CHAPTER XIX.
FANDANGO ON ONE LEG.
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“God! ’tis a fearsome thing to see That pale wan man’s mute agony–– Those pinioned arms, those hands that ne’er Shall be lifted again––not even in prayer! That heaving chest! Enough; ’tis done! The bolt has fallen! the spirit is gone.” |
Day dawned in the east. The early spikes of morning shot up in rosy bands from behind the lofty hills of Cuba and announced the coming of the sun. The inlet and basin, framed in by their rocky walls, were still clothed in the gloom of night, and dimly reflecting the fading stars on the calm unruffled surface where the schooner and felucca were moored. Away off in the distance a dense white misty vapor hung flat and low over the lagoon and thickets of mangroves, with not a breath of air to disturb the noxious fog or quiver a leaf in the silent groves. The revels, too, of the drunken sailors had long since ceased; the sentinels, with their cutlasses in the sheaths, paced slowly to and fro before the doors of the sheds, and the look-outs at the signal-stations and battery peered through the early dawn to seaward; else not a sound or moving thing, save a teal or two fluttering with a sharp cry up and down the lagoon; the music of the tiny ripples lapping on the shelly beach; and the low roar, in a deep bass, breaking and moaning over the ledge beyond the island. Such was the appearance of things where our scene is laid in the Twelve League Group of Keys, on a Sunday morning, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and five.
Half a mile, perhaps, inland from the sheds where the sailors lived, and beneath the steep face of the ridge-like crag which split the island in two parts, stood a low chapel, built of loose stones nicely fitted together and roofed with tiles. A rough iron cross was fastened over the doorless entrance, and at the other end was a stone balustrade, with a rude painting of the Virgin over the altar, on which stood four or five tall brass candlesticks and a lighted taper. Outside the building was a narrow and secluded inclosure, surrounded by a low wall of coral rocks, with a few head-stones marked with black crosses––the graves of the pirates whose bones reposed beneath. At one end of this burial-place was still another subdivision, where stood ten upright 123 flat white stones, on whose faces were rudely carved initial letters, with the years in which the eternal sleepers had been laid beneath the sand. Far and near sprang up close and almost impenetrable thickets of cactus, whose sharp and pointed needle-shoots defied the passage of any thing more bulky than land-crabs and lizards. One or two narrow pathways had been cut out here and there, but they were overgrown again by the stubborn, hardy vegetation; and only with the risk of losing one’s trowsers, and having one’s legs cut in gashes, could a human being struggle through it.
Within the chapel kneeled a dozen or more of the “Centipede’s” crew, the coarse and sodden faces and uncombed locks, from their night’s debauch, in striking contrast to the place and the apparent devoutness of manner in which they crossed themselves while the rites of the Church were going on. Before the altar stood Padre Ricardo, with his breviary on the chancel beneath the taper, and chanting forth from his deep lungs the services of the mass. In a few minutes the unholy hands and lips which performed the solemn ceremony ceased word and gesture, and with a sonorous benediction at the elevation of the Host, and a tinkle of a bell, the sailors arose from their knees and again staggered back to the sheds, to slumber through the day. When all had gone, the padre clasped his missal, tucked it into his bosom, and making the sign of the cross with a genuflexion before the Virgin, the sacrilegious wretch turned and left the chapel.
Pursuing the winding path which led to his own habitation for a certain distance, he then turned to the left, and carefully picking his way through the sharp cactus and Spanish bayonets along the face of the crag, he stopped at a yawning fissure which gaped open in the rock. Here, too, the same wiry vegetation had crept, and it was with great difficulty, and many an “Ave!” and “Santa Maria!” that the padre succeeded in passing into the dark, rugged mouth of the cavern.
“By the ashes of San Lorenzo!” he muttered, “there are serpents and venomous insects in this pit of purgatory. Oh, misericordia! what has pierced my leg? Why should my son drag me through this hole? Ah! blessed Saint Barnabas! a slimy reptile has crossed my instep!”
Feeling with his outspread hands in his fright, as he gradually made his way into the dripping cavern, getting narrower and lower as he proceeded, he at last, after stumbling prayerfully along for about a hundred and fifty yards, came to a loose pile of stones. Here opened another low narrow fissure on the left, and, in some doubt, he was about to enter; but the noise he made by stepping on a stone was answered by the hissing warning of a serpent, and the scared padre fell back at his full length in a pool of stagnant slimy water.