Foul Play - Dion Boucicault (the best books to read txt) 📗

small, and called Welch out. They agreed to rig the mainsail tarpaulin-wise and sleep in the boat. Accordingly they made themselves very busy screening the east side of Miss Rolleston’s new abode with the foresail, and fastened a loop and drove a nail into the tree, and looped the sail to it, then suddenly bade her good-night in cheerful tones, and were gone in a moment, leaving her to her repose, as they imagined. Hazel, in particular, having used all his ingenuity to secure her personal comfort, was now too bent on showing her the most delicate respect and forbearance to think of anything else. But, justly counting on the delicacy, he had forgotten the timidity of her sex, and her first night in the island was a terribly trying one.

Thrice she opened her mouth to call Welch and Hazel back, but could not. Yet, when their footsteps were out of hearing, she would have given the world to have them between her and the perils with which she felt herself surrounded.

Tigers; snakes; scorpions; savages! what would become of her during the long night?

She sat and cowered before the hot embers. She listened to what seemed the angry roar of the sea. What with the stillness of the night and her sharpened senses she heard it all round the island: she seemed environed with peril, and yet surrounded by desolation. No one at hand to save her in time from a wild beast. No one anywhere near except a sick sailor and one she would almost rather die than call singly to her aid, for he had once told her he loved her.

“Oh, papa! Oh, Arthur!” she cried, “are you praying for your poor Helen?” Then she wept and prayed; and half nerved herself to bear the worst. Finally, her vague fears completely overmastered her. Then she had recourse to a stratagem that belongs to her sex—she hid herself from the danger, and the danger from her; she covered herself face and all, and so lay trembling, and longing for the day.

At the first streak of dawn she fled from her place of torture, and after plunging her face and hands in the river, which did her a world of good, she went off and entered the jungle, and searched it closely, so far as she could penetrate it. Soon she heard “Miss Rolleston” called in anxious tones. But she tossed her little head and revenged herself for her night of agony by not replying.

However, Nature took her in hand; imperious hunger drew her back to her late place of torture; and there she found a fire, and Hazel cooking crayfish. She ate the crayfish heartily, and drank cocoanut milk out of half a cocoanut, which the ingenious Hazel had already sawn, polished and mounted for her.

After that, Hazel’s whole day was occupied in stripping a tree that stood on the high western promontory of the bay, and building up the materials of a bonfire a few yards from it, that, if any whaler should stray that way, they might not be at a loss for means to attract her attention.

Welch was very ill all day, and Miss Rolleston nursed him. He got about toward evening, and Miss Rolleston asked him, rather timidly, if he could put her up a bell-rope.

“Why, yes, miss,” said Welch, “that is easy enough; but I don’t see no bell.” Oh, she did not want a bell—she only wanted a bell-rope.

Hazel came up during this conversation, and she then gave her reason.

“Because, then, if Mr. Welch is ill in the night, and wants me, I could come to him. Or—” finding herself getting near the real reason she stopped short.

“Or what?” inquired Hazel, eagerly.

She replied to Welch. “When tigers and things come to me, I can let you know, Mr. Welch, if you have any curiosity about the result of their visit.”

“Tigers!” said Hazel, in answer to this side slap; “there are no tigers here; no large animals of prey exist in the Pacific.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It is notorious. Naturalists are agreed.”

“But I am not. I heard noises all night. And little I expected that anything of me would be left this morning, except, perhaps, my back hair. Mr. Welch, you are clever at rigging things—that is what you call it—and so please rig me a bell-rope, then I shall not be eaten alive without creating some little disturbance.”

“I’ll do it, miss,” said Welch, “this very night.”

Hazel said nothing, but pondered. Accordingly, that very evening a piece of stout twine, with a stone at the end of it, hung down from the roof of Helen’s house; and this twine clove the air until it reached a ring upon the mainmast of the cutter; thence it descended, and was to be made fast to something or somebody. The young lady inquired no further. The very sight of this bell-rope was a great comfort to her; it reunited her to civilized life. That night she lay down, and quaked considerably less. Yet she woke several times; and an hour before daylight she heard distinctly a noise that made her flesh creep. It was like the snoring of some great animals. This horrible sound was faint and distant; but she heard it between the roll of the waves, and that showed it was not the sea roaring; she hid herself in her rugs, and cowered till daybreak. A score of times she was minded to pull her bell-rope; but always a womanly feeling, strong as her love of life, withheld her. “Time to pull that bell-rope when the danger was present or imminent,” she thought to herself. “The thing will come smelling about before it attacks me, and then I will pull the bell;” and so she passed an hour of agony.

Next morning, at daybreak, Hazel met her just issuing from her hut, and pointing to his net told her he was going to forage; and would she be good enough to make the fire and have boiling water ready? he was sorry to trouble her; but poor Welch was worse this morning. Miss Rolleston cut short his excuses. “Pray do not take me for a child; of course I will light the fire, and boil the water. Only I have no lucifer matches.”

“Here are two,” said he. “I carry the box wrapped in oilskin. For if anything happen to them, Heaven help us.”

He crossed the prostrate palmtree, and dived into the wood. It was a large beautiful wood, and, except at the western edge, the trees were all of the palmtree genus, but contained several species, including the cocoanut tree. The turf ran under these trees for about forty yards and then died gradually away under the same thick shade which destroyed all other vegetation in this wood, and made it so easy to see and travel.

He gathered a few cocoanuts that had burst out of their ripe pods and fallen to the ground; and ran on till he reached a belt of trees and shrubs, that bounded the palm forest. Here his progress was no longer easy. But he found trees covered with a small fruit resembling quinces in every particular of look, taste and smell, and that made him persevere, since it was most important to learn the useful products of the island. Presently he burst through some brushwood into a swampy bottom surrounded by low trees, and instantly a dozen large birds of the osprey kind rose flapping into the air like windmills rising. He was quite startled by the whirring and flapping, and not a little amazed at the appearance of the place. Here was a very charnel-house; so thick lay the shells, skeletons and loose bones of fish. Here too he found three terrapin killed but not eaten, and also some fish, more or less pecked. “Aha! my worthy executioners, much obliged,” said he. “You have saved me that job.” And into the bag went the terrapin, and two plump fish, but slightly mutilated. Before he had gone many yards, back came the sailing wings, and the birds settled again before his eyes. The rest of the low wood was but thin, and he soon emerged upon the open country; but it was most unpromising; and fitter for geese than men. A vast sedgy swamp with water in the middle, thin fringes of great fern-trees, and here and there a disconsolate tree like a weeping-willow, and at the end of this lake and swamp, which all together formed a triangle, was a barren hill without a blade of vegetation on it, and a sort of jagged summit Hazel did not at all like the look of. Volcanic!

Somewhat dismayed at finding so large a slice of the island worthless, he returned through the wood, guiding himself due west by his pocket-compass, and so got down to the shore, where he found scallops and crayfish in incredible abundance. Literally, he had only to go into the water and gather them. But “enough” is as good as “a feast.” He ran to the pots with his miscellaneous bag, and was not received according to his deserts. Miss Rolleston told him, a little severely, the water had been boiling a long time. Then he produced his provender, by way of excuse.

“Tortoises again!” said she, and shuddered visibly.

But the quinces and cocoanuts were graciously received. Welch, however, cried out for cabbage.

“What am I to do?” said Hazel. “For every such cabbage a king must die.”

“Goodness me!”

“A monarch of the grove.”

“Oh, a King Log. Why, then down with them all, of course; sooner than dear Mr. Welch shall go without his cabbage.”

He cast a look of admiration on her, which she avoided, and very soon his ax was heard ringing in the wood hard by. Then came a loud crash. Then another. Hazel came running with the cabbage and a cocoa-pod. “There,” said he, “and there are a hundred more about. While you cook that for Welch I will store them.” Accordingly he returned to the wood with his net, and soon came back with five pods in it, each as big as a large pumpkin.

He chucked these one at a time across the river, and then went for more. It took him all the afternoon to get all the pods across the river. He was obliged to sit down and rest.

But a suggestion of Helen’s soon set him to work again.

“You were kind enough to say you would store these for me. Could you not store them so as to wall out those terrible beasts with them?”

“What terrible beasts?”

“That roar so all night, and don’t eat us, only because they have not found out we are here yet. But they will.”

“I deny their existence,” said Hazel. “But I’ll wall them out all the same,” said he.

“Pray do,” said Helen. “Wall them out first, and disprove them afterward; I shall be better able to believe they don’t exist when they are well walled out—much.”

Hazel went to work, and with her assistance laid cocoa-pods two wide and three deep, outside the northern and western sides of her leafy bower, and he promised to complete the walls by the same means in two days more.

They all then supped together, and, to oblige him, she ate a little of the terrapin, and, when they parted for the night, she thanked him, and said, with a deep blush, “You have been a good friend to me—of late.”

He colored high, and his eyes sparkled with delight; and she noticed, and almost wished she had kept her gratitude to herself.

That night, what with her bell-rope and her little bit of a wall, she was somewhat less timorous, and went to sleep early.

But even in sleep she was watchful,