L'Etna was a smart and sharply-built vessel, with a low hull, raking masts, pierced for eight twelve-pounders, and all painted black. While in French hands, she did great damage to our West-India trade. Mr. Stanley, a midshipman of the Adder, commanded the prize-crew.
We stood down the Canal des Saintes, and after rounding Point du Vieux Fort of Guadaloupe, we lost sight of Harry Smith's craft, which bore away into the Caribean Sea, while we hauled up for Dominica, on a lovely evening, when the sky was all of a warm lilac hue, which paled to blue as the golden sun sank down and vanished like a flaming shield.
After our separation, the adventures of both were very remarkable. Poor Harry's, at that time, made much more noise than mine, being full of romance, notwithstanding his most unromantic surname; and a narrative of these, written by Haystone of ours, appeared in more than one public journal. As he and they are alike forgotten now, before resuming the thread of my own story, I will briefly relate the strange catastrophe which befell the unfortunate aide-de-camp.
L'Ami du Peuple, after encountering a gale of wind which carried away her topmasts, reached Jamaica; where Smith, after landing his stores and his sable detachment, hastened to the house of M. du Plessis, to whose daughter, Aurore, he was deeply attached. Many of our fellows at this time got themselves into scrapes with the pretty Creoles and Frenchwomen of colour, natheless all the serious disadvantages of making love when in a profuse state of perspiration to a pale damsel who could, to all appearance, remain cool as a cucumber, when the thermometer stood at ninety in the shade, and her European swain was in a melting mood in more ways than one.
Some time before, when Smith was quartered in Jamaica, Kingston had been full of French royalist emigrants or fugitives from the Antilles; and many of these, from being persons of opulence and good position, by their flight and loss of fortune, had been reduced to extreme penury. Most of these emigrants were from Martinique, Marigalante, and Los Santos; but by far the greater number were from Hispaniola. Among those from the latter island, were M. du Plessis, (brother of the colonel whose capture I have just related) and his daughter, Aurore, with a few servants in whom he confided, or who choose to follow his fallen fortune. After his arrival, these were forced, by the pressure of circumstances, to leave him, all, save one, named Scipio, a gigantic negro, to whom he was much attached, although a subtle savage, who, for a time, had served in the coloured bands of Bellegarde and Pelocque.
Aurore was a French girl who possessed a delicacy of beauty that seldom falls to the lot of her countrywomen; but a West-Indian sun often works wonders, for although barely sixteen, she was "rich in all the fascinations of tropical girlishness;" and unmelted by the fiery skies of those regions, her cheeks wore a tinge of red, and ripe as those of any English girl at home; but much of the beauty of Aurore was inherited from her mother, who was descended from the old Spanish settlers in Hispaniola.
In Kingston, the lively little French beauty had many admirers, but she preferred to all others Harry Smith, of the Scots Royals, whose handsome figure and face were displayed to advantage by his brilliant staff uniform. He had fine dark eyes, which generally played the deuce with ladies, who always averred they beheld "in them a deep expression of tenderness not to be described," and so forth; yet I had seen them fiery and stern enough at such times as when the cannon ball from La Fleur d'Epée shaved off his epaulette and a slice off his shoulder with it. In short, he was the beau idéal of a smart and gentlemanly young officer, without a vestige of the fop about him—for he had seen too much service during the six years he had been in the Royals—"too many hard knocks" as the mess-room phrase is—to be guilty of such folly; and so little Mademoiselle Aurore loved him with all her heart.
On his return to Jamaica, full of the ardour so natural to a young lover, Harry hastened to the house of M. du Plessis, but found, that though the letters of Aurore expressed an undiminished affection, a great change had taken place in the sentiments of the old planter, her father.
News (which, however, proved false) had arrived at Kingston, that the second division of the army from old France, destined to crush the insurgent slaves in the French Antilles, had reached the island of Hispaniola; and M. du Plessis, elated by the prospect of a restoration to fortune and to his extensive estates and plantations, now avowed that which hitherto he had the cunning or the wicked policy to conceal, a decided repugnance for Lieutenant Smith, and refused to permit Aurore to receive his visits.
Harry was as if thunder-struck! He sued, he entreated, he stormed, and poor Aurore was in despair. She wept and prayed, but M. du Plessis remained as inexorable as any father in an old melodrama, and embarked on board of a ship sailing under a cartel, with his wife, his property, and all his black servants whom he had collected—the faithful Scipio included. Poor Harry sprang into a boat, and though still suffering from the effects of his wound, reached the ship, which was then almost ready for sea, and lay in the harbour of Kingston, with her cable hove short upon the anchor, her courses loose, and blue-peter flying at the fore.