“Up so late? Up so early you mean! Ah, don’t put on that air of incorruptible morality. Wait now till I get in on the one side of my hammock and out at the other, and I’ll look as early-rising-proud as yourself. Alister! Alister dear!——”
Through all this the engineer made no sign, and it struck me how wise he was, so I pulled the hammock round me again and fell asleep; not for long, I fancy, for those intolerable sandflies woke me once more before Dennis had turned in.
I looked out and saw him still at the window, his
eyes on a waning planet, his cheek resting on the little glove laid in his right hand, and singing more sweetly than any nightingale:
“Youth must with time decay,
Eileen aroon!
Beauty must fade away,
Eileen aroon!
Castles are sacked in war,
Chieftains are scattered far,
Truth is a fixèd star,
Eileen aroon!”
CHAPTER XV.
“Which is why I remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark,
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.”
Bret Harte.
Alister did more than pick pink-pale oleanders by the dyke side that morning. His business with the captain was soon despatched, and in the course of it he “fore-gathered,” as he called it, with the man of business who had spoken to us on the night of the great fire, and whose own warehouse was in ruins. He proved to be a Scotchman by birth, and a man of energy (not a common quality in the tropics), and he was already busy about retrieving his fortune. The hasty repair of part of the building, in which to secure some salvage, and other similar matters, was his first object; and he complained bitterly of the difficulty of inducing any of the coloured gentlemen to do a “fair day’s work
for a fair day’s wage,” except when immediate need pressed them. They would then work, he said, but they would not go on working till the job was done, only till they had earned enough wages to take another idle “spell” upon.