Fortune's My Foe. John Bloundelle-Burton
more than he would have done had his young wife been at home at Deptford or Portsmouth, and he without the knowledge that at the present time, she was about to make him a father.
Yet, all the same, his thoughts were never absent from her, his bride of a year; again and again he lamented bitterly that she had come upon this cruise with him. Why, he asked himself repeatedly, could he not have left her behind in Port Royal, where she would have been well and carefully attended to, and where he could have joined her after this siege was over? He had been mad to bring her! Already the bomb-ketches were making a hideous din all around; already, too, some of the great ships of war had received their orders to open fire, and were obeying those orders; from the forts on shore a horrible noise was being kept up as they replied to the attackers in a more or less irregular and perfunctory manner.
"What surroundings," he muttered to himself, breaking off even as he did so to bawl orders to the men in the tops to train their swivel guns more accurately upon the shore, "what surroundings for a little helpless babe to be born in the midst of. What surroundings!"
They were, however, to become worse--far worse for the poor mother below; surroundings more terrible and awful to accompany the birth of a new-born child.
Commodore Lestock, with his broad red pennant hoisted, tapering and swallow-tailed, went in to bombard all the forts along the shore, and after him followed an appointed number of the ships in his squadron. It was a noble sight, one that might have caused--and doubtless did cause--many hearts to beat enthusiastically in their owners' breasts. Along the line of other vessels which they passed, cheer rang upon cheer; the bands of the flagships, and others which possessed such music, played "Britons, Strike Home." Soon five hundred great guns were firing on those forts, which replied with courage; the din was tremendous, as also was the vibration caused to each of the vessels while the flames belched forth and the guns shook. And in the middle of the cannonading--when, on board, one could not see across the ship, nor from the mizzen to the main shrouds on either side--the chaplain, staggering on to the upper deck, his handkerchief to his nose and mouth to keep out the saltpetre from his lungs, ran against Captain Thorne giving orders for a marine who had been wounded by a shot from the shore to be carried below.
"Sir," Mr. Glew said hastily, and clutching the captain by the arm, "sir, I offer my congratulations. It----"
"Is well over?" Thorne exclaimed. "Is that it?"
"It is that, sir. And the child is----"
"What?"
"A girl."
"A girl," the captain repeated, while even amongst all the roar of the cannonading, Glew seemed to think he heard a tone of disappointment in the other's voice.
"So-so!" Thorne exclaimed a moment later. "Well, carry down my love to my dear wife. I must not leave the deck now. Say--say--that I will be below ere long. Say that I--am--rejoiced."
* * * * * * *
Meanwhile, what was passing below in the captain's cabin--which had been set aside for his wife ever since her hour drew nigh; he sleeping in a spare one close by? Independently of it being now a chamber in which a young and beautiful wife had just become a mother, as well as a room in great disorder, there were other things which, in any circumstances, must have caused it to present an appearance of extreme confusion. Naturally, all the pictures had been unshipped, since the concussion of the guns would otherwise have brought them from the bulkheads to the floor, or deck, to say nothing of shivering any glass they might possess. And also all china and glass in the cabin, and the pretty knick-knacks which Thorne had bestowed about it, were removed from their usual positions. Whereby the apartment in the Ariadne, in which Mrs. Thorne had but recently presented a child to her husband, was even more disarranged than it would ordinarily have been, Likewise, every port and scuttle was opened, so that thus some of the concussion should be avoided, and the cabin was thereby made less hot and stuffy than such a place would otherwise have been in this climate. Yet it was but a poor place in which to bring a fresh body and soul, into a troublous world--a poor place in which a child should first open its eyes upon the light.
"Dear, dear!" said Mrs. Tickle, the wife of the master-at-arms, she thinking thus, as she wiped the perspiration from Mrs. Thorne's face. "Dear, dear! What a place for the sweet young thing to give birth to a babe in. Yet," and, as she spoke, she took a sip of rumbullion from a cannikin close to her hand, and then passed it over to Mrs. Pottle, the wife of the ship's corporal, "it might have been wuss. My first was born in Havant Work'us', Tickle being away with Captain Clipperton at the time."
"Ha!" said Mrs. Pottle, as she in her turn took a sip of the toothsome liquor. "Indeed, and it might have been wuss. Even now it may be so. What if one of them forts should plump a round shot into us below the water-line? Then there won't soon be no Captain Thorne, nor Mistress Thorne, nor baby either."
"Nor yet no Mrs. Tickle nor Mrs. Pottle," said the other. Whereupon each took another drink at the rumbullion to calm their nerves, which, in truth, needed little calming, since this was not the first battle, or rather bombardment, in which these good ladies had taken part. For, in those days of a century and a half ago, it was common enough for the wives of the petty officers and the lower-deck men to sail on board ships with their husbands, they doing much such work therein as, in these days, is done by soldier's wives who are on the "strength of the regiment." They could also turn their hands to other things, even as Mrs. Tickle and Mrs. Pottle were now doing. For they were almost always excellent nurses, understanding much about wounds and fevers and other complaints, and quite capable of working under, and sometimes of advising, the raw sawbones whom the Admiralty sent into the ships of war to cure--or kill--the sailors.
"Is the battle over?" Mrs. Thorne asked feebly, opening her eyes now as she spoke, and endeavouring in her newly-developed maternal love, to turn them down upon the tiny mite lying on her breast.
"Over, deary!" said Mrs. Tickle, sinking the character of the inferior woman who was in the presence of the superior, and speaking only as a good-hearted, motherly creature, which indeed she was, to another who needed her care. "Not yet, poor lamb. Lawk's sakes," she whispered to her comrade, "can't she hear the guns a-belching? Ah! drat you all," she muttered, as at this moment a larboard broadside bellowed forth, causing the ship to tremble at her keelson; "that's them lower deck twenty-four pounders at it again. Poor dear, she don't seem to hear or feel them, anyhow."
She should have done so, indeed she must have done so, since even as the roaring continued, while the Ariadne was brought round so that now her starboard broadside could be fired, she lifted her arms feebly and enfolded more tightly to her breast than she had done before the little atom she had but recently brought into the world.
"My child," she moaned, "my child! Oh what can your future be with such a beginning as this? What shocks and tempests must threaten the existence that commences in such turbulence and throes as these."
"You 'ear," said the master-at-arms' wife to the wife of the ship's corporal, "you 'ear! She is quite calm and full of understanding. Ah! poor dear." Whereupon she stretched out her hand once more for the can of rumbullion.
And even now, as each of these women in the cabin listened to the uproar without, that uproar seemed to increase. Half a dozen vessels were firing at once; the battery which had been constructed ashore by those who had landed overnight was adding to the tumult; the bo'sun's pipes were heard whistling like some shrill-voiced bird that sings its loudest amidst the violence of a summer storm; the master-gunner's voice was heard on board the Ariadne giving his orders. And there came too, the sound of a hideous crash in the vessel, the rending of timbers, the shrieks of sailors, who were doubtless wounded--bellows, shouts and curses.
"The ship is struck," said Mrs. Tickle, calm and tranquil as became a sailor's wife who had been in battle before. "Pray Heaven 'tis not below the water-line."
"Nor that the magazine is set afire," said Mrs. Pottle, also with heroic coolness. "Otherwise we have got our passage to Davy Jones. Yet," she continued, the woman rising above the Amazon, "I have three poor little children at home in Portsmouth town. And one is a'most blind. God help them, what shall they do if Pottle and I have got our discharge!"