Chapter II: Part 2

The wooden part of the house was nearly all gone. After they had succeeded in reaching shelter, one wall after another had blown down. The furniture was splintered into matchwood. Even the heavy mahogany dining-table, which they loved, and had always kept with its legs in little glass baths of oil to defeat the ants, was spirited right away. There were some fragments which might be part of it, or they might not: you could not tell.

Mr. Thornton returned to the cellar and helped his wife out: she was so cramped as hardly to be able to move. They knelt down together and thanked God for not having treated them any worse. Then they stood up and stared about them rather stupidly. It seemed not credible that all this had been done by a current of air. Mr. Thornton patted the atmosphere with his hand. When still, it was so soft, so rare: how could one believe that Motion, itself something impalpable, had lent it a hardness: that this gentle, hind-like Meteor should have last night seized Fat Betsy with the rapacity of a tiger and the lift of a roc, and flung her, as he had seen her flung, across two fair-sized fields?

Mrs. Thornton understood his gesture.

‘Remember who is its Prince,’ she said.

The stable was damaged, though not completely destroyed: and Mr. Thornton’s mule was so much hurt he had to tell a negro to cut its throat. The buggy was smashed beyond repair. The only building undamaged was a stone chamber which had been the hospital of the old sugar-estate: so they woke the children, who were feeling ill and beyond words unhappy, and moved into this: where the negroes, with an unexpected energy and kindliness, did everything they could to make them comfortable. It was paved and unlighted: but solid.

The children were bilious for a few days, and inclined to dislike each other: but they accepted the change in their lives practically without noticing it. It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realise what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives. If Emily had known this was a _Hurricane_, she would doubtless have been far more impressed, for the word was full of romantic terrors. But it never entered her head: and a thunderstorm, however severe, is after all a commonplace affair. The mere fact that it had done incalculable damage, while the earthquake had done none at all, gave it no right whatever to rival the latter in the hierarchy of cataclysms: an Earthquake is a thing apart. If she was silent, and inclined to brood over some inward terror, it was not the hurricane she was thinking of, it was the death of Tabby. That, at times, seemed a horror beyond all bearing. It was her first intimate contact with death--and a death of violence, too. The death of Old Sam had no such effect: there is, after all, a vast difference between a negro and a favourite cat.

There was something enjoyable, too, in camping in the hospital: a sort of everlasting picnic in which their parents for once were taking part. Indeed it led them to begin for the first time to regard their parents as rational human beings, with understandable tastes--such as sitting on the floor to eat one’s dinner.

It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children. She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the centre of their passionate devotion. Actually, she was congenitally incapable of telling one end of a child from the other. She was a dumpy little woman--Cornish, I believe. When she was herself a baby she was so small they carried her about on a cushion for fear a clumsy human arm might damage her. She could read when she was two and a half. Her reading was always serious. Nor had she been backward in the humaner studies: her mistresses spoke of her Deportment as something rarely seen outside the older Royal Houses: in spite of a figure like a bolster, she could step into a coach like an angel getting onto a cloud. She was very quick-tempered.

Mr. Bas-Thornton also had every accomplishment, except two: that of primogeniture, and that of making a living. Either would have provided for them.

If it would have surprised the mother, it would undoubtedly have surprised the children also to be told how little their parents meant to them. Children seldom have any power of quantitative self-analysis: whatever the facts, they believe as an article of faith that they love Father and Mother first and equally. Actually, the Thornton children had loved Tabby first and foremost in all the world, some of each other second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once a week. Their father they loved a little more: partly owing to the ceremony of riding home on his stirrups.

Jamaica remained, and blossomed anew, its womb being inexhaustible. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton remained, and with patience and tears tried to reconstruct things, in so far as they could be reconstructed. But the danger which their beloved little ones had been through was not a thing to risk again. Heaven had warned them. The children must go.

Nor was the only danger physical.

‘That awful night!’ said Mrs. Thornton, once, when discussing their plan of sending them home to school: ‘Oh my dear, what the poor little things must have suffered! Think how much more acute Fear is to a child! And they were so brave, so English.’

‘I don’t believe they realised it.’ (He only said that to be contradictious: he could hardly expect it to be taken seriously.)

‘You know, I am terribly afraid what permanent, _inward_ effect a shock like that may have on them. Have you noticed they never so much as mention it? In England they would at least be safe from dangers of that sort.’

Meanwhile the children, accepting the new life as a matter of course, were thoroughly enjoying it. Most children, on a railway journey, prefer to change at as many stations as possible.

The rebuilding of Ferndale, too, was a matter of absorbing interest. For there is one advantage to these match-box houses--easy gone, easy come: and once begun, the work proceeded apace. Mr. Thornton himself led the building gang, employing no end of mechanical devices of his own devising, and it was not long before the day came when he stood with his handsome head emerging through the fast dwindling hole in the new roof, shouting directions to the two black carpenters, who, lying spread-eagle in their check shirts, pinned on shingle after shingle--walling him in, like the victim in some horrid story. At last he had to draw in his head, and where it had been the last few shingles were clapped into place.

An hour later the children had looked their last on Ferndale.

When they had been told they were to go to England, they had received it as an isolated fact: thrilling in itself, but without any particular causation--for it could hardly be due to the death of the cat, and nothing else of importance had occurred lately.

The first stage of their journey was by land, to Montego Bay, and the notable thing about it was that the borrowed wagonette was drawn not by a pair of horses or a pair of mules, but by one horse and one mule. Whenever the horse wanted to go fast the mule fell asleep in the shafts: and if the driver woke it up it set off at a gallop, which angered the horse. Their progress would have been slow anyhow, as all the roads were washed away.

John was the only one who could remember England. What he remembered was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs, which was fenced off from him by a little gate, playing with a red toy milk-cart: and he knew, without having to look, that in the room on the left Baby Emily was lying in her cot. Emily _said_ she could remember something which sounded like a Prospect of the Backs of some Brick Houses at Richmond: but she might have invented it. The others had been born in the Island--Edward only just.

They all had, nevertheless, most elaborate ideas about England, built up out of what their parents had told them, and from the books and old magazines they sometimes looked at. Needless to say it was a very Atlantis, a land at the back of the North Wind: and going there was about as exciting as it would be to die and go to Heaven.

John told them all about the top of the stairs for the hundredth time as they drove along; the others listening attentively (as the Believing do to a man remembering his reincarnations).

Suddenly Emily recalled sitting at a window and seeing a big bird with a beautiful tail. At the same time there had been a horrid screeching going on, or perhaps something else disagreeable--she could not quite remember which sense was offended. It did not occur to her that it was this self-same bird which had screeched: and anyhow it was all too vague for her to try to describe it. She switched off to wondering how it was possible actually to _sleep_ when walking, as the driver said the mule did.

They put up for the first night at St. Anne’s, and there another notable thing occurred. Their host was a hardened Creole: and at supper he ate Cayenne pepper with a spoon. Not ordinary Cayenne pepper, mind, such as is sold in shops, which is heavily adulterated with log-wood: but the far fierier pure original. This indeed was an Event of the first water: none of them ever forgot it.

The desolation through which they drove is indescribable. Tropical scenery is anyhow tedious, prolific, and gross: the greens more or less uniform: great tubular stems supporting thick leaves: no tree has an outline because it is crushed up against something else--no _room_. In Jamaica this profusion swarms over the very mountain ranges: and even the peaks are so numerous that on the top of one you are surrounded by others, and can see nothing. There are hundreds of flowers. Then imagine all this luxuriance smashed, as with a pestle and mortar--crushed, pulped, and already growing again! Mr. Thornton and his wife were ready to shout with relief when they caught their first glimpse of the sea, and at last came out in view of the whole beautiful sweep of Montego Bay itself.

In the open sea there was a considerable swell: but within the shelter of the coral reef, with its pinhole entrance, all was still as a mirror, where three ships of different sizes lay at anchor, the whole of each beautiful machine repeated in the water under it. Within the Roads lay the Bogue Islands; and immediately to the left of the islands, in the low land at the base of the hills, was the mouth of a small river--swampy, and (Mr. Thornton informed John) infested with crocodiles. The children had never seen a crocodile, and hoped one might venture as far as the town, where they presently arrived: but none did. It was with considerable disappointment that they found they were to go on board the barque at once; for they still hoped that round some corner of the street a crocodile might yet appear.

The _Clorinda_ had let go her anchor in six fathoms: the water so clear, and the light so bright, that as they drew near the reflection suddenly disappeared, and instead they found themselves looking right underneath her and out the other side. The refraction made her seem as flat-bellied as a turtle, as if practically all of her were above the surface: and the anchor on its cable seemed to stream out flatly, like a downwards kite, twisting and twining (owing to the undulating surface) in the writhing coral.

This was the only impression Emily retained of going on board the ship: but the ship itself was a strange enough object, requiring all her attention. John was the only one who could remember the journey out at all clearly. Emily thought she could, but was really only remembering her visualisations of what she had been told: in fact, she found that a real ship was totally unlike the thing she thought she remembered.

By some last whim of the captain’s the shrouds were being set up--tauter than seemed good to the sailors, who grumbled as they strained the creaking lanyards. John did not envy them, winding away at that handle in the hot sun: but he did envy the chap whose job it was to dip his hand in a great pot of aromatic Stockholm tar, and work it into the dead-eyes. He was tarred up to the elbows: and John itched to be so too.

In a moment the children were scattered all over the ship, smelling here, miaowing, sniffing there, like cats in a new home. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton stood by the main companion-way, a little disconsolate at their children’s happy preoccupation, a little regretting the lack of proper emotional scene.

‘I think they will be happy here, Frederic,’ said Mrs. Thornton. ‘I wish we could have afforded to send them by the steamboat: but children find amusement even in discomfort.’

Mr. Thornton grunted.

‘I wish schools had never been invented!’ he suddenly burst out: ‘they wouldn’t then be so indispensable!’

There was a short pause for the logic of this to cross the footlights: then he went on:

‘I know what will happen; they’ll come away ... _mugs_! Just ordinary little mugs, like any one else’s brats! I’m dashed if I don’t think a hundred hurricanes would be better than that.’

Mrs. Thornton shuddered: but she continued bravely:

‘You know, I think they were getting almost _too_ devoted to us? We have been such an unrivalled centre of their lives and thoughts. It doesn’t do for minds developing to be completely dependent on one person.’

Captain Marpole’s grizzled head emerged from the scuttle. A sea-dog: clear blue eyes of a translucent trustworthiness: a merry, wrinkled, morocco-coloured face: a rumbling voice.

‘He’s too good to be true,’ whispered Mrs. Thornton.

‘Not at all! It’s a sophism to imagine people don’t conform to type!’ barked Mr. Thornton. He felt at sixes and sevens.

Captain Marpole certainly looked the ideal Children’s Captain. He would, Mrs. Thornton decided, be careful without being fussy--for she was all in favour of courageous gymnastics, though glad she would not have to witness them herself. Captain Marpole cast his eyes benignantly over the swarming imps.

‘They’ll worship him,’ she whispered to her husband. (She meant, of course, that he would worship them.) It was an important point, this, of the captain: important as the personality of a headmaster.

‘So that’s the nursery, eh?’ said the captain, crushing Mrs. Thornton’s hand. She strove to answer, but found her throat undoubtedly paralysed. Even Mr. Thornton’s ready tongue was at a loss. He looked hard at the captain, jerked his thumb towards the children, wrestled in his mind with an elaborate speech, and finally enunciated in a small, unlikely voice:

‘Smack ’em.’

Then the captain had to go about his duties: and for an hour the father and mother sat disconsolately on the main-hatch, quite deserted. Even when all was ready for departure it was impossible to muster the flock for a collective good-bye.

Already the tug was fulminating in its gorge: and ashore they must go. Emily and John had been captured, and stood talking uneasily to their parents, as if to strangers, using only a quarter of their minds. With a rope to be climbed dangling before his very nose, John simply did not know how this delay was to be supported, and lapsed into complete silence.

‘Time to go ashore, Ma’am,’ said the captain: ‘we must be off now.’

Very formally the two generations kissed each other, and said farewell. Indeed the elders were already at the gangway before the meaning of it all dawned in Emily’s head. She rushed after her mother, gripped her ample flesh in two strong fists, and sobbed and wept, ‘Come too, Mother, oh, do come too!’

Honestly, it had only occurred to her that very moment that this was a _parting_.

‘But think what an adventure it will be,’ said Mrs. Thornton bravely: ‘much more than if I come too!--You’ll have to look after the Liddlies just as if you were a real grown-up!’

‘But I don’t want any more adventures!’ sobbed Emily: ‘I’ve _got_ an _Earthquake_!’

Passions were running far too high for any one to be aware how the final separation took place. The next thing Mrs. Thornton could remember was how tired her arm had been, after waving and waving at that dwindling speck which bore away on the land breeze, hung awhile stationary in the intervening calm, then won the Trade and climbed up into the blue.

Meanwhile, at the rail stood Margaret Fernandez, who, with her little brother Harry, was going to England by the same boat. No one had come to see them off: and the brown nurse who was accompanying them had gone below the moment she came on board, so as to be ill as quickly as possible. How handsome Mr. Bas-Thornton had looked, with his English distinction! Yet every one knew he had no money. Her set white face was turned towards the land, her chin quivering at intervals. Slowly the harbour disappeared: the disordered profligacy of the turbulent, intricate mass of hills sunk lower in the sky. The occasional white houses, and white puffs of steam and smoke from the sugar-mills, vanished. At last the land, all palely shimmering like the bloom on grapes, settled down into the mirror of emerald and blue.

She wondered whether the Thornton children would prove companionable, or a nuisance. They were all younger than she was: which was a pity.

ii

On the journey back to Ferndale both father and mother were silent, actuated by that tug of jealousy against sympathy which a strong common emotion begets in familiar rather than passionate companions. They were above the ordinary sentimentalities of grass-bereavement (above choking over small shoes found in cupboards): but not above a rather strong dose of the natural instincts of parenthood, Frederic no less than his wife.

But when they were nearly home, Mrs. Thornton began to chuckle to herself.

‘Funny little thing, Emily! Did you notice almost the last thing she said? She said “I’ve got an earthquake.” She must have got it mixed up in her silly old head with earache.’

There was a long pause: and then she remarked again:

‘John is so much the most sensitive: he was absolutely too full to speak.’

iii

When they got home it was many days before they could bring themselves openly to mention the children. When some reference had to be made, they spoke round them, in an uncomfortable way, as if they had died.

But after a few weeks they had a most welcome surprise. The _Clorinda_ was calling at the Caymans, and taking the Leeward Passage: and while riding off the Grand Cayman Emily and John wrote letters, and a vessel bound for Kingston had taken charge of them and eventually they reached Ferndale. It had not even occurred to either parent that this would be possible.

This was Emily’s:

MY DEAR PARENTS,--This ship is full of Turtles. We stopped here and
they came out in boats. There is turtles in the saloon under the
tables for you to put your feet on, and turtles in the passages and
on the deck, and everywhere you go. The captain says we mustn’t fall
overboard now because his boats are full of turtles too, with water.
The sailors bring the others on deck every day to have a wash and
when you stand them up they look just as if they had pinafores on.
They make such a funny sighing and groaning in the night, at first
I thought it was everybody being ill, but you get used to it, it is
just like people being ill.--Your loving daughter,
EMILY.

And John’s:

MY DEAREST PARENTS,--The captain’s son Henry is a wonderful chap,
he goes up the rigging with his hands alone, he is ever so strong.
He can turn round under a bellying pin without touching the deck, I
can’t but I hang from the ratlines by my heels which the sailors say
is very brave, but they don’t like Emily doing it, funny. I hope you
are both in excellent health, one of the sailors has a monkey but its
tail is Sore.--Your affectionate Son,
JOHN.

That was the last news they could expect for many months. The _Clorinda_ was not touching anywhere else. It gave Mrs. Thornton a cold feeling in the stomach to measure just _how_ long. But she argued, logically enough, that the time must come to an end, all time does: there is nothing so inexorable as a ship, plodding away, plodding away, all over the place, till at last it quite certainly reaches that small speck on the map which all the time it had intended to reach. Philosophically speaking, a ship in its port of departure is just as much in its port of arrival: two point-events differing in time and place, but not in degree of reality. _Ergo_, that first letter from England was as good as written, only not quite ... legible yet. And the same applied to seeing them. (But here one must stop, for the same argument applied to old age and death, it wouldn’t do.)

Yet, a bare fortnight after the arrival of this first budget, still another letter arrived, from Havana. The _Clorinda_ had put in there unexpectedly, it appeared: the letter was from Captain Marpole.

‘What a dear man he is,’ said Alice. ‘He must have known how anxious we would be for every scrap of news.’

Captain Marpole’s letter was not so terse and vivid as the children’s had been: still, for the news it contained, I give it in full:

HAVANA DE CUBA.

HONOURED SIR AND MADAM,--I hasten to write to you to relieve you of
any uncertainty!

After leaving the Caymans we stood for the Leeward Passage, and
sighted the Isle of Pines and False Cape on the morning of the 19th
and Cape S. Antonio in the evening, but were prevented from rounding
the same by a true Norther, the first of the season, on the 22nd,
however, the wind coming round sufficiently we rounded the cape in
a lively fashion and stood N½E. well away from the Coloradoes which
are a dangerous reef lying off this part of the Cuban coast. At six
o’clock on the morning of the 23rd there being light airs only I
sighted three sail in the North-East, evidently merchantmen bound on
the same course as ourselves, at the same time a schooner of similar
character was observed standing out towards us from the direction
of Black Key, and I pointed her out to my mate just before going
below, having the wind of us he was within hailing distance by ten
in the morning, judge then of our astonishment when he rudely opened
ten or twelve disguised gun-ports and unmasked a whole broadside
of artillery trained upon us, ordering us at the same time in the
most peremptory manner to heave-to or he would sink us instanter.
There was nothing to do but to comply although considering the
friendly relations at present existing between the English and all
other governments my mate was quite at a loss to account for his
action, and imagined it due to a mistake which would be speedily
explained, we were immediately boarded by about fifty or seventy
ruffians of the worst Spanish type, armed with knives and cutlasses,
who took possession of the ship and confined me in my cabin and my
mate and crew forward while they ransacked the vessel committing
every possible excess broaching rum-casks and breaking the necks
off wine-bottles and soon a great number of them were lying about
the deck in an intoxicated condition, their leader then informed
me he was aware I had a considerable sum in specie on board and
used _every possible threat which villainy could devise_ to make
me disclose its hiding-place, it was useless for me to assure him
that beyond the fifty or so pounds they had already discovered I
carried none, he grew even more insistent in his demands, declaring
that his information was certain, tearing down the panelling in my
cabin in his search. He carried off my instruments, my clothes, and
all my personal possessions, even taking from me the poor Locket in
which I was used to carry the portrait of my Wife, and no appeal to
his sensibility, tho’ I shed tears, would make him return this to
him worthless object, he also tore down and carried away the cabin
bell-pulls, which could be of no possible use to him and was an act
of the most open _piracy_, at length, seeing I was obdurate, he
threatened to blow up the ship _and all in it_ if I would not yield,
he prepared the train and would have proceeded to carry out this
devilish threat if I had not in this last extremity, consented.

I come now to the latter part of my tale. The children had taken
refuge in the deck-house and had been up to now free from harm,
except for a cuff or two and the Degrading Sights they must have
witnessed, but no sooner was the specie some five thousand pounds in
all mostly my private property and most of our cargo (chiefly rum
sugar coffee and arrowroot) removed to the schooner than her captain,
in sheer infamous wantonness, had them all brought out from their
refuge your own little ones and the two Fernandez children who were
also on board and murdered them, every one. That anything so wicked
should look like a man I should not have believed, had I been told,
tho’ I have lived long and seen all kinds of men, I think he is mad:
indeed I am sure of it; and I take Oath that he shall be brought
to at least that tithe of justice which is in Human hands, for two
days we drifted about in a helpless condition, for our rigging had
all been cut, and at last fell in with an American man-of-war, who
gave us some assistance, and would have proceeded in pursuit of the
miscreants himself had he not most explicit orders to elsewhere. I
then put in to the port of Havana, where I informed the correspondent
of Lloyds, the government, and the representative of the _Times_
newspaper, and take the opportunity of writing you this melancholy
letter before proceeding to England.

There is one point on which you will still feel some anxiety,
considering the sex of some of the poor innocents, and on which I am
glad to be able to set your minds at rest, the children were taken
onto the other vessel in the evening and I am glad to say there done
to death _immediately_, and their little bodies cast into the sea, as
I saw with great relief with my own eyes. There was no time for what
you might fear to have occurred, and this consolation I am glad to be
able to give you.--I have the honour to be,

Your obedient servant,
JAS. MARPOLE,
Master, barque _Clorinda_.

_Chapter 3_

The passage from Montego Bay to the Caymans, where the children had written their letters, is only a matter of a few hours: indeed, in clear weather one can look right across from Jamaica to the peak of Turquino in Cuba.

There is no harbour; and the anchorage, owing to the reefs and ledges, is difficult. The _Clorinda_ brought up off the Grand Cayman, the look-out man in the chains feeling his way to a white, sandy patch of bottom which affords the only safe resting-place there, and causing the anchor to be let go to windward of it. Luckily, the weather was fine.

The island, a longish one at the western end of the group, is low, and covered with palms. Presently a succession of boats brought out a quantity of turtles, as Emily described. The natives also brought parrots to sell to the sailors: but failed to dispose of many.

At last, however, the uncomfortable Caymans were left behind, and they set their course towards the Isle of Pines, a large island in a gulf of the Cuban coast. One of the sailors, called Curtis, had once been wrecked there, and was full of stories about it. It is a very unpleasant place; sparsely inhabited, and covered with labyrinthine woods. The only food available is a kind of tree. There is also a species of bean which looks tempting: but it is deadly poison. The crocodiles, Curtis said, were so fierce they chased him and his companions into trees: the only way to escape from them was to throw them your cap to worry: or if you were bold, to disable them with a blow of a stick on the loins. There were also a great many snakes, including a kind of boa.

The current off the Isle of Pines sets strongly to the east: so the _Clorinda_ kept close inshore, to cheat it. They passed Cape Corrientes--looking, when first sighted, like two hummocks in the sea: they passed Holandes Point, known as False C. Antonio: but were prevented for some time, as Captain Marpole told in his letter, from rounding the true one. For to attempt C. Antonio in a Norther is to waste your labour.

They lay-to in sight of that long, low, rocky, treeless promontory in which the great island of Cuba terminates, and waited. They were so close that the fisherman’s hut on its southern side was clearly discernible.

For the children, those first few days at sea had flashed by like a kind of prolonged circus. There is no machine invented for sober purposes so well adapted also to play as the rigging of a ship: and the kindly captain, as Mrs. Thornton had divined, was willing to give them a lot of freedom. First came the climbing of a few rungs of the ratlines in a sailor’s charge: higher each time, till John attained a gingerly touching of the yard: then hugged it: then straddled it. Soon, running up the ratlines and prancing on the yard (as if it were a mere table-top) had no further thrill for John or Emily either. (To go out on the yard was not allowed.)

But when the ratlines had palled, the most lasting joy undoubtedly lay in that network of foot-ropes and chains and stays which spreads out under and on each side of the bowsprit. Here, familiarity only bred content. Here, in fine weather, one could climb or be still: stand, sit, hang, swing, or lie: now this end up, now that: and all with the cream of the blue sea being whipt up for one’s own especial pleasure, almost within touching distance: and the big white wooden lady (Clorinda herself), bearing the whole vessel so lightly on her back, her knees in the hubble-bubble, her cracks almost filled up with so much painting, vaster than any living lady, as a constant and unannoying companion.

In the midst there was a kind of spear, its haft set against the under-side of the bowsprit, its point perpendicularly down towards the water--the dolphin-striker. Here it was that the old monkey (who had the Sore tail) loved to hang, by the mere stub which was all a devouring cancer had left him, chattering to the water. He took no notice of the children, nor they of him: but both parties grew attached to each other, for all that.

--How small the children all looked, on a ship, when you saw them beside the sailors! It was as if they were a different order of beings! Yet they were living creatures just the same, full of promise.

_John_, with his downy, freckled face, and general round energeticalness.

_Emily_, with her huge palm-leaf hat, and colourless cotton frock tight over her minute impish erect body: her thin, almost expressionless face: her dark grey eyes contracted to escape the blaze, yet shining as it were in spite of themselves: and her really beautiful lips, that looked almost as if they were sculptured.

_Margaret Fernandez_, taller (as midgets go: she was just thirteen), with her square white face and tangled hair, her elaboratish clothes.

Her little brother _Harry_, by some throw-back for all the world like a manikin Spaniard.

And the smaller Thorntons: _Edward_, mouse-coloured, with a general mousy (but pleasing) expression: _Rachel_, with tight short gold curls and a fat pink face (John’s colouring watered down): and last of all _Laura_, a queer mite of three with heavy dark eyebrows, and blue eyes, a big head-top and a receding chin--as if the Procreative Spirit was getting a little hysterical by the time it reached her. A silver-age conception, Laura’s, decidedly.

When the Norther blew itself out, it soon fell away almost dead calm. The morning they finally rounded Cape San Antonio was hot, blazing hot. But it is never stuffy at sea: there is only this disadvantage, that while on land a shady hat protects you from the sun, at sea nothing can protect you from that second sun which is mirrored upwards from the water, strikes under all defences, and burns the unseasoned skin from all your under-sides. Poor John! His throat and chin were a blistered red.

From the point itself there is a whitish bank in two fathoms, bowed from north to north-east. The outer side is clean and steep-to, and in fine weather one can steer along it by eye. It ends in Black Key, a rock standing out of the water like a ship’s hull. Beyond that lies a channel, very foul and difficult to navigate: and beyond that again the Coloradoes Reef begins, the first of a long chain of reefs following the coast in a north-easterly direction as far as Honde Bay, two-thirds the way to Havana. Within the reefs lies the intricate Canal de Guaniguanico, of which this channel is the westernmost outlet, with its own rather dubious little ports. But ocean traffic, needless to say, shuns the whole box of tricks: and the _Clorinda_ advisedly stood well away to the northward, keeping her course at a gentle amble for the open Atlantic.

John was sitting outside the galley with the sailor called Curtis, who was instructing him in the neat mystery of a Turk’s-head. Young Henry Marpole was steering. Emily was messing around--not talking, just being by him.

As for the other sailors, they were all congregated in a ring, up in the bows, so that one saw nothing but their backs. But every now and then a general guffaw, and a sudden surging of the whole group, showed they were up to something or other.

John presently tiptoed forward, to see what it might be. He thrust his bullet-head among their legs, and worked his way in till he had as good a view as the earliest comer.

He found they had got the old monkey, and were filling him up with rum. First they gave him biscuit soaked in it: then they dipped rags in a pannikin of the stuff, and squeezed them into his mouth. Then they tried to make him drink direct: but that he would not do--it only wasted a lot of spirit.

John felt a vague horror at all this: though of course he did not guess the purpose behind it.

The poor brute shivered and chattered, rolled his eyes, spluttered. I suppose it must have been an excruciatingly funny sight. Every now and then he would seem altogether overcome by the spirit. Then one of them would lay him on the top of an old beef barrel--but hey presto, he would be up like lightning, trying to streak through the air over their heads. But he was no bird: they caught him each time, and set to work to dope him again.

As for John, he could no more have left the scene now than Jacko the monkey could.

It was astonishing what a lot of spirit the wizened little brute could absorb. He was drunk, of course: hopelessly, blindly, madly drunk. But he was not paralytic, not even somnolent: and it seemed as if nothing could overcome him. So at last they gave up the attempt. They fetched a wooden box, and cut a notch in the edge. Then they put him on the barrel-top, and clapped the box over him, and after much manœuvring his gangrenous tail was made to come out through the notch. Anaesthetised or not, the operation on him was to proceed. John stared, transfixed, at that obscene wriggling stump which was all one could see of the animal: and out of the corner of his eye he could see at the same time the uproarious operators, the tar-stained knife.

But the moment the blade touched flesh, with an awful screech the mommet contrived to fling off his cage--leapt on the surgeon’s head--leapt from there high in the air--caught the forestay--and in a twinkling was away and up high in the fore-rigging.

Then began the hue and cry. Sixteen men flinging about in lofty acrobatics, all to catch one poor old drunk monkey. For he was drunk as a lord, and sick as a cat. His course varied between wild and hair-raising leaps (a sort of inspired gymnastics), and doleful incompetent reelings on a taut rope which threatened at every moment to catapult him into the sea. But even so they could never quite catch him.

No wonder that all the children, now, stood open-mouthed and open-eyed on the deck beneath in the sun till their necks nearly broke--_such_ a Free Fun Fair and Circus!

And no wonder that on that passenger-schooner which Marpole, before going below, had sighted drifting towards them from the direction of the Black Key channel, the ladies had left the shade of the awning and were crowding at the rail, parasols twirling, lorgnettes and opera-glasses in action, all twittering like a cage of linnets. Just too far off to distinguish the tiny quarry, they might well have wondered what sort of a bedlam-vessel of sea-acrobats the light easterly air was bearing them down upon.

They were so interested that presently a boat was hoisted out, and the ladies--and some gentlemen as well--crowded into it.

Poor little Jacko missed his hold at last: fell plump on the deck and broke his neck. That was the end of him--and of the hunt too, of course. The aerial ballet was over, in its middle, with no final tableau. The sailors began, in twos and threes, to slide to the deck.

But the visitors were already on board.

That is how the _Clorinda_ really was taken. There was no display of artillery--but then, Captain Marpole could hardly know this, seeing he was below in his bunk at the time. Henry was steering by that sixth sense which only comes into operation when the other five are asleep. The mate and crew had been so intent on what they were doing that the Flying Dutchman himself might have laid alongside, for all they cared.

ii

Indeed, the whole manœuvre was executed so quietly that Captain Marpole never even woke--incredible though this will seem to a seaman. But then, Marpole had begun life as a successful coal-merchant.

The mate and crew were bundled into the fo’c’sle (the Fox-hole, the children thought it was called), and confined there, the scuttle being secured with a couple of nails.

The children themselves were shepherded, as related, into the deck-house, where the chairs, and perfectly useless pieces of old rope, and broken tools, and dried-up paint-pots were kept, without taking alarm. But the door was immediately shut on them. They had to wait for hours and hours before anything else happened--nearly all day, in fact: and they got very bored, and rather cross.

The actual number of the men who had effected the capture cannot have been more than eight or nine, most of them ‘women’ at that, and not armed--at least with any visible weapon. But a second boatload soon followed them from the schooner. These, for form’s sake, were armed with muskets. But there was no possible resistance to fear. Two long nails through the scuttle can secure any number of men pretty effectually.

With this second boatload came both the captain and the mate. The former was a clumsy great fellow, with a sad, silly face. He was bulky; yet so ill-proportioned one got no impression of power. He was modestly dressed in a drab shore-going suit: he was newly shaven, and his sparse hair was pomaded so that it lay in a few dark ribbons across his baldish head-top. But all this shore-decency of appearance only accentuated his big splodgy brown hands, stained and scarred and corned with his calling. Moreover, instead of boots he wore a pair of gigantic heel-less slippers in the Moorish manner, which he must have sliced with a knife out of some pair of dead sea-boots. Even his great spreading feet could hardly keep them on, so that he was obliged to walk at the slowest of shuffles, flop-flop along the deck. He stooped, as if always afraid of banging his head on something; and carried the backs of his hands forward, like an orang-outang.

Meanwhile the men set to work methodically but very quietly to remove the wedges that held the battens of the hatches, getting ready to haul up the cargo.

Their leader took several turns up and down the deck before he seemed able to make up his mind to the interview: then lowered himself into Marpole’s cabin, followed by his mate.

This mate was a small man: very fair, and intelligent-looking beside his chief. He was almost dapper, in a quiet way, in his dress.

They found Captain Marpole even now only half awake: and the stranger stood for a moment in silence, nervously twiddling his cap in his hands. When he spoke at last, it was with a soft German accent:

‘Excuse me,’ he began, ‘but would you have the goodness to lend me a few stores?’

Captain Marpole stared in astonishment, first at him and then at the much be-painted faces of the ‘ladies’ pressed against his cabin skylight.

‘Who the devil are you?’ he contrived to ask at last.

‘I hold a commission in the Columbian navy,’ the stranger explained: ‘and I am in need of a few stores.’

(Meanwhile his men had the hatches off, and were preparing to help themselves to everything in the ship.)

Marpole looked him up and down. It was barely conceivable that even the Columbian navy should have such a figure of an officer. Then his eye wandered back to the skylight:

‘If you call yourself a man-of-war, sir, who in Heaven’s name are _those_?’ As he pointed, the smirking faces hastily retreated.

The stranger blushed.

‘They are rather difficult to explain,’ he admitted ingenuously.

‘If you had said _Turkish_ navy, that would have been more reasonable-sounding!’ said Marpole.

But the stranger did not seem to take the joke. He stood, silent, in a characteristic attitude: rocking himself from foot to foot, and rubbing his cheek on his shoulder.

Suddenly Marpole’s ear caught the muffled racketing forward. Almost at the same time a bump that shivered the whole barque told that the schooner had been laid alongside.

‘What’s that?’ he exclaimed. ‘Is there some one in my hold?’

‘Stores ...’ mumbled the stranger.

Marpole up to now had lain growling in his bunk like a dog in its kennel. Now for the first time realising that something serious was afoot he flung himself out and made for the companion-way. The little silent fair man tripped him up, and he fell against the table.

‘You had much better stay here, yes?’ said the big man. ‘My fellows shall keep a tally, you shall be paid in full for everything we take.’

The eyes of the marine coal-merchant gleamed momentarily:

‘You’ll have to pay for this outrage to a pretty tune!’ he growled.

‘I will pay you,’ said the stranger, with a sudden magnificence in his voice, ‘at the very least five thousand pounds!’

Marpole stared in astonishment.

‘I will write you an order on the Columbian government for that amount,’ the other went on.

Marpole thumped the table, almost speechless:

‘D’you think I believe that cock-and-bull story?’ he thundered.

Captain Jonsen made no protest.

‘Do you realise that you are technically guilty of _piracy_, making a forced requisition on a British ship like this, even if you pay every farthing?’

Still Jonsen made no reply: though the bored expression of his mate was lit up for a moment by a smile.

‘You’ll pay me in _cash_!’ Marpole concluded. Then he went off on a fresh tack: ‘Though how the devil you got on board without being called beats me!--Where’s my mate?’

Jonsen began in a toneless voice, as if by rote: ‘I will write you an order for five thousand pounds: three thousand for the stores, and two thousand you will give me in money.’

‘We know you’ve got specie on board,’ interjected the little fair mate, speaking for the first time.

‘Our information is certain!’ declared Jonsen.

Marpole at last went white and began to sweat. It took even Fear an extraordinarily long time to penetrate his thick skull. But he denied that he had any treasure on board.

‘Is that your answer?’ said Jonsen. He drew a heavy pistol from his side pocket. ‘If you do not tell us the truth, your life shall pay the forfeit.’ His voice was peculiarly gentle, and mechanical, as if he did not attach much meaning to what he said. ‘Do not expect mercy, for this is my profession, and in it I am inured to blood.’

A frightful squawking from the deck above told Marpole that his chickens were being moved to new quarters.

In an agony of feeling Marpole told him that he had a wife and children, who would be left destitute if his life was taken.

Jonsen, with rather a perplexed look on his face, put the gun back in his pocket, and the two of them began to search for themselves, at the same time stripping the saloon and cabins of everything they contained: firearms, wearing apparel, the bedclothes, and even (as Marpole with a rare touch of accuracy mentioned in his report) the bell-pulls.

Overhead there was a continuous bumping: the rolling of casks, cases, etc.

‘Remember,’ Jonsen went on over his shoulder while he searched, ‘money cannot recall life, nor in the least avail you when you are dead. If you regard your life in the least, at once acquaint me with the hiding-place, and your life shall be safe.’

Marpole’s only reply was again to invoke the thought of his wife and children (he was, as a matter of fact, a widower: and his only relative, a niece, would be the better off by his death to the tune of some ten thousand pounds).

But this reiteration seemed to give the mate an idea: and he began to talk to his chief rapidly in a language Marpole had never even heard. For a moment a curious glint came into Jonsen’s eye: but soon he was chuckling in the sentimentalest manner, and rubbing his hands.

The mate went on deck to prepare things.

Marpole had no inkling of what was afoot. The mate went on deck to prepare his plan, whatever it was: and Jonsen busied himself with a last futile search for the hiding-place, in silence.

Presently the mate shouted down to him, and he ordered Marpole on deck.

Poor Marpole groaned. Unloading cargo is inclined to be a messy business anyway: but these visitors had been none too careful. There is no smell in the world worse than when molasses and bilge-water marry: now it was let loose like ten thousand devils. His heart was almost broken when he saw the havoc that had been made with the cargo: broken cases, casks, bottles, all about the deck: everything in the greatest confusion: tarpaulins cut to pieces: hatches broken.

From the deck-house came the piercing voice of Laura:

‘_I want to come out!_’

The Spanish ladies seemed to have returned to the schooner. His own men were shut up in the fo’c’sle. It was obvious where all the children were, for Laura was not the only vociferator. But the only persons to be seen were six members of the visiting crew, who stood in a line, facing the deck-house, a musket apiece.

It was the little mate who now took charge of the situation:

‘Where is your specie hid, Captain?’

The musketeers having their backs to him, ‘Go to the Devil!’ replied Marpole.

A startling volley rang out: six neat holes were punctured in the top of the deck-house.

‘Hi! Steady there, what are you doing?’ John cried out indignantly from within.

‘If you refuse to tell us, next time their aim will be a foot lower.’

‘You fiends!’ cried Marpole.

‘Will you tell me?’

‘_No!_’

‘_Fire!_’

The second row of holes can only have missed the taller children by a few inches.

There was a moment’s silence: then a sudden wild shriek from within the deck-house. It was so terrified a sound not their own mothers could have told which throat it came from. One only, though.

The stranger-captain had been slouching about in an agitated way: but at that shriek he turned on Marpole, his face purple with a sudden fury:

‘_Now_ will you say?’

But Marpole was now completely master of himself. He did not hesitate:

‘NO!’

‘Next time he gives the order it will be to shoot right through their little bodies!’

So that was what Marpole had meant in his letter by ‘_every possible threat which villainy could devise_’! But even by this he was not to be daunted:

‘No, I tell you!’

Heroic obstinacy! But instead of giving the fatal order, Jonsen lifted a paw like a bear’s, and banged Marpole’s jaw with it. The latter fell to the deck, stunned.

It was then they took the children out of the deck-house.

They were not really much frightened; except Margaret, who did seem to be taking it all to heart rather. Being shot at is so unlike what one expects it to be that one can hardly connect the two ideas enough to have the appropriate emotions, the first few times. It is not half so startling as some one jumping out on you with a ‘_Boo!_’ in the dark, for instance. The boys were crying a little: the girls were hot and cross and hungry.

‘What were you doing?’ Rachel asked brightly of one of the firing-party.

But only the captain and the mate could speak English. The latter, ignoring Rachel’s question, explained that they were all to go on board the schooner--‘to have some supper,’ he said.

He had all a sailor’s reassuring charm of manner. So under the charge of two Spanish seamen they were helped over the bulwarks onto the smaller vessel, which was just casting off.

There the strange sailors broke open a whole case of crystallised fruits, on which they might turn the edge of their long appetites as much as they would.

* * * * *

When poor stunned Captain Marpole came to his senses, it was to find himself tied to the mainmast. Several handfuls of shavings and splintered wood were piled round his feet, and Jonsen was sprinkling them plentifully with gun-powder--though not perhaps enough, it is true, to ‘blow up the ship and all in it.’

The small fair mate stood at hand in the gathering dusk with a lighted torch, ready to fire the pyre.

What could a man do in such straits? At that dreadful moment the gallant old fellow had to admit that he was beaten at last. He told them where his freight-money--some £900--was hidden: and they let him go.

Just as the darkness closed in, the last of the pirates returned to their ship. Not a sound was to be heard of the children: but Marpole guessed that they had been taken there too.

Before releasing his crew he lit a lantern and began a sort of inventory of what was gone. It was heart-breaking enough: besides the cargo, all his spare sails, cordage, provisions, guns, paint, powder: all his wearing apparel, and that of his mate: all nautical instruments gone, cabin stores--the saloon in fact gutted of everything, not even a knife or spoon left, tea or sugar, nor a second shirt to his back left. Only the children’s luggage was left untouched: and the turtles. Their melancholy sighing was the sole sound to be heard.

But it was almost as heart-breaking to see what the pirates had _left_: anything damaged, such worn-out and useless gear as he had been only waiting for some ‘storm’ to wash overboard--not one of these eyesores was missing.