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Words: 56221 in 21 pages
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MORLEY ASHTON.
MARIQUITA ESCUDERO.
After the breathless calm of the past day, the heat of the cabin was intense. The lamp was trimmed and lit by the steward, but the skylight was still kept open.
"Awfully hot, Morley, is it not?" said Tom Bartelot, as he threw off his jacket.
"Yes; and the heat makes one so thirsty, too!"
"I can't give you iced champagne, as in the gardens at Rio; but the steward has bitter beer, beaujolais, and potash water, with grog for you, Morrison, which I know you prefer; and you, too, Noah, my old Triton. And now let us to work, and overhaul the old man's papers."
Morrison, who had been scanning over the manuscript, helped himself to a glass of grog mechanically, without taking his eyes from the writing. Noah Gawthrop, who had been specially invited below, in virtue of the part he had borne in the past day's episode, received a jorum of stiff grog from the steward, and seated himself near the bulkhead, uncomfortably, on the extreme edge of a sea-chest, in preference to the well-cushioned locker, which he evidently considered too fine for his tarry trousers.
Morley and Bartelot were each furnished with a glass of beaujolais and potash water. The stars were visible through the open skylight, paling away into the blue ether overhead, when Morrison began to read, translating the recluse's Spanish into tolerable English, as he made himself master of the subject; the sole interruptions, as he proceeded, being an occasional interjection from Noah, such as "Dash my buttons!" "Smite my timbers!" varied by "Darn my eyes! the ragamuffin! the regular-built old Bluebeard!" followed by a hard slap of his hand upon his own thigh; though much of what he heard proved a sore puzzle to him, especially the religious invocations, the outbursts of remorse, and bitter self-reproaches, which we omit in the rehearsal of his story.
The manuscript proceeded thus:
"I pray the reader hereof, if he be a good Catholic, to say a novena, or nine days' prayer, for the repose of my sinful soul; and I beg of the first Christian man who shall give my remains interment to place a cross at the end of my grave.
"Let whoever beholds these poor remains profit by the sad spectacle they exhibit, even as the recluse, Brother Pedro, has sought to profit by the prayers, penance, and mortification of twenty years spent in this solitude, while striving to atone for the errors of forty spent in the world as Don Pedro Zuares Miguel de Barradas.
"I was a man of fortune in New Spain; my forefathers were of the purest blood--the boasted blue blood of those who dwelt by the Ebro, without taint of Goth, of Moor, or Jew--and my more immediate predecessors, men who came with Hernan Cortez, of Medellin, and Francis Pizarro, of Troquillo, to conquer the new world which Columbus had given to Castile and Leon.
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