The White Squall | Page 2

Spaniards call it.
But, I wish to go back now to the memorable day when Jake set off so
briskly on his errand to see if the English mail steamer had arrived,
leaving me on the terrace in front of our house wondering, as he
speeded on his way, whether the packet was in sight; and, if she had
been signalled, trying to surmise what news she would bring.
I was really very anxious about the matter, and I will tell you the reason
why.
My father was an officer of the royal navy, who found it a hard thing,
with an increasing family, to make both ends meet in the mother
country on his half-pay. At last, sick of waiting for active employment
afloat during the long stagnation in the service occasioned by the
interregnum of peace that lasted almost from Waterloo up to the time of
the Crimean war, he determined, like Cincinnatus, to "beat his sword
into a ploughshare." In other words, he abandoned the fickle element
on which he had passed the early days of his manhood and emigrated to

the West Indies, to see whether he might not improve his fortunes by
investing what little capital he had in a coffee and cocoa plantation in
the island where my scene opens. A couple of months or so before, he
had taken a trip across the Atlantic to arrange some money matters with
his London agent, and we were now expecting his return by every mail.
Beyond this, my father had more than half-hinted that, as soon as he
got back to Grenada, he would send me over to England in my turn to
go to school, when, most likely, I would have to bid adieu to my West
Indian home for good and all; for, my fervent desire was to follow in
dad's footsteps and enter the navy as soon as I was able to pass the
admiralty examination--a desire to which dad, in spite of the scurvy
way in which he had been treated by an ungrateful country, did not say
nay, his ambition being that I should succeed where he failed if
possible, for he was a true sailor and hankered after the sea yet.
It was not surprising, therefore, that I was so eager to learn whether the
packet had come in, albeit her arrival would naturally bring to an end
the little brief authority which I had been so proud to assume during
dad's absence as the protector of my mother and sisters, besides being
regarded by all the negro hands as "um lilly massa of um plantashun."
Really, I esteemed myself at that period to be a most important and
highly dignified person, being only a boy of thirteen years old then, and
small-grown for my age at that!
Jake had scarcely been out of sight five minutes when I began to look
out for his return. My impatience, indeed, quite got the better of my
reason, for I ought to have known well enough, if I had only considered,
that he could not have yet half accomplished the journey to the signal
station on Richmond Hill, much less thought even of coming back, the
willing darkey being as unable as anyone else to annihilate distance or
space!
It was a terribly hot day, being close on to the noontide hour, the
thermometer under the shade of the verandah where I stood marking
over a hundred degrees; while, goodness only knew what it was out in
the open, where the sun's blistering rays produced such intense heat that
the paintwork of the green jalousie shutters outside the windows of the

house fairly frizzled up in liquid blotches!
The air, too, was oppressively close and warm, just as when the door of
an oven is opened in one's face, not a breath of wind stirring to agitate
the still atmosphere; but, neither did this fact, nor did the blazing power
of the glowing orb of day, which looked like a globe of fire in the
centre of the heavens, affect the wild luxuriance of nature at Mount
Pleasant.
As I gazed around, everything appeared to be invigorated instead of
prostrated by the high temperature.
This seems to be the natural order of things in the tropics, that is, in
respect of everything and everyone accustomed to broiling weather,
like hot-house flowers and coloured gentry of the kidney of Jake and
his sable brethren, whose ancestors, having been born under the
sweltering equator, handed down to their descendants constitutions of
such a nature that they seem fairly to revel in the heat, and appear to be
all the healthier and happier the hotter it is!
Ruby-throated humming-birds, with breasts of burnished gold, fluttered
about the garden on the terrace in front of me in