Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

388 страница из 953

“I have some letters for you, Mr. Byam. You may have as much time as you like here, alone. When you are ready to return to your quarters you have only to open the door and inform the guard.”

He then left me, and I opened the packet with trembling hands. It contained a letter from Sir Joseph Banks, written only a few days earlier, upon his receipt of the news of the Gorgon’s arrival. He informed me that my mother had died six weeks before, and enclosed a letter to me written the night before her death, forwarded to him by our old servant, Thacker.

I was grateful indeed to Captain Montague for the privilege of half an hour’s privacy in his cabin; but there was no relief, then or later, for the desolation of heart I felt. Scarcely a day had passed, in the years since the Bounty had left England, that I had not thought of my mother and longed for her, and the consciousness of her love had sustained me through all the weary months of our imprisonment. There was never any question of her belief in my innocence, but she was as proud in spirit as she was gentle and kind-hearted, and the slur cast upon our good name by the event of the mutiny—above all, the fact that Bligh considered me among the guiltiest of the mutineers—was a shock beyond her strength to withstand. There was nothing of this in her letter; I had the facts, later, from Thacker, who told me that my mother’s health had begun to fail from the day when she had received the letter from Bligh. I have made all possible allowances for him. He had reason to believe that I was an accomplice of Christian; but a man with a spark of humanity would never have written the letter he sent to my mother. I no more forgive him the cruelty of it now than I did when I first read it.