”—That form
That short allotted span.
That binds the few and weary years
Of pilgrimage to man.”
Yes, Ben is getting old. As oaks get old, so is my faithful friend getting old. As oaks in age are hard and tough, and defiant of the gales that rage through the forest, uprooting mighty trees, so is Ben my friend; and for all the storms he has weathered, I trust I shall have him by me yet for years and years to come. Ben is so buoyant and fresh, it always instils new blood into my veins merely to talk to him. “Ben, my boy,” I often say, “you are, by your own confession, some twenty years my senior, and yet I believe you feel as young and even younger than I do.”
“Well, Nie,” he replies, “I believe it’s the heart that does it, you know.
“For old as I am, and old as I seem,
My heart is full of youth.
“Eye hath not seen, tongue hath not told,
And ear hath not heard it sung,
How buoyant and bold, though it seem to grow old,
Is the heart for ever young.
“For ever young—though life’s old age
Hath every nerve unstrung;
The heart, the heart, is a heritage
That keeps the old man young.”
He always calls me “Nie” for short, “because,” he added once, by way of explanation, “your name is a heathenish kind of one at best, but a person is bound to make the most of it.”
I cannot deny that Ben is right; my name is a heathenish one. How did I come by it? I will tell you. I was born, as you know, at sea, in the Indian Ocean, in the Niobe, whilst she was cruising in that region in the search of slavers—born not long before the appearance of that terrible gale of wind described in the first chapter of this story, when the tempest was at its fiercest, and the stormy waves were doing their worst; born on board a vessel which seemed doomed to certain destruction. And it is the custom of the service to call a child by the name of the ship in which he first sees the light of day.
I never knew a father’s love or a mother’s tender care, for the gentle lady who gave me birth lived but a little after that event; but she bequeathed me all she had—her blessing—and died. In a glade in the gloomy depths of an African forest my mother is sleeping, in the shade of a banian tree. I stood by that lonely grave one morning not many years ago. The ground, I remember, was all chequered with sunshine and with shade from the tree above; little star-like primulas grew here and there. Among these and the fallen leaves sea-green lizards were creeping; high overhead bright-winged birds sang soft lullabies, and every time the wind moved the boughs a whole shower of sparkling drops fell down, like tears.
And my father? He never seemed to rally after my mother’s death until one hour before his own, just a fortnight and a day from that on which he had followed her to her grave in the forest like one dazed. He did not appear in his mess-place after this. He took no food, he spoke to no one, he spent his time mostly within the screen by the empty cot where my mother had been—in grief.
About the tenth day he suffered my friend Roberts (the boatswain) to lead him like a child to the spare cabin where his baby boy was sleeping; and in a daze he had seen her loved remains laid to rest beneath the tree. He bent over the grave for a moment, and then for the first time he burst into tears.