“Oh, yes, sir, I have clothes; I have a hair-brush and a tooth-brush, and two shirt collars, in my waistcoat pocket.”
“Very well, can we venture to lumber our kind friends with this giant, Mr Cringle, and can we really leave the ship without him?” Little Reefy was now all alive. “Tailtackle, go on board—say we shall be back to dinner the day after tomorrow,” said the Captain.
We now made ready for the start, and certainly the cavalcade was rather a remarkable one. First, there was an old lumbering family volante, a sort of gig, with four posts or uprights supporting a canopy covered with leather, and with a high dash-iron or splashboard in front. There were curtains depending from this canopy, which on occasion could be let down, so as to cover in the sides and front. The whole was of the most clumsy workmanship that can be imagined, and hung by untanned leather straps in a square wooden frame, from the front of which again protruded two shafts, straight as Corinthian pillars, and equally substantial, embracing an uncommonly fine mule, one of the largest and handsomest of the species which I had seen. The harnessing partook of the same kind of unwieldy strength and solidity, and was richly embossed with silver and dirt. Astride on this mulo sat a household negro, with a huge thong of bullock’s hide in one hand, and the reins in the other. In this voiture were ensconced La Senora Campana, a portly concern, as already mentioned, two of her bright black-eyed laughing nieces, and Master Reefpoint, invisible as he lay smothered amongst the ladies, all to his little glazed cocked hat, and jabbering away in a most unintelligible fashion, so far as the young ladies, and eke the old one, were concerned. However, they appeared all mightily tickled by little Reefy, either mentally or physically, for off they trundled, laughing and skirting loud above the noise and creaking of the volante. Then came three small, ambling, stoutish long-tailed ponies, the biggest not above fourteen hands high; these were the barbs intended for mine host, the skipper, and myself, caparisoned with high demipique old-fashioned Spanish saddles, mounted with silver stirrups, and clumsy bridles, with a ton of rusty iron in each poor brute’s mouth for a bit, and curbs like a piece of our chain cable, all very rich, and, as before mentioned with regard to the volante, far from clean. Their pace was a fast run, a compound of walk, trot, and canter, or rather of a trot and a canter, the latter broken down and frittered away through the instrumentality of a ferocious Mameluke bit, but as easy as an armchair; and this was, I speak it feelingly, a great convenience, as a sailor is not a Centaur, not altogether of a piece with his horse, as it were; yet both Captain Transom and myself were rather goodish horsemen for nauticals, although rather apt to go over the bows upon broaching-to suddenly. Don Ricardo’s costume would have been thought a little out of the way in Leicestershire; most people put on their boots when they do a riding go, but he chose to mount in shoes and white cotton stockings, and white jean small-clothes, with a flowing yellow-striped gingham coat, the skirts of which fluttered in the breeze behind him, his withered face shaded by a huge Panama hat, and—with enormous silver spurs on his heels, the rowels two inches in diameter.
Away lumbered the volante, and away we pranced after it. For the first two miles the scenery was tame enough; but after that, the gently swelling eminences on each side of the road rose abruptly into rugged mountains; and the dell between them, which had hitherto been verdant with waving guinea grass, became covered with large trees, under the dark shade of which we lost sight of the sun, and the contrast made every thing around us for a time almost undistinguishable. The forest continued to overshadow the high-road for two miles further, only broken by a small cleared patch now and then, where the sharp-spiked limestone rocks shot up like minarets, and the fire scathed stumps of the felled trees stood out amongst the rotten earth in the crevices, from which, however, sprang yams and cocoas, and peas of all kinds, and granadillos, and a profusion of herbs and roots, with the greatest luxuriance.
At length we came suddenly upon a cleared space; a most beautiful spot of ground, where, in the centre of a green plot of velvet grass, intersected with numberless small walks, gravelled from a neighbouring rivulet, stood a large one-story wooden edifice, built in the form of a square, with a court-yard in the centre. From the moistness of the atmosphere, the outside of the unpainted weatherboarding had a green damp appearance, and so far as the house itself was concerned, there was an air of great discomfort about the place. A large open balcony ran round the whole house on the outside; and fronting us there was a clumsy wooden porch supported on pillars, with the open door yawning behind it.
The hills on both sides were cleared, and planted with most luxuriant coffee-bushes, and provision grounds, while the house was shaded by several splendid star-apple and kennip-trees, and there was a border of rich flowering shrubs surrounding it on all sides. The hand of woman had been there!
A few half-naked negroes were lounging about, and on hearing our approach they immediately came up and stared wildly at us.
“All fresh from the ship these,” quoth Bang.
“Can’t be,” said Transom. “Try and see.”
I spoke some of the commonest Spanish expressions to them, but they neither understood them, nor could they answer me. But Bang was more successful in Eboe and Mandingo, both of which he spoke fluently accomplishments which I ought to have expected, by the by, when I declared he was little skilled in any tongue but English.