Yambo was very tender to Harold during his illness, and the latter felt corresponding gratitude, so that there sprang up between the two a closer friendship than one could have supposed to be possible, considering that they were so different from each other, mentally, physically, and socially, and that their only mode of exchanging ideas was through the medium of a very incompetent interpreter.
Among other things Harold discovered that his friend the chief was extremely fond of anecdotes and stories. He, therefore, while in a convalescent state and unable for much physical exercise, amused himself, and spent much of his time, in narrating to him the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Yambo’s appetite for mental food increased, and when Crusoe’s tale was finished he eagerly demanded more. Some of his warriors also came to hear, and at last the hut was unable to contain the audiences that wished to enter. Harold, therefore, removed to an open space under a banyan-tree, and there daily, for several hours, related all the tales and narratives with which he was acquainted, to the hundreds of open-eyed and open-mouthed negroes who squatted around him.
At first he selected such tales as he thought would be likely to amuse, but these being soon exhausted, he told them about anything that chanced to recur to his memory. Then, finding that their power to swallow the marvellous was somewhat crocodilish, he gave them Jack the Giant-killer, and Jack of Beanstalk notoriety, and Tom Thumb, Cinderella, etcetera, until his entire nursery stock was exhausted, after which he fell back on his inventive powers; but the labour of this last effort proving very considerable, and the results not being adequately great, he took to history, and told them stories about William Tell, and Wallace, and Bruce, and the Puritans of England, and the Scottish Covenanters, and the discoveries of Columbus, until the eyes and mouths of his black auditors were held so constantly and widely on the stretch, that Disco began to fear they would become gradually incapable of being shut, and he entertained a fear that poor Antonio’s tongue would, ere long, be dried up at the roots.
At last a thought occurred to our hero, which he promulgated to Disco one morning as they were seated at breakfast on the floor of their hut.
“It seems to me, Disco,” he said, after a prolonged silence, during which they had been busily engaged with their knives and wooden spoons, “that illness must be sent sometimes, to teach men that they give too little of their thoughts to the future world.”
“Werry true, sir,” replied Disco, in that quiet matter-of-course tone with which men generally receive axiomatic verities; “we is raither given to be swallered up with this world, which ain’t surprisin’ neither, seein’ that we’ve bin putt into it, and are surrounded by it, mixed up with it, steeped in it, so to speak, an’ can’t werry well help ourselves.”
“That last is just the point I’m not quite so sure about,” rejoined Harold. “Since I’ve been lying ill here, I have thought a good deal about forgetting to bring a Bible with me, and about the meaning of the term Christian, which name I bear; and yet I can’t, when I look honestly at it, see that I do much to deserve the name.”
“Well, I don’t quite see that, sir,” said Disco, with an argumentative curl of his right eyebrow; “you doesn’t swear, or drink, or steal, or commit murder, an’ a many other things o’ that sort. Ain’t that the result o’ your being a Christian.”
“It may be so, Disco, but that is only what may be styled the don’t side of the question. What troubles me is, that I don’t see much on the do side of it.”
“You says your prayers, sir, don’t you?” asked Disco, with the air of a man who had put a telling question.