A Roving Commission; Or, Through the Black Insurrection at Hayti

by G. A. Henty

"Well, she won't be quite so dark as that, anyhow," Nat said; "in fact I can tell you, you three will all have to look your best to make a good show by the side of her."

"But this talk is all nonsense, Nat," the rector said gravely. "Your engagement is a very serious matter. Of course, now you have been so wonderfully fortunate, and are commander of a ship, you will, I have no doubt, have an income quite sufficient to marry upon, and, of course, you are in a position to please yourself."

"We are not going to be married just at present, father. She is three years younger than I am, and I am not far advanced in years; so it has been quite settled that we shall wait for some time yet. By then, if I am lucky, my prize-money will have swelled to a handsome amount, and indeed, although I don't know the exact particulars, I believe I am entitled to from eight to ten thousand pounds. Moreover as the young lady herself is an only child, and her father is a very wealthy man, I fancy that we are not likely to have to send round the hat to make ends meet."

The visit was duly paid the next day, and was most satisfactory to all parties, and, as the rectory was a large building, Mr. and Mrs. Glover insisted upon the Duchesnes removing there at once.

"We want to see as much of Nat as we can," his mother urged, "and if he is to divide his time between Yeovil and the rectory, I am afraid we should get but a very small share of him."

"I suppose your brother has told you all his adventures," Myra said the next morning, as she and all the party, with the exception of Mr. Glover and Nat, were seated in the parlour after breakfast was over.

"No, he is a very poor correspondent. He just told us what he had been doing, but said very little about his adventures. I suppose he thought that girls would not care to hear about midshipmen's doings. He did tell us, though, that he had had a fight with a dog that had bitten you."

Myra's eyes opened wider and wider as the eldest, Mary Glover, spoke. Her face flushed, and she would have risen to her feet in her indignation had not her mother laid her hand upon her arm.

"I do not think, Miss Glover," Monsieur Duchesne said gravely, "that you can at all understand the obligation that we are under to your brother. The bite of a dog seems but a little thing. A huge hound had thrown Myra down, and had rescue been delayed but half a minute her death was certain. Your brother, riding past, heard her cries, and rushed in, and, armed only with his dirk, attacked the hound. He saved my daughter's life, but it was well-nigh at the cost of his own, for although he killed it, it was not until it had inflicted terrible injuries upon him—injuries so serious that for a time it was doubtful whether he would live. This was the first service to us. On the next occasion he was staying with us when the blacks rose. Thanks to our old nurse, there was time for them to run out into the shrubbery before the negroes came up, and then take refuge in the wood. My wife was seized with fever, and was for days unconscious.

"The woods were everywhere scoured for fugitives. Six blacks, led by two mulattoes, discovered their hiding-place. Your son shot the whole of them, but had one of his ribs broken by a pistol-ball. In spite of that, he and Dinah carried my wife some thirty miles down to the town across rough ground, where every step must have been torture to him, and brought her and Myra safely to me. Equal services he performed another time to a family, intimate friends of ours, composed of a gentleman and his wife and two daughters, who, with six white men, were prisoners in the hands of the blacks, and would assuredly have suffered deaths of agonizing torture. Though he had but twenty men with him, he landed them all, marched them up to the place, rescued the whole party, and made his way down to his boat again through three hundred and fifty maddened blacks. No less great was the service he rendered when he rescued some fifteen ladies and gentlemen who had been captured by a pirate, and whose fate, had he not arrived, would have been too horrible to think of. As to his services at sea, the official reports have testified, and his unheard-of promotion shows the appreciation of the authorities. Never were more gallant deeds done by the most valiant naval captains who have ever lived."