The Tragedy of Ida Noble

by William Clark Russell

"Yes, sir."

"How do you know."

"I put the question to him and he said he would be willing."

"Then," I exclaimed, "I consent. I agree with you that, if you are to leave me, I must be alone until I can get help. I might indeed transship you, feign to the master of the vessel we should speak that you were mutineers—a character you would all have to support—and ask him to give me two or three men in exchange for my five. That I might do; but the business would consist of a lie, and I hate lies. We should have to act a part: the five of you would have to invent a yarn, and carefully stick to it, while you were aboard the vessel that received you.... No! your plan is the most straightforward, and the least troublesome. The risk is mine, and a heavy risk it is—to be left in a big vessel with one hand only, and that hand a boy, and a mad lady below, who will require watching, and who may attempt our lives when she awakes. But I see no other way out of the difficulty."

"Nor I, sir," he answered. "We don't like the notion of leaving ye alone; but then, you insist upon carrying this here schooner to England, and to England we don't mean to go," said he, slapping his leg.

"Say no more. We'll hold that matter settled. Only, before you leave, the two Spaniards must have left; otherwise they'll be cutting Tom's and my throat, taking their chance, as I shall have to take my chance, of being fallen in with and succored. The Don doesn't like the notion of losing his schooner; but lose her he must, for he'll never dare to lay claim to her."

"I should think not!" said he. "Well, sir, then I'll tell my mates it's settled. What about leaving the vessel under this small canvas?"

"Oh," I answered, "sail can now be made, and I'll shape a course for Cadiz. As we approach the land, we stand to fall in with some trader, who'll put the two Spaniards ashore on their native soil."

I was in charge of the deck, and it was for me, therefore, to give the necessary orders for sail to be made. The sailors sprang about with marvelous agility. The influence of the money they had received operated far more strongly in them than the influence of the funeral they had witnessed, and I believe that nothing had restrained them from singing, dancing, making a night of it, in short—for the fellows were never without plenty of a cheap sort of claret that had been economically laid in for their consumption—nothing, I say, had hindered them from celebrating their payment of thirty pounds a man by a forecastle carousal, but the feeling that some trifling respect was due to the memory of the dead and to the affliction of Don Lazarillo. Sail was heaped upon the schooner. Her twin spires floated through the liquid dusk that was radiant with large trembling stars, and a sheen melted off the edges of the canvas into the gloom, as though the whole fabric were some tall island of ice.