Part 12 (2/2)

I am only engaged so far. But, indeed, I care little what becomes of me,” he ended, gloomily.

The captain probably had his own notions with regard to the boatswain, as Salve escaped the severe punishment he had expected, and was only condemned to solitary confinement for fourteen days on bread-and-water.

”That will take you down a bit, my lad,” said the captain.

The boatswain, however, made up for the leniency of his superior by a little ingenuity of his own; and every day, when Salve was enjoying his meagre fare in his place of confinement, the mulatto, whom he had triumphed over, by the boatswain's orders, took his dinner of hot meat and ate it outside the door, close to the hole through which the light was admitted, that the savoury smell might make its way in and tantalise him.

At first, Salve rather enjoyed the repose which his confinement afforded him; but as his hunger increased he grew irritable, and at dinner-time one day he approached his face to the opening.

”Mulatto!” he began; and the other looked up and grinned with his white teeth, pleased to see some sign at last that his attentions had not been thrown away--”that's good food you have there.”

”Excellent,” replied the other, mischievously, and with an inward chuckle.

”It makes me picture to myself your future,” Salve continued, placidly, ”how it will be with you when I come out again. You will be like that lobscouse, my friend. Had that never occurred to you?”

The mulatto went on eating, but grew absent. His nature, as before observed, was not a courageous one, and it was obvious that his food at last began to stick in his throat.

”It is much the same as if you were sitting there and feeding on yourself,” said Salve, after a longer pause, during which he had watched the other's lengthening countenance. ”That's just what it will be, my dear friend, unless--”

”Unless--?” repeated the mulatto, p.r.i.c.king up his ears.

”Unless you take good care to pa.s.s your dinner in here to me every day from this time. There are only five days more, and I have fasted for nine, while you have been feeding away, so you are getting off cheaply enough. If the boatswain sees you pa.s.sing in food to me, you'll be punished, so you will have to be cautious, and hold up the plate yourself before the opening, that he may think you are eating right in my face.”

These were humiliating terms; and the mulatto made no immediate reply.

He merely sat with his woolly head bent down in a thoughtful att.i.tude.

But the next day he stationed his broad person with the plate in his hand up in front of the opening, and Salve mercilessly took every morsel there was on it.

It was a matter of the last importance to him not to be reduced in strength, as he knew his life was in his own hands; and that he was anything but taken down, and was as ready as ever for a fight, he showed, when he came out, in a sanguinary encounter which he engaged in gratuitously for Federigo with one of the Americans, and in which it would otherwise undoubtedly have gone hard with the Brazilian.

It was not out of any respect for him that Salve took his part. He looked upon him as false, treacherous, and entirely unprincipled; there was nothing he did or said that did not seem pervaded with these characteristics. But he helped him on the strength of that comrades.h.i.+p which among these reprobates has its inviolable laws; and further than that, there was something akin to a personal friends.h.i.+p existing between them. Federigo was decidedly interesting. He could talk more or less on almost every subject, and he was full of theories which he propounded during their watches together, and to which Salve eagerly listened.

There was, he said, among other remarks, and in a superior manner, no such thing as religion, no such being as G.o.d. Such ideas were only for dunderheads, who, moreover, in every country had their own particular form of belief for the clever people and the priests to turn to their own purposes. In reference to that, he told many stories of the impositions practised by the priests in Brazil; and had many agreeable anecdotes, too, about the beliefs of the wretched little race whose Sun land they were pa.s.sing at the time. He p.r.o.nounced, in a word, for the right of the strongest, and for piastres, women, and freedom as the great objects of existence. What other G.o.d than Salve, he once asked ironically, had prevented the Irishman from taking the life of the miserable Spaniard down there in the hold? or what G.o.d other than Fear prevented the boatswain from felling Salve himself to the deck with a handspike? Although Salve despised the speaker, his arguments made no slight impression upon him. What G.o.d, he asked himself, would save him, if he did not take care of himself among all these ruffians who surrounded him? and had there been any such controlling Power in the world, he thought with bitterness, a great deal in his life would have been very different. Conversations of this kind always made him feel thoroughly bad.

”What do you suppose,” he suddenly asked, one evening as they were talking together on their watch, ”your sister meant to do with me, Federigo, if I had not escaped?”

Up to this they had avoided touching upon this tender subject, and Federigo answered, evasively--

”I'm sure I don't know. She takes wild notions sometimes.”

”Yes--but what do you think? I know you had no hand in the matter.”

”H'm! I had rather not say,” replied Federigo, obviously relieved, but with a peculiar smile, as if his fancy was ranging not without enjoyment through the region of possibilities. ”She scalded a monkey once, that had bitten her, slowly to death with boiling-water. But her ingenuity was endless.”

Salve felt a shudder run through him, and something in his face told the other that he had better not indulge his fancy any further; and he hastened, therefore, to add half in joke and half by way of consolation--

”Poor Antonio Varez will pay for her having been obliged to marry him, never fear. Yes, she is rich and happy,” he concluded with a sigh, as if he envied her; and the subject dropped.

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