The colonel took advantage of the interval that would necessarily have to elapse before his presence would again be required in court to escort Miss Elsie to Paris, and place her under the care of the sisters at the convent at Neuilly, where, I think I told you before, he said her mother had been brought up and educated; while the skipper and others of us belonging to the Star of the North, being compelled to remain within handy reach of the authorities, in case our presence at the trial might be required, the opportunity was seized to lay the old barquey up in dry dock and give her a thorough overhaul within and without, though the engines, as proved by our rapid passage here, were none the worse for our breakdown in mid-Atlantic, thanks to the skill and exertions of poor Stoddart and the rest of old Mr Stokes’ staff.
Most of us in this way got a short holiday while awaiting the assizes, which I spent with my mother and sister, taking home with me the money I had been awarded as my share of the Saint Pierre’s salvage, which had made me fancy myself a temporary Croesus.
Alas, though, the sum, large though it was for a young fellow to find unexpectedly in his pocket, went but a very short step in satisfying the rapacious wolf I found at my mother’s door when I reached the little cottage, where she lived with my sister Janet, in one of the suburbs of Liverpool.
A bubble company, whose directors had all been selected for their religious bias rather than their business qualifications, burst at one fell coup, almost in the very hour of my return home, dissipating into thin air, as the Latin poet has it, all the savings of a lifetime which my mother had invested in the swindle—the provision left behind by my father, when he died, for her use, and the subsequent benefit of my sister and myself. The devout rogue who had “managed” the concern to his own worldly interest and that of his fellow religionists, carried on the same, so they said, in a pious and eminently “Christian way,” no doubt, respected alike in the eyes of God and men, according to the loudly-voiced tenets of the particular sect to which he and his co-directors mostly belonged; but he managed, all the same, to carry off to a remote and friendly land outside the pale of international law and where dividends need no longer be paid to clamorous creditors, a considerable amount of portable property of a valuable nature, amongst which, probably, was our inheritance, my mother’s capital!
Under these circumstances it behoved me to consider how I could best aid my poor mother and sister, then left suddenly destitute through no fault of their own.
Fortunately, I had the means ready at hand.
In our constant association on board the Star of the North after his rescue from the drifting boat, in which he greatly exaggerated the help I was able to render him, Colonel Vereker was kind enough to notice me much more than my subordinate position on board would have seemed to warrant; and in a conversation we had together during the voyage home from New York, after asking me what my prospects were, he made me an offer to accompany him back to Venezuela on his return, promising me, should I accept, a good salary to start with, and a fair chance of ultimately making my fortune.
Loving the sea and my profession, however, with all a sailor’s love, besides being attached to my old ship and her officers, I felt no inclination then to give up what I had learnt to look upon as my legitimate calling, and turn landsman; so, although I had the highest admiration for the colonel, coupled with more than a liking for his young daughter, between whom and myself there seemed such a mysterious sympathy on the evening of my sighting the Saint Pierre, when the captain declared we were some hundreds of miles apart, I reluctantly and, so it seemed to me, ungraciously, declined his proposal, telling him I preferred “sticking” to the skipper and the old barquey!
But the colonel very kindly would not take my refusal at first as final; and, when setting out for Paris to take Elsie to her convent school, she taking leave of me with many tears and assurances that under any circumstances she would always remain mio amiquito (my little friend) pledging herself, too, to be, if allowed at the school, a constant correspondent if I would write to her sometimes to let her know where I was. Well, the kind, good-hearted man, taking, as he said, a deep interest in my welfare for Elsie’s sake as well as for my own, assured me that he would keep his generous offer open until the period arrived for his ultimate departure for South America, on the termination of the trial of the Haytian pirates and their mutineer accomplices.
So, recollecting all this, in my hour of need, I naturally turned to the colonel and told him of my trouble on his return to Liverpool for the assizes, at which, by the way, the black scoundrels and their allies were sentenced to five years’ penal servitude, the judge regretting his inability to impose a heavier punishment from the fact of proof being wanted of the active participation of the prisoners in the atrociously cruel murder of Cato and the other diabolical work perpetrated on board the ill-fated ship.