CHAPTER XIII.
DREAMS.
"For thoughts, like waves that glide by night, Are stillest when they shine." --OLD SONG.
"Rouse up, Richard! Rouse up, man! An you give way like this, you'llsoon be taking the ship-fever and dying. 'Tis no use to wilfully hastenthe end," said Peter Ruffin to the apathetic man beside him.
But Richard sat staring over the waters, saying only in a dogged way,"'Tis no use to retard it."
"Ay, but it is; something may happen--Washington may drive Clinton fromNew York--"
"He cannot, for he hath not the force."
"--Or we may escape."
Richard glanced around the deck where guards, armed to their teeth,trod in ceaseless vigil, and then looked away to the shore, where afew cabins marked the station of the shore patrol who took up thewatch where the ship guard left off, thus making assurance doublysure.
"With the sea and a double guard against us, the chance is not worth thecounting."
"A resolute man could swim ashore from here."
"Methinks he could most easily, especially with the tide in his favour;but if he eludes the watch here, the patrol yonder will shoot him like arat when he crawls out of the water. No, Peter, I have gone over it allin my mind, calculated the method of reaching the water, the length ofthe swim, and the best place to land. I have even tried to get speechwith Dame Grant when she comes with her wares, to see if she could notbe bribed to aid me; but the warden never takes his eyes from her untilher sales are over and her boat ready to start. She has a solemnly sourface, but mayhap a gold piece would soften her heart to mercy. It wasfor this that I have hoarded Colborn's gold."
"I, too, thought of the bumboat woman, but gave up hope of aid from her,seeing how she is watched. 'Twere as much as her life is worth to giveus the smallest assistance," answered Peter.
"Yes, we are cut off from every chance, condemned--doomed--and seeingthis, I have given up hope."
"I am some twenty years your senior, Richard, and I say to you that asane man never ceases to hope."
"Then mayhap I am insane--sometimes I think it may be so. Surely, it wasthe arch-fiend himself who put it into the hearts of the English to turnthese disease-infected hulks into prisons; no mere mortal mind couldhave in itself conceived such a thought. The fever or the vermin--whichwere worse, 'twere hard to say. To rot here inch by inch, and the fightgoing on outside! God, but 'tis hard!"
"Hist! the guard is looking at you suspiciously. 'Tis no use getting hisill-will; let us talk of something else." And when the sentinel passedslowly in front of them, the older man was talking of his boy who haddied in childhood, and the younger one had dropped his head again uponhis breast and sat in moody silence. Thus had life crept on for fiveweeks, each day of which was a slow-paced agony, each night a long-drawnhorror.
Wallabout Bay, where the prison-ships were anchored, cut into the LongIsland shore on the north, and was protected from the storms that rockedthe outer deep. Most of the prisoners were seamen, but now and then asquad of land captives, for lack of some other place in which to confinethem, were sent thither to starve and suffer and wait their turn to die.The wound in Richard's head had healed, thanks to Colborn's salve; butthe confinement, together with the scant and rancid food and the foulair in the ship's hold where the nights were passed, was slowlyundermining his strength of body and of will. Each morning the inhumanorder, "Rebels, turn out your dead!" which the guard called down throughthe opened hatches, sent a shiver of horror to his very soul; and thefeeling was not lessened as he aided in selecting the poor fellows whohad died in the night, and saw them sewed into their blankets and rowedaway to shallow graves upon the shore. Two of the prisoners were made toact as grave-diggers on these occasions, the guard going merely tosuperintend.
Twice in the past weeks Richard and Peter had gone in the funeral-boat,and on each occasion thoughts of making a break for liberty had hauntedthem. But the futility of such an attempt was made apparent by theproximity of the shore patrol, within range of whose guns the graveswere dug. The nearest cover was a line of sand-dunes and stuntedbrush-growth fifty yards up the level beach, before reaching which a mancould be pierced by twenty bullets. Regretfully and angrily the two mennoted this; and later on had it all doubly impressed upon them by theshooting of a prisoner who, one day, when the grave was half-filled,made the mad attempt to get away. Only one of the two impressedgrave-diggers came back in the boat that day, for the other was buriedwhere he fell; and the harshness of the ship-jailers increased towardthose who remained.
"Look," said Richard, shuddering, the second time he and Peter weredetailed to take a corpse to the sandy burying-ground; "already thewaves have opened some of the graves and left the poor fellows but thescantest covering. Before long their bones will whiten to the sun."
"It is a sickening certainty! And all of this you and I might escapeif so we would but go back yonder to the warden and take the oath ofallegiance to the king, and change these tattered coats for gay uniformsof scarlet," answered Peter.
"True; but like those who have gone before us, we will die in the shipyonder and fester here in the sand first. Between death and Englishslavery there is a quick choice, and we made it long ago. But promiseme, Peter, that if I die first you will ask to come as my sexton, anddig me a grave deep enough to keep me from the sea for at least a littlewhile."
"I will; and you will do a like thing for me. But as I told you theother day, you will go before me, and soon at that, if so you keep upthis dreary moping."
But Richard could not bring himself to hope. The absolute helplessnessof their position, the powerlessness of action of any sort took fromhim the ability to reason normally. Everything twisted itself backwardto the wretched and relentless present, turn where he would forconsolation. And so after the morning tasks of airing blankets andscrubbing decks were performed, he sat all day looking sullenly out overthe water, studying the changing moods of the sea, watching the gulls asthey flapped past or went soaring upward with the glancing sunlight ontheir wings. And all this while there was but one clear thought in hismind--Joscelyn. Plainer than the faces about him he saw her features,and above the ship noises and the restless wash of the waves, he heardthe sweet accents of her voice. Incessantly he brooded over each memoryof her, recalling the chestnut tints of her hair, the blue lights in hereyes, and the rose hues of cheeks and lips. Her beauty had never beforeappeared to him so great or so much to be desired as now.
"Even behind prison bars I am her lover;" often he said the words tohimself, wondering morbidly if Billy carried her the message, and whatshe said in answer. He would never know, of course, for his career mustend yonder in the sand with his unfortunate fellows; but liberty itselfwould not be sweeter than some token, it mattered not how small, of hersorrow and her favour. How he longed for her, body and soul! Alwaysin fancy he kissed her good night, holding the sweet face between hispalms and watching to see the eyes droop under his ardent gaze, and thedelicate lips quiver with the passion of his caress. He told himself itwas only such fleeting fancies as these that kept him sane. For in thesemoments she was tender and loving, and she was all his; and the unknownhusband--he who would one day claim her in reality when he himself, withhis idle dreams, should be dead and gone--he hated with a jealous rageas vital as though the man stood before him in the flesh; and he lookedat his fingers with a dull sense of their strangling powers, and longedto feel them tighten over a purpling throat. Peter talked of heaven, ofits rest and peace; but how could there be for him either joy or peace,even in Paradise, while another man held Joscelyn in his arms? Often inhis cloying misery he tried to make out who this other lover would be;but no one, not even Eustace Singleton, seemed to fill the place. Once,and his heart had been hot with jealousy at the thought, he had imaginedthat under hers and Eustace's frank friendship there lingered a warmerfeeling; but this fancy stood no test of observation, for in noact of Joscelyn's was there a trace of that air, indescribable yetunmistakable,
that marks the beginnings of love; and of late monthsEustace had a way of looking at Betty that put strange fancies intoRichard's head. No, Joscelyn and Eustace were not lovers; it would besome one else, some stranger who would claim all the sweetness of herlove. And at the thought the murderous fingers writhed upon each other,and the sweat of agony was on his brow. Then his fancy would takeanother turn. There was no other lover, there never would be any other;by strength of his love she belonged to him here and would be histhrough all eternity. In heaven there is no marrying nor giving inmarriage, so the Bible said; but surely God would be merciful to him,knowing how he had missed his happiness here.
This was the dream-palace in which he dwelt, while he gazed vacantlyover the sunlit sea and waited to be sewed into his blanket and carriedacross to the white sands by those who, in their turn, one afteranother, should follow to the same end.
And then, one morning when August was well on the wane, somethinghappened that broke the spell of deadening despair that held him in itsgrasp.