'Or what?' asked Bella, looking at him with tear-laden eyes.
'Or,' her uncle said, not, however, concluding his speech as he had originally meant to do, 'or drift about until we fall in with another vessel. We ought to do that, too,' he continued, 'for we are almost in the direct track from the Red Sea to Australia; we are in the track of the big liners.'
'How,' asked Gilbert now, while forcing a smile to his face as he spoke, although it was but a poor, wan substitute for the bright, joyous one that generally lit up his countenance--and, indeed, it was only assumed with the hope of cheering his sweetheart by his side, wherefore, like all other substitutes for the real thing, it was but a wretched copy--'how are my brother-sufferers? It would be cheering news to hear that some of them were regaining their sight.'
'At present,' Pooley replied, 'only one of your "fellow-sufferers" seems to be doing so, and that's not a human being but no other than Bella's protégé the tiger-cub. That creature is, we all believe, coming round. It is rambling about the deck by itself, but it undoubtedly can see now to avoid hitting its head against the raffle lying there. However,' he went on, 'here's a little information which you may both be glad of, upon which he dropped his hand into his nankeen jacket and produced from it an old, dirty, and much-thumbed book, on which, in addition to many other unclean marks and stains, were added droppings from candles.' It was evidently, as Bella at once divined, one which had been pored over at night; while, had she been well acquainted with the habits of those who dwelt in the forecastle, she would have also understood that mercantile Jack is often in the habit of sticking lighted bits of candle about whenever he wants to read, and even to the sides of his bunk in which he lies, when he sleeps in one instead of in a hammock.
'Millett,' her uncle went on, naming one of the men who had still retained his eyesight, 'showed me this an hour ago. It belongs to poor Wilks, and is a book entitled Calamities of Sailors, it being a collection of odds and ends accumulated from various writers by an unknown hand. Now, here,' he went on, 'is a strange account of blindness attacking a vessel in much the same way as those in my poor old Emperor have been attacked, and----'
'Did they regain their sight?' exclaimed his listeners together; all three, namely, Mrs. Pooley, Gilbert, and Bella, asking the same question in almost the same words.
'They did,' the master went on, 'in this case. It happened on board the James Simpson, in 1803. But in another, I am sorry to say, they did not; and also, I am sorry to say, this is a very circumstantial account, given by M. Benjamin Constant to the French Chamber of Deputies, in 1820, when he was speaking on the horrors of the West African slave trade. He tells how a French ship, Le Rôdeur, having a crew of twenty-two men and a hundred and sixty slaves, left Bonny in 1819, and was attacked with almost precisely the same blindness which has now fallen on most of us. Things were worse with them than in this ship, however. They had scarcely any water, the air below was horribly impure, and, when the poor wretched slaves were allowed on deck, they locked themselves in each other's arms and leaped overboard in their agony, so that the French captain ordered some of them to be shot as a warning.'
'Yet,' exclaimed Gilbert, 'Le Rôdeur must have got safely into harbour at last, or M. Constant would not have given his information.'
'Yes,' said Pooley, 'that of course is so. Pray God we do, too'; whereon he closed the book and dropped it into his pocket.
It was well he should do so. Well, too, that Bella did not ask to be allowed to read it for herself, for it contained a good deal more than her uncle had thought fit to read out, and described further horrors which it was not advisable that any in that saloon should be made acquainted with.[[1]]