The Tragedy of Ida Noble

by William Clark Russell

"Where are you from?" I shouted.

They were squatting in the bottom of the boat like monkeys, and their manner of looking upward was exactly that of monkeys—swift, their gleaming eyes restless, and a queer puckering of their leather lips that seemed a grin. They understood me, and one answered, "Bahia."

"Where are you bound to?"

"Lisbon."

I tried them with one or two more questions, but to no purpose. After the lapse of some twenty minutes Mariana came out of the cabin, and said that Don Lazarillo begged I would be so good as to send two seamen below to convey his effects into the boat.

"Certainly," I answered, and ordered a couple of men to attend upon the Spaniard. Guessing that the Don's effects would be comparatively trifling, I could not imagine why he required the services of two men in addition to the cook's help; until, after a little, first one sailor made his appearance with his arms full of boxes of cigars, then the second sailor arrived with a case of wine, then Mariana came on deck with bags and valises belonging to the two Dons. These articles were handed into the boat, and the seamen and the cook returned for more. It was clearly Don Lazarillo's intention to carry off as much as the Portuguese boat would hold, and by and by she was lying alongside deep with wine, cigars, a chest, as I supposed, of the silver plate, and a variety of other portable articles.

Don Lazarillo then came up with the Portuguese captain. They went to the side and looked over at the boat, and the Portuguese captain hailed the men in her, and some unintelligible talk followed. The boat was then drawn under the gangway by the two fellows, and without a syllable, but with one deadly glance of malice at me, Don Lazarillo entered her. Mariana, throwing a bundle into her, followed. The Portuguese skipper then sprang, and the boat shoved off.

Fortunately for her inmates, the surface of the sea flashed and feathered in ripples only, for the spite or avarice of the Spaniard had so loaded the boat that it needed but a very little weight in the movement of the water to swamp and founder her out of hand.

When her two oars had impelled her a pistol-shot distant from us, Don Lazarillo stood up and proceeded to harangue me in Spanish, with both arms raised and both fists clinched. He rapidly worked himself into a white heat of passion; his voice rose into a penetrating shriek. That he was heaping upon my head every malediction which the language of his country, rich in grotesquely injurious terms, could supply him with, I did not doubt. I picked up a telescope and looked at his face through it, which cool, provoking act so heightened the madness of his wrath that he fell to swaying and toppling about after the manner of a man delirious with drink; whereupon the Portuguese captain, who had sat stolidly looking up at him, to save his own and the lives of the others—for the boat dangerously swayed to the Don's ecstatic gestures—struck him behind in the bend of his legs with the sharp of his hand, and Don Lazarillo vanished in a twinkling in the bottom of the boat. A roar of laughter went up from our men.

"Trim sail, lads, and then heap it on her," I called out; and, even as the boat lay alongside the brig, with the people in her handing up Don Lazarillo's little cargo, the Casandra, yielding to the impulse of her broad and lofty cloths, was ripping through it to the southward and eastward, the brine spitting at her stem, and the shapely little Portuguese brig veering astern into a Lilliputian toy, her white canvas resembling a hovering butterfly in the confused, misty, and broken fires of the sun's reflection upon the ocean in the south-west.