Children -- Fiction; Pirates -- Fiction; Sea stories
They were all by now just as much at home on the schooner as they had
been in Jamaica. Indeed, nothing very continuous was left of Ferndale
for the youngest ones: only a number of luminous pictures of quite
unimportant incidents. Emily of course remembered most things, and
could put them together. The death of Tabby, for instance: she would
never forget that as long as she lived. She could recollect, too, that
Ferndale had tumbled down flat. And her Earthquake: she had been in an
earthquake, and could remember every detail of _that_. Had it been as a
result of the earthquake that Ferndale had tumbled down? That sounded
likely. There had been quite a high wind at that time, too.... She
could remember that they had all been bathing when the earthquake had
come, and then had ridden somewhere on ponies. But they had been _in_
the house when it fell down: she was pretty sure of that. It was all
a little difficult to join up.--Then, when was it she had found that
negro village? She could remember with a startling clearness bending
down and feeling among the bamboo roots for the bubbling spring, then
looking round and seeing the black children scampering away up the
clearing. That must have been years and years ago. But clearer than
everything was that awful night when Tabby had stalked up and down the
room, his eyes blazing and his fur twitching, his voice melodious with
tragedy, until those horrible black shapes had flown in through the
fanlight and savaged him out into the bush. The horror of the scene was
even increased because it had once or twice come back to her in dreams,
and because when she dreamt it (though it seemed the same) there was
always some frightful difference. One night (and that was the worst of
all) she had rushed out to rescue him, when her darling faithful Tabby
had come up to her with the same horrible look on his face the captain
had worn that time she bit his thumb, and had chased her down avenues
and avenues and avenues and avenues of cabbage-palms, with Exeter House
at the end of them never getting any nearer however much she ran. She
knew, of course, it was not the real Tabby, but a sort of diabolic
double: and Margaret had sat up an orange tree jeering at her, gone as
black as a negro.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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