“All the machinery in Trinidad be worked with cocoanut oil. ’Tis a very funny smell, but you soon get used to it.
“Our next port was Tobago, and here we shall bide for a good while and let our fires out and have a go at the boilers. This letter will go off from there to you, and I do hope and trust as it will find you as it leaves me at present, my dear wife. Ban’t much good for me to ax you to write the news, because you wouldn’t know where to send it. But I hope afore next year be out that we’ll come together again, and your poor chap will be proved an innocent man.
“I’ll send you three pound from here presently, and another letter along with it. If there’s any good news and the charges don’t run too high, you might send a telegram on getting this letter, to ‘Bob Bates, Steamship Peabody, Bridgetown, Barbados.’ We go back there in three weeks, and shall be there afore you get this. I be ‘Bob Bates’ now, and shall remain so for the present till I can be Dan Sweetland again without running my neck in the rope.
“Lord save us, but how I do long to be squeezing my own true wife! Awful rough luck we’ve had, but there’s a better time coming. Tell mother and father all about me, but make ’em swear on father’s old Bible fust that they’ll name it to none else. They can hear bits of this letter, but not all. I’m sending you twenty thousand kisses. I wish to God I was bringing ’em. Last thing I done at Trinidad was to cut your name and mine on a great aloe leaf in the Botanical Garden when nobody was looking. And over ’em I scratched two hearts with a arrow skewered through. They aloe leaves live for ever, I’m told; so our names will be there for people to see long after we be dead and gone, I hope. But that won’t be for a mighty long time yet, please God.
“I may say that I’ve growed a bit religious since we parted. Ban’t nothing to name and won’t make any difference in my feelings to old friends, but you can’t see the Lord’s wonders in the Deep without growing a bit thoughtful like. And if by good chance I ever get back to you and stand afore the world clear of the killing of poor Adam Thorpe, then I shall be a church-member for ever more—or else a chapel member—which you like best. But one for sartain. So no more at present, from your faithful husband till death,
Daniel Sweetland.”
CHAPTER XI
THE LAST OF THE “PEABODY”
Fate, it seemed, had ordered a final fleeting happiness for the lonely young wife before her sun was to set in sorrow. For a season the glow of Daniel’s letter clung to her, warmed her heart, and lighted her spirit. Nor did she hide the news from all. Daniel’s parents heard much of the letter, as he directed, and Minnie trusted Mr Beer and his wife with the news also. But nobody else heard it. Then, as summer approached and she already began to count the days until another letter might reach her, a crashing grief fell upon the woman, and all her future was changed. Hope perished; life henceforth stretched forward into the dreary future without one ray of light to break its darkness.