Up sprang Clare, and tenderly he lifted the now broken form of the wretched idiot. Crushe, with livid face and trembling lips, asked him if the man was dead. Tom could not reply. He was too indignant to trust himself to speak; but giving the lieutenant a look of scorn, he raised the body in his powerful arms, and reclining the inanimate head upon his shoulder as gently as a woman would have laid her babe's, bore his mangled burden to the surgery.
The little doctor did his utmost to save the man's life,—amputation of one limb was resorted to, but all without avail. Crushe ordered a screen to be placed across the steerage, and every few moments went to know "how the fellow got on."
But the end was not far off. Maimed by accident or design, mutilated by the surgeon's art, weak and weary, the spirit of Dunstable would have passed away without a struggle, but Crushe came down; and when he saw his enemy standing before him with no sign of pity, but rather a contemptuous expression upon his cruel face, the victim raised his head, and with his eyes gleaming with unnatural brightness, gasped out, "You did this, you monster! you did this; tell my mother he murdered me!" Then, with a terrible convulsion, the muscles of his body trembled, and the soul of the idiot passed to the other world, where, we are told, "there will be no more sorrow, nor any trouble known, no more misery or injustice, but all will be joy and peace."
There lay the victim with the marks of the cat upon his body, the effects of the sand torture still visible upon him, and with the livid wales raised by the raw-hide thongs growing more distinct each moment. There lay the idiot, foully murdered, and done to death by Crushe and his subordinates; yet none dared tell of it, or raise their voice in denouncing his murderers.
The doctor told Clare to arrange the body for burial, and the sailor who had himself suffered so much performed the last few offices for the dead. When this was done they carried it up, placed it aft upon the quarter-deck, and spread a flag over it. There it lay until the commander was notified that the ordinary seaman who fell from aloft was ready for burial. Then Puffeigh directed Crushe to "bury the fellow," adding, "he considered it a good riddance;" and that officer, with the blood of his victim on his conscience, stood at the port, and with mock humility read from the prayer book of the Church of England the solemn service "for the burial of the dead, who die at sea." There, with the crew gathered round, the man whose bloody work it was which the flag covered, this sin-steeped wretch, with holy words upon his accursed lips, "committed his brother to the deep, in the sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection when the sea shall give up its dead."
"Hands, make sail!" A breeze had sprung up, and all that was mortal of Dunstable was soon far astern.
Crushe made the following entry in the log-book of H. M. S. Stinger, where it looked like a very ordinary accident.
"8.50. A.M., lat. —— long. ——. Departed this life, Charles Dunstable, ordinary seaman belonging to this ship, having died from the effects of injuries received through falling from aloft."
"Departed this life," hounded to death, and forced into another, and we hope a happier, state, was this man and brother. "May he rest in peace."
Some time after this, an old woman dozing over her misery by the side of a wretched fire in a London garret, received a letter from a kind-hearted midshipman belonging to the Stinger; and when a friend read the contents to her she cried and rocked herself, saying, "She had lost her boy, her dear, good, darling Charley."