E-text prepared by the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.
By
Author of "The Courtship of Morrice Buckler," "The Watchers,"
"Parson Kelly," etc.
1901
It was eleven o'clock at night when Surgeon Wyley of His Majesty'sship Bonetta washed his hands, drew on his coat, and walked from thehospital up the narrow cobbled street of Tangier to the Main-Guard bythe Catherine Port. In the upper room of the Main-Guard he foundMajor Shackleton of the Tangier Foot taking a hand at bassette withLieutenant Scrope of Trelawney's Regiment and young Captain Tessin ofthe King's Battalion. There were three other officers in the room, andto them Surgeon Wyley began to talk in a prosy, medical strain. Two ofhis audience listened in an uninterested stolidity for just so long asthe remnant of manners, which still survived in Tangier, commanded,and then strolling through the open window on to the balcony, littheir pipes.
Overhead the stars blazed in the rich sky of Morocco; theriding-lights of Admiral Herbert's fleet sprinkled the bay; and belowthem rose the hum of an unquiet town. It was the night of May 13th,1680, and the life of every Christian in Tangier hung in the balance.The Moors had burst through the outposts to the west, and were nowentrenched beneath the walls. The Henrietta Redoubt had fallen thatday; to-morrow the little fort at Devil's Drop, built on the edge ofthe sand where the sea rippled up to the palisades, must fall; andCharles Fort, to the southwest, was hardly in a better case. However,a sortie had been commanded at daybreak as a last effort to relieveCharles Fort, and the two officers on the balcony speculated overtheir pipes on the chances of success.
Meanwhile, inside the room Surgeon Wyley lectured to his remainingauditor, who, too tired to remonstrate, tilted his chair against thewall and dozed.
"A concussion of the brain," Wyley went on, "has this curious effect,that after recovery the patient will have lost from his consciousnessa period of time which immediately preceded the injury. Thus a man maywalk down a street here in Tangier; four, five, six hours afterwards,he mounts his horse, is thrown on to his head. When he wakes again tohis senses, the last thing he remembers is—what? A sign, perhaps,over a shop in the street he walked down, or a leper pestering him foralms. The intervening hours are lost to him, and forever. It is noquestion of an abeyance of memory. There is a gap in the continuity ofhis experience, and that gap he will never fill up."
"Except by hearsay?"
The correction came from Lieutenant Scrope at the bassette table. Itwas quite carelessly uttered while the Lieutenant was picking up hiscards. Surgeon Wyley shifted his chair towards the table, and acceptedthe correction.
"Except, of course, by hearsay."
Wyley was a new-comer to Tangier, having sailed into the bay less thana week back; but he had been long enough in the town to find in Scrop