Part 15
And so it was that Mr Murch and I took the road together, and you may judge of my emotions in this dilemma. How could I quarrel with this extraordinary man? The thing were difficult enough, though we were at open enmity; and now, stuffed as I was with Mr Murch’s victuals, and treated by my host as a long-lost friend, ’twas merely impossible. I had been but a spectator of the comedy of the three buccaneers throughout, and content enough to be no more; it seemed I was to remain a spectator to the end of the piece. Some hazy notion of putting off in a shore-boat to warn the schooner, arose in my labouring mind; but, of what use would that be, even supposing I could escape from Mr Murch, since Pomfrett and Dawkins, that redoubtable navigator, were already cramming the _Willing Mind_ main-chains under? Still, they would be the better prepared had they due warning, and I resolved to attempt this feat did the opportunity arise. But it never arose, as I shall proceed to show, and I do but mention this futile scheme, in justice to Henry Winter; who would fain appear as a man not so utterly destitute of resource in emergency as events would seem to indicate. And, although it cannot be denied that the said personage was never cast for a hero, I have never remarked that he was the less happy for that. Heroism is a fine profession: but it entails a deal of riding and riving, hard knocks and hard fare, and discomfortable tumults of passion, and little enough in the upshot to show for them, very likely. And so to my tale.
“I’ll neither ride nor sail on the private account any more,” says Murch, as we plashed forward in the dark. “This is the last cast. Strange, how we spend our lives getting and saving, and go down quick into the grave at the last. We’re all at knuckle-bones with Signor Death, Mr Winter. I’ve seen many a tall fellow swinging in chains on Gallow’s Point, who would have made an ornament to his country had he lived; the birds feeding on the head of many a fine man who was ready to become a member of Parliament or a Doctor of Divinity. But his repentance came too late, you see--his log was never kept posted. I took warning early by those poor dangling memorials, Mr Winter. You know my rule--a clean ship, alow and aloft, fit for the Great Commander’s inspection by day or night. So I count upon a little leisure in the evening of my days--a clear conscience, no regrets, a good house out of sound of the sea, a cellar of good wine, a library of the classics. For it may surprise you, Mr Winter, to hear that I’ve never read the literature of the ancients. The time to gain that learning which is given to fortunate young men like yourself, sir, must be bought with many a painful year by those who do their business in the great waters.”
He spoke with a settled assurance, strange to remark in a man who was even then riding a desperate race with fortune; and as we journeyed he continued to talk in the same strain. Day was breaking behind the wild hills as we rode into Porlock. Winter had gone in the night; the soft air, filled with the noise of running waters, savoured of the spring; and the sky was faintly touched with hues of rose. We broke our fast at the inn, and Mr Murch ate more than you would think possible.
“I don’t know how it is,” said he. “I’m as hungry as a boy, and it’s not my habit, neither. Why, I feel younger to-day than I have done this many a year, Mr Winter. Is it English air and Exmoor mutton? At this rate, I shall live for ever.”
And his eye was bright as a young man’s as he got into the saddle again, despite the pain it must have cost him, as I knew from my own sufferings.
We had taken fresh horses, and so rode from out the cup of the valley and came upon the summit of the moorland, where the wind blew keen. We halted, and gazed to seaward. The sea, a brilliant blue, spread away into a bright haze, dotted here and there with sails of ships; but I could not tell, at that distance, if the schooner were among them. Murch, who knew the look of the ship better than I, might have made her out; but if he did, he kept the discovery to himself; and we jogged on without a word. Presently Mr Murch began to talk again, and all he said was pitched in the same key of moralism. He told of his voyages, and the strange countries he had explored, and the foreign cities he had visited; and to hear him talk, you would think the old buccaneer had spent his life as the peaceablest explorer in the world, journeying in the interests of the Royal Society. Yet his narrative continually inferred misfortune or disaster, or something of a darker name, requiring immediate repentance. The word was always on his lips; for want of repentance, it appeared, all his old companions had perished in one way or another; by means of this singular operation, himself had survived danger and escaped judgment, to devote himself at last to the study of the ancients.
“Their bones lie scattered far and wide--the bones of my good shipmates,” said Murch, “I shall think upon them as I sit beside the winter fire, with the claret warming before the blaze. Some lie fathoms deep; the skeletons of some are whitening on sandy Cays; the hanged men are melted to the four winds, sinew and bone. What a troop of ghosts, to come at my signal as I sit snug by the fire, the rain dashing on the windows.... But would you believe it, Mr Winter,” cried Murch, breaking off suddenly, “I’m hungry again--actually famished.”
It was at this point that I began to regard the old buccaneer with a tincture of fear. There was something not right about the man. What was it? Not merely was his ordinary strain of talk heightened as by a touch of fever, which might have been caused by the excitement of his enterprise, but there was something new and daunting in him, though I could not put a name to it. I did not like his look. It might easily be that his late disastrous voyage, coming upon him on the top of a long life of sailing and fighting in hot climates, had unsettled his wits. It would be an ill moment for me if Mr Murch went mad on these desolate hills; and I kept a wary eye upon my travelling companion. And yet there was nothing of madness in his talk, and his manner held the same strong composure.
We must needs halt at Lynton for another meal, though it was scarce two hours since we had breakfasted at Porlock. Murch took his food standing, in a greedy haste. Then we were in the saddle again, making a long stage of it to Ilfracombe, for the going was extremely heavy. Yet Murch never lost his patience, but held steadily onward, with the same bright-eyed composure, the same intermittent talk, the same complaints of hunger. So, mile after mile, we ploughed our way across the unending wastes of moorland, high above the sea, and still the next hill rose in soft undulations before us, and still the wind blew with a constant force in our faces. It was long past noon when we rode down into Ilfracombe, where we had another full meal.
The sun was sinking as we came out upon the bare heights above Morte Point, the northern horn of Morte Bay, of which Baggy Point, beneath which lay the ship, made the southern; and there, some five miles out to seaward, was a little ship beating up against the wind. Now, Morte Bay is scarce four miles round the bend, all level sand, rising landward into grassy dunes. The schooner--if indeed that little craft were she--had nearly double that distance to make, against a head wind. There, beyond the long, brown reach of sand, hid in the purple shadow of the rocky point, lay the _Blessed Endeavour_. Murch halted, staring to seaward under his hand, the level sunlight striking upon the lower part of his face, revealing every wrinkle of his netted skin, every hair of his great white beard. So I see him now, staring to seaward under his hand, sitting motionless on his horse.
He struck spurs in and clattered down the rocky and steep descent to the sea-shore. Halfway down his horse stumbled and fell, Murch avoiding the animal and coming unhurt to his feet. The poor beast had broken his leg--a glance told us that.
Without a word, Murch drew a pistol and shot the animal through the head; and the smoke had not cleared, or the echoes done leaping from rock to rock, before he had mounted my horse--for I had incautiously dismounted--and was picking his way down the hill at the best pace he could. Slow as he went, ’twas faster than I could travel. But I had a pistol, too, and now was the time to use it; there was no scruple to prevent my shooting my own horse, at least, and I hauled out the weapon, looked to the priming, and dragged myself to a stumbling run. We came to the belt of rolling sand-dunes, and the little, steep ascents checked Mr Murch’s jaded nag, already oppressed with a rider near double the weight he had been carrying hitherto. I lay down and took a steady rest, and when horse and rider forged upon the reddening sunset sky, I pulled the trigger. ’Twas a long shot, but the ball struck the wretched animal somewhere; he stumbled and fell. By the time Murch had disengaged himself, and was lashing savagely at his horse, I had loaded afresh, and the second shot told also. Murch dropped the bridle, facing about, and fired in my direction; but I was hid in the long dry grass, and the bullet sang harmlessly overhead. I thought he would have made at me then; but no, he turned about; I saw his great figure for an instant, black upon the red flush of the sky, as he crossed the summit of the hillock. As he dropped into the hollow I rose to pursue him. We were on equal terms now, so far as two such different men might be; but, I began to think that Harry Winter, in the words of old Dawkins’s chanty, might cry farewell to earth and sky. Nothing seemed easier than for Murch to plant a bullet in him among the sand-hills.
But, avoiding the sky-line, I ran along the hollows of the dunes, until I caught a glimpse of Mr Murch, far out on the vast stretch of sand, trotting heavily forward. The tide was low, showing no more than a delicate fringe of foam beyond a mile of wet sand, gleaming blood-red in the dying sunlight. Far to seaward, the dagger-point of a sail notched the glimmering waters. In the impenetrable shadow of the dark cliffs that rose beyond the brown plain of sand and ran bluntly out to sea, the ship, the goal of forlorn hope, lay still hidden from sight.
Murch was out of range when I came to the level sand, or I think I would have tried a shot at him. This indomitable old gentleman had been near twenty-four hours in the saddle, yet he kept ahead of me. His trot had fallen to a walk; he ploughed along with hanging head, yet he never stopped; while, as for me, I was fain to halt every few paces, and, even so, I thought I should have burst. A man could have crawled on his belly faster than Murch was going, and yet I could not gain upon him. There was but one chance left. When he came within hail of the ship there might be a delay while the men got a boat ashore. But even then Murch had as good a chance--or better--of shooting me as I approached, as I had of shooting him. Meanwhile, he was slowly, irresistibly drawing near the goal; to all appearance, the little black triangle of the schooner’s sail was hardly within the bay; and, keeping the same distance behind him, as though the space between us were enchanted, dragging one foot up and setting it down again, with an inconceivable effort, there came toiling the last hope of Brandon Pomfrett, of Mr Dawkins, of the merchants of Bristol city, and of Mrs A.
So we went, one behind the other, until the masts and yards of the _Blessed Endeavour_, lying beneath the crags, were dimly printed in the shadow. The schooner was behind us now, and the last flicker of hope died within me. The red ball of the sun hung immediately above the horizon; sea and shore were drenched with red light; a red mist swam giddily before my eyes, with the figure of Murch, a black dot, in the centre.
Suddenly, I saw the bowed figure halt and throw up its hands; the red mist cleared away, and I beheld Murch sinking to his knees, struggling in the sand. He cried out, with an accent of mortal terror dreadful to hear, and, as in a dream, when one strives to run and leaden weights clog the feet, so I struggled ineffectually towards the agonised figure, that seemed, in the red illumination, to be writhing in a lake of blood. The quicksand had him by the waist; he upreared his huge trunk, and I saw his face for one moment--not all the tides of time can wash out the remembrance. He flung himself this way and that, with gasps and groans that seemed to tear his heart. The ooze rose to his chest; his arms were swallowed to the elbow; he dragged them free with a bursting effort, and the slime rose to his chin. An inarticulate gabble of sounds broke from him; then, his mouth was choked with sand. The last I saw of the poor wretch was a hand that clutched at the air once or twice, then sank out of sight. A ripple agitated the wet, oily surface once and again, and all was still.
XXI
MR DAWKINS HAS THE LAST WORD
I watched the sun visibly declining, until the glowing sphere was half submerged; and across the red semicircle slowly glided the black triangle of a sail. Presently, the sun vanished below the far sea-line, and the grey ghost of a schooner stole across the glimmering water and vanished into the gloom that was thickening under the Point. The voyagers might take their time, now, after so many thousand leagues of chasing; and so might the wretched chronicler of those travels, dragging himself towards the lights that glimmered in the darkness under the hill. But that night Pomfrett and Dawkins and I were sitting at supper again in our own cabin.
But I could not eat; the thought of Murch and his insatiate craving for food stuck in my throat.
“Sick, are you? Well, and I don’t wonder. I’m on’y surprised as a man of Murch’s education didn’t take warning from that there unnatural craving for victuals,” observed old Dawkins, shaking his head. “That was the grave-hunger, that was; the earth a-hungry for its nat’ral food. I seen it before, and never know’d the sign to fail. But it was fate, I reckon.”
My tale draws to its natural conclusion. I have but to seize the loose strands of the rope’s end, and it’s done. Pomfrett had the _Blessed Endeavour_ repaired and floated off, before he touched upon the subject of the dividend to the ship’s company, and then he took a short way with those unfortunate buccaneers. He so contrived that they were all ashore together without boats. Then he sent for the quartermaster, and went round the ship with him, collecting every man’s possessions, which were piled in a heap in the waist. Next came the delicate question of the division of plunder. Since the ship had been stolen, Pomfrett might justly have taken possession of the whole cargo. But he had dipped his hands into the same bucket as themselves; he, too, had been a gentleman of fortune; and, moreover, he had no mind to incur the hazard of being blackmailed for the rest of his life by every stray desperado of Murch’s gang. So he decided to treat the booty gained by the _Blessed Endeavour_ while she was under Mr Murch’s captaincy, as though the old pirate had commanded her in the interests of the rightful owners, but omitting from consideration dead-shares and compensation for wounds. Under this arrangement, himself and Dawkins and I profited with the rest, as though we had been aboard throughout the voyage. The owners, of course, had no part in plunder, as such, as I have before explained in Chapter II. To them belonged all coined money, bar gold and silver ingots, women’s ear-rings, pearls and precious stones, and loose diamonds. The plunder itself, then, including bedding, clothes, gold rings, buckles, buttons, liquors, provisions, arms, ammunition, watches, wrought silver or gold crucifixes, prisoners’ movables generally, and wearing apparel, was equitably divided by the supercargo.
“You’ve a pretty high way with you, hain’t you?” grumbled the quartermaster. “I seen many a dividend, but never a one like this here. Where’s the skipper? Why don’t we wait for Mr Murch, then?”
“We might have to wait long, and it’s a pity to miss the tide,” said Pomfrett, pushing a paper across the table to him. “There’s the formal quittance in full on behalf of the officers and crew. You are to sign for yourself and the men ashore.”
“Not me; not likely,” returned the other, angry and suspicious. “D’ye think I want a knife in my back? The officers and crew have got to be present at this here dividend, themselves.”
“Please yourself,” said Brandon. “It’s that or nothing. I’m stretching a point as it is, though you mayn’t think it.”
But the matter had to be opened much more at large to the quartermaster before he would sign. In fine, it was the beach for him and his mates, whether or no; the choice lay between full pockets and empty.
So he signed at last, and Pomfrett folded the paper, and buttoned his coat upon the document which was both to set him square with his owners and secure him against any future attempt at blackmailing. The long-boat was loaded with the men’s kit and their booty, and sent ashore with the quartermaster, who was left on the beach to do sentry-go over a king’s ransom until such time as the crew should come along. But, they were happily employed in an ale-house some two miles inland; and we of the _Blessed Endeavour_ never saw those scoundrels any more.
We fetched up in Bristol docks on a clear, frosty evening at sunset, the bells chiming somewhere in the darkling town, with its lights glimmering here and there, and the sky over all jewelled with faint stars. Morgan Leroux was waiting on the quay--Brandon had sent her a letter from Morte Bay--and those two went off together to the house of Brandon Pomfrett the elder. Old Dawkins and I were left to keep each other company; and as we sat upon the deserted deck, where everything was so strangely still and motionless, and looked ashore at the darkness closing down upon the packed houses, a kind of melancholy fell upon us.
“Why, now, shipmate,” says Dawkins, “we had ought to been happy, you and me, not to mention the young turtle-doves yonder; though I reckon them being inexperienced, they think they’re in heaven, having fetched up safe and hearty, and chock-a-block with plunder, too. But we ain’t not to say hilarious, are we now? No, says you, not properly so. Ah, well, things is so, shipmate. I reckon we wants a good rousing supper with plenty liquor, to start us on the Jerusalem tack, shipmate.”
And certainly, when, a little later, we found ourselves seated at the table of Uncle Brandon Pomfrett, not even Mrs A.’s sour countenance could stay our hilarity. Old Dawkins presently found his tongue, getting to his feet and leaning forward on the table in his old way.
“Here’s to you, gentlemen o’ fortune all, and you, ma’am, what’s a lady o’ fortune, by what I hear,” shouts Dawkins, glass in hand. “Gentlemen of fortune all, by the bones of the deep! For if you don’t sail yourselves, you sends us on the account, and ‘there’s many a man gone on this cruise, what never has come back’--ah, many a good seaman! Not a dozen men left, out o’ ninety hands! Ah, it’s you that stays at home is the bold ones, for every man that’s drowned in the deep or cast away, or perished in mortal pain and sickness, or gets shot or stabbed or what not, why, his blood’s at your door. Ah, it is! No wonder you goes to church so frequent, and pipes all hands to prayers twice daily. Lord!” says Dawkins, staring hard at Pomfrett the elder, and turning his little, lighted eyes upon Mrs A., who paled visibly, “as I look at you, lady and gentleman born, I could swear I see the blood a-spotting your white hands. But what cheer! The longest liver takes all, and the chaplain can square the dividend, I reckon. What’s he draw pay and rations for, else?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. If those good ship-owners, Mrs A. and Mr Pomfrett, never heard the truth before, they heard it, then, from Mr Dawkins’s vinous lips. But that gallant seaman, not in the least understanding the situation, kindly relieved our embarrassment by incontinently breaking into song; and the rest of the evening went pleasantly enough, for we told the whole history of our adventures; only suppressing Mr Dawkins’s share in them to the extent of setting our detention in Barbadoes to the sole account of the late Mr Murch.
The rest is soon told. When the owners came to overhaul the accounts, Sir Henry Morgan’s silver was, at Morgan’s request, made over to them. They never knew to whom it had originally belonged. The sacrifice was the easier, because Murch had left the bag of diamonds he took in Cartagena in Morgan’s keeping, and the supercargo saw no reason for including that little piece of booty in the Book of Plunder. And, as soon as might be, the two were married, of course. Pomfrett goes no more to sea; he is become a country gentleman and a Justice of the Peace; and I know no life better worth living, if you own a taste for it. As for me, I am sufficiently occupied with that leisurely study of the ancients, to which Mr Murch had looked forward with such admirable enthusiasm. And as for Captain Dawkins, he would not touch his plunder. “No, no,” said he. “Why, inside of a month old Dawkins would come a-begging to your door, as poor as the day he were born. No, don’t you give Dawkins no money, if you love him, no more than a matter of a few dollars, drawn weekly, you understand. And don’t you give him no more, not if he was to beg on his bended knees.”