CHAPTER XXII.
“This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,And much, much different from the man he was;But till this afternoon, his passionNe’er brake into extremity of rage.”Comedy of Errors.
“This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,And much, much different from the man he was;But till this afternoon, his passionNe’er brake into extremity of rage.”Comedy of Errors.
“This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,And much, much different from the man he was;But till this afternoon, his passionNe’er brake into extremity of rage.”Comedy of Errors.
“This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,
And much, much different from the man he was;
But till this afternoon, his passion
Ne’er brake into extremity of rage.”
Comedy of Errors.
The night was far advanced, when Appadocca undertook to carry into execution, the design which he had formed of leaving the Rancha. He cautiously went out of the apartment which he occupied, and found no difficulty in opening the carelessly fastened door of the house. He went out softly, and when he had got outside, he had to stand still for a moment, in order to have recourse to his memory to help him to form some sort of idea of the position in which he found himself: such was the excessive darkness. Had he previously petitioned nature for a night, which might effectually shroud him from any one that might pursue him, she could not have sent one that was more dark or dismal. The blackness of the wilds, heightened a thousand-foldthat of the night, which itself required no augmentation. Objects seemed heaped together in one pitchy chaos, and nature seemed to sleep heavily under a canopy of gloom. The fire flies that flew low and lonely on the level Savannahs, seemed to show their light, merely to point out the surrounding darkness. In the same proportion with this thick gloom was the silence of the hour, which permitted the faintest sounds to be heard. At long intervals the brief but sonorous cry of the owl, as it signaled to its mate, would fall upon the ear; or there might be heard the hoarse and unearthly shriek of the night raven, as it vented its rage at the falling of some fruit, which it carried in its beak; or, perhaps, the low sound of some tethered and invisible horse that cropped the short grass hard by.
Incapable of seeing one foot before him, Appadocca could not proceed. He remembered well where he was, but the darkness confounded his calculation, and he knew not in what direction to move.
“The pen lies there,” he said, “no there—no there,” and vainly pointed where he could not see his own hand before him.
In this dilemma he bethought him of the stars: full of hope he quickly looked up: the heavens were as dark as the earth, not a star was to be seen.
“Shall I stay where I am,” he inquired of himself, “until the morning star shows itself? this gloom will not, it cannot last!” No there might be a chance of his being discovered, and who knew the inconveniences, that such a circumstance would bring.
“The wind—there is no wind.”
Appadocca wet the tip of his index finger with his saliva and turned it round.
“Ha! there is a breath,” he said, as he felt the chill, on the tip of the moistened finger. “The wind,” he argued, “blows at this hour in these regions, at a point varying from north-east to east. Following such a course, I shall assuredly open on the ocean: good.”
Appadocca now began to move along, keeping his index finger straight before him, and taking care to moisten it from time to time. He proceeded under the pilotage of his sense of feeling, and heard the drowsy dialogue of some Llaneros, as they lazily turned in their hammocks, in some neighbouring pen, and asked each other, if he did not hear some one walking.
The soft breeze still gently blew, and afforded the same means of directing himself. He tumbled here and there into the deep farrows which the heavy rains had made. The severe shocks and bruises which he received, as he fell into those holes, were quite sufficientto try the endurance of a strong man, much less that of one who was but just recovering from illness. Fortunately the point to be attained was not far off, and Appadocca, after having groped his way for an hour, heard the low moaning of the ocean before him. He approached as much as he thought he could with prudence, for he conjectured that the ground would be the more broken and torn, as it verged nearer toward the sea; and, finally, sat down on the grass to await the approach of morning.
The gray light which temporarily chases away darkness immediately before the advent of morning, to leave a moment afterward the gloom which it dispelled for a time, came. Careful not to lose one favourable moment, Appadocca immediately got up, and advanced in the direction in which the sea was rolling. Again, however, he was obliged to suspend his progress, for darkness again returned.
At the approach of the real light Appadocca felt his sensibility deeply moved by the view which opened before him. The great Atlantic rolled heavily below, and it was only where the horizon limited vision that its silently rising mountains would appear as if they were at last levelled into easy quietness. Its moving volumes were as yet undisturbed by the wind, and the transparenthaze that still floated over its surface, imparted an air of repose that well befitted the hour. The mountain-peaks of the little islands that lined the shore, rose forth to contrast the wild waste of waters, and then came the high land on which he stood, that verged to the north-west into capacious bays and havens, and pointed out towards the east, and advanced high and lofty like a battalion of fearless soldiers, against the billows that lashed them, and that had likely lashed them long long before they bore the adventurous Columbus to its foot. At his back, also, lay the level and wide-spreading Savannahs, where, too, only the horizon bourned the sight.
Solitary and alone in such a situation, Appadocca could not refuse to his heart the pleasure of admiring such a scene; and, although prudence, not to say safety, pressed him to hie away from the Rancha, he could not resist the temptation of resting and feasting his eyes upon that which was before and around him.
Rousing himself, however, from the influence of this feeling, he endeavoured, and succeeded in descending the cliffs, and resolved to wait until fortune, or, to use his own expression, destiny, should send in his way, one of the numerous little vessels that trade along that coast.
That day passed, and destiny—the broken reed—was not kind enough to send a vessel his way. Worn out with anxiety, and weakened by the want of food, he drew himself up in the chasm of a rock, with the intention of resting himself there in the best way that his unbroken fast, and the uninviting accommodation would permit.
Despite these two unfavourable circumstances, he fell into a deep sleep, and had been under its influences for some hours, when he was startled by a most terrifying noise. It seemed that numbers of savage animals were assembled immediately above his head, and were designedly giving vent in one unbroken roar to their dismal and fearful howlings, that rose above the measured breakings of the billows below.
“What can this be,” said Appadocca to himself, as he awoke; “what now comes to break this slumber that weans me from the sense of hunger?” So saying, he jumped up and walked a little way from the foot of the cave, across the beach, and looked up. He perceived the dark outlines of some large animals, that were moving about restlessly on the ridge, and were howling in the manner we have described.
“Ha!” he exclaimed, “shall I have escaped from the scaffold, the waves of the Atlantic ocean, and fromthe jaws of the sharks that fill the bocas, to be, at last, ignominiously devoured by wild beasts; by Heaven, then, whatsoever you be, if you attack me, I warn you, you will attack one that is prepared for you, and one who is ready, at this moment, to make any one, or any thing, bear a heavy amount of chastisement.”
This was spoken in a resolute and even fierce and over-confident tone. The speaker seemed impatient.
There has not been, perhaps, a single philosopher since the human race began, to ruminate on rules and plans of human excellence, who can be said to have entirely controlled the emotion of anger. All our other feelings seem to give way, and yield to the discipline of a well-watched life, and to the strong volition of our reason, but that passion alone still remains uncontrollable; smothered it may be for a time, it is true, but it is liable on the very first occasion, to be fiercely kindled. It seems to be so intimately connected, although negatively with the pleasures of the mind and body, and consequently with the gratification of the actual cultivation of philosophy itself, that any derangement of any of these things acts in producing the feeling which human perfection is too weak to avoid.
Notwithstanding his cynicism, Appadocca was irritated by the numberless difficulties that fell to his lot to surmount.
‘But a feather breaks the loaded camel’s back’: he had undergone privations, borne sufferings, staked life, happiness—all that was dear and solacing to man—on the accomplishment of a design; after exerting himself to an extent that such as he, only, could exert themselves; after sacrificing the happiness that a lovely and angelic being was willing to confer, he was, at the eleventh hour, of his suffering, when hope began to beam again, now exposed to be devoured by vile unreasonable creatures.
These reflections might have been made on another occasion, without endangering the temper of the person who made them. But Appadocca was now almost maddened by fatigue and hunger. Famine makes the most steady violent, and human nature has already a sufficiently hard duty to contain itself, even when starvation is not present to gall it into rage.
In this mood he stood boldly on the shore, looking up at the wild beasts, with his chest heaving highly and quickly, and apparently desiring that they should rush upon him at once, and afford a but to his fury, and put an end to his unsweetened existence. His wishes were partly fulfilled.
The animals rushed to and fro and seemed to be looking for a footing to descend the crag; but their instinct apparently did not deem it sufficiently securefor that purpose, for they drew back and howled as if disappointed of their prey.
“Fools,” cried Appadocca, addressing them with more rage than reason, “go further down the ridge if you would have me to feast upon.”
One of the animals, bolder than the others, went as far forward as possible, and seemed to have found a means of descending, but as the creature endeavoured to rest the weight of its body on the projection, on which it had laid one of its paws, it gave way. Its balance was lost and headlong it tumbled down the precipice. It had no sooner reached the ground, than Appadocca, wild as the animals themselves, threw himself upon it and buried his thumb and finger into its neck.
“Now you must either kill me, or I shall kill you, vile creature that assails me, as if mankind could not inflict sufficient injury without your coming from your native wilds and forests to aid them. Die, by Heaven! or I shall”—saying this, he contracted his muscles as tightly as the sinews of a convulsive man.
The animal lay for awhile stunned by the fall; but as soon as the blood commenced to circulate again, it felt the pressure on its wind-pipe, and began to kick violently.
“Kick your spirit away, vile brute, I shall not budge,” cried Appadocca, now half mad with fury.
On its legs the creature stood, and shook its head and plunged, and away it went with Appadocca still clutching its wind-pipe with the grasp of the dying crocodile. The animal staggered a few paces and fell heavily to the ground, strangled to death.
Appadocca got up from the ground to which he had been borne by the beast in its fall, and walked round his prey in triumph.
“Whatever you are,” said he, “provided you are flesh and blood, I shall have a meal of you.”
He groped about among the small stones that strewed the upper part of the beach, and found what he seemed to have been searching for, a flint. He dashed it against a larger one and with the sharp pieces of it he began to cut through the hide of the animal that he had killed. He then succeeded in cutting a large portion of the still quivering flesh, and eat it.
What will not famine relish? Oh! hunger, that eternally tells us of our lowliness. Hunger levels. Hunger brings down the highest and proudest individuals to the standard of the meanest creature, whose instinct is to eat, whose life is concentrated in devouring, and whose death comes by over-feeding.
After Appadocca had fed upon the reeking flesh of his victim, he seemed recalled to himself: the madness of famine was past. He now looked upon the carcass before him with the indifference that formed the greater part of his nature, and the faint glimmerings of the fact that he had defied that beast which was now before him, and had engaged it in mortal combat, disgusted him: he contemned himself, too, when he recollected a little, the vain boastful and undignified language that he had held, and bent his steps in much sadness towards the same crevice where he had slept away the first part of the night. The other animals had fled after the fall of the one we have mentioned, and the stillness of the night was, as before, broken upon only by the moans of the ocean.
The next morning revealed to Appadocca the extent of the danger that he had escaped the night before. The animal was discovered to be one of those American tigers or jaguars, which pervade the plains of South America, and whose hunger has not unfrequently surmounted their instinctive cowardice so far as to bring them to the very houses of the Rancheros. The huge and powerful jaws of the animal, in which his bones could have been ground to pieces, attracted the attention of Appadocca; and when he observed the woundon the animal—the rude incision that he had made with the flint, and recollected the bloody meal that he had made of its flesh, he shuddered in disgust.
It was now that, withdrawing his eyes from the jaguar, he perceived at a distance a small craft tossing about on the heavy billows. He nimbly climbed the eminence to have a better view of what he feared his fancy may have too flatteringly pictured to him. It was in reality a smallfalluchathat was labouring on the heavy seas. Her course was under the land, but on the reach she was edging sea-ward. Alarmed at this appearance, he came down the cliff and ran along the beach towards the little vessel. Having got nearly opposite, he halloed as loudly as he could. He was not heard; again he cried, but with as little success as before.
“Am I destined again to meet with other misfortunes?” he muttered, calmly. “Am I destined to be left to perish on this unfrequented shore! Oh my father! how many events seem to arise to befriend you. Were I not sufficiently grounded in my belief, I would be almost tempted to believe that destiny, or Providence, or something else, exerted itself to shield you from your merited chastisement. But avaunt, vain, and stupid thought, the fatalities that have befallen thee, Emmanuel Appadocca, are only the acting of one of the grandlaws by which yon sun stands where it is, while the earth wheels around it; or by which thou thyself throttled the huge beast last night. Dost thou not see that the distance is too far for thy voice to reach? Providence has instruments enough among his creatures, he does not interfere with our little concerns.”
Muttering this, Appadocca climbed the heights, took off the jacket with which the hospitable Ranchero had provided him, and waved it in the air.
The mariners on board thefalluchaheld their oars in mid-air.
“They have seen me,” said Appadocca, and waved the jacket again.
Thefalluchahad discovered the signal.
Casting away the jacket, Appadocca threw himself at once from an overhanging rock into the sea, and began to swim boldly out to meet the vessel that was now slowly approaching him.
His eagerness however, was now well nigh proving his death; for miscalculating the distance as well as his strength, he had ventured farther than his fatigues could justify. He was just sinking from exhaustion, when the powerful arm of a sailor from on board thefalluchagrasped him.
He was laid on one of the rower’s benches, where helay insensible. The sailors gravely bent over him, and tried every means for producing re-animation, which was not easily attained, for the Spaniards had no effectual restoratives, and Appadocca was now so overwhelmed, that the healthy elasticity of nature was almost destroyed.
Appadocca proffered his thanks to the four men who formed the crew of that little vessel for their kindness, as soon as he had come to himself.
“Who are you?” asked the captain, after receiving the thanks, “and where do you come from, you do not seem to me to be a seaman?”
“No,” readily answered Appadocca, “I went out from Trinidad in my pleasure boat, together with some friends; we were taken through the bocas by the force of the currents, and having inadvertently approached too near a whirlpool, we were capsized. My friends have been drowned. I am the only one who have survived: I managed to swim ashore, and had to encounter a number of accidents, and a large amount of suffering. I at last saw your vessel.”
“And where are you going,” he demanded in his turn, anxious to divert further inquiry.
“To Trinidad.”
“To which port,” again demanded Appadocca.
“To any one where I may be able to sell my cargo,” answered the captain of thefallucha.
Appadocca yielded himself up to his reflections.
The captain could not withdraw his eyes from the stranger. He looked at him with the peculiar expression of the face, which indicates the absence of entire mental satisfaction, with regard to the reality of the object gazed upon. Still there was nothing in the appearance of Appadocca that could warrant any definite suspicion; but there was a combination in it, nevertheless, which forcibly attracted attention, and inspired a peculiar sort of feeling that probably was akin to awe.
The morning gradually passed. When the strong trade-wind sprang about eleven o’clock, the rowers pulled in their sweeps; the feather-like sails of thefalluchawere hoisted; her head was pointed towards the bocas, and the little vessel began to mount over the waves under her closely boarded sheets. The sailors now carelessly threw themselves at full length on the rowers’ benches; the captain kept his eye on the bows of the little vessel; and Appadocca gazed pensively on the ocean before him. Had any of those who were on board thefalluchacast his eyes towards the land that lay on the lee, he would probably have made out the dim outlines of a female form that was waving a white handkerchief in the air.
At night-fall, thefalluchawas in the chops of the outlets.
Appadocca thus saw himself, by a strange coincidence, in the same place and about the same time that he had jumped from the man-of-war. He gazed on the rolling waves which nature had surrounded with the terrors both of the animated and unanimated portions of creation. For the rocks beneath the impending mountains, together with the waves that looked merciless and unrelenting, raised at first sight the idea of sure destruction: while the huge repulsive sharks that are there to be seen in thousands reminded one of a still more painful and frightful death.
“Nil arduum,” muttered Appadocca, as he gazed on the scene of his daring adventure, “said the Roman poet, and no mortal ever enunciated a greater truth. Here are these overwhelming waves that seem to carry sure destruction on their frowning crest, that roll over an abyss, which if it were dry, would be difficult for man to fathom, that contain within themselves all sorts of huge and destructive monsters, in comparison to the smallest fins of which, man, enterprizing, achieving man, dwindles to the insignificance of the rose-twig by the side of the towering magnolia: still the human race subjugates them even in their fiercest mood,and from their frail fabric of boards and pitch, men make war on their dangerous denizens. Not only that, but I, my very self, at the hour of midnight, when man and beast retire to their habitations, and sleep away darkness and its horrors, I plunged into the terrific waters with only a clay-pot to help me through, and here I am, principally by dint of perseverance, safe and sound. Oh, human race, you know not your power; you know not what you could do if you would only throw away the superstitious fears in which you have enthralled yourselves, and venture to assume a position, which the indefiniteness of your intellect assuredly intends you for. But you must study the law of nature: until you do that, you cannot be fit to achieve great things; as you are, you are living merely like brutes, with this aggravation, that the resources of your reason give you a greater facility of corrupting yourselves, and of becoming cowardly and base, the natural effect of corruption.
“Had I permitted myself,” continued Appadocca, “to be nursed in the lap of an enervating luxury, either mental or bodily, to be surrounded with numbers of base menials, whose care was to prevent even the dew of heaven from falling too heavily upon me, who were to prepare the couches of indolence for me, who were to pamper my body, beyond the power of endurance, andat last transform me into an animal lacking thews and muscles? if I had been tutored to look upon the falling of a picture as a calamity, or been taught to tremble at the ramblings of a mouse; and more, had I permitted my mind to be enslaved by the ignorant notions of fiends, of horrors after death, and of all those things by which the world is made to quake in utter fear, should I have undertaken the execution of a design that would have been made to appear, even more terrible than that death in which its entire failure could have resulted? No, decidedly not.
“And, my good father,” a sardonic smile might have been marked about his lips, “rejoice while you can, amidst vain pomps and ceremonies, surrounded as you are again by smiling and sympathising sycophants, for your time of merry-making will be but short.”
Such were the half-muttered reflections of Appadocca as thefalluchacrossed the bocas.
Having once cleared the straits, the little vessel drew closely under the land on the left side with her sails filled by the cool and gentle land breeze. She was sailing up to Port-of-Spain, among the beautiful little islands with which the reader was made acquainted at the beginning of this narrative. The curling wavelets of the smooth gulf broke on the sharp prow of the fast-sailingfallucha, and kept up a soothing music that invited to repose. The rustling of the trees that grew to the water’s edge, charmed the ear of the mariner; the land breeze wafted far out to sea the sweet perfumes of the wild flowers, which nature has known to create only in the tropics.
The little vessel was doubling a small promontory, and entering the beautiful bay which indents the coast about that part, and is known as “Chaguaradmas Bay,” when the hasty splashes of several oars were suddenly heard, while, from the darkness of the night, the approaching boat was still unseen.
The splashes every moment grew more and more loud and distinct, they sounded more and more near, and suddenly a large boat, pulled by ten armed men, appeared, and the next instant thefalluchawas boarded; as nimbly as antelopes the men jumped into the little craft.
“Que es ese?” the Spaniards simultaneously cried, and each drew his knife.
“Lorenzo,” exclaimed Appadocca, with more warmth than his cynicism could justify, and, in a moment, that officer—for it was he—was affectionately shaking his chief by the hand: they were both much affected.
How sweet it is when loving relatives have died away,one by one, when lover has been inconstant, and has shot the arrow—coldness—through the loving heart; when the ingratitude of professed friends has frozen the limpid currents of our feelings, when the world has heaped upon us miseries on miseries, and then has cast us forth; when father shews the front of enmity to filial deservedness, when we are isolated in ourselves in this great world of numbers of movements and of alacrity; how sweet it is to meet, after separation, the friend whose heart-strings throb in sympathy with ours, and about whose head the shadows of suspicion could never play.
At the sound of the captain’s well-known voice, a loud and prolonged cheer from the men in the boat, echoed in the silence of the night far and wide over the gulf, and was repeated long and loudly by the ringing dales on the shore.
“Thanks, thanks,” exclaimed Lorenzo, in his joy, “to the chance that sent us after this vessel.”
“Where is the schooner?” inquired Appadocca.
“Behind that promontory, that you barely see: she is there safely hidden.”
“Then take the helm,” said Appadocca, “and steer to her.”
Lorenzo attempted to take the tiller out of the hands of the captain, but met with strong resistance.
The captain of thefalluchabrandished his knife, and called on his men to assist.
“Stop,” coolly said Appadocca, “do not resist: I shall give you five hundred dollars for your little vessel and its cargo. Submit, I am Appadocca, the young pirate.”
“Jesu!” cried the captain of thefallucha, “whom did I receive on board my vessel?” and he resignedly gave up the tiller.
The command of thefalluchawas now taken by the pirate party. She was immediately put about. On making two or three tacks she headed the small promontory, and discovered the long Black Schooner that lay enshrouded, in the silence of night, on the smooth and deepening bay.