The rest is soon told. When the owners came to overhaul the accounts, Sir Henry Morgan’s silver was, at Morgan’s request, made over to them. They never knew to whom it had originally belonged. The sacrifice was the easier, because Murch had left the bag of diamonds he took in Cartagena in Morgan’s keeping, and the supercargo saw no reason for including that little piece of booty in the Book of Plunder. And, as soon as might be, the two were married, of course. Pomfrett goes no more to sea; he is become a country gentleman and a Justice of the Peace; and I know no life better worth living, if you own a taste for it. As for me, I am sufficiently occupied with that leisurely study of the ancients, to which Mr Murch had looked forward with such admirable enthusiasm. And as for Captain Dawkins, he would not touch his plunder. “No, no,” said he. “Why, inside of a month old Dawkins would come a-begging to your door, as poor as the day he were born. No, don’t you give Dawkins no money, if you love him, no more than a matter of a few dollars, drawn weekly, you understand. And don’t you give him no more, not if he was to beg on his bended knees.”
So Pomfrett invested Mr Dawkins’s little fortune, and bought him a white cottage by the water-side, with a stout sail-boat moored at the garden foot, and a flagstaff in a gravelled square, bordered with sea-shells. There the old gentleman entertains his old friend, the Reverend Jeremiah Ramsbottom, who is understood to be piloting Mr Dawkins’s soul on the straight course to the Golden Gates.
“I never knowed,” says Dawkins, “that religion were that easy. Why, a child could learn it! You ain’t got to do nothing, on’y avoid several things what a man of my age and experience don’t want to do anything but avoid, and believe what the chaplain tells you to believe. Believe! Why, there ain’t anything a seaman can’t believe, I often think, if he lays his mind to it. That,” says Dawkins, with a wink, “is the benefit of being a sailor, d’ye see. And to think o’ the many poor seamen drowned, what ain’t had my opportunities! Ah, well, they’re all right, too; we’ll meet again, I reckon—
“‘We’ll meet again at Fiddler’s Green,
All up among the stars.’”
FINIS
New Fiction
A Daughter of the Snows
By JACK LONDON