University of Virginia Library

32. CHAPTER XXXII.
In which Robin Day meets with many delightful surprises, takes
a new name, and explains such circumstances as require explanation.

It was many, many days before I awoke again to
life. In truth, that unlucky musket-bullet, by which
I had been prostrated, without much suspecting its
agency in my downfall, had passed through my
body, inflicting desperate mischief in its way, from
which I never could have recovered, had not Heaven
sent me such assistance as could only be found in a
skilful and devoted physician, and endowed me with
a constitution capable of withstanding the severest
shocks and injuries.

I opened my eyes in a strange room, to look upon
a stranger sight; it was my friend and patron, Dr.
Howard, who was bending over me with looks of
deep anxiety, one hand lying upon my breast, as if
feeling whether life were yet beating at my heart, the
other holding a cup, from which he had just poured
some hot and pungent liquid between my lips. I could
express the sense of pleasure mingled with surprise,
which I felt at sight of him, only by a faint smile,
being incapable of any speech or motion; but the
look was perceived, and drew from him an exclamation—“God
be praised! he is yet alive!” and I then
saw other countenances bending over me, that filled

me with still greater delight, though it was like the
delight of a dream, vague, confused, and confusing.
The first was that of my sister Isabel: I thought I
was in heaven with her; but she was sobbing over
me, and by her side was Colonel Aubrey, looking
haggard with grief; and I knew that such feelings
belonged not to heaven, but to earth. Was I not
dreaming? I was sure I must be; for the next visage
that met my eyes was that of Nanna Howard: yes,
it was Nanna herself, but pale and wasted, and with
the look that spoke of the canker-worm preying on
the heart. There were still others, about me, shadowy
forms, in which I might dimly trace, or fancy,
the lineaments of other friends, my friend Dicky
Dare, little Tommy, the priest, and the caséra; but
they soon vanished away, with all the former ones,
excepting Dr. Howard and Isabel who still remained
at my side. In fact, as I afterwards understood,
they had been summoned together to see me die,
and were only dismissed from the room, when it
was discovered I had taken a new lease of existence.

The powers of life rallied at the last gasp;
gathered, after a day or two of uncertainty, fresh
strength; and, in a week more, I was out of danger,
rejoicing, in the arms of my sister and uncle, (for
my claims to the relationship were now established
upon evidence much stronger than my own eager
belief,) and in the society of Nanna and her father,
over those wonderful circumstances to which we
owed the happiness of our meeting.

But let me take up the story of explanation at
the period when the invalids of the Querida, with
the priest and the caséra, were committed to the
sea in the long-boat, and left to perish. Happier
than I, who sought so vainly, and indeed foolishly,
to join them, they had the good fortune to be discovered,

early the next morning, by a Spanish vessel
bound to the port they had left, and which they
returned to, with the dismal story of the capture of
the brig, the murder of her crew, the fate of the
hapless Isabel. The Vengador was then in the bay:
in two hours she was under sail with the Intendant
on board, in pursuit of the Viper, though with little
hope of overtaking her. Captain Dicky, always
ready to volunteer where there was a prospect of
fighting, was also on board; and he was the more
anxious to accompany the expedition, as he hoped
to reclaim his unfortunate followers, seduced by a
strange error and misfortune, from the path of their
duty—and perhaps, also, to save their necks from
the halter.

Little Tommy was also carried with them, as it
was thought his acquaintance with a portion of Hellcat's
followers, the original crew of the Jumping
Jenny, might be productive of useful testimony
against them.

The pirates had lost several days, cruising up
and down in search of the fugitive jolly boat; they
were returning in all the ill humour of disappointment,
to their accustomed harbour, when accident
threw in their way another prize, the Fair American:
the reports of the guns, heard at a great distance,
brought the Vengador to the scene of battle.

The Viper was immediately captured, and a
prize-crew put on board, with orders to despatch a
boat to the Fair American, to rescue, perhaps, some
of her mangled crew, who might be still living, and
could be easily saved; for, in reality, the torch had
been hurriedly applied to some of the sails, which,
with the rigging, had been consumed, leaving the
hull of the vessel almost unharmed; while the
Vengador gave immediate chase to the Querida.

The result of the pursuit has been already seen.
From one of the few pirates taken alive from the
Viper, Colonel Aubrey learned the escape of his
adopted daughter; but he could well believe, with
his informant, she had fled from the Querida only to
perish with her deliverer. And the assurance that
she had thus been driven to an untimely grave
among the waves of ocean did not abate the feeling
of rancorous revenge, which impelled him to attack
the pirate amid the horrors of the tempest; which
carried him with her among the breakers; and was
not sated, until the last of the freebooters had been
cut to pieces on the strand.

Then, indeed, his fury relented, and such of the
wretches as still survived, were collected, and, with
his own wounded, carried to a distant hacienda, or
plantation, where such assistance was given them as
could be obtained; and hearing that a foreign physician,
an American, who had visited the island with
a sick daughter, to enjoy the benefit of the tropical
air, was at another plantation, some miles off, he
despatched a messenger to solicit his attendance upon
the wounded.

That stranger physician was my patron, Dr. Howard;
and I was the first patient whom Colonel
Aubrey besought him to take in charge.

The account of my instrumentality in saving Isabel,
which he had received from the captive pirate,
after the previous stories told him by the chaplain
and caséra of the attempt I had made in her favour
at the moment of capture, had long since driven
suspicion and anger from my uncle's mind; and I
had greatly mistaken his feelings, when, approaching
me as I lay wounded on the strand, I fancied I beheld
fury and vengeance in his aspect. They were
feelings of amazement at my appearance, whom he

thought buried with Isabel in the sea; and, still more,
of sudden hope, of eager curiosity, of anxious solicitude
on her account, for from me, perhaps, he might
learn the secret of her fate.

This secret he was destined soon to learn from
others. The boat from the Viper had reached the
Fair American; Isabel and the captain's wife were
discovered and released; the Viper, though crippled,
stood out the gale, and in the morning made a
harbour at no great distance from the scene of shipwreck
and battle. The messenger despatched for
Dr. Howard found him already engaged in the duties
of humanity among the wounded of the Viper;
he obeyed the summons, and Isabel attended him to
her amazed and rejoicing uncle.

The story of the rosary was soon told: it was
found upon my neck, and identified both by Dr.
Howard and my uncle: and, while I still lay unconscious,
hovering between life and death, the evidence
of two living witnesses of my father's death,
Captain Brown and the miserable Skipper Duck,
had established my identity with the “little Juan”
beyond the possibility of doubt.

Brown survived his wounds three days, and died
the hardened villain he had lived; but being appealed
to by my uncle, he readily confessed the
truth in regard to the fate of my father. The wealth
of the unhappy exile was a temptation Brown, a dissolute
and unprincipled fellow, although not then a
pirate, could not resist. The crew of the Sally Ann
were, one by one, gained over to his purpose; they
rose in the night, killed the master, my father, and
his attendants, and then, scuttling the vessel, betook
them to a boat, and reached the land, some thirty or
forty miles off, the following day. Brown insisted
to the last that he wanted to save the baby—that is,

myself; but that the others objected, lest it should
lead to a discovery of their villany; and all he could
obtain for me was the privilege of being left to go
down with the schooner alive. He did not know,
and could not understand, why the schooner did
not go down, as he bored the holes through her bottom
himself; but he supposed it was all owing to
me, he said, ending his confession with a brutal jest,
“because them that was born to be hang'd, d—n his
blood, they could n't be drown'd.”

Skipper Duck was captured on board the Viper,
where his miserable condition procured him quarter
and even pity. I have sometimes suspected it was
owing to his having been for so many days deprived
of my medical attentions; but he had grown much
better in the interim, and recovered his senses, and
Dr. Howard thought, at first, that he would recover.
In consideration of his not having taken, as, indeed,
he could not, any part in Brown's late atrocities,
(excepting the capture of the Viper alone,) and of
the importance of his testimony to my interests,
Colonel Aubrey pledged his influence to procure
him a free pardon, upon condition of his also making
a confession of all the circumstances attending the
catastrophe of the Sally Ann, which he immediately
did. He confirmed Brown's story in nearly all its
parts, and confessed that he had purchased his vessel,
the Jumping Jenny, out of his share of the plunder,
intending to live an honest life for the future,
and declared he had lived as honest a one as he
could. He insisted, however, that it was he who
saved my life, and not Brown; and that he had
bought me of old Mother Moll for the purpose of
befriending me; a pious intention, which he admitted
he had not fulfilled, and could not, “because the
devil was in him, and he never looked at me without

hating me.” His malice, I fancy, may be explained
by the maxim of the philosopher, that he is
our bitterest enemy, who is conscious he has done
us the deepest wrong. The poor wretch did not
live to enjoy the offered pardon: his delirium returned
after a few days; and before I had recovered
strength to leave my bed, he expired miserably of
gangrene, the consequence of the terrible scourging
he had received.

He made, before he died, another confession, by
which little Tommy's claims were as satisfactorily
established as my own. He admitted that the boy
was Dr. Howard's lost son, that he had kidnapped
him out of revenge against his father, to whose
efforts to bring him to justice for his barbarity to
me, he properly attributed all the punishments that
followed, the imprisonment, the heavy fine by
which he was robbed of all the gaining of years,
and the lynching that ended the chapter of retributions;
not to speak of the loss of so valuable a slave
as I had been. Accident brought little Tommy
into his power; for having swum ambitiously into
the river among the vessels lying at anchor, fatigue
compelled him to take refuge for a while in the one
nearest him, which unfortunately proved to be the
Jumping Jenny, then making her last visit to the
town. Upon being roughly questioned, he told his
name to Duck, who immediately thrust him into the
hold, and, soon after, setting sail, carried him off,
leaving his parents mourning for his supposed death.
From that moment, the unfortunate lad became the
object upon which he vented all the fury of his brutality
and revenge; and it is not wonderful that five
years of cruelty had changed him from a bright and
generous boy, into the stupid, vindictive cub I had
found him. Alas! his restoration to the arms of his

father and sister produced less of rapture than pain
and humiliation: but they remembered that I had
been rescued from degradation as deep and unpromising,
and they hoped a similar happy resurrection
for him.

But what had brought them, my benefactor and
Nanna, thus so opportunely to the island? It was
an expedient adopted to save the life of Nanna, who,
while I was so ready to forget my allegiance, to
forget her, and fall so violently in love with my own
sister, (but that, after all, was mere nature and instinct,
a burst of preordained fraternal affection,
which a boy of nineteen, or rather less, might naturally
mistake for love of another kind,) was remembering
me in tears, and pining away with grief
over the supposed fall and ruin of one she loved
better than she, or I, or any one else, suspected.

The affair of M'Goggin, who was for more than
twenty-four hours supposed to be dying, though he
suddenly remitted, and got well in a very few days,
was of itself such a shock to Nanna's spirits and
health, that her father was doubly rejoiced upon her
account, when the favourable change in M'Goggin's
symptoms allowed him to despatch a messenger with
a permission, or command for my immediate return.
The reader has seen how my return was prevented
by my suspicions of the messenger; the news of the
trick by which I effected my escape from Mr. John
Dabs reached my benefactor at the same moment
that he was made acquainted with my midnight
visit to the house of Mr. Bloodmoney; not to speak
of the rumours of the highway robbery, which had
also been brought to his ears. And, soon after,
there came an account, I know not how such an
unlucky truth could reach him, that I had entered
the British service, and, of course turned traitor to

my country. The effect of these unlucky stories, it
may be imagined, had the unhappiest effect upon the
little reputation I had left behind me, and upon the
minds of my friends. It was in vain Dr. Howard strove
to make others believe, and to believe himself, that
there was some inexplicable error and illusion at the
bottom of the affair, that it was impossible I could so
suddenly have been transformed from a thoughtless, innocent
boy, into a desperate and accomplished rogue:
his visit to Mr. Bloodmoney proved my share in the
burglary beyond question; my hat and knapsack,
the latter full of Mr. Bloodmoney's plate, were evidence
too strong to be resisted; and nothing spoke
in my favour except my parting asseveration to Isabel,
that I was no robber or villain; and this spoke
but faintly, as my actions seemed so clearly to establish
the contrary.

A letter from me might have cleared up the whole
mystery, and one was long impatiently expected;
but expected in vain. It was many weeks before I
had an opportunity to write; and it was some
months before my letter, committed to a provincial
post office, and exposed to all the irregularities and
accidents of a period of war, reached its destination.
It cleared up my character, indeed, at least, to my
patron's mind; but it came too late to repair the
mischief inflicted upon poor Nanna's health. She
was rapidly sinking into a decline; and the distracted
father, doubly distracted in consequence of the
wonderful story of little Tommy told in the letter,
leaving to others the task of recovering his lost son,
was glad to embrace the opportunity of a Spanish
vessel sailing to Cuba, to carry his daughter thither,
as the only means left of arresting a malady that
was fast threatening to become fatal.

A pleasant situation on a lonely plantation near

the coast, the benignant air, and the explanations in
my letter, with the hope which never abandons the
youthful spirit, had already produced a favourable
change in the maiden's health; which, notwithstanding
the shock of my sudden and lamentable appearance,
wounded almost to death, was gradually
confirmed, and, indeed, thoroughly re-established,
before I myself was entirely restored to my wonted
strength.