I found myself in bed—in a luxurious couch—and in a large and airy apartment. Its ceiling was lofty; painted a light azure and starred with gold; the flowing window-curtains, being sprinkled with lime-juice for coolness, imparted a delightful fragrance, which, with the summer odours that were wafted through the open jealousies, proved delicious to a feverish patient. Everything about me betokened wealth, splendour, and tropical luxury. From each of the three tall windows of my apartment, on which the flower-covered verandah without cast a chastening shadow, hung a basket of creeping plants, and in one of these a pair of beautiful humming-birds had built their little nests of cotton, pilfered no doubt, by their tiny beaks, from the fresh-bursting buds of the cotton-tree.
The intense stiffness, benumbed and leaden sensation in my right arm, at once informed me, that the bones had been set, splinted, and bandaged, but by whom I knew not. There were dreams of soft female voices having spoken to me; and memories of their faces seemed to float before me, amid the misty memories of pain and suffering; but these were mere dreams, doubtless, like the vision of Amy Lee appearing at the porch of the villa, as I sank in agony and almost in despair on the steps that led to it.
After lying still for a time with closed eyes, I looked around me again, half in expectation that some other scene—perhaps a tent, a ship's cabin, a bivouac, or something equally familiar would display itself; but no—the splendid bedchamber remained unchanged in all its details, save that it now had one other occupant than me.
A beautiful young girl, no doubt, the reader may suppose!
Not at all—nothing nearly so pleasant; but a hideous old negro, who was slowly approaching on tiptoe, softly, and with his stealthy and glittering eyes fixed on mine. Danger was my first thought, but this old man was without any knife or weapon. His grey woolly locks straggled like horsehair under a blue cotton kerchief, which encircled his huge round caput, beneath a broad rush-plaited hat, in the band of which two short tobacco-pipes were jauntily stuck. His jacket and short wide trowsers were composed of white cotton striped with flaming red; but his feet were bare like his breast, on which hung a necklace or fetish of old buttons, rusty nails, bits of broken glass, and green or scarlet parrots' feathers; to all of which he attached, no doubt, some deep and cabalistic value. The tattooing which was visible on his black breast, indicated that in his own sun-scorched country he had been esteemed as a chief or warrior of note, before he had been compelled by the whip of the white man, to relinquish the hatchet and arrows for the spade and hoe of the sugar-fields; and now, as he drew nearer, I recognized an old acquaintance.
"Benoit," said I; "Benoit."
"Ya—ya, massa le capitaine," he replied, showing all his yellow fangs; "Benoit le Noir—you memory ob me, massa?"
"Remember you, old fellow—of course I do!"
"Très bon! I watch massa in his sleep—me an Obeah nigger," he added, handing to me a crystal jug containing a draught of some cool and medicated preparation, which wonderfully strengthened and revived me.
"Where am I, Benoit?"