was gone, and the light with him....
No one word pa.s.sed our trembling lips, for all felt the horror of impending destruction. Only the dying yet moved a little, stirring in their blood, but even they soon lay still. Meanwhile, through the great rent in the wall, the wind blew exceeding strong, so that although at the first we had postponed all thoughts to that one vision of the giant presence, we now perceived by the direction of the wind and the saltness of it that it was the river-wall was down, and not (as in our confusion we had supposed) the inner wall, by which the soldiers must necessarily have a.s.saulted us.
I am not altogether sure who it was by this means solved the mystery, but I think it was Captain Spurrier; howbeit we had not endured that sweeping gale above an half-minute, before some one cried out that the apparition was nothing else than the carven prow of the _Saracen's Head_, that dragging at her moorings by the wharf had run against the Inn wall and destroyed it; which was presently confirmed by the s.h.i.+p's again battering us, but broadside, and not head-on as before. For as I have (I think) already said, the Inn was jutted out to the extreme edge of the _Fair Haven_ wharf, so that at the high tide there was a deepness of water sufficient for any ordinary s.h.i.+p to lie alongside and discharge her cargo upon the quay; the tide mark running a little below the vault where we were, that else would have been suddenly flooded by the inflow of water through the broken wall. Beyond measure relieved that we were besieged by neither soldier nor devil, we could not restrain our joy, and so by a common impulse moved to be gone, the whole company of us that yet remained alive and able, ran forward to the breach, and to the s.h.i.+p's side, having her starboard light to further us that had formerly so stricken us into dismay. And thus by this way and that, grasping at whatever projection of blocks and shrouds lay to our hands, some helping and other hindering our escape, we had at length all clambered up into the s.h.i.+p, save only that traitor Cutts, who, upon a sudden lurch of the s.h.i.+p, was crushed betwixt the bulwark and the wall, and so died.
I looked about for my uncle, and soon found him, leaning over the rail.
”Ha, Denis,” said he coolly, ”so thou art escaped. I had a notion 'twas thou wert crushed against the wall.”
”You mistook then,” said I, and might have said more, had not Captain Spurrier laid a hand upon my collar, the whiles he clapped his pistol to my uncle's ear, and called out--
”Lay me these men in irons, Attwood. I am master on my own good s.h.i.+p, if not in that fiends' compter.”
We were seized upon instantly and hurried down to the hold, where, heavily shackled, we were thrown among such stuff as there lay stored.
The vessel rolled horribly, and often drove against the impediments upon the bank with a dreadful grinding noise, but about morning, as I supposed, they got her about, and into the stream, where, the tempest somewhat abating, she rode pretty free, though what course she kept I could not be certain in, and indeed soon gave over the attempt to follow their purposes that had us so utterly in their power.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE VOYAGE OF THE _SARACEN'S HEAD_
Whatever the doubts I may at first have entertained, it was soon enough abundantly clear that the _Saracen's Head_ was under way toward the open sea; for from my place in the hold I could hear the s.h.i.+pmen calling to one another as such and such a landmark or hamlet came into sight; as the green heights of Greenwich; and Tilbury, where there was a troop of horse at exercise, the which sight was occasion of a good deal of rough wit amongst the crew. At the mouth of the Medway we spoke a great merchant galley that was returned from Venice, and put in to Rochester for repairs, she having come by some damage in the late storm. Of the pa.s.sage of time I soon lost count lying in the dark bottom of the s.h.i.+p, where was nought to denote those petty accidents by which we customarily reckon it. So I knew not positively whether 'twere day or night I waked and slept in nor whether we made good progress or slow. For awhile I tried to keep measure of the hours by our meals, as it might be three meals to an whole day; but this would not hold neither, for there was no regularity in the serving of them, they being brought us quite by haphazard and as they were thought on: which was seldom enough, and the food so stale and nauseating, as led me suppose we only received it by afterthought, or in such grudging contempt as is sometimes termed charity. To do him right, I must allow that my uncle took this reversal of his fortunes with a perfect indifference; as no doubt in the like situation my father would have done, though upon a loftier consideration; but however come by, his patience shamed me, who could by no means attain thereto, nor I think did seriously attempt it. My sufferings were indeed very great, and in that voyage I conceived such a pa.s.sionate disgust of the sea as hath caused me to regard it as being (what in fact it is) the element the nearest to chaos, and therefore the least to be accounted for perfect--and yet perhaps not altogether the least, for I soon found myself doubting if a man's stomach were every way a sound device; it being very certain that mine often fell away into the original incoherence that all things had before the Creation, or ever I had gone three leagues from the sh.o.r.e.
No loathing can compare with that a man experienceth at such a time, when dinner is a greater insult than a blow. And I am ashamed even now to remember the hate I cherished for the honest mariner that stumbled down the companion bearing my platter of salt beef; which feeling found its vent in my imagining a world of tortures for the bearer of the beef and for all jovial ruddy mariners, and for every s.h.i.+pwright since the days of Noah.
Nevertheless, since into what state soever we come, we be so framed as by degrees to acquire a sort of habit, if not a content, therein, so it befell that I also, in due time, from my amazing and profound malady recovered some fragment of a willingness to live. It might have been the third or fourth day after, that I ate without such consequences as I had supposed necessarily incident to the act, and life came to a.s.sume an aspect wherein it stood on favourable terms with sudden death. This surprised me, seeing that of late I had conceived life to be (at the best) but a protracted and indefinite dissolution; and I ate again....
”The devil take you!” I cried to the fellow that had just entered the hold with a handful of biscuits and a little rundlet of burnt wine.
”What a meal is that to set before starving men?”
”Courage, master,” said the mariner with a great laugh, ”we be come within but a few leagues of the Straits, and perhaps shall touch at one of the Spanish ports, where we may better provision the s.h.i.+p than our Captain thought it altogether safe to do, the night we set sail.”
”And shall we be released then?” I asked eagerly.
The man shrugged up his shoulders with a grin, and for the first time my uncle, who all these days had lain quite silent in the dark of the hold, leaned over from his place among the stuff, and thus accosted me--
”Are you so great a fool yet? When the p.a.w.n is taken, it is cast aside, and the game goes on. Teach your mind to expect nothing, and your tongue to require nothing. There is an h.e.l.l where they and I shall meet.” He paused a s.p.a.ce, and then with an intensity of purpose that held my blood in the veins: ”We shall meet there,” he added slowly, ”and shall need all eternity for that we shall there do. 'Tis the privilege of h.e.l.l that no enmities be in that place forgot, nor forgiven.”
When the mariner had left us, I asked my uncle what he considered our fate would be; who answered that, as it had been put into the articles of the false contract he had made with Spurrier, that offers of help should be made to the Spaniards, in the which emba.s.sage he himself had promised (though he intended nothing less) to undertake the chiefest part; so, he being now deposed, it was probable that Spurrier would take upon him the fulfilment of that office.
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