The Thirteen Gun Salute Read Online Free PDF Page B

medicine-chest, a new, particularly massive affair with two locks.
    From these he went on to check their surgical instruments, the grim saws, retractors, artery-hooks, gags, leather-covered chains; and then the more massive substances such as portable soup, stored in flat wooden cases of thirty-six slabs apiece, lime and lemon juice, plaster of Paris for healing broken limbs in the oriental manner (much favoured now by Dr Maturin), and neat square bales of lint, each marked with the broad arrow. He was turning over the last (already attacked by rats) when Stephen joined him. 'Everything seems to be in order,' said Martin, 'except that I have not been able to find more than this single case-bottle quart of laudanum, instead of all our usual five-gallon carboys.'
    'There is only that one quart,' said Stephen. 'I have decided to employ it no more, except in the greatest emergency.'
    'It used to be your panacea,' observed Martin, his mind drifting away to the builders at home: were they attending to the roof at this moment? He doubted it: he would send a note to Mr Huge by the Plymouth pilot-boat.
    'I am no more infallible than Paracelsus, who used antimony for a great many years,' replied Maturin. 'There are grave objections to the frequent exhibition of laudanum, I find.'
    'Yes, yes, of course,' said Martin, clapping his hand to his forehead. 'I beg your pardon.'
    There were indeed very grave objections. Padeen, Stephen's Irish servant and loblolly-boy, often in and about the sick-berth and the medical stores, had become deeply addicted to laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Stephen, late in discovering the fact, had done what he could, but what he could do was not enough; and at the time he was disabled. Padeen deserted the ship when she touched at Leith, and being unable to get his opium by fair means- he was illiterate, barely comprehensible in English, and he knew the substance only by the name of tincture - had taken it by force, breaking into an apothecary's house by night and tasting till he found it.
    This had happened in Edinburgh, far from Stephen's knowledge until the very end; but all the talent of the Scottish bar could not disguise the fact that a capital offence had been committed or that the big wild Papist at the bar was guilty of it. Padeen was sentenced to death, and it had required all the force of Jack Aubrey's influence as member for Milford to have the hanging commuted to transportation. Padeen had been sent, with many hundred more, in the next convoy to Botany Bay; but at least he carried an earnest recommendation from Dr Martin to the surgeon of the ship and the medical officer in the colony and one from Sir Joseph Banks to the Governor of New South Wales.
    'I beg your pardon,' said Martin again. 'How my mind came to...'
    A hail on deck, the distant reverberation of running feet, the perceptible rotation of the deck and the dying away of the complex sound of a ship in motion relieved him from his embarrassment. 'It is stopping,' he said.
    'We are lying up,' said Stephen. 'Let us go above, having first locked the chest and dowsed the light.'
    They climbed quite nimbly up the dim, familiar ladders - seamen in this if in nothing else - and emerged blinking into the brilliant light of day; and there was the Eddystone a mile to the north-westward, with the mainland rather hazy beyond it and four ships of the line close hauled for the Sound.
    'Are you not amazed, Doctor?' asked Davidge, the officer of the watch.
    'Certainly,' said Stephen, looking at the lighthouse with the ring of surf at its foot and the halo of gulls over its head. 'As noble an erection as could well be conceived.'
    'No, no,' said Davidge. 'The decks, the brasswork, the squared yards, all fit for an admiral's inspection.'
    'Nothing could be neater, or more trim,' said Stephen; and still gazing at the lighthouse he saw a pilot-cutter, obviously bound for the frigate and obviously receiving signals from her and replying to