“I say, Don Ricardibus—do—beg pardon, though—do give over this humbugging outlandish lingo of yours—speak like a Christian, in your mother tongue, and leave off your Spanish, which now, since I know it is all a bam, seems to sit as strangely on you as my grandmother’s toupe would on Tom Cringle’s Mary.”
“Now do pray, Mr Bang,” said I, when Don Ricardo broke in “Why, Mr Bang, I am, as you now know, a Scotchman.”
“How do I know any such thing—that is, for a certainty—while you keep cruising amongst so many lingoes, as Tom there says?”
“The docken, man,” said I.—Don Ricardo smiled.
“I am a Scotchman, my dear sir; and the same person who, in his youth, was neither more nor less than wee Richy Cloche, in the long town of Kirkaldy, and in his old age Don Ricardo Campana of St Jago de Cuba. But more of this anon,—at present we are in the house of mourning, and alas the day! that it should be so.”
By this time the storm had increased most fearfully, and as Don Ricardo, Aaron, and myself, sat in the dark damp corner of the large gloomy hall, we could scarcely see each other, for the lightning had now ceased, and the darkness was so thick, that had it not been for the light from the large funeral wax tapers, which had been instantly lit upon poor Maria’s death, in the room where she lay, that streamed through the open door, we should have been unable to see our very fingers before us.
“What is that?” said Campana; “heard you nothing, gentlemen?”
“By this the storm grew loud apace,
The water-wraith was shrieking;
And in the scowl of heaven each face,
Grew dark as they were speaking.”
In the lulls of the rain and the blast, the same long low cry was heard which had startled me by Maria’s bedside, and occasioned the sudden and fatal exertion which had been the cause of the bursting out afresh of the blood vessel.
“Why,” said I, “it is little more than three o’clock in the afternoon yet, dark as it is; let us sally out, Mr Bang, for I verify believe that the hollo we have heard is my Captain’s voice, and, if I conjecture rightly, he must have arrived at the other side of the river, probably with the Doctor.”