Chapter XXXIV: The Mangrove Creek

I reached the garrison in time for guard-mounting, and the storm sufficiently explained the cause of my absence from quarters. I had ample time for thought during the monotony of that day's duty, when with a guard of twenty rank and file, including my comrade Tom Telfer (now a corporal), I had charge of various stores, powder, shot and live shells, which a gang of woolly-headed negroes were hoisting into the launch of H.M.'s frigate _Adder_, which was still anchored ahead of the leeward line, about a mile off in the bay, where all the fleet were preparing for the forthcoming attack upon the isle of Martinique.

During this important duty, which we superintended under a sunshine so hot that the barrels and bayonets of our firelocks actually grew warm in our hands, my mind never for a moment ceased reverting to the pretty villa of Boscobelle, and the beautiful young Frenchwoman who dwelt in seclusion there.

Wearily I counted the hours till I could return.

Strict orders had been issued against permitting liquor to be given to soldiers on duty, but so much was I abstracted from all sublunary matters by the fair image of Eulalie de Rouvigny, and the whole tenor of my late adventure, that I was quite oblivious of the fact that some of my comrades were industriously "sucking the monkey," through the kind ministrations of two or three pretty mulatto girls. This monkey, was a cocoanut-shell filled with coarse rum, to be sucked at the end through the orifice, which represents the mouth of an ape. A discovery of this neglect might have caused me, in those days, to lose the three stripes from my arm, and to gain three hundred elsewhere, as intoxication when on duty, and more especially on foreign service, is a most serious military crime, and severely was it visited in those old times of the cat and halberds.

I could not conceal from myself, that ruin, misfortune, and the Revolution had combined to make Madame de Rouvigny somewhat of a philosopher. Then, circumstanced as we were,--she married to a man whom she hated, and might never see,--an exile from a country to which she could never return; I, a Scots Fusilier, bound on a desperate service, in a torrid clime of fever and death. What secret impulse made me yield to the folly of being attracted or lured into an amour with her? What end could it serve?

I could not determine this. I was only eighteen; and at that age one does not scrutinize too closely. It may be, that I was solely actuated by the resolution to enjoy life while it lasted; as the volunteer of a forlorn hope, sells his kit and blanket, or spends his last sixpence in roistering at the sutler's tent, lest it should become the prey of the plunderer who overhauls his corpse, or the pioneer who buries it.

There was no enthusiasm in my heart for Eulalie, because I could not deem her that which every lover deems his divinity to be,--perfection. I pitied her friendless condition; her beauty charmed and her manner won me. That was all. I could scarcely love, in the purest sense of the term, a woman who had yielded, even under terror of death, to a wretch, such as she had portrayed Thibaud de Rouvigny to be. Any regard I felt for her could not be lasting; and yet, so inconsistent is our nature, that I departed next day to visit her, quoting, as I left the barracks, the words of Rochefoucault, who says tritely, somewhere, "There are few people who are not ashamed of having loved one another _when that love ceases_;" and with this cold aphorism in my heart, I hastened along the road to Boscobelle.

I found madame in her pretty little drawing-room: at the sight of her all scruples vanished, and I was vanquished by the charm of her presence and her beauty.

Previous to reaching the villa there occurred an incident which, though it seemed almost trivial at that time, was connected with some very important events.

The heat of the morning was oppressive; repeatedly I fanned my face with my forage-cap or the leaves of the large plants that grew by the highway. The cool umbrageous foliage of a thicket lured me to halt, to fling off my shoulder-belt and sword, and to lie for a time under the shadow of its intertwisted branches. This thicket clothed the steep sides of a gully, at the bottom of which rippled a long inlet, or arm of the sea. It was a lonely spot, haunted only by monkeys that leaped from tree to tree, and by tortoises that crawled upon the shelves of weedy rocks far down below me. The steep and volcanic rifts were covered by wild gourd-vines and those Spanish lemon-trees which usually grow among rocks and stone. Arching over this watery avenue, the depth of which made it seem of inky hue, for the leaves excluded the sky, were the giant date-trees, with their fruit in spiral clusters, the pale-green cedar, the golden orange, and the calibash-tree, with its enormous gourds of the brightest yellow.

I had not been many minutes in this sequestered and luxuriant place before the sounds of voices and of oars fell upon my ear, and then a long, low, half-decked boat, built like an Indian piragua, with her mast, yard, and sail laid flat, shot into the mangrove creek. Three men who were in her laid their oars on board, and by their hands urged their craft along under the luxuriant foliage and mangroves which almost concealed the water whereon they floated, and the long, giant, and wonderful plants that grew upward from the oozy bottom, and were brushed by the keel as it cleft their wavy masses. As these three men passed below me, I could perceive that one was an old negro, the other was attired like a French priest, in a long black coat and shovel hat. The third, who was well armed with pistols and cutlass, notwithstanding a black beard, and the addition of a pair of rings in his ears, I could recognize by his villanous face, his brawny, bull-shaped neck, and his strange oaths, which stirred a terrible cord in memory, to be Dick Knuckleduster.

The Indian suddenly gave the piragua a lurch that nearly capsized it.

"Halloo, Quashi, Snowball, or whatever you call yourself!" bellowed Dick, "d----n your stupid optics! do you mean to send us all to kingdom-come in this stinking hole, all bilge and green leaves?"

"_Tonnerre de Ciel!_" added the priest fiercely; "mind what you are about, Monsieur Benoit le Noir, or I'll break every bone in your black skin!"

The priest I had no doubt was a French emigrant, but his language made me as doubtful of his sanctity as of his object, which was evidently a secret one, or why all this studious concealment?

"I do right, massa," urged the old negro.

"How should you know whether you do right or not?" growled the Frenchman; "what the devil are you?"

"Me your slave, massa," was the submissive and then common reply.

This strangely assorted trio, whose purpose I could not divine, passed close to me, or at least about twenty feet below my place of concealment; and, assisted by the weeds and mangroves which they grasped, dragged their boat further up this watery gulley or chasm in the rock.

Having no desire to renew my acquaintance with Mr. Knuckleduster, who, no doubt, had deserted from one of our ships in the bay, as he and his two companions disappeared under the dwarf mangroves, I sprang up the bank, reached the highway, and hastened to the villa of Madame de Rouvigny.