Chapter 44

TRUTH AND TERROR.

"In slumbers of midnight the sailor-boy lay, His hammock swung loose at the sport of the wind; But watch-worn and weary, his cares flew away, And visions of happiness danced o'er his mind."

"And how the sprites of injured men Shriek upward from the sod; Ay! how the ghostly hand will point To show the burial clod; And unknown facts of guilty acts Are seen in dreams from God!"

In a great square room, standing, as usual, on cocoa-nut stilts, which had once been used for a billiard-room, were half a dozen iron-framed cots, ranged along the walls, in which some of the Escondido's guests were to bivouac. Every thing, however, was tidy and comfortable; snow-white bedclothes and gauze musquito nets, lots of napkins and ewers, and things for bathing behind a screen of dimity curtains; and not forgetting a large table--vice the billiard-table--in the centre, on which stood plenty of sugar and limes, cinnamon and nutmeg, bottles and flasks, red and white, and--very little water, in jugs.

The occupants of this bivouac had turned in, and the lights had been doused. Conversation, however, was kept up, especially by the thin little voice of Mr. Mouse, who, having enjoyed a nap in the early evening, and having been danced and tumbled about on the trip to the lodge by Harry Darcantel, who was in tiptop condition, the reefer was as wide awake as a blackfish. Don Stingo chanted a few convivial airs and snored; so did Jacob Blunt, with a spluttering groan intermixed; and Paddy Burns fell off into a doze, saying blasphemous words addressed to the world at large, with a mutter against the military, hoping he might look at a Bolivian patriot edgewise with a friend and companion of his, Mr. Joe Manton, at his side; he would put an end to any more lies about charges of cavalry, and cutting out frigates in Callao Bay. That Paddy Burns would, though he didn't wear a wig and a large sapphire on the only finger he had left on his left hand, and with a diamond snuff-box, too! Presented to you by a connection of your family, was it? Take a pinch out of it? D---- him, no! Begorra, the snuff is not Lundy Foot's, and the box is brass, sir, brass!

"I say, Mouse, keep quiet, will you, and let me go to sleep!" Harry Darcantel did not think of going to sleep; that was a fib he told the reefer; he wanted merely to shut his eyes and dream of--you know who--a tall, graceful girl with blue eyes and light hair, who looked at him once or twice such looks that there was no sleep for him for ever so long. What did she say? Why, she never opened her pouting lips to show those even pearly teeth. She only looked out of those soft blue eyes. That was all!

"Mr. Darcantel, I think of getting married."

"The d---- you do! And who to, pray?"

"Why," said Mr. Mouse, as he rolled over and kicked the sheet off his slate-pencil built legs, "I haven't made up my mind; but do you know that that pretty girl up there at the big house has taken quite a fancy to me, and when you were presented to her mother she gave me _such_ a squeeze of the hand! Oh my!"

Here Mr. Mouse's narrative was cut short by a pillow hitting him plump on the mouth, clean through his musquito net.

"Very charming young lady, Mr. Mouse," said a quiet voice, in a cool tone, on the other side of him; "she did seem to take a violent fancy to you."

Mr. Mouse rolled over, and then, sitting up in his cot, replied, "Yes, sir! and that was her mother sitting by you when the big nigger in white capsized the wine over your sleeve, and nearly pulled your a--hair off."

Look out, Mr. Mouse! If that man there beside you once gives a twitch at your curls, he'll pull something more than hair--perhaps a little scalp with it!

"Oh!" was the sound that came back.

"Yes, sir; and the other beautiful lady next the commodore is her sister. She had a son just mademoiselle's age, who was murdered by pirates off Jamaica ever so many years ago, and Commodore Cleveland chased them in a ship he was first lieutenant of--my father commanded the ship--she was the old 'Scourge.'"

"Hold your tongue!" came from the cot where the spare pillow was thrown from.

"Ho!" said the military chieftain; but if the room had not been so dark, the way his eyes opened and emitted an icy glare of surprise would have made Tiny Mouse shiver with cold.

"Oh dear, yes, colonel, I heard the commodore tell all about it the other night on board the frigate. He thought I was asleep, but I kept awake through the best part of it."

"The best part of it?"

"Why, sir, how an old one-eyed Spaniard deceived my father, and sent him on a fool's errand from St. Jago down to the Isle of Pines, and afterward how the 'Scourge' chased the piratical schooner in a hurricane for ever so long, clear away to the coast of Darien, where they blew her out of water, and killed every scoundrel on board!"

Not every one, Mr. Mouse. There is the very greatest of those scoundrels grinding his teeth and glaring your way at your elbow.

"What was the name of that cape, Darcantel, where the schooner was destroyed? No, I won't be quiet; the colonel wants to hear all about it. There's a good fellow, tell me!"

"Garotte Cape."

The listener slowly raised the mutilated hand, and put the finger with the sapphire ring to his throat, evidently not liking the name of that cape, for it caused a choking sensation to utter it--"Ho! Cape Garotte!"

"Yes, sir; and Darcantel's father here once chartered a vessel, and went all the way down there to explore the place, and was gone fifteen months! Wasn't he, Darky?" said the boy, familiarly.

"Mouse, I tell you what it is, if you don't shut up that little flytrap of yours, I'll make Rat lick you when you go on board!"

"Rat lick me?" said Tiny, as he jumped straight up in the cot; "I gave him and Martin a black eye apiece only on our last boat-duty day for saying your father, the doctor, had killed his brother-in-law in a duel!"

"Hush, my dear little fellow! you did a very foolish thing. There, say no more on that subject; it gives me pain, my Tiny. So talk on as much as you like."

"My dear friend," exclaimed the lad, in a broken voice; as he plunged through his net and put his arms around Darcantel, "I wouldn't grieve you for the world; but do you suppose, little as I am, that I wouldn't fight for the doctor, who is so kind to me, and has done so much for my poor dear sweet mother?"

Here there was a sob as he wound his arms closer round his friend's neck, and cried like a child, as he was.

"Well, never mind, Tiny; go to sleep, now! I am not angry. There, turn in!"

"I won't speak another word to-night, Harry, for any soul breathing--little fool that I am!"

"I beg your pardon, monsieur," said the colonel, in French, with a slight quiver on his tongue, "but did your father really go all the way down to Darien out of mere curiosity?"

"Yes, sir, he did go there to see if by any chance one of the pirates had escaped; and he traveled, too, a good deal about among the Indians, making inquiries."

"Ho! and did he pick up any information there?"

"Why, sir, I am not positive, but I believe that he got a hint that a European had wandered over that country who had been wounded in the head and hand, and was almost naked; but the natives could give him but very meagre accounts. He continued on, however, down the Isthmus, on the Pacific side, by sea, as far as Chili, when he went into the interior to Peru, crossed the Andes, and followed down the Orinoco to Para, when he sailed again for England."

"Oh! no other motive than curiosity?"

"Perhaps he had; for he once told me he had some old scores to settle with the man who commanded the pirate, and if he was alive he felt quite sure he would, one of those days, put him to death. My father, sir, is a very determined person, and never forgets an oath."

"Truly, monsieur, you interest me. But what sort of a man in appearance is your father--a doctor, I think you said?"

"He is a tall gentleman of about fifty, sir, though he looks much older; for he has suffered deeply in early life, when my mother--a--died; but I shall have the pleasure of introducing him to you, colonel. He is now on board our frigate at Kingston, and told me he would be up here to-morrow or the next day."

"Ah! thank you extremely, Monsieur Darcantel. I shall have--a--much curiosity to see him."

No more words that night; but much thinking and moving of thin lips, and eyes staring in the dark, wide open. There was low grating of teeth, too! And a man lay in that large room on a narrow cot, surrounded by a gauze net; and, so far as mental torture went, it was not unlike a trestle net we once saw without gauze, where a gaunt frame was stretched, with myriads of sand-flies, musquitoes, and stinging insects sucking his heart's blood. Sometimes the eyelids closed, as if they were a film of ice forming over the blue cold orbs within; and again the fabric cracked, and they were wide open once more. They could read, too, those frozen orbs; and like heavy flakes of snow falling on bloodstained decks, till it covered with a weight of lead the stark, stiff corpse beneath, they yet tried to pierce into the dark region beyond. And the heart beat with a slow and measured tramp, like a moose crunching through the sharp, treacherous crust of snow, and then stood stock-still! Had a letter, traced with the fingers of an icicle, been congealed a hundred feet deep in the heart of a toppling iceberg on the coast of Labrador, those eyes could have read it as clear as day!

"You infamous pirate, Captain Brand!" it began--"the son of the man who destroyed the 'Centipede' and her crew, and the boy whom your brutal mate tore from the mother you saw at dinner to-day, are near you! That calm, stern, determined doctor, too, whom you laced down on the trestle for poisonous insects to kill, has been on your track for the past seventeen years, and will soon hold you in his iron gripe! There will be no mercy then!"

The eyes closed, the heart stopped beating, and the thin lips and tongue, as dry as cartridge-paper, now took up the strain, while the mutilated hand clutched convulsively, as if there were fifty fingers fingering knives and pistols.

"Shall I assassinate my old doctor, and run the risk of being arrested and hung? No! He thinks me dead, and I will go back to the island, redeem my treasure, and pass the remainder of my life tranquilly in the highlands of Scotland!"

Don't be too sanguine, Colonel Lawton; for, though your ten thousand pounds in gold is still in the vault, yet there is Don Ignaçio Sanchez, whose estates have been confiscated, and who has just got out of ten years' imprisonment in the Moro of Havana, glad to save his neck from the iron collar, and, without the little jewel-hilted blade up his sleeve, is now turning about to see how he may redeem his lost fortunes. Don't be an hour too late, I pray you, Captain Brand, for that sharp eye of Don Ignaçio has already, perhaps, looked at the shiny cleft in the crag, and thinks he knows what lies hidden there! Oh, _si_! nothing but mouldy beans and paper cigars to live upon for ten years, and fond of more substantial food, even though it were yellow greenish gold, mildewed by damp, but yet solid and refreshing. _Cierto_--certainly! _Quien sabe_--who knows?

But be careful, Don Ignaçio! Don't take your old wife with you on that projected expedition, for you have treated that old woman--who resembles a rotten banana--badly! You have won back in monté all she ever won by cheating, besides the half ounces you used to give her for the Church--cheated her by drawing two cards at a time when you saw the numerals with that spark of an eye, and when you knew that she would win if you drew fairly! Yes, you have, you old sinner, for more than two score of years! And she hates you now--though you don't think it--worse than you did Captain Brand! Have an eye to that old banana!

So passed that short night--long enough, however, for somebody--and before the fresh land-wind had woke up to creep down the valley, there was a mettled barb, with open nostrils, galloping up the broken road as if he had the devil on his back--as perhaps he had, or Colonel Lawton, or Captain Brand, possibly all three, but it makes very little odds to us.