We marched hastily back to the sea-beach, and delivered up our prisoner to a party of marines from the admiral's ship.
After the dreadful story I had heard, how terrible were the thoughts that crowded on me!
I pictured in fancy poor Eulalie in the power of this merciless Frenchman and his callous negroes, flung, pinioned, into her watery grave, and sinking without a hand to save her—sinking to sleep, far down amid the oozy and mysterious depths of that hot sea, where flourish a myriad of giant plants that almost reach its surface—and as she sank perhaps becoming, ere dead, a prey to the horrid shark. But even these ideas were less terrible and less agonizing than the awful thought of her perishing miserably on a lonely rock—marooned—to die alone, unseen, unwept-for—to die of hunger and thirst—of horror and despair!
Thus wrath and just vengeance filled my heart, as the Adder squared her yards, and the whole of that crowded and magnificent fleet sailed out of Carlisle Bay, and bore up for Martinique.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
A SEA OF FIRE.
We sailed from Barbadoes about sunrise on the morning of the 3rd of March, and sternly I rejoiced that the distance between us and the land of our conquest and, as I hoped, of retribution, was so short.
All were now on board again, and as we left Carlisle Bay and gained the open sea, the cheers we exchanged rang merrily from ship to ship. Bridgetown, with its little spires, the windmills, the mole and forts, disappeared, as the bay seemed to close its arms, and the undulating line of coast diminished to a low dark streak, when evening found us again ploughing the sea of gold and azure, with the bright-hued dolphin dashing through the brine, and the silver-scaled flying-fish springing like a work of enchantment, from wave to wave:—
A feeble thing,
With brine still dropping from its wing,
Just sparkling in the solar glow,
To plunge again in depths below.
We had a fair wind, and by lying well to the westward, saw the fading rays of the setting sun gild the two high and conical hills of St. Lucia—the Pitons—which are covered from the beach to their summits with the greenest foliage; but these darkened and seemed to melt away as the cloudless sun went down beyond the burning sea, while afar off on our larboard quarter a crimson gleam shot at times across the horizon. It came from the flaming crater of La Soufrière in St. Lucia, where clouds of burning alum, sulphur, and cinders are hourly spouted to the sky.