Chapter Three

 
“Hope, with her prizes and victories won,
Shines in the blue of my morning sun,
Conquering hope with golden ray,
Blessing my landscape far away.”
 

Tupper.

Not a single prisoner was taken.

Those who were not fatally wounded had sprung overboard.

The rest of the night passed in quietness, but when day broke, the sun shone on a sad and ghastly scene. There still lay about broken cutlasses, spears, torn pieces of cloth, and all the débris of fight, and blood, blood everywhere.

On one side of the deck, with upturned faces, lay in ghastly array the dead of the enemy, on the other our own poor fellows had been put, and carefully covered with flags.

All hands were summoned to prayers, to bury the dead and clear up decks.

When, after service, the commander and his officers – alas! among those who lay beneath the Union Jack were one or two officers – went round to view the bodies, to their astonishment, they found that Zareppa had gone.

He had only shammed death, then, in order to escape!

Incidents of the very saddest character are soon forgotten in the service. It is as well it should be so. But a battle is no sooner fought than the decks are carefully washed, the damages all made good, and even rents and holes in the ship’s side, that might well redound to her honour, are not only carefully repaired but painted over. And whenever a vessel has had sails torn in a gale of wind, sailors are put to mend them on the following day.

For modesty always goes hand-in-hand with true valour.

In a fortnight after the fight in the river the brave Niobe was once more at sea, and looking all over as smart a craft as ever sailed.

Just as I wrote these lines my good friend, Captain Roberts, looked over my shoulder.

“Ay, lad,” he said, “and she was a smart craft too. They don’t make such ships now, and they couldn’t find the men to man ’em if they did. I tell you, Nie, it was a sight that used to make Frenchmen stare to see the old Niobe taking down top-gallant masts.”

“Well, my dear old sea-dad,” I replied, “of course you are fond of the good old times. It is only natural you should be.”

“But they were times. Why, nowadays they could no more do the things we did than they could pitch a ball o’ spun yarn ’twixt here and Jericho. I’m right, lad, I tell you, and I should know.”

“Oh!” I replied, “for the matter of that, I was living in those brave old days as well as yourself.”

“Yes, so you were,” cried the old captain, laughing. “You were borne on the books o’ the old Niobe as well as myself, and a queer little chap you were when first we met. Heigho! time flies: it’s more’n forty years ago, Nie.”

“Wait half a minute,” I said, for I knew the old man was going to spin me a yarn that I was never tired of hearing – the story of my own early years. Why was it that I liked to hear him tell the tale over and over again, you may ask. For this reason – he never told it twice quite the same: always the same in the main incidents, doubtless, but with something new each time.

“Wait half a minute.”

“Ay, ay, lad!”

I brought out the little table and set it down under his favourite tree on the lawn, and placed thereon his favourite pipe and his pouch.

The old sailor smiled, and drew his great straw chair up and sat down, and I threw myself on the grass and prepared to listen.

The captain had his two elbows on the table; he was teasing the tobacco, and when he began to speak he was evidently following out some train of thought, and addressing the tobacco, not me.

“As saucy a wee rascal he turned out as ever put a foot on board a ship,” said Captain Roberts.

“Whom are you talking about, old friend?” I asked.

“I’m talking about baby Nie,” replied the captain, still addressing the tobacco. “I wonder, now, what would have become of him, though, if it hadn’t been for old Bo’swain Roberts. Why, he would have died. Died? Ay, but I wouldn’t see poor Sergeant Radnor’s baby thrown to the sharks, not for all the world. Fed him first on hen’s milk (the name given by sailors to egg beaten up in water). Didn’t do well on that. ‘Cap’n,’ says I to the skipper one day, ‘soon’s we go to Zanzibar we must get a nanny-goat for the young papoose, else he’ll lose the number of his mess, and the doctor will have to mark him D.D.’ (discharged dead.) ‘Very well, Roberts,’ says the skipper, ‘that’s just as you like.’

“Now our purser was a mean old fellow. ‘Nanny-goat!’ he cries, when I went to ask him for the money. ‘What next, I wonder? the service is going to the deuce. No, Her Majesty pays for no nanny-goats, I do assure ye.’

“I just touches my hat and marches off to our dear old doctor. I knew he had a kindly heart. ‘Nanny-goat,’ cries he, ‘why, of course the darling baby’ll have a nanny-goat. We’ll keep it out of the sick-mess fund, and mark it down medical comforts.’¹ ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said I, catching hold of the doctor’s hand – it was as rough as my own – ‘but you’re a brick.’

“And that, ‘Nie,’ is how you came for the first five years o’ your life to be called nothing else but young ‘medical comforts.’”

“Five years!” I said, “that is a long spell for a ship to be on one station.”

“Ay, lad, you’re right. But ships were ships in those days.

“Young ‘medical comforts’,” he continued, “as they called you, in less than four years was a deal smarter than any monkey on board. Not that he could climb quite so high, maybe, but he was more tricky, and that is saying a lot. And it was among the monkeys that ‘medical comforts’ would mostly be, too.

“But the monkeys all seemed to like you, Nie; they would tease each other, and fight each other, but they never touched you. There was one animal in particular, and he was your favourite, the queerest old chap you ever saw. We got him down in Madagascar, and they called him the Ay-ay. Doctor always said he was a being from another world, a kind of a spirit, and the men used to be afraid of him. He had hands like a human being, but the middle finger was much longer than the others, and not thicker than a straw. When only a baby, he used to dip this long skinny finger in milk and give you to suck, and when you went to sleep he never left your side. Sometimes he would stroke your face and say, ‘Ay-ay’ as tenderly as if he’d been a mother to you. But the men always declared it was ‘Nie, Nie,’ he’d be saying.

“But you had one pet on board that maybe you mind on – the Albatross?”

“I do,” said I, “young as I must have been at the time.”

“People say,” the captain went on, “they’ve never been tamed; but there he was, sure enough, in an immense great hencoop, that the doctor had made for him, and there you’d be in front of him often enough, though he would have cut the nose of anyone but yourself; and never a flying-fish was caught you didn’t get hold of, and take to him. The men got small share of these. But, bless you, Nie, you were the ship’s chief pet, and the men would have gone through fire and water for you any hour of the day or night.

“The jealousies there used to be about you, too, Nie! Why, lad, if it had been a young lady it couldn’t have been worse. Jealousies, Nie, ay, and more than jealousies, for our fellows didn’t need much to make them strip to the waist and fight. Fact is, when times were dull with us, I think they rather liked the excuse. I’ve heard a row got up for’ard just in the following fashion:

“You would be playing on Davis’s knee.

“‘Give us half an hour o’ the wee chap,’ Bill would say.

“‘Go along,’ Davis would reply, ‘you ’ad him all day yesterday.’

“‘He’s smilin’ to me,’ Bill would say.

“‘Smilin’ at you, you mean,’ Davis would answer derisively.

“‘Smilin’ at your ugly face. Why, that mouth o’ yours couldn’t be made any bigger ’athout shifting your ears back.’

“This would be enough.

“‘Come below,’ Bill would cry, ‘and I’ll see if a big ugly lubber like you is to cheek me!’

“‘Go with him, Davis!’ half a dozen would cry. ‘I’ll hold the youngster!’

“And there would be such a scramble to get you, that I used to wonder you weren’t torn to pieces. And all the while that animal with the long skinny middle finger would be jumping around like a demon and crying —

“‘Ay-ay! – Ay-ay! – Ay-ay!’

“As he never cried like this without all the monkeys following suit, and all the parrots whistling and shrieking – on occasions like these, Nie, there was five minutes of a rough ship, I can tell you.”

Chapter Four

 
“Still onward, fair the breeze nor rough the surge,
The blue waves sport around the stern they urge;
Far on the horizon’s verge appears a speck,
A spot – a mast – a sail – an armed deck.”
 

Byron.

“Well, Ben,” I said, “life must have been very pleasant to me then.”

“And isn’t it now, Nie? isn’t it now, lad? Look at the beautiful old place that you have around you – all your own; you ought to be thankful. Listen to the birds on this delightful morning, their songs mingling with the cry o’ the wind through the poplars. And, lad, you cannot draw a breath out on the lawn here, without inhaling the odour of honey, and the perfume of flowers.”

“You are quite poetic, Ben Roberts,” I replied.

“Quite enough to make the barnacliest old tar that ever lived feel poetic, Nie,” quoth Ben.

“Well, fill your pipe again, Ben.”

“Ha! ha!” laughed the old man, “fill my pipe again, eh? That means heave round with another yarn, eh?”

“Something very like it,” I said.

“Well,” said the captain, “an old man is to be forgiven if he does get a little bit gossiping now and then, and wanders from his subject, and I always was fond of a bit o’ pretty scenery, Nie – pretty bits like the old mill by the riverside down yonder.”

“And a bit of fishing and shooting, Ben?”

“Ay, lad. But memory is at this moment taking me back to one of the loveliest bits o’ woodland landscape in the world. What a poem our Robbie Burns could have written there! You were still the Niobe’s pet, but old enough now to be left at times without your sea-dad. Away miles and miles into the wooded interior of Africa, we were a good long distance south the Line, and just sitting down, me and my mates, to a snack o’ lunch on the banks of a roaring tumbling brook, where we’d been bathing. We’d had a smartish week’s shooting, and were thinking of returning to the ship the very next day.

“Our guns were lying carelessly enough at some little distance, when suddenly a branch snapped, and before any of us could have stood up to defend ourselves, had it been an unfriendly Arab, or a savage Somali, a dark skin pushed the branches aside and stood before us.

“It was our faithful Sweeba, the negro who had brought us the news of Zareppa’s intended attack on the night your poor father was killed, Nie.

“‘Sweeba, what on earth brings you here?’ says I.

“‘Commander’s orders,’ said Sweeba, saluting.

“Now Sweeba was always dressed when on board like a British sailor, but here he was almost as naked as the stem of a palm-tree.

“‘What have you done with your clothes, Sweeba?’ I asked.

“‘I expect he has pawned them,’ said little Brown, our purser’s clerk.

“‘I not can run muchee wid English clothes,’ Sweeba said modestly.

“‘And so you hid them in the bush, eh?’

“‘Ah! Massa Roberts,’ replied the negro, smiling; ‘you berry much clebber.’

“‘Well, and what are the commander’s orders?’

“‘You come back plenty much quick.’

“‘Ship on fire?’

“‘No, sah.’

“‘Anything happened to Nie?’

“‘No, sah. Nie and de monkey all right, sah.’

“‘Well, explain.’

“‘Only dis, sah, we goin’ to fight Arab dhow.’

“We were all up quick enough at this intelligence. We didn’t stop to finish our luncheon.

“‘Lead the way, Sweeba,’ I cried.

“And off went Sweeba through the forest, we following in Indian file. We didn’t take more of the game with us than we could easily carry, so the jackals had a good feed that night.

“It was a long and a rough road to travel. You know the style of thing, Nie; the dark dismal woods, the broad swamps, the hills and the wide stony uplands, where never a thing lives or thrives, bar the lizards and a few snakes, and then last of all the mangrove forests. Our anxiety to get back made us hurry all the more. We made forced marches, and burned but two camp fires ere we reached the coast.

“The ship we had left lying at anchor in a little wooded creek. We returned to find it gone.

“‘Massa, massa; we too late,’ cried Sweeba. ‘Now de Arab men come quick and kill us all for true.’

“‘Where is the nearest village, Sweeba?’

“‘Long way, sah; long way, and no good. Dey kill Englishman. No gib mooch time to tink.’

“‘Well, we’re in a fix, I think,’ I said.

“‘Not a bit of it,’ cried a cheery voice close behind us; and looking round there stood little Midshipman Leigh, of the starboard watch. The young rascal had heard us coming, and hidden his boat among the trees, making his men lie close, as he expressed it, to see how we’d look.