Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street

BENITO CERENO 99
more calamitous parts, such as the fatalities among the
seamen, the consequent prolonged beating about, the
past sufferings from obstinate calms, and still continued
suffering from thirst ; in all these points, as well as
others, Don Benito's story had corroborated not only
the wailing ejaculations of the indiscriminate multitude,
white and black, but likewise—what seemed impossible
to be counterfeit— by the very expression and play of
every human feature, which Captain Delano saw. If
Don Benito's story was, throughout, an invention, then
every soul on board, down to the youngest negress, was
his carefully drilled recruit in the plot : an incredible
inference. And yet, if there was ground for mistrusting
his veracity, that inference was a legitimate one.
But those questions of the Spaniard. There, indeed,
one might pause. Did they not seem put with much
the same object with which the burglar or assassin, by
day-time, reconnoitres the walls of a house ? But, with
ill purposes, to solicit such information openly of the
chief person endangered, and so, in effect, setting
him on
his guard ; how unlikely a procedure was that. Absurd,
then, to suppose that those questions had been prompted
by evil designs. Thus, the same conduct, which, in this
instance, had raised the alarm, served to dispel it. In
short, scarce any suspicion or uneasiness, however
apparently reasonable at the time, which was not now,
with equal apparent reason, dismissed.
At last he began to laugh at his former forebodings ;
and laugh at the strange ship for, in its aspect, some
and laugh, too, at the
way siding with them, as it were ;
odd-looking blacks, particularly those old scissors-
grinders, the Ashantees ; and those bedridden old
knitting women, the oakum-pickers ;
and almost at the
dark Spaniard himself, the central hobgoblin of all.
For the rest, whatever in a serious way seemed