“Arrah, sure, all’s well that inds will!” said Mr McCarthy; “but I’m glad you weren’t a desarter, as I thought you were; and I’m roight glad, too, that that thafe of a Moody has mit with his desarts at last!”
Chapter Thirty Two.
Preparations for Departure.
It was a fortunate circumstance, not only for the surviving mutineers who had turned up so strangely, but for the little community at Penguin Castle as well, that they did not make their appearance on the scene earlier; for, had they came at the trying period, when famine, so to speak, reigned in the land, they certainly would not have been “welcome guests!” Of course, even then, Mr Meldrum and the others would have felt bound to do as much for them as they could; but as at that time the castaways were almost near upon starvation, they could ill have afforded to help others in the same predicament, however much charity might have constrained them.
But, now, things were very different in regard to their larder, wild ducks being plentiful enough and another heavy “bag” of rabbits having been secured as soon as the road to the warren had become passable through the partial subsidence of the flood in the valley; while, in addition to those stores of substantial food, there was Kerguelen cabbage ad libitum at their disposal—all the fresher and more juicy through being covered up by the snow and watered by the spring rains—besides an abundance of the haddock-like, spike-headed fish to be had for the catching in the bay, not to speak of the dried penguins as a last resource, should the other articles of diet fail to suit or pall on the palate after a time. Indeed, as Mr Lathrope observed frequently when seated at the central table of their general room and disposing of the savoury residue of some gipsy stew of Snowball’s concoction, during this period of plenty, which came in such pleasing contrast to their recent scarcity of provender, they were “living like fighting cocks, and no mistake!”
Such being the state of things at “Penguin Castle,” it was not long before the emaciated men, who arrived in the longboat almost at death’s door through want, were restored to health. Mr Meldrum, however, took the precaution of binding them down by the most stringent conditions as to their obedience and orderly conduct before admitting them on the same terms as the rest to the common membership of the community—it being clearly put before them that the least lâche or inattention to orders would subject them to expulsion, when they would have to shift for themselves and give a wide berth to those of the settlement.
Captain Dinks had recovered so far now that he was able to sit up for a short time each day; but the length of his illness and the amount of blood he had lost had so aged and pulled him down that he was transformed, from the smart energetic sailor he had been, into a feeble old man, utterly incapable of ever resuming his former position should events ever place it in his power to take command of a ship again—at least so it seemed from his general state of prostration.
Under these circumstances, therefore, Mr Meldrum was unquestionably still looked upon as the head of the party, quite apart from any appointment as such, from the simple reason that everybody recognised that it would be only through his advice and forethought that they could ever hope to escape from the island and see home once more.