"Findin' I was helpless, for I'd sprained my ankle in the fall, four of 'em picked me up, and carried me away to a hut, and tended me like a baby; and when the men, who'd come over to that side of the island 'long with 'em, and gone a-fishin', come back, I was safe enough; for women are women all the world over, soft-hearted, kindly creturs, that like anything that's in trouble, 'specially if they can give it a lift out on't. So I was nursed, and fed, and finally taken over the ridge of rocks that run acrost the island to their town of bamboo huts; and now begun to look about me, for here I was, stranded, as one may say, out o' sight o' land.
"Ships didn't never touch there, I knew by their ways, their wonderin' and takin' sights at me. As for Cap'en Twist, he wouldn't come back for his own father, unless he was short o' hands for whalin'. I was in for life, no doubt on't; and I'd better look at the fair-weather side of the thing. The island was as pretty a bit of land as ever lay betwixt sea and sky; full of tall cocoa-nut palms, with broad, feathery tops, and bunches of brown nuts; bananas hung in yellow clumps ready to drop off at a touch; and big bread-fruit trees stood about everywhere, lookin' as though a punkin-vine had climbed up into 'em and hung half-ripe punkins off of every bough; beside lots of other trees that the natives set great store by, and live on the fruit of 'em; and flyin' through all, such pretty birds as you never see except in them parts; but one brown thrasher'd beat the whole on 'em singin'; fact is, they run to feathers; they don't sing none.
"It was as sightly a country as ever Adam and Eve had to themselves; but it wa'n't home. Howsomever, after a while the savages took to me mightily. I was allers handy with tools, and by good luck I'd come off with two jack-knives and a loose awl in my jacket-pocket, so I could beat 'em all at whittlin'; and I made figgers on their bows an' pipe-stems, of things they never see,roosters, and horses, Miss Buel's old sleigh, and the Albany stage, driver'n' all, and our yoke of oxen a-ploughin',till nothin' would serve them but I should have a house o' my own, and be married to their king's daughter; so I did.
"Well, Doctor, you kinder wonder I forgot Hetty Buel. I didn't forget her, but I knew she wa'n't to be had anyhow; I thought I was in for life; and Wailua was the prettiest little craft that ever you set eyes on, as straight as a spar, and as kindly as a Christian; and besides, I had to, or I'd have been killed, and broiled, and eaten, whether or no! And then in that 'are latitude it a'n't just the way 'tis here; you don't work; you get easy, and lazy, and sleepy; somethin' in the air kind of hushes you up; it makes you sweat to think, and you're too hazy to, if it didn't; and you don't care for nothing much but food and drink. I hadn't no spunk left; so I married her after their fashion, and I liked her well enough; and she was my wife, after all.
"I tell ye, Doctor, it goes a gret way with men-folks to think anything's their'n, and nobody else's. But when I married her, I took the chain with Hetty Buel's ring off my neck, and put 'em in a shell, and buried the shell under my doorway. I couldn't have Wailua touch that.
"So there I lived fifteen long year, as it might be, in a kind of a curus dream, doin' nothin' much, only that when I got to know the tongue them savages spoke, little by little I got pretty much the steerin' o' the hull crew, till by-'n'-by some of 'em got jealous, and plotted and planned to kill me, because the king, Wailua's father, was gettin' old, and they thought I wanted to be king when he died, and they couldn't stan' that no way.
"Somehow or other Wailua got word of what was goin' on, and one night she woke me out of sleep an' told me I must run for't, and she would hide me safe till things took a turn. So I scratched up the shell with Hetty's ring in't, and afore morning I was over t'other side of the island, in a kind of a cave overlookin' the sea, near by to a grove of bananas and mammee apples, and not fur from the harbor where I'd landed; and safe enough, for nobody but Wailua knew the way to't.
"Well, the sixth day I sot in the porthole of that cave I see a sail in the offing. I declare, I thought I should 'a' choked! I catched off my tappa cloth and h'isted it on a pole, but the ship kep' on stiddy out to sea. My heart beat up to my eyes, but I held on ag'inst hope, and I declare I prayed; words come to me that I hadn't said since I was a boy to Simsbury, and the Lord he heerd; for, as true as the compass, that ship lay to, tacked, put in for the island, and afore night I was aboard of the Lysander, a Salem whaler, with my mouth full of grog and ship-biscuit, and my body in civilized toggery. I own I felt queer to go away so and leave Wailua; but I knew 'twas gettin' her out of danger, for the old king was just a-goin' to die, and if ever I'd have gone back, we should both have been murdered. Besides, we didn't always agree; she had to walk straighter than her wild natur' agreed with, because she was my wife; and we hadn't no children to hold us together; and I couldn't 'a' taken her aboard of the whaler, if she'd wanted to go. I guess it was best; anyhow, so it was.
"But this wasn't to be the end of my v'yagin'. The Lysander foundered just off Valparaiso; and though all hands was saved in the boats, when we got to port there wasn't no craft there bound any nearer homeward than an English merchant-ship, for Liverpool, by way of Madeira. So I worked a passage to Funchal, and there I got aboard of a Southampton steamer, bound for Cuba, that put in for coal. But when I come to Havana I was nigh about tuckered out; for goin' round the Horn in the Lemon, that 'are English ship,I'd ben on duty in all sorts o' weather; and I'd lived lazy and warm so long I expect it was too tough for me, and I was pestered with a hard cough, and spit blood, so't I was laid up a long spell in the hospital at Havana. And there I kep' a-thinkin' over Hetty's Bible, and I b'lieve I studied that 'are chart till I found out the way to port, and made up my log all square for the owner; for I knowed well enough where I was bound; but I did hanker to get home to Simsbury afore shovin' off.
"Well, finally, there come into the harbor a Mystic ship that was a-goin' down the Gulf for a New York owner. I'd known Seth Crane, the cap'en of her, away back in old Simsbury times. He was an Avon boy; and when I sighted that vessel's name, as I was crawlin' along the quay one day, and, seein' she was Connecticut-built, boarded her, and see Seth, I was old fool enough to cry right out,I was so shaky. And Seth he was about as scart as ef he'd seen the dead, havin' heerd up to Avon, fifteen year ago nearly, that the Lowisy Miles had been run down off the Sandwich Islands by a British man-of-war, and all hands lost, exceptin' one o' the boys. However, he come to his bearin's after a while, and told me about our folks, and how't Hetty Buel wasn't married, but keepin' deestrict school, and her old grandmother alive yet.
"Well, I kinder heartened up, and agreed to take passage with Seth.Good Lord, Doctor! what's that?"
A peculiar and oppressive stillness had settled down on everything in and out of the hospital while Jackson was going on with his story. I noticed it only as the hush of a tropic midnight; but as he spoke, I heardapparently out on the prairiea heavy jarring sound like repeated blows, drawing nearer and nearer the building.
Jackson sprung upright on his pillows, the hectic passed from either gaunt and sallow cheek, leaving the red and blue tattoo marks visible in most ghastly distinctness, while the sweat poured in drops down his hollow temples.
The noise drew still nearer. All the patients in the ward awoke and quitted their beds, hastily. The noise was at hand,blows of great violence and power; and a certain malign rapidity shook the walls from one end of the hospital to the other,blow upon blow, like the fierce attacks of a catapult, only with no like result. The nurse, a German Catholic, fell on his knees and told his beads, glancing over his shoulder in undisguised horror; the patients cowered together, groaning and praying; and I could hear the stir and confusion in the ward below. In less than a minute's space the singular sound passed through the house, and in hollow, jarring echoes died out toward the bay.
Jackson sprung upright on his pillows, the hectic passed from either gaunt and sallow cheek, leaving the red and blue tattoo marks visible in most ghastly distinctness, while the sweat poured in drops down his hollow temples.
The noise drew still nearer. All the patients in the ward awoke and quitted their beds, hastily. The noise was at hand,blows of great violence and power; and a certain malign rapidity shook the walls from one end of the hospital to the other,blow upon blow, like the fierce attacks of a catapult, only with no like result. The nurse, a German Catholic, fell on his knees and told his beads, glancing over his shoulder in undisguised horror; the patients cowered together, groaning and praying; and I could hear the stir and confusion in the ward below. In less than a minute's space the singular sound passed through the house, and in hollow, jarring echoes died out toward the bay.
I looked at Eben;his jaw had fallen; his hands were rigid and locked together; his eyes were rolled upward, fixed and glassy; a stream of scarlet blood trickled over his gray beard from the corner of his mouth;he was dead! As I laid him back on the pillow and turned to restore some quiet to the ward, a Norther came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid to temperate zone.
Vainly did I endeavor to calm the terror of my patients, excited still more by the elemental uproar without; vainly did I harangue them, in the plainest terms to which science is reducible, on atmospheric vibrations, acoustics, reverberations, and volcanic agencies; they insisted on some supernatural power having produced the recent fearful sounds. Neither common nor uncommon sense could prevail with them; and when they discovered, by the appearance of the extra nurse I had sent for, to perform the last offices for Jackson, that he was dead, a renewed and irrepressible horror attacked them, and it was broad day before composure or stillness was regained in any part of the building except my own rooms, to which I betook myself as soon as possible, and slept till sunrise, too soundly for any mystical visitation whatever to have disturbed my rest.
The next day, in spite of the brief influence of the Norther, the first case of yellow fever showed itself in the hospital; before night seven had sickened, and one, already reduced by chronic disease, died. I had hoped to bury Jackson decently, in the cemetery of the city, where his vexed mortality might rest in peace under the oleanders and china-trees, shut in by the hedge of Cherokee roses that guards the enclosure from the prairie, a living wall of glassy green, strewn with ivory-white buds and blossoms, fair and pure; but on applying for a burial-spot, the city authorities, panic-stricken cowards that they were, denied me the privilege even of a prairie grave, outside the cemetery hedge, for the poor fellow. In vain did I represent that he had died of lingering disease, and that nowise contagious; nothing moved them. It was enough that there was yellow fever in the ward where he died. I was forthwith strictly ordered to have all the dead from the hospital buried on the sand-flats at the east end of the island.
What a place that is it is scarcely possible to describe. Wide and dreary levels of sand, some four or five feet lower than the town, and flooded by high tides; the only vegetation a scanty, dingy gray, brittle, crackling growth,bitter sandworts and the like; over and through which the abominable tawny sand-crabs are constantly executing diabolic waltzes on the tips of their eight legs, vanishing into the ground like imps as you approach; curlews start from behind the loose drifts of sand and float away with heartbroken cries seaward; little sandpipers twitter plaintively, running through the weeds; and great, sulky, gray cranes droop their motionless heads over the still salt pools along the shore.
To this blank desolation I was forced to carry poor Jackson's body, with that of the fever-patient, just at sunset. As the Dutchman who officiated as hearse, sexton, bearer, and procession, stuck his spade into the ground, and withdrew it full of crumbling shells and fine sand, the hole it left filled with bitter black ooze. There, sunk in the ooze, covered with the shifting sand, bewailed by the wild cries of sea-birds, noteless and alone, I left Eben Jackson, and returned to the mass of pestilence and wretchedness within the hospital walls.
In the spring I reached home safely. None but the resident on a Southern sand-bank can fully appreciate the verdure and bloom of the North. The great elms of my native town were full of tender buds, like a clinging mist in their graceful branches; earlier trees were decked with little leaves, deep-creased, and silvery with down; the wide river in a fluent track of metallic lustre weltered through green meadows that on either hand stretched far and wide; the rolling land beyond was spread out in pastures, where the cattle luxuriated after the winter's stalling; and on many a slope and plain the patient farmer turned up his heavy sods and clay, to moulder in sun and air for seed-time and harvest; and the beautiful valley that met the horizon on the north and south rolled away eastward and westward to a low blue range of hills, that guarded it with granite walls and bristling spears of hemlock and pine.
This is not my story; and if it were, I do not know that I should detail my home-coming. It is enough to say, that I came after a five years' absence, and found all that I had left nearly as I had left it;how few can say as much!
Various duties and some business arrangements kept me at work for six or seven weeks, and it was June before I could fulfil my promise to Eben Jackson. I took the venerable old horse and chaise that had carried my father on his rounds for years, and made the best of my way out toward Simsbury. I was alone, of course; even Cousin Lizzy, charming as five years had made the little girl of thirteen whom I had left behind on quitting home, was not invited to share my drive; there was something too serious in the errand to endure the presence of a gay young lady. But I was not lonely; the drive up Talcott Mountain, under the rude portcullis of the toll-gate, through fragrant woods, by trickling brooks, past huge boulders that scarce a wild vine dare cling to, with its feeble, delicate tendrils, is all exquisite, and full of living repose; and turning to descend the mountain, just where a brook drops headlong with clattering leap into a steep black ravine, and comes out over a tiny green meadow, sliding past great granite rocks, and bending the grass-blades to a shining track, you see suddenly at your feet the beautiful mountain valley of the Farmington river, trending away in hill after hill,rough granite ledges crowned with cedar and pine,deep ravines full of heaped rocks,and here and there the formal white rows of a manufacturing village, where Kühleborn is captured and forced to turn water-wheels, and Undine picks cotton or grinds hardware, dammed into utility.
Into this valley I plunged, and inquiring my way of many a prim farmer's wife and white-headed school-boy, I edged my way northward under the mountain side, and just before noon found myself beneath the "great ellum," where, nearly twenty years ago, Eben Jackson and Hetty Buel had said good-bye.
I tied my horse to the fence and walked up the worn footpath to the door. Apparently no one was at home. Under this impression I knocked vehemently, by way of making sure; and a weak, cracked voice at length answered, "Come in!" There, by the window, perhaps the same where she sat so long before, crouched in an old chair covered with calico, her bent fingers striving with mechanical motion to knit a coarse stocking, sat old Mrs. Buel. Age had worn to the extreme of attenuation a face that must always have been hard-featured, and a few locks of snow-white hair, straying from under the bandanna handkerchief of bright red and orange that was tied over her cap and under her chin, added to the old-world expression of her whole figure. She was very deaf; scarcely could I make her comprehend that I wanted to see her grand-daughter; at last she understood, and asked me to sit down till Hetty should come from school; and before long, a tall, thin figure opened the gate and came slowly up the path.