CHAPTER XVIII.
WE TALK OVER OUR SITUATION.
That night, as afterwards, Tassard occupied the berth that he was usedto sleep in before he was frozen. Although I had not then the least fearthat he would attempt any malignant tricks with me whilst we remained inthis posture, the feeling that he lay in the berth next but one to minemade me uneasy in spite of my reasoning; and I was so nervous as tosilently shoot a great iron bolt, so that it would have been impossibleto enter without beating the door in.
In sober truth, the sight of the treasure had put a sort of fever intomy imagination, of the heat and effects of which I was not completelysensible until I was alone in my cabin and swinging in the darkness.That the value of what I had seen came to ninety or a hundred thousandpounds of our money I could not doubt; and I will not deny that my fancywas greatly excited by thinking of it. But there was something else.Suppose we should have the happiness to escape with this treasure, thenI was perfectly certain the Frenchman would come between me and my shareof it. This apprehension threading my heated thoughts of the gold andsilver kept me restless during the greater part of the night, and I alsoheld my brains on the stretch with devices for saving ourselves and thetreasure; yet I could not satisfy my mind that anything was to be doneunless Nature herself assisted us in freeing the schooner.
However, as it happened, the gale roared for a whole week, and the coldwas so frightful and the air so charged with spray and hail that we wereforced to lie close below with the hatches on for our lives. It was trueCape Horn weather, with seas as high as cliffs, and a westering tendencyin the wind that flung sheets of water through the ravine, which musthave quickly filled the hollow and built us up in ice to the height ofthe rails but for the strong slope down which the water rushed as fastas it was hurled.
I never needed to peep an inch beyond the companion-way to view thesky; nor for the matter of that was there ever any occasion to leave thecabin to guess at the weather, for the perpetual thunder of it echoedstrong in every part of the vessel below, and the whole fabric wasconstantly shivering to the blows of the falls of water on her decks.
At first the Frenchman and I would sit in the greatest fear imaginable,constantly expecting some mighty disaster, such as the rending of theice under our keel and our being swallowed up, or the coming together ofthe slopes in such a manner as to crush the ship, or the fall upon herof ice weighty enough to beat her flat; though perhaps this we leastfeared, for unless the storm changed the whole face of the cliffs, therewas no ice in our neighbourhood to serve us in that way. But as the timeslipped by and nothing worse happened than one sharp movement only inthe vessel, following the heels of a great noise like a cannondischarged just outside; though this movement scared us nearly out ofour senses, and held us in a manner dumbfounded for the rest of the day;I say, the time passing and nothing more terrifying than what I haverelated happening, we took heart and waited with some courage andpatience for the gale to break, never doubting that we should find awonderful change when we surveyed the scene from the heights.
We lived well, sparing ourselves in nothing that the vessel contained,the abundance rendering stint idle; the Frenchman cooked, for he was abetter hand than I at that work, and provided several relishablesea-pies, cakes, and broths. As for liquor, there was enough on board todrown the pair of us twenty times over: wines of France, Spain,Portugal, very choice fine brandy, rum in plenty, such variety indeed asenabled us to brew a different kind of punch every day in the seven. Butwe were much more careful with the coal, and spared it to the utmost byburning the hammocks, bedding, and chests that lay in the forecastle;that is to say, we burnt these things by degrees, the stock beingexcessive, and by judiciously mixing them with coal and wood, they madegood warming fires, and as tinder lasted long too.
We occupied one morning in thoroughly overhauling the forecastle forsuch articles of value as the sailors had dropped or forgotten in theirflight; but found much less than I had expected from the sight of themoney and other things on the deck. There was little in this way to befound in the cabins: I mean in the captain's cabin which I used, and theone next it that had been the mate's, for of course I did not search Mr.Tassard's berth. But though it was quite likely that the seamen hadplundered these cabins before they left the ship, I was also sure thatthe Frenchman had made a clean sweep of what they had overlooked when hepretended to search for the keys of the treasure-chests; and thissuspicion I seemed to find confirmed by the appearance of the captain'sboxes. One of these boxes contained books, papers, a telescope, somenautical instruments, and the like. I looked at the books and thepapers, in the hope of finding something to read; but they were writtenand printed in the Spanish tongue, and might have been Hebrew for allthe good they were to me.
Our life was extraordinarily dismal and melancholy, how much so I amunable to express. It was just the same as living in a dungeon. Therewas no crevice for the daylight to shine through, and had there been wemust have closed it to keep the cold out. Nothing could be imagined moregloomy to the spirits than the perpetual night of the schooner'sinterior. The furnace, it is true, would, when it flamed heartily, throwa brightness about it; but often it sank into redness that did butempurple the gloom. We burned but one candle at a time, and its lightwas very small, so that our time was spent chiefly in a sullen twilight.Added to all this was my dislike of my companion. He would half fuddlehimself with liquor, and in that condition hiccup out twenty kinds ofvillainous yarns of piracy, murder, and bloodshed, boasting of thenumber of persons he had despatched, of his system of torturingprisoners to make them confess what they had concealed and where. Hewould drivel about his amours, of the style in which he lived whenashore, and the like; but whether reticence had grown into a habit toostrong even for drink to break down, he never once gave me so much as ahint touching his youth and early life. He was completely a Frenchman inhis vanity, and you would have thought him entirely odious anddetestable for this excessive quality in him alone. Methinks I see himnow, sitting before me, with one half of him reflecting the light of thefurnace, his little eyes twinkling with a cruel merriment of wine,telling me a lying story of the adoration of a noble, queenly-lookingcaptive for his person--some lovely Spanish court lady whom, withothers, they had taken out of a small frigate bound to old Spain. Totest her sincerity he offered to procure her liberty at the firstopportunity that offered; but she wept, raved, tore her hair. No;without her Jules life would be unendurable; her husband, her country,her king, nay, even the allurements and sparkle of the court, had growndisgusting; and so on, and so on. And I think a monkey would have burstinto laughter to see the bald-headed old satyr beat his bosom, flourishhis arms, ogle, languish, and simper, all with a cut-throat expression,too, soften his voice, and act in short as if he was not telling me asbig a lie as was ever related on shipboard.
It naturally rendered me very melancholy to reflect that I had restoredthis old villain to life, and I protest it was a continuous shock tosuch religious feelings as I had managed to preserve to reflect thatwhat had been as good as nearly half a century of death had done nothingfor this elderly rogue's morals. It entered my head once to believe thatif I could succeed in getting him to believe he had lain frozen foreight-and-forty years, he might be seized with a fright (for he was awhite-livered creature), and in some directions mend, and so come to asense of the service I had done him, of which he appeared whollyinsensible, and qualify me to rid my mind of the fears which Ientertained concerning our association, should we manage to escape withthe treasure. I said to him bluntly--not _apropos_ (to use his ownlingo) of anything we were talking about,--
"'Tis odd, Mr. Tassard, you should doubt my assurance that this is theyear eighteen hundred and one."
He stared, grinned, and said, "Do you think so?"
"Well," said I, "perhaps it is not so odd after all; but you shouldsuffer me to have as good an idea of the passage of time as yourself.You cannot tell me how long your stupor lasted."
"Two days if you like!" he interrupted
vehemently. "Why more? Why longerthan a day? How do you know that I had sunk into the condition in whichyou found me longer than an hour or two when you landed? How do youknow, hey? How do you know?" and he snapped his fingers.
"I know by the date you name and by the year that this is," said Idefiantly.
He uttered a coarse French expression and added, "You want to prove thatI have been insensible for forty-eight years."
"It is the fact," said I.
He looked so wild and fierce that I drew myself erect ready for him ifhe should fall upon me. Then, slowly wagging his head whilst the angerin his face softened out, he said, "Who reigns in France now?"
I said, "There is no king; he was beheaded."
"What was his name?" said he.
"Louis the Sixteenth," I answered.
"Ha!" cried he, with an arch sneer; "Louis the Sixteenth, hey? Are yousure it wasn't Louis the Seventeenth?"
"He is dead too."
"This is news, Mr. Rodney," said he scornfully.
"Whilst you have been here," said I, "many mighty changes have happened.France has produced as great a general and as dangerous a villain as theworld ever beheld; his name is Buonaparte."
He shrugged his shoulders with an air of mocking pity.
"Who is your king?" he asked.
"George the Third," said I; "God bless him!"
"So--George and Louis--Louis and George. I see how it is. Stick to yourdates, sir. But, my friend, never set up as a schoolmaster."
This sally seemed to delight him, and he burst into a loud laugh.
"Eighteen hundred and one!" he cried. "A man I knew once lost tenthousand livres at a _coup_. What do you think happened? They settled inhim here;" he patted his belly: "he went about bragging to everybodythat he was made of money, and was nicknamed the walking bourse. One dayhe asked a friend to dine with him; when the bill was presented he feltin his pockets, and exclaimed, 'I left my purse at home. No matter;there is plenty here;' with which he seized a table-knife and rippedhimself open. Eighteen hundred and one, d'ye call it? _Soit._ But letit be _your_ secret, my friend. The world will not love you for makingit fifty years older than it is."
It was ridiculous to attempt to combat such obstinacy as this, and asthe subject produced nothing but excitement and irritation, I dropped itand meddled with it no more, leaving him to his conviction that I wascracked in this one particular. In fact, it was a matter of noconsequence at all; what came very much closer home was the business ofour deliverance, and over this we talked long and very earnestly, for heforgot to be mean and fierce and boastful, and I to dislike and fearhim, when we spoke of getting away with our treasure, and returning toour native home.
For hour after hour would we go on plotting and planning and scheming,stepping about the cook-house in our earnestness, and entirely engrossedwith the topic. His contention was that if we were to save the money andplate, we must save the schooner.
"Unless we build a vessel," said I.
"Out of what?"
"Out of this schooner."
"Are you a carpenter?" said he.
"No," I replied.
"Neither am I," said he. "It's possible we might contrive such astructure as would enable us to save our lives; but we have not theskill to produce a vessel big enough to contain those chests as well asourselves, and the stores we should require to take. Besides, do youknow there is no labour more fatiguing than knocking such a craft asthis to pieces?"
This I very well believed, and it was truer of such a vessel as the_Boca del Dragon_ that was a perfect bed of timber, and, like the_Laughing Mary_, built as if she was to keep the seas for three hundredyears.
"And supposing," said he, "after infinite toil we succeeded in breakingup as much of her as we wanted, what appliances have we for reshapingthe curved timbers? and where are we to lay the keel? Labour as wemight, the cold would prove too much for us. No, Mr. Rodney, to save thetreasure, ay, and to save ourselves, we must save the ship. Let us putour minds to that."
In this way we would reason, and I confess he talked very sensibly,taking very practical views, and indicating difficulties which my moreardent and imaginative nature might have been blind to till theyimmovably confronted me, and rendered days of labour useless. But howwas the ship to be saved? Was it possible to force Nature's hand; inother words, to anticipate our release by the dissolution of the ice? Wewere both agreed that this was the winter season in these seas, thoughhe instantly grew sulky if I mentioned the month, for he was as certainI was as mad in this, as in the year, and he would eye me verymalignantly if I persisted in calling it July. But, as I have said, wewere both agreed that the summer was to come, and though we could notswear that the ice was floating northwards, we had a right to believeso, in spite of the fierceness of the cold, this being the trick of allthese frozen estates when they fetch to the heights under which we lay;and we would ask each other whether we should let our hands and mindsrest idle and wait to see what the summer would do for us, or essay tolaunch the schooner.
"If," said he, "we wait for the ice to break up it may break us up too."
"Yes," said I, "but how are we to cut the vessel out of the ice in whichshe is seated to above the garboard streak? Waiting is odious andintolerable work; but my own conviction is, nothing is to be done tillthe sun comes this way, and the ice crumbles into bergs. The island isleagues long, and vanishes in the south; but it is wasting fast in thenorth, and when this gale is done I shall expect to see twenty bergswhere it was before all compact."
As you may guess, our long conversations left us without plans, bitteras was our need, and vigorous as were our efforts to strike upon somelikely scheme. However, if they achieved no more, they served to beguilethe time, and what was better yet, they took my companion's mind off hisnauseous and revolting recollections, so that it was only now and againwhen he had drained a full bowl, and his little eyes danced in theirthick-shagged caves, that he regaled me with his memories of murder,rapine, plank-walking, hanging, treacheries of all kinds, and crueltiestoo barbarous for belief.