"The bullet entered his mouth, and passed out of the base of the skull behind, injuring the brain in its passage, and destroying him instantly.
"So Captain Benson told me, for I never looked on his face again, though I have often seen it since in my dreams.
"About two hours after this summary act of justice we were found and relieved by a travelling party of Indians, Micmacs, who come from the continent of America at times, and domicile themselves chiefly along the western shore of the island, to hunt the beaver by the banks of the Serpentine Lake.
"They conveyed us through the fur country of the Buenoventura people to the miserable little settlement of that name, where we remained till the ice broke up, when we were taken to St. John's in a seal-fisher.
"There our perils and suffering ended. We had shipped on board different crafts for different countries, and the next year saw me appointed captain of this clipper-ship, the _Pride of the Ocean_."[*]
[*] A character not unlike Urbain Gautier figures in the account of the first or second expedition of Sir John Franklin.
*CHAPTER XXVIII.*
Pass we the long, unvarying course, the track Oft trod, that never leaves a trace behind; Pass we the calm, the gale, the change, the tack, And each well-known caprice of wave and wind, Cooped in their winged sea-girt citadel; The foul, the fair, the contrary, the kind, As breezes rise and fall, and billows swell, Till on some jocund morn--lo, land! and all is well. BYRON.
Pleasantly we traversed the almost tideless waters of the Mediterranean, the great inland sea of Europe.
We generally had a fair wind; but in our tacks southward and northward more than once we sighted the shores of Europe on one side, and those of Africa on the other.
The routine of transport life varied but little, so every passing sail became an object of speculation and interest. Day by day, and frequently night after night, we walked with the same person on the same side of the quarter-deck, turning short round at the taffrail aft, and at the break forward, to resume the same pace, without making a remark, for all our mutual ideas had been interchanged over and over again, and no tie remained, save that of being comrades, weary and worn alike, though each had his own thoughts, the mental orbit in which his soul revolved, and these were, perhaps, three thousand leagues astern.
Every probable and possible phase of the war we had dissected and discussed, and the future excitement that was to come we contrasted impatiently with the quiet, inglorious monotony of the present, while the swift clipper cleft the classic waters of the Mediterranean.
The monotony on board was once varied by a trivial practical joke played by M'Goldrick, the paymaster, on the colonel and some of the English officers, who had been deriding Scottish cookery. He produced at dinner a valuable preserve, which he had previously had carefully soldered up in a tin case, by the armourer's aid, and which he had compounded with the joint assistance of the ship's cook and my man, Pitblado.
It was duly boiled, and produced at table in its tin case as a scarce and rare Parisian decoction--_Farina d'avoine au fromage_, or some such name; and after being partaken of by Beverley, Studhome, and the rest, was pronounced excellent, though it proved, after all, to be only a very ill-made Scotch haggis.
In the Mediterranean we were frequently impressed by the extreme blueness of the water. It seemed to have a purer and deeper tint than we had ever seen it wear even in higher latitudes, especially when the weather was fine, and light scattered clouds were floating through the sky.
About a fortnight after passing "old Gib," the outline of Malta and its sister isle, the abode of Calypso, rose from the morning sea on our lee bow; and during the whole of a lovely day our eyes were strained in that direction, watching that rocky shore of so many great and glorious memories--the last stronghold of Christian chivalry--the link between Britain and her Indian empire--our "halfway house" to the Bosphorus--with all its cannon bristling as the mistress of the Mediterranean and Levant.
As we drew nearer, our field-glasses enabled us to trace the rocky outline of the greater isle--the hilly range of which is only about a hundred feet higher than the dome of St. Paul's--and the steep, rugged coast to the north-east, beyond which lie the _casals_, or villages of the lank, yellow-visaged, black-bearded, and malicious-looking Maltese, concerning whom I do not mean to afflict my reader with either a description or a dissertation.
The evening gun flashed redly from the Castle of St. Elmo, and the harbour lights of Valetta were sparkling brightly amid the golden evening haze, as we ran into the harbour, round which a thousand or more pieces of cannon were bristling on battery and platform, and on coming to anchor found that we were only a pistol-shot astern of the _Ganges_, which had on board Wilford's troop of ours, and which had come in two days before us.
We were only to wait the refilling of our tank with fresh water, of which, being a horse transport, we required an unusual quantity; and now our poor nags were neighing in concert in the hold, for, as Captain Binnacle termed it, "they smelt the land."
No officer or soldier was permitted to go on shore, unless on duty, for already Malta was crowded with troops, so much so that the 93rd Highlanders were actually bivouacking in a burying-ground. But these orders did not prevent us from visiting our comrades in the _Ganges_; so Binnacle sent off his gig, with the colonel, Studhome, Sir Harry Scarlett, and me.
We found that all were well on board, and had suffered no casualties, save the loss of four horses by disease. Unlike us, however, they had been favoured by that remarkable illumination known in those waters as St. Elmo's light, which had shone on their main-topgallant mast for a space of three feet below the truck in the night, when they were off the volcanic isle of Pantalaria.
My old friend Fred Wilford received us with warmth and welcome. Thus far our voyages had been equally unmarked by danger or adventure.
In the cabin we found Berkeley, reading one of the London morning papers, which was only a week or so old. It had come by the steam packet from Marseilles. He addressed a few remarks, in his usual languid way, to the colonel and to Scarlett, made a pencil-mark on his paper, as if half casually, and tossing it on the cabin table, retired, with his strange smile and lounging gait, on deck.
Under other circumstances I should most probably have been awaiting him at the hotel of M. Dessin, at Calais, for the purpose of giving him a morning airing on the beach, with the chance of myself being carried back on a shutter, perhaps, to that famous room, in which, as all the travelling world know, Lawrence Sterne and Walter Scott have slept. But fate or duty had arranged it otherwise; so here we were, quietly smoking cheroots in the harbour of Valetta. But his voice and presence recalled all the baseness of his conduct at the Reculvers, and the bitterness of the time when he involved me in disgrace with Louisa Loftus--a double piece of treachery for which I had yet to demand satisfaction.
Curious to see the paragraph which had such interest for him, I took up his paper, and my eye fell at once upon the following paragraph:--
"THE NEW PEERAGE.--Our readers will be glad to perceive that, by last night's _London Gazette_, a right honourable lord, long known in the world of fashion, and latterly in political circles, has been raised to a marquisate, by the title of Marquis of Slubber de Gullion and Viscount Gabey of Slubberleigh. Rumour adds that, lest the newly-won honours perish, the noble marquis is about to lead to the altar the only daughter and heiress of one of the greatest of our English families--the fair maid of Kent."
I knew well that the closing words could only refer to Louisa Loftus. I had seen her but a few days before this piece of impertinent twaddle had been penned, and the memory of our parting hour, and the expression of her eyes, came vividly before me; but we were far separated now, and it is difficult to describe how deeply the tenor of that paragraph stung me.
The drums were beating in barrack and citadel, and the trumpets were sounding tattoo in the transports, as we were rowed back to our vessel. Studhome and the colonel were chatting gaily, and Scarlett was humming a waltz, as he pulled the stroke-oar and thought of past days at Oxford.
I alone was silent and sad.
From violet and purple, the tints of the later evening--the gloaming, as we call it in Scotland--passed into blue and amber, and the lights of Valetta rose over each other, glittering in tiers along the slope on which the city is built, with all its "streets of stairs," which Byron anathematized.
The band of an infantry regiment was playing in Citta Nuova, and softly the strains of the music came across the rippling water, over which the blue and amber tints were swiftly spreading, while in its depths the stars were shining, and all the shipping were reflected downwards.