Chapter Thirty.
Strange Scenes and Doings far away
Let us turn, now, to a very different region of the world from that in which the events just narrated took place.
It is an island of the sea. Nature has been bountiful to that island, for there is redundant verdure on every side. Paradise of old may have been something like it,—could not have been much better, physically, although it was so in a moral point of view. Yet, even in that aspect our island is superior to many others, for there are only two human beings upon it, and these are less sinful specimens of humanity than one usually meets with. They are peculiar, too.
One is an athletic middle-aged man, whose clothing is goat-skin, evidently home-made, and cut in sailor fashion. Magnificent shaggy locks fall in heavy masses from his head, lip, and chin. Robinson Crusoe himself could not have looked grander or more savage in outward aspect.
The other is a boy—a lad. He is a stout well-grown fellow, neither so tall nor so muscular as his companion, but giving promise that he will excel him in due time. In the matter of hair, his head exhibited locks if possible more curly and redundant, while the chin and lip are not yet clothed with young manhood’s downy shadow.
Both, the middle-aged man and the youth, have a pensive expression of countenance; but there is a gleam of fire in the eye of the latter, and a spice of fun about the corners of his mouth, which are wanting in his companion.
“Faither,” said the lad, rising from the rock on which they were seated, “what are ’ee thinkin’ on?”
“I’ve bin thinkin’, Billy, that it’s nigh five years sin’ we come here.”
“That’s an old thought, daddy.”
“May be so, lad, but it’s ever with me, and never seems to grow old.”
There was such a tone of melancholy in the remark of our old friend Gaff, that Billy forbore to pursue the subject.
“My heart is set upon pork to-day, daddy,” said the Bu’ster with a knowing smile. “We’ve had none for three weeks, and I’m gettin’ tired o’ yams and cocoa-nuts and crabs. I shall go huntin’ again.”
“You’ve tried it pretty often of late, without much luck.”
“So I have, but I’ve tried it often before now with pretty fair luck, an’ what has happened once may happen again, so I’ll try. My motto is, ‘Never say die.’”
“A good one, Billy; stick to it, lad,” said Gaff, rising. “And now, we’ll go home to supper. To-morrow we’ll have to mend the fence to keep these same wild pigs you’re so anxious to eat, out of our garden. The nets need mendin’ too, so you’ll have to spin a lot more o’ the cocoa-nut fibre, an’ I’ll have to make a fish-hook or two, for the bones out o’ which I made the last were too small.”
Father and son wended their way down the steep cliffs of the mountain at the foot of which was their cavern home.
“What’s that?” exclaimed Gaff in a low whisper, as they passed along the top of a precipice.
“Pigs,” said Billy with glee; “hold on now, daddy, and let me go at ’em.”
The Bu’ster was no longer the little boy whom I introduced to the reader at the commencement of this narrative. Five years’ residence in the desert island had made him such a strapping young fellow that he seemed much more fitted to cope with a lion than a wild pig! He was not indeed tall, but he was unusually strong.
Gaff sat down on a ledge of rock while Billy crept cautiously to the edge of the precipice and looked down.
A smile of satisfaction lit up the lad’s countenance as he beheld a big sow and six young pigs busily engaged in digging up roots directly below him. To seize a large stone and drop it into the centre of the group was the work of a moment. The result was in truth deadly, for the heavy stone hit one of the little pigs on the nape of the neck, and it sank to the ground with a melancholy squeak which proved to be its last.
The crash of the stone and the squeak of the pig caused the rest of the family to turn and fly from the fatal spot with porcine haste, filling the air as they ran with shrieks and yells, such as only pigs—and bad babies—know how to utter.
“Got him, daddy—Hooray!” shouted the Bu’ster, as he leaped up and ran by a circuitous route to the foot of the precipice, whence he speedily returned with the pig under his arm.
“A fat ’un, daddy,” he observed, holding it up by the tail.
“Capital!” said Gaff, pinching the pig’s sides, “we shall grub well for some days to come.”
“I should think so, daddy; why, we’ve more than we know what to do wi’; for, what with the crab-pies you made this mornin’, and the cocoa-nut soup and yams and dove-hash left fro’ yesterday’s dinner, an’ this little grumpy, we stand a good chance o’ aperplexy or somethin’ o’ that sort.”
“Was there many more o’ ’em, lad?”
“Ay, five moloncholly brothers and sisters, an’ a hideously fat mother left to mourn the loss o’ this chap. I’ll be after them to-morrow. They won’t go far, for I’ve noticed that when pigs take a fancy to a spot they don’t leave it for a good while. Here we are at home, an’ now for a splendid roast. There’s nothin’ like grub when ye’re hungry.”
“’Xcept drink when ye’re dry,” observed Gaff.
“Of coorse, an’ a snooze when ye’re sleepy; but don’t let’s git too pheelosophical, daddy; it an’t good for digestion to argufy on a empty stummik. An’ I see ye wants me to argue, but I won’t do it; there now!”
It was one of Billy’s devices to keep himself and his father cheery in their prolonged exile, to pretend that he didn’t like to argue, and to stoutly assert that he would not do it, while at the same time he led his parent into all sorts of discussions.
On the present occasion, while he was engaged in preparing the pig for the spit, and his father was mending the handle of a fish-spear of his own fabrication, the discussion, or rather the conversation, turned upon the possibility of two people living happily all their days on a desert island.
Billy thought it was quite possible if the grub did not fail, but Gaff shook his head, and said it would be a blue look-out if one of them should get ill, or break his leg. Billy did not agree with this at all; he held that if one should get ill it would be great fun for the other to act the part of nurse and doctor, while the sick one would learn to value his health more when he got it back. As to breaking a leg, why, it was no use speculating how things would feel if that should occur; as well speak of the condition of things if both of them should break their necks.
The discussion diverged, as such discussions usually did, to home and its inmates, long before any satisfactory conclusion was come to, and it was brought to a close in consequence of Billy having to go out of the cave for firewood to roast the pig.
The cavern home had assumed a very different aspect from that which it presented when Gaff and his son took possession of it five years before. It now bore, externally and internally, the appearance of an old much-used dwelling. The entrance, which was an irregular archway of about ten feet in diameter, had been neatly closed up with small trees, over which strong banana leaves were fastened, so as to make it weather-tight. In this screen two holes were left—a small one for a door, and a still smaller one for a window. Both were fastened with a goat-skin curtain, which could be let down and fastened at night. In the daytime both door and window were always left wide-open, for the island on which our friends had been cast was one of a group of uninhabited islets, the climate around which is warm and delightful during the greater part of the year.
The ground outside of the cave was trodden by long use to the hardness of stone. The small vegetable garden, close to the right of the door, was enclosed by a fence, which bore evidence of having been more than once renewed, and frequently repaired. Some of the trees that had been cut down—with stone hatchets made by themselves—when they first arrived, had several tall and sturdy shoots rising from the roots. There was a flat stone deeply hollowed out by constant sharpening of the said hatchet. There was a rustic seat, the handiwork of Billy, that bore symptoms of having been much sat upon. There were sundry footpaths, radiating into the woods, that were beginning to assume the hardness and dimensions of respectable roads; while all round the place there were signs and symptoms of the busy hand of man having been at work there for years.
High up, on a mighty cliff that overlooked and almost overhung the sea, a rude flagstaff had been raised. This was among the first pieces of work that Gaff and his son had engaged in after landing. It stood on what they termed Signal Cliff, and was meant to attract the attention of any vessel that might chance to pass.
To Signal Cliff did Gaff and Billy repair each morning at daylight, as regularly as clockwork, to hoist their flag, made from cocoa-nut fibre; and, with equal regularity, did Billy go each night at sunset to haul the ensign down.
Many an anxious hour did they spend there together, gazing wistfully at the horizon, and thinking, if not talking, of home. But ships seldom visited that sea. Twice only, during their exile, did they at long intervals descry a sail, but on both occasions their flag failed to attract attention, and the hopes which had suddenly burst up with a fierce flame in their breasts were doomed to sink again in disappointment.
At first they had many false alarms, and frequently mistook a sea-gull in the distance for a sail; but such mistakes became less frequent as their hopes became less sanguine, and their perceptions, from practice, more acute. Sometimes they sat there for hours together. Sometimes, when busy with household arrangements, or equipped for fishing and hunting, they merely ran to hoist the flag; but never once did they fail to pay Signal Cliff a daily visit.
On Sundays, in particular, they were wont to spend the greater part of their time there, reading the New Testament.
It happened that, just before Gaff left Cove in the sloop of Haco Barepoles, Lizzie Gordon had presented him with a Testament. Being a seriously-minded man, he had received the gift with gratitude, and carried it to sea with him. Afterwards, when he and poor Billy were enduring the miseries of the voyage in the whale-ship, Gaff got out the Testament, and, aided by Billy, tried to spell it out, and seek for consolation in it. He thus got into a habit of carrying it in his coat-pocket, and it was there when he was cast on the desert island.
Although, of course, much damaged with water, it was not destroyed, for its clasp happened to be a very tight one, and tended greatly to preserve it. When father and son finally took up their abode in the cavern, the former resolved to devote some time night and morning to reading the Testament. He could spell out the capital letters, and Billy had, before quitting home, got the length of reading words of one syllable. Their united knowledge was thus very slight, but it was quite sufficient to enable them to overcome all difficulties, and in time they became excellent readers.
The story of Christ’s redeeming love wrought its legitimate work on father and son, and, ere long, the former added prayer to the morning and evening reading of the Word. Gradually the broken sentences of prayer for the Holy Spirit, that light might be shed upon what they read, were followed by earnest confessions of sin, and petitions for pardon for Christ’s sake. Friends, too, were remembered; for it is one of the peculiar consequences of the renewal of the human heart that the subjects of this renewal begin to think of the souls of others as well as of their own. Unbelievers deem this presumptuous and hypocritical, forgetting that if they were called upon to act in similar circumstances, they would be necessarily and inevitably quite as presumptuous, and that the insulting manner in which the efforts of believers are often received puts hypocrisy out of the question.
Be this as it may, Gaff prayed for his wife and child at first, and, when his heart began to warm and expand, for his relatives and friends also. He became more earnest, perhaps, when he prayed that a ship might be sent to take them from the island, (and in making this and his other petitions he might have given an instructive lesson to many divines of the present day, showing how wonderfully eloquent a man may be if he will only strive after nothing in the way of eloquence, and simply use the tones and language that God has given him); but all his prayers were wound up with “Thy will be done,” and all were put up in the name of Jesus Christ.
To return from this digression. The inside of the cavern bore not less evidence of long-continued occupation than the outside. There was a block of wood which served father and son for a seat, which had two distinct and highly-polished marks on it. There was a rude table, whose cut, scratched, and hacked surface suggested the idea of many a culinary essay, and many a good meal. There was a very simple grate composed of several stones, which were blackened and whitened with soot and fire. There was no chimney, however, for the roof of the cave was so high that all smoke dissipated itself there, and found an exit no one knew how! In a recess there was a sort of small raised platform, covered with soft herbage and blankets of cocoa-nut fibre, on which, every night, father and son lay down together. The entrance to the inner cave, which formed a store-room and pantry, was covered with a curtain, so that the habitation with its rocky walls, earthen floor, and stalactite roof had quite a snug and cosy appearance.
Soon Billy returned with an armful of dry wood.
“Have ye got a light yet, daddy?”
Gaff, who had been endeavouring to produce a light by using his knife on a bit of flint for five or ten minutes, said he had “just got it,” and proved the truth of his assertion by handing his son a mass of smoking material. Billy blew this into a flame, and applied it to the wood, which soon kindled into a roaring fire.
“Now, then,” cried the Bu’ster, “where’s the spit? Ah! that’s it; here you go; oh dear, how you would yell just now, Mister Grumpy, if you were alive! It’s a cruel thought, but I can’t help it. There, now, frizzle away, and I’ll go clean up my dishes while you are roasting.”
No sooner had the pig been put on the spit, and the first fumes arisen, than there was a loud yell in the forest, followed immediately by the pattering of small feet, as if in tremendous haste.
“Aha! Squeaky, I knew you would smell out the supper double quick,” cried Billy with a laugh, as he looked towards the door.
“He never misses it,” said Gaff with a quiet smile. Next moment a small pig came scampering into the cave and rushed up to the fire, where it sat down promptly as if the sole object it had in view were to warm itself!
And this was indeed its only object, for that pig was passionately, ludicrously fond of the fire! It was a pet pig.
One day when Billy was out hunting, he had caught it in a somewhat singular fashion. He usually went out hunting with a bow and arrow of his own making, and was very successful in bringing down white doves, parroquets, and such creatures, but could make nothing of the pigs, whose skins were too tough for his wooden and unshod arrows. He let fly at them, nevertheless, when he got a chance.
Well, on the day referred to, Billy had shot nothing, and was returning home in a somewhat pensive mood when he heard a squeak, and at once fitted an arrow to his bow. A rush followed the squeak, and dreadful yells accompanied the rush—yells which were intensified, if possible, when Billy’s arrow went into an old sow’s ear after glancing off the back of one of her little ones.
Billy ran after them in wild despair, for he knew that the shot was thrown away. One of the pigs had sprained its ankle, apparently, for it could only run on three legs. This pig fell behind; Billy ran after it, overtook it, fell upon it, and almost crushed it to death—a fact which was announced by an appalling shriek.
The mother turned and ran to the rescue. Billy gathered up the pig and ran for his, (and its), life. It was a hard run, and would certainly have terminated in favour of the sow had not the greater part of the chase been kept up among loose stones, over which the lad had the advantage. In a few minutes he descended a steep cliff over which the bereaved mother did not dare to run.
Thus did Billy become possessed of a live pig, which in a few weeks became a remarkably familiar and fearless inmate of the cavern home.
Billy also had a pet parroquet which soon became tame enough to be allowed to move about at will with a cropped wing, and which was named Shrieky. This creature was a mere bundle of impudent feathers, and a source of infinite annoyance to the pig, for, being possessed of considerable powers of mimicry, it sometimes uttered a porcine shriek, exciting poor Squeaky with the vain hope that some of its relations had arrived, and, what was far worse, frequently imitated the sounds of crackling fire and roasting food, which had the effect of causing Squeaky to rush into the cave, to meet with bitter disappointment.
“Now, Squeaky,” said the Bu’ster, hitting the pig on its snout with a bit of firewood, “keep your dirty nose away from yer cousin.”
Squeaky obeyed meekly, and removed to another spot.
“Isn’t it a strange thing, daddy, that you and I should come to feel so homelike here?”
“Ay, it is strange,” responded Gaff with a sigh, as he laid down the hook he was working at and glanced round the cavern. “Your mother would be astonished to see us now, lad.”
“She’ll hear all about it some day,” said Billy. “You’ve no notion what a splendid story I’ll make out of all this when we get back to Cove!”
It was evident that the Bu’ster inherited much of his mother’s sanguine disposition.
“P’raps we’ll never git back to Cove,” said Gaff sadly; “hows’ever, we’ve no reason to complain. Things might ha’ bin worse. You’d better go and haul down the flag, lad. I’ll look arter the roast till ye come back.”
“The roast’ll look after itself, daddy,” said the Bu’ster; “you look after Squeaky, however, for that sly critter’s always up to mischief.”
Billy hastened to the top of Signal Cliff just as the sun was beginning to descend into the sea, and had commenced to pull down the flag when his eye caught sight of a sail—not on the far-off horizon, like a sea-gull’s wing, but close in upon the land!
The shout that he gave was so tremendous that Gaff heard it in the cave, and rushed out in great alarm. He saw Billy waving a shred of cocoa-nut cloth frantically above his head, and his heart bounded wildly as he sprang up the hill like a stag.
On reaching the flagstaff he beheld the vessel, a large full-rigged ship, sailing calmly, and, to his eye, majestically, not far from the signal cliff.
His first impulse was to wave his hand and shout. Then he laid hands on the halliards of the flag and gave it an extra pull to see that it was well up, while Billy continued to stamp, cheer, yell, and wave his arms like a madman!
Only those who have been long separated from their fellow-men can know the wild excitement that is roused in the breast by the prospect of meeting with new faces. Gaff and Billy found it difficult to restrain themselves, and indeed they did not try to do so for at least ten minutes after the discovery of the ship. Then a feeling of dread came suddenly upon the former.
“Surely they’ll never pass without takin’ notice of us.”
“Never!” exclaimed Billy, whose sudden fall of countenance belied the word.
Gaff shook his head.
“I’m not so sure o’ that,” said he; “if she’s a whaler like the one we came south in, lad, she’ll not trouble herself with us.”
Billy looked very grave, and his heart sank.
“My only consolation is that she looks more like a man-o’-war than a whaler.”
“I wish we had a big gun to fire,” exclaimed Billy, looking round in perplexity, as if he half hoped that a carronade would spring up out of the ground. “Could we not make a row somehow?”
“I fear not,” said Gaff despondingly. “Shoutin’ is of no use. She’s too far-off for that. Our only chance is the flag.”
Both father and son stood silent for some moments earnestly gazing at the ship, which was by this time nearly opposite to their flagstaff, and seemed to be passing by without recognising the signal. This was not to be wondered at, for, although the flag was visible enough from landward, being well defined against the bright sky, it was scarce perceptible from seaward, owing to the hills which formed a background to it.
“I know what’ll do it!” exclaimed Billy, as he leaped suddenly to one side. “Come along, daddy.”
A few yards to one side of the spot on which the flagstaff was reared there was a part of the precipice which sloped with a steep descent into the sea. Here there had been a landslip, and the entire face of the cliff was laid bare. At the top of this slope there was a great collection of stones and masses of rock of considerable size. At various points, too, down the face of the steep, masses of rock and débris had collected in hollows.
Billy now went to work to roll big stones over the edge of this cliff, and he did it with such good-will that in a few minutes masses of a hundred weight were rolling, bounding, and crashing down the steep. These, in many cases, plunged into the collections of débris, and dislodged masses of rock that no efforts of which Billy was capable could have otherwise moved.
The rattling roar of the avalanche was far more effective than a salvo of artillery, because, besides being tremendous, it was unceasing, and the result was that the vessel ran up a flag in reply to the strange salute. Then a white puff of smoke from her side preceded the roar of a heavy gun. Immediately after, the vessel’s head came round, and she lay-to.
“It’s a man-o’-war,” cried Billy excitedly.
“Ay, and a British one too,” exclaimed Gaff; “let’s give him a cheer, lad.”
Billy complied with a will! Again and again did they raise their strong voices until the woods and cliffs became alive with full, true, ringing British cheers!