Part 48
But here she was, on _The British Queen_--and near her Mrs. Joshua Horrotian. When the Call was sounded for the drawing, and the folded slips of official paper that had an inky scrawl of “Go” inside them, or a blank more eloquent still, were tossed--as was the ancient custom in this Regiment--upon the sheepskin of the kettledrums yet vibrating from the Charge--Nelly had waited her turn in a mounting fever of anxiety that had melted the last icicles away from her poor heart. Joshua Horrotian had hardly known the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked creature, who had run to him, panting and trembling, and thrown glad arms about his neck, and shed tears of bliss upon his bosom, crying, “I’m to go!--I’m to go!” For until you are about to lose the last remaining joy, you never realize how rich you are, or how poor you may yet live to be if God takes that also.
After dinner that evening, while the light airs from the nor’-west were pushing _The British Queen_--long since parted from her tug--towards the Bay of Biscay, and glowing cigar-ends were patroling the quarter-deck singly and in couples; and the tinkle of a piano-played waltz came cheerfully from the Officers’ Mess Cabin, and the strains of “Annie Laurie” and “A Life on the Ocean Wave” proceeded from the troop-deck as the forecastle--where troopers and tars fraternized in high accord--Morty heard one semi-visible stroller say, in answer to some remark of a companion:
“By Jove no! But with me it’s like this!--I don’t object to a man who smells of Money--but a man who stinks of it, I simply can’t stand!”
It was the male voice that had cynically cried “Oh Lord, yes!” and “Hear, Hear!” when Jowell was speechifying. And a feminine voice responded:
“He _meant_ well, dear, I’m _sure_! But _what_ a dreadful man!”
Morty knew whom the officer’s wife was discussing with her husband. And whilst he burned and smarted, he admitted perforce the truth of their utterances. His father did stink of Money. His father undoubtedly must appear to persons of any breeding and refinement a really dreadful man. Why, his own son--
Later, when Morty was in bed in the comfortable lower berth of the state-room that had been expanded, to the compression of the young man’s fellow-passengers--and _The British Queen_, having left the glassy Solent far behind her, was beginning to roll amidst the restless surges of the Atlantic so that cabin doors banged, cabin crockery rattled, timbers groaned and creaked--and heavy rushes of footsteps on the deck were followed by the flumping of tightened canvas and the noisy coiling away of ropes--Jowell’s son--who, like his great parent, was of queasy sea-stomach--found this question cropping up again.
The Governor stank of Money. That was why his son, who had learned since he joined the Cut Red Feathers to refrain from quenching his thirst with brandy-and-water early in the morning, and to eschew cravats and waistcoats of violently contrasting hues--who had left off sleeking the stiff brown hair upon his bullet-head with perfumed bear’s grease and besprinkling his person with the combined essences of Frangipani and Jockey Club--found respiration difficult in his father’s company. But--was it only Money the Governor stank of?... The air of the big dining-room at Hanover Square had been heavy with the odor of roguery on that night when Thompson Jowell had laid his cards, as he had said, upon the table, and owned up to playing--from first to last, an infernal dirty game!...
“I’m a bit of a Cabbager myself!” Morty could hear him saying it. And--“The bad with the good--the rotten with the sound--that’s the secret of successful Contracting!”
It was jolly--confounded jolly to be a British Guardsman and know yourself the son of a father who had become a millionaire--and meant to become yet richer--by diddling the British Army. It was enough to drive sleep from any honest, decent pillow, and this is a feeble pen if it has not conveyed that Morty Jowell was an honest, decent young man. Vulgar and dull and clumsy perhaps--but sound at the core, and wholesome-natured, as his mother’s son could hardly fail to be.
The rolling of the vessel increased, and, from the adjoining cabin, occupied by the Honorable Mr. Skiffington, the Admiralty Agent--whose experience of the ocean had been gathered in the course of two or three Naval Reviews at Spithead and half-a-dozen trips across the English Channel--groans of the most piteous description now began to be heard. So Morty sat up, hugging his knees and frowning at the pale eye of the state-room port-light--which, sometimes hidden by its short green velvet curtain, or revealed--as the drapery swung aside with the ship’s rolling--seemed to wink in a derisive way.
“Gaw! how this dam’ ship rolls!--and, talkin’ of stinks--how smelly she is!... Horses and soger-men and tar and bilge--piff!--and somethin’ else to top up.” He sniffed, becoming more and more sensible of having inherited the queasy paternal stomach.... “Somethin’ I’ve smelt at those kilns at Little Milding--where the Governor dries his sprouted oats and mildewed hay.” He added, in an aggrieved tone:
“My forage ’ud taste a deal sweeter if it had been bought with cleaner money. That’s what I say, and to that I shall stick. And I’m ready to lay any fellow ten to one in tenners--and the Governor’s given me a hundred of ’em!--I shall come across that core of cow-parsley in every truss I get!”
Here Morty succumbed to the malady of the ocean, groaning just as dismally as the Admiralty Agent. You may imagine corresponding sounds breaking out in neighboring cabins--indeed, for some hours the stuffy, crowded troop-deck had been littered with the bodies of those who had fallen victims to this insidious complaint.
And as the weather worsened, and hatchways, companions, and even scuttles were kept closed, that smell that Morty Jowell had said “Piff!” at--and that was reminiscent of the kilns at Little Milding, where fermenting hay was dried--mingled more potently in the hotch-potch of weird smells that distinguishes a troopship full of seasick soldiers.
* * * * *
It came in overpowering gusts from the fore-hold, that was close-packed with the Government forage-trusses. It came in blasts more overpowering still--being mingled with an appalling equine odor--through a square black hole in the lower deck--a yawning hole that had not been padded with sacks of straw like the corresponding aperture in the deck above it--when by means of canvas slings and tackle from the mainyard, the horses had been lowered into the after-hold.
Descending into the stifling blackness of this place, you presently made out by the significantly-haloed light of a couple of wire-guarded ship’s lanterns, rows of frightened hairy faces ranged along the sides of the hold, and looking at you across the spars that kept their owners--slung in canvas belts from hooks in the over-deck beams--in the stalls that were padded with straw and bundles of tow.
The central space between the rows of frightened hairy faces was packed to the upper-deck with more of Jowell’s forage-trusses. Dunnage was beneath the hoofs of these unlucky four-legged passengers, and layers of Cowell’s beef-barrels were underneath this. And when the ship rolled in stress of heavy weather, and the barrels shifted, the legs that got between them were frequently mashed to jelly, adding to the deadly qualms of nauseau torments more cruel still.
Sire my Friend accommodated the horses of his Cavalry, Artillery and Transport on the spar-decks of troop-ships--or at worst in the ’tween decks; sheltering them in the first instance beneath canvas, or housing them under temporary sheds of planks. But Britannia, at the instance of her evil genius Jowell, stowed--in nine cases out of ten--these luckless brutes upon the ballast.
Every day on board _The British Queen_--as on board those other transports speeding in the cause of Humanity to the East with men and horses--shots were heard far down in these submarine hells; and every night hairy bodies--sometimes dreadfully disfigured and distorted--were hauled up with rope-tackle and hove overboard. For your horse, whose anatomical structure renders it next to impossible to vomit, is capable of going mad; and does it under given circumstances, with conspicuous thoroughness. Therefore the faces of the men who went down into these places, looking pale or red as the case might be, came up again livid or purple; and the oaths they swore grew more sulphurous every day. For between good men and good horses there is love.
What time _The British Queen_ was staggering, close-hauled, through the shattering yellow-green seas of the Bay of Biscay O! two hundred miles from England--and it blew a great gale through heavy squalls of rain--and the hatches were battened down, and every soul on the troop-decks, and every military officer in the poop cabin and several of the ship’s officers and crew, were dog-sick and helpless; even stout Blueberry nearly gave up hope of seeing the light of day again, and breathing something sweeter than the atmosphere of the after-hold.
For the comrade on his off-side was screaming in the convulsions of tetanus; and the mare on his near-side was dead like many another, with her long neck and helpless head banging him, flail-fashion, whenever the smelly, stifling stable you were pent up in stood on its front end--or swinging the other way and banging Corporal Geogehagan’s horse--and even the sailors who had come down at intervals to pump the tainted water from the tanks and serve out the musty hay had left off coming.
* * * * *
Then, in the middle of one unforgettable, fateful night, was heard aboard _The British Queen_, and heard in every conceivable tone of human and animal terror, fear, and anguish--the dreadful cry of Fire!
LXXIX
Upon a fine June morning some eight days later, Jowell, in his dingy office in The Poultry, London, in the narrow alley of sordid houses hard by the Banking House of Lubbock, received a telegram from the Admiralty. A moment later the gray-faced Chobley, busy in his little glass case opening out of the office where the seven pallid clerks bent over ledgers, was summoned by a strangled shriek that came from the whistle of the speaking-tube, and entered the Contractor’s private sanctum. A moment later he rang the bell.
For a dreadful, white-and-blue faced jabbering Something that wore the clothing of Thompson Jowell had come staggering at the manager, shaking a slip of flimsy yellow paper; and, jabbering out an unintelligible word or so, had fallen down in a fit.
“Fetch a doctor from somewhere, will you!” said Chobley to the sea-green Standish’s pallid successor, as he knelt over the bulky, stertorously-breathing body that sprawled upon the shabby ink-stained carpet, fumbling at its shirt-collar stud. He had been enlightened by a glance at the telegraphic message from Whitehall, and added, working away:
“There has been bad work at sea. The forage aboard _The British Queen_ worked and took fire--at least, the message says so. Ship was a blazing hulk in half-an-hour from the outbreak--they took to the boats, such of ’em as they could get at. A Dundee brig bound for Lisbon picked up three of ’em--a Southampton-bound barque and a schooner for Port au Prince, St. Domingo, overhauled the rest. Eighty-nine souls were saved, twenty-three drowned or burned--including the Veterinary Surgeon and the Colonel of the Regiment. And all the horses except one--I should like to know how that one managed to save himself,” said Chobley rather gruesomely, “from being frizzled with the rest in the after-hold?”
Avid of more horrors, Standish’s successor queried:
“And Mr. Mortimer?”
“Why,” returned the manager, still busying himself about the neck of the prone, insensible figure, “Mr. Mortimer has been picked up, with the rest, aboard the ship’s boats. It’s the shock of hearing that his son was in danger lays the Governor snoring and choking here. For _The British Queen_ and everything aboard of her was insured--pretty heavily insured; and there’s no loss to us resulting from the casualty--rather the reverse!”
Chobley, the leaden-complexioned, meant a great deal the reverse; and the clerk knew it as he went away for the doctor; and the manager--having loosened his employer’s collar and cravat, opened the window to admit what passed in The Poultry for fresh air. And presently Jowell recovered sufficiently to be hoisted up from the carpet, and got into his chair; and damn them for calling in the medical man.
He went home early to Hanover Square, and--saying nothing of his own indisposition--broke the news of Morty’s peril and deliverance--escape-end first--to his boy’s mother. And then--sending one of the large powdered footmen for the immense gilt Church Service, usually borne after him upon Sundays in the country by one of these privileged menials, as the great man waddled up the aisle of Market Drowsing Parish Church--he mounted his glasses and read, occasionally pausing to take off and wipe these aids to vision--the Prayer for Those at Sea.
His wife, subsequently entering his library, found him thus employed, and was secretly thankful. It seemed like a first answer to all her petitions for him. He looked up as she came in, and found no fault with her red eyes on this occasion, his own being, if possible, redder.
He spoke gently to her, and finding him in this unusual mood, and being anxious to improve the occasion, she bade him take comfort and be thankful, for their dear son was under the protection--forbid that I should quote the words irreverently!--of a Heavenly Father’s Hand.
At which Jowell blew his nose--cocked at quite a subdued angle--and agreed with her, adding:
“All the same, the boy has got a good ’un Down Here. No man can call me Ben Blinker at any time, but where my son’s concerned I’m William Wide Awake, Esquire. As to the hay firing of itself--I don’t believe it! To palm off hay green, or hay half-cured, upon Her Majesty’s Government’s Contractors would be a Fraud. People don’t do such things--they ain’t capable of it!” said Jowell virtuously. “Some drunken sailor dropped a lighted candle-lantern into the fore-hold, or some trooper smoking on the sly on stable duty stuck his pipe in amongst the straw and left it there--and if I had him here,” said Jowell ogreishly, “I’d make him smoke on the wrong side of his mouth, by Gosh, I would!”
He added: “And you’re a good woman, Maria, by Gosh, you are!” And in testimony to this excellence he bought her, the very next day, an immense cameo brooch, representing the triumph of Venus, and set with many blazing brilliants of great price.
* * * * *
Wounds of the soul, neglects of years, are healed and made as nought in the belief of men like this man, by a trinket purchased at the jeweler’s. Disloyalties and treacheries are blotted out--harsh words, ill-usage and infidelity atoned for. The wives who receive these gewgaws know sorrowfully well why they are given.
All unsolicited gifts bestowed by men like Jowell are sops to the shrill-voiced Conscience chiding behind their waistcoats. Thus, the man gave to his wife because she had so much to forgive; he sent a draft for a great sum to his son, not only because his own dishonesty had placed that beloved one in peril, but because he had so greatly swindled the sons of other men. That half-pint of porter shed upon the troopers and their wives in the ’tween-decks did them good, perhaps! But how they paid for it in the end!
Young Mortimer Jowell escaped, not without risk of life, upon that night of terror. For when columns of stifling smoke lanced through with yellow flame came pouring up the fore-hatch--and the ineffectual hoses had ceased to play upon the conflagration--while the burning vessel ran with lashed helm before the westerly gale to keep the fire forward, while the boats were being hurried off the skids and launched and loaded--a big young man in night-shirt and trousers--a young man who had been knocked senseless by a tackle-block falling from the blazing mainyard--was being lowered by the Captain of _The British Queen_ into the last boat of all--when a horizontal, swordlike tongue of flame licked through the smoke now rolling up the mizzen-hatchway, proving how fearfully the fire gained below--and the rope was severed by it as by a saber-stroke--and the half-naked senseless wretch fell into the raging sea. And would have been drowned undoubtedly, had not a hulking, red-headed trooper of the Hundredth Lancers, when a dripping head rose in the yeasty smother close to the boat’s side--reached forth his hand and grabbed its owner by the scruff, and hauled him so near that other hands could help to drag him into comparative safety.
And presently, his scattered wits returning, young Morty Jowell became aware that he was bitter cold. Next, that sea-water was washing over him; next that he was not on board a ship, but a comparatively small ship’s boat, dancing like a walnut-shell in the tourney of monstrous seas. And then--opening his raw and stiffened eyelids--he became aware that he, half naked, wet and shivering, was one of a crowd of fellow-creatures, chiefly male, equally unclad, perished and soaking. And that, as the boat was pitched from ridge to ridge of huge and watery mountains--there were to be had brief, appalling glimpses of a burning ship with showers of incandescent fragments falling from her rigging, and clouds of firefly sparks drifting away to leeward--painted in hues of rose and apricot, clear dazzling scarlet, peacock blue and springlike, exquisite apple-green upon the background of pitch-black tempestuous, rainy night--and that the shrill song of the gale in their frozen ears was mingled with the roar of the greedy flames that crunched her bones. And that those dreadful shrieks that ripped and tore through the other noises were the cries of horses burning in her after-hold, and men burning on the blazing decks of her.... For the Captain of the unlucky vessel, the Veterinary Surgeon of the Hundredth Lancers--twenty troopers and the Colonel--had--the long boat having been rendered useless--remained on board _The British Queen_.
One other terrific picture was bitten in as with corrosive acid on Mortimer Jowell’s memory. It was when--her mainmast having fallen with a tremendous crash, and her ballast having shifted from her unguided, furious wallowings amidst the liquid mountains--_The British Queen_ canted over with a tremendous list to port.... They saw her decks then as one sees a stage with a steep rake, all smoking and charring and crawling with tongues of liquorish fire. Also, they saw, and groaned aloud with ineffectual pity--for they had but one oar, and, had the boat been capable of holding another passenger, could not have moved to the rescue--doomed human beings huddled in her starboard mizzen channels, that were as yet not burned away.
And they recognized, in less time than one takes to write it, in a fiery object that burst screaming up upon her after-deck, a maddened horse, whose mane and tail were on fire, whose legs were flayed and bleeding, and whose sides and flanks were garnished with blazing patches of tow.
There was a piteous cry at that sad sight, and a woman swooned. Strange things had been seen that night, but none more strange and terrible. How the brute had freed himself from that fiery hell below may not even be conjectured, but there he was, as I have said....
* * * * *
He pranced down the deck with heraldic, rampant gait, screaming and snorting; reared, with his bloody forelegs stuck out stiffly, and leaped into the sea. And a man sprang up in the boat and pointed with a scorched and naked arm; and yelled out something that was drowned in the shriek of the gale and the bellowing of the fire. What he yelled was:
“That’s my horse! I’d know him among a thousand! And, by G----, he’s swimming. Keep up! Don’t ye give in, my brave old Bluberry!”
He could not have heard, but he did not give in.... He was breathing yet, with his long neck thrown across the charred and floating wreckage of the fallen mainmast when the wild gray dawn broke, and the brig _Maggie o’ Muirhead_ and the St. Domingo schooner overhauled the red-hot hulk of _The British Queen_.
The Captain and a trooper were rescued, living, from her mizzen channels, the perishing castaways in the boat were saved. Sailors are superstitious. Not being desirous of a mutiny in his forecastle, the master of the _Maggie_ yielded to the pressure brought to bear by his crew. And they got a bight of a line round Blueberry, and hauled the horse aboard; dosed him, all limp and sprawling--with tincture of ginger--kept by the mate for stomachic chills--in hot water; doctored his burns with linseed oil--and presently he floundered up on those raw legs of his, and tried to be himself again.
Thenceforth he consorted with the ship’s goat until the _Maggie_ reached Lisbon; and, though he bore the scars of that wild night’s work all the rest of his life, and the hair, where it grew again upon his flanks, came white in patches, he lived to carry his master through the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and die at the long last of cold and famine at the Cavalry Camp on the slopes above Kadikoi.
* * * * *
Said Morty, coming up to a red-headed trooper on the forecastle-deck of the _Maggie_: “Look here! I’ve just found out it was you who saved my life. And I’m obliged to you--tremenjous!--and though all the money I’d got was burned on that dam’ ship, my father--Mr. Thompson Jowell--owner--will give you anything you want! See?”
And the speaker, attired in a cast-off pair of trousers of the master’s and a pea-jacket lent by the _Maggie o’ Muirhead’s_ second mate--and wearing a list slipper of the steward’s on his right foot, and a half-boot contributed by another philanthropist, on the left one--held out his large hand to his savior with genuine eagerness.
“Blast your father!” said the red-headed trooper, so suddenly and so savagely that Morty jumped in his odd foot-coverings. “Can he give me back _my_ boy? And do you think--if I’d been let to have a chance o’ choosing--I’d ha’ put out my hand--knowingly--to save his son? Wait till next time, that’s all I ha’ got to say!--you wait till next time, that’s all!”
And Joshua Horrotian turned his back on the heir of his enemy, and spat over the bulwarks of the forecastle-deck in loathing, and then a thought occurred to him that brought his head round again.
His wish had been granted. He had lived to see Jowell’s son, half-clad and penniless, with an old boot on one foot and an old shoe on the other--asking--and asking vainly for the hand he had denied.
It was merely an odd chance. That experimental curse of Josh’s had had nothing to do with it. And yet--supposing Some One Above had heard--the granting of that ill wish had not spared misfortune to the wisher. The wife and the horse were safe, though; and Corporal and Mrs. Geogehagan were in one of the boats that had been picked up by the St. Domingo schooner. One would do well not to grumble at one’s luck, reflected Joshua Horrotian.
LXXX
The Tsar was right. Men who desire Death very keenly and bitterly, who seek the grim tyrant in his very citadel, find him difficult of access, as a rule.
Something that had been a man came staggering back out of the poisonous swamps of the delta of the Dobrudja, and--more dead than alive--reached the port of Kustendje on the Black Sea, what time Protestant England and Catholic France had allied with the Moslem against Christian Russia; and Lord Dalgan, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces, and H.R.H. the Duke of Bambridge, were being entertained by Sire my Friend, at Paris.