"Eh! eh!" he murmured, when I told him the dreadful truth. "You are in a pretty pickle. I have known before of such cases, resulting from a crack on the head. The famous John Hunter agrees with Jean Louis Petit that it is due to a bloodclot on the brain, which, in favorable cases, dissolves, and the patient becomes fully restored."
I stared, uncomprehending. I had forgotten Hunter and Petit; I had forgotten all my learning—everything of my past life. I did not even realize that I was a physician.
He went on cheerily: "So you have some little hope for a full return of memory, Jack. In the meantime you will soon regain strength enough to leave the sick bay. For your own good, let me advise you to obey orders and do your duty, with no further attempts at vain and foolish resistance to your superiors. Whether or not you are a British subject,—which personally I strongly doubt,—you are entered in the crew of the 'Belligerent,' and the iron rules of the Royal Navy deal severely with the slightest infractions of discipline."
CHAPTER XXXIV
SHAME
It was another week before I recovered a fair share of my usual strength, and I believe the kindly little surgeon kept me under his charge two or three days longer than was strictly necessary. Meantime the mist still shrouded my memory, and though otherwise my wits were as clear as they had ever been, so far as knowledge of anything other than the commonest matters of daily life was concerned I was in a dense night of ignorance.
Dr. Cuthbert took care to explain this to the officer of the watch in which I was put, and the lieutenant was sufficiently humane to set me at tasks which required no skill of seamanship. As it chanced, I saw nothing of the midshipman who had impressed me. He was, as I afterwards learned, in another watch.
The day I was ordered on deck we sighted a palm-fringed coast, which my fellow seamen spoke of as Yucatan. The word meant nothing to me, for my memory was still in the mist, and the only name left me out of the past was Vera Cruz.
From Yucatan the Belligerent cruised off in an easterly direction toward Cuba. But the second day we fell in with a west-bound frigate, which signalled the Belligerent to patrol the mouths of the Mississippi, on the lookout for a noted French privateer sloop La Belle Silène, whose master, Jean Laffat or Lafayette, was rumored to have turned pirate.