Читать книгу In Far Bolivia: A Story of a Strange Wild Land - Stables Gordon - Страница 4

I have noticed more than once that although thelife-story of some good old families in Englandmay run long stagnant, still, when one importantevent does take place, strange thing after strangething may happen, and the story rushes on withheedless speed, like rippling brooklets to the sea.

The St. Clairs may have been originally a Scottishfamily, or branch of some Highland clan, but theyhad been settled on a beautiful estate, far away in thewilds of Cornwall, for over one hundred and fifty years.

Stay, though, we are not going back so far as that.Old history, like old parchment, has a musty odour.Let us come down to more modern times.

When, then, young Roland's grandfather died, anddied intestate, the whole of the large estate devolvedupon his eldest son, with its fat rentals of fully fourthousand a-year. Peggy St. Clair, our little heroine, was his only child, and said to be, even in her infancy, the very image of her dead-and-gone mother.

No wonder her father loved her.

But soon the first great event happened in thelife-story of the St. Clairs. For, one sad day Peggy'sfather was borne home from the hunting-fieldgrievously wounded.

All hope of recovery was abandoned by the doctorshortly after he had examined his patient.

Were Herbert to die intestate, as his father haddone, his second brother John, according to the oldlaw, could have stepped into his shoes and becomelord of Burnley Hall and all its broad acres.

But, alive to the peril of his situation, which thesurgeon with tears in his eyes pointed out to him, thedying man sent at once for his solicitor, and a willwas drawn up and placed in this lawyer's hands, andmoreover he was appointed one of the executors.This will was to be kept in a safe until Peggy shouldbe seventeen years of age, when it was to be openedand read.

I must tell you that between the brothers Herbertand John there had long existed a sort of blood-feud, and it was as well they never met.

Thomas, however, was quickly at his woundedbrother's bedside, and never left it until-

"Clay-cold Death had closed his eye".

The surgeon had never given any hopes, yet duringthe week that intervened between the terrible accidentand Herbert's death there were many hours in whichthe doomed man appeared as well as ever, thoughscarce able to move hand or foot. His mind wasclear at such times, and he talked much with Thomasabout the dear old times when all were young.

Up till now this youngest son and brother, Thomas, had led rather an uneasy and eventful life. Nothingprospered with him, though he had tried most things.

He was married, and had the one child, Roland, towhom the reader has already been introduced.

"Now, dear Tom," said Herbert, one evening afterhe had lain still with closed eyes for quite a longtime, and he placed a white cold hand in that of hisbrother as he spoke, "I am going to leave you. Wehave always been good friends and loved each otherwell. All I need tell you now, and I tell you inconfidence, is that Peggy, at the age of seventeen, will be my heir, with you, dear Tom, as herguardian."

Tom could not reply for the gathering tears. Hejust pressed Herbert's hand in silence.

"Well," continued the latter, "things have not goneover well with you, I know, but I have often heardyou say you could do capitally if you emigrated to analmost new land-a land you said figuratively 'flowingwith milk and honey'. I confess I made no attemptto assist you to go to the great valley of the Amazon.It was for a selfish reason I detained you. My brotherJohn being nobody to me, my desire was to have you near."

He paused, almost exhausted, and Tom held a littlecup of wine to his lips.

Presently he spoke again.

"My little Peggy!" he moaned. "Oh, it is hard, hard to leave my darling!

"Tom, listen. You are to take Peggy to yourhome. You are to care for her as the apple ofyour eye. You must be her father, your wife hermother."

"I will! I will! Oh, brother, can you doubt me!"

"No, no, Tom. And now you may emigrate. Ileave you thirty thousand pounds, all my depositaccount at Messrs. Bullion & Co.'s bank. This is forPeggy and you. My real will is a secret at present, and that which will be read after-I go, is a mereepitome. But in future it will be found that I havenot forgotten even John."

Poor Peggy had run in just then, and perched uponthe bed, wondering much that her father should liethere so pale and still, and make no attempt to rompwith her. At this time her hair was as yellow as thefirst approach of dawn in the eastern sky.

—

That very week poor Squire St. Clair breathedhis last.

John came to the funeral with a long face anda crape-covered hat, looking more like a mute thananything else.

He sipped his wine while the epitomized will wasread; but a wicked light flashed from his eyes, andhe ground out an oath at its conclusion.

All the information anyone received was that thoughsums varying from five hundred pounds to a thousandwere left as little legacies to distant relations and toJohn, as well as douceurs to the servants, the wholeof the estates were willed in a way that could notbe divulged for many a long year.

John seized his hat, tore from it the crape, anddashed it on the floor. The crape on his arm followedsuit. He trampled on both and strode away slammingthe door behind him.

Years had flown away.

Tom and his wife had emigrated to the banks ofthe Amazon. They settled but a short time at or nearone of its mouths, and then Tom, who had no lackof enterprise, determined to journey far, far into theinterior, where the land was not so level, wheremountains nodded to the moon, and giant forestsstretched illimitably to the southward and west.

At first Tom and his men, with faithful Bill asoverseer, were mere squatters, but squatters by thebanks of the queen of waters, and in a far morelovely place than dreams of elfinland. Labour wasvery cheap here, and the Indians soon learned fromthe white men how to work.

Tom St. Clair had imported carpenters and artificersof many sorts from the old country, to say nothingof steam plant and machinery, and that greatresounding steel buzz-saw.

Now, although not really extravagant, he had aneye for the beautiful, and determined to build himselfa house and home that, although not costing a deal, would be in reality a miniature Burnley Hall. Andwhat a truly joyous time Peggy and her cousin, oradopted brother, had of it while the house wasgradually being built by the busy hands of the trainedIndians and their white brethren!

Not they alone, but also a boy called Dick Temple, whose uncle was Tom St. Clair's nearest neighbour,That is, he lived a trifle over seven miles higher upthe river. Dick was about the same age and build asRoland.

There was a good road between Temple's ranch andTom St. Clair's place, and when, after a time, Tomand Peggy had a tutor imported for their own especialbenefit, the two families became very friendly indeed.

Dick Temple was a well-set-up and really braveand good-looking lad. Little Peggy averred thatthere never had been, or never could be, another boyhalf so nice as Dick.

But I may as well state here at once and be donewith it-Dick was simply a reckless, wild dare-devil.Nothing else would suffice to describe young Dick'scharacter even at this early age. And he soon taughtRoland to be as reckless as himself.

—

Time rolled on, and the new Burnley Hall wasa fait accompli.

The site chosen by Tom for his home by the riverwas a rounded and wooded hill about a quarter ofa mile back from the immediate bank of the stream.But all the land between the hill and the Amazonwas cultivated, and not only this, but up and downthe river as well for over a mile, for St. Clair wantedto avoid too close contact with unfriendly alligators, and these scaly reptiles avoid land on which crops aregrowing.

The tall trees were first and foremost cleared offthe hill; not all though. Many of the most beautifulwere left for effect, not to say shade, and it waspleasant indeed to hear the wind whispering through theirfoliage, and the bees murmuring in their branches,in this flowery land of eternal summer.

Nor was the undergrowth of splendid shrubs andbushes and fruit-trees cleared away. They werethinned, however, and beautiful broad winding walksled up through them towards the mansion.

The house was one of many gables; altogetherEnglish, built of quartz for the most part, andhaving a tower to it of great height.

From this tower one could catch glimpses of themost charming scenery, up and down the river, andfar away on the other shore, where forests swam inthe liquid air and giant hills raised their blue topsfar into the sky.

So well had Tom St. Clair flourished since takingup his quarters here that his capital was returninghim at least one hundred per cent, after allowing forwear and tear of plant.

I could not say for certain how many white men hehad with him. The number must have been close onfifty, to say nothing of the scores and scores ofIndians.

Jake Solomons and Burly Bill were his overseers, but they delighted in hard work themselves, as wehave already seen. So, too, did Roland's fatherhimself, and as visitors to the district were few, you maybe certain he never wore a London hat nor eveningdress.

Like those of Jake and Bill, his sleeves were alwaysrolled up, and his muscular arms and brave square faceshowed that he was fit for anything. No, a Londonhat would have been sadly out of place; but thebroad-brimmed Buffalo Bill he wore became himadmirably.

That big buzz-saw was a triumph. The clearing ofthe forest commenced from close under the hill wherestood the mansion, and strong horses and bullockswere used to drag the gigantic trees towards the mill.

Splendid timber it was!

No one could have guessed the age of these treesuntil they were cut down and sawn into lengths, when their concentric rings might be counted.

The saw-mill itself was a long way from the mansion-house, with the villages for the whites and Indiansbetween, but quite separate from each other.

The habitations of the whites were raised on pileswell above the somewhat damp ground, and steps ledup to them. Two-roomed most of them were, but thatof Jake was of a more pretentious character. So, too, was Burly Bill's hut.

It would have been difficult to say what the Indianslived on. Cakes, fruit, fish, and meat of any kindmight form the best answer to the question. Theyate roasted snakes with great relish, and many of thesewere of the deadly-poisonous class. The heads werecut off and buried first, however, and thus all dangerwas prevented. Young alligators were frequentlycaught, too, and made into a stew.

The huts these faithful creatures lived in were chieflycomposed of bamboo, timber, and leaves. Sometimesthey caught fire. That did not trouble the savagesmuch, and certainly did not keep them awake atnight. For, had the whole village been burned down, they could have built another in a surprisingly shorttime.

When our hero and heroine got lost in the greatprimeval forest, Burnley Hall was in the most perfectand beautiful order, and its walks, its flower-garden, and shrubberies were a most pleasing sight. All wasunder the superintendence of a Scotch gardener, whomSt. Clair had imported for the purpose.

By this time, too, a very large portion of theadjoining forest had been cut down, and the land onwhich those lofty trees had grown was undercultivation.

If the country which St. Clair had made his homewas not in reality a land flowing with milk andhoney, it yielded many commodities equally valuable.Every now and then-especially when the river wasmore or less in flood-immense rafts were sent downstream to distant Pará, where the valuable timberfound ready market.

Several white men in boats always went in chargeof these, and the boats served to assist in steering, andtowing as well.

These rafts used often to be built close to the riverbefore an expected rising of the stream, which, whenit did come, floated them off and away.

But timber was not the only commodity that St. Clairsent down from his great estate. There weresplendid quinine-trees. There was coca and cocoa, too.

There was a sugar plantation which yielded the bestresults, to say nothing of coffee and tobacco, Brazil-nutsand many other kinds of nuts, and last, but notleast, there was gold.

This latter was invariably sent in charge of areliable white man, and St. Clair lived in hope that hewould yet manage to position a really paying gold-mine.

More than once St. Clair had permitted Roland andPeggy to journey down to Pará on a great raft. Butonly at the season when no storms blew. They hadan old Indian servant to cook and "do" for them, andthe centre of the raft was hollowed out into a kindof cabin roofed over with bamboo and leaves. Stepsled up from this on to a railed platform, which wascalled the deck.

Burly Bill would be in charge of boats and all, andin the evenings he would enter the children's cabin tosing them songs and tell them strange, weird tales offorest life.

He had a banjo, and right sweetly could he play.Old Beeboo the Indian, would invariably light hismeerschaum for him, smoking it herself for a goodfive minutes first and foremost, under pretence ofgetting it well alight.

Beeboo, indeed, was altogether a character. BothMr. and Mrs. St. Clair liked her very much, however, for she had been in the family, and nursed both Peggyand Roland, from the day they had first come to thecountry. As for her age, she might have been anyage between five-and-twenty and one hundred and ten.She was dark in skin-oh, no! not black, but moreof copper colour, and showed a few wrinkles at earlymorn. But when Beeboo was figged out in her nicestwhite frock and her deep-blue or crimson blouse, with her hair hanging down in two huge plaits, then, with the smile that always hovered aroundher lips and went dancing away up her face till itflickered about her eyes, she was very pleasantindeed. The wrinkles had all flown up to the moonor somewhere, and Beeboo was five-and-twenty once again.

I must tell you something, however, regarding her, and that is the worst. Beeboo came from a race ofcannibals who inhabit one of the wildest and almostinaccessible regions of Bolivia, and her teeth had beenfiled by flints into a triangular shape, the form bestadapted for tearing flesh. She had been broughtthence, along with a couple of wonderful monkeysand several parrots, when only sixteen, by an Englishtraveller who had intended to make her a presentto his wife.

Beeboo never got as far as England, however. Shehad watched her chance, and one day escaped to thewoods, taking with her one of the monkeys, who wasan especial favourite with this strange, wild girl.

She was frequently seen for many years after this.It was supposed she had lived on roots and rats-I'mnot joking-and slept at night in trees. She managedto clothe herself, too, with the inner rind of the barkof certain shrubs. But how she had escaped deathfrom the talons of jaguars and other wild beasts noone could imagine.

Well, one day, shortly after the arrival of St. Clair, hunters found the jaguar queen, as they called her, lying in the jungle at the foot of a tree.

There was a jaguar not far off, and a huge pieceof sodden flesh lay near Beeboo's cheek, undoubtedlyplaced there by this strange, wild pet, while closebeside her stood a tapir.

Beeboo was carried to the nearest village, and thetapir followed as gently as a lamb. My informantdoes not know what became of the tapir, but Beeboowas tamed, turned a Christian too, and never evincedany inclination to return to the woods.

Yet, strangely enough, no puma nor jaguar wouldever even growl or snarl at Beeboo.

These statements can all be verified.