Two Years Ago Volume I Part 15

"'Gad, sir, you were near enough being drowned at last; only that girl's pluck saved you."

"Well; but it did save me: and here I am, as I knew I should be when I first struck out from the s.h.i.+p."

"Knew!--that is a bold word for mortal man at sea."

"I suppose it is: but we doctors, you see, get into the way of looking at things as men of science; and the ground of science is experience; and, to judge from experience, it takes more to kill me than I have yet met with. If I had been going to be snuffed out, it would have happened long ago."

"Hum! It's well to carry a cheerful heart; but the pitcher goes often to the well, and comes home broken at last."

"I must be a gutta-percha pitcher, I think, then, or else--

"'There's a sweet little cherub who sits up aloft,' etc.

as Dibdin has it. Now, look at the facts yourself, sir," continued the stranger, with a recklessness half true, half a.s.sumed to escape from the malady of thought. "I don't want to boast, sir; I only want to show you that I have some practical reason for wearing as my motto--'Never say die.' I have had the cholera twice, and yellow-jack beside: five several times I have had bullets through me; I have been bayoneted and left for dead; I have been s.h.i.+pwrecked three times--and once, as now, I was the only man who escaped; I have been fatted by savages for baking and eating, and got away with a couple of friends only a day or two before the feast. One really narrow chance I had, which I never expected to squeeze through: but, on the whole, I have taken full precautions to prevent its recurrence."

"What was that, then?"

"I have been hanged, sir," said the doctor quietly.

"Hanged?" cried the Lieutenant, facing round upon his strange companion with a visage which asked plainly enough--"You hanged? I don't believe you; and if you have been hanged, what have you been doing to get hanged?"

"You need not take care of your pockets, sir,--neither robbery nor murder was it which brought me to the gallows; but innocent bug-hunting. The fact is, I was caught by a party of Mexicans, during the last war, straggling after plants and insects, and hanged as a spy. I don't blame the fellows: I had no business where I was; and they could not conceive that a man would risk his life for a few b.u.t.terflies."

"But if you were hanged, sir--"

"Why did I not die?--By my usual luck. The fellows were clumsy, and the noose would not work; so that the Mexican doctor, who meant to dissect me, brought me round again; and being a freemason, as I am, stood by me,--got me safe off, and cheated the devil."

The worthy Lieutenant walked on in silence, stealing furtive glances at Tom, as if he had been a guest from the other world, but not disbelieving his story in the least. He had seen, as most old navy men, so many strange things happen, that he was prepared to give credit to any tale when told, as Tom's was, with a straightforward and unboastful simplicity.

"There lives the girl who saved you," said he, as they pa.s.sed Grace Harvey's door.

"Ah? I ought to call and pay my respects."

But Grace was not at home. The wreck had emptied the school; and Grace had gone after her scholars to the beach.

"We couldn't keep her away, weak as she was," said a neighbour, "as soon as she heard the poor corpses were coming ash.o.r.e."

"Hum?" said Tom. "True woman. Quaint,--that appet.i.te for horrors the sweet creatures have. Did you ever see a man hanged, Lieutenant?--No?

If you had, you would have seen two women in the crowd to one man. Can you make out the philosophy of that?"

"I suppose they like it, as some people do hot peppers."

"Or donkeys thistles;--find a little pain pleasant! I had a patient once in France, who read Dumas' 'Crimes Celebres' all the week, and the 'Vies des Saints' on Sundays, and both, as far as I could see, for just the same purpose,--to see how miserable people could be, and how much pinching and pulling they could bear."

So they walked on, along a sheep-path, and over the Spur, and down to the Cove.

It was such a morning as often follows a gale, when the great firmament stares down upon the ruin which it has made, bright and clear, and bold; and seems to say, with shameless smile,--"There, I have done it; and am as merry as ever after it all!" Beneath a cloudless sky, the breakers, still grey and foul from the tempest, were tumbling in before a cold northern breeze. Half a mile out at sea, the rough backs of the Chough and Crow loomed black and sulky in the foam. At their feet, the rocks and s.h.i.+ngle of the Cove were alive with human beings--groups of women and children cl.u.s.tering round a corpse or a chest; sailors, knee-deep in the surf hauling at floating spars and ropes; oil-skinned coast-guardsmen pacing up and down in charge of goods, while groups of farmers' men, who had hurried down from the villages inland, lounged about on the top of the cliff, looking sulkily on, hoping for plunder: and yet half afraid to mingle with the sailors below, who looked on them as an inferior race, and refused, in general, to intermarry with them.

The Lieutenant plainly held much the same opinion; for as a party of them tried to descend the narrow path to the beach, he shouted after them to come back.

"Eh! you won't?" and out rattled from its scabbard the old worthy's sword. "Come back, I say, you loafing, miching, wrecking crow-keepers; there are no pickings for you here. Brown, send those fellows back with the bayonet. None but blue-jackets allowed on the beach!" And the labourers go up again, grumbling.

"Can't trust those landsharks. They'll plunder even the rings off a corpse's fingers. They think every wreck a G.o.dsend. I've known them, after they've been driven off, roll great stones over the cliff at night on the coast-guard, just out of spite; while these blue-jackets here--I can depend on them. Can you tell me the reason of that, as you seem a bit of a philosopher?"

"It is easy enough; the sailors have a fellow-feeling with sailors, and the landsmen have none. Besides, the sailors are finer fellows, body and soul; and the reason is that they have been brought up to face danger, and the landsmen haven't."

"Well," said the Lieutenant, "unless a man has been taught to look death in the face, he never will grow up, I believe, to be much of a man at all."

"Danger, my good sir, is a better schoolmaster than all your new model schools, diagrams, and scientific apparatus. It made our forefathers the masters of the sea, though they never heard of popular science; and I dare say couldn't, one out of ten of them, spell their own names."

This sentiment elicited from the Lieutenant a grunt of approbation, as Tom intended that it should do; shrewdly arguing that the old martinet was no friend to the modern superst.i.tion, that all which is required to cast out the devil is a smattering of the 'ologies.

"Will the gentleman see the corpses?" asked Brown; "we have fourteen already;"--and he led the way to where, along the s.h.i.+ngle at high-water mark, lay a ghastly row, some fearfully bruised and mutilated, cramped together by the death-agony; others with the peaceful smile which showed that they had sunk to sleep in that strange water-death, amid a wilderness of pleasant dreams. Strong men lay there, little children, women, whom the sailors' wives had covered decently with cloaks and shawls; and at their heads stood Grace Harvey, motionless, with folded hands, gazing into the dead faces with her great solemn eyes. Her mother and Captain Willis stood by, watching her with a sort of superst.i.tions awe. She took no notice either of Thurnall or of the Lieutenant, as the doctor identified the bodies one by one, without a remark which indicated any human emotion.

"A very sensible man, Willis," said the Lieutenant apart, as Tom knelt awhile to examine the crushed features of a sailor; and then looking up said simply,--

"James Macgillivray, second mate. Cause of death, contusions; probably by the fall of the main-mast."

"A very sensible man, and has seen a deal of life, and kept his eyes open; but a terrible hard-plucked one. Talked like a book to me all the way; but, be hanged if I don't think he has a thirty-two pound shot under his ribs instead of a heart.--Doctor Thurnall, that is Miss Harvey,--the young person who saved your life last night."

Tom rose, took off his hat (Frank Headley's), and made her a bow, of which an amba.s.sador need not have been ashamed.

"I am exceedingly shocked that Miss Harvey should have run so much danger for anything so worthless as my life."

She looked up at him, and answered, not him, but her own thoughts.

"Strange, is it not, that it was a duty to pray for all these poor things last night, and a sin to pray for them this morning?"

"Grace, dear!" interposed her mother, "don't you hear the gentleman thanking you?"

She started, as one awaking out of a dream, and looked into his face, blus.h.i.+ng scarlet.

"Good heavens, what a beautiful creature!" said Tom to himself, as quite a new emotion pa.s.sed through him. Quite new it was, whatsoever it was; and he was aware of it. He had had his pa.s.sions, his intrigues, in past years, and prided himself--few men more--on understanding women; but the expression of the face, and the strange words with which she had greeted him, added to the broad fact of her having offered her own life for his, raised in him a feeling of chivalrous awe and admiration, which no other woman had ever called up.

"Madam," he said again; "I can repay you with nothing but thanks: but, to judge from your conduct last night, you are one of those people who will find reward enough in knowing that you have done a n.o.ble and heroic action."

She looked at him very steadfastly, blus.h.i.+ng still. Thurnall, be it understood, was (at least, while his face was in the state in which Heaven intended it to be, half hidden in a silky-brown beard) a very good-looking fellow; and (to use Mark Armsworth's description) "as hard as a nail; as fresh as a rose; and stood on his legs like a game-c.o.c.k." Moreover, as Willis said approvingly, he had spoken to her "as if he was a duke, and she was a d.u.c.h.ess." Besides, by some blessed moral law, the surest way to make oneself love any human being is to go and do him a kindness; and therefore Grace had already a tender interest in Tom, not because he had saved her, but she him. And so it was, that a strange new emotion pa.s.sed through her heart also, though so little understood by her, that she put it forthwith into words.

"You might repay me," she said in a sad and tender tone.

"You have only to command me," said Tom, wincing a little as the words pa.s.sed his lips.

"Then turn to G.o.d, now in the day of His mercies. Unless you have turned to Him already."

One glance at Tom's rising eyebrows told her what he thought upon those matters.

She looked at him sadly, lingeringly, as if conscious that she ought not to look too long, and yet unable to withdraw her eyes.--"Ah! and such a precious soul as yours must be; a precious soul--all taken, and you alone left! G.o.d must have high things in store for you. He must have a great work for you to do. Else, why are you not as one of these! Oh, think! where would you have been at this moment if G.o.d had dealt with you as with them?"

"Where I am now, I suppose," said Tom quietly.