The plea “It was none of us men did this wicked deed, but one of our young female prisoners,” was hardly one which could be submitted to a jury.
Captain Jonsen had discovered from the steamer’s log where he was: so he put the schooner about, and set a course for his refuge at Santa Lucia. It was unlikely, he thought, now, that any British man-of-war would still be cruising about the scene of the Clorinda episode — they had too much to do: and he had reasons (fairly expensive ones) for not anticipating any molestation from the Spanish authorities. He did not like going home with an empty ship, of course: but that appeared inevitable.
The outward sign of this change in the atmosphere of the schooner was a spontaneous increase in the strictness of discipline. Not a drop of rum was drunk. Watch was kept with the regularity of a line-of-battle ship. The schooner became tidier, more seamanlike in every way.
Thunder was slain and eaten the next day, without any regard for the feelings of his lovers: indeed, all tenderness towards the children vanished. Even José ceased playing with them. They were treated with a detached severity not wholly divorced from fear — as if these unfortunate men at last realized what diabolic yeast had been introduced into their lump.
So sensible were the children themselves of the change that they even forgot to mourn for Thunder — excepting Laura, whose face burned an angry red for half a day.
But the ship’s monkey, on the other hand, with no pig now to tease, nearly died of ennui.
II
The reopening of the wound in her leg made it several days more before Emily was fit to be moved from the cabin. During this time she was much alone. Jonsen and Otto seldom came below, and when they did were too preoccupied to heed her blandishing. She sang, and conversed to herself, almost incessantly; only interrupting herself to beseech these two, with a superfluity of endearments, to pick up her crochet-hook, to look at the animal she had built out of her blanket, to tell her a story, to tell her what naughty things they did when they were little — how unlike Emily it was, all this gross bidding for attention! But as a rule they went away again, or went to sleep, without taking the least notice of her.
As well, she told herself, to herself, endless stories: as many as there are in The Arabian Nights , and quite as involved. But the strings of words she used to utter aloud had nothing to do with this: I mean, that when she made a sort of narrative noise (which was often), she did it for the noise’s sake: the silent, private formation of sentences and scenes, in one’s head, is far preferable for real story-telling. If you had been watching her then, unseen, you could only have told she was doing it by the dramatic expressions of her face, and her restless flexing and tossing — and if she had had the slightest inkling you were there, the audible rigmarole would have started again. (No one who has private thoughts going on loudly in his own head is quite sure of their not being overheard unless he is providing something else to occupy foreign ears.)
When she sang, however, it was always wordless: an endless succession of notes, like a bird’s, fixed to the first vocable handy, and practically without tune. Not being musical, there was never any reason for her to stop: so one song would often go on for half an hour.
Although José had scrubbed the cabin floor as well as he could, a large stain still remained.
At times she let her mind wander about, quite peacefully, in her memories of Jamaica: a period which now seemed to her very remote, a golden age. How young she must have been! When her imagination grew tired, too, she could recall the Anansi stories Old Sam had told her: and they often proved the point of departure for new ones of her own.
Also she could remember the creepy things he had told her about duppies. How they used to tease the negroes about the supposed duppy at the bathing-hole, the duppy of the drowned man! It gave one an enormous sense of power, that — not to believe in duppies.
But she found herself taking much less pleasure in duppies now than she used.
She even once caught herself wondering what the Dutchman’s duppy would look like, all bloody, with its head turned backwards on its shoulders and clanking a chain…it was a momentary flash, the way the banished image of Tabby had come back to her. For a moment her head reeled: in another she was far from Jamaica, far from the schooner, far from duppies, on a golden throne in the remotest East.
The other children were no longer allowed in the cabin to visit her: but when she heard their feet scampering overhead, she often conversed with them in loud yells. One of these yells from above told her:
“Marghie’s back, you know.”
“O-oh.”
After that Emily was silent for a bit, her beautiful, innocent gray eyes fixed on the ear of a dwarf at the end of her bunk. Only the slight pucker at the top of her nose showed with what intensity she was thinking: and the minute drops of sweat on her temples.
But it was not only when there was some outward occasion, like this, that she suffered acute distress.
Froth as she might, those times of consciousness, which had begun with a moment of such sublime vision, were both growing on her and losing their luster. They were become sinister. Life threatened to be no longer an incessant, automatic discharge of energy: more and more often, and when least expected, all that would suddenly drop from her, and she would remember that she was Emily , who had killed…and who was here …and that Heaven alone knew what was going to happen to the incompetent little thing, by what miracle she was going to keep her end up…. Whenever this happened, her stomach seemed to drop away within her a hundred and fifty feet.
She, like Laura, had one foot each side of a threshold now. As a piece of Nature, she was practically invulnerable. But as Emily , she was absolutely naked, tender. It was particularly cruel that this transition should come when so fierce a blast was blowing.
For mark this: anyone in bed, with a blanket up to her chin, is in a measure safe. She might go through abysms of terror; but once these passed, no practical harm had been done. But once she was up and about? Suppose it was at some crisis, some call to action, that her Time came on her? What appalling blunder could she fail to make?
Oh why must she grow up? Why, for pity’s sake?
Quite apart from these attacks of blind, secret panic, she had other times of an ordinary, very rational anxiety. She was ten and a half now. What sort of future lay before her, what career? (Their mother had implanted in them young, as a matter of principle, girls and boys alike, the idea that they would one day have to earn their own livings.) I say she was ten and a half: but it seemed such ages since she had come on the schooner that she thought she was probably older even than that. — Now this life was full of interest: but was it, she asked herself, a really useful education? What did it fit her for? Plainly, it taught her nothing but to be a sort of pirate too (what sort of a pirate, being a girl, was a problem in itself). But as time slipped by, it became clearer and clearer that every other life would be impossible for her — indeed, for all of them.