Chapter XIII: Dreams

"For thoughts, like waves that glide by night,
Are stillest when they shine."
--OLD SONG.

"Rouse up, Richard! Rouse up, man! An you give way like this, you'll soon be taking the ship-fever and dying. 'Tis no use to wilfully hasten the end," said Peter Ruffin to the apathetic man beside him.

But Richard sat staring over the waters, saying only in a dogged way, "'Tis no use to retard it."

"Ay, but it is; something may happen--Washington may drive Clinton from New York--"

"He cannot, for he hath not the force."

"--Or we may escape."

Richard glanced around the deck where guards, armed to their teeth, trod in ceaseless vigil, and then looked away to the shore, where a few cabins marked the station of the shore patrol who took up the watch where the ship guard left off, thus making assurance doubly sure.

"With the sea and a double guard against us, the chance is not worth the counting."

"A resolute man could swim ashore from here."

"Methinks he could most easily, especially with the tide in his favour; but if he eludes the watch here, the patrol yonder will shoot him like a rat when he crawls out of the water. No, Peter, I have gone over it all in my mind, calculated the method of reaching the water, the length of the swim, and the best place to land. I have even tried to get speech with Dame Grant when she comes with her wares, to see if she could not be bribed to aid me; but the warden never takes his eyes from her until her sales are over and her boat ready to start. She has a solemnly sour face, but mayhap a gold piece would soften her heart to mercy. It was for this that I have hoarded Colborn's gold."

"I, too, thought of the bumboat woman, but gave up hope of aid from her, seeing how she is watched. 'Twere as much as her life is worth to give us the smallest assistance," answered Peter.

"Yes, we are cut off from every chance, condemned--doomed--and seeing this, I have given up hope."

"I am some twenty years your senior, Richard, and I say to you that a sane man never ceases to hope."

"Then mayhap I am insane--sometimes I think it may be so. Surely, it was the arch-fiend himself who put it into the hearts of the English to turn these disease-infected hulks into prisons; no mere mortal mind could have in itself conceived such a thought. The fever or the vermin--which were worse, 'twere hard to say. To rot here inch by inch, and the fight going on outside! God, but 'tis hard!"

"Hist! the guard is looking at you suspiciously. 'Tis no use getting his ill-will; let us talk of something else." And when the sentinel passed slowly in front of them, the older man was talking of his boy who had died in childhood, and the younger one had dropped his head again upon his breast and sat in moody silence. Thus had life crept on for five weeks, each day of which was a slow-paced agony, each night a long-drawn horror.

Wallabout Bay, where the prison-ships were anchored, cut into the Long Island shore on the north, and was protected from the storms that rocked the outer deep. Most of the prisoners were seamen, but now and then a squad of land captives, for lack of some other place in which to confine them, were sent thither to starve and suffer and wait their turn to die. The wound in Richard's head had healed, thanks to Colborn's salve; but the confinement, together with the scant and rancid food and the foul air in the ship's hold where the nights were passed, was slowly undermining his strength of body and of will. Each morning the inhuman order, "Rebels, turn out your dead!" which the guard called down through the opened hatches, sent a shiver of horror to his very soul; and the feeling was not lessened as he aided in selecting the poor fellows who had died in the night, and saw them sewed into their blankets and rowed away to shallow graves upon the shore. Two of the prisoners were made to act as grave-diggers on these occasions, the guard going merely to superintend.

Twice in the past weeks Richard and Peter had gone in the funeral-boat, and on each occasion thoughts of making a break for liberty had haunted them. But the futility of such an attempt was made apparent by the proximity of the shore patrol, within range of whose guns the graves were dug. The nearest cover was a line of sand-dunes and stunted brush-growth fifty yards up the level beach, before reaching which a man could be pierced by twenty bullets. Regretfully and angrily the two men noted this; and later on had it all doubly impressed upon them by the shooting of a prisoner who, one day, when the grave was half-filled, made the mad attempt to get away. Only one of the two impressed grave-diggers came back in the boat that day, for the other was buried where he fell; and the harshness of the ship-jailers increased toward those who remained.

"Look," said Richard, shuddering, the second time he and Peter were detailed to take a corpse to the sandy burying-ground; "already the waves have opened some of the graves and left the poor fellows but the scantest covering. Before long their bones will whiten to the sun."

"It is a sickening certainty! And all of this you and I might escape if so we would but go back yonder to the warden and take the oath of allegiance to the king, and change these tattered coats for gay uniforms of scarlet," answered Peter.

"True; but like those who have gone before us, we will die in the ship yonder and fester here in the sand first. Between death and English slavery there is a quick choice, and we made it long ago. But promise me, Peter, that if I die first you will ask to come as my sexton, and dig me a grave deep enough to keep me from the sea for at least a little while."

"I will; and you will do a like thing for me. But as I told you the other day, you will go before me, and soon at that, if so you keep up this dreary moping."

But Richard could not bring himself to hope. The absolute helplessness of their position, the powerlessness of action of any sort took from him the ability to reason normally. Everything twisted itself backward to the wretched and relentless present, turn where he would for consolation. And so after the morning tasks of airing blankets and scrubbing decks were performed, he sat all day looking sullenly out over the water, studying the changing moods of the sea, watching the gulls as they flapped past or went soaring upward with the glancing sunlight on their wings. And all this while there was but one clear thought in his mind--Joscelyn. Plainer than the faces about him he saw her features, and above the ship noises and the restless wash of the waves, he heard the sweet accents of her voice. Incessantly he brooded over each memory of her, recalling the chestnut tints of her hair, the blue lights in her eyes, and the rose hues of cheeks and lips. Her beauty had never before appeared to him so great or so much to be desired as now.

"Even behind prison bars I am her lover;" often he said the words to himself, wondering morbidly if Billy carried her the message, and what she said in answer. He would never know, of course, for his career must end yonder in the sand with his unfortunate fellows; but liberty itself would not be sweeter than some token, it mattered not how small, of her sorrow and her favour. How he longed for her, body and soul! Always in fancy he kissed her good night, holding the sweet face between his palms and watching to see the eyes droop under his ardent gaze, and the delicate lips quiver with the passion of his caress. He told himself it was only such fleeting fancies as these that kept him sane. For in these moments she was tender and loving, and she was all his; and the unknown husband--he who would one day claim her in reality when he himself, with his idle dreams, should be dead and gone--he hated with a jealous rage as vital as though the man stood before him in the flesh; and he looked at his fingers with a dull sense of their strangling powers, and longed to feel them tighten over a purpling throat. Peter talked of heaven, of its rest and peace; but how could there be for him either joy or peace, even in Paradise, while another man held Joscelyn in his arms? Often in his cloying misery he tried to make out who this other lover would be; but no one, not even Eustace Singleton, seemed to fill the place. Once, and his heart had been hot with jealousy at the thought, he had imagined that under hers and Eustace's frank friendship there lingered a warmer feeling; but this fancy stood no test of observation, for in no act of Joscelyn's was there a trace of that air, indescribable yet unmistakable, that marks the beginnings of love; and of late months Eustace had a way of looking at Betty that put strange fancies into Richard's head. No, Joscelyn and Eustace were not lovers; it would be some one else, some stranger who would claim all the sweetness of her love. And at the thought the murderous fingers writhed upon each other, and the sweat of agony was on his brow. Then his fancy would take another turn. There was no other lover, there never would be any other; by strength of his love she belonged to him here and would be his through all eternity. In heaven there is no marrying nor giving in marriage, so the Bible said; but surely God would be merciful to him, knowing how he had missed his happiness here.

This was the dream-palace in which he dwelt, while he gazed vacantly over the sunlit sea and waited to be sewed into his blanket and carried across to the white sands by those who, in their turn, one after another, should follow to the same end.

And then, one morning when August was well on the wane, something happened that broke the spell of deadening despair that held him in its grasp.