The night was one of a peculiar sort. It was dark, but the air was soft and dry, and the numberless stars that shone, seemed to twinkle more, and more, and more brightly, and by their brilliant light, the imaginative, may have seen, or fancied to have seen, to a vast depth into the bluish ethereal fluid, in which they were suspended. Appadocca directed his steps immediately across the Savannah. He walked on pensively and moodily, without even raising his head for a moment, to gaze on the stars above; or, to listen to the faint and peculiar insect-sounds, that might now be heard, amidst the general calm and lull of nature.
When he had arrived at the western end of the Savannah, he again climbed over the railing, and found himself in the road which runs parallel in that direction, with the Saint Ann’s road, on the opposite side. He then diverged towards the left, and continued down the road, until he had arrived to a certain street, which ran to the right.
Appadocca walked along this street, and was obliged to stop from time to time, in order to drive away the numbers of dogs that followed, and that kept up an unceasing noise at his heels.
The street opened on the extensive cemetery, that lies to the west-ward of Port-of-Spain, and that looks picturesque and beautiful by day, under the grove of magnificent trees, that shelter it; but which, by night, looks as dark and as gloomy, as the thoughts themselves which it calls up.
Appadocca stood for a moment, and looked over the wall; no one, nothing was to be seen, save a few white and spotted goats, that silently cropped the grass at a distance, or frisked capriciously over the tombstones.
He scaled the wall, and held his way straight down the road, which lies concealed beneath the thickly knotted branches of the trees that overhang it, and that unseen, leads into the innermost parts of that long and lasting home of thousands.
Having reached the utmost end of this road, he turned towards the left, into one of the many cross-formed paths, that bisect the cemetery. He walked carefully along, and examined attentively every tomb that he passed, until he had arrived at a simple grave, that with a plain cross at its head, lay sheltered beneath the rich spreading foliage, of a thick cluster of bamboos. Here Appadocca stood, and remained motionless and entranced, at the foot of that unornamented tomb; his arms were folded over his breast, and he was in the attitude of one whose thoughts were veiled in an absorbing and holy feeling.
In a moment he approached nearer and nearer; then seated himself down at the head of the grave, and remained there, his brow resting on his hand, as if his spirit was in communion with that of the body which the grave contained.
Time fled, still the pirate captain remained in the same position. The deeds of a whole life-time, one would have said, were returning in rapid succession on his memory. The pursuits, the pleasures and pains, the endearments and enjoyments of childhood, of boyhood, of youth, of all, seemed to fly back like administering angels, or like fiends of hell upon his mind; for his recollections were freshened, his sensibilities were awakened by his mother’s grave:—his mother’s grave, which he approached now a different man from what he was, when he bade the farewell which proved the last on earth to that mother. He had left her with the halo of those virtues, which she had taught more by example than by precepts, still surrounding his head, with his spirits fresh and expanding, with his heart good and at ease, with his intellect aspiring higher and higher; now he revisited her in the cold tomb, with a callous indifference either to virtue or to vice, with a heart that was poisoned to the centre, with spirits lacerated and torn to shreds and tatters. How to wreak retribution now engrossed his whole intellect—retribution on the man whom that mother had once too fondly loved, and whose placid nature had, no doubt, long long forgiven. How could he be certain that her spirit now looked down upon him with pleasure, the spirit of her whose life was a speaking lesson of patient endurance.
Such might be the feelings and thoughts of Emmanuel Appadocca, whose manhood could not restrain the tears that trickled down his cheeks, and flowed, as it were, in mockery over the hilt of the sword that lay across his knees, and moistened the mound before him.