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

but, seeing her sweet anxious face, begged her not to be alarmed—he knew what to take for it. Would she be kind enough to go to his arsenal and fetch some specimens of bark she would find there, and also the keg of rum?

She flew at the word, and soon made him an infusion of the barks in boiling water; to which the rum was added.

His sweet nurse administered this from time to time. The barks used were of the cassia tree, and a wild citron tree. Cinchona did not exist in this island, unfortunately. Perhaps there was no soil for it at a sufficient elevation above the sea.

Nevertheless with these inferior barks they held the fever in check. But the pain was obstinate, and cost Helen many a sigh; for, if she came softly, she could often hear him moan; and, the moment he heard her foot, he set to and whistled, for a blind; with what success may be imagined. She would have bought those pains, or a portion of them; ay, and paid a heavy price for them.

But pain, like everything, intermits, and in those blessed intervals his mind was more active than ever, and ran a great deal upon what he called the Problem.

But she, who had set it him, gave him little encouragement now to puzzle over it.

The following may serve as a specimen of their conversation on that head.

“The air of this island,” said he, “gives one a sort of vague sense of mental power. It leads to no result in my case. Still, it is an agreeable sensation to have it floating across my mind that some day I shall solve the Great Problem. Ah! if I was only an inventor!”

“And so you are.”

“No, no,” said Hazel, disclaiming as earnestly as some people claim; “I do things that look like acts of invention, but they are acts of memory. I could show you plates and engravings of all the things I have seemed to invent. A man who studies books instead of skimming them can cut a dash in a desert island, until the fatal word goes forth—invent; and then you find him out.”

“I am sure I wish I had never said the fatal word. You will never get well if you puzzle your brain over impossibilities.”

“Impossibilities! But is not that begging the question? The measure of impossibilities is lost in the present age. I propose a test. Let us go back a century, and suppose that three problems were laid before the men of that day, and they were asked to decide which is the most impossible: 1st, to diffuse intelligence from a fixed island over a hundred leagues of water; 2d, to make the sun take in thirty seconds likenesses more exact than any portrait-painter ever took—likenesses that can be sold for a shilling at fifty per cent profit; 3d, for New York and London to exchange words by wire so much faster than the earth can turn, that London shall tell New York at ten on Monday morning what was the price of consols at two o’clock Monday afternoon.”

“That is a story,” said Helen, with a look of angelic reproach.

“I accept that reply,” said Hazel. “As for me, I have got a smattering of so many subjects, all full of incredible truths, that my faith in the impossibility of anything is gone. Ah! if James Watt was only here instead of John Hazel—James Watt from the Abbey with a head as big as a pumpkin—he would not have gone groping about the island, writing on rocks, and erecting signals. No; he would have had some grand and bold idea worthy of the proposition.”

“Well, so I think,” said Helen, archly; “that great man with the great head would have begun by making a kite a hundred yards high.”

“Would he? Well, he was quite capable of it.”

“Yes; and rubbed it with phosphorus, and flown it the first tempest, and made the string fast to—the island itself.”

“Well, that is an idea,” said Hazel, staring; “rather hyperbolical, I fear. But, after all, it is an idea.”

“Or else,” continued Helen, “he would weave a thousand yards of some light fabric, and make balloons; then he would stop the pitch-fountain, bore a hole in the rock near it, and so get the gas, fill the balloons, inscribe them with our sad story and our latitude and longitude, and send them flying all over the ocean—there!”

Hazel was amazed.

“I resign my functions to you,” said he. “What imagination! What invention!”

“Oh, dear no, said Helen slyly; “acts of memory sometimes pass for invention, you know. Shall I tell you? when first you fell ill you were rather light-headed, and uttered the strangest things. They would have made me laugh heartily, only I couldn’t—for crying. And you said that about kites and balloons, every word.”

“Did I? then I have most brains when I have least reason, that’s all.”

“Ay,” said Helen, “and other strange things—very strange and bitter things. One I should like to ask you about, what on earth you could mean by it; but perhaps you meant nothing, after all.”

“I’ll soon tell you,” said Hazel; but he took the precaution to add, “provided I know what it means myself.”

She looked at him steadily, and was on the point of seeking the explanation so boldly offered; but her own courage failed her. She colored and hesitated.

“I shall wait,” said she, “till you are quite, quite well. That will be soon, I hope; only you must be good, and obey my prescriptions. Cultivate patience; it is a wholesome plant; bow the pride of that intellect which you see a fever can lay low in an hour. Aspire no more beyond the powers of man. Here we shall stay unless Providence sends us a ship. I have ceased to repine. And don’t you begin. Dismiss that problem altogether; see how hot it has made your poor brow. Be good now, and dismiss it; or else do as I do—fold it up, put it quietly away in a corner of your mind, and, when you least expect, it will pop out solved.”

(Oh, comfortable doctrine! But how about Jamie Watt’s headaches? And why are the signs of hard thoughts so much stronger in his brow and face than in Shakespeare’s? Mercy on us, there is another problem.)

Hazel smiled, well pleased, and leaned back, soothed, silenced, subdued, by her soft voice and the exquisite touch of her velvet hand on his hot brow; for, woman-like, she laid her hand like down on that burning brow to aid her words in soothing it. Nor did it occur to him just then that this admonition, delivered with a kind maternal hand, maternal voice, came from the same young lady who had flown at him like a wild-cat with this very problem in her mouth. She mesmerized him, problem and all; he subsided into a complacent languor, and at last went to sleep, thinking only of her. But the topic had entered his mind too deeply to be finally dismissed. It returned next day, though in a different form. You must know that Hazel, as he lay on his back in the boat, had often, in a half-drowsy way, watched the effect of the sun upon the boat’s mast; it now stood, a bare pole, and at certain hours acted like the needle of a dial by casting a shadow on the sands. Above all, he could see pretty well by means of this pole and its shadow when the sun attained its greatest elevation. He now asked Miss Rolleston to assist him in making this observation exactly.

She obeyed his instructions, and the moment the shadow reached its highest angle, and showed the minutest symptom of declension, she said, “Now,” and Hazel called out in a loud voice:

“Noon!”

“And forty-nine minutes past eight at Sydney,” said Helen, holding out her chronometer; for she had been sharp enough to get it ready of her own accord.

Hazel looked at her and at the watch with amazement and incredulity.

“What?” said he. “Impossible. You can’t have kept Sydney time all this while.”

“And pray why not?” said Helen. “Have you forgotten that once somebody praised me for keeping Sydney time; it helped you, somehow or other, to know where we were.”

“And so it will now,” cried Hazel, exultingly. “But no! it is impossible. We have gone through scenes that— You can’t have wound that watch up without missing a day.”

“Indeed but I have,” said Helen. “Not wind my watch up! Why, if I was dying I should wind my watch up. See, it requires no key; a touch or two of the fingers and it is done. Oh, I am remarkably constant in all my habits; and this is an old friend I never neglect. Do you remember that terrible night in the boat, when neither of us expected to see the morning—oh, how good and brave you were!—well, I remember winding it up that night. I kissed it, and bade it good-by. But I never dreamed of not winding it up because I was going to be killed. What! am I not to be praised again, as I was on board ship? Stingy! can’t afford to praise one twice for the same thing.”

“Praised!” cried Hazel excitedly; “worshiped, you mean. Why, we have got the longitude by means of your chronometer. It is wonderful! It is providential! It is the finger of Heaven! Pen and ink, and let me work it out.”

In his excitement he got up without assistance, and was soon busy calculating the longitude of Godsend Isle.

 

CHAPTER XL.

 

“THERE,” said he. “Now the latitude I must guess at by certain combinations. In the first place, the slight variation in the length of the days. Then I must try and make a rough calculation of the sun’s parallax. And then my botany will help me a little; spices furnish a clew; there are one or two that will not grow outside the tropic. It was the longitude that beat me, and now we have conquered it. Hurrah! Now I know what to diffuse, and in what direction; east, southeast; the ducks have shown me that much. So there’s the first step toward the impossible problem.”

“Very well,” said Helen; “and I am sure one step is enough for one day. I forbid you the topic for twelve hours at least. I detest it because it always makes your poor head so hot.”

“What on earth does that matter?” said Hazel, impetuously, and almost crossly.

“Come, come, come, sir,” said Helen authoritatively; “it matters to me.”

But when she saw that he could think of nothing else, and that opposition irritated him, she had the tact and good sense not to strain her authority, nor to irritate her subject.

Hazel spliced a long, fine-pointed stick to the masthead, and set a plank painted white with guano at right angles to the base of the mast; and so, whenever the sun attained his meridian altitude, went into a difficult and subtle calculation to arrive at the latitude, or as near it as he could without proper instruments. And he brooded and brooded over his discovery of the longitude, but unfortunately he could not advance. In some problems the first step once gained leads, or at least points, to the next; but to know whereabouts they were, and to let others know it, were two difficulties heterogeneous and distinct.

Having thought and thought till his head was dizzy, at last he took Helen’s advice and put it by for a while. He set himself to fit and number a quantity of pearl-oyster shells, so that he might be able to place them at once, when he should be able to recommence his labor of love