The little suffering boy, lying there on the coral pavement, with his head resting on the thin, delicate arm, with pale, sweet face turned half upward toward the Virgin, gave a feeble cry and opened his eyes. He rose to a sitting posture, with his little hands resting on his lap and little ragged shirt. Then, with his dim hazel eyes fixed upon the painting, while the tears coursed slowly down his pallid cheeks, he put forth his hands in a childish movement of supplication, and murmured again his tearful prayer, “Mamma! mamma!”
Presently rising, he turned his feeble footsteps toward the doorway, and as his eye caught the stone bowl of holy water standing on its coral pedestal near the portal, he bent down his feverish head and slaked his parched lips. Revived by this, he timidly looked out from the chapel, and shuddering as he beheld the gloomy wilderness around, he once more screamed in a thin piercing cry, “Mamma! oh, ma chère mamma!”
That was the last sad wail for help for many and many a long year that those infant lips were destined to utter; and when he again called upon that dear name, his manly arms would clasp a joyful mother to his swelling heart.
“Henri!” came back like an echo in a clear shout to the shriek of the boy. “Henri! Henri!” was reiterated again and again, each time in a voice that seemed to split asunder the canopy of clouds above.
The boy started and listened.
“Henri! Henri! this way to your good friend the doctor! Quick, my little boy!”
Now with the step of a fawn the child ran out upon the sharp sandy esplanade, and following the voice as he tripped lightly through the narrow pathway between the needle-pointed cactus, in a moment he stopped, with a look of horror, beside the trestle on which the bound and nearly naked man was stretched.
Ay, it was a sight to make a strong and stalwart man turn pale with sickness and horror, much less a baby-boy of three or four years old. There lay the man, all through the dreadful night, with swarms on swarms and myriads upon myriads of stinging insects, biting and sipping, and sucking his life-blood with distracting agony away. Ah! think of the hellish torture often practiced by those bloody pirates upon their victims in the West Indies! The bound man’s eyes were closed, the lips and cheeks puffed and swollen out of all human proportions, and the inflamed body was one glowing red and angry surface. No needle could have been stuck where the venomous stings of a thousand sand-flies or musquitoes had not already sucked blood. Ay, well might the child start back with horror!
“It is your friend the doctor, Henri,” he said in French, still in a strong but kindly voice. “I can not see you, but get me a knife. No, my child, never mind––you can not find one; don’t leave me.”