'Uncle!' cried Bella, while Mrs. Pooley touched her husband's arm reprovingly with her forefinger, and Mr. Fagg hid his face behind the vase of brilliant Cape gooseberries on the table. 'Uncle!' Whereon the bluff, good-natured sailor desisted, and began to speculate on the blindness with which the rescued negroes were attacked, and on that attack being, as he imagined, a recent one. 'They capture these poor wretches inland,' he went on musingly, 'in the big lake region as often as not; but, as far as I have ever heard, blindness is not one of their afflictions. Moreover, these Arab owners and captains wouldn't buy blind slaves, either for selling farther north, or for using as sailors in their dhows. Therefore, I take it, this blindness must have come on them since they were shipped. That's strange, isn't it?' while, as he spoke, he rose, and went to his neat mahogany bookcase which was securely fastened to one of the saloon's bulkheads, and took down the two medical works he possessed--the one dealing with all general human complaints to which our flesh is heir, and the other with tropical diseases more especially. Yet neither under the heading of 'Eye,' nor 'Blindness,' nor 'Optics,' could he find aught that bore upon the subject; nor, in his book on tropical complaints, could he discover any information that might enlighten him as to why the four negroes should be so stricken.
He spoke again, however, after turning over the leaves of these erudite volumes a second time, saying: 'Fever, I know, sometimes produces blindness as an after-effect, yet--well, we have all seen these fellows, and there's no fever in them, I should say. Oh, deuce take this confusion of tongues!' he exclaimed irritably; 'if it did not exist we could find out so much from the sufferers themselves. Bella, our only hope is in you and your patient. If Lieutenant Bampfyld can't tell us something, we shall never know who these men and the woman are, where they came from, what is the matter with them, and to whom the dhow belonged. Can he speak anything but English, child?'
'He knows some Hindustani,' Bella replied; 'and, I think he said, some words of Swahili. He has taken up Eastern languages in the Service, which was one of the reasons for his being appointed to the Briseus. He may be some help. At least he can tell us how he came on board that horrid ship.'
As she spoke, eight-bells struck on deck, and, as the sound came through the skylight, both she and Mr. Fagg rose, the girl doing so because it was the hour at which she intended to visit Gilbert again, and the latter because it was time to relieve Stephen Charke, who would now come below to take his supper. For Bella had fixed this hour for paying her last evening visit to her future husband because she knew that the second mate would then descend, and she was never now desirous of being more in his company than necessary.
She therefore left the saloon before Fagg could have relieved Charke, and, going to the cabin in which Gilbert Bampfyld lay, pushed back the curtain that hung at the door and went in to him, while observing as she did so that he was awake and gazing upwards as he lay. And she saw that he smiled happily on perceiving her, and whispered the word 'Darling' as she advanced to his bedside.
'You are better, dearest,' she said, bending over him and putting her hand on his forehead, which was cool and moist. 'Much better. Aunt will come soon with fresh bandages for your poor head, and then you will have a good night's refreshing sleep. And to-morrow, perhaps, you will be able to tell us how you came to be in that hideous slaver. Oh, Bertie!'--for so she often called him--'what a mercy it was that we found you as we did. And what a miracle that we should have met thus. Home-keeping and narrow-minded people would say, if they read it all in a book, that such a thing was unnatural and impossible.'
Their first meeting, their joy at discovering that they had come together again in this marvellous manner; their rapture when, a few hours before, Gilbert Bampfyld had emerged from his stupor and unconsciousness, has not been forgotten, although the description of it has been omitted. Omitted for the simple reason that most of us have been, or are, lovers; most of us have known in our time, or know now--and those are the happy ones!--the sweet, unutterable joy with which such meetings are welcomed. Who does not remember the sudden, quickened beat of the heart at some period of their existence, as they met again the one they loved the best of all in this world; the creature upon whom their thoughts were for ever dwelling, and from whom those thoughts, however wandering they had heretofore been, were, at last, never more to roam! Picture to yourself, therefore, what rhapsody was Bella's when, forgetting everything else but that she held her lover to her heart, she wept over his salvation from an awful, swift, impending death; picture also to yourself the delirious joy which coursed through Gilbert's now unclouded mind, as he found himself in her arms--with her--close to her. Picture this, and no further description is needed of their meeting in that cool, darkened cabin of the old ship. Imagine for yourself what your own ecstasy would have been in such or kindred circumstances, and you possess the knowledge of what theirs was.
'Darling,' he said again now, as she held to his lips a cooling drink that she had brought into the cabin with her, 'darling, I can tell you in half-a-dozen sentences or less----'
'No,' she said. 'No; not now. To-morrow, when you have slept----'
'Yes, now. Why, dearest, I am well! I could take the middle watch to-night if necessary, or--or--do anything that a sailor may be called on to do. And as for finding me in that dhow, why, it's the simplest thing on earth--or the waters. Listen. The Briseus, as you would have learnt by that telegram I sent you if you had ever received it, was suddenly ordered to join the Cape Squadron--dhow-catching. And I can tell you we were not so very long before the game began, since by the time we were abreast of Kilwy--which is the southern limit of the legal slave trade--we fell in with twelve dhows, one of them being our friend from which I was rescued by your people. And you may depend we were after them like lightning, while beginning to ply them with shell and shot from our little gun forward. They scattered, of course, though some got hit and lay disabled on the water, while I went off in the whaler with her crew to attack one that seemed badly knocked about. The one in which I was when found by you.'