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 aboardThe British Queenworked 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 Surgeonand 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:
“AndMr.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. ForThe British Queenand 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 tokeep 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 ofThe British Queeninto 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 boardThe 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 Queencanted 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 brigMaggie o’ Muirheadand theSt.Domingo schooner overhauled the red-hot hulk ofThe British Queen.
The Captain and a trooper were rescued, living, from her mizzen channels, the perishing castaways in the boatwere saved. Sailors are superstitious. Not being desirous of a mutiny in his forecastle, the master of theMaggieyielded 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 theMaggiereached 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 theMaggie: “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 theMaggie o’ Muirhead’ssecond 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 backmyboy? 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 footand 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 theSt.Domingo schooner. One would do well not to grumble at one’s luck, reflected Joshua Horrotian.